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The Christian‐Jewish Debate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2024

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Christianity is without doubt the most disputatious of all religions. The Church was bom arguing, and Judaism was the first opponent which it wrestled with, like the infant Hercules, in its cradle. In modem times this venerable controversy has been pushed into the background by the more urgent battle against a rationalism, that in its many different guises has threatened orthodox Judaism no less than Christianity. But the old volcano, though not very active at the moment, is by no means extinct. Thanks to the labours over the last fifty years or more of Dr J. Klausner, an eminent professor of the Hebrew University at Jerusalem, it has been steadily building up pressure which has recently issued in a premonitory puff or rumble. This literary activity did indeed take place more than thirty years ago, and has been through a second and third edition since, but all that happened in modem Hebrew, which rendered it practically unavailable to the Christian reader, and therefore non-explosive as regards the Christian-Jewish controversy. It is only this year that it has appeared in this country in English—well, to be quite frank, in a quaint patois which is recognizable as a variant of the current language. According to a preface by the translator, the rendering of modem Hebrew presents special problems. We can well believe it; but they can scarcely be responsible for such unidiomatic, and at times incorrect, English as Dr Stinespring manages to achieve here. He would have served his author better if, besides submitting his translation to him and another Jewish scholar for correction, he had also taken the trouble to consult some suitable person who has English and not German for his mother tongue. Incidentally, we are curious to know what Hebrew words may lie behind such contraptions as ‘ethico-political’, ‘religio-spiritual’, ‘politico-material’, which creak at us from every other page.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1956 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 The Messianic Idea in Israel. By J. Klausner; translated by W. F. Stinespring. (Allen and Unwin; 30s.).

2 This is most obvious in his treatment of the Servant passage, Isaiah 52–53. Even on purely critical, objective grounds, the Jewish case which he puts forward does seem very unconvincing. As Kissane says in his commentary, it is most unlikely that a prophet who never makes any bones about the sinfulness of Israel, should suddenly present the nation personified as the sinless victim atoning for the sins of the gentiles. Quite apart from anything else, in what sense could such a prophecy be expected to come true? It is also perhaps significant that Dr Klausner completely ignores the refer once to a personal Messiah contained in Psalms 2 and 110 (109), which the N.T. alluded to more than any other texts in order to support the messianic claims of Jesus; in which, incidentally, it seems to have been quite in step with contemporary Jewish tradition.

3 I use throughout the same spelling for O.T. names as the book we are considering, which follows the Authorized Version.