Thanks for your thoughts and recommendations, Phil.

Yes, I'm going to get the book w.c. mentioned.

I guess I need to add, to be responsible to other readers here, that I had some problems going on with knowing who to trust intellectually. For a start, though I respect him, my dad told us (his family) something about his own family that was completely different from the truth. When he finally did tell us the truth, it explained a whole bunch of things to the point of being funny, and none of us were angry with him, but still...Then, too, I grew up mostly going to evangelical churches and though I love the people and still attend a fairly evangelical church, I was thrown ( as was Bart Ehrman [sp.?]) when this rabbi pointed out small discrepancies in the gospel accounts. That wasn't a big deal--I wasn't greatly needing to believe that the Bible was inerrant in order to trust it-- but I had to wonder how much I could intellectually trust church leaders on other things. And then, for two years prior to this rabbi, I'd been reading such amazingly hateful things in Church history regarding Jews that I was shaken badly--Martin Luther's "On the Jews and Their Lies" as well as other writings, both Catholic and Protestant, were hard to take. I'd just assumed that the anti-semitic charges against the church only applied to cultural--not practicing--Christians. So all this stuff taken together was like the "trusted monster" show that I earlier told of watching as a very young girl. My point being, to forum readers, that I was predisposed --once set off by this rabbi--to over-react and back off in shock from the Church.

But still I need to say that I desperately wanted to find Christ to be true. I profited from studying Judaism, but as I said in an earlier post, if God is who Jesus showed Him to be, He's more beautiful and honorable than anything I could invent. And, though I disagree with how he said it, I think that's what Dostoevsky was getting at in the letter I quoted.

The rabbi I've been talking about isn't so much set on attacking Jesus as he is trying to show from the Old Testament how all the things we say apply to Jesus really have other interpretations. To him, these other interpretations exclude Jesus as the Messiah. I don't have a problem, necessarily, with living with multiple interpretations. Some passages that the New Testament applies to Jesus can have more than one layer of meaning, and I'm fine with that.

Finally, I have to say that this rabbi is a polemicist, and a passionate one at that. The passion is not a bad thing. But he is too aggressive. I've come to value God's "divine shyness." Having had my faith violated by this over-reaching rabbi, I now kind of like the fact that He leaves room for doubt.