A Jewish person recently asked, “What do Catholics think of the Jewish religion?” We think of Catholics, Jews and time. We bounce through the centuries. We ricochet from Pascal in the 1600s to Justin Martyr in the 100s. We are then deflected to St. Jerome in the 400s, back once more to the 1600s, and end up in the 1940s, within living memory.
Pascal said in the 1600s that one of the great mysteries of all time was that Jewish people had received and expensively maintained the prophecies concerning The Messiah. When many thought the prophecies were fulfilled by Jesus, the Jerusalem establishment had Jesus killed and ignored His teachings. They did so after having incurred the incredible cost of maintaining their Sacred Writings, all written by hand on expensive parchment and replaced every few centuries in synagogues all over the known world.
Then, we bounce back in time to the brilliant scholar who died for The Faith around 165 AD, Justin Martyr. Justin Martyr wrote passages to which we may link in http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/01286.htm The passages describe Justin Martyr’s dialogue with Trypho the Jew. In the short paragraphs that are Chapters 71-75, and those following, Justin Martyr explains how some authority had ordered politically correct changes and omissions to be made in their own Sacred Writings to remove direct references to, and prophecies describing, Jesus.
Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew is still politically incorrect. Even short passages like 71-75 are more than most want to think about. Justin Martyr describes, by Chapter and Verse, changes and omissions a few false scribes had made to prophetic writings. Today, only a few are willing to spend even five or ten minutes on Chapter 71, 72, and those that follow, to begin realizing the extent of the changes made to disconnect Jewish prophecies from The Messiah and souls from salvation.
Bounce forward in time to 400 AD. At the time of St. Jerome, nearly all Christians were Catholic. The Church realized that it needed an accurate record of The Prophets. Intentional distortions and omissions kept people from seeing how completely Jesus fulfilled the Prophecies about Him.
St. Jerome realized that poorer synagogues could not afford the new, altered scrolls. He traveled through the Middle East to find ancient, original documents. They were compared, compiled and authorized by The Church in Council. If we bounce forward to the 1600s, we see a similar desperation among Protestants to remove whole Books from The Bible in order to justify dividing The Only Church Jesus Founded into 43,000 personal profit centers.
Now, go forward in time to the 1940s. The Dead Sea Scrolls, written before Jesus, were found. They validated The Bible provided by St. Jerome and confirmed by The Church in Council.
To answer “What do Catholics think of the Jewish religion?” we consider; Catholics, Jews and time. Then, we shrug our collective shoulders, turn up our outstretched, open palms, turn the corners of our mouths sharply downward, and think of the facts we found bouncing through the centuries. We may simply say, “You pay your money and you take your choice.”
