About "soft on Christianity," I was being ludic.
About Clinton, I was referring to Blue's position that Jesus's declaration of identification with the Law was him being a politician-- ie, saying it but maybe not meaning it.
Sure, 'some' scholars, not 'all' scholars, obviously, or the seminaries would be turning out the lights. I guess what I was trying to convey, and it's always a surprise that it's a surprise, was that Jesus was a Jew of his time. And that he participated in vigorous discussions about the "oral Torah," and what should be included in it, and there is a strong scholarly consensus (it isn't unanimous) that the differences between traditional Judaic ethics and the (minimal, except for his extreme position on divorce) reconfiguring imposed on them by Jesus in his quest for a cataclysmic final divine intervention, constitute examples of what might be called situation ethics or interim ethics. These innovations, misunderstood, were elaborated in a tortured way in the much later construction of Christian doctrine by Paul and his branch of interpreters.
It is Jesus himself who said that he was a devotee of the Law, though not of "the totality of every rule ever promulgated in the history of Judaism," just the Pentateuch, and that's plenty.
The scholars in the field are giving really quite clear and convincing reconsiderations, based on solid research, (archeology, Dead Sea scrolls, Nag Hammadi texts,) of the origins of Christian belief, and this view, or interpretation, is gaining ground at the academic level-- but it is popularly received with manifest discomfort.
For the most part, it appears to me, Christians deeply do not want to contemplate the proposition that the historical Jesus was a Jew. But he was. Jesus was a parochial Jew, a nationalist Jew, a fundamentalist Jew, a slightly nutty Jew, he lived and died a Jew, he was never anything other than a Jew. And everything else is midrash. IMHO.
It is understandable that Christians cling to a latterly- developed cartoon of the life of Jesus. It is a story wonderfully adaptable to the desires and anxieties of people in all times, sufferers. But it is a cartoon, and the character Jesus in it has been stolen from the Jews.
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