Tag: Chrestomathy

“The difference is much wider than the fact that Christians have both the Old and New Testaments while the Jews have the Old Testament. Rather, the distinction is that Christians have the entire Word of God while the Jews have an Old Testament which they have in effect nullified with their traditions. This process was already well underway when Jesus rebuked it, and it has continued down to the present, with the Jews unrepentant.”

American Milk and Honey, p. 53

“So according to Christ, the rabbis had been supplanting the teaching of the Word of God for the sake of their traditions, and they had been doing this for centuries [Mark 7:6-13]. To be clear, what Jesus is talking about here is a gradually forming Talmud.”

American Milk and Honey, pp. 47-48

“Replacing the Temple system with the tradition of the elders resulted in what might be called the triumph of Pharisaism, and the Talmud is the monument to that triumph. Prior to the judgment on Jerusalem, they already had a few centuries of a wrong-footed head start; the traditions that Jesus so violently rejected were the traditions of the first half of the Talmudic stream. Indeed, the Talmudic traditions of the elders were the reason why Jerusalem was judged so severely.”

American Milk and Honey, pp. 49-50

“Many Christians naively believe that Orthodox Jews are basically on the same page with Christians, only they are running one testament short. This kind of superficial treatment of Judaism and Christianity reduces everything to whether you say ‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘Happy Hanukkah.’ Do you put up Christmas lights, or do you light a menorah? Many Christians, particularly some in the dispensational tradition, regard our differences with the Jews as extreme denominational differences, but still somehow within the pale. But modern Judaism is not the religion of the Old Testament. It is something else entirely. It is not the biblical faith with Jesus left out.”

American Milk and Honey, pp. 47-48

“If Christians over here, purporting to have a biblical worldview, start expressing their sympathy with the open skunks because they are convinced that the hidden skunks are just as bad, then it does not astonish me at all that people don’t want to listen to us.”

American Milk and Honey, p. 44

“I believe that Jews need Christ in order to be forgiven for their sins, and that if they die without Christ, then they die unforgiven. And I am well aware that in some quarters the mere embrace of such positions makes you de facto antisemitic. But the fact that I would be falsely charged with antisemitism does not make real antisemitism nonexistent.”

American Milk and Honey, p. 40

“I can resist other people’s temptations all day long and not even break a sweat. But I am a hardline conservative, and this means that one of the things I should keep a weather eye out for is the tendency of certain kinds of conservatives to get a bad case of the Jew thing. I want to exercise the kind of climate control that prevents antisemitism from taking root and growing anywhere around me.”

American Milk and Honey, p. 40

“I can see on camera which side is shooting rockets, and which side is driving the tanks. But which side is pointing the cameras?”

American Milk and Honey, p. 39

“Zionism as a doctrine was not a good idea. But in just the same way, Manifest Destiny was a piece of impudence cooked up by Americans during our ‘look at us go’ stage. I don’t hold the doctrine of Manifest Destiny at all, along with the assumptions that were underneath it. And yet, here my house is, ensconced in Idaho, right in the middle of Manifest Destiny territory. I own that house, have a legitimate right to it, and would object in quite forceful terms if Nez Perce Indians were shooting rockets at it.”

American Milk and Honey, pp. 37-38

“In the ancient world, there was no clean way to separate combatants from non-combatants. When you besieged a city, the entire city was besieged and not just the soldiers. The law of God assumes that Israel would go to war and that sieges would be part of what they would do.”

American Milk and Honey, p. 36