'The Prophets' War Is Not Over'

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So it was when the Israelites finally accepted this that classical prophecy died out?
Yes, in fact, as one eminent Protestant historian, John Brighton in his History of Israel, said, by the third or fourth century BCE, the war against idolatry had been won. As I point out in my book, the irony is that it was not the Jews who reaped the spoils of victory in that war; it was the new religion that was born out of the womb of the religion of ancient Israel, Christianity. When the Roman Empire, the great pagan empire, converted to monotheism, it was to Christianity, not to Judaism. So in that sense, the prophecy turned out to be both true and not true. Christians would say that they were actually foreseeing the advent of Christianity, which is one of the misconceptions that I argue against in my book--that the prophets were on the way to Christianity or were premature Christians. Most serious scholars, including Christian ones, no longer accept what used to be called the Christological interpretation of the prophets, the idea that there were foreshadowings and hints of the coming of Christ.

But most Christians still believe that the book of Isaiah foretells the coming of Christ.
Yes, most Christians do, but no serious scholars do. And the Christians who do, I think, from the point of view of serious study of what Christians call the Old Testament, are out of date. You will find scholars, many of them very pious Christians themselves, who say flatly that the Old Testament is not merely a precursor to the New Testament. It exists in its own right, and it was not a forecast of the New Testament. All the early Christians who were Jews believed that it was. But that they believed that it was and that many fundamentalist Protestants still believe it doesn't make it true.

There's a parallel development within the Roman Catholic Church, and also among many Protestants, which is the rejection of what is called supercessionism, the idea that Christianity supercedes Judaism. The Pope has said that Judaism is a religion in its own right, it is the older brother of the Church, which means that the Church, more or less officially, no longer accepts the view of St. Paul, that Judaism was no longer valid. That's a very long and complicated theological discussion I'm not really willing to enter.

You mention in your book that Jews read the prophets every Shabbat. Is the prophetic literature as important in Christianity?
No. There was a time until relatively recently when Roman Catholics were forbidden to read the Bible. That was one of the reasons that, when Martin Luther inaugurated the Reformation, one of the first things he did was to translate the bible into German, so that ordinary people could read it without the intercession of the Church. The Church of course did not believe in that -- in fact in the early days there were people who were executed for translating the Bible into the common languages. Now that's no longer true; the Church no longer discourages reading the scriptures.

Orthodox Jews also discouraged reading the scriptures nakedly. If you read them, you read them surrounded by rabbinic commentaries. Even in the synagogue, when the sections of the prophetic literature are read, as a supplement to the reading of the Pentateuch, they are also surrounded by commentaries, and usually the rabbi will deliver a sermon to interpret what the prophetic literature for that week is saying.

The fact is that compared to even fifty years ago, the level of biblical literacy in relation to the prophets has fallen catastrophically. In most Protestant countries, including this one, in the early years of the 20th century, everyone knew the bible, including illiterate people. Now if you stop the first 100 people you meet on the street and ask them to name the first five books of the bible, I'll bet that not one out of a hundred could do so, let alone tell you what's in those books. This is part of my purpose - to stimulate interest and to get people to start reading the Bible again. I focus on the prophets because, as a literary man, I feel they have an appeal, even to nonbelievers, because they were among the greatest poets who ever lived.

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