• Wertheimer [any]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      Well shucks. No, good call if that’s the usage of it you’re most familiar with. Paul is absolutely being anti-Semitic with it, but he’s twisting (as I read it) the phrase as used in Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, and elsewhere.

      • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        11 months ago

        I don’t think Paul’s usage was especially anti-semitic except in so far as he was becoming a different religion to Judaism. He wasn’t saying it is bad to be circumcised he was saying that it is wrong to say that Christians are expected to become circumcised

        in the very same letter Paul says "I ask then: Did God reject his people? By no means! " … "do not consider yourself to be superior to those other branches. " (other branches here refers to non Christian Jews)

        so he clearly wasn’t intending to advocate for religious oppression of the Jews and at the time of writing Christian oppression of Jews wouldn’t have occured to him or the audience as a remote possibility given how far Christianity was from political power at that point in history

        if someone in a modern context however used it to criticise Judaism as immoral it would then be anti-semitic but that would also for the reasons I mentioned be an interpretation in conflict with the context