I almost talked myself out of running this morning, as the weather was rainy and warm. In the end, the force of habit was too great to resist, and I laced up my trainers and sandwiched my run between two spells of rain. Coffee and fruit for breakfast, a teleconference, retirement planning followed by a special lunch with my dearest, and home for some digital typesetting, more work and reading.
Danya posted the second part of her argument over at her blog yesterday; I support most of her case, except that I would hold back from leaning hard on identifying Jesus with Hillel-ism; there was abundantly enough diversity among Pharisees for Jesus to fit into his own distinct mode, close to but not identical with Hillel. The broad point remains: Jesus wasn’t arguing with Pharisees as the representative of a rival religion, nor even a rival sect, but as one Judaic leader in the mode of other such prominent representatives as Hillel and Shammai. And one reason things sometimes got heated between Jesus and his contemporaries was that his teaching was so similar to theirs, but without acknowledging their authority and correctness but rather asserting his own distinct angle within a shared outlook.
With the apostles and especially with subsequent generations of church leadership, the conflicts rapidly outweighed the shared outlook (though not as rapidly as most Christians have typically assumed) — but Jesus argued with (and defended!) Jewish contemporaries as one of them. We who hold the faith of Jesus would add ‘and more’, but the former conclusion is sound no matter the status of our ‘and more’.