Also there’s always this tone Christians take about this shit like Jews saw tax collectors as some sort of unclean aliens living among them and xenophobocally despised them when actually they were angry with them the same way you’d be if a family member started extorting you.
Like Christians REALLY want to associate tax collectors with lepers, as if Jews of the time were less capable than we are of understanding a distinction between quarantining people they believed to have a communicable disease and shunning wealthy, abusive grifters.
Or they want to associate tax collectors with marginalized people today, as if they were equivalent to disabled people or queer people being failed by society, instead of rich people exploiting their own people on behalf of an occupying power.
So in reading Christian commentary on the parables, and its wild and ugly claims about first-century Jews and Judaism, I often find myself wondering how they got there.
And I think I've discerned the process.
Short thread:
It goes a little something like this:
A) Christians receive traditional interpretations of what the parables "mean." E.g. the prodigal son means you should forgive people, the good Samaritan means you should help people in need. These meanings are, generally, banal.
B) Rather than reading the parables as *stories,* Christians read them as fables with a moral. They read them through the lens of that moral instead of approaching them without a predetermined interpretation.
Okay, as promised, let's take a Twitter look at all the weird Christian commentary and claims about first-century Jews centered around the father (and hypothetical villagers) in the prodigal son story.
For those who haven't been playing along at home, we've also looked at their wacky claims about Jews and shepherds, both that Jews hated shepherds and that Jewish shepherds broke lambs' legs to teach them not to stray. (?!)
And the preceding page on my site talks about a LOT of weird claims in Christian commentary on the story of the woman who loses her coin (although it looks like I didn't actually do a Twitter thread on those; I should).
I also think the tendency to demonize Jews this way stems from dissonance within Christian thought about how to view Jesus’s teachings. They’re trying to have it both ways:
-Jesus’s teachings are simple and self-evidently true
So on one hand, if Jesus’s teachings are simple teachings about compassion and they’re self-evident if you think about them and they all just boil down to the Golden Rule, you’d have to be either incredibly stupid or incredibly evil not to agree with them.
The problem with that, of course, is basic compassion and the golden rule are hardly unique to Jesus. So if you reduce it that much, he has nothing substantive to say.
1) cheering on gunmen attacking US synagogues actually feeds INTO Israeli propaganda that they're the only safe place for Jews, so if your anti-Zionism doesn't include making the diaspora safer for Jews, it's not really about Palestinian rights
and just another gentle reminder that:
2) American Christians are FAR more likely to unquestioningly support the actions of Israel than American Jews, so if the only Zionism you focus on is what you *assume* is coming from Jews, helping Palestinians is probably not your priority