"You are about to withstand a barrage of lies about the war that broke out today in Israel. Some of those lies will be explicit. Some of them will be lies of omission. Others will be lies of obfuscation. Or lies of minimization. Lies told by people who are simply too afraid to look at such a barbarous reality. And lies told by people whose true beliefs are too ugly to quite say aloud. Turn on cable news and you can hear some of them right now." – Bari Weiss
Al-Anon: When people show you who they are, let them.
Chuck Colson: Truth conforms to (aligns with) reality.
Scripture: And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. https://esv.org/John3.19
Finally getting back to this. I'll take up the question of Old Testament war in a follow up, but I want to start by making the perhaps tedious but necessary point that there is a difference between what a text actually says and how it is perceived. There is no doubt - no doubt - that some have rationalized their Jew hatred by appealing to the New Testament text. But their appeal is incoherent and fundamentally in contradiction to the entire message of the New Testament. (Flannery O'Connor wrote in a note to a friend, that the best time for a writer was when he has finished his work, but before it is published and "begins to be misunderstood". The more I write and see responses, the more I'm team O'Connor on this question. ) Take, for example, your reference to the epithet "Christ-killers". Those who use(d) that pejorative are/were engaging in a kind of linguistic jujitsu which turned the actual words of Jesus himself on their head. "Christ-killer" introduces the pernicious idea that the circumstances around Jesus death involved his victimization. But that idea, as it happens, is precisely and explicitly the opposite of the way he himself described his death: "No one takes my life from me, I lay it down of my own accord." My only point here is that how malevolent people might have appealed to the biblical text as a way to justify their own malevolence, and what the text ACTUALLY says, are very often entirely different things. I could go on with this line of reasoning but no one who ever read the apostle Paul with honesty could come away without perceiving his deep love and longing for the Jewish people of whom, of course, he himself was a notable example, as was Jesus. The New Testament is only a manual for hatred in the same sense that the Koran presents Islam as a religion of peace, which is to say, not at all. And yet, to your point, people will still perceive things in precisely this way. Though I myself have never met anyone who has actually taken the time to read both books in their full context who then still came away with that perspective.
Thanks for commenting. I have a lot to say in response but I'm out of pocket all morning and into the afternoon so won't get around to responding to the substance of your comment until late today. For now I will just observe that the contents of the Koran were merely incidental to my actual point, which was to highlight the jarring disconnect between what it ACTUALLY says and what the political class and media were saying ABOUT it at the time. The Koranic illustration was in service to the larger agenda of my post, which was to comment on the lengths to which we will go in an effort to avoid coming to grips with what is obvious.
Having said all of the above, I will get around to responding to your observation about Jew-hating and what you perceive to be troubling passages in the Old Testament. One of the better books on the latter, fwiw, is Paul Copan's "Is God a Moral Monster: Making Sense of the Old Testament God"
"You are about to withstand a barrage of lies about the war that broke out today in Israel. Some of those lies will be explicit. Some of them will be lies of omission. Others will be lies of obfuscation. Or lies of minimization. Lies told by people who are simply too afraid to look at such a barbarous reality. And lies told by people whose true beliefs are too ugly to quite say aloud. Turn on cable news and you can hear some of them right now." – Bari Weiss
Strong, Keith. And terribly sad.
Al-Anon: When people show you who they are, let them.
Chuck Colson: Truth conforms to (aligns with) reality.
Scripture: And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. https://esv.org/John3.19
Finally getting back to this. I'll take up the question of Old Testament war in a follow up, but I want to start by making the perhaps tedious but necessary point that there is a difference between what a text actually says and how it is perceived. There is no doubt - no doubt - that some have rationalized their Jew hatred by appealing to the New Testament text. But their appeal is incoherent and fundamentally in contradiction to the entire message of the New Testament. (Flannery O'Connor wrote in a note to a friend, that the best time for a writer was when he has finished his work, but before it is published and "begins to be misunderstood". The more I write and see responses, the more I'm team O'Connor on this question. ) Take, for example, your reference to the epithet "Christ-killers". Those who use(d) that pejorative are/were engaging in a kind of linguistic jujitsu which turned the actual words of Jesus himself on their head. "Christ-killer" introduces the pernicious idea that the circumstances around Jesus death involved his victimization. But that idea, as it happens, is precisely and explicitly the opposite of the way he himself described his death: "No one takes my life from me, I lay it down of my own accord." My only point here is that how malevolent people might have appealed to the biblical text as a way to justify their own malevolence, and what the text ACTUALLY says, are very often entirely different things. I could go on with this line of reasoning but no one who ever read the apostle Paul with honesty could come away without perceiving his deep love and longing for the Jewish people of whom, of course, he himself was a notable example, as was Jesus. The New Testament is only a manual for hatred in the same sense that the Koran presents Islam as a religion of peace, which is to say, not at all. And yet, to your point, people will still perceive things in precisely this way. Though I myself have never met anyone who has actually taken the time to read both books in their full context who then still came away with that perspective.
Thanks for commenting. I have a lot to say in response but I'm out of pocket all morning and into the afternoon so won't get around to responding to the substance of your comment until late today. For now I will just observe that the contents of the Koran were merely incidental to my actual point, which was to highlight the jarring disconnect between what it ACTUALLY says and what the political class and media were saying ABOUT it at the time. The Koranic illustration was in service to the larger agenda of my post, which was to comment on the lengths to which we will go in an effort to avoid coming to grips with what is obvious.
Having said all of the above, I will get around to responding to your observation about Jew-hating and what you perceive to be troubling passages in the Old Testament. One of the better books on the latter, fwiw, is Paul Copan's "Is God a Moral Monster: Making Sense of the Old Testament God"