Here I read the riot act to a particularly ignorant and arrogant Christianist Apologist, Mr. Tim Stratton. The subtext is that we should deal with the Apostle Paul’s bigotry in the so-called “clobber passages” the way we deal with the Beloved Disciple’s antisemitism. I am responding to an attempt made by Tim Stratton to gaslight us into thinking this antisemitism could not possibly be present in the Gospel of John.
“Tim Stratton: The Beloved Disciple has some intriguing insights, which I take to be inspired by the Holy Spirit. (Maybe that is just me.) But not everything he says reaches those heights. Much of it — the parts that later generations took to license hatred and violence against Jewish people and that are difficult to read otherwise — stems from his historical situation.
“Raymond Brown briefly discusses that situation in his *The Community Of The Beloved Disciple* (which I am sure you’ve read, no?):
“”In different areas and different times in the first century there were varied relations between Jews who believed in Jesus and Jews who did not, and these relations were not always hostile. In Johannine Christianity, because of its peculiar history, we see one of the most hostile relationships, and by the second century such extreme hostility became normal — a situation that has continued throughout the centuries. (Tragically, in those later centuries the situation of John 16:2 was reversed, and Christians put Jews to death thinking they were thus serving God.) We can only be grateful that in the mid-twentieth century, partly out of revulsion for the holocaust, the situation has changed….” (pp. 68-69)
“None of this should be news to you, but apparently it is. You obviously have not done your homework. The upshot is that lots of John is dripping with hostility and hatred towards Jewish people, and any decent person with any functioning neurons at all has to find a way to deal with that without also nullifying the genuine, may I say inspired insights.
“Oh and I have another homework assignment for you. You have not dealt with the lack of scholarly agreement regarding how to interpret or even translate the clobber passages in Paul. Why don’t you write up some of the different translations and interpretations? For extra credit, you can also write up the historical situation Paul was facing in *Romans*, and how Jewish Christians were returning to Rome after Claudius had expelled the Jews and how this might affect the interpretation of *Romans*.
“And please don’t tell me the dog ate your homework.”
It has often been noted that the Christianists and their apologists so frequently display a shocking ignorance of the scholarship they need to be intimately familiar with if they are to have even a minuscule chance of being persuasive. And when they engage in blood libel against vulnerable groups, there is absolutely zero chance that the integrity of their personal witness will make up for what they lack in scholarship. I know that Tim Stratton may find these words difficult, but as he is so fond of saying, the truth hurts.
cliffengelwirt 