September 22 -- Opening night for the ICJS Fall Mini-Course on first-century origins of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism. The room is hot, noisy, and far too small. Obviously there are a lot more people here than the ICJS folks expected. Some of us are here again. Rosann shamelessly reveals our hidden agenda: We’ve come for the rabbi. It’s not that we didn’t ad-mire Rosann’s valiant attempts last year to present both sides of the story. A teacher myself, I considered her dialogistic technique as amazing as her skill in using the blackboard. But the promise this year of a real dialogue between a Christian scholar and a Jewish scholar on the topic of Biblical Israel, Rabbinic Judaism, and Christianity is as irresistible as a piece of New York cheesecake.

October 16 -- Saturday following the fourth class session. I’m sitting in one of the local bookstores, listening to an author promoting her most recent book in a discussion of grammar and writing. She is lamenting the ways in which we speakers of English are weakening the language, mentioning specifically the use of adjective-noun combinations in which, she claims, both words mean the same thing, so the adjective adds nothing to the meaning of the noun. She cites some examples. I catch only "close proximity" and "meaningful dialogue." My ears shut down. (No, I am not bored; grammar is NOT boring.) I am filtering her comments through my mini-course experi-ence. I’ll give her "close proximity," especially since we moved into a larger room the second week. But I am thunderstruck that this woman can possibly entertain the notion that "meaningful" is meaningless when it comes in proximity to "dialogue." In distinct contrast to last year’s course, this year’s experience has vividly demonstrated two things: how hard it can be to establish dialogue on religious issues within any given group, and how much harder it can be to make that dialogue meaningful.

Consider first the two people conducting the formal dialogue. One is a Jewish man trained as a rabbi and a historian, the other is a Roman Catholic woman trained as a theologian. The historian looks at first-century Palestine and wants to know what happened there; the theologian looks at the same material and wants to know what it means. "Theology" doesn’t even mean the same thing to the dialogue partners, since theology does not occupy positions of equal importance in Jewish and Christian thought.

Consider now the witnesses to the dialogue. Some know a great deal about the first-century origins of Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, others know almost nothing. In their eager-ness to learn more, many people decide to join the dialogue, continually hurling questions and comments toward the front of the room with reckless abandon and uncertain aim. The questions and comments occasionally confuse the issues further because some of these people are Christians and some are Jews. They have different Bibles, and they read their Bibles in significantly different ways. Each group possesses a religious vocabulary foreign to the other, and even the words they share yield different definitions. Throw scholarship into this mix and the sometimes fine line between critical thinking and confessional faith becomes a formidable barrier to under-standing.

October 20 -- The final class session. The room is much bigger and cooler, but the noise level has not abated. I am too battle weary to think about whether this dialogue has been truly "meaningful." I do believe, though, that everyone will leave tonight with a clear idea of how vitally important it is to understand the religious "other" in order to construct a mean-ingful dialogue. That understanding alone makes this course a success.

Janis Koch is a long-time friend and supporter of the ICJS and has recently become the Web consultant to the ICJS.