As I Was Saying This Time Last Week
Mar. 5th, 2004 11:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
arisbeZmirak's Passion piece in TAC is even better than the one in Godspy:
Make no mistake: as the Gospels make clear, Jesus did indeed say things that contravened the law of Moses—divinely imposed, the highest, purest religion existing on earth. In the high priest’s presence, Jesus asserted His own divinity. Faced with this, the high priest had only two choices: bow down and worship Jesus or put Him to death.
There is no room in the Gospels for the liberal 19th-century myth of Jesus as a great moral teacher, unjustly persecuted. As C.S. Lewis has written, Jesus was either the Son of God or a wicked, perhaps deranged, imposter. Religious Jews who reject His divinity but affirm Him as a noble ethicist are being extremely generous.
I don't know about generous. Liberal Jews and liberal Christians have agreed on the cover story that Jesus was a great teacher, but none of his followers got the point. Some great teacher! The teachings of Confucius, Buddha, and Muhammad are well preserved in the movements to which they gave their names. Christianity alone is a total fraud. Or so the mainstream churches tell us -- and a great many Catholic theologians are being sucked into the mainstream -- and any Christian who doesn't follow the party line runs the risk of being denounced as a closet Hitler.
It seems to me, though, without seeing the movie, that Zmirak has a much clearer idea than Gibson of what it is all about. The Temple authorities had very good reasons for acting as they did. But for Mel, the Devil made 'em do it, and that says it all. Which is, when you come to think of it, pretty close to anti-Semitism, though that might not be the motivating factor. Mel is just too much the authoritarian to want to see Jesus as a challenge to the religious authorities of his day, so their animosity must be attributed solely to supernatural (sorry, John, preternatural) intervention.
The JDL, ADL, whatever, has gone off half cocked and shot itself in the foot by presuming that Mel is anti-Semitic in so far as he follows the Gospels, not when he departs from them. The Jewish propaganda machine has discredited itself in the eyes of all fair-minded folks of any religion and none. And just as well, as long as false accusations of anti-Semitism are the weapon of choice against any who question the indiscriminate slaughter of Arabs.
But there I go again.
Make no mistake: as the Gospels make clear, Jesus did indeed say things that contravened the law of Moses—divinely imposed, the highest, purest religion existing on earth. In the high priest’s presence, Jesus asserted His own divinity. Faced with this, the high priest had only two choices: bow down and worship Jesus or put Him to death.
There is no room in the Gospels for the liberal 19th-century myth of Jesus as a great moral teacher, unjustly persecuted. As C.S. Lewis has written, Jesus was either the Son of God or a wicked, perhaps deranged, imposter. Religious Jews who reject His divinity but affirm Him as a noble ethicist are being extremely generous.
I don't know about generous. Liberal Jews and liberal Christians have agreed on the cover story that Jesus was a great teacher, but none of his followers got the point. Some great teacher! The teachings of Confucius, Buddha, and Muhammad are well preserved in the movements to which they gave their names. Christianity alone is a total fraud. Or so the mainstream churches tell us -- and a great many Catholic theologians are being sucked into the mainstream -- and any Christian who doesn't follow the party line runs the risk of being denounced as a closet Hitler.
It seems to me, though, without seeing the movie, that Zmirak has a much clearer idea than Gibson of what it is all about. The Temple authorities had very good reasons for acting as they did. But for Mel, the Devil made 'em do it, and that says it all. Which is, when you come to think of it, pretty close to anti-Semitism, though that might not be the motivating factor. Mel is just too much the authoritarian to want to see Jesus as a challenge to the religious authorities of his day, so their animosity must be attributed solely to supernatural (sorry, John, preternatural) intervention.
The JDL, ADL, whatever, has gone off half cocked and shot itself in the foot by presuming that Mel is anti-Semitic in so far as he follows the Gospels, not when he departs from them. The Jewish propaganda machine has discredited itself in the eyes of all fair-minded folks of any religion and none. And just as well, as long as false accusations of anti-Semitism are the weapon of choice against any who question the indiscriminate slaughter of Arabs.
But there I go again.
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no subject
Date: 2004-03-07 01:23 pm (UTC)But seriously, I consider the Iraq war to be vile and bestial. (Call me selfrighteous if you like, but that is not an agrument.) An impressive number of folks who have criticized Mr. Bush's foreign policy agenda, and the neoconservative intellectuals who formulated it, have been smeared as anti-Semites. Indeed, it is alleged that neoconservative, used to describe the war hawks, is simply a code word for Jew -- though that is the term they use to describe themselves, and a great many of their paleoconservative critics are Jewish by faith or descent.
I find that I must continue to respectfully disagree with you.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-07 05:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-07 07:57 pm (UTC)Don't be sorry. Life's no fun if we can't disagree.