I Lost Another Follower

I don't know what happened but I presume my merely posting what Maimonides originally wrote about the origins of Islam lost me my one and only follower who happened to be Muslim.

Now I just spent a week arguing with a 'Preterist' - a Christian who believes that the only truth that will, can or was 'meant' to be ever be known about Christianity is found in the writings of the Church Fathers.

I just started wondering about the whole idea of whether Christians can be expected to give a fair or 'scientific' evaluation of Christianity, Muslims of Islam or Jews of Judaism (atheists of atheism certainly belongs here too).

It is easy to do a 'Bill Maher' and pull out the lowest ranks of each of these communities and demonstrate how stupid, intolerant and xenophobic 'they all are.' But that's not my gig.

My interest is in discovering the lost source for all three religions for on some level they necessarily all go back to some common tradition. How did Christianity grow out of Judaism? How did rabbinic Judaism develop out of the destruction of the temple? How did Islam originally see itself fulfill the messianic expectations of both of its religious forerunnners?

These are my questions especially because I think it necessarily proves the involvement of Marcus Julius Agrippa, the last king of Israel as a reformers of Judaism, Samaritanism and Christianity.

Of course it seems to me that there are some who don't want us to ask questions. They just want us to believe. Yet this approach seems contrary to any authentic religious sensibility.

How could God not want us to see how his greatest flower actually emerged from the mud of existence? Of course believing isn't a bad thing but if God manifest himself to us directly surely the development of his revelation is one clear way that he would want us to 'see him' - no? Am I missing something?

I have absolutely contempt for the blind (and typically German) aspects of Protestantism. Yet I love their investigative spirit - i.e. 'go to where the truth leads us.' As a Jew I find much of Jewish research into Judaism even more mendacious than anything perpetrated in Christian circles.

How could anyone hold that rabbinic Judaism ISN'T an innovation? Indeed for all the smarts that my people have and represent the blindness that we show toward our own origins in the second century is utterly embarrassing.

Does anyone really believe that the Jews of the Common Era really 'forgot' what to do when the Passover fell on the Sabbath? There must have been Passovers which fell on Sabbaths umpteen times in previous ages. How did everyone suddenly get so dumb so as not to know what the 'rule' was?

The only way that this story makes any sense is if acknowledge that there was a long period when the Law was not practiced in Israel and when a form of Christianity ruled over Palestine with its 'new Torah' - the gospel.

Of course no one ever says this. When you want to explain what happen to Judaism in this period you are told to simply regurgitate the BS that is put forward in the Mishnah that the rabbinic tradition represented an unbroken chain from the time of Moses.

My question is if we acknowledge that a break did occur - and there isn't a Jewish scholar alive in the world who will even allow this idea to float into his head - how could it not be understood to have occurred during the reign of Marcus Agrippa?

This is when the temple was destroyed. The natural question which follows is how did Judaism survive in the period when Agrippa ruled Palestine? Again the mythical BS developed by the rabbanites is uncritically introduced into the discussion.

'There was a gathering at Yavneh which somehow preserved the teachings,' or 'the tradition had to go underground' or something stupid like this.

Yet don't these people even so much as think about the logical consequences of what they are saying? How could the Jews go from a seeming eternal cycle of sacrificing in the temple one minute and then 'pow!' the next minute there was a gathering at some insignificant village where the 'true halakhah' of the previous 500 years were preserved when the whole religion was focused on atonement through sacrifices?

Again these people aren't stupid. I have never met a stupid Jew in all my travels. So how is it that in this one instance of the utmost significance to the religion as a whole the entire nation looks the other way?

The answer is obvious - it's okay if you lie, tell untruths or don't investigate the origins of your religion. Somehow God sanctions that.

This is so stupid it makes my head spin. Clearly when you look at the period - and Tractate Shabbat 116a in particular - it is impossible to imagine that some form of Christianity was imposed over the Jews in the period.

The outsider can't imagine what an amazing 'historical black hole' exists for the study of Judaism and Christianity in the period immediately following the destruction of the temple. Yet again, it is an inconvenient truth that is almost never uttered in the existing literature.

We use the Acts of the Apostles and Josephus - the former a text developed in the middle of the second century, the latter an original Jewish history which was developed within the Church by various later supposed 'synergoi' (helpers) of original author (see Thackeray on this) - to draw a fanciful history of an apolitical and ultimately extra-Jewish Church that never had any historical reality.

What I propose instead is to consider that Marcus Agrippa developed ur-Christianity (a religion ultimately which expressed itself as 'Marcionitism' in the late second century) in order to fill the void was resulted from the destruction of the temple. The religion of the Jew on the cross was developed as a warning to all Jews, Samaritans and proselytes what going back to old ways necessarily meant.

Of course I can't prove this understanding with the same degree of 'certainty' that existing religion traditions appear at first glance to have with their 'textual tradition.' Nevertheless when you look closely none of these traditions seem at all convincing.

Only the Catholics believed in Acts. So what did the Marcionites believe was the story of the development of the Church? That question is never asked (because it was compromise the faith of a generation of academics).

Only the rabbanites could possibly believe in a desperate story which explained the 'survival' of the Jewish tradition through countless generations of official Imperial persecution after the destruction of the temple.

The only way we are going to make sense of the two religions - the Catholic faith and the rabbinic tradition - which emerge in the late second century is if Christians listen to the Jews and Jews to the Christians in order to 'fill in' some of the details in that 'black hole historical epoch' I just mentioned.

Of course, this is likely never going to happen. Our only hope is to encourage the same among scholars and laypeople who haven't already taken 'sides.'

If this is an unlikely hope add to this the need for Muslims and Christians and Jews to learn from each other to make sense of the development of Islam from an original Jewish messianic expectation and a single, long gospel.

Hell might freeze over twenty five times before any of these things happen.

To be honest with you, I sometimes get the feeling that religious tolerance and cultural openness will be thought of as a 'cultural fad' that developed in the Golden Age that I happened to be born into in the late twentieth century.

There are ominous signs of rigidity emerging in our culture and in cultures around the world which make the promulgation of my book and my ideas in this period so critical.