Raphael 'The Baptism of Constantine'
CHRISTIANITY: A JEWISH PERSPECTIVE
1. INTRODUCTION
A. Introduction
I was born and raised in a neighborhood of Brooklyn, called
Williamsburg, a Jewish Orthodox ghetto primarily populated with
Holocaust survivors. I attended Jewish parochial schools through
Elementary School and High School, then Yeshiva University. To
entertain the notion of entering a Church was considered tautamount to
blasphemy. When I was approximately ten years old our housekeeper
Hadie, a black Protestant died. Her husband was a Protestant Minister;
I recall him always dressed in a dark gray suit with a New York
Times under his arm. They were throughout my childhood the only
Christians I ever remember meeting. My mother announced to my father
that we had to go to Church for the Funeral. My father, a well known
Orthodox Jewish figure retorted said ‘I will not go into a Church’. I
think my father believed he would be strike dead by God if he were to
enter a Church. My mother who had worked full time with my accountant
father retorted ‘she raised our children and we are not going to her
funeral’? They attended the funeral and my mother even allowed me,
their eldest son to accompany them. I learnt a great deal from
this event.
As a graduate student at Oxford University in 1970 I decided to visit
the Anglican Church on Christian Eve. I was amazed how the
services seemed Jewish-like to me. I discovered a class on the Talmud
at Oxford. I naively assumed that the teacher would be a Rabbi; in fact
he was an Anglican Minister. Not only was I amazed - having grown up in
a Jewish ghetto I assumed only Jews learnt the Talmud - I was also
angry. Why was this Gentile cleric reading our books? In 1984, after
visiting Auschwitz I entered an Orthodox Church in Bucharest and was
once again I was struck by the resemblance to a service in a Jewish
Synagogue. At the time my knowledge of Christianity was virtually
nil. The following year I found an ex-Jesuit Priest from
Yale University who agreed to teach me the Christian Bible.
During my period of immersion in the Christian Bible, the world of
Christianity underwent a radical transformation. Pope John XXIII stated
in 1969 that the Jews had not killed Jesus. Even as Papal Nuncio in
Paris Pope John XXIII then Cardinal Rancalli, after viewing photographs
of Jewish corpses from Auschwitz as WWII ended, exclaimed ‘This is the
Body of Christ’. In the early 1980’s Pope John Paul II named the Jews
‘the People of the Covenant’ and visited the Jewish Synagogue in Rome
to meet his ‘elder brothers’ as he called them. The Catholic Church no
longer missionizes Jews and not only because of embarrassment for the
Holocaust, but more importantly the theology has indeed changed.
God had written (at least) two covenants. God had not changed, the
Catholics had. Not all Catholics have yet accepted that transformation
but the establishment certainly has espoused this approach.
Certain enlightened figures within the Catholic world advanced further.
Professor Didier Pollefeyt of The Catholic University of Leuven (the oldest continual Catholic University in the world) stated his view at the Cathedral Notre Dame on October 1996 as follows:
‘The way Jesus will come as the Christ and the Redeemer of the world will depend on the way Christians re-present Him in the present. When Christians are not able to bring His redemption to the world today, especially in relationship with the Jewish people, I'm afraid that at the end of times, they will not meet a triumphalising Messiah, but what I would like to call a `’weeping Messiah', a Messiah weeping for the injuries and the unredeemedness Christians caused, especially to His own people. Then it could end with the fact that indeed not Christians, with their triumphalistic Messianic perceptions, but the Jews will be able to recognize as the first one's the Messiah as the Savior of the World.’
At a pre Christmas service in 2001, Father Dr. Reimund Beiringer, also
of the Catholic University of Leuven, began his sermon with the
following opening remarks: ‘when Jesus comes back he will be
circumcised, he will not be able to eat at my home because it is not
kosher and will look at this church and ask the Rabbi where can he find
a synagogue’. The above remarkable statements confirm that Jesus the
Jew continues to accept the symbol of Jewishness – the circumcision –
by eating kosher he continues to observe Jewish ritual law and by
attending a synagogue he continues his Jewish persona. This embodies
the total antithesis of Rejection theology. Father Reimund personally
asked me to attend this church service and pointed me out as the person
Jesus would ask for a synagogue and at whose home he could eat.
As a result of the concerted effort of many scholars the Vatican stated
(Jan. 17, 2002) that "The Jewish wait for the Messiah is not in vain .
. . The difference consists in the fact that for us, he who will come
will have the same traits of that Jesus who has already come."
(Cardinal Ratzinger, is the Prefect of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith.)
B. Goals of This Book:
In underlying thesis of my fist book ‘Messengers of God: A Theological
and Psychological Perspective’: a commentary of the Hebrew Bible, was
that each messenger of God by dint of his unique nature and nurture
externalized God’s calling in a unique and personal manner.
Much of the Hebrew Bible is composed as if it were autobiographical; Samuel, Jeremiah and Ezekiel appear to written their own stories. Are autobiographies the Truth and nothing but the Truth? An autobiographer chooses selectively what he wishes to record. We have learnt from Freud that what we choose to record may be less important, than what we ‘forgot’. (The author is fully aware of the many conflicts about the authorship of the Bible. My interest is in commenting on the text regardless of the identity of the author – assuming that such could ever be ascertained. In view of the enormous influence of the texts, (both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles) that itself is a worthwhile endeavor. Many scholars indeed do interest themselves with the authorship issue.)
The suffering of both Jeremiah and Job’s seems too truthful not to be true; Is Ezekiel’s story too outrageous to be true or too outrageous not to be true? Would God really ask His prophet Hosea to marry a prostitute and an adulterous woman? Maimonides wrestled with that reality. The subtle negative irony in Samuel’s narrative seems more biographical than autobiographical. Genesis seems written by a narrator-historian with great insight into the characters whom he portrays.
Jeremiah and Ezekiel both were born as Priests and then received God’s
call to be Prophets. Born within a decade of each other shortly before
the destruction of the First Temple. Jeremiah remained in Jerusalem
after the destruction of the Temple. He referred to the destroyer,
Nebuchadnezzar, as an Servant of God and attributed the destruction to
the Jews and specifically the Priests for their own ethical
misbehaviour. Ezekiel several years younger than Jeremiah was exiled to
Babylon; he blamed the Jews for their own ritual misbehaviour and
painted Jewish history in much more bleaker terms that Jeremiah. For
Ezekiel the building of a New Temple with a Davidic Messianic figure (a
‘nasi’) was the only solution. Cultic ritual behaviour required a
Temple. Ezekiel seemed more concerned with his position as a Priest
(which he was born into) than a Prophet (which was his calling from
God). For Jeremiah live as an ethical person even in the exile of
Babylon was superior to living unethically with a Temple in Jerusalem.
Jeremiah suffered greatly as a prophet partially because he rejected
the Priestly position. Can his position be compared to Jesus’?
The Christian Bible is quite different; five major authors write about
Jesus: The authors of the public ministry of Jesus are the three
synoptic authors (Mark, Matthew and Luke) who write from a similar oral
tradition, John emanates from a tradition differs significantly in
important aspects. Paul by means of his epistles and Luke in the Acts
of the Apostles do not comment on the public ministry of Jesus but on
Paul’s own conversion to believing in Jesus and his propagating
such belief among mainly pagans, but also Jews. None of these
authors personally knew Jesus
Very little is known about the lives of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John or
their communities. No consensus exists as to whether were born as Jews
or were Gentiles; it seems unlikely that any of them spoke Aramaic or
Hebrew, the language of Jesus and his direct disciples. Mark, Luke and
John and their communities appear from their writing to be ‘Gentile
identified’ while Matthew appears more ‘Jewish identified’. All,
possibly including Paul, so far as we know read the Bible in its Greek
translation – the Septuagint. Their audiences were primarily Jewish and
non-Jewish Hellenistic speakers. By the time of their writing (70 – 110
CE) the Gospels had already failed to convince the majority of Jews of
Jesus’ Messianic status. The primarily reason for that was that a
Jewish Messiah had to be alive to accomplish his task.
Most of the biographical information about Paul is from his companion Luke. It is Luke and not Paul who tells us the Paul studied under Gamaliel; Paul tells us he was a ‘Hebrew of Hebrews’ (Phil. 3:4) but does not mention Gamaliel. When Paul tells us of his life as a persecutor (Gal. 1:13-14) he does not mention Jerusalem as we would expect. Luke tells us he went to Jerusalem immediately after his conversion-call. Paul tells us he went from Damascus to Arabia for several years, back to Damascus and then to Jerusalem. When Paul tells of the meeting in Jerusalem with James and Peter in the Letter to the Galatians it is a different story than Luke tells in chapter 15 of Acts of the Apostle.
No common theology is shared by the five authors; neither had Jewish
theology attained a level of unification.
Jesus is quoted by each of these authors’ there ‘reportings’ of
Jesus seem to contradict each other. Mathew has Jesus say:
‘Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I
have come not to abolish but to complete them’ (Matt. 5:17). James, the
brother of Jesus and apparently the head of the believers in Jesus
believed in a continuation of Jewish law (Acts 21:20-26). Paul rejects
the Torah law and contrasts it with ‘Christ’s Law’ seemingly based on
faith (1 Cor. 9:20-21) while John presents Jesus as having rejected his
own people and culture the Jews and he replaced it with Christology.
Can we truly know what Jesus really said? 1
Can we know who Jesus was – to himself, to others in his lifetime and in the century after his death?
How do twenty first century readers see Jesus?
The author believes Jesus emanated from the variegated streams of
Jewish tradition. Even his death was based on a particular stream
of Jewish thought. The Gospel of John reasons for Jesus’ death is
significantly different than the synoptic Gospels. It is not Jesus’
Law-free Gospel, nor his threat to the biblically mandated sacrifices
as a means of repentance but as the High Priest stated ‘if we let him
go on thus, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and
destroy both our holy place and our nation. . . it is expedient
for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole
nation should not perish.’(Jn. 11:48,50). Jesus’ death is
described by Caiaphas as the death of a martyr; his death will save the
nation! Given the Romans actions toward would be rebels and
insurrection and ‘King of the Jews’ Caiaphas is of course correct.
Forty years late this is precisely what happened. Jesus’ prediction of
his death by the Romans for insurrection, was an accurate anticipation
of exactly what would happen. He understood how the Romans would
misconstrue the concept of his ‘Kingdom of God’. Any apocalyptic
preacher by definition makes both religious and political statements.
The Romans were understandably hostile to all charismatics preaching a
‘Kingdom of God’. They could only see it as another earthly kingdom in
opposition to the Roman Empire. As Fredriksen notes ‘crucifixion [for
these men] would be a prudent Roman response’ given their zero
tolerance policy for what they perceived as sedition. 2
Paul’s theology likewise stems from Jewish tradition, but included more of the Hellenistic tradition. Jesus and Paul may have both been influenced by the Dead Sea Scroll community. Jesus related to his own Jewish compatriots and taught them his personal form of love, piety and of the Kingdom of God. Paul and the Gospel writers came to teach Gentiles their version of the Jewish traditions. Gentiles however were in need of a different identity than Jews and thus the ‘Parting of the Ways’ was inevitable.
The other major stream in Christian thought comes from the Gospel of
John. This gospel differs radically from than the synoptic gospels. In
Christological terms it is closer to the theology of Paul. Both
emphasize not the Jesus historic Jesus but his death. In the Pauline
letters the historic Jesus is never referrerd to. In the gospel of John
David Granskou has pointed out that in nineteen of the twenty-one
chapters of the gospel of John Jesus’ death is mentioned (only 4 and 9
are excluded). 3 John rejects the God of Israel for his own theology of
the god-ship of Jesus. Francis Watson suggests that both Paul and John
(as well as Qumran) create ‘an ideology legitimating its separation
from [the Jewish] society’. 4
C. Jewish and Christian Attitudes Toward Each Other
What began within decades of the death of Jesus the Jew was the
‘teaching of contempt’ and it continued for almost two millennium and
culminated in the Shoah. John XXIII and Vatican II marked a remarkable
reconciliation in Christian theology. John Paul II made this a sea
change by becoming the first Bishop of Rome to visit a Synagogue. He
established diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the State of
Israel, and emphatically denounced anti-Semitism.
Moreover the Vatican’s recent statement ‘We Remember’ speaks of the Shoah (in Hebrew) as an ‘unspeakable tragedy’ and one that ‘can never be forgotten’. It refers to the ‘very close bonds of spiritual kinship with the Jewish people’ and to the ‘remembrance of the injustices of the past.’
Jewish history changed radically as a result of the Shoah and the establishment of the State of Israel. It however is not yet clear how Jewish theology will adjust to these historical changes.
Many Jews have modified their views of Christianity as a result of the Christian reaction to the Shoah. This is a reaction to Christian Tshuva – repentance. Many Jews particularly descendants of the Shoah and of Eastern European Jewry, have difficulty in accepting this Tshuva or act of forgiving. Whether accepting Tshuva requires forgiveness is a complicated philosophical and theological issue.
What is less known to Jews and Christians is that many important Jewish
figures were never anti-Christian although they fought against
anti-Semitism.
Maimonides, the great Jewish Halakhic master and thinker stated ‘They
[Christians] will not find in their Torah [the Christian Bible]
anything that conflicts with our Torah.’ 5 He encouraged dialogue with
Christians as well as with Muslims. The school of Tosafists (12th and
13th century Talmudic commentators) and specifically Rabbi Jacob Tam
(grandson of Rashi, the most well noted commentator in the middle ages)
ruled that the concept of the Trinity was not idolatrous if practiced
by Christians but would be considered as such if practiced by Jews. 6
Rabbi Jacob Tam (Rabbenu Tam) also stated that Peter was a devout Jew
who wrote the famous prayer recited on Shabbat and festivals ‘Nishmat’.
7 An 18th century Jewish Talmudist commentator Rabbi Jacob Emden
(1697-1776) stated ‘that Jesus never intended to abolish Judaism, but
only to establish a new religion for the Gentiles based on
the Noahide commandments’. 8 He further elaborated that ‘their
[Christianity and Islam] are for the sake of Heaven, to make Godliness
known amongst the nations, to speak of Him in distant places; they have
accepted virtually all of the Noahide Commandments’. 9 A 19th century
Orthodox commentator Rabbi Samuel Hirsch noted ‘In order that Jesus’
power of hope and greatness of soul should not end with his death, God
has raised in the group of his disciples the idea that he rose from
death and continues to live. He continues living in all those who want
to be true Jews’. 10
Despite these important mainstream figures these concepts have never
been integrated into mainstream Jewish attitudes toward toward
Christianity.
D. Conclusions
Jesus belonged to a Jewish culture; Christians do not; how did that
happen? That Christian identity can be defined as follows:
Jesus is ‘begotten from the father . . . from the virgin Mary mother of God with respect to his humanity: one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, made known in two natures , . . one and the same Son and only begotten God, Word, Lord, Jesus Christ . . . and Jesus Christ himself instructed us concerning him’ (Faith of the Christian Church defined at the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE). This statement of faith is quite remote from that of Jesus the Jew of Nazareth. That Jesus saw himself as special a sexalted as Enoch, Moses or Elijah is almost certainly true as did later Jews the Ari (Isaac Luria and the Ball Shem Tov) but it is doubtful he did not consider Joseph as his biological father. (Whose DNA was his?)
Jesus was born, lived and died as an observant Jew. His manner of death
- crucifixion - was common amongst the Jewish people occupied by the
Roman Empire. Pontus Pilate as Josephus tells us was a particularly
cruel Governor.
Christianity did not result from Jesus’ crucifying death.
Christianity began with the visions of his resurrection by several
people, particularly Paul who was told in his vision to be the Apostle
to the Gentiles. Paul made two important changes from the Jewish
disciples of Jesus: One he added to the ‘Jesus movement’ Gentiles who
within a century became the majority in this movement. Second he began
the change from Jesus, the Jew from Nazareth to the ‘proclaimed Christ
Jesus’, Messenger of God.
Later the Evangelist John writing a half of a century after Paul
proclaimed him the ‘supercelestial’ Incarnate God. The historical Jesus
could never have understood John’s theology.
This gospel made Jesus equal to God. ‘I and the Father are one’ (Jn.
10:30). In this Gospel ‘the deity and incarnation of Jesus are
unequivocally proclaimed’. 11 For John the Gentile followers of Jesus
were clearly superior to the Jews. ‘You [the Jews] are from your father
the devil, and you prefer to do what your father wants’ (Jn. 8:44).
Instead of the cruel Pontius Pilate crucifying Jesus Pilate is depicted
as an aggrieved bystander. The Jews who several times threatened Jesus
according to this Gospel finally committed deicide. P.M. Casey has
written that the author of the Gospel of John created a ‘misleading
picture of Jesus’. . . . It makes him divine and infallible and has him
condemn the Jews, to whom the historical Jesus preached, and from whom
he selected his disciples, Apostles and his supporters. We cannot
reasonable believe in all the results of that developmental process.’
12 This would have been inconceivable to the historic Jesus and to the
synoptic authors.
1 Funk, R.W., Hoover, R.W. eds., The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus, Translated and Commentary (Macmillan, N.Y., 1993).
2 Fredriksen, Paula, From Jesus To Christ, (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1988) pg. 125.
3 Richardson, Peter, and Granskou, David, Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity, (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1986) pg. 209-211.
4 Watson, Francis, Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986) pg. 40-48.
5 Quoted in Harvey Falk, Jesus The Pharisee, (Paulist Press, N.Y., 1985) pg. 4.
6 Falk, pg. 34.
7 Falk, pg. 34.
8 Falk, pg. 4.
9 Falk, pg. 15.
10 Lapide, Pinchas, The Resurrection of Jesus, (SPCK, London, 1983) pg. 137.
11 Casey, P.M., From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God, (James Clarke, Cambridge, 1991) .pg. 23.
12 Casey, pg. 178.