Daniel Boyarin and the Jewish Problem of Hermeneutics.

[John D. Brey]

When orthodoxy finds a tough nut it's unable to crack it typically camouflages the problem as best it can so that it not create a complication orthodoxy is unable to open up and deal with transparently. Unfortunately, as Thomas Kuhn points out, it's often someone outside orthodoxy who, having dealt with the problem single-handedly, offers orthodoxy a solution that tends to burst the wine-skin of the current orthodoxy therein requiring the hard work of establishing a new orthodoxy. Scholem considered Saul of Tarsus the quintessential example of someone single-handedly handing orthodoxy a solution to a their problem which, the solution, causes more headaches than the problem itself.

Saul spoke of himself as a Jew prematurely born into the Christian epoch. If the spirit of this thread is correct, Talumdic scholar Daniel Boyarin might very well be a Jew prematurely born into the post-Christian zeitgeist of the rapidly approaching age.




John​

 

[AlexanderG]

I'm having a hard time parsing the point that you're making, here. What is the spirit of your thread?

I agree that humanity is approaching a post-Christian age. I think that Orthodoxy has "found a tough nut it's unable to crack" in the form of science and reason. Namely, Christianity appears to be an exaggerated set of stories about mundane events, like every other religion. There is no valid argument with sound premises that supports any religious worldview, nor is there good positive evidence anywhere in observable reality that distinguishes any religion from imaginary speculation reinforced by cultural tradition. It is easier to come to this understanding, today more than ever.

The insular communities that strictly controlled access to information are impossible to maintain in the internet era. We can see what claims are in fact false, and realize that "hermeneutics" is a euphemism for personal feelings guiding the cherry-picking of beliefs out of vague, contradictory, often clearly immoral scripture.

Additionally, we've collectively learned enough to conclude that unquestionable dogma (i.e. orthodoxy) is a hallmark of falsehood. If a proposition is true, it doesn't need to be protected from questioning, critical thinking, diverse perspectives, or the null hypothesis.

 

[pearl]

You have certainly chosen two outstanding scholars.
Gershom Scholem (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

How Christians invented 'Judaism,' according to a top Talmud scholar - Israel News - Haaretz.com

 

[John D. Brey]

I'm having a hard time parsing the point that you're making, here. What is the spirit of your thread?

I agree that humanity is approaching a post-Christian age. I think that Orthodoxy has "found a tough nut it's unable to crack" in the form of science and reason. Namely, Christianity appears to be an exaggerated set of stories about mundane events, like every other religion. There is no valid argument with sound premises that supports any religious worldview, nor is there good positive evidence anywhere in observable reality that distinguishes any religion from imaginary speculation reinforced by cultural tradition. It is easier to come to this understanding, today more than ever.

The insular communities that strictly controlled access to information are impossible to maintain in the internet era. We can see what claims are in fact false, and realize that "hermeneutics" is a euphemism for personal feelings guiding the cherry-picking of beliefs out of vague, contradictory, often clearly immoral scripture.

Additionally, we've collectively learned enough to conclude that unquestionable dogma (i.e. orthodoxy) is a hallmark of falsehood. If a proposition is true, it doesn't need to be protected from questioning, critical thinking, diverse perspectives, or the null hypothesis.

I agree with most of your statement. And you express the truisms we agree on extremely well. Nevertheless, in my opinion it's in the fine print (where we don't necessarily agree) that the value of our orthodoxy-shattering open-minded zeitgeist should be spent.

The point of this thread, where I'll try to direct it, although it's somewhat in line with your comments, is more specifically a case where an important heremenuetical element of Judaism past and present, has ----in my opinion----been shown (by Daniel Boyarin) to be broken and thus camouflaged to keep anyone from doing what I believe Boyarin has done: expose a serious Jewish problem concerning scriptural hermeneutics.



John

 

[John D. Brey]

You have certainly chosen two outstanding scholars.
Gershom Scholem (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

How Christians invented 'Judaism,' according to a top Talmud scholar - Israel News - Haaretz.com

This seems like a good place to add a link to the Daniel Boyarin essay that's seminal to the ideas directing this thread: The Word and Allegory; or, Origen on the Jewish Question.




John

 

[John D. Brey]

I'm having a hard time parsing the point that you're making, here. What is the spirit of your thread?

I should have answered this question first.

By speaking of Daniel Boyarin as a Jew prematurely born into a post-Christian zeitgeist, I'm implying firstly that in my opinion Daniel Boyarin's explication of his ideas, in his writings, appear to me to be similar to those of Saul of Tarsus in the sense of being not only harbingers of the new and rapidly approaching age, but that their writings play a part in the transformative conceptualism that brings about the new age.

In orthodox Christian theology the age of Christianity doesn't eliminate the promises to Israel and the Jews. It merely postpones them. And yet by Christian orthodoxy there will be no new Christian ever again in all of history after the event ending the Christian age, i.e., the so-called Rapture of the Church.

After the last Christian is resurrected (ala the Rapture) the promises to Israel come not just back into view, but become the central element of post-Christian historical reality.

At this point Jews and Judaism will be forced to see that although Christianity didn't replace Judaism, it was nevertheless related to Judaism in a manner that will, at this still future point, be retroactively examined and brought into full understanding through intense study couched in the new realization of the reality of the Christian epoch.

At that point every thoughtful Jew will stand where Saul of Tarsus stood on the road to Damascus: forced to bring ideas he thought were outside his orthodoxy into union with his orthodoxy even though this process bursts the seams of his former orthodoxy.

The joyous irony in paralleling Boyarin with Saul, is that whereas Saul, in his revelatory understanding that Christ was God, therein, by unifying his Judaism with that truth, created Christianity, Boyarin, if he's indeed acting as a post-Christian sort of Saul of Tarsus, will, rather than unify Judaism with knowledge that Christ is God, be forced to make sense of that reality after that reality has forced itself on all the world through the universal manifestation of that reality in the Rapture, the apocalypse, and the post-Christian age that follows.

In the Daniel Boyarin essay already linked to in this thread, Boyarin (whom I should repeat is a Talmudic scholar) appears to have single-handedly found a hermeneutical problem that Judaism has camouflaged for millennia, and found it by brilliantly uncovering the very element of Christian doctrine that shines a light on what Judaism was forced to camouflage. In this sense, Boyarin tentatively, or conceptually, intuits the correctness of the Christian doctrine that mortally wounds Judaism's heremeutical authority over the holy scripture, and appears to do so without a misplaced belief that this wound administered to Judaism does Judaism in ----rather than merely acting as a spear in the side that's necessary for the death and resurrection of the glorious Judaism of the eschatological future.



John

 

[kaninchen]

As somebody who has debated with Christians online for getting on for three decades, I've often been impressed by their facility for inventing whatever Judaism suits the occasion.

 

[Harel13]

At that point every thoughtful Jew will stand where Saul of Tarsus stood on the road to Damascus: forced to bring ideas he thought were outside his orthodoxy into union with his orthodoxy even though this process bursts the seams of his former orthodoxy.

But more likely will prefer to jump off a cliff.

 

[John D. Brey]

As somebody who has debated with Christians online for getting on for three decades, I've often been impressed by their facility for inventing whatever Judaism suits the occasion.

So you believe Judaism is homogeneous outside of Christianizing fancy?

Today two diametrically opposed parties confront each other. The one party has inherited uncomprehended Judaism as a mechanical habit, without its spirit; they bear it in their hands as a sacred relic, a revered mummy, and fear to rouse its spirit. The others are partly filled with noble enthusiasm for the welfare of the Jews but look upon Judaism as a lifeless framework, as something which should be laid in the grave of a long since dead a buried past. They seek its spirit and find it not, and are in danger, with all their efforts to help the Jew, of severing the last life line of Judaism.

Rabbi Samson Hirsch, Nineteen Letters, letter 18.​

Which of the two do you subscribe to?



John

 

[kaninchen]

So you believe Judaism is homogeneous outside of Christianizing fancy?

Homogeneous? In the sense that a group of people can be wedded to continuous argument between themselves.

I'd put it differently from the good Rabbi - he didn't live in the age of the internet, after all.

Judaism is not Christianity minus Jesus and Christianity is not Judaism plus Jesus - they're two very different religions with different suppositions and different foci. However, since interpretations of certain aspects of Judaism are foundational to Christianity and since there seems to be a necessity of endlessly proving a man to have been God (to others but, I suspect, mainly to themselves) apologists often take the convenient course of defining Judaism (then and now) to suit the argument.

 

[John D. Brey]

Judaism is not Christianity minus Jesus and Christianity is not Judaism plus Jesus - they're two very different religions with different suppositions and different foci.

I couldn't agree with you more.

However, since interpretations of certain aspects of Judaism are foundational to Christianity and since there seems to be a necessity of endlessly proving a man to have been God (to others but, I suspect, mainly to themselves) apologists often take the convenient course of defining Judaism (then and now) to suit the argument.

Again, I agree with you. What I've implied in this thread is that Saul of Tarsus is a an orthodox Jewish contemporary of Gamaliel; and that prior to his Damascus road experience/conversion he not only saw Jesus as at best a troublesome rebel, but he was persecuting Jesus' followers.

After his conversion he claimed that he was a Jew prematurely born into the Christian epoch. That statement is important to the spirit of this thread since by making that claim Paul is implying that Gamaliel's Judaism is fully intact after Saul's has undergone a transformation.

To some extent Paul is saying that after the beginning of the Church, the Judaism of Gamaliel is completely intact. There are now, at that point, two unique epochs neither of which is dependent on, nor an epiphenomenon of, the other (btw, I have Rabbi Jacob Neusner's, Jews and Christians: The Myth of a Common Tradition, at arm's length though I haven't yet read it having just finished his, A Rabbi Talks with Paul).

One of the claims of this thread is that whereas Paul was one of the Jews whose Judaism got transformed or transmogrified into Christianity, therein making Paul no longer a Jew in the sense of Gamaliel (Paul's transformation spit him out of Judaism proper), Daniel Boyarin's understanding of Judaism and Christianity appears to be something different than Paul's. Daniel Boyarin appears to be something Paul may have longed for with all his might, but never saw since it wasn't time: a Jewish understanding of the legitimacy (the truth-content ---the spirit) of the two epochs (Judaism and Christianity) that doesn't transform or transmogrify the Jew into a Christian ala Paul.

The Christian orthodoxy that acknowledges the total legitimacy of Judaism as another epoch independent of Christianity states that after the Rapture (resurrection of the Church) the Christian epoch is complete such that there will never be another Christian added to that corporate body. At that point, God will be manifest to all the world, Jew, agnostic, atheist -----and Messiah will arrive as expected in Jewish thought, such that precisely what orthodox Judaism taught, teaches, expects, and hopes for, will have arrived, post-term perhaps, but arrived nonetheless.

The Christian epoch is what Col. R.B. Thieme Jr., called the "dispensation of intercalation." Technically it has nothing to do with Judaism, is foreign, and utterly distinct, like something inserted where it doesn't belong, and which has an expiry date (the Rapture) after which normative orthodox Judaism will be completely back on track with the arrival of Messiah. Christianity, the epoch of intercalation, will have been utterly and completely removed from the Jewish calendar and Jewish reality.

Except, that is, for what this thread is about. The revelation given to Judaism at the Rapture of the Church, which, though it doesn't transform normative Judaism into some other epoch, acts as something like the mezuzah into the Kingdom age Jews have been longing for for millennia.

The claim at the heart of this thread is that Daniel Boyarin isn't a Christian, and yet knows what every person will know after the Rapture of the Church. In this sense he, like Paul, is prematurely born, not into the Christian epoch (ala Paul), but into the post-Christian epoch (that's not here yet): he's a Jew through-and-through; but with knowledge no Jew can possess and still be a Jew (rather than a Paul-like Jew-become-Christian) until after the Rapture of the Church.

If this is correct, its stupendousness is two-fold. One, it targets one of the most important thinkers alive (and maybe there are more than one), and two, it implies that Judaism's messianic-age is upon us; we're right at the gate, at the mezuzah, into the Kingdom age -----so close, in fact, that Boyarin, at least, has already kissed the mezuzah; a practice that will be required in order to be present when the King kisses his bride (Psalms 2:12).



John

 

[kaninchen]

If this is correct, its stupendousness is two-fold.

Except, that, from a Jewish perspective, it's all 'lit crit' - or, perhaps, more like a game of chess where pieces are moved with great intelligence and art (I enjoy reading your contributions) towards a - perhaps - checkmate.

The problem (as you well know) is the chessboard itself - the NT.

 

[Harel13]

One, it targets one of the most important thinkers alive

Who thinks Boyarin is one of the most important thinkers alive? Other than you, that is.

 

[Rival]

But more likely will prefer to jump off a cliff.

I don't mean to get dark, but in my more suicidal times with Noahidism, I would literally have rather jumped off a bridge, and there is a local one known for suicides, than become a Christian.

So... trufax.

 

[John D. Brey]

Who thinks Boyarin is one of the most important thinkers alive? Other than you, that is.

That depends on what criteria are used to determine who's smart and who isn't? If your criteria for intellect is dependent on smart people agreeing with you, or your tradition, then that eliminates a lot of people who would otherwise be considered smart.

I think the biologist Richard Dawkins believes in some of the stupidest theories known to man. And yet I believe he's a very creative and brilliant thinker. I strongly disagree with some of Rashi's exegesis of the Hebrew text, and think parts of his traditional understanding of the Word of God are incorrect, but I would be a fool not to appreciate his otherworldly brilliance and intellect.

Do you think Saul of Tarsus was stupid or smart?



John

 

[John D. Brey]

Except, that, from a Jewish perspective, it's all 'lit crit' - or, perhaps, more like a game of chess where pieces are moved with great intelligence and art (I enjoy reading your contributions) towards a - perhaps - checkmate.

The problem (as you well know) is the chessboard itself - the NT.

If you've read enough of my arguments, and understand them well enough to "enjoy" them, then it should be safe to assume you realize my argumentation, when it's contra-Judaism, is never based, ignorantly I might add, on Christian tradition, or traditional Christian understanding (in thirty-years I've quoted the Jewish sages and Chazal a thousand-to-one versus the NT), but only on sound, logical, objective observations concerning somewhat transparent problems found within the Jewish tradition.

Some of these undeniable problems are the key to this thread as well as Daniel Boyarin's contribution to the thread. Pulling the camouflage off the problems (that are well-known to any Talmudic scholar, to include Boyarin) is unthinkable for orthodox tradition until the solution to the problem is in hand. Boyarin has provided a solution (to some specific problems that are seminal to Jewish tradition) that's as transpicuously correct as any solution to these problems I've ever come across.



John

 

[Harel13]

That depends on what criteria are used to determine who's smart and who isn't? If your criteria for intellect is dependent on smart people agreeing with you, or your tradition, then that eliminates a lot of people who would otherwise be considered smart.

I think the biologist Richard Dawkins believes in some of the stupidest theories known to man. And yet I believe he's a very creative and brilliant thinker. I strongly disagree with some of Rashi's exegesis of the Hebrew text, and think parts of his traditional understanding of the Word of God are incorrect, but I would be a fool not to appreciate his otherworldly brilliance and intellect.

Do you think Saul of Tarsus was stupid or smart?



John

All of this is irrelevant. I wasn't asking about the intelligence quota. Importance of thought is to be determined on level of influence and popularity.

 

[John D. Brey]

All of this is irrelevant. I wasn't asking about the intelligence quota. Importance of thought is to be determined on level of influence and popularity.

Which is why I asked you specifically about Saul of Tarsus. It wasn't until perhaps the Renaissance that Paul's letters were suddenly appreciated for their incredible brilliance. Kierkegaard was unknown and unread in his lifetime though you can find him in any good bookstore anywhere in the world today. As Schopenhauer said, the true genius is far ahead of his contemporaries such that his renown is often, if not almost always, posthumous.

In my opinion, if we're serious about thought ourselves, we judge another thinker's thoughts by the power of the thoughts rather than the level of their influence among their contemporaries.



John

 

[Harel13]

Which is why I asked you specifically about Saul of Tarsus

You asked me if I think he was smart. Still not relevant. Don't know if he even had a Hebrew name. I'll stick with Paul. In any case, even if there was some uptick in the study of his material in the Renaissance, it was already over a millennia prior that his works were included in the Christian canon and so far it seems that he practically single-handedly built the international Christian community. So yes, it was evident early on that he was influential. Perhaps not necessarily in his lifetime, but not too long after.

 

[John D. Brey]

You asked me if I think he was smart. Still not relevant. Don't know if he even had a Hebrew name. I'll stick with Paul. In any case, even if there was some uptick in the study of his material in the Renaissance, it was already over a millennia prior that his works were included in the Christian canon and so far it seems that he practically single-handedly built the international Christian community. So yes, it was evident early on that he was influential. Perhaps not necessarily in his lifetime, but not too long after.

How about Moses de Leon? Or even Sergio Leone?




John