The theology of Santa Claus
The New Yorker posts a cartoon by Emily Flake on Facebook.
Our old friend the intersection between god and Santa again…but many commenters instead saw anti-Semitism.
–I agree this smacks of Anti-Semitism. At the very least a typically erroneous Christian stereotype of Jewish scripture.
–This is antisemitic. And it’s sparking hateful comments.
–This would be funny, if it wasn’t anti-semitic!
–That feels really antisemitic. And not funny.
–One anti-semetism from your increasing pathetic magazine. Shame on you..
Etc. There’s even a whole essay on it at Religion News Service!
The idea of an “Old Testament Santa” is anti-Judaism 101.
First of all, the very term “Old Testament.”
“Old Testament” is an unconscious piece of anti-Judaism. “Testament” means “covenant.”
To say that the Jewish Bible, or the TANAKH, is the old testament implies that the covenant that God made with Israel is old — as in, outmoded, out of step, out of style. To put it in computer terms, the old covenant needs an upgrade — to a new covenant, a new testament — through Jesus.
For that reason, many sensitive Christians no longer refer to our Bible as the Old Testament. Some refer to it as the “first testament.” Some even respectfully call it what we call it — the TANAKH.
Second, Santa wielding a whip. Here we have the following implication — that the God of the so-called Old Testament is a cruel, vengeful God — and that the God of the Christian New Testament is a loving God. God of justice vs. god of love.
The idea is very powerful, and very old.
It dates back to the first century Christian theologian, Marcion.
And so on and so on, for many words…all as if the cartoon had appeared in a Christian magazine and were making a Christian argument when any fule kno Santa was invented by the Coca Cola company.
H/t Dave Ricks
Ironically, in the New Yorker comment section:
• Anyone who said they were Christian said the cartoon was anti-Semitic.
• Anyone who said they were Jewish said they had no problem with it.
I’m not sure what to make of that, but to paraphrase from my favorite comments there, Jews don’t study the OT because the OT is Christian.
You gotta admit, the relentless attempt to find and punish evil where no evil exists is very Christian.
Huh. Well, that history is a bit more complicated than I realised. Given the history of Christianity though, I suppose I should have guessed…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Testament#Content
The table is interesting. The Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Old Testaments are not the same as the Tanakh – they contain books which are not included in the Tanakh. They have significantly different content, so it is a useful distinction to refer to them by different names.
The Protestant New Testament does appear to contain the same books as the Tanakh (although Wikipedia says that there are some differences in wording and order) – but Protestantism grew out of Catholicism, so the Protestant Old Testament still doesn’t descend more directly from the Tanakh, but instead comes through Catholicism, and takes the extra books out again and puts them to one side in a separate collection.
Reading further… it just gets more complicated.
I’m still not sure how referring to them as “Old” and “New” is more anti-semitic than referring to them as “First” and “Second” would be though. Christians would just end up referring to the First Testament god as being cruel and vengeful, with the Second Testament god being loving.
Karellen, I read a good explication on that new and old, and if I remember where, I will post it for you. It does have to do with the idea that the “new” testament overruled the “old” testament, and the Jews were no longer god’s chosen people. But I can’t do any better than that, because it’s been a year or so since I read it.
A huge amount of Christian practice and theology is rooted in books that aren’t in either ‘testament.’ Early Christians usually had access to the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Tanakh with many dubious insertions and extra books. Thence the Latin Vulgate, that went from the Greek to Latin without consultation with Hebrew sources.
Protestant bibles, put together with much better textual access and wider sourcing, match more authoritative Jewish tanakhs.
Somewhere in Wiki is a table contrasting the number of books in various Bibles. Some of the older fringe churches (Coptic, Syrian, Armenian) have a dozen or more extra books.
So is it anti-Semitic because it depicts the wrong fictional bearded old geezer? Or because Christmas doesn’t figure large in the O.T.*? Is it the whip defaming that famously kind and cuddly OT JHWH who wouldn’t drown a fly in soup?
I know! It’s anti-Semitic because professional offence-takers from the brigade of the permanently chronically offended (pco) got offended that the people who for reasons unspecified should have found the cartoon offensive, didn’t, giving the pco’s an opportunity to be offended on their behalf, manufacture an outrage from nothing, and show how much more offended the Jewish people would to be if they cared about their own religion as much as our pco’s do about theirs. Which makes the complainants far more anti-Semitic than the not-anti-Semitic cartoon fanning their fake flames of faux offence.
*Unlike in the N.T. where, if I remember the theology correctly, Mary kissed Santa Claus underneath the mistletoe and lo! the Saviour of retail outlets and manufacturers of kitsch decorations and tacky crap was born.