Julius Wellhausen Quotes
As we learn from the New Testament, the Jews and the Samaritans in the days of Jesus were not agreed on the question which was the proper place of worship, but that there could be only one was taken to be as certain as the unity of God Himself.
Wellhausen, Julius. Prolegomena to the History of Israel. Translated by J. Sutherland Black and Allan Menzies, Adam & Charles Black, 1885, p. 17.
The people of the Book refers to Jews and Muslims. This passage of the Koran is used to justify ecumenism with Muslims integrated with Jews and Christians. The Koran consists of Muhammed’s sayings, and he himself had opinions about Jews and Christians that differed from time to time. So although this passage signals a tolerant religion, in other places Muhammed preached violence against the people of the Book. At first Muhammed and his followers expected to see the people of the Book adopt Islam as their religion. When they did not, relations deteriorated somewhat.
His protest was focused on Middle East policies which he believed did not value the lives of Muslims as highly as Christians and Jews. The irony of this protest is that United States policy claims to value all life equally as do virtually all industrialized democracies. Omeish however is unusual among world Islamic leaders and politicians in that he values Christian and Jewish life as much as Muslim. Most, typically value Muslims almost exclusively and many advocate the killing of Christians and Jews.
See {586039} for a quotation that goes further and seeks to punish and humiliate the non believers. This sura is often used by those wishing to illustrate the intolerance of Islam—especially of other religions. They fail to put this into the context of the Old Testament which proscribed death for heretics or the history of Christianity regarding the murder of nonbelievers. The difference is however, that a very small proportion of Jews or Christians today believe in following Biblical instructions in this respect while the proportion of Muslims who believe in the literal interpretation of scripture on these points is much larger. However there are Islamic modernists and moderates throughout the world who reject this notion of warring on all other religions and there is a struggle going on within Islam itself.
In 1859 Boston public school students were required to recite the Ten Commandments from the King James version of the Bible each week. Thomas Wall, an 11 year old Catholic refused to recite from the King James Protestant version of the Bible. His teacher then beat him until he complied. His parents filed an assault complaint against the teacher. The Boston police court not only exonerated the teacher but excoriated the Walls. Some day a Jew might ask to swear his court oath. The “slippery slope” argument that the court made referred to the fact that orthodox Jews pray facing Jerusalem often with a prayer shawl over their heads. The Pentateuch is the first 5 books of the Old Testament which Jews recognize as opposed to the entire Bible.
This was early in his career. As he got older, he was very frustrated with the Jews who would not convert to Christianity even after he had “purified” the religion and freed Christians from the “evils” of the Papacy. He became a virulent anti-Semite. See {617773}.
Julius Wellhausen was a German biblical scholar and orientalist. In the course of his career, he moved from Old Testament research through Islamic studies to New Testament scholarship. Wellhausen contributed to the composition history of the Pentateuch/Torah and studied the formative period of Islam. For the former, he is credited as one of the originators of the documentary hypothesis.
