Judaism, in short, included for the Jew all that had gone before. But
for St. Paul's attitude of hostility to the Law, but for the deep-seated
conviction that the Pauline Christianity was a denial of the Jewish
monotheism, the Jew might have accepted much of the teaching of Jesus as
an integral part of Judaism. In the realm of ideas which he conceived as
belonging to his tradition the Jew was not logical; he did not pick and
choose; he absorbed the whole. In the Jewish theology of all ages we find
the most obvious contradictions. There was no attempt at reconciliation
of such contradictions; they were juxtaposed in a mechanical mixture,
there was no chemical compound. The Jew was always a man of moods, and
his religion responded to those varying phases of feeling and belief
and action. Hence such varying judgments have been formed of him and his
religion. If, after the mediaeval philosophy had attempted to systematise
Judaism, the religion remained unsystematic, it is easy to understand
that in the earlier centuries of the Christian Era contradictions
between past and present, between different strata of religious thought,
caused no trouble to the Jew so long as those contradictions could be
fitted into his general scheme of life. Though he was the product of
development, development was an idea foreign to his conception of the
ways of God with man. And to this extent he was right. For though men's
ideas of God change, God Himself is changeless. The Jew transferred the
changelessness of God to men's changing ideas about him. With childlike
naivete he accepted all, he adopted all, and he syncretised it all as best
he could into the loose system on which Pharisaism grafted itself. The
legacy of the past thus was the past.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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