Anti-Climacus

WELL**: OxBlog (and again here has been making some hay out of the idea that Judaism and Christianity are fundamentally incompatible: Christianity, to affirm its own covenant with God, has to uproot Judaism in whole or in part (thus the Gospels have to be 'anti-semitic' on a plain-text reading*). The traditional defense of Christians, that Jesus and the disciples themselves were Jews, doesn't work, because that just reinforces the fact that Jews who get it = good, while Jews who don't get it = bad.

While I'd be interested in hearing Jollyblogger's or evangelical outpost's take on this, a brief sketch of mine: even accepting the force of the argument (that Jews who get it are good, and those who don't are definitionally bad), it's not at all clear how the decision of a Jewish person to reject the Gospels differs at all from anyone else's decision to do so. It may have been the case that Jews were closer to Jesus at the time he was around, but that was just the reality on the ground, and it'd be wrong to read anything more into that. And, granted, it's also true that the Christian covenant is supposed to supercede (though maybe not entirely replace) the Jewish covenant, but that's true of any religious belief--Judaism just happens to have been the first relevant other religion Christians encountered. I don't know that you can read too much more into it than that.

*we won't even get into how dubious I find that charge

**this is not to say that all charges of anti-semitism are specious (they aren't), or that there's never been violence against Jews under the auspices of Christianity (there has been), but rather that Christianity and Judaism are no more or less antagonistic than Christianity and any other religion, and besides, Christian criticisms do not (or should not) go to the man, but rather towards the dogmatic system.