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In a message dated 10/16/02 2:58:16 PM, mikeebb@... writes:

<< Jews and Christians share the same scriptures: the
Old Testament, as Rachel Ann mentioned, was passed intact from Jews
to Christians. >>

"Intact"?

The Torah is only the first five books of the Protestant Old Testament.
Catholics have extra books which Protestants decided to dump at some point.
When was it "intact"? Is there a Hebrew word or concept for that set of
writings which Christians call "The Old Testament"?

And Jews have commentary along with the scriptures. Do we inherit the
commentary too? And if so, just commentary up to 2,000 years ago or even
newer?

Sandra

Mike Ebbers

--- In Unschooling-dotcom@y..., SandraDodd@a... wrote:
> The Torah is only the first five books of the Protestant Old
>Testament. Catholics have extra books which Protestants decided to
>dump at some point. When was it "intact"?

This URL
http://www.biblelearning.org/code.nsf/e0b86e977ba26eae85256766007d5df8
/086a7a7f9a4412af852567a9005212fb?OpenDocument
tells which books belong in the Hebrew Scriptures and the Old
Testament. Near the end of the web page, a summary sentence
indicates that Protestant Christians use the Jewish scripture intact:

"In the 1600s, some Protestant Christians began to use only the
Jewish list of Old Testament books, while the Roman Catholic and
Eastern Orthodox Christians continued to use some or all of the
Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical books as well."

> And Jews have commentary along with the scriptures. Do we inherit
>the commentary too? And if so, just commentary up to 2,000 years
>ago or even newer?

Good point. This URL
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1061/5_112/80680260/p6/article.jhtml
?term=bible
indicates that Jews and Christians regard their scriptures
differently. In fact, it seems to indicate that Jews regard their
commentary as authorative as they do their scriptures, which
Christians do not (generalizing here for simplicity).

The whole web site warns against simplistic comparisons of the
Christian OT and the Jewish scripture, which I guess was your point.
So I learned something new from this research. Here are the first
and last paragraphs:

"STILL MORE fundamental is the partiality of vision that allows the
statement's authors to declare that both faiths "seek authority from
the same book," known to Jews as the "Tanakh" (a Hebrew acronym for
the three sections of the Jewish Bible) and to Christians as the "Old
Testament." This awkward gloss on how the two traditions refer to
the "same book" already points to the problem. Christians do not
refer to the Old Testament alone as the Bible, and Jews, for their
part, do not consider the New Testament to be biblical in any way."
........
"In their paragraph about the Bible, the authors of Dabru Emet also
passed up an opportunity to correct one of the most common Christian
misconceptions about Judaism--namely, that the Bible is its sole
authority. They could have done so by pointing to the centrality of
the oral Torah, that is, the Mishnah and subsequent rabbinic
teaching. Did they refrain out of the (perhaps unconscious)
recognition that this would have profoundly undermined their
simplistic claim that the two communities appeal to "the same book"?"

Mike Ebbers
Age 51, still learning