Not sure what angle you're taking relative to Alison's and my respective
observations, but it's important to be careful to keep the historicism
historical, and your interpretation of some of these relations seems
anachronistic. The authors of the NT didn't really have the OT, as such, did
they? My understanding is that the Jews of the period had an assortment of
texts all of which counted more or less as Scripture and that the Gospel
writers were far less interested in expanding that collection than they were
in establishing Jesus as the Messiah by emphasizing whatever he'd said or
done that could be argued as having fulfilled one or more of the Scriptural
criteria for Messiahship. They and their legatees were also perhaps our
first religious censors to the extent that they actively suppressed the
Apocrypha from the work which became the New Testament because it diverged
at so many points from the party line on Jesus they were proselytizing.
What those Jews meant when they called themselves Christians, especially in
the context of Roman rule and its subsequent Christianizing, is a world away
from modern Christianity and was as much a political identity as a religious
one in their times (again, according to my understanding, but I'm no expert
on these matters).
Islam's relationship to Judaeo-Christianity, and the Koran's to the OT
versus the NT, are both complicated and complexified by Jesus' prophet
status in Islamic theology, so to that extent your "Christians in re OT"
analogy would seem to hold, if somewhat tenuously. I'm just unclear about
its point(?).
Candice
> It's handy to remember that the authors of the NT, every one of them
> Jewish, saw themselves for the most part as adding to, not replacing, the
> OT. Most of them--certainly Mark and Matthew, and probably Luke, considered
> themselves Jewish and Christianity a new and improved kind of Judaism.
>
> Mohammed's relationship to OT and NT is somewhat more complex, but he
> incorporated both into Islam, tho--like the Christians in re OT-- he set
> the terms for the incorporation.
>
> Mark
>
> At 04:50 PM 9/27/2001 -0400, you wrote:
>> Not sure which two texts you have in mind, since the Koran has different
>> genealogical relationships with the Old and New Testaments, but your own
>> distinction between genealogy and history is certainly well-taken. It's the
>> "nothing more than" here that gives me pause. Nothing LESS than a "deep
>> genealogical [OR historical] relationship"?
>>
>> Candice
>>
>>
>>
>>> I'd say the convergence is nothing more than the deep genealogical
>>> relationship between these two religious texts - interesting also to
>>> compare them with the Juadaeic spiritual writings -
>>>
>>> A
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> What chilled me about those two passages was their convergence with Bush's
>>>> militant/military plans (or the rhetoric thereof), almost as if Islam had
>>>> long since anticipated what would be in store for (some of) them, or--more
>>>> chilling yet--almost as if Washington were drawing on the Koran for
>>>> strategy. Note my "almost as if" before denouncing me as paranoid. I don't
>>>> think this convergence is anything like this literal, but it's
> suggestive of
>>>> such momentous historical dovetailing--at this moment at least--as would
>>>> make anyone weep, I'd have thought.
>>>>
>>>> Candice
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