Editor Joseph Bottum of First Things magazine, on ....

Kevin Madigan and Jon Levenson's

Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews.

As the editor tells us:

"Reform Jews excise, and Conservative Jews qualify,

"the sine qua non of Jewish belief: resurrection of the dead...''



This snippet adapted from the June / July 2010 issue of First Things magazine.


"When all Jews prayed, quipped the editor of a Reform prayer book of a past generation, one siddur (prayer book) sufficed for all; now that few Jews pray, there's a different siddur for every taste.

"As Kevin Madigan and Jon Levenson explain on Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews, one reason for the prayer - book proliferation is that Reform Jews excise , and Conservative Jews qualify, the sine qua non of Jewish belief: resurrection of the dead.

"Because resurrection is the subject of the first of the eighteen benedictions prayed by observant Jews, even the most duplicitous translators cannot quite rise to the occasion.

"In his new book A Short History of the Jews, however, Michael Brenner of Brandeis University offers one of the ploys that seems to have become standard these days: The Hebrew Bible occasionally mentions a resurrection of the dead, but it is only under Hellenistic influence that the doctrine of a new life after death acquires central importance.

"Greek doctrine, however, was dualist, separating body and soul, and it envisioned immortality in the perpetuation of the soul (not necessarily individual, either) despite the destruction of the body.

"Hebrew monism instead considers body and soul an indivisible entity, such that eternal life is unimaginable without the revival of the body as well as the soul.

"This did not seem strange to the rabbis of antiquity; if something without life can gain life, they argued, all the more so should something that had life be able to regain life.

"Christianity explicitly rejected the Hellenistic notion, which lingered on in Gnostic heresies, in favor of the Hebrew one: Christians believe that Jesus did not rise from the dead as a metempsychotic vapor, but as a man in the flesh.

"The modern sensibilities of the Jewish majority revolt against a belief that the rabbis of antiquity put foremost in Jewish prayer.

"It is one thing to deny a central precept of Judaism, though, and another to insidiously mistranslate prayer or falsify Jewish history..."....