Is Walter Kasper revisionist? (quote, comment)

Here is my quote from a speech by that man:

As everybody knows the history of Jewish–Christian relations is complex and difficult, going back to the beginnings of the Church in the first century AD. The early Christian community in Jerusalem still took part in the prayers in the Temple and was highly esteemed; in fact, the apostle Paul in his missionary trips always went first to the synagogues and only after to the pagans. But the rift between Jews and Christians and the schism between Jews and the one Church of Jews and Gentiles had already arisen in the first century, especially after the destruction of the second Temple by the Romans in the year 70. This history has also seen positive times, such as when bishops took Jews under their protection against pogroms by mobs, but there have been dark times that have been especially imprinted upon the collective Jewish consciousness.

Here is my immediate source: TimesOnline, May 25 2010

Here is my highlight:

The early Christian community in Jerusalem still took part in the prayers in the Temple and was highly esteemed; in fact, the apostle Paul in his missionary trips always went first to the synagogues and only after to the pagans.

Oh, Kasper, that was so much for his personal comfort, was it? He went there because it was there he was highly esteemed, was it? He had never like been higher esteemed by them before, like when running about on their behalf persecuting the Church, or so? On Pentecost Monday the mass said by a priest of the FSSPX to us who made the pilgrimage from Chartres included a sermon, where he contrasted "revisionnismes et théories" as against " l'amour de la vérité". The latter phrase, just in case some reader should be lousy in French, meaning: love for truth.

OK, if imitation is an act of high esteem, maybe it was sometimes in high esteem that some Jews and Cohanim held the Christians: since the obligation to study the Law, which was not in the law, may well have been Joshua Ben Gamla's imitation of Christians learning Apostles Creed, Pater, Commandments by heart or being tested on contents in Didaché tôn dodeka apostolon. And since their new rite of Yôm Kippur no longer as the old, lawful rite symbolises the Crucifixion of Our Lord, but its fruit, baptism. Unless of course the new rite was already instituted during Babylonic Captivity, in which case it was a prophetic figure of baptism. But apart from "sincerest falttery being imitation" I do not see in general that Christians were held in "high esteem" by their persecutors.

I would probably like to read your revised version of the Acts just for fun, but for purposes of religious instruction, I prefer the old one. In which Pentecost day really assembled the people of Israel from all over the earth, as foretold in the Prophecy Of Jeremias, Chapter 23:

7 Therefore behold the days to come, saith the Lord, and they shall say no more: The Lord liveth, who brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt: 8 But the Lord liveth, who hath brought out, and brought hither the seed of the house of Israel from the land of the north, and out of all the lands, to which I had cast them forth: and they shall dwell in their own land.

But in which also the assembled (though totally international) were a minority of the population which before that had been calling itself Church of Israel. As those themselves, a thousand years before, had been one when opposed to the Ten Tribes.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Paris V, Mouffetard
Mercredi de QT
de la Pentécôte 2010

PS: the actual NEWS STORY (link, see above) that Kasper was talking about was opening of Vatican archives for the reign of Pope Pius XII in connection with his beatification and impending canonization. He correctly noted, that Pius XII, as proven from the time when he was Secretary of State to Pope Pius XI by no means favoured Hitler's ideology. Though he alluded to Mit brennender Sorge (<-- click link) as if racialism were the only or main secularism it condemned, which is by no means true if you take alternative "only" and is a bit of a stretch if you take it as "main secularism condemned in that encyclical".

Here is the actual passage:

8. Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community -- however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things -- whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.