The Jewish Annotated New Testament (169 page)

Even though the New Testament is frequently critical of the Pharisees, Geiger suggested that Jesus himself was part of the liberalizing Pharisaic movement of his day. In his
Das Judentum und seine Geschicht
(
Judaism and Its History
) he declared in a passage that became notorious among Protestant theologians that Jesus “was a Jew, a Pharisaic Jew with Galilean coloring–a man who shared the hopes of his time and who believed that these hopes were fulfilled in him. He did not utter a new thought, nor did he break down the barriers of nationality. …. He did not abolish any part of Judaism; he was a Pharisee who walked in the way of Hillel.” Geiger argued that Christianity was not founded by Jesus, but by Paul, who brought the Jewish monotheism taught by Jesus to the pagan world. There it became corrupted by pagan thought and led to non-Jewish doctrines such as the Trinity. Geiger suggested that Christians find the actual liberal faith of Jesus—Pharisaic Judaism—in Geiger’s own Reform Judaism.

The next generation of Jewish scholars, including Leo Baeck (1873–1956), Joseph Eschelbacher (1884–1916), and Felix Perles (1874–1933), extended Geiger’s arguments. By the early twentieth century, a cottage industry had developed of Jewish writers who adduced parallels between rabbinic literature and the Gospels. The biblical scholar and Zionist leader Hirsch Perez Chajes wrote in 1919, “You have to be a rabbinical Jew, to know midrash, if you wish to fathom the spirit of Christianity in its earliest years. Above all, you must read the Gospels in the Hebrew translation.” Claude Montefiore (1858–1938), one of the founders of liberal Judaism in Great Britain, saw in Jesus the forerunner of his own liberal attitude to Jewish orthopraxy. The Reform theologian Samuel Cohon (1888–1959) argued in a 1928 article published in the prestigious
Journal of Biblical Literature
that Jesus should be seen as a
Hasid
from the’
amei ha-
’
aretz
, the peoples of the land, rather than as a Pharisee or Essene.

By the twentieth century, most Jewish thinkers followed Geiger in asserting that Jesus said nothing original or unusual. From this there is a short step to Martin Buber’s proclamation (from his 1951
Two Types of Faith
), “From my youth onwards I have found in Jesus my great brother.” Such positive comments about Jesus were not always welcomed in the Jewish community. For example, enormous controversy broke out when the American Reform rabbi Stephen Wise declared in his 1929 autobiography, “Jesus was a Jew, Hebrew of Hebrews. … Jesus did not teach or wish to teach a new religion.”

Jesus also played an important role in Zionist writings. Christian commentators had long argued that Jesus rejected the nationalist confines of Jewishness as well as the strictures of Jewish law. Joseph Klausner (1874–1958), who taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, published in 1922 the first book on Jesus written in modern Hebrew. There, he presented Jesus as a pious Pharisee, a Galilean poet, and a miracle worker with apocalyptic interests. Klausner’s Jesus departed from the boundaries of Jewish nationhood, implying that Jews who reject Zionism end up like Jesus, as Christians. In contrast to Klausner, the liberal theologian and chief rabbi of Stockholm Gottlieb Klein wrote in 1910 that Jesus never abandoned his nationality; in Jesus, “a Jew is speaking, no cult hero, but a Jew with a marked national consciousness.” Other Zionist thinkers also claimed Jesus as a member of a selfconscious Jewish nationality, often as a rebel against religious piety.

Among Jews of Eastern Europe, however, the nuances of Jesus’ Jewishness are more complex. In Sholem Asch’s 1909 Yiddish story, “Jesus climbs down from the cross in St. Peter’s Cathedral to become one of the Jewish martyrs persecuted by the Church. The Virgin Mary joins Mother Rachel in sewing the shrouds.” In a 1920 Yiddish poem, “Golgotha,” printed in the shape of a cross, the major Yiddish and Hebrew poet Uri Zvi Greenberg writes,

You’ve become inanimate, brother Jesus. For two thousand years you’ve been tranquil on the cross. All around you the world expires. Damn it, you’ve forgotten everything. Your petrified brain can’t grasp: a Star of David at your heart, over the star—hands in a priestly blessing … the worship of those millions is a lie … Beit Lehem is a Jewish town! Ben-Yosef is a Jewish son!

It is Jesus on the cross who comes to represent the figure of the Jew in Eastern Europe: “
Mir kumen tsu kholem di yidn vos hengen af tslomin
[I dream of the Jews hanging on crosses],” wrote Greenberg in 1923. Jesus becomes the symbol for catastrophe, for the pogroms, and for the Shoah. Marc Chagall frequently painted crucifixion scenes, and his most famous, the 1938
White Crucifixion
, depicts Jesus wrapped in a tallit (prayer shawl) and nailed to the cross, while around him communist revolutionaries attack, a synagogue burns, Jews flee on foot and by boat, a Torah scroll is in flames, an old Jew weeps, a mother clutches her baby. For Chagall’s painting Jesus’ death not only fails to end suffering, it is responsible for generating it. Chagall’s 1944
The Crucified
depicts a village with fully clothed Jews hanging from a series of crosses. The Holocaust is the Crucifixion, and the Crucifixion is a mass murder.

Elie Wiesel depicts in his memoir
Night
the heartwrenching image of three Jews hanging on the gallows at Auschwitz; the middle victim is a child. An anonymous voice asks a question not from Psalm 22 (see Mt 27.46; Mk 15.34), but “Where is God now?” and the narrator responds, “And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.’” In contrast to Chagall, neither Jesus nor Christianity is the crucifier. In
Night
, the perceived death of God at Auschwitz is expressed in crucifixion imagery.

Other Jews attempted to bring historical precision to studies of Jesus’ crucifixion. Solomon Zeitlin (1886–1976), whose 1967
Rise and Fall of the Judean State
was one of the first modern comprehensive studies of the late Second Temple period, published several articles in the 1940s asking
Who Crucified Jesus
? His answer includes not only Pilate but also the high priests, whom he saw as complicit in Roman rule.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the time of the “new quest” of the historical Jesus, the dominant approach was reconciliatory and optimistic; Jewish writers positively approached Jesus, and they saw in him a Jew who represented much that was good about early Judaism (determined by a selective reading of rabbinic sources). In 1967 Schalom ben Chorin (1913–99) drew upon rabbinic literature, Jewish folk-tradition, and studies of Semitic languages to write
Bruder Jesus—Mensch, Nicht Messias
(
Brother Jesus—Human, not Messiah
). This attempt at building bridges between Jews and Christians presents Jesus as a love-filled proto-rabbi who saw himself as the suffering servant of God (Isa 49–53). Pinchas Lapide (1922–97) argued in his 1970
Der Jude Jesus: Thesen eines Juden: Antworten eines Christen
(
The Jew Jesus: Theses of a Jew: Answers of a Christian
) and in several other publications both that Jesus was Torah-observant and that the Jews did not reject Jesus. He also claimed that Jesus’ resurrection was a physical occurrence, a miracle whose purpose was to bring Gentiles to belief in Israel’s God. David Flusser (1917–2000), professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Hebrew University, took a similarly irenic, fraternal tone. His 1968
Jesus in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten
(
Jesus in Self-Portrayals and Picture-Documents
) depicts Jesus as an observant Jew more concerned with the moral rather than the ritual aspects of the tradition. Instead of associating Jesus with liberal Pharisees, he saw in Jesus Essene connections, including an apocalyptic orientation, a messianic self-identity and a sense of personal call by the Holy Spirit. Samuel Sandmel (1911–79), a Reform rabbi with a PhD in New Testament from Yale, introduced Jesus to Jewish audiences with books such as
We Jews and Jesus
(1965) and
A Jewish Understanding of the New Testament
(1956). Other Jewish scholars of this generation include Hans Joachim Schoeps (1909–80), Yitzhak (Fritz) Baer (1888–1980), Ben-Zion Bokser (1907–84), Haim (Hugo) Mantel (1908–), and Haim Cohen (1911–2002).

The turn to the “Third quest” of the historical Jesus, with its more historical-critical approach to the rabbinic sources and greater attention to other Jewish literature of the late Second Temple period (e.g., the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus and Philo, the Pseudepigrapha, archaeological remains) continued the trend of Jewish scholars finding Jesus within, rather than apart from, his Jewish tradition. In several major studies starting with
Jesus the Jew
(1973), Geza Vermes (1924–) locates Jesus in the context of other Jewish-Galilean charismatic miracle workers, such as
Ḥ
oni the Circle Drawer and
Ḥ
anina ben Dosa, and sees Jesus’ elevation to messianic status as the invention of the Gentile churches and, especially, of Paul of Tarsus. Asking similar questions, Shmuel Safrai (1919–2003) also located Jesus among the Galilean
Hasidim
but saw him as closer to the Pharisees in his legal opinions. Hyam Maccoby (1924–2004) placed Jesus among apocalyptically inclined Jews who were expecting divine intervention to end Roman occupation; among his more controversial theories are the claim that Judas Iscariot is an invention of the church and that the name “Bar-abbas” originally applied to Jesus of Nazareth.

Jacob Neusner (1932–) has written numerous volumes on Second Temple and rabbinic Judaism, but it was his
A Rabbi Talks with Jesus
(1993) that engaged Pope Benedict XVI’s own study of the man from Nazareth. Neusner explains that were he a rabbi listening to Jesus, he would have rejected Jesus’ command to leave his family and become a disciple, rejected Jesus’ focus on himself as opposed to the community, and concluded that instead of following Jesus, he would follow the Torah.

Paula Fredriksen (1951–), in
From Jesus to Christ
(1988) explains the development of images of Jesus in the church. Her
Jesus of Nazareth: King of the Jews
(1999) calls into historical question the famous Gospel scene in which Jesus “cleanses” the Temple. Combining historical-critical analysis with attention to how popular negative stereotypes of Jews and Judaism infect Christian teaching and preaching,
The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus
(2006) by Amy-Jill Levine (1956–) seeks to both locate Jesus within his diverse Jewish context and show how the historical Jesus has benefits for Jewish-Christian dialogue.
The Historical Jesus in Context
(2006), Levine’s collection of studies co-edited with Dale C. Allison Jr. (a Protestant) and John Dominic Crossan (a Roman Catholic) situates Jesus and the Gospel writers in both their Jewish and Roman worlds.

A number of Jewish authors, including Levine, Judith Plaskow, Susannah Heschel, Ross S. Kraemer, Adele Reinhartz, and Pnina Navé Levison, have specifically attended to Jesus’ relations with women and to the erroneous Christian stereotype that sees early Judaism as comparable to the Taliban and Jesus as an early feminist. Today, Israeli scholars such as Eyal Regev, Uriel Rappaport, Joshua Efron, and Israel Knohl are making contributions in archaeologically situating Jesus and using increasingly sophisticated methods of textual analysis to see how he fits into a Jewish context.

PAUL IN JEWISH THOUGHT

Daniel R. Langton

Jewish interest in the apostle Paul is essentially a modern phenomenon. Generally speaking, Jews have regarded the apostle to the Gentiles suspiciously as a kind of self-hating Jew and as the “real” founder of the Christian religion. In particular, he has commonly been held responsible for Christianity’s traditional antagonism toward the Law.

Rabbinic literature never mentions Paul by name, but there are some tantalizing references. For example: “[He who] profanes the Hallowed Things and despises the set feasts and puts his fellow to shame publicly and makes void the covenant of Abraham our father, and discloses meanings in the Law which are not according to the Halakhah” (
Pirkei Avot
3.12); “This man … estranged himself from circumcision and the commandments of the Torah” (
Ruth Rab. Petikha
3); a pupil of Gamaliel who “scoffed” at his master’s teachings and who exhibited “impudence in matters of learning” (
b. Shabb
. 30b). All of these texts postdate 200 CE and, if they refer to Paul, reflect knowledge of Christian teaching rather than independent knowledge of Paul himself.

Nor does Paul feature in medieval Jewish refutations of Christianity, despite his importance for its theology. This might reflect simple ignorance, a deliberate policy to ignore a dangerous opponent, or, more likely, an awareness of the political danger of engaging with such an authoritative Christian figure. Those few authors that do make brief mention tended to be Karaites (Jews who rejected Rabbinic authority and law), or minor figures living in the relative safety of Muslim lands, or converts (e.g., Al-Mukammis, Kirkisani, Hadassi, Ibn Kammuna, Profiat Duran, and Isaac Troki). One exception is a brief, confused reference in the anonymous
Toledot Yeshu
or
Story of Jesus
, a notorious, popular polemic composed sometime in Late Antiquity on the basis of earlier traditions, some of which may go back to the second century CE. (See “Jesus in Medieval Jewish Tradition,” p.
581
). Versions of the
Toledot
dating from the thirteenth-century record that the Jewish sages “desired to separate from Israel those who followed Yeshu as the Messiah, and that they called upon a learned man, Simeon Kepha, for help.” Simeon Kepha is Simon, called Peter, Jesus’ apostle. Claiming to speak on behalf of Yeshu, Simeon Kepha introduced new festivals, and rejected circumcision and the dietary laws. The
Toledot
then confuses Peter and Paul: “All these new ordinances which Simeon Kepha (or Paul, as he was known to the Nazarenes) taught them were really meant to separate these Nazarenes from the people of Israel and to bring the internal strife to an end.”