On Wed, 16 Jul 1997, Andrew Gow wrote:
But my point concerns the relationship between Jews and
> Christians in the everyday world of medieval Europe. I very much doubt that
> such fine distinctions as Dennis Martin makes were at the fingertips of
> burgomasters, guildsmen and preachers.
Precisely for this reason, one needs to look for evidence of belief in
supercession of the Hebrew Scriptures in the thoughts and utterances and
actions of burgomasters, guildsmen, and preachers before adducing it as an
explanation for everyday Jewish-Christian relations in the Middle Ages.
Since, to my knowledge, supercession was not taught by the major Christian
theologians and spiritual writers (who were not entirely unknown to elite
laymen and certainly were well known to preachers), the next task would be
to look for evidence that a theology of the supercession of the Hebrew
scriptures by the Christian New Testament rather than other religious,
economic, social, ethnic etc. factors provides a key to understanding
Jewish-Christian relations. That the Hebrew patriarchs and prophets were
treated as saints in literature and iconography would indicate that even
in popular perception supercession was not the key to the relations
between testaments, rather, that the patristic idea of
fulfillment/foreshadowing was relatively widely understood.
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