I’m not sure where I will end up putting this just now, but there is a thread of understanding missing from virtually every commentary and Bible study I’ve ever read.
The Four Gospels don’t directly state the Old Covenant is closed. Matthew comes closest to addressing it and John seems to take it for granted. Mark and Luke are too busy with other major questions. Both Paul and the writer of Hebrews hit it squarely and bluntly, but most of what I’ve read tries to twist it around backwards. It seems to me almost ludicrous non-Christian scholars can point out how Dispensationalism presumes to agree with the Pharisees. That is, even while paying lip service to Jesus’ attack on the Jewish leadership, most Western Christians ignore exactly what it was the Pharisees got wrong. Legalism they seem to understand, but too many Christians never bother to probe how that is merely a symptom of the deeper problem with Judaism as a sharp departure from Old Testament religion. To this day, almost every evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant simply agrees with the fundamental claims of modern Judaism as somehow being a continuation of Moses.
The Pharisees have won the battle among most American Christians. So if reading Moses with Aristotelian eyes is valid, so it is with the whole Bible. Thus, with any attempt to point out why it’s necessary to learn how to think Hebrew, that same old recording plays in their heads, reinterpreting that to mean “learn Judaism.” They never escape Westernized thinking because everything is defined within the matrix of it.
This is precisely what Aristotle was hoping to do. And is precisely what Satan was selling in the Garden.
It’s why so very many Americans demand we expend resources, which we don’t even have, to protect one of the most hateful and belligerent collections of humanity Satan has ever captured. Jesus called them Synagogue of Satan, and nothing He offered as justification for saying that has changed. We have Christians reacting with the same belligerence and hatred as the Pharisees directed at Jesus, for precisely the same reason, and announce to the world they are doing God’s work.
And people wonder why I don’t join any mainstream churches.
Addenda: I forgot to mention the series on John’s Gospel is also finished; find the results here (site gone). I’ll begin prepping the book for publication tonight and maybe have it submitted to Smashwords tomorrow. I need to come up with some cover art, of course.
