Jon

Dave- I like Brueggemann’s book very much, but it needed to be longer. His list of publications on the OT is very long. I also am going to read Old Testament Theology: An Introduction. and The Prophetic Imagination among others. Also I think Levinas’s Talmudic Readings is a good bet too.

I don’t expect everyone to be at the same level of interest.

Gospel Doctrine is meant for people, whose interest is at the level of figuring out the difference between Jacob and Israel (if any!?). And that’s where most people are at. Holzapfel et.al. have done a good job of bringing the Near East closer to a lay student. Grateful for that.

Raymond has a good angle, if you ask me… that’s what’s my major discovery; when you peel off the cultural layers, you see the core of the Messiah/Christ figure saving the children of God from death and sin. The gospel’s core message has always been essentially the same.

The problem is one of credibility. Sometimes the Mormonizing cooks the books so far that the original meaning or idea is lost and then you have no idea how reliable the rest of the material is–what has been cooked and what hasn’t. It isn’t just a problem with modern Mormons, Matthew, for example, in the New Testament, sometimes distorts Messianic prophecies into places they really weren’t intended to go. It’s nice to know what the Jews thought it meant. It is fine to Mormonize, but it is also valuable to know when it is being done. At least in private study, it is good to know what was there originally (as best that term can be used) and how it has been bent. There’s lots of interesting material in the supplementary material that may not best be used for teaching Gospel Doctrine. The agenda for Sunday School class time and private scripture study are different.

No one seriously thinks there will be any real instruction on the Old Testament during the next year, do they? Or maybe it’s just past my bed time and I’m cranky.

OK, sorry for all that. I do thank you for the list of supplementary sources.

As for “Mormonizing” the Old Testament: One of the things that makes Mormonism attractive for me is the concept that God’s work has continuity, that his gospel is essentially the same in every dispensation. It is certainly worthwhile understanding how Orthodox Jews interpret Isaiah 53, but reading into it a Christian and even Mormon interpretation is legitimate, even if Isaiah didn’t grasp all of the details in the way we do with the perspective of the New Testament and Book of Mormon.

The Gospels depict Jewish people who anticipated a Messiah who would fulfill specific prophecies, and it seems reasonable to me that those Jews, like Saul, who accepted that interpetation of the Old Testament, parted company with the Jews who did not.

The Jews we know today are heirs of the latter group, while the Jews who saw a different import in the Old Testament prophecies of Messiah became Christians, and accepted a brotherhood with Gentile converts. As I understand it, Methodist scholar Margaret Barker has argued in her books that a Judaism that anticipated a coming Son of God, fulfilled by Jesus of Nazareth, was the foundation of the Jews who became Christians.