Sublime

So, sharpening up these issues into our five main questions: How does Jesus fit into the Judaism of his day? What were his aims? Why did he die? How did the early church come into being, and why did it take the shape it did? and Why are the gospels what they are?28 The sixth question is something of a joker in the pack, though every writer on Jesus

One of the most stunning gestures of Judaism was to overturn the whole idea of a hierarchy of knowledge,18 for if there are inequalities of learning, they will be replicated through all other social structures, giving some people unwarranted power over others. This is the great insight of the Jewish vision, from which all else followed: A free soci

“The risen Lord is not the historical Jesus behind the Gospels, but the Christ of the apostolic preaching, of the whole New Testament” (65).

The revered senior rabbi of the reform Temple Israel, Joseph Narot, who’d been a champion of black civil rights and a strong opponent of the war in Vietnam, spoke in favor of the amendment: “If God is love, then let it be the love for all mankind,” he said.

‘Respectable’ individuals can absolve themselves from individual blame: they would never plant a bomb in a church; they would never stone a black family,” Toure and Hamilton wrote. “But they continue to support political officials and institutions that would and do perpetuate institutionally racist policies.”

The Sadducees insisted that only the written Torah was authoritative. The Pharisees affirmed that side by side with the written Torah there was a parallel revelation at Sinai of principles and categories with which humans could interpret, apply, and develop the Law. That body of revelation given over to humans was called the Torah Sheh-B’ Al Peh (t

Once we come to associate the parables with children’s stories, it becomes difficult to see them as anything but.

In the end, though, the stringency of Jewish law, above all the practice of circumcision, was a barrier against its wider adoption, and it was precisely these elements that Paul removed.

The Jews who remained Jews, who remained faithful to the historical character of the Exodus, continued to insist that redemption could not be fully realized without social, political, and economic liberation as well as spiritual fulfillment.