1. In Randall Heskett’s Messianism Within the Scriptural Scrolls of Isaiah, the following quote of G. Adam Smith (on page 57) stood out to me:
“Isaiah foretells his Prince on the supposition that certain things are fulfilled. When the people are reduced to the last extreme, when there is no more a king to rally or to rule them, when the land is in captivity, and revelation is closed, when in despair of the darkness of the Lord’s face, men have taken to them that have unfamiliar spirits and wizards that peep and mutter, then, in the last sinful, hopeless estate of man, a Deliverer shall appear.”
So did the following quotes of Thomas Cheyne (on page 58):
“Isaiah held the metaphysical oneness of the Messiah with Jehovah, but he evidently does conceive of the Messiah, somewhat as the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Babylonians regarded their kings, as an earthly representation of Divinity…No doubt this development of the Messianic doctrine was accelerated by contact with foreign nations; still it is in harmony with fundamental Biblical ideas and expressions.”
“[Because of the] improved condition of the human world…the evil propensity of lower animals will die out…”
Here’s some of Randall’s summary of John F.A. Sawyer’s discussion on Isaiah 7:14 (“a young woman conceives…and you will call his name Immanuel”):
“In Jesus ‘God is with us’ in a special way and the coming of Jesus is the fulfillment of prophecy, which has been altered from its original context of judgment to one of salvation.”
2. On page 120 of Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah, Jacob Neusner says that the parts of the Mishnah between the wars (i.e., the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. and the defeat of Bar Kokhba in the second century) focus on the Temple. After the second war, however, the Mishnah pushes the Temple to the periphery. Is that because there was little hope at that time that the Temple would be rebuilt, and so the rabbis wanted the Jews to get on with their lives and to focus on other things?
3. There have been prominent deaths this week. Old Rose from The Titanic passed on. Tony Curtis passed on as well. I was thinking about him earlier this week. My mind wandered to the scene in Some Like It Hot in which Tony Curtis told Marilyn Monroe that women’s kisses have no effect on him, and so she was trying to test that out! But I didn’t know that he was Tony Curtis, nor that he was the “singer of songs” who claimed to perform “feats of magic” in Spartacus.
On Ann Coulter’s web site, I learned that conservative columnist Joseph Sobran also passed on. I grew up reading Sobran in one of the Indianapolis papers, plus one of my relatives really liked him. Sobran was accused of anti-Semitism, a charge that he addresses here, in a speech that he gave to the Institute for Historical Review, a group that denies the Holocaust. You can judge for yourself whether or not Sobran is anti-Semitic. In my opinion, he gets a little too close to Holocaust denial for my comfort. (He says that he believes the Holocaust happened, but…well, read the speech!) And yet, he raises some good points.
First of all, I think that the best way to address Holocaust denial is to combat it with facts. Countries that ban Holocaust denial as a “thought crime” are wrong to do so, in my view. Dismissing Holocaust denial as the product of hatred or stupidity is also not the right way to fight it. Even if that charge is true, it only encourages Holocaust deniers to say that people are marginalizing them because they’re unable to prove the Holocaust. Appeal to facts should be how people combat Holocaust denial.
I was thinking of doing a blog series on Holocaust denial at some point. I saw a few Holocaust-revisionist books at the Hebrew Union College library—Did Six Million Really Die?, and another whose title I cannot remember. I also saw lengthy books that critiqued Holocaust denial. I’d like to study this because I wonder how we know what we know about the Holocaust. My Mom sent me an article a short while ago about a gas chamber that is being uncovered, which is important because, while Holocaust deniers believe that there were concentration camps, they don’t think that Jews were exterminated in gas chambers. For Holocaust deniers, Jews died in the work camps from disease, or other causes. My Mom said that she may also be able to put me in touch with people who survived the Holocaust.
Second, Sobran’s article brought to my mind a question: are Holocaust deniers pro-Hitler? Sobran himself (who technically may not be a Holocaust denier) criticizes Nazi Germany’s repressive policies in his speech. However, in this letter to the John Birch Society, Mark Weber of the Institute for Historical Review seems to talk out of both sides of his mouth. Weber says that Holocaust revisionists “acknowledge that many hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed and otherwise perished during the Second World War as direct and indirect result of the brutally anti-Jewish policies of Germany and its allies”, and he points out that the father of Holocaust revisionism, Paul Rassinier, was “a French educator and underground Resistance activist [who] was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and interned until the end of the war in the Buchenwald and Dora concentration camps.” At the same time, Weber appears to praise Hitler’s anti-Communism, as well as his promotion of private ownership and Christianity.
Third, Sobran takes swipes at Israel for its mistreatment of Arabs, and he says that the Holocaust is the main reason that Israel gets a free pass for its human rights abuses, whereas other nations are held accountable. Sobran also criticizes the Right, which he says was at one point balanced and level-headed in its discussion of Israel, only to have been hijacked by neo-conservatives. In my opinion, there are two sides to this story. Israel acts as she does for national security reasons, and (sadly) innocent Palestinians are victims in the process. No one should get a free pass to oppress others—neither Nazi Germany, nor Israel, nor Arab countries that want to drown Israel in the sea.