The Christian‐Jewish Debate

Extract

Christianity is without doubt the most disputatious of all religions. The Church was bom arguing, and Judaism was the first opponent which it wrestled with, like the infant Hercules, in its cradle. In modem times this venerable controversy has been pushed into the background by the more urgent battle against a rationalism, that in its many different guises has threatened orthodox Judaism no less than Christianity. But the old volcano, though not very active at the moment, is by no means extinct. Thanks to the labours over the last fifty years or more of Dr J. Klausner, an eminent professor of the Hebrew University at Jerusalem, it has been steadily building up pressure which has recently issued in a premonitory puff or rumble. This literary activity did indeed take place more than thirty years ago, and has been through a second and third edition since, but all that happened in modem Hebrew, which rendered it practically unavailable to the Christian reader, and therefore non-explosive as regards the Christian-Jewish controversy. It is only this year that it has appeared in this country in English—well, to be quite frank, in a quaint patois which is recognizable as a variant of the current language. According to a preface by the translator, the rendering of modem Hebrew presents special problems. We can well believe it; but they can scarcely be responsible for such unidiomatic, and at times incorrect, English as Dr Stinespring manages to achieve here. He would have served his author better if, besides submitting his translation to him and another Jewish scholar for correction, he had also taken the trouble to consult some suitable person who has English and not German for his mother tongue. Incidentally, we are curious to know what Hebrew words may lie behind such contraptions as ‘ethico-political’, ‘religio-spiritual’, ‘politico-material’, which creak at us from every other page.