Readers Reply
002
You Can Bash Religion, But Don’t Touch Sex
I found it very interesting that your readers responded “in record numbers…the largest outpouring of letters in memory” to an act of censorship (Readers Reply, BR 15:06). Jesus can be blasphemed; Moses, the Prophets and the holy men and women of Israel trodden underfoot; the Bible dismissed as a work of fiction; the Law vilified as misogynistic oppression of women (and everyone else, for that matter)—and hardly a voice is raised in protest, hardly a word is spoken in defense. But just dare to mess with our right to see naked pubies, and you get plenty of response!
We’re willing to go to the wall when it comes to defending our “freedoms,” but not what we say we believe is holy. If you doubt that, let’s try a test. In the October 1999 Insight column, Michael D. Coogan is obviously piqued at the U.S. House of Representatives’ passage of a bill allowing states to require public schools to post the Ten Commandments. In order to demonstrate that the House proposal is ridiculous, Coogan attacks the Bible, and those who believe it, by pointing out various passages that (to him) exhibit inconsistencies. There’s plenty here to raise the hackles of believing Christians and Jews, as well as those who, like Coogan, believe that God should apologize for not being a late-20th-century culturally sensitive “progressive” instead of the Creator of the Universe. If our religious beliefs meant anything to us, we would expect another great outpouring of mail, at least the equivalent of that received about the naked Eve painting. But I doubt that the interest or the fire is there. Only sex seems capable of inciting such a response, because it seems to be the only thing that we find important enough to get excited about anymore.
Søren Kierkegaard was right when he said, “There was a time when one could almost be afraid to call himself a disciple of Christ, because it meant so much. Now one can do it with complete ease because it means nothing at all.”
Please cancel my subscription.
Pine Grove, Pennsylvania
Why 2K?
Revelation—Not About the Future
At the end of “Why 2K?” BR 15:06, James Tabor quotes from H.H. Rowley’s book The Relevance of Apocalyptic. Rowley writes of the Book of Revelation and other apocalyptic writings: “The writers of these books were mistaken in their hopes of imminent deliverance; their interpreters who believed the consummation was imminent in their day proved mistaken; and they who bring the same principles and the same hopes afresh to the prophecies will prove equally mistaken.” While I agree that relating these principles to the present or the future will prove to be a mistake, I believe that the apostle John was not mistaken in relating these prophecies to the events transpiring during his time.
When interpreting the Book of Revelation, one has to look at the prophecies in the view of the audience that John was writing for, the early church of the first century. The very first verse in the Book of Revelation declares, “The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to show unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass.” If we take the prophecies of the Book of Revelation out of their setting and put them into the future, some 2,000 years after they were first written, how can these things “shortly come to pass”?
By interpreting the Whore/Babylon of Revelation as first-century Jerusalem (see also Matthew 24) and the Beast as Nero, the Book of Revelation is no longer an enigmatic puzzle with myriad interpretations, but a book of fulfilled prophecy that declares the victory of Yahshua, the Lamb of Yahweh. The Book of Revelation brought comfort and hope to the early persecuted church, and it continues to 004bring comfort and hope to the present-day church.
Auburn, New York
115 Years to Go
I was pleased to read James Tabor’s “Why 2K?” BR 15:06. Although I would have appreciated a more thorough analysis, I was especially pleased that he dealt with the difference between the Jewish calendar and the biblical count.
But if our purpose is to determine “the time of the end” based on the theory of a six-thousand-year prophetic “week,” there is one question that Professor Tabor did not explore. Are we right to begin our count with the creation of Adam, i.e., with the year of the world? Is it not more appropriate to begin our count with the eating of the forbidden fruit and the expulsion from the garden? Isn’t that when human history really began? It would seem that the time spent in the garden should no more be included in the six millennia of human history than should the seventh, or Sabbath, millennium. Neither of these two periods belongs properly to the age of human dominion.
While the count from the creation of Adam is revealed in scripture (however we count it), the count from the expulsion from the garden is not. The only clue we have is in Genesis 5:3, where we are told that Adam was 130 years of age when he begat Seth. Since the birth of Seth (as well as the birth of Cain and Abel) took place after the expulsion from the garden, the expulsion must have taken place some time during the 130 years that preceded the birth of Seth. If we allow time for both Cain and Abel to mature to manhood, we can conservatively deduct perhaps another 15 years from that total, leaving us with a 115-year window for the time of the expulsion. (This is assuming, of course, that Seth was born after Abel was killed; an assumption that would seem to be supported by the wording of Genesis 4:25: “For God, said she [Eve], hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew.”) What this means is that once we attain the six thousandth year from the creation of Adam, we can still have an indeterminate period of as much as 115 years before the sixth millennium of human history expires.
That the exact time of the end is hidden is consistent with what Jesus said in Matthew 24:36, “but of that day and hour knoweth no man.” In Acts 1:7 he goes even further, saying that even the season might not be knowable: “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power.” Six thousand years from creation may be a significant milestone—if we get the count right—but it still does not get us where we want to go. And the omission, we are told, is deliberate.
Brooklyn, New York
Flip-Flop; We’re Sorry
I found James Tabor’s “Why 2K?” BR 15:06, very interesting, well researched and well written. The illustrations, as usual, were stimulatingly varied and pertinent to the article. As a budding art historian 40 years ago, I spent many an hour in the Morgan Library in New York City researching the Spanish Beatus manuscript illustrated on the cover of the
But wait a minute! The condemned man is on the wrong side, as is the saved soul. The illustration somehow got reversed. Michael’s right side, like Christ’s (on the left as we face the painting), is always reserved for the righteous. Although the illustration is reversed, however, it is reproduced in fine detail and accurate color.
What is most unusual about this Last Judgment is the fact that the ubiquitous devils torturing the condemned are nowhere to be found. It is the psychological state of each soul that drives him/her to Heaven or Hell. Notice the expression of horror on the face of the condemned man in the scales. This is a modern concept far in advance of the 15th century.
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Incidentally, it would be useful to include a reference to the location of each art work illustrated in BR. Otherwise, keep up the good work!
Professor Emeritus
University of Oregon
Eugene, Oregon
The painting is reprinted here with the correct orientation.—Ed.
God and History
The Bible Is Not Divine
Professor Hanson’s argument just won’t fly (“Can We Find God Without History?” BR 15:06). Against Walter Brueggemann he tries to bring everything the Bible teaches about God under the rubric of the moral order, where mercy must necessarily be accompanied by justice. That such a moral order is powerfully articulated in some of the biblical writings is true, but there is also much there that radically undermines it.
Most fundamental are the many texts that depict God as achieving his purposes through indiscriminate mass killing. The place to start here is the Bible’s powerhouse of social morality, Deuteronomy. This great book is marred by a very great flaw. It has God commanding the Israelites, as they move into the land of Canaan, to “not let anything that breathes remain alive” (Deuteronomy 20:16–17). And Joshua purports to report the enthusiastic efforts of the ancient Israelites to carry out this command, with God firing up their lethal energies (Joshua 10:42).
Then we can go back to the paradigmatic divine intervention that liberates the Israelites from slavery and sends them on the way to the Promised Land. Here God achieves his purpose through the indiscriminate mass slaughter of the Egyptian firstborn; God himself does the killing (Exodus 11:4, 12:12, 29). Here is Matthew’s Bethlehem massacre by Herod increased to the power of ten.
And it won’t do to say that it did not, of course, really happen like that. What matters is that the biblical writers, tradents and canon-makers felt that this was a completely appropriate way to envisage God as acting.
Nor does it avail anything to say that this activates the nasty old Christian prejudice that contrasts “an Old Testament God of wrath with a New Testament God of love.” On the one hand, there is plenty of Old Testament witness—“Original Testimonies” would be a much better name than “Old Testament”—to a gracious life-giving God, from Genesis 1 to Proverbs 8–9. On the other hand, it is in Revelation, the book which, in the Christian Bible, brings the mega-narrative that begins in Genesis to its triumphant conclusion, that the theme of the indiscriminately destructive God reaches its highest intensity.
The Bible itself, along with the whole logic of critical Bible studies, suggests what we must do: Recognize an idol and rid ourselves of it. Break it, or better yet, dissolve it. I am speaking not of the biblical writings but of the perception of them as sacred divine word (which was the final stage in their retroactive apotheosis), a perception that prevents us from engaging their powerfully energizing but radically ambiguous contents with a maximum of 008intellectual vigor and moral discernment. At the end of this blood-soaked century, which brings the second Christian millennium to a close, nothing less will do.
Madison, Wisconsin
Daring to Imagine God
In the study of the ancient Near East, there is Egyptology and Assyriology. Why is there no Israelology? What is lacking, actually, is not the thing but only the name for the thing, but the lack is instructive. Israelology is the subject all too often offered under the name biblical studies or Hebrew Bible studies.
I offer this observation prompted, or provoked, by Israelologist Paul D. Hanson’s vitriolic review of Walter Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament (see “Can We Find God Without History?” BR 15:06). Hanson seeks to disparage Brueggemann’s rhetorical approach to the text by contrasting it with his own historical approach, but the contrast distorts both of its terms. In fact, any good rhetorician will want to know the historical setting in which he writes or criticizes writing, just as any good historian will want to know the literary effects—intended or unintended, contemporary or subsequent—of any text that bears on a period whose events he would reconstruct. The difference is one not of principle but of precedence. For the rhetorician or “Bibliologist,” appreciation of the text as a rhetorical artifact is primary, and everything else, including any background events, is secondary and of merely instrumental importance. For the historian or Israelologist, reconstruction of the events is primary, and everything else, including the Bible and any other background texts, is secondary and of merely instrumental importance.
Methodologically and, as it were, innocently, Israelological or historical criticism has been more interested in the events than in the words. To the historical critic, in other words, literary criticism makes a good servant but a bad master. The newer literary criticism has arisen in part from a desire to make history a good servant for a change. Though some have made this move with a polemical edge, the essential move can be made quite irenically. The interpretive game may be played either way. It’s just a question of who’s “it.”
Walter Brueggemann, as I read his new book, appreciates the intellectual and theological implications of this alternation. Hanson, not just in his reading of Brueggemann but in the rest of his scholarship, does not. What bars his path is a concealed premise that Brueggeman’s new work, precisely because it is so constructively theological, has effectively flushed out. That premise—assumed, like all premises, rather than argued—is that God speaks through historical events and their interpretation but not through literary invention or speculation. Brueggemann, the theologian as rhetorician, is prepared to accept and deal theologically with the possibility that revelation may come about through fabrication. Hanson, the theologian as historian, is not.
The notion that God is capable of speaking through nonfiction but not through fiction has manifold consequences. Hanson writes, for example: “I can agree with Brueggemann that the primary witness…to the God of the Hebrew Bible is found in Israel’s testimony. But I find too limiting an approach that dismisses as irrelevant the 009light shed on that testimony by historians, epigraphists and historians of religion.” Hanson’s second sentence is more slander than opinion, as will be evident to anyone who spends an hour with Brueggemann’s book itself, but it is the first sentence that I find most revealing. If the statement that the Hebrew Bible is the “primary witness…to the God of the Hebrew Bible” is true, is that statement true in any sense such that there could be a second witness or a third? Hanson is right, of course, when he states in his next sentence, “The light they [historians, epigraphists and historians of religion] bring to the testimony clarifies the grounding of biblical religion in the real world of its time,” but this clarification, I submit, accrues not to theology but to Israelology.
It does so, at any rate, unless and until some historian or epigraphist makes bold to identify an event or inscription so extraordinary as to constitute a truly independent witness to the existence and activity of a being identical to the God of the Bible. Now, no secular historian or epigraphist has ever done this, and none is likely to do so, though disreputable attempts to “prove” the Bible from history abound. To the eyes of faith, to be sure, not just the history of Israel but all history and indeed all reality may be interpreted as testimony to the greatness of God. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it. But there is no difference—Brueggemann recognizes this fact, Hanson resists it—between this vision as voiced by a Victorian poet and by an Iron Age prophet. A South Carolina schoolboy recently startled George W. Bush by characterizing his candidacy as a part of God’s plan for America. The boy’s characterization, with which a good many South Carolinians probably agree, differs in gravity but not in kind from Second Isaiah’s identification of Cyrus the Great as the Lord’s anointed. Such interpretations are all theologically legitimate, but none is historical except as an interpretation. A secular examination of the defeat of John McCain in South Carolina, like a secular examination of the fall of Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon, may testify to the existence of each man and to the events in question; it will not testify to the role of God in either case.
The great strength of Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament is that he is unembarrassed by this state of affairs. The great weakness of Hanson’s review is that he is panicked by it. Recognizing that the Bible is an inspired invention, even when some of it may be correlated with historical data, allows Brueggemann to dare an imagination of God that goes beyond the Bible. To some, this step is apostasy, if not blasphemy. To others, it is an overdue recognition that the Bible, like the Sabbath, was made for man, not man for the Bible. Denying that the Bible is an inspired invention requires Hanson to become Yahweh’s spin doctor, glossing over morally appalling parts of the text either by subsuming them in a breathtakingly bowdlerized Bible history or by defending them with an ad hoc fideism.
God instructs Israel (Deuteronomy 20) to perpetrate in Canaan what can only be called pre-emptive genocide. Hanson can bring himself to speak only of “settlement in a land promised by God, which entailed armed struggle with Canaanite kings.” This is theological spin doctoring. A page later, in a line that would gladden the heart of a Torquemada, he writes “When humans offer pride or sin, it is in the very nature of Yahweh to remove the offense.” This is ad hoc fideism.
Just what “the very nature” of God may be is, of course, the proper subject of all theology, including but transcending biblical theology. Reconstructing the history of ancient Israel can help us to reconstruct what sort of God the ancient Israelites imagined themselves to have. But the fact that they imagined themselves to have a God who was not of their own imagining does not mean that they were right to do so or that we must agree with them. Historical criticism does not hesitate to correct the Bible as history. Rhetorically astute theological criticism need not hesitate to correct the Bible as theology. The word for this enterprise, Brueggemann’s enterprise, is not postmodernism or mythologism or gnosticism but exegesis.
Pasadena, California
Hanson’s Slippery History
It is no doubt true that a strong case can be made for the importance of historical critical methodologies to biblical theology, but Paul Hanson fails to make one in his tendentious and misleading review of Walter Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament (see “Can We Find God Without History?” BR 15:06). Instead Hanson presents a self-evident case for the importance of historical criticism to biblical studies—something that Brueggemann would likely not argue with. And when it comes time to make theological claims, Hanson can do no more than repeat slogans from the biblical theology movement of two generations ago: “Israel, in contrast to the surrounding cultures, presented her God by recounting events she claimed occurred in human history.” Hanson, unlike Brueggemann, ignores the fact that this sort of “theology of history” was subject to cogent and sophisticated critiques already in 1961 by theologian Langdon Gilkey and biblical scholar James Barr, who showed independently that biblical theologians had a slippery notion of history that fit neither the texts nor modern understandings of historicity. And the notion that only Israel, in contrast to other ancient Near Eastern cultures, made claims about divine activity in history was more thoroughly critiqued by Bertil Albrektson in his 1967 book, History and the Gods.
Though Hanson pays lip service to the importance of history to biblical theology, and quotes Brueggemann’s work selectively in order to caricature it as naively unconcerned with history, in the end his own theological reflections are remarkably unhistorical. That is, Hanson is willing to sacrifice the historical particularity of the biblical texts in the service of a larger synthetic project, what he calls a “centering moral purpose.” What this clearly means for Hanson is that God is always right and always morally coherent. But given the number of biblical texts that clearly do not fit such moral and theological presuppositions (one thinks immediately of Exodus 4:24–26; Ezekiel 20:25, etc.), Hanson is willing to elide particular texts and the particular historical contexts that gave rise to them in order to preserve a theological position that is abstracted from history. This is, of course, the typical way of doing biblical theology, and whether one agrees with Brueggemann’s conclusions or not, the valuable correction that he offers to the project of reading the Bible theologically is to show us that we need not harmonize biblical passages that are in conflict with one another, even as we need not imagine the biblical God as having an utterly harmonious inner life.
Theology Department
Georgetown University
Washington, DC
N.T. Wright
Mr. Wright
Sitting in my study, enjoying my second cup of coffee of the morning and reading 053the latest issue of BR, I felt compelled to write to say thank you, thank you, thank you for having N.T. Wright as one of your columnists. His words of sweet sanity are indeed refreshing in the midst of the maelstrom of modern biblical scholarship. His books are a delight to read, as well.
As a retired United Methodist pastor who now lives in Israel several months each year (where I lecture to Christian pilgrims who visit the Holy Land during the winter months), I find your magazine and its companion, Biblical Archaeology Review, stimulating and helpful, and I recommend them often.
The ads, on the other hand, are sometimes rather odd. In the most recent issue, you advertise “BAS Tools for Learning” and promise a “Free Gift” with every order. Is not the popular advertising phrase “free gift” a redundancy? This is not only a grammatical question, but also a theological one, considering that Christian theology teaches us that grace is the unmerited gift of God through Christ.
East Lansing, Michigan
Mr. Wrong
N.T. Wright constantly amazes me. How can one man be so wrong so much of the time and still make a living? I doubt that he is more than 50 years old, yet most of the time he is at least a century behind the times. His argument that the early church read the four Gospels rather than that other stuff modern people are suggesting is countered by Luke 1:1–4, which shows that it was because folks were reading that other stuff that the Gospels (at least Luke) were written. When the church finally chose four gospels, it was because the earth was flat and had four corners. I shudder to think of how many gospels we would need if those new myth people are right and the earth actually is round.
Richland, Washington
Theodosius Made Christianity Official
For shame! N.T. Wright states, “It points the way for Constantine’s declaration of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire.” Constantine did no such thing (see “A Return to Origins (Again),” BR 15:06). In 313 A.D. he issued an Edict of Tolerance that allowed the practice of Christianity and stopped persecutions, but did not name it as the official religion of the Roman Empire. That distinction goes to the Roman Emperor Theodosius. Shortly after he was baptized in 380 A.D., he issued an edict that stated his belief in Christ and the Trinity, that all his subjects were to share the same views, that any people with different views were “extravagant madmen” (his words) and heretical. He established the Catholic Church and empowered it to treat all heretics as it thought proper. He entered Constantinople and gave the Arian bishop there the choice of proclaiming the Trinity or going into exile. The bishop chose exile. To Theodosius’s credit, he allowed him to 054leave rather than burning him at the stake. He then issued another edict to the effect that all bishops of the church and preachers of the gospel had to accept the doctrine of the Trinity or be replaced. He then sent an aide with troops to enforce the edict on those Arian bishops unwilling to accept the Trinity. After this, he called 150 bishops to a church council in Constantinople in 381 A.D., and they adopted the Trinity overwhelmingly. Thus, Christianity became the state religion of the eastern portion of the Roman Empire in 380 A.D., but not in the West.
In 388 A.D., Theodosius defeated Magnus Maximus of the western empire and became emperor of the entire Roman Empire. He made a triumphal entry into Rome with his troops and exiled one of the leading priests of Jupiter. He then asked the Roman Senate “whether the worship of Jupiter or that of Christ should be the religion of the Romans.” Constantine may have seen the cross in the sky, but with Theodosius and his troops in town, the senators clearly saw the handwriting on the wall. Christianity thus officially became the state religion of the Roman Empire in 388 A.D. by a vote of the Roman Senate.
Admittedly, many think Constantine made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire, but N.T. Wright should have known better. The credit goes to Theodosius the Great.
Tulsa, Oklahoma
N.T. Wright responds:
Thank you for clarifying things. I was writing about the first and second centuries, and unpardonably foreshortened the latter end of the tale.
Dire Straits
In the second paragraph of Wright’s article we find, horribile dictu, “straight and narrow.” Tell it not in Gath (see “A Return to Origins (Again),” BR 15:06). It is, of course, “strait and narrow,” and “strait” is quite a different word.
Wilson, North Carolina
Potpourri
BR Right on Two Counts
Leave it to BR to enlighten!
Michael M. Cohen (Insight, BR 15:06) writes that Moses, “hit a rock in anger instead of praying to it.” The reference is Numbers 20:11. That passage says, “Then, raising his hand, Moses struck the rock twice with his staff.” I was surprised at the notion that the sin was that Moses struck the rock rather then praying to it. I was ready to write you a nasty note, and then I did some research. I found the New Jerome Biblical Commentary helpful, as it pointed out that Numbers 20:8 says that God told Moses, “[O]rder the rock to yield its water.” I always thought that Moses was prohibited from entering the promised land because he struck the rock twice, that is, he was being punished for not having the faith to trust God that one blow would do it. Now I know he was prohibited because he struck the rock.
I also read in Gallery that “Revelation is the only book of scripture that directly calls the devil a serpent” (emphasis mine). As it happens, just after I read this article I was reading the liturgy for the feast of the Immaculate Conception. Genesis 3:9–15 is the famous Garden of Eden scene where Adam blames Eve for eating from the tree and Eve blames the serpent. I thought for sure that I had found a flaw in BR, but indeed, as I read the text carefully, I saw that while certainly it is implied that the serpent is Satan, the serpent is not directly called the devil.
Thanks for a thought-provoking issue.
Miami, Florida
For more on these topics, see William H.C. Propp, “Why Moses Could Not Enter the Promised Land,” BR 14:03; and Ronald F. Youngblood, “Fallen Star: The Evolution of Lucifer,” BR 14:06. Both articles are available on our Web site, www.bib-arch.org.—Ed.
Look Out, Rabbi Cohen
When I subscribed to BR, I didn’t realize that the initials stood for Bible Rewrite, but the article by Michael M. Cohen tipped me off (see Insight, BR 15:06).
Mr. Cohen’s specious theory that Moses did enter the Promised Land is totally counter to all logic. Why would Moses think God couldn’t see him enter it (even for a day), or why would Moses want to disobey the God he loved and served?
I’m one of those evangelical fanatics who believe the Bible is an inspired work that has no errors, and I believe the apostle Paul when he writes in 2 Timothy 3:16–17: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”
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I am quite in awe of Rabbi Cohen when he says that God “could have been clearer” in his original message to Moses. On the day of judgment, I wonder if he will be able to present that argument to the Living God from his position facedown on the ground. Let’s listen to God speaking to Job: “The Lord said to Job: ‘Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him? Let him who accuses God answer him!’” (Job 40:1–2).
Personally, I love the Bible—both the Old and New Testaments—and I am thankful to the Living God for condescending to reveal Himself to us through it.
Please cancel my subscription to BR, and send a refund if appropriate.
“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you” (1 Thessalonians 5:28).
Chicago, Illinois
Knowledge—and When Not to Use It
I love biblical exegesis, and I have been reading BR as well as several books on religion, so last Sunday, in a Southern Baptist Church down here in west Texas, I tried out my new confidence about being a well-educated exegete.
The Sunday school teacher was giving a lesson on the annunciation of the angel to Mary and how upset Joseph was when he came home and found his betrothed pregnant. I explained that the story in the Book of Luke was one of four theories on how Mary became with child and that one of the other theories is that Joseph is the father of Jesus.
The class really came down hard on me, claiming that only what the Bible says is true and, moreover, that Isaiah 7:14 foretells the virgin birth. I did not respond that Isaiah probably refers to Ahaz’s wife, a young woman (which is what the Hebrew says, rather than a virgin, as in the Greek translation). I would have been hanged.
At a fellowship that evening, I was talking to the pastor, who loves biblical research even more than I. He said there are a lot of controversies about the text of the Bible, but he just doesn’t present them to the congregation. So tonight, as I light my candle to pray, I shall ask the Holy Spirit not only for more wisdom, but for the common sense to know when to use it.
I love BR. Please never cancel my subscription.
Big Spring, Texas
Jewish Testament and Christian Testament
It is very gracious and humorous of you to print those letters from unhappy people who threaten to cancel subscriptions because they disagree with some scholar’s point of view or because Eve’s fig leaf got blown away in last August’s breezes.
Over the past few months, we have seen some articles in various media suggesting that the titles of the Old Testament and the New Testament be changed to the First Testament and the Second Testament. Certainly the titles Old and New Testaments or First and Second Testaments are chronologically correct, but they are not emotionally satisfying. We humbly suggest that the titles be changed to the Jewish Testament and the Christian Testament. These titles would identify the books with the people who wrote them and love them.
Many Protestant churches and the Catholic Church use a Sunday lectionary in which the first of three readings is from the Old Testament. If priests and pastors announced the first reading as coming from the Jewish Testament, it would be very beneficial to interfaith relations because Christians would be reminded every Sunday of the Jewish roots of their faith. Jesus was a Jew and proud to be a member of God’s chosen people. Mary and Joseph, his parents, were Jews, and his relatives, friends and chosen apostles were all Jews.
This letter is from two guys, one a Catholic, the other a Jew, who have been good friends for 60 years (since junior high school). We Christians and Jews have different theologies, but we have the same human needs and desires for mutual understanding, respect and love. We hope that our suggestion about using the titles Jewish Testament and Christian Testament might bring us closer together emotionally and spiritually. Rather than dwell on the iniquities of the past, let us rejoice in the possibilities of the future.
Delray Beach, Florida
You Can Bash Religion, But Don’t Touch Sex
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