The Case for God (16 page)

The rabbis continued to use terms such as the Glory
(kavod)
, Shekhinah, and Spirit
(ruach
) to distinguish their inherently limited, earthly experience of God from the ineffable reality itself. Their new spiritual exercises made the divine a vibrant and immanent presence. Exegesis would do for them what yoga did for Buddhists and Hindus. The truth they sought was not abstract or theoretical but derived from the practice of spiritual exercises. To put themselves into a different state of consciousness, they would fast before they approached the sacred text, lay their heads between their knees, and whisper God’s praises like a mantra. They found that when two or three of them studied the Torah together, they became aware of the Shekhinah in their midst.
¹²
One day, when Rabbi Yohanan was studying the Torah with his pupils, the Holy Spirit seemed to descend upon them in the form of fire and a rushing wind.
¹³
On another occasion, Rabbi Akiva heard that his student Ben Azzai was expounding the Torah surrounded by a nimbus of flashing fire. He hurried off to investigate. Was Ben Azzai attempting a dangerous mystical flight to the throne of God? “No,” Ben Azzai replied. “I was only linking up the words of
the Torah with one another, and then with the words of the prophets and the prophets with the Writings, and the words rejoiced, as when they were delivered from Sinai, and they were sweet as at their original utterance.”
¹⁴
As Ezra had indicated so long ago, scripture was not a closed book and revelation was not a distant historical event. It was renewed every time a Jew confronted the text, opened himself to it, and applied it to his own situation. The rabbis called scripture
miqra:
it was a “summons to action.” No exegesis was complete until the interpreter had found a practical new ruling that would answer the immediate needs of his community. This dynamic vision could set the world aflame.

Anybody who imagines that revealed religion requires a craven clinging to a fixed, unalterable, and self-evident truth should read the rabbis. Midrash required them to “investigate” and “go in search” of fresh insight. The rabbis used the old scriptures not to retreat into the past but to propel them into the uncertainties of the post-temple world. Like the Hellenistic philosophers, Jews had started to build an intellectual “bricolage,” creatively reinterpreting the available authoritative texts to carry the tradition forward. But already they had moved instinctively toward some of the great principles that had inspired the other major traditions to find a transcendent meaning amid life’s tragedy. They too now stressed the centrality of compassion and were developing a more interior spirituality.

But during the Second Temple period, midrash had been a minority pursuit. It would take the rabbis about twenty years to make any serious impact on the wider Jewish community. It was not easy to make textual study attractive to the masses. How could it possibly compete with the dramatic temple rituals? By the late 80s and 90s, as we shall see later in this chapter, the hard work of the rabbis and their colleagues at Yavneh finally paid off, but in the first years after the disaster, another Jewish sect seemed to be making more headway.

The Christians got organized more quickly. The first of the four canonical gospels was written either shortly before or immediately after the destruction. We know very little about the historical Jesus, since all our information comes from the texts of the New Testament, which were not primarily concerned with factual accuracy. He seems
to have been a charismatic healer and a man of
ahimsa
who told his followers to love their enemies.
¹⁵
Like other prophets at this time, he preached the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God, a new world order in which the mighty would be cast down and the lowly exalted, the righteous dead would rise from their tombs, and the whole world would worship the God of Israel.

Jesus does not seem to have attracted a large following during his lifetime. But that changed in about 30 CE when—for reasons that are not entirely clear—he was crucified by the Romans. His disciples had visions that convinced them that he had been raised by God from the dead in advance of the Last Days; he was the
messhiach
(Greek:
christos)
, the “anointed one” who would soon return in glory to establish the Kingdom.
¹⁶
The first Christians prepared for this great event by living a dedicated Jewish life, holding all property in common, and giving generously to the poor.
¹⁷
They had no intention of founding a new religion but observed the Torah, worshipped in the temple, and kept the dietary laws.
¹⁸
Like the Pharisees, they regarded the Golden Rule as central to Judaism.
¹⁹
They continued to think about God in the traditional Jewish way and, like the rabbis, experienced the Holy Spirit, the immanent presence of God, as a tangible, empowering, and electrifying force.
²⁰
Christian missionaries preached the “gospel” or “good news” in such marginal regions of Palestine as Samaria and Gaza, and established congregations in the Diaspora to ensure that all Jews, even “sinners,” were prepared for the Kingdom.
²¹
They also took the highly unusual step of admitting non-Jews into their community. Some of the prophets had predicted that in the Last Days the foreign nations would share Israel’s triumph and would voluntarily throw away their idols.
²²
When the Christians discovered that they were attracting gentile converts, many of them already sympathetic to Judaism, this confirmed them in their belief that the old order was indeed passing away.
²³

One of the most forceful champions of this view was Paul, a Greek-speaking Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia, who joined the Christian movement some three years after Jesus’s death. Paul’s letters to his converts, written during the 50s and 60s, are the earliest extant Christian writings and show that the Christians had already started to engage in a radically inventive exegesis of the Torah and the Prophets to demonstrate that Jesus was the culmination of Jewish history. Paul
was convinced that his mixed congregations of Jews and gentiles were the first fruits of the new Israel. These were astonishing claims. There was nothing in the scriptures to suggest that a future redeemer would be crucified and rise from the dead, and many found the idea utterly scandalous.
²⁴
After the disaster of 70, Christians saw the destruction of the temple as an
apokalypsis
, a “revelation” of a terrifying truth. The old Israel was dead. The catastrophe had been predicted by Daniel,
²⁵
and the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah had criticized the cult and insisted that God wanted the temple to be a house of prayer for all peoples.
²⁶
Now in the new Israel Jews must encounter the Shekhinah, the divine presence formerly enshrined in the Holy of Holies, in the person of Jesus, the
christos.
²⁷

The twenty-seven books of the New Testament, completed by the middle of the second century, represented a heroic effort to rebuild a shattered tradition. Like the rabbis, the Christians used midrashic techniques to enable Jews to move forward.
²⁸
The authors of the four gospels later attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were Jewish Christians who wrote in Greek, read the Bible in its Greek translation, and lived in the Hellenistic cities of the Near East.
²⁹
Mark was written in about 70; Matthew and Luke in the 80s; and John in the late 90s. The gospels were not biographies in our sense but should, rather, be seen as commentaries on the Hebrew Bible. Like Paul, the evangelists searched the scriptures to find any mention of a
christos—
be it a king, prophet, or priest—who had been “anointed” in the past by God for a special mission and was now seen to be a coded prediction of Jesus. They believed that Jesus’s life and death had been foretold in the four servant songs, and some even thought that he was the Word and Wisdom of God, who had descended to earth in human form.

This was not simply a clever exercise in public relations. Jews had long realized that all religious discourse was basically interpretive. They had always looked for new meaning in the ancient texts during a crisis, and the basic methodology of Christian
pesher
(“deciphering”) exegesis, which had also been practiced by the Qumran sectarians, was not unlike Greek “bricolage” or rabbinical midrash. Above all, it was a spiritual exercise. Luke has shown the way it may have worked in his story of a numinous encounter on the road to Emmaus.
³⁰
Three days after Jesus’s crucifixion, two of his disciples had been walking
sadly from Jerusalem to the nearby village of Emmaus and had fallen in with a stranger who asked them why they were so despondent. They explained what had happened to Jesus, the man they thought had been the messiah. The stranger gently rebuked them: Did they not realize that the scriptures had foretold that the
christos
would suffer before attaining his glory? Starting with Moses, he began to expound “the full message” of the prophets, and later the disciples recalled how their hearts had “burned” within them when he had “opened” the scriptures to them in this way. When they arrived at their destination, they begged the stranger to dine with them, and it was only when he blessed the bread that they realized it was Jesus himself, but that their “eyes had been held” from recognizing him.

Like the rabbis, the Christians gathered “in twos and threes” to decipher the old texts. As they conversed together, the scriptures would “open” and bring them fresh insight. This illumination might last only a moment—just as Jesus had vanished as soon as the disciples had recognized him—but the act of bringing hitherto unconnected texts together to form an unexpected harmony gave them intimations of the
coincidentia oppositorum
that had characterized the temple experience. Apparent contradictions locked together in the luminous “wholeness” of
shalom
. The stranger had a crucial role. In Luke’s congregation Jews and gentiles were discovering that, like Abraham at Mamre, when they reached out to the “other,” they experienced the divine. The story also shows how the early Christians understood Jesus’s resurrection. They did not have a simplistic notion of his corpse walking out of the tomb. Henceforth, as Paul had made clear, they would no longer know Jesus “in the flesh” but would find him in one another, in scripture, and in the ritual meals they ate together.

Jesus was acquiring mythical and symbolic status, but like any
mythos
, this would make no sense unless it was put into practice. In his letter to his converts in Philippi in Asia Minor, Paul quoted a hymn already well-known to the Christian communities, which shows that from this very early date (c. 54–57) Christians saw Jesus’s life as a
kenosis
, a humble “self-emptying.”
³¹
Although, like all human beings, Jesus was the image of God, he did not cling to this high dignity,

Because of this humiliating descent, God had raised him high and given him the supreme title
kyrios
(“lord”), “to the glory of God the Father.” This text is often quoted to show that Christians saw Jesus as the incarnate son of God from the very beginning, but Paul was not giving the Philippians a lesson in Christian doctrine. He had introduced the hymn to them with a moral instruction: “In your minds, you must be the same as Christ Jesus.”

Unless they imitated Jesus’s
kenosis
in the smallest details of their own lives, they would not understand the
mythos
of the lord Jesus. Like all great religious teaching, Christian doctrine would always be a
miqra
that would make sense only when translated into a ritual, meditative, or ethical program.

When he gave Jesus the title “lord,” Paul did not mean that he was God. The careful wording of the hymn made it clear that there was a distinction between the
kyrios
and God. Even though Paul and the evangelists all called Jesus the “son of God,” they were not making divine claims for him. They would have been quite shocked by this idea. For Jews, a “son of God” was a perfectly normal human being who had been raised to special intimacy with God and had been given a divine mandate. Prophets, kings, and priests had all been called “sons of God;” indeed, the scriptures saw all Israelites as the “sons of God” in this sense.
³³
In the gospels, Jesus called God his “father,” but he made it clear that God was the father of his disciples too.
³⁴

Today it is often assumed that when they told the story of Jesus’s virgin birth, the evangelists alleged that he was somehow impregnated by God in the womb of his mother and was a “son of God” in the same way as Dionysus, who was the son of Zeus by an earthly woman. But no Jewish reader would have understood the story in this way. There are a number of unusual conceptions in the Hebrew Bible: Isaac, for example, was born when his mother was ninety years old. A tale of this kind is regularly attached to an exceptional human being to show that the child had been marked out for greatness from
the first instant of his life. The virgin birth is found only in Matthew and Luke—the other New Testament writers do not appear to have heard of it—but both trace Jesus’s lineage through Joseph, his natural father, in the normal way; Mark takes it for granted that Joseph was Jesus’s father and that he had brothers and sisters who were well known to the earliest Christian communities;
³⁵
like the other evangelists, he sees Jesus primarily as a prophet.
³⁶
Skeptics point derisively to the obvious discrepancies in the infancy narratives, but these were not supposed to be factual, and the final redactors felt no qualms about including such contradictory accounts. These stories are exercises in creative midrash, their object being to show that Jesus’s coming was foretold in the Hebrew scriptures. Placed at the beginning of these two gospels, they give the reader a foretaste of how each evangelist understood Jesus’s mission. Like the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament records a wide range of views rather than a single orthodox teaching. Matthew was anxious to show that Jesus was the
christos
of the gentiles as well as the Jews, so he has the Magi come from the Far East to worship at the crib. Luke, on the other hand, always stressed Jesus’s mission to the poor and marginalized, so in his gospel a group of shepherds are the first to hear the “good news” of his birth.