New Year, New Plans

Hello, readers! (And by readers, I mean, like, maybe two or three people, tops.) As of last week, we have entered the Year of Your Lord 2023, and this is typically a time when people write about all the big stuff they're gonna do in the future. "New year, new me" is the most popular turn of phrase related to this phenomenon.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines the word "future" (apparently a noun, according to the confusing rules of the English language) in several ways. The blanket definition basically says that the future is the indefinite time yet to come or something that will happen during that time.

Your humble author has had plans for the future many times in his life. Each time, they were different. Some goals were loftier than others, and some were just plain unrealistic. To him, and no doubt to many, the future is a constantly changing animal. There's always hope that there will be mostly good things and fewer bad things, but that's the other thing about the future: it's beyond our control.

I don't know what tomorrow will bring. And I'm comfortable with that. Sometimes the picture's blurry, but at least there's a picture at all. Others aren't so comfortable with that; thus, religion.

Anyway... I don't like to commit to resolutions or any of that nonsense, but I can tell you about a couple of things that I hope to get to by the end of this month. If you know me personally, and you read this blog, hold my feet to the fire if we've hit February and I haven't delivered on either goal.

Goal #1: Another Interlude

To put it simply, Catholics are extra, as the kids say. Do you want proof? I think the best proof is the existence of a book like Drinking with Saint Nick: Christmas Cocktails for Sinners and Saints -- beer and wine selections, and dozens of cocktail recipes, all targeted at the holiday season (here defined as all the feast days between December 1 and February 2). That is a special kind of extra. 

Don't worry, this isn't turning into a recipe blog. But there are other ways in which Catholics are extra. 

For example, you probably know, at least from spotting the names of some of their churches if nothing else, about saints -- those who are recognized as having an exceptional degree of holiness, likeness, or closeness to God, and usually have a story of martyrdom attached. But did you know sainthood isn't always permanent? 

It's true. The Catholic Church removed 93 saints from the universal calendar and revoked their feast days in 1969 when Pope Paul VI revised the canon of saints and determined that some of the names had only ever been alive as legends or not enough was known about them to determine their status. Such popular saints as Christopher and even Nicholas -- unceremoniously dropped from the calendar. Wild, right?

Well, here's what's even wilder: to paraphrase a renowned scholar, the next Interlude will be the story of how the Church didn't realize until the mid-nineteenth century that they had a) accidentally made the Buddha a Christian saint, and b) he'd been part of the pantheon for a thousand years.

Stay tuned for more!

Goal #2: A Jewish Walk Through the New Testament

If you're reading this blog, then hopefully you already agree with me that the portrayal of the Jews as "black-hearted villains looking for a way to trap -- and an excuse to kill -- an innocent man named Jesus" is repulsive, hateful, anti-Semitic propaganda, and should be denied and pushed aside by any intelligent, thoughtful person.

An even sharper reader, perhaps one with an interest in comparative religion, could make the (valid) argument that Jesus was not unique; he did not create a new vision of deity or of man's relationship to deity. The Sermon on the Mount, including the Beatitudes, and indeed all of the sayings attributed to (or most commonly associated with) him, all noble words and loving sentiments whether you believe he said them or not, can be traced to the common rabbinical writings of his time. 

When he taught love and forgiveness over judgment and legalism, he was not making a radical stand against a hateful and petty race of Jewish hypocrites; these teachings abound in rabbinical literature, and variations of almost everything attributed to Jesus can be found in the mouths of Rabbi Hillel and his contemporaries. His words would not have earned him so much as a frown or a sneer from the rabbis and priests of his time. (Oddly enough, for all the whitewashing the Gospels did to present Jesus as an enemy of the Pharisees, he actually had a lot in common with their doctrines.) 

Remember those interactions between Jesus and the scribes recorded in the Gospels, where it seems they are always testing him, trying to catch him in some misstatement or blasphemy? Jesus wasn't deviating from the norm. Jews questioned doctrine all the time. It was a pastime at the Temple to dissect the nitty-gritty. This sort of back-and-forth, Q&A-type discussion was, and still is for that matter, a commonplace of how Jewish thought was not only taught but evolved.

A Jewish origin is firmly rooted at the heart of Christianity. The New Testament itself proclaims its indebtedness to the Old Testament on its very first page; the Gospel of Matthew begins with a genealogy that makes sense only to those who are familiar with the people and events to which it refers. The fourth edition of the United Bible Society's Greek New Testament (1993) lists 343 Old Testament quotations in the New Testament, as well as no fewer than 2,309 allusions and verbal parallels. (The books most used are Psalms [79 quotations, 333 allusions] and Isaiah [66 quotations, 348 allusions].) 

Bearing that in mind, I feel that if one really wants to be a good Christian, one should learn more about Jewish belief instead of dismissing it or only cherry-picking those beliefs which are relevant to their own interests. And that's what I hope to accomplish with this planned series. Aided by the work of authors and researchers like Shalom Ben Chorin, Haim Cohn, Johannes Lehmann, Shlomo Pines, Joshua Podro (who I feel deserves the main credit for the observations about the Jewish origins of Jesus' teachings in his collaboration with Robert Graves, The Nazarene Gospel Restored), Leon Zitzer (and his bibliography), and more, we're going to look at the historical, Jewish Jesus, and exactly where his teachings came from.

Noted comedian Lewis Black, in his 2006 special Red, White, and Screwed, made a rather profound statement:

...every Sunday I turn on the television set, and a priest or a pastor is reading from my book [the Old Testament; Black is Jewish], and interpreting it, and their interpretations, I have to tell you, are usually wrong. It's not their fault, because it's not their book. You never see a rabbi on TV interpreting the New Testament, do you?

Would that we did! We might learn a great deal. Jesus was a devout Jew, and so were his followers. So let's look at it like they did.

See you in the New Year!