Success Quote by Jack Schwartz

A scientist writing about theology brings a lab-minded bluntness to a subject that’s usually wrapped in piety. Schwartz’s line doesn’t merely describe a historical argument; it exposes a power move. “Deemed no longer worthy” is doing the real work here. It signals that worthiness is being assigned by an institution with something to gain, not discovered as a neutral fact. The phrase makes early Christian polemics sound like a gatekeeping procedure: a community consolidating authority by revoking another community’s interpretive rights.

The intent is diagnostic. Schwartz is pointing to a mechanism by which Christianity, in its formative centuries, differentiates itself from Judaism while still claiming Judaism’s textual capital. The subtext is sharper: you can inherit someone’s library while declaring the original owners unfit to hold a library card. That’s not just disagreement over messianic identity; it’s an attempt to control the story’s foundations by controlling who gets to read the foundational texts “correctly.”

Context matters because “early church polemics” weren’t casual blog disputes; they were boundary-making tools in a competitive religious landscape, especially as Christianity sought legitimacy in the Roman world. Casting Jews as having “failed” performs a rhetorical inversion: the people to whom these Scriptures were central become, in this framing, the ones who misunderstand them most. The effect is double: it authorizes Christian readings as fulfillment while planting a durable logic for exclusion, one that can slide from theological critique into cultural contempt.