Probably pointless, altho I'm always wary of anything that could be read as
"blame the jews." See the very slightly veiled antisemitism of Sevanthi
Ragunathan's post proposing a causal connection between the Bronze and Iron
Age accounts of warfare in the Old Testament and the savagery of the modern
Israeli state: "This tradition in treating enemies, starting with Moses, is
well preserved in the Gush Emunim, Shamir, Netanyahu, and Rabin (who
several years ago as Defense Minister authorized the Isaeli forces to
enter Palestinian homes and 'break bones.')" Rather like seeing the Koran
as continuous with the bloodthirsty behavior of various Caliphs and Sultans
or the NT with the behavior of Crusaders or for that matter the Klu Klux
Klan. Or the Toin with the IRA. Or the Iliad with the Greek colonels.

Do you mean the Christian or the Jewish apocrypha as commonly understood?
Jews have always kept the Jewish ones separate--if I remember, all or most
are known only in Greek, and they postdate the canonical books. Different
Christian sects regard the Jewish apocrypha differently--Catholics and
Orthodox include them, Protestants don't. And of course different Christian
sects deal with the Christian Apocrypha differently--Ethiopians and some
Copts.

The Old Testament as we now have it contains no more nor less (nor
different) books than did the Septuagint, thought to have been compiled by
150 BC, indicating that there was some agreement about the canon by that
date. It's generally thought to be the OT as Christ would have known it.
You may mean the Masoretic Text, which supplies vowels for the Hebrew.
Hebrew writing traditionally consisted only of consonants, which leaves a
fair amount of room for disagreement (particularly among verb tenses and
moods, which are often indistinguishable without the vowels. According to
tradition the Masoretic Text was compiled circa 500 AD. It wasn't printed
until book printing reached the West. It has been the subject of
controversy forever--those who follow the Vulgate or Septuagint account for
some of the divergences from the Hebrew by claiming that the Masorites
sometimes got it wrong.

Jews have been obsessive about the accuracy of their transmission of the
OT, especially of the Pentateuch. The scroll is hand-written. If a scribe
makes even one mistake he may not scratch out the letter and write it over,
he has to discard the whole work and start over. But it was universally
thought among scholars that transmission of scripture must have been prey
to the scribal errors that have plagued all other transmission. The Dead
Sea Scrolls came as quite a shock--they affirm a very high degree of accuracy.

As to degree of sacredness, to the best of my knowledge no Jewish
theologians, from ancient times to now, have interpreted anything but the
Pentateuch as divine law.

I don't know about early Christians being "far less interested," but what I
said is I believe a truism of the scholarship of the early church. It
mattered to early Christians because they were addressing their
coreligionists. The Romans couldn't have given a rat's ass about Isaiah's
prophecies or continuity with a Biblical past. Think about Christ's family
tree in this context.

Mark


At 05:47 PM 9/27/2001 -0400, you wrote:
>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
>