laura@l5.uucp (Laura Creighton) (12/23/85)
I didn't want to post this, but this has gone on long enough. 2 years ago I went to a week long series of lectures at U of Toronto given by an wonderfully erudite Jewish religious scholar who lives in Israel. Unfortunately, I cannot remember his name. Next week my stuff is promised to arrive, so if I have it written down there, I will post it. In the meantime I have cross posted this to net.religion.jewish in the hope that someone there might be able to identify him. He is a renowned scholar in Hebrew, who has been criticised for the arhceology that he feels is essential to true religious scholarship. He is responsible for a lot of translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and has devoted his life to the study of the roots of Judaism. He is as much an expert on the Sadducees as there is, and perhaps the greatest living authority on the Essenes. He speaks with a heavy accent and is hard to listen to, but a marvellous speaker in any case. Any takers? He appears to have conclusively demonstrated that John the Baptist was an Essene who had rejected the doctrine of Double-Predestination (if that rings any Christian bells..) I *wish* I could remember his name. But back to hell... At the time of Christ, there was a big religious split among the Jews. The Sadducees (about whom little is known) did not believe in an afterlife, or at least did not believe in an afterlife as the Pharisees did. So when Jesus gets asked about the afterlife in front of Pharisees and Sadducess, this is a *real* *big* *thing* -- he is being asked to rule on which of the major sects of contemporary (for him) Judaism is full of it. The Essenes were a third major sect, but they were monks who fled cities and towns as ``places of corruption'' and lived in their monestaries practicing as harsh a way of life as they could develop. Some of their writings have been preserved, so we know more about htem than we do about the Sadducees. They had a very well developed idea of Hell as a big place of eternal torment. they linked this place to Sheol. And they believed that only the Essenes had been predestined by God to be saved, and that in virtue of their being Essenes, they should do penance and live a harsh life for the rest of their lives to demonstrate that they are saved and that they really regretted their wretched state. This appears to be the reason that John the Baptist broke with them -- he thought that if you sincerely repented for your sins, you could be saved, whereas the Essenes believed that only those destined by God to be saved were going to be saved -- if you were not destined by God to be saved then all the repenting in the world wasn't going to help you. Soooo, Jesus did not invent the idea of Hell. That idea was already well-established in Essene thought long before Jesus was born. But since the Essenes had religious disputes with both the Pharisees and the Sadducees over Hell, it seems also clear that Jesus' ideas on Hell would not be accepted by a great many Jews of Jesus' time. [At the very least those who disagreed with the Essenes over the *existence* of Hell and those who disagreed with the Essenes over whether or not there was *any* torment in Hell would disagree with Jesus.] Buuut, it is not necessary to look at Jesus' condemnation of the Pharisees to conclude that Jesus was anti-Jew. All you have to do is read the book of John. I have a 40 page essay on that coming with my stuff -- I can post the juicy parts if you like. But my conclusion from that was not that Jesus was anti-Jew (who can tell?) but that rather the author(s) of John spoke for a population that had a large Samartitan element and that these people had had great trouble with existing populations of Jews. The Acts of the Apostles talks about how ``the Jews'' kicked out the Christians from preaching about Jesus in the synagogues. If you were one of these people, you might have very good reason to resent Jews in general since you had sufferred at their hands -- but this of course does not mean that Jesus resented the Jews. Actually, I find it rather hard to envision Jesus resenting *anybody* -- getting angry and losing his temper, yes, but deep long term resentment, no.