CADRE Comments

One of the more ridiculous assertions in objection to the Christian message is that the New Testament is anti-semitic. I am aware that some scholars have made this claim in the past, but simply because someone -- even someone with a Ph.D. -- makes an assertion is hardly reason to believe that it is necessarily reasonable. While an exhaustive analysis of this rather heady subject is beyond the scope of a simple weblog entry, I do want to briefly raise some reasons for rejecting this claim. First, let me make a statement about context. I am a Bible-believing Christian and argue from that context. I believe that the books attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were all written by those men or written down by people who were their disciples (and, in the case of Mark, a person who was himself a disciple of Peter), and that all three of the canonical Gospels were completed by 70 A.D. with John being largely written before that date and completed sometime shortly thereafter. I have my rea...

In Parts 2 and 3 of this Round, I demonstrated that the actual data of the texts does not indicate the authors were using the name "Jud-", including with Judas Iscariot, to heap derision on orthodox Judaism; that there is no clear progression across the texts of exonerating Pilate while blaming the Jewish religious authorities; and (most problematic of all, perhaps), that Bishop Spong himself has less than no problem admitting that there was a fatal rejection of Jesus and his teaching (even on Bishop Spong's theologically truncated notion of Jesus' teaching) by the mainstream Jewish authorities of his day: a rejection leading to Jesus' death at the hands of the Romans via the Sanhedrin. Which admission of historical accuracy, radically undermines Bishop Spong's theory for the reason why the authors would invent a fictional character of 'Judas Iscariot', in order to promote rejection of orthodox Judaism among Jewish Christians. There is, of course, th...