17AR22-37

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AR 22:37 - Is America "Fantasyland?"

In this issue:

JUDAISM - how the Talmud "provides fodder for Christian apologists"

TRUTH - "the most persistent thread in Fantasyland is Christianity"

Apologia Report 22:37 (1,357)

October 12, 2017

JUDAISM

"The Jewish Talmud and Its Use for Christian Apologetics" by Daniel Mann (New York School of the Bible) -- summarized: "The Talmud is a collection of ancient rabbinic writings completed around AD 550. Known as the 'Oral Law' among Orthodox Jews, it is believed Moses received the Talmud on Mount Sinai along with the Torah (Written Law). It contains history and represents the primary rabbinic commentary on the Hebrew Scriptures. In many ways, it also provides fodder for Christian apologists. ...

"Orthodox Jews regard the Talmud as authoritative and look to it for guidance more than to the Hebrew Bible." Even so, "Talmudic thought is often at odds with the prevailing rabbinic opinions of today. ...

"Numerous Talmudic passages also acknowledge that Jesus had been a worker of miracles. While the Talmud describes these miracles as 'magic' or 'sorcery,' these admissions still have apologetic value."

Mann points out problems with the Orthodox claim that the written Torah "needs the Oral Torah [Talmud] to make certain that the correct meaning is conveyed and understood." This includes: "The contents of the Talmud are clearly uninspired," "the Talmud often contradicts the Hebrew Scriptures. In fact, one Talmudic Rabbi often contradicts another," and "the Hebrew Scriptures give absolutely no support for the simultaneous existence of an Oral Law. ...

"Even though the Talmud is not God-given and is even blasphemous in many regards, it is still a valuable historical document [in that it] sometimes contradicts present-day rabbinic assertions."

Mann finds that "the Talmud dramatically endorses the gospel narrative, albeit indirectly. ...

"The Talmud states that from forty years before the Temple's destruction and onward, there were supernatural omens of the disaster to come - that is, starting from the inception of the Christian religion following the death of Jesus. ...

"Amazingly, after the Crucifixion (ca. AD 30) and for the next forty years until the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, Israel was saturated with a series of miraculous omens pointing ominously to its future destruction. ...

"Miracles validated Jesus' claims, and His detractors would have to offer an alternative explanation or deny the miracles altogether. The safest thing for them to do was simply to deny that He had performed miracles. However, it is likely that Jesus' miracles were so thoroughly accepted that the Talmud had little alternative but to ascribe them to Satan's black magic." Mann provides a few examples and asks; "do the Talmud's charges of 'magic' or 'sorcery' mean that it acknowledges that Jesus actually performed miracles, or that He used sleight-of-hand.

"It would seem to be the former." Christian Research Journal, 40:4 - 2017, pp34-41.

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TRUTH

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History, by Kurt Andersen [1] -- the publisher hails Walter Isaacson, President and CEO of the DC-based Aspen Institute <aspeninstitute.org>, who describes the book as "A razor-sharp thinker offers a new understanding of our post-truth world...."

When Hanna Rosin, co-host of <www.goo.gl/hhFuhH> NPR's Invisibilia, opens her review she gets off to a bad start with anyone who has experienced Christian regeneration: "Reading a great revisionist history of America is the bookish way to feel what it's like to be born again. ... You feel ashamed, but also enlightened, because at least you have named the sin: You belong to a nation of bloodthirsty colonizers (Howard Zinn), or anti-intellectuals (Richard Hofstadter) or, in Kurt Andersen's latest opus, a people who have committed themselves over the last half century to florid, collective delusion."

Next, Rosin ironically refers to America as "a nation that has, over the centuries, nurtured a 'promiscuous devotion to the untrue.'

"Fake news. Post-truth. Alternative facts. For Andersen, these are not momentary perversions but habits baked into our DNA....

"In the 1960s fantasyland goes into overdrive. Psychedelics, academic scholarship and the New Age movement conspire to make reason and reality the realms of idiots and squares. ... U.F.O. sightings explode, and the stories become ever more elaborate, involving abductions and cover-ups and frolics and secret alliances with interplanetary beings. ...

"While the most persistent thread in Fantasyland is Christianity - the astounding number of Americans who believe in heaven and angels, which most of Europe gave up decades ago - Andersen reserves a starring role for the secular spiritualists. They were supposed to be a counterpoint to narrow-minded evangelicals, but Andersen says the New Agers committed an even greater sin than the faithful. What [dissenting Puritan] Anne Hutchinson started, Gestalt therapy finished off in the '60s. Fritz Perls, a psychotherapist and Gestalt founder, simply put it: 'I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine.' Or put more simply: You do you.

"It's clear that Andersen is uncomfortable with the extreme relativism we've settled into. But he doesn't grapple with what it might mean to give that up. ...

"What we Americans need, it would seem, is something more powerful. A story to end all stories, preached by someone with the fire of Anne Hutchinson. A collective delusion so seductive that it will have us all, in Locke-step, bowing down to reason and reality. Anyone have any ideas?" (Doubtless there is an angel of light who does.) New York Times Book Review, Sep 10 '17, p1, 22. <www.goo.gl/mDwXki>

We're reminded of the contrast found in the 1997 book by Martin L. Gross, The End of Sanity [2], in which he laments that at one university "separate dorms have been set up in the name of racial harmony.

"Among women soldiers returning on a troopship from Desert Storm, one in ten was pregnant.

"In New Jersey, dentists who are HIV-positive do not have to tell their patients."

Another university, "boasts African-American studies but is doing away with Shakespeare for being politically incorrect.

"Women who score relatively low on medical school admissions test are replacing more qualified men as doctors.

"Grades are so inflated at Harvard that 85 percent of students graduate with 'honors.'" The more things change ...

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SOURCES: Monographs

1 - Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History, by Kurt Andersen (Random House, 2017, hardcover, 480 pages) <www.goo.gl/NGdjSs>

2 - The End of Sanity: Social and Cultural Madness in America, by Martin L. Gross (Harper, 1998, paperback, 352 pages) <www.goo.gl/Qwp3pj>

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