re: #82 Obdicut

Sure. But for the time being, I hope you understood Sergey’s point that the “Old Testament”, the text stripped of whatever amelioration is contained in the oral tradition, has many brutal things in it. Even though a reasonable person reading it should realize that it needs interpretation, Christian preachers— and Jews, for example, some of the weirder sects during the messianic era when Christ was (or wasn’t) around— do ‘interpret’ it in a way that their followers trust, even though they shouldn’t.

True. But those other groups are not all equal. It would be grossly unfair to judge mainstream Protestant Christianity by the example of the preacher in this post for example. Every religion has its whack jobs. The Oral Law, as transmitted, has been accepted by the majority of Jews for thousands of years.

Talmudic debates and small sectarian differences are not withstanding. You are talking about groups in that period with first order (in the Taylor sense) deviations from the Law. The differences between this Rav and that Rav in the course of rabbinic debates are about comparative minutia (say fifth order or higher in some cases). They all agree on over 99% of what the law is. In fact the smallness of the details wrangled over in Talmud itself should tell you how vastly accepted and largely formalized the Oral Tradition was even back then.