Word: gospels
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...book, Jesus of Nazareth (Doubleday; $24.95), Pope Benedict XVI devotes 20 pages to A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, a 161-page grenade Neusner lobbed in 1993. In that volume, the professor (now at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.) and noncongregational rabbi projected himself back into the Gospel of Matthew to quiz Jesus on the Jewish law. He found the Nazarene's interpretation irredeemably faulty. In his 14-years-delayed response, Benedict not only compliments Neusner as a "great Jewish scholar" but also recapitulates the thesis of A Rabbi Talks and spends a third...
Contention was the very soul of A Rabbi Talks. Neusner based his book on the common scholarly understanding that the New Testament's Gospel of Matthew was written as an invitation to Jesus' fellow Jews, trying to convince them, by dint of purportedly predictive passages in the Jewish Bible and Jesus' striking interpretations of Jewish Scripture, that he was Israel's longed-for Messiah. His claim in the Sermon on the Mount that he came "not ... to abolish the Torah and the [writings of the] prophets ... but to fulfill them" is one of the great hinge sentences connecting Western monotheisms...
...fact, a close reading of the Pope's chapter suggests more a marriage of convenience. Benedict is preoccupied with what he sees as the Gospel's overriding message of Jesus' divinity, even in passages that liberal Christians read primarily as straightforward injunctions to help the poor and powerless. Having a rabbi help make that case is novel and convenient. Regarding one verse, Benedict writes that "Neusner shows us that we are dealing not with some kind of moralism, but with a highly theological text, or, to put it more precisely, a Christological one." He acknowledges the rabbi's point that...
Although our vices and virtues seem to be independent of religion, there is no dividing Americana from religion. The two are interwoven. Removing the churches from the Boston skyline would be equivalent to creating a New York without skyscrapers. Forgetting Southern gospel songs would be as much a blow to our culture as if we turned our back on jazz and rock ’n’ roll. Cherishing our freedom to hold any or no religion is as important as practicing our freedom of speech. Our history with religion might be filled with bumps and wrong turns...
...premarital sex, adultery and drinking - and in 1965, just a few weeks after Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, Falwell delivered a sermon that urged against any formal mixture of politics and faith: "Believing the Bible as I do, I would find it impossible to stop preaching the pure saving gospel of Jesus Christ and begin doing anything else - including the fighting of communism, or participating in the civil rights reform.... Preachers are not called to be politicians, but to be soul winners...