Rick Spence: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, Hebrews. Hebrews robbed the Egyptians. They were taken in. We took them in and sheltered them, gave them jobs, and then they stole all the jewelry and ran away. We didn’t even chase them. We were glad to see them gone. So it’s a different narrative on that story, but it essentially portrays the Jews as being hostile, that they don’t like other people, they’re contemptuous of other people’s religions, the rest of it. And see, the Greeks tended to think of themselves as being extremely cosmopolitan. Now, the Greeks run across people worshiping other gods. They go, oh, well those are just our gods under different names. Okay. Everything was sort of adjusted into their landscape. So you end up with that kind of hostility, which was there at the time. And that was probably influenced also by some of these earlier rebellions that had taken place in Egypt. During the Roman period, you not only have the Judean Rebellion in 70 A.D., but you have a couple of other uprisings in North Africa, and they were very bloody affairs. And in some cases, Jews began massacring other people around them. They start killing the Greeks and the Greeks start killing them. So there was a fair amount of, from that periodonic, a certain amount of bad blood of mutual contempt between Greeks or between Hellenes, between the people who became Hellenized as the Romans would be and the Jews. And the Romans also seems to have developed much of that idea. They considered Judea as being a horrible place to have to govern, inhabited by a stubborn, obnoxious people, not well-liked. So that’s really where you see the earliest version of that. And the reasons for it would be complicated, but you could say is that going back to Manetho and to the Roman period, Jews, Judeans frequently experienced difficulties, conflicts with other people living around them. And part of that probably had to do with the diaspora, which was the movement. Well, you get the idea. The Romans came in and kicked everybody out, which they didn’t. Jews had been leaving Judea since it was a poor limited area. And moving into areas like North Africa, Egypt, Cyrenaica, all the way into Southern France. They moved widely around the Roman Empire. So that sense of both distinctness and hostility existed since ancient times. to areas like North Africa, Egypt, Cyrenaica, all the way into Southern France. They moved widely around the Roman Empire. So that sense of both distinctness and hostility existed since ancient times. So it wasn’t just, the attitude of the church towards Jews was mixed by… Well, one of the ideas, of course, is that at the end of time, just before the second coming, one of the signs, how are we going to know that Jesus is going to return and the world is going to end? Well, the Jews will all convert. There will be a mass conversion. They’ll sort of see the light. Now, so there have to be Jews around to do that, or we won’t. It’s like a canary in a coal mine. You have to have them there to tip it off. So that was one of the arguments as to why, within the church as to why Jews would not be forcibly converted beyond the fact that it’s just kind of bad policy to forcibly convert people because you don’t know whether it’s sincere, but they need to be preserved as a kind of artifact, which will then redeem itself at the end of time. It’s not something which is encouraged. It predates Christianity, and then Christianity, of course, in its own way, just sort of… … of course, in its own way, just plagiarizes the whole Jewish thing, doesn’t it? I mean, I hesitate to use that term, but that’s what you do. It’s just like, “Well, we’re the Jews now. You used to have a unique relationship with God, but now it’s been passed over to us. Thanks for the Bible.” I can remember that on my mom’s side, I was periodically exposed to Sunday school, and pretty much the Old Testament was always presented as if somehow it was the history of, for lack of better term, Europeans in some way. It was a Christian history. It was all the prequel to that. First, the term Hebrew was always used, never Jews. So the ancient Hebrews, and somehow the Hebrews just became the Christians, and I don’t know, the Jews, they didn’t get a memo or something. So it’s basically like, Christianity, the prequel, is the Old Testament.…

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