The Jewish Gospels (18 page)

Another classical rabbinic passage might perhaps be the earliest attestation from the tradition:
²¹

Rabbi Yose Hagelili said: Go forth and learn the praise of the King Messiah and the reward of the righteous from the First Adam. For he was only commanded one thou-shalt-not commandment and he violated it. Behold how many deaths he and his descendants and the descendants of his descendants were fined until the end of all of the generations. Now which of God's qualities is greater than the other, the quality of mercy or the quality of retribution? Proclaim that the quality of goodness is the greater and the quality of retribution the lesser! And the King Messiah fasts and suffers for the sinners, as it says, “and he is made sick for our sins etc.” ever more so and more will he be triumphant for all of the generations, as it says, “And the Lord visited upon him the sin of all.”
²²

If this text be deemed genuine, then we have clear evidence that by the third century, rabbinic readers understood the suffering servant to be the Messiah who suffers to vicariously atone for the sins of humans.

There are also various medieval Jewish commentators, among them figures marginal to rabbinic Judaism (but hardly suspected of Christian leanings) such as the
Karaite Yefet ben Ali, who clearly understand the Isaiah text and its suffering servant as about the Messiah.
²³
The early modern Kabbalist Rabbi Moshe Alshekh, also a spotlessly “orthodox” rabbinite teacher, writes, “I may remark, then, that our Rabbis with one voice accept and affirm the opinion that the prophet is speaking of the King Messiah, and we ourselves also adhere to the same view.”
²⁴
The intellectual giant of Spanish Jewry, Rabbi Moses ben Nahman, concedes that according to the midrash and the rabbis of the Talmud, Isaiah 53 is entirely about the Messiah, but he dissents.
²⁵

As we see, neither Judaism nor Jews have ever spoken with one voice on this (hermeneutical) theological question, and therefore there is no sense in which the assertion of many sufferings and rejection and contempt for the Son of Man constitutes a break with Judaism or the religion of Israel. Indeed, in the Gospels these ideas have been derived from the Torah (Scripture in its broadest meaning) by that most Jewish of exegetical styles, the way of midrash.
²⁶
There is no essentially Christian (drawn from the cross) versus Jewish (triumphalist) notion of the Messiah, but only one complex and contested messianic idea, shared by Mark and Jesus with the full community of the Jews. The description of the Christ as predicting his own suffering and then that very suffering in the Passion narrative, the Passion of the Christ, does not in any way then
contradict the assertion of Martin Hengel that “Christianity grew
entirely
out of Jewish soil.”
²⁷

Gospel Judaism was straightforwardly and completely a Jewish-messianic movement, and the Gospel the story of the Jewish Christ.

 

*
According to the Mishna, Sanhedrin 7:5, it is mentioning the name of God that constitutes blasphemy. Both Josephus and the Community Rule of Qumran precede the Mishna in this determination. I contend, therefore, that it is most plausible to understand Jesus' “I Am” as being the name of God, hence the blasphemy. Many scholars deny this argument, contending that “I Am” is merely a declarative sentence and not a predication of the name of God to himself (see Adela Yarbro Collins,
Mark: A Commentary,
ed. Harold W. Attridge, Hermeneia—a Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible [Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007], 704–6). The blasphemy, then, has to be understood differently, namely, in connection with Philo's definition of blasphemy, which is, as she says, somewhat less stringent than that of the Mishna, Josephus, or Qumran (see Adela Yarbro Collins, “The Charge of Blasphemy in Mark 14:64,”
Journal for the Study of the New Testament
26, 4 [2004]: 379–401). In my view, an interpretation of the text that is closest to the other Palestinian views of the matter is preferable, but Yarbro Collins may, of course, be right. In support of her view is the verse in Mark 2 discussed above where Jesus is accused of blasphemy for having arrogated to himself the divine prerogative to forgive sins. However, even on Philo's account, blasphemy consists of imputing divine status to oneself or to another human, so my point that the blasphemy consists precisely in Jesus claiming divine status for himself stands. Even if
eigo eimi
is innocent, Jesus' further allusion to himself as the Son of Man and coming with the clouds of heaven certainly, according to the high priest's reaction, constitutes blasphemy and thus a claim to divine status. Compare also John 8:57–58: “Then the Jews said to him, ‘You are not yet fifty years old and you have seen Abraham?' He said to them, ‘Truly, truly I say until you, before Abraham came into being, I Am
[eigo eimi]
.' They then picked up stones that they might cast them at him.” This is precisely the same as what happens here in Mark. Jesus in both Gospels is understood as claiming divine status through naming himself as YHVH names himself. Since stoning is the biblically ordained punishment for blasphemy, the people seek to stone him. This is precisely the same blasphemy for which Stephen was stoned according to Acts 7:56, although there the blasphemy consisted in implying the divine status of Jesus, not, of course, his own. To my knowledge, this is the only place in which “Son of Man” is used of Jesus by someone other than Jesus himself; it shows how charged was the claim to be the Son of Man, which only makes sense if it is a claim to divinity.

J
EWS NOT INFREQUENTLY ARGUE THAT
Christianity appropriated the Hebrew Bible and turned it to its own non-Jewish purposes, thus distorting its meanings. This book challenges this claim in two ways. On one hand, the implication of my argument is that Christianity hijacked not only the Old Testament but the New Testament as well by turning that thoroughly Jewish text away from its cultural origins among the Jewish communities of Palestine in the first century and making it an attack on the traditions of the Jews, traditions that, I maintain, it sought to uphold and not destroy, traditions that give the narrative its richest literary and hermeneutical context. On the other hand, this book challenges the notion that the New Testament itself is an appropriation, or—even better—a misappropriation of the Old. If the interpretations offered here hold water, then the New Testament is much more deeply
embedded within Second Temple Jewish life and thought than many have imagined, even—and this I emphasize again—in the very moments that we take to be most characteristically Christian as opposed to Jewish: the notion of a dual godhead with a Father and a Son, the notion of a Redeemer who himself will be both God and man, and the notion that this Redeemer would suffer and die as part of the salvational process. At least some of these ideas, the Father/Son godhead and the suffering savior, have deep roots in the Hebrew Bible as well and may be among some of the most ancient ideas about God and the world that the Israelite people ever held.

Many, perhaps even most, New Testament scholars today argue that the most striking parts of the Jesus story as told in the Gospels—that he was the Messiah, the Son of Man; that he died and was resurrected; and that he is to be worshipped as God—all stem
ex eventu
(after the fact) from the earliest followers of Jesus, who developed these ideas in the wake of his death and their experiences of his resurrection appearances. Thus, one of the finest and most respected (by me, as well, of course) scholars of New Testament today, Adela Yarbro Collins, writes openly, “Most New Testament scholars would still agree with Bultmann's judgment that the creation of the ‘idea of a suffering, dying, rising Messiah or Son of Man' was ‘not done by Jesus himself but by' his followers
‘ex eventu,'
that is, after the fact of the crucifixion and the
experiences of Jesus as risen.”
¹
In this, she is, as she says, entirely representative of the dominant scholarly tradition today about the Son of Man and the exalted status of Jesus, the Christ. As it was recently put to me by an orthodox Jewish scholar of rabbinics, the Gospel story is a complete novelty engendered by the remarkable life and death of the man Jesus of Nazareth.

The historian in me rebels at such an account. Taking even the remarkable nature of Jesus—and I have no doubt that he
was
a remarkable person—as the historical explanation for a world-shifting revision of beliefs and practices seems to me hardly plausible. It may have been necessary that Jesus was so extraordinary for such a compelling narrative of divine being and function to have developed, but it was hardly sufficient. Even more so, the notion that some kind of experience of the risen Christ preceded and gave rise to the idea that he would rise seems to me so unlikely as to be incredible. Perhaps his followers saw him arisen, but surely this must be because they had a narrative that led them to expect such appearances, and not that the appearances gave rise to the narrative.
*
An alternative account such as I have given here seems much more likely to make historical sense. A people had been for centuries
talking about, thinking about, and reading about a new king, a son of David, who would come to redeem them from Seleucid and then Roman oppression, and they had come to think of that king as a second, younger, divine figure on the basis of the Book of Daniel's reflection of that very ancient tradition. So they were persuaded to see in Jesus of Nazareth the one whom they had expected to come: the Messiah, the Christ. A fairly ordinary story of a prophet, a magician, a charismatic teacher is thoroughly transformed when that teacher understands himself—or is understood by others—as this coming one. Details of his life, his prerogatives, his powers, and even his suffering and death before triumph are all developed out of close midrashic reading of the biblical materials and fulfilled in his life and death. The exaltation and resurrection experiences of his followers are a product of the narrative, not a cause of it. This is not to deny any creativity on the part of Jesus or his early or later followers, but only to suggest strongly that such creativity is most richly and compellingly read within the Jewish textual and intertextual world, the echo chamber of a Jewish soundscape of the first century.

 

*
Let me make myself clear here: I am not denying the validity of the religious Christian view of matters. That is surely a matter of faith, not scholarship. I am denying it as a historical, scholarly, critical explanation.

Introduction

1
.
Paula Fredriksen, “Mandatory Retirement: Ideas in the Study of Christian Origins Whose Time Has Come to Go,” in
Israel's God and Rebecca's Children: Christology and Community in Early Judaism and Christianity: Essays in Honor of Larry W. Hurtado and Alan F. Segal,
ed. David B. Capes et al. (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007), 25.

2
.
I will be developing this idea further in a forthcoming book, entitled
How the Jews Got Religion
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).

3
.
Shaye J.D. Cohen, “The Significance of Yavneh: Pharisees, Rabbis, and the End of Jewish Sectarianism,”
Hebrew Union College Annual 55
(1984): 27–53.

4
.
For one of the best historical descriptions of this process, see R.P.C. Hanson,
The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318–381 AD
(Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1988).

5
.
Robert L. Wilken,
John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late 4th Century
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

6
.
Jerome,
Correspondence,
ed. Isidorus Hilberg, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vienna: Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996), 55:381–82 (my translation).

7
.
See also Reuven Kimelman, “Birkat Ha-Minim and the Lack of Evidence for an Anti-Christian Jewish Prayer in Late
Antiquity,” in
Aspects of Judaism in the Greco-Roman Period,
vol. 2,
Jewish and Christian Self-Definition,
ed. E.P. Sanders, A.I. Baumgarten, and Alan Mendelson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981), 226–44, 391–403.

8
.
Chana Kronfeld,
On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 28.

9
.
Albert I. Baumgarten, “Literary Evidence for Jewish Christianity in the Galilee,” in
The Galilee in Late Antiquity,
ed. Lee I. Levine (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), 39–50.

10
.
The era of the “Aryan Jesus” is over, thankfully. Susannah Heschel,
The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

11
.
Craig C. Hill, “The Jerusalem Church,” in
Jewish Christianity Reconsidered: Rethinking Ancient Groups and Texts,
ed. Matt Jackson-McCabe (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 50.

1. From Son of God to Son of Man

1
.
Joseph Fitzmyer,
The One Who Is to Come
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 9. I have drawn much on Fitzmyer's exposition for this section.

2
.
To be sure, the person of the king has a sacralized quality, and moreover, as we see in the case of Saul himself, even an ecstatic or prophetic measure. (Is Saul among the prophets?)