In an earlier post, I summarized a few events of my life that brought me to 2006 and the decision to write the historical novel that had long been fermenting in my mind. Around Labor Day in 2006, the time was right – I closed an online business and began to devote full time efforts to the novel.
Interesting. As a Jewish Episcopalian (bar mitzvah and then, at 34, baptized), I try to emphasize the Jewishness of Jesus in an attempt to “re-Judaize” the church — though not in the ritualistic sense of the Judaizers who opposed Paul.
I hope you’ll be posting, and cross-posting some from here, at CrossLeft. We could use some new voices there.
Bill,
Thanks for your comment. I think that Jesus was closer to the Pharisees than the gospels indicate. His statement about the whole law hanging on two commandments is very similar to comments attributed to Hillel, the great Pharisee sage. The same is true of the so-called “golden rule”.
The Jewish civil war/Roman intervention in which the Christians may have opted out, followed by the Gentile direction of Christianity, and the struggle between emerging rabbinic Judaism (the remnant of the Pharisees) and the Christians for control of the synagogue explains the anti-Pharisee, anti-Jewish polemic of the gospels, I think. Of course, Paul’s strong language didn’t help either. At the time of gospel composition, there was incentive to appeal to the Romans and scapegoat the Jews.
In my novel, I treat James as a Pharisee and friend of Pharisees in the Sanhedrin including Gamiliel the leader. I think the real battle at the time of Jesus and later was with the Sadducee aristocrats and Herodians who had ties to the Romans.
Thanks for the invitation to contribute to Crossleft. I will look into that, and I will also bear in mind your concerns about the process of commenting.