The Jewish Gospels (3 page)

The Temple in Jerusalem was one of the most impressive cultic centers of the ancient world and famous throughout the known world for its splendor and magnificence. As opposed to most other peoples, who had many cultic centers, the Israelites performed all of their sacrifices at one place, the Temple in Jerusalem, for centuries—from
Josiah's reform in the seventh century
B.C.
until the Second Temple was destroyed in
A.D.
70—(at least officially). When the Temple was extant, most Jews organized their religious lives around its festivals and rites, its priests and practices; distant Jews in Alexandria and similar places sent in donations. At least in principle, all Israelites were expected to make a pilgrimage to the one Temple in Jerusalem three times a year to celebrate the great festivals. This provided an organizing and joining principle for all the people transcending many disagreements and diversities. Even this, however, was not always the case, as there were groups, such as the people of the Dead Sea Scrolls, who rejected the Jerusalem Temple as corrupt.

Once the Temple was destroyed in
A.D.
70, however, all bets were off. Some Jews wished to continue sacrifices as best they could, while others rejected such practices entirely. Some Jews thought that the purity practices that were important in Temple times were still to be practiced, while others thought they were irrelevant. There were, moreover, different interpretations of the Torah, different sets of ideas about God, different notions of how to practice the Law. In Jerusalem, which had been refounded by priests and teachers (scribes) returned from the Babylonian Exile (538
B.C.
), new religious ideas and practices had been developed, many of them adopted by a group called the Pharisees, who were apparently rather aggressively promoting these ideas among Jews outside of Jerusalem who
had different traditional practices, the so-called People of the Land, those who had not gone into Exile in Babylonia.

So being religiously Jewish then was a much more complicated affair than it is even now. There were no Rabbis yet, and even the priests in Jerusalem and around the countryside were divided among themselves. Not only that, but there were many Jews both in Palestine and outside of it, in places such as Alexandria in Egypt, who had very different ideas about what being a good, devout Jew meant. Some believed that in order to be a kosher Jew you had to believe in a single divine figure and any other belief was simply idol worship. Others believed that God had a divine deputy or emissary or even son, exalted above all the angels, who functioned as an intermediary between God and the world in creation, revelation, and redemption. Many Jews believed that redemption was going to be effected by a human being, an actual hidden scion of the house of David—an Anastasia—who at a certain point would take up the scepter and the sword, defeat Israel's enemies, and return her to her former glory. Others believed that the redemption was going to be effected by that same second divine figure mentioned above and not a human being at all. And still others believed that these two were one and the same, that the Messiah of David would be the divine Redeemer. As I said, a complicated affair.

While by now almost everyone, Christian and non-Christian, is happy enough to refer to Jesus, the human, as
a Jew, I want to go a step beyond that. I wish us to see that Christ too—the divine Messiah—is a Jew. Christology, or the early ideas about Christ, is also a Jewish discourse and not—until much later—an anti-Jewish discourse at all. Many Israelites at the time of Jesus were expecting a Messiah who would be divine and come to earth in the form of a human. Thus the basic underlying thoughts from which both the Trinity and the incarnation grew are there in the very world into which Jesus was born and in which he was first written about in the Gospels of Mark and John.

You may well wonder why these distinctions—drawn from a very distant past—should matter to anyone in the present day. One difference that I expect this discussion to make is that Jews and Christians will need to begin to tell different stories about each other in the future. On one hand, Christians will no longer be able to claim that Jews willfully, as a body, rejected Jesus as God. Such beliefs about Jews have led to a deep, painful, and bloody history of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. Many ancient Jews simply accepted Jesus as God, and they did so because their beliefs and expectations had led them there. Others, while holding similar ideas about God, found it hard to believe that this particular, seemingly undistinguished, Jew was the one they were waiting for.

On the other hand, Jews will have to stop vilifying Christian ideas about God as simply a collection of “un-Jewish,” perhaps pagan, and in any case bizarre fantasies.
God in a human body indeed! Recognizing these ideas as deeply rooted in the ancient complex of Jewish religious ideas may not lead us Jews to accept them but should certainly help us realize that Christian ideas are not alien to us; they are our own offspring and sometimes, perhaps, among the most ancient of all Israelite-Jewish ideas. On the other hand, certain kinds of modern “liberal” Christian apologists, such as Philip Pullman (the author of
His Dark Materials
), will have to stop separating out a “good Jesus” from a “bad Christ.” I suggest that Jesus and Christ were one from the very beginning of the Jesus movement. It won't be possible any longer to think of some ethical religious teacher who was later promoted to divinity under the influence of alien Greek notions, with his so-called original message being distorted and lost; the idea of Jesus as divine-human Messiah goes back to the very beginning of the Christian movement, to Jesus himself, and even before that.

Checklists and Families:
Christian and Non-Christian Jews

The terms “Christian Jews” and “non-Christian Jews” that I distinguish throughout this book might be surprising to people who think of Christians and Jews as opposites. But if we look closely at the first few centuries after Christ, we begin to see that this is precisely the way we ought to view the history of the religion of the Jews at that time. Before
we get there, however, it may be helpful to challenge some of our closely held assumptions about what religions are.

For moderns, religions are fixed sets of convictions with well-defined boundaries. We usually ask ourselves: What convictions does Christianity forbid or what practices does it require? We ask similar questions in regard to Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism, the so-called great religions of the world. Such an understanding, of course, makes nonsense of the idea that one could be both a Jew and a Christian, rendering it just a contradiction in terms. Jews don't fit the definition of Christians, and Christians don't fit the definition of Jews. There are simple incompatibilities between these two religions that make it impossible to be both. I will argue in this book that this conception just doesn't always fit the facts, and specifically that it doesn't represent well the situation of Judaism and Christianity in the early centuries at all.

We usually define members of religions by using a kind of checklist. For instance, one could say that if someone believes in the Trinity and incarnation, she is a member of the religion Christianity, but if she doesn't, she isn't a proper member of that religion. One could say, conversely, that if someone does not believe in the Trinity and incarnation, then he is a member of the religion Judaism, but if he does believe in those things, he isn't. One could also say that if someone keeps the Sabbath on Saturday, eats only kosher food, and circumcises her sons, she is a member of
the Jewish religion, but if she doesn't, she is not a member of the Jewish religion. Or, conversely again, if some group believes that everyone should keep the Sabbath, eat only kosher food, and circumcise sons, they are not Christians, but if they believe that these practices have been superseded, then they are Christians. This is, as I have said, our usual way of looking at such matters.

However, this manner of categorizing people's religions runs into difficulties. First, someone has to be making the checklists. Who decides what specific beliefs disqualify a person from being a Jew? Throughout history these decisions have been made by certain groups of people or individuals and are then imposed on other people (who may, however, refuse—unless the deciders have an army). It's a little bit like those “race” checklists on the census forms. Some of us simply refuse to check a box that defines us as Caucasian or Hispanic or African American because we don't identify that way, and only laws, and courts, or an army could force us to if they chose to. Of course, it will be asserted that the decisions about Jews and Christians (not Americans) were made by God and revealed in this Scripture or that, by this prophet or that, but this is a matter of faith, not of scholarship. Neither faith nor theology should play a role in the attempt to describe what was, as opposed to what ought to have been (according to this religious authority or another).

Another big problem these checklists cannot address
has to do with people whose beliefs and behaviors are a blend of characteristics from the two lists. In the case of Jews and Christians, this has been a problem that simply won't go away. For centuries after Jesus' death, there were people who believed in Jesus' divinity as the incarnate Messiah but who also insisted that in order to be saved they must eat only kosher, keep the Sabbath as other Jews do, and circumcise their sons. Here was an environment where many people, it would seem, thought that there was no problem in being both a Jew and a Christian. Moreover, many of the very items that would form the eventual checklist for being a Jew or being a Christian did not at all form a border line at that time. What shall we do with these folks?

For quite a number of generations after the coming of Christ, different followers and groups of followers of Jesus held many different theological views and engaged in a great variety of practices with respect to the Jewish law of their ancestors. One of the most important arguments had to do with the relation between the two entities who would end up being the first two persons of the Trinity. Many Christians believed that the Son or the Word (Logos) was subordinate to God the Father and even created by him; others believed that while the Son was uncreated and had existed from before the beginning of time, he nonetheless was only of a
similar
substance to the Father; a third group believed that there was no difference at all
in substance between the Father and the Son. There were also very sharp differences in practice between Christian and Christian: some Christians kept much of the Jewish law (or all of it), some kept some rules but dropped others (e.g., the apostolic rule of Acts), and still others believed that the entire law needed to be overturned and discarded by Christians (even those born Jews). Finally, there were Christians who held that Easter was a form of the Jewish Passover, suitably interpreted with Jesus as the Lamb of God and paschal sacrifice, while others vigorously denied such connections. These had an analogue in practice as well, with the former group celebrating Easter at the same time as the Jews celebrated Passover, while the latter just as vigorously insisted that Easter must
not
be when the Jews hold their Passover. There were many other points of conflict as well. Until early in the fourth century, all of these different groups and diverse individuals called themselves Christians, and quite a few called themselves both Jews and Christians as well.

Checklists and the Imperial Religion

The checklist approach to making an absolute divide between Christian and non-Christian, between Jew and non-Jew, came into its own under the Christian Roman Empire, which set much store in getting all the messiness sorted out.

For many years it was believed that an early period of fluidity came to an end in a definitive “parting of the ways” that took place in either the first or second century. The argument was twofold. On one hand, the Temple had been such a unifying force that other forms of diversity were much more tolerable without threatening the core of Jewish identity. Following the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans in
A.D.
70, other ways had to be produced to secure such identity, hence the invention of a Jewish orthodoxy that excluded followers of Jesus. On the other hand, we are told that it was the divergence of Christianity from that core that drove an early parting of the ways. I contend that such diversity did not end with the destruction of the Temple and continued well beyond this event. Many have thought until recently (and some still do) that it ended with the Council of Yavneh, which allegedly took place in
A.D.
90 or so.
³
According to a certain interpretation of a talmudic legend, this was a great Jewish ecumenical council (something like the great Christian ecumenical councils of the fourth and fifth centuries) in which all sectarian differences were abolished: all Jews agreed to follow the pharisaic-rabbinic tradition, and those who didn't were expelled and left the Jewish polity. But this view has largely been discredited by recent scholarship. It was invented by scholars more or less on the model of the great late-ancient Christian councils during which Christian orthodoxy was promulgated, especially
the famous Council of Nicaea and its successor the Council of Constantinople.

In 381 at Constantinople the definitive step in cleaning up the differences based on a half century of negotiations following the Council of Nicaea was taken.
⁴
In 318 the newly Christian emperor Constantine had called an ecumenical council of bishops from all over the Christian world to come to Nicaea (present-day Ä°znik in Turkey) to sort all of this out and restore peace to the Christian churches and communities, following a great deal of dissension, conflict, and bitterness between them.