You all should check out Neusner's "Judaism in the New Testament" because he lays out an extraordinary premise: Christianity is a Judaism. Note that he didn't say it was THE Judaism. In fact, there are many Judaisms and many Christianities. Neusner explains that they are more like systems. And Christianity is part of the Judaic system (based on the fact that it was created by Jews who felt they were teaching the truest form of Judaism).
This is great because it answers a question I had in regard to Carl Kinbar's definition of Judaism. I felt that there was something wrong with it but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Now I know what was bothering me.
You can't define Judaism per se since there are different and contradictory forms of Judaism--it's not uniform but rather pluriform. You have to say that there are Judaisms, a system of Judaism. You can't say that there's simply Judaism as if it's this big monolith understood universally the same way (same deal with Christianity).
So that got me thinking. We shouldn't ask "What is Judaism?" or "What is Christianity?" But rather we should ask "What SHOULD be the form of Judaism?"
When I named this blog "Orthodox Messianic Judaism" I had a simple idea: there SHOULD be a true form of Judaism. Does it exist yet? Not in its final form. But I believe it's in progress right now and that we're all contributing to its evolution.
UPDATE: here's the link for the google preview of Neusner's book: LINK.
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