Word: jewish
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...exempt from the tripartite rancor, early Christians used their understanding of Abraham, who they claimed found grace outside Jewish law, to prove that the older religion begged for replacement--a contention that helped propel almost two millenniums of anti-Semitism...
...Nile to the Euphrates. The pact is sealed in a mysterious ceremony in a dream, during which the Lord, appearing as a smoking torch, puts himself formally under oath. He requires a different acknowledgment from Abraham: he must inscribe a sign of the Covenant on his body, initiating the Jewish and Muslim customs of circumcision. He is now committed, God notes later, to "keep the way of the Lord to do righteousness and justice...
...universal God made it easier to imagine a universal code of ethics. Positing a deity intimately involved in the fate of one's children overturned the prevalent image of time as an ever cycling wheel, effectively inventing the idea of a future. Says Eugene Fisher, director of Catholic-Jewish relations for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops: "Whether you call it submission in Muslim terms, conversion in Christian terms or t'shuva [turning toward God] for the Jews, monotheism is a radically new understanding, the underlying concept of Western civilization." So linked is Abraham's name with this new path...
...Gospels, but it was Paul who did the fine mortise work, citing the patriarch in his New Testament epistles more than any other figure exceptChrist. Perhaps the most strongly self-identifying Jew among the Apostles, Paul clearly felt an urgency to connect his new movement with the Jewish paterfamilias. He did so primarily through Abraham's original response to God's Call and through the old man's embattled faith, or "hope against hope," as Paul famously put it, that God would bring him a son. Such faith, Paul wrote, made Abraham "the father of all who believe...
...Paul's Abrahamic bouquet to his birth religion contained poisoned thorns. One of his themes was that a believer no longer needed to be Jewish or to follow Jewish law to be redeemed--the way now lay through Christ. Abraham's story served these arguments well. His Covenant long predated the Jewish law as brought down from the mountain by Moses, and so, wrote Paul, "the promise to Abraham and his descendants ... did not come through...