[7x57]

Originally Posted by mtenenhaus

Garand, I'm not challenging you, your understanding or your faith.

My response merely expresses a personal reflection on the OP's query. Likely i am biased by my religious and cultural background as well as our approach to law and education.

In this respect, quoting a lesson from a famed teacher who preceeded your diety seems reasonable to me.

i certainly respect your teacher's message as so much of what i've learned seems to parallel precedent messages and thought.

"Your Deity" -- I was tempted to point out that appealing to Jesus' authority is pretty specific to only one of the two surviving descendants of second temple Judaism.

As I understand (historical, Orthodox) Rabbinical Judaism, the consensus of the rabbis has what would be in Christian terms a kind of inspired status. As it was explained to me, issues that were settled in one aeon and not re-opened in the next are more or less fixed forever. So it seemed that quoting a rabbi who the consensus regards as authoritative is the closest equivalent to quoting Yeshua. That seemed very like what you were doing with the good rabbi Hillel, who has a clear foundational status in the development of Rabbinical Judaism. (I think I detect a range of opinion on this. The most conservative rabbi I ever met just baldly stated that Torah was incomprehensible without the tradition and the tradition was so complete that Torah was not even necessary. I think that was an extreme position, and it reminded me of both gnosticism and the Qumran sectarians attitude toward the Teacher of Righteousness, but it seemed to not be outside the permissible rabbinical variation.)

Given that, I assumed that you were most likely contributing a Jewish viewpoint to the conversation. Well, why not? If you'll put up with the "children" of the other, troublesome twin (an explicit reference to Alan Segal's "Rebecca's Children"), I certainly will. Glad to have you.

7x57