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Response to the Rabbis' Critique of the United Church of Canada's Just Peace Task Group Report
The double-speak in the Canadian Rabbis Statement in response to the United Church of Canada's recent report on the church's work for...
argualtieri33
Jan 30, 20222 min read
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Transfiguration and Demythologizing
A problem with radical demythologizing of the Bible is that it seems to presuppose a pre-mythic understanding of human affairs in the...
argualtieri33
Sep 11, 20211 min read
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Who are the Palestinians?
Mitri Raheb’s book Faith in the Face of Empire: The Bible Through Palestinian Eyes (2014) confirmed an answer to a question that had long...
argualtieri33
Aug 28, 20213 min read
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Who is Jesus?
Finally, matters are beginning to come clear. Who is Jesus? Jesus is a counter-cultural confrontational rabbi. He was not an apostate...
argualtieri33
Aug 14, 20212 min read
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Jesus and the Law
We still need to clarify Jesus’ understanding of the authority of the Torah. Here I begin by making use of the interpretive device of the...
argualtieri33
Jul 31, 20212 min read
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Was Jesus a Pharisee?
I Incredible as it may seem to conventional Protestant piety, Arnold Toynbee (in The Crucible of Christianity: Judaism, Hellenism and the...
argualtieri33
Jul 24, 20212 min read
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Jesus and the Rabbis
The fact that here and there a rabbi contemporary with Jesus may be found who holds particular moral views similar to Jesus’ (thus...
argualtieri33
Jul 17, 20211 min read
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The Gospels and their Transmission
The New Testament, when subjected to historical analysis in the quest for its meaning, discloses itself to be stratified. On one level,...
argualtieri33
Jul 3, 20212 min read
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Searching for Jesus
A series of blogs in my continuing quest to get Jesus figured out in my remaining years of life. Here’s the problem: How do we move from...
argualtieri33
Jun 19, 20211 min read
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Frank Talk on Israel
It is probably time to stop talking pretty to Israel and its supporters in a supposed spirit of biblical ecumenicity. We (progressive...
argualtieri33
Jun 11, 20214 min read
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Can we be both free and equal?
A New Yorker article (7 January 2019) deals with the ancient dichotomy between individual freedom and social equality. The problem is...
argualtieri33
Feb 15, 20212 min read
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Did Paul distort Jesus?
It is commonplace to come upon derogations of Paul on the grounds that he distorts the simple teaching of Jesus (e.g., love of God and of...
argualtieri33
Feb 8, 20212 min read
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Was Jesus a Hellenized Jew?
According to A.H.M. Jones, the extensive immigration of Greek mercenaries into Syria-Palestine instigated by the Ptolemaic and Seleucid...
argualtieri33
Feb 1, 20212 min read
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Is the Sermon on the Mount only for the end of the world?
Contemporary scholars debate whether Jesus is best understood as a Jewish Cynic – a teacher and healer, practicing eating commensality –...
argualtieri33
Jan 25, 20212 min read
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The identity of Jesus disclosed in the "antitheses" in the Sermon on the Mount
For many months I was agitated by Albert Schweitzer’s question about Jesus: Who is this figure who stands opaquely behind the creation of...
argualtieri33
Jan 18, 20212 min read
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Mosaic law or new law in Jesus' moral outlook?
Some interpreters anxious to demonstrate the Jewishness of Jesus, have argued that the “antitheses” of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew...
argualtieri33
Jan 17, 20212 min read
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Dear old dad
Reading newspaper obituaries one could be forgiven the unscientific inference that one of the surest guarantors of an old age is to adopt...
argualtieri33
Sep 1, 20202 min read
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Randy Bachman and affirming oneself: Within or without?
It all started with Randy Bachman and his Saturday night rock and pop radio program during which he recalled the sad drug death of...
argualtieri33
Aug 15, 20202 min read
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Disclosures: A Christian map of the cosmos
When we doubt and debate our understanding of Christianity are we fixing too narrowly on the God question? To be a Christian is not only...
argualtieri33
Aug 1, 20204 min read
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Who are the cows of Bashan?
The Bible can be very distressing and, like bad-tasting medicine, is sometimes best left on the shelf. I talked recently to a friend...
argualtieri33
Jul 25, 20202 min read
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