(urth) Silk for calde blog: Wolfe thesis

[James Wynn]

John,

I absolutely agree with pts 1&2.  On pt 2, I'll go farther and posit that 
Judaism was *recreated* to a large extent in the 2nd century to enable it to 
go on after the destruction of the Temple (I didn't just think this up. An 
Orthodox Jew asserted this much to me about 10 years ago). This Neo-Judaism 
(as you imply) was formed to a great extent as a counter-Christianity and so 
the Septuagint was scrapped (being the Bible Christians used) where as 
before it was accepted as a divinely inspired translation (yet, the Orthodox 
Jews I've talked to still accept the "70 translators" story as factual). So, 
following the Hebrew Bible as the rule was essentially giving the day to 
Christianity's enemies without getting anything in return.

But that leads to my main point: The Reformers (or Deformers if one wants to 
insist) did not dispense with the deuterocanon just because they didn't 
"like" them. They had no reason at all to dispense with them other than that 
they were convinced that the books were self-evidently not authored at the 
time or by the people they claimed. It was an act of Rationalism to drop 
them, and the Reformation was a child of a more Rational age. IIRC Luther 
suspected Revelation should have been dropped as well.

Finally, just because a writer (even a divinely inspired one as the 
Reformers saw it) quotes from a text, does not make that text itself 
divinely inspired. The Book of Enoch was also quoted by Jude and by various 
Church Fathers thru the end of the 2nd century. This, even though it was 
deliberately excluded from the Septuagint. Then, at some time in the 3rd 
century they stopped quoting from it and it was soon "lost". I suspect this 
occurred when Christian scholars ceased to consider it trustworthy as 
Scripture.

Luther was a man of many faults, looking back at him 400 years later. Dan'l 
accused me of being binary, but Luther tended to see all things binarily. In 
his view, the rebels in the Peasant's War were violating the Bible's command 
to be subject to one's rulers and so he bestowed a blessing on those who cut 
them down (Irony? Maybe. But see the end of this paragraph). When Zwingli 
died in battle defending Zurich, Luther's attitude was "Serves him right" 
for carrying a sword as a priest. But to call him an oath-breaker, I think, 
is out-luthering Luther. It seems to me, he had come to believe that those 
who demanded the oath celibacy from him were frauds (the church leaders in 
Rome who --often as not-- never followed the oath themselves and were in 
many cases cynical skeptics toward Christianity as a whole) and that that 
oath was part of their fraud. Maybe he was wrong, but he saw what he saw and 
drew his conclusions, and I don't think there is enough counter-evidence to 
condemn him as an oath-breaker.

J.