I don’t mean to pick on him particularly, but I feel obliged to haul Claude Mariottini over these metacatholic coals, pour encourager les autres. In an otherwise good post (read it), he says:
In late Judaism, the Messiah was considered to be God’s agent who would bring restoration to Israel. The New Testament used the title and applied it to Christ to designate him as the savior of the world. (my emphasis)
But if Judaism was late 2,000 years ago, what on earth is it now?
I am aware that this used to be a standard and commonplace phrase of a Christian scholarship that operated in complete isolation from Jewish scholarship, with a completely supercessionist theology, and quite commonly with an anti-Semitic ideology. But I had thought the phrase had been pretty much stamped out nowadays. I will put its use on this occasion down to carelessness caused by reading too many worthy but now ancient tomes of Christian scholarship on the Second Temple period.
I really think we ought to stop using the phrase “late Judaism” to describe something that has continued to flourish for 2,000 years after the period being described as “late”. It’s not even middle-aged at that point. Arguably, in any sense that we know it today, it’s not Judaism either, but a common ancestor of Christianity and Judaism.
Let’s be clear. “Late Judaism” is a theological construct, not a descriptive one, when it is applied to the late Second Temple period, and in many people’s ears (including mine) it carries anti-semitic baggage. (I am not accusing Claude of that, but only of using a phrase carelessly. I am quite sure Claude didn’t mean to be insulting to contemporary Judaism at all.) Christians need to stop saying “late Judaism” and say something else.
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