The Old Testament faith was superseded by that of the New Testament. Jesus himself said so. That Jews reject this story merely means they are unbelievers while Christians are believers. ‘Nothing is true or false in religion but thinking makes it so.’ Whatever your religious beliefs may be I accept as true to you.

It is historically true that the Old Testament precedes the commentary. Without a source there can be no commentary. Elementary, my dear Watson.

So, the Bible is severed having nothing to do with your theological interpretation.

As far as the Puritans go, they did see themselves as the New Chosen People superseding the old as the true continuation of the Hebrews, who have nothing to do with modern Jews, while the Jews refusing to accept this obvious truth, to them, need to be converted to be ‘saved’ from themselves. This must be true to them. Reconcile it how you will if you can.

The Roman Catholics represent the New Dispensation superseding the Jews as Jesus indicated. This is in the evolution of religious thought.

The Protestants, from which I spring, are a bunch of bozos who consider Catholicism a false faith and the Jews deluded. Or, they did fifty years ago.

As Jesus was a Jew who told the woman at the well ‘We Jews know what we believe while you goyim don’t’ and people do believe this, Jesus is the greatest salesman the Jews have to bind the goyim to them. You’d better love Jesus because if you succeed in discrediting him, which I devoutly hope you do, you will sever any connection to the poor dodos who believe in him.

Even so, the rabbis were never “in command”. Pharisaic Judaism only came into its own religiously in the first century CE and flourished after the fall of the Second Temple. So you’d have to blame the Temple faction for interpolating your objective, unpolluted, totally artificial “Biblical faith.”

To speak of “Old Testament” faith (a queer expression that reeks of Christian supercessionism and a general depreciation of Tanakh) or THE ‘Biblical faith” is to speak
of something about which we know very little due to the scarcity of texts from that era. And even if we could draw the outlines of this supposedly pure “Biblical faith”, purged
of its Talmudic accretions and “distortions”, we would know nothing of how it was practised and transmitted by its adherents.

Michael Hoffman, you sound like the numerous groups (Marcion gnostics, Kairites, Protestants) which attempted to reconstruct a tradition cleansed of the commentary and exegesis
that jarred with their theology. As if any one theological perspective or overarching vision of religious truth, could extract from the tangle of Scripture a single, internally consistent
worldview.

Your severing of the Oral tradition from the Bible is as indicative of some high-handed, arrogant theological bias as the view a view that you wrongly attribute to the readers and
redactors of the Talmud, namely that Talmud exhausts Tanakh. No Sir, the Talmud does not set itself up as the definitive, authoritative interpretation of Tanakh. Quite the contrary.
The Talmud is shot through with doubt and a general reluctance on the part of the rabbis to claim that theirs was the final word, the definitive interpretation (a capability unique to God).

As for the bizarre reference to the State of Israel, are you not aware that Israeli law is secular in character and that despite its (unwholesome) arrangements with Orthodox rabbinic establishment,
the laws of land use and ownership are secular and civic in character? There are plenty of “nice” customs such as the jubilee year that could be re-introduced. But why remove these artificially from
the theorcratic legal, political and religious system of which they were orginally a part? Why not go the whole hog and turn Israel into a theocracy?

Finally, the Christian Hebraists looked to the Israelites as an example of a holy nation, a kingdom of priests. What distinguished them from their Catholic “co-religionists” was their desire to emulate Israel, not to supersede it (this is evident in Calvin’s notion that divine history of the Israelite’s was a crucial element in God’s plan for mankind and that as agents of God’s will, the Jews still carried His message and purpose). “Verus Israel” is a Catholic idea. The Protestants saw themselves as following in Israel’s footsteps, not as erasing them. Herein lies a possible explanation for the (comparatively) tolerant attitude of Protestant authorities to the Jews (c.f. United Provinces, England after Cromwell, the American Republic).

There is no use discussing the difference between Hebrews and Jews in the Protestant mind but what Hoffman says about it is true.

This is merely a case of historical objectivity and your Jewish subjectivity. You have the ‘issues.’

You got issues. Pardon the ad hominem argument but that was the thought which came to my mind.

The Talmud does not invalidate the Torah. They go hand in hand. The Written Torah and the Oral Torah. And since you are quoted the Zohar, let me divulge a Kabbalistic secret, that the Oral Torah is like feminine and the Written Torah is masculine and they go together.

You really lost me when you blasted the Mishnah….

Of course there were Christian Hebraists. They saw themselves as the true Israelites, and regarded the rabbis in the manner in which the Zohar regards the Mishnah, as “the graveyard of Moses.”