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I wasn't aware that 'real racism' was anything other than a mockery to begin with.

Moron.

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The Pharisees wouldn't care. See remarks by Gamaliel below. The Priest class (Sadducees) and their Roman masters would care, because declaring oneself king of a Roman subject realm is an act of sedition against Rome. The way Rome punished such acts-- and only such acts-- was crucifixion. Although the Pharisees left a copious literature behind, there is no contemporaneous record anywhere of Pharisees crucifying anyone or advocating the crucifixion of anyone. The Pharisees were nationalists, and crucifixion was abhorrent to them, as it stood for their subjugation by Rome. Also, as nationalists, they sympathized with Messianic movements, whose whole purpose was to kick Rome's ass out of Judaea.

I hope you're beginning to get the picture.

Then you can't read.

It's only antisemitic because it invents a conspiracy of Jewish leaders to torture and kill God Himself. It also exonerates the true killers and oppressors of Jews. That's pretty antisemitic.

I have acknowledged that Jesus argued with the Pharisees, as all Pharisees argued with Pharisees, and condemned the Sadducees, as all Pharisees (probably) condemned the Sadducees, and that this was their job, and there was nothing antisemitic about that. You cannot seem to get this through your skull.

The question that I think is thick-witted, which you continue to ask in myriad wondrous forms, is "What's so antisemitic about framing up the Pharisees for the death of Christ?" I thought that pointing to Christendom's long and heart-rending history of pogroms and genocide against the Jews might provide you some clues, but alas.

Gamaliel was the leading Hillelite Pharisee of the time. Such was his fame that the author of Acts puts these words in Paul's mouth: "I am verily a man which am a Jew, born in Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, yet brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, and taught according to the perfect manner of the law of the fathers, and was zealous toward God" (22:3). In other words, the claim to Paul's knowledge of Pharisaic law rested on his training "at the feet of Gamaliel."

And what did Gamaliel have to say about the followers of Jesus' Messianic movement? According to Acts:

5:34 Then stood there up one in the council, a Pharisee, named Gamaliel, a doctor of the law, had in reputation among all the people, and commanded to put the apostles forth a little space;

5:35 And said unto them, Ye men of Israel, take heed to yourselves what ye intend to do as touching these men.

5:36 For before these days rose up Theudas, boasting himself to be somebody; to whom a number of men, about four hundred, joined themselves: who was slain; and all, as many as obeyed him, were scattered, and brought to nought.

5:37 After this man rose up Judas of Galilee in the days of the taxing, and drew away much people after him: he also perished; and all, even as many as obeyed him, were dispersed.

5:38 And now I say unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought:

5:39 But if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God.

5:40 And to him they agreed...

So according to Acts itself, the leading Pharisee, Gamaliel, who "had in reputation among all the people," advocated the position that we shouldn't mess with claimants to Messiahship, because if the claim is false, it will come to nothing, but if it is true, then you're messing with the Messiah and going against God. And his argument carried the day. This position is quite consistent with what we know of the Pharisees from their own writings, and the position we would infer from the fact that they were nationalists who wanted Rome out of Judaea.

Again, it is not the Pharisees, but the Priest class and their Roman masters, who had something to fear from Jesus.

Because the textual foundation of Christianity, including the Gospels, is the writings of Paul. You and Chi (and I suppose many others) have some rather non-current ideas about New Testament authorship, and I'm putting it charitably. More on that later.

So he identified parts that were arguably antisemitic? Admirable. And since he says it was all taken directly from the Gospels, he and I apparently agree that the Gospels are arguably antisemitic. Glad he made efforts to tone down those possibly-antisemitic parts.

Maybe your reading skills are deficient, or maybe you're high on shoe polish or something. I wrote that for all I know Mel loves Jews from the bottom of his heart, but his intentions do not enter into the question of whether the Gospels are antisemitic, and whether by repeating the story, he is repeating an antisemitic story-- intentionally or not. So, there, I wrote it again. I expect you'll soon be asking again why I think Mel Gibson intended an antisemitic message, and I'll have to repeat the same answer. Or you could just read what's in front of you.

More snappy answers to such questions are on the way.

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What others say about boorite!

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Hold up for a second.

If it is true that the Gospels are anti-semitic, then the following holds:

(1) The basis of Christianity is what is written in the Gospels, since these are the account of Jesus Christ
(2) The Gospels are anti-semitic
(3) Any film which purports to tell the story of the Gospels is anti-semitic
(4) People who believe in the Gospels as the divinely inspired Word of God (a.k.a. Christians) are likewise anti-semites

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A friend of mine who's an Orthodox Jew once said that the Jews really did kill Jesus and people should stop trying to be politically correct and just admit it.

I don't really care who killed him. It got the job done after all. Wasn't that the point anyway?

MakK sez:

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He keeps refering to their authors as "followers of Paul", and I am assuming he does this to try to find a way to weasel in Paul's texts to the argument. Last time I check the authors of the Gospel were followers of Jesus.

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Gotta clarify an antecedent. I wrote:

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Paul's epistles (the ones he actually wrote, which are not all the ones attributed to him) were written before the Gospels. [The Gospels] were written by converts to the religion he invented, based on the theology and "history" embodied in his epistles. There is no weaseling. Paul is the foundation. His epistles came first. That's not a contentious issue. It's the kind of thing you can look up in an encyclopedia.

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Boorite, all your blustering ignores the point that the story was in the context of Israel, so the story was about the Jewish people. Again I say, if it was set in China, the Chinese would have killed him. Your only defense seems to be your invented motivation for a "Jews killed Jesus" conspiracy. If you read the works you're criticising you'd see Jewish mobs, not Pharisees, calling for Jesus to be killed. They sold Jesus up the river because he was breaking THEIR laws, not Rome's.

I think it was Chi who had the point that if you talk about the State of Texas putting someone to death, it's not anti-Texan to say the Texans killed this person, it's not anti-American to say the Americans killed him, you'e just stating the facts.

And again, the point is he had to die, so the people killing him enabled him to finish his work. If you're so concerned about taking things in the context of the Gospel, God is the one who allows Jesus to die. Is the movie, based on the Gospels, therefore ANTI-GOD?? Oh gosh I think there's cause to say it is. What a pickle.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

Your "context" lacks a crucial feature: The Roman occupation of Judaea, without which the Messianic movements make no sense. I have indeed read the Bible, and find nothing in the Gospels to suggest that Jesus was some kind of religious rebel and breaker of Jewish law-- until John, that is, where we meet a very weird Jesus indeed. John, btw, was the last Gospel written, and the ideas it espoused were the least recognizable to Jews of the day.

And if you'd read the Bible, you'd surely see how the NT vilifies the Pharisees. You're correct, however, that it also vilifies "Jewish mobs" and the Jewish religion at large. This would be fine, much like your State of Texas scenario-- except it's false. Really, a better analogy would be: The State of Texas puts someone to death, and a story is invented to blame the Mexicans. The victim of this execution would have to be someone highly esteemed (like, ooohh, let's say.... GOD) and the frameup of the Mexicans would have to be full of vicious false Mexican stereotypes. And the story would have to be important enough that Texans and other Americans would be willing to take it out on the Mexicans for much of the next two millenia. Then you would have something decidedly anti-Mexican, wouldn't you? And something roughly analogous to the hatchet job that Paul and company did on the Jews.

And that stuff about Jesus having to die to finish his work here is pure paganism, going back to Paul's hometown of Tarsus, named for the mystery god Baal-Taraz and where Paul (named Saul) grew up surrounded by icons of the flayed and hung mystery god Attis. The concept of salvation in the sacrifice of a man-god would have felt like home to Paul but utterly alien to Jews, including Jesus.

Yeah. Not only that, God is Jesus, and vice-versa. I told you the damn story is crazy. It's also old as Babylon.

I think the Jewish version makes a bit more sense.

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What others say about boorite!

You're right. Your over-whelming evidence has convinced me. I now hate the Jews. Thank you for straightening me out.

I notice you didn't respond to the section where I ask exactly whose laws Jesus was executed for breaking. Maybe because it messes with your whole anti-semitic 2000 year old conspiracy.

If your argument is "the Gospels are anti-semitic and so is the movie" why do you keep going outside the Gospels to make your point? Is it because your whole argument hinges on Paul, whom you apparently thought wrote the gospels or something when you made your stroke-of-genius post? You've had to do a lot of work to cover up your mistake, by the way.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

Actors Whip Easter Bunny at Church Show

GLASSPORT, Pa. (AP) - A church trying to teach about the crucifixion of Jesus performed an Easter show with actors whipping the Easter bunny and breaking eggs, upsetting several parents and young children.

People who attended Saturday's performance at Glassport's memorial stadium quoted performers as saying, ``There is no Easter bunny,'' and described the show as being a demonstration of how Jesus was crucified.

Melissa Salzmann, who brought her 4-year-old son J.T., said the program was inappropriate for young children. ``He was crying and asking me why the bunny was being whipped,'' Salzmann said.

Patty Bickerton, the youth minister at Glassport Assembly of God, said the performance wasn't meant to be offensive. Bickerton portrayed the Easter rabbit and said she tried to act with a tone of irreverence.

``The program was for all ages, not just the kids. We wanted to convey that Easter is not just about the Easter bunny, it is about Jesus Christ,'' Bickerton said.

Performers broke eggs meant for an Easter egg hunt and also portrayed a drunken man and a self-mutilating woman, said Jennifer Norelli-Burke, another parent who saw the show in Glassport, a community about 10 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.

``It was very disturbing,'' Norelli-Burke said. ``I could not believe what I saw. It wasn't anything I was expecting.''

Information from: The Daily News, http://www.dailynewsmckeesport.com

[Click to view comic: 'A Holiday for Everyone']

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I was gonna send a robot back in time, but I got high.

Of course, you're completely ignoring what I wrote. AGAIN. I went on at some length about the fact that reading an anti-something text does not make the reader anti-something. Again, I expect you'll continue to do this.

I only said it about 50 times: He was executed for sedition against Rome, in the manner reserved exclusively for that crime: crucifixion. Even the Gospels say this, although they present the story as if Roman authorities were duped by Jewish authorities into believing false charges against Jesus.

No, it fits right in.

AGAIN, you ignore what I wrote. I said explicitly that I know that Paul did not write the Gospels. He founded the religion, however, and those who wrote (a more proper term might be assembled) the Gospels were converts to the Pauline faith. So Paul is important.

A mistake I didn't make. You've gone beyond distortion to simply accusing me of writing the opposite of what I wrote. This is the kind of thing I expect from you.

Speaking of acknowledging mistakes, I see that when you are called on yours, you never acknowledge them, but instead either ignore the information or insist that it is are irrelevant and that I am somehow missing your "real point." Another trait of yours that makes arguing with you such a joy. If points like the authorship of the Gospels (about which you were dreadfully mistaken) are irrelevant, then I wonder why you bring them up.

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What others say about boorite!

I think MaKK is the White House Press Secretary and he uses these forums to practice his spin tactics. Never in my life have I seen someone pull out every anti-logic trick in the book to try to overpower a debate. He's worse than a woman in a heated argument.

I took a philosophy class in college that taught true logic and methods for debating logically, and MaKK would have failed the class eighty times over.

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The giant three-phallused phallus of Uzbekistan will one day squirt the cosmic jizz of revenge all over Canada.

Also, it's rather suspicious that he sarcastically says I've convinced him to hate Jews, just after I have said that the Jewish version of the Jesus story makes more sense than the Gospel version. He twists, he distorts, and when that doesn't work, he just lies.

It's kind of dumb to lie about what someone just wrote in a forum, since you can prove the lie just by scrolling up. MakK's recklessness in this regard makes me wonder if he's on crack.

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What others say about boorite!

boorite,

I must confess that my knowledge of Gospel authorship does not extend much beyond Sixth Form, and hence I may well be mistaken in assuming that what I was taught was actually the truth. The teachers were Christians, after all.

However, I am still stuck on one issue which doesn't seem to have been addressed: Jesus was Jewish. Paul was Jewish. Jesus' disciples were Jewish. Jesus was executed for calling himself "King of the Jews". If the Gospels are truly anti-semitic, surely that would make them self-defeating? It's one thing to say that the Gospel writers placed the blame of Jesus' execution upon an assembled Jewish crowd, but it is a huge leap to say that from this we can conclude the Gospels are anti-semitic. For them to be anti-semitic, they would surely have to deny the Jewish nature of Jesus, Paul and his disciples, and furthermore they would not highlight Jesus' status as "King of the Jews".

It's no good saying that there was a marked distinction between Jews and Christians, because there wasn't. Contemporary theological scholarship (and of this I can be certain, as I attended a talk on the subject only two weeks past) says that people did not self-define as Christian (to the exclusion of any form of Judaism) for a very long time after the death of both Jesus and Paul.

Until I have been shown how the Gospels can be at once anti-semitic and yet at the same time have all heroes (bar Pilate) played by Jews, I simply cannot concede that they really are anti-semitic.

There's also some nice stuff in the Gospels about loving your neighbor, and inviting people of all races into Christianity. But no, boorite says it's obviously OBVIOUSLY anti-semitic because the Gospels don't condemn Rome (which is an OBVIOUS attack on all Jews).

You're right boorite! Matthew, Mark, Luke and John = DEATH TO THE JEWS!

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

Actually, I said the Gospels exonerate the real killers of Jesus and oppressors of Jews-- Rome-- and falsely pin the blame on Jews. Maybe you can't see anything anti-Semitic in this, but the message was not lost on two millenia's worth of Christians who persecuted and killed Jews all over Europe.

Yes, the Gospels show Jesus saying some nice things. Of course they do. Much of that is taken straight from the Talmud. The problem is, it's presented as if Jesus is saying something really outlandish, which Jewish leaders want to kill him for, when in fact, it's standard Pharisaical exegesis, and in any case, the Pharisees were not in the habit of resolving religious disputes via homicide. Stories of amicable disputes between Pharisees exist in the earlier Gospels; later, these accounts are changed into hostile confrontations. The bias or trend (tendenz, to use the technical term) is to vilify the Jews, to "religify" the conflict, and to depoliticize it, thus exonerating Rome. This constitutes a smear campaign against the Jews, one which worked rather well, considering the history of Jews in Christendom.

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What others say about boorite!

So you're saying this is why the Jews have been persecuted, why the Holocaust happened, and why anti-semitism exists?

You keep ignoring Chi's point, that even if you could say 'well Jesus was complaining to the wrong people' he was a Jew complaining to other Jews.

This is another big problem of your argument. You suggest the Gospels were written with the motivation of "smearing" the Jews. Again I say, I think it's pretty clear only if you are already anti-semitic (or riddled with Jewish paranoia of anti-semitism) would you find anti-semitic inspiration in the Gospels. People who used and use the Gospels to justify anti-semitic behavior are anti-semitic, but it doesn't make the Gospels anti-semitic.

If you're talking about things and interpretations since their writting, it doesn't apply to the argument (which you made: the Gospels are anti-semitic therefore a movie based on the Gospels is anti-semitic). If the Gospels after their writing are used to justify anti-seimitic behavior, it doesn't mean they are anti-semitic texts.

If there was such a conspiracy between Rome and Christianity, why did Rome persecute Christians for so long?

I like how you keep ignoring Chi's points. Is it because they are very good points? Or do you need some time to find a nice tricky way to answer them, which somehow, after a lot of winding talk and hypothesis, you completely "prove" what Chi is writing is wrong (under X circumstance supposing Y is true with a word in latin or two thrown in)?

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

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However, I am still stuck on one issue which doesn't seem to have been addressed: Jesus was Jewish.

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Ich mag torte.

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So you're saying this is why the Jews have been persecuted, why the Holocaust happened, and why anti-semitism exists?

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I'd say based on the schooling boorite just gave you, MaKK, you should be worried more about your own points.

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The giant three-phallused phallus of Uzbekistan will one day squirt the cosmic jizz of revenge all over Canada.

quote:

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[Click to view comic: 'A Holiday for Everyone']

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Marry me, Boinky.

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What others say about boorite!

I was with you up until this point, boorite:

That's false. The distinction could hardly be more marked.

The distinction really was not that marked at all. Many Jews who accepted Jesus as the Messiah nevertheless continued in their adherence to Jewish law. Other Gentile followers of Jesus 'converted' but as a result thought of themselves as Jewish having done so. The gulf between 'follower of Christ' and 'Jew' was not anywhere near as pronounced then as it is now. Many perceived Jesus as having given Gentiles an 'easier' route into Judaism, i.e. one which did not require circumcision or upholding all 613 commandments.

Though it is true that Paul, on various occasions, did criticise Jews for persisting with their laws, this did not stop them, for the most part. Christianity as a distinct religion did not truly emerge until quite some time after Paul's death. Don't forget Paul's own utterance "I am a Jew" from Acts 22:3 - he still clearly considered himself Jewish, even if he had gnostico-pagan beliefs. The clear-cut dichotomy between Judaism and Christianity really did not exist at the time of Paul and the early churches. Whilst the two faiths now stand worlds apart, this was not how things stood back then. For quite some time, followers of Christ were considered a sect of Judaism, much akin to the Essenes.

Remember Matthew's Gospel: in this book, much emphasis is placed upon Jesus' fulfilment of the prophecies (actually, on closer inspection one will find that he fulfilled none of them, and that a lot of the so-called 'prophecies' cited therein are a mish-mash of non-contextual quotations lifted from entirely different passages of scripture, but we'll leave that aside for now) and this was done in order to persuade Jews that the Messiah really had come and lived amongst us. Such efforts would not have been made if Christianity really were an entirely different religion as you seem to claim it was back then.

At the end of it all, Jesus was a Rabbi, a Jewish teacher of the law. He expressed Jewish law and teaching in a way which later Apostles, particularly Paul, may well have taken to be a new religion. What they then went on to build on top is history, but the foundations of what we now call Christianity were firmly rooted in Judaism.