From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!seismo!hao!hplabs!hpda!bvi
Newsgroups: net.flame
Title: Re: A reply to Dave Lee
Article-I.D.: hpda.361
Posted: Mon Feb 14 12:14:43 1983
Received: Thu Feb 17 04:59:37 1983

Your flame was sufficiently interesting to cause me to wade through the 
net.religion morass to find the original offending article (I have since
re-unsubscribed so I am reacheable via this newsgroup or mail).

Anyway, I would like to interject a note of objectivity, if I may.
First off, it is entirely possible for two people to argue from what they
view as the same base (in this case the Old Testament/Holy Scriptures), 
where, in reality, they are arguing from different bases.  Though many of 
the titles and much of the content of the OT/HS are the same, there are 
significant (and often subtle) variations between the Jewish Bible, the 
Catholic OT, and most flavors of Prostestant versions of the OT.  I had been 
brought up to understand that there were various versions of the Bible
(OT & NT), mainly due to *which* source was used as the basis for a
particular book (Greek/Roman/Hebrew/earlier/later), but that all basically
proclaimed the same 'truth' (ours, of course).  

I would cheerfully (albeit cynically) have gone on believing that most versions 
of the OT were basically the same except for minor differences in translation
had my husband and I not once gotten into a discussion of some of the
more bizarre aspects of the Song of Songs as viewed from the Catholic 
faith (it's viewed as an expression of the love of Christ for the 'body'
of the Church, i.e., its people).   There were passages and nuances that
I, coming from a Catholic upbringing, remembered, which he, from a Jewish
upbringing, did not.  Lo and behold, neither of us had completely lost
our wits - there were quite a number of subtle differences in the words
used, sentence organization, punctuation, etc., which individually were
fairly insignificant, but added up to a fairly sizeable whole.  For
example, under no circumstances (well, maybe I underestimate religious
fanaticism) would the Jewish translation be interpreted as the love of 
Christ for the body;  however, the Catholic translation made this quite
easy, from the choice of words & phraseology right down to the footnotes
which explained the symbolism.

To get to my point.  People interpret things in the light of what they
have been brought up in.  Dave was using *his* interpretation of what
he perceives/believes is the truth to justify his beliefs.  I don't 
think anybody has a patent on *THE* Old Testament/Holy Scriptures, nor
do I think such a beast exists.  Can a set of documents which have
undergone hundreds of years of editing/translation by Christian 
scholars be considered, in its essence, Jewish?  Can a set of documents
which have been handed down for many more hundreds of years in the
Jewish tradition, subject to the vagaries of copying & translation,
be used to justify in retrospect a religion which diverged 2k years ago?
Probably not, to both of these.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, though the *basis* for the OT/HS
were once the same, the interpretations (and this is what people argue
from, in the long run) vary sufficiently that I don't think it's 
inconsistent to use a passage in the XXX Christian version of the Old
Testament to justify passage YYY in the New Testament, since both 
OT & NT will have been brought into some semblance of internal consistency
over the years.  Note that you may not necessarily be able to perform
that justification using the ZZZ Christian version of the OT, or the
Holy Scriptures, or anything else outside of that self-consistent 
environment.  

Well, enough on why anything can be used to justify anything else, as
long as it's in the same framework.  Flammably yours, 

Beatriz Infante