I not infrequently like to imagine a contrafactual Christian history in which Christianity had basically remained a unique option within Judaism, with Jesus as minimally a primary Sage of the Tradition alongside the likes of Shammai and Hillel, linking them to Yohanan b. Zakkai and Ishmael and Akiva and so forth, and perhaps moderately as a paradigmatic prophet-martyr, glorified like Moses and Elijah, and maximally as a divine messiah or something, but all still receiving Jesus' importance, whatever his credentials as an apocalyptic prophet, as a social prophet focused on this very pragmatic, earthly, halakhic question of how best to practice Torah & wisdom. Perhaps Christianity might not have come into being as a result, true, and some goods would have been lost; but perhaps also some evils avoided, and other goods gained.
You've said on more than one occasion that "you don't have a pastoral bone in your body," but this commentary is surely worth a thousand sermons.
Not much of it is new to me. It's either in the scholarship somewhere, or in your own writing somewhere (or, frankly, in the Greek everywhere). But I think we all need to admit that centuries of viewing things through the "infernalist lens" has made it hard for even the most committed universalist to unlearn the disastrous hermeneutical habits that view tends to inculcate. It's refreshing to be shocked (yet again) out of one's spiritual torpor by a commentary that so vividly captures the immensity of the moral imagination on offer in the Sermon.
You did pass over a verse that has, at various points in my life, just floored me: "for he makes his sun to rise on the wicked and the good, and sends rain upon the just and the unjust."
Having rejected the ways of the wicked man and exhorted his followers to in no way imitate that man's ways, it is surely striking to be told that imitating the perfections of God includes imitating God's concern *for the wicked man.*
A hermit once told me something that I manage to forget several times a day: "You must understand that you -- you in particular -- are God's unique creation. And because that is so, you are the constant object of God's divine care and protection. The problem you must therefore confront at every moment is the fact that this is also true of everyone else."
A Conversation on the Sermon on the Mount
I not infrequently like to imagine a contrafactual Christian history in which Christianity had basically remained a unique option within Judaism, with Jesus as minimally a primary Sage of the Tradition alongside the likes of Shammai and Hillel, linking them to Yohanan b. Zakkai and Ishmael and Akiva and so forth, and perhaps moderately as a paradigmatic prophet-martyr, glorified like Moses and Elijah, and maximally as a divine messiah or something, but all still receiving Jesus' importance, whatever his credentials as an apocalyptic prophet, as a social prophet focused on this very pragmatic, earthly, halakhic question of how best to practice Torah & wisdom. Perhaps Christianity might not have come into being as a result, true, and some goods would have been lost; but perhaps also some evils avoided, and other goods gained.
This is just marvelous, David.
You've said on more than one occasion that "you don't have a pastoral bone in your body," but this commentary is surely worth a thousand sermons.
Not much of it is new to me. It's either in the scholarship somewhere, or in your own writing somewhere (or, frankly, in the Greek everywhere). But I think we all need to admit that centuries of viewing things through the "infernalist lens" has made it hard for even the most committed universalist to unlearn the disastrous hermeneutical habits that view tends to inculcate. It's refreshing to be shocked (yet again) out of one's spiritual torpor by a commentary that so vividly captures the immensity of the moral imagination on offer in the Sermon.
You did pass over a verse that has, at various points in my life, just floored me: "for he makes his sun to rise on the wicked and the good, and sends rain upon the just and the unjust."
Having rejected the ways of the wicked man and exhorted his followers to in no way imitate that man's ways, it is surely striking to be told that imitating the perfections of God includes imitating God's concern *for the wicked man.*
A hermit once told me something that I manage to forget several times a day: "You must understand that you -- you in particular -- are God's unique creation. And because that is so, you are the constant object of God's divine care and protection. The problem you must therefore confront at every moment is the fact that this is also true of everyone else."