Robert, I agree. I did not mean to suggest otherwise. I was speaking about a tendency I recognize in ordinary church life, including forms I know.

Tjalling said

Part of why it happens so seldom, I suspect, is that the question is genuinely uncomfortable from the inside. It seems easy for church life to become listening, agreeing, and going home, while what Christ cares about in Matthew 25 remains less central than it should be: feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, visiting the prisoner, caring for the least of these. These are not marginal illustrations.
I also wonder whether grace is sometimes received as reassurance without being allowed to become discipleship. If Christians have to be reminded of this mostly from the outside, something has already gone wrong. I do say that as one of the things that troubles me most from within it.

I think at least some churches and communities consider the practice of the teaching of Mt 25 as the most important focus of their mission.
  

Stephen said

Ideally this would be one of those disputes best conducted amongst believers themselves but as an interested outsider it is a bit surprising how seldom this kind of internal discussion takes place.   Leaving it up to the outsider robs the critique of most of its force.   
  

I think that is fair. 

Part of why it happens so seldom, I suspect, is that the question is genuinely uncomfortable from the inside. It seems easy for church life to become listening, agreeing, and going home, while what Christ cares about in Matthew 25 remains less central than it should be: feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, visiting the prisoner, caring for the least of these. These are not marginal illustrations.

I also wonder whether grace is sometimes received as reassurance without being allowed to become discipleship. If Christians have to be reminded of this mostly from the outside, something has already gone wrong. I do say that as one of the things that troubles me most from within it.

Tjalling said
Stephen, people can go back and forth without end on the historical ledger of Christianity's good and bad effects. The very sharp question, for me, is the one you raised in post 22: if the Christian claims are true, why is the fruit so often obscured among Christians themselves? As a Christian I do not want to dodge that. There are familiar replies one can reach for, but I would rather not reach for one here. If Christ is true, then the ways Christians have obscured him are not a side issue. They are part of the burden Christians have to face.
  

Ideally this would be one of those disputes best conducted amongst believers themselves but as an interested outsider it is a bit surprising how seldom this kind of internal discussion takes place.   Leaving it up to the outsider robs the critique of most of its force.   

I found this interesting article.  Botticelli's Madonna of the Pomegranate is very beautiful. 

In my younger world traveler days I once had the opportunity to walk through an open air market in Cairo.  Nothing so grand as Istanbul but I nevertheless experienced total sensory overload.  The sights, the sounds, the smells!  And the voices.   I can imagine what it must have been like in ancient times.  

My understanding is that the healed person would have to first go to a local priest and be declared clean.  Then at some point, yes, they would have to go to the Temple in Jerusalem to make the appropriate offering.  But I'm not an expert so anybody with specialized knowledge please chime in.

And the prices.  Not even worth haggling about. 

By the way, in looking at Wolfson's books, I was struck by the title of the first, The Book of the Pomegranate, a critical Hebrew edition of a work by Moses de Leon.  I've always been rather taken by the exotic fruit ever since encountering it years ago in the Song of Songs.  At the time I was barely cognizant of what it was. Even though I've since become familiar with it (great juice, part of Greek tradition), it's never lost its mystical allure. 

I saw Les Misérables in London soon after it opened, loved it, aand then read the novel by Victor Hugo, in my opinion an overly long, rather boring novel that I had to force myself to finish. I know many of you will strongly disagree, but that doesn't matter, it was my reaction to the original. I loved the way in which the playright and others involved in the production adapted, revised, and distilled a great story into a beautiful and moving musical. Eventually the movie version came out and resisted seeing it for years because I didn't like what I heard in the previews, but eventuality (only recently) bought the DVD and watched it several times. Explaining some of the novel's elements left out of the play and movie (eg, the coin incident) to my daughter choked me up and I realized some of the beauty of the novel that I had not originally appreciated. A text comes to its completion as a conversation among its audience,band a classic multiplies the audiences involved in the conversation.

Even when we don't have an original autograph, some scholars will still imagine earlier sources or versions based on various criteria and methodologies. Do they succeed in this quest? Probably not all that well, but it is still an attempt to appreciate multiple dimensions of a text that may not be apparent otherwise.

Just my two cents.

I'm a huge fan of Hebrew scholar James Kugel, and the book that did it was The God of Old: Inside the Lost World of the Bible.  It's a collection of essays about the different conceptions of god found in the Hebrew Bible.  (The chapter about the figure of the Angel of the Lord alone is worth the price of admission.)

Relevant to the subject of panentheism is Kugel's description of ancient Hebrew spiritual sensibility.  He describes their concept of god as a "Field of Divine Presence", not a distant, utterly transcendent ruler sitting in a remote heaven but a divine reality that is immediate, palpable, and woven into the very fabric of the world. 

To these ancients the boundary between mind and the world was porous and fluid.  Thoughts, dreams, and emotions were not viewed as internal psychological states but were experienced as intrusions from the "Great Outside".  There was no dualism here between "nature" and "supernature". The spiritual realm was as palpable as the mundane world.

This explains why the divine could condense into the physical.  God walks through the garden.   One could encounter a traveler on the road or share a meal, and only later realize you were interacting directly with god.

In his book The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times, Kugel examines how and why he thinks this viewpoint changed.  God became a distant, abstract, transcendent being who is encountered inwardly through prayer or conscience rather than as a stranger on a dusty road. 

But a couple of further pessimistic thoughts, with respect to the Gospels more than the Paulines:

It isn't even clear to me that there was a single autograph. Even today, works can go through multiple editions (there may be several versions an author circulates privately as he continues to work on it, versions which sometimes circulate quite widely; then there are sometimes even multiple "final", printed editions). 

Adding to that is the more general question, Who is the author? Who is a redactor (does he count as an author)? Who is just a scribe taking liberties? I think it is common to recognize, especially in some of the gospels, that there are sometimes several voices at work or several layers in the text (John and Luke are prime examples). 

All the evidence suggests that the earlier we go, the less reliable transmission was and the freer people were with changing the text. And the earliest period is precisely where we have the fewest data. Thus when the texts were most in flux is when we have no direct view of the process. Indeed it seems that in the earliest stages the texts were, one might say, living documents.

So not only is it not clear how we could recover the pristine original with the data we have, it isn't even clear that there is a single pristine original to recover. 

Yes, Through the Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism.

Thanks, Stephen.  That'll be the one I eventually get.  I'm not willing to dish out $60 for the Kindle, so I suppose I'll see if I can get it through an interlibrary loan once I'm back in the States.

I approached the subject through the writings of English visionary poet William Blake for whom imagination was a way of interpreting reality.  (Blake famously wrote that “All gods exist within the human breast.”  But for him this didn’t mean they didn’t exist!  For Blake imagination is not imaginary if you’ll pardon the intentional paradox.) 

I love Blake. London has always been a favorite. 

Bruce, just to be nosey, in what context did you become aware of Wolfson?

I was interested in Jewish panentheism and authors who wrote about it as scholars and not as advocates.

BJH1960 said
Has anyone read anything by Elliot Wolfson? If so, is there something you'd recommend?
  

Yes, Through the Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism.

When I first got into the subject of Merkabah mysticism I noticed that this book was listed in almost every bibliography I read.  That's always a good sign that it's one you'll want to get.  What particularly resonated for me in this one is that it focuses on the importance of imagination.  I approached the subject through the writings of English visionary poet William Blake for whom imagination was a way of interpreting reality.  (Blake famously wrote that "All gods exist within the human breast."  But for him this didn't mean they didn't exist!  For Blake imagination is not imaginary if you'll pardon the intentional paradox.) 

Anyway I was drawn by the subject and interested in the view from the Jewish visionary tradition.  In this book Wolfson deals with the precursors of Kabbalah (about which is an acknowledged expert) including Merkabah.  Frankly, when I first got the book I wasn't ready for this level of erudition.  This is one I definitely need to revisit now that I'm a bit further down the path.  One of Wolfson's strengths is that he is fluent in contemporary lit/crit approaches and can use them as lenses to interpret the texts. So he doesn't treat these systems as historical curiosities.    

I notice that Amazon is asking absurd prices for this one.  I paid considerable less than that.  

Bruce, just to be nosey, in what context did you become aware of Wolfson?