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Jesus also spiritualized the very notion of Israel. Membership in the people of God was not determined merely by descent; Israel was not to be equated with "children of Abraham." Neither was "Israel" defined by conventional wisdom's distinctions between righteous and outcast. What mattered was being a child of God, whose fundamental trait was compassion.
Yet Jesus remained deeply Jewish, even as he radicalized Judaism. He neither advocated the social world of the gentiles, nor dissolved Judaism in the name of a more universal vision. His movement, the Jesus movement, was concerned with what it meant to be Israel.
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Comparing Borg with what we find in the Urantia Book, we surely must note the many similarities--and some differences. Perhaps the major difference is whereas The Urantia Book gives the impression that only a small group consisting mainly of members of the Sanhedrin plus the Pharisees were violently opposed to Jesus' teaching, Borg indicates that this opposition was much more widespread--which he states in these words: "As a transformation movement within Judaism, the Jesus movement failed….it did not capture the allegiance of the majority of the Jewish people.
We pursue this further in our next issue.
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