There Could Not Be A Happier People

[Navidad]

4 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

"A Christian Jesus is a parochial, self-serving myth and an Aryan Jesus a perverse one.  But why then have Christians so persistently thought of Jesus as a Christian and resisted admitting the obvious, that Jesus was a Jew?  Answer: the pervasive problem of uniqueness."

". . . many Christian scholars, . . seek to make Jesus dissimilar from the Judaism of his day and from the Greco-Roman world in which it was set."

    [Ferdinand] "Baur argued successfully that early Christianity had originated historically within Judaism . . . ."  His enduring, basic point was "the Jewish matrix of Christianity" . . . .

    "A Jesus who taught like a Jew and an early Christian community that looked like a Jewish sect troubled many 19th-century German Lutheran scholars, who preferred to envision a Jesus who taught a new and unique doctrine that overthrew the established tradition."

    "To wrench Jesus out of his Jewish world destroys Jesus and destroys Christianity, the religion that grew out of his teachings.  Even Jesus' most familiar role as Christ is a Jewish role.  If Christians leave the concrete realities of Jesus' life and of the history of Israel in favor of a mythic, universal, spiritual Jesus and an otherworldly kingdom of God, they deny their origins in Israel, their history, and the God who has loved and protected Israel and the church.  They cease to interpret the actual Jesus sent by God and remake him in their own image and likeness."

Well said, and for whatever it is worth, I couldn't agree more. The Jewish faith is the "nido," (nest) the "cuna" (cradle) or birthplace of Christianity. There is great diversity in Judaism from the almost secularism of Martin Buber (who, at the same time loved the study of Jewish mysticism) to the profound religiosity of the strict Orthodox, for whom both Orthodoxy and Orthopraxy are critical. They are both separate and inseparable - just like LDS Christians and non-LDS Christians. The LDS faith, in its infancy borrowed heavily from the standard Christianity of its time, expanding it in some unique ways. Early Christianity borrowed even more from Judaism, expanding and narrowing it in some unique ways. Christianity was named after Christ. Christ wasn't named after Christianity. It is all wonderfully diverse, complex, and when properly understood, very faith-producing.