Voltaire's Revolution by G.K. Noyer
Author:G.K. Noyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633880399
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)
Published: 2015-06-22T16:00:00+00:00
LETTER IX
On the Jews
Of all those who have attacked the Christian religion in their writings, the Jews would perhaps be the most to be feared and, if we did not confute them with the miracles of Our Lord Jesus Christ, it would be very difficult for a mediocre scholar to stand up to them. They consider themselves the eldest sons of the house who, in losing their inheritance, have retained their titles. They have employed a profound sagacity in explaining all the prophecies to their advantage. They claim that the Law of Moses given to them was meant to be eternal, that it is impossible for God to have changed or to have perjured himself, and that our Savior acknowledged as much himself. They object to us that, according to Jesus Christ, no point, no iota of the law should be transgressed, that Jesus came to fulfill the law, not to abolish it,27 that he observed all the commandments, that he was circumcised, that he kept the Sabbath, that he celebrated all the holidays, that he was born a Jew, lived as a Jew and died a Jew, that he never instituted a new religion, that we do not have a single line written by him, that the Christian religion was created by us, not him.
A Christian had best not attempt to argue with a Jew unless he knows the Hebrew language like his mother tongue, which alone can enable him to understand the prophecies and reply to the rabbis. Here is how Joseph Scaliger puts it in his Excerpta: “The Jews are subtle. How pathetic are Justin's writings against Tryphon! And Tertullian even worse! He who wants to refute the Jews must know Judaism thoroughly. The shame of it! Christians write against Christians, and dare not write against the Jews!”
The Toledot Jeschu is the oldest Jewish writing against our religion that has come down to us. It is a life of Jesus in total contradiction with our holy Gospels. It seems to date from the first century, written even before the Gospels because the author does not mention them and he would probably have tried to refute them if he had known of them. He portrays Jesus as born of the adultery between Miriah or Mariah and a Roman soldier named Joseph Panther. He says that he [Jesus] and Judas both wanted to become the head of a sect, and that both seemed to perform miracles by invoking the name of Jehovah, which they learned to pronounce in the way required to cast magic spells. It is a mishmash of rabbinical reveries that far outdo the 1001 Arabian Nights. Origen refuted it, and he was the only one who could, because he was almost the only Greek Father well-versed in the Hebrew language.
The Jewish theologians didn't write much more reasonably than that until the eleventh century when, enlightened by the Arabs who had by then become the only learned nation, they used sounder judgment in their works. Those of Rabbi Ibn Ezra were highly esteemed.
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