mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate) (11/08/84)
[St. George, protect me]
I can't restrain myself. In case people haven't noticed, I am increasingly
despairing of finding any reasoning in Yirmiyahu's articles. Lately all
he has said is that we are unqualified to argue with him. Well, I have
two comments:
(1) If we aren't worth arguing with, why does he bother?
(2) Where does he get the right to assume that we know nothing about
Judaism?
As they have been presented to us, Yirmiyahu's arguments make no
appeal to Jewish theology. They also make no appeal to christian
theology. Yirmiyahu hasn't the slightest idea what I believe (unless he
has read my "What Episcopalians Believe" article :-)); he therefore has
no right to make statements about my beliefs. I don't make statements
about what he believes. It is not clear that Yirmiyahu knows anything
about Christianity other than what his apostate source told him.
Us more liberal types have learned in the last 1900 years that you can't
take the scriptures as an absolute authority, without some sort of external
criticism. We've learned to listen to what those 1900 years of christians
have had to say on the subject before we make our own decisions. Now we
have Yirmiyahu coming out of the blue with his "antiredaction" theory,
refusing to even reply to the church fathers. And the funny thing is that
no amount of redaction on his part is going to remove the central
embarassment: the resurrection. Edit out the ressurection, and you have
no text at all; leave it in, and no amount of redaction elsewhere will
help.
Enough. Charley Wingate