Hi Jacqueline!
Great perspective! One thing I noticed and find ironic is that the Catholic church has maintained the deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament: the Maccabees, Judith, Tobit, Sirach etc. What is so interesting to me about this fact is that these are all clearly Jewish books from the fourth-first centuries BC! So what’s amazing to me is that the Christian Catholic church holds Jewish books as sacred, whereas the Jewish community did not preserve these particular books! Quite amazing! Maccabees is literally the story of Hanukkah, Judith means “Jewess,” Tobit is about Jewish marriage practices, Sirach is Jewish wisdom literature (from Yeshua/Jesus ben Sirach). I definitely agree with you that the more we study context, the less anti-Semitic we will be. I also hold to the universality and catholicity of the church, which includes our Jewish brethren, with whom gentiles are grafted into the grand “commonwealth of Israel” (according to Paul, Romans 11 and Ephesians 2). Thank you for sharing!
