Saturday, August 13, 2005
My response to Steve Benson
Steve Benson, an ex-Mormon cartoonist, posted an article entitled CHRISTIANTIY VS. THE JEWS: AN UGLY LEGACY on the Recovery from Mormonism message board. Here is my response:
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Chase notes that this “oldest, most persistent, pervasive, pernicious hatred known to the world” was “reared in the Christian era . . .”
He's laying it on a little thick here.
An examination of the origins of doctrinal Christian hatred of Jews reveals that anti-Semitism not only formed a basis for generations of Christian hatred of, and attacks against, Jews but constituted an integral part of canonized Christian scripture.
Practitioners of Judaism persecuted Christians first, either directly or as collaborators. That is the source of anti-Judaic remarks in the New Testament.
This foundation of Christianity’s systemic anti-Jewishness was built, in part, he notes, on “the rigid method of scriptural interpretation used by the early Christians, which took every unflattering reference to Jews in the Hebrew Bible (in some of the Prophetic books, for example) at face value. The denigration of Jews thus easily slipped into dogma.”
As if there were any other way to take the "unflattering refereces to Jews" in their own scriptures.
# posted by O'Brien @ 8/13/2005 10:35:00 AM 
