Ghosty:
One is instituted by man making no divine claims and providing no evidence, the other is instituted by man with nothing but divine claims, and heavy testimony to the divine.
I may construe this as Gerald Gardner having been less megalomaniac than Jesus.
But seriously, we don’t know that Jesus ever saw himself as God or said he was God, and we do know sayings and deeds can be falsely attributed. The Bible has a proven example of that: the book of Ecclesiastes says it was written by King Solomon, but the language of that book, which is close to Mishnaic Hebrew, shows that it cannot have been. False attribution is easy to find.
Wicca has little in the way of spiritual or historical backing.
It’s of no importance. Even the quasi- Apostolic Succession concept I mentioned is fast losing importance in Wiccan circles nowadays. The Catholic-like claim to a historical chain leading up to Gardner is being replaced by a Protestant-like claim that each Priest and Priestess has been directly initiated by the Goddess and the God, not by another human by laying on of hands.
Christians did not consider themselves a break-off sect, and neither did Jews, initially. It was all within the family, so to speak.
And neither was English very different from German a thousand years ago, or humans very different from apes. But Christianity evolved to become much, much different from Judaism.
As a near convert to Orthodox Judaism, I can say that modern Jews have about as much in common with Temple Judaism as Jehovah’s Witnesses have with the Apostles. The Judaism of today, even Orthodox Judaism, is far from the Judaism of time of the Temple.
Of course, since there is no Temple! But the Temple sacrifices have been replaced by prayers: three prayers a day corresponding to the three daily temple sacrifices.
Furthermore, much of later Jewish theology, espescially in the Talmud, was formulated specifically to counter the growth of Christianity; in some aspects modern Judaism is an “anti-religion”.
The Talmud doesn’t bash Christianity very much. Most of the Talmud contains the discussion and codification of the Jewish Halakhah, the system of laws that regulates every aspect of the Jew’s life, from shoelaces to the throne. In that, Talmudic Judaism is a lineal descendant of the religion of the Pharisees Jesus confronted.
Christianity found fertile ground in the Judaism of the day, at least enough so that events like the loss of the Sacrificial Miracles of the Temple were associated with the “apostacy” of so many Jews to Christianity. Comparing modern Judaism to the Judaism of Jesus’ day is extremely erroneous, as not even the center of faith and worship survives today.
But to compare Christianity, post-Nicene, to Judaism is erroneous too. Did I mention the Trinity? This is a theological innovation that no Jew had ever known. God’s Son? God born of a Virgin, Mother of God? God becoming a man? God dying? To Judaism, to
any Judaism, whether in Jesus’s time or Orthodox Judaism today, these concepts are as heterically innovative as the theology of Mormonism.
There is a reason my forefathers in Europe never converted to Christianity.
good to see you again.
