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Note: This was in the queue before I realized that it was falling on General Conference weekend, so it’s not in response to anything said over the pulpit.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n I recently read an account of the three great medieval Jewish-Catholic disputations (<\/span>Judaism on Trial<\/span><\/i>, McCoby). These were debates arranged by the Christian authorities where the top rabbinical scholars were pitted against typically former Jewish, now Christian theology scholars. They were conducted under some duress by the Jewish community, who knew that a misplaced phrase could lead to a pogrom or expulsion for their community, and were constantly trying to thread the needle by defending their faith, which by definition rejects fundamental tenets of the Christian faith, without saying something that could be seen as offensive to Christian beliefs.<\/span><\/p>\n The stakes of these debates made them thrilling even if the back-and-forth about what a particular line in the Talmud meant could get a little dry. In most cases implied parameters were set up as to where the Jewish debaters could and could not go, and the arguments were about very specific points of dispute (of the three, the Barcelona disputation was considered the freest and fairest, as the Jewish disputant was a friend and confidante of the king, who seemed to sincerely hold that a genuine, free “marketplace of ideas” approach would naturally prove the superiority of Christianity).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n As an example, at the Disputation of Paris the Church was deciding whether to censure or burn the Talmud for heresy because according to some it disparaged Jesus Christ. Whether it did in fact do so turned on whether the Jesus mentioned in the Talmud is the Christian Jesus, so among other arguments the rabbis dryly made the point that \u201cnot every Louise in France is King.\u201d\u00a0 Because of this needle-threading, there was a fascinating tactic where the rabbis would be quoting early Church fathers like Jerome to make their point in the original Latin while the Christian disputants would be quoting Midrash from the Talmud to make theirs. While sometimes the discourse was very legalistic and formal, in other moments it was more playground smack-down between the individuals involved while the king or Pope (depending on the disputation) sat in the background.<\/span><\/p>\n For example, there was one particularly\u2013I beg your pardon but it really is the best word for this\u2013ballsey moment in the Jewish disputant\u2019s opening statement at the Paris disputation.<\/span><\/p>\n But we will die rather than give up the Talmud, which is the apple of our eye. Even if you should decide to burn the Talmud in France, it will continue to be studied in the rest of the world, for we Jews are dispersed throughout the world. Our bodies, but not our souls, are in your hands.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n Of course, nowadays we are more ecumenical (I have a hard time seeing anybody set up a formal debate between Elder Bednar and Cardinal Dolan on infant baptism), so this kind of formal religious back-and-forth generally has been relegated to YouTube influencers and such, and I think that\u2019s the way it should be for a number of reasons.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n As I have noted before, I enjoy a good <\/span>intellectual back-and-forth<\/span><\/a>, and I think it\u2019s important for sides to flesh out their perspectives, with iron sharpening iron and all that, but nobody is convinced by these (at least from any single video, the <\/span>inability<\/span><\/i> or <\/span>unwillingness<\/span><\/i> for a faith to defend itself is a problem) one way or the other. Plus we have something to learn from one of the rabbis in the disputes (I forget which one) who tried to come to a sort of \u201cagree to disagree\u201d position where both faiths are based on fundamental priors that are not constructible or deconstructable through reasoning and debate, and I think that\u2019s where most people are. We have formalized that epistemological approach in our own Church, where testimony is based on sense experience and not logical proofs (which isn\u2019t to say that logic can\u2019t attack a faith, at some point I don\u2019t care if the spirit told you there is a Loch Ness monster if there has never been any evidence for it that we would expect given the parameters of the claim).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n So while these more casual debates are fun, there have been religious debates where the stakes were much, much higher than influencer clicks. In addition to the Jewish-Catholic medieval disputations, a few that I can think of:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n On one hand the stakes are quite a bit lower now because, for some cases, we don\u2019t burn or stone people for heterodoxy anymore, which is, it goes without saying, a good thing. On the other hand I think some of the lower stakes are a simple function of the fact that religion in general just means less in society today. So in a sense I look back with a certain interest in the time when empires waited with baited breath on the outcome of a religious dispute, but by the same token I recognize that there are objectively good social developments that have led us to the place to where our lives do not hinge on the outcomes of those religious debates.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n