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