A theological earthquake

The wider public has not noticed, but extraordinary things are happening in the worlds of Jewish and Christian theology.

Christian theologians are beginning to recognize that God’s covenant with Jews is ongoing, as Paul taught in Romans 11.28-29, despite almost 1800 years of Christians thinking that God transferred that covenant to the Church after Jesus’ death.

It took the Holocaust to wake Christian theologians up from their dogmatic slumbers—and realize that their “supersessionism” (the notion that the Church superseded Israel so that the latter is no longer important to God) contributed to the long horrific history of Christian persecution of Jews.

Now a Jewish historian is making noises that will eventually turn into a volcanic roar. Daniel Boyarin, Taubman Professor of Talmudic literature at the University of California at Berkeley, is writing books that are overturning nearly everything that Christians and Jews have believed about Jesus and Paul—and each other.

Boyarin’s Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ appeared in 2013, and has created a storm of controversy among both Jewish and Christian scholars. Yet even its critics acknowledge that much or most of what he says is well-attested in ancient sources.

Why the storm? Because it turns upside down what most scholars—and ordinary Jews and Christians—have believed about Jesus for most of the last two thousand years.

These long-held beliefs could be summed up in these four propositions: 1. Jews never expected a messiah who would be divine, and so never a god-man incarnation; this was made up by Christians only after the death of Jesus. 2. Jesus’ disregard for Torah laws about the Sabbath prove that he was starting a new religion at odds with the Judaism in which he was reared;  3. Jesus also rejected kosher laws, and this is seen most clearly in Mark 7 where Mark writes that Jesus “declared all foods clean” (v. 19); 4. Jews never imagined that the messiah would suffer and die, and so the early Christian proclamation that Jesus was crucified was inimical to Jewish expectations.

Boyarin argues that every one of these beliefs about Judaism and Jesus is wrong.

First, he shows that before Jesus’ time many Jews reasoned from Daniel 7 that the “one like a son of man” was a divine messiah because he sat on his own throne and would rule the whole world. “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” (6).

We have evidence from the Similitudes of Enoch and Fourth Ezra that Jews in various circles were expecting a divine messiah “by at least the first century AD and probably earlier” (95).

Second, Jesus’ instructions to his disciples to pluck grain on the Sabbath violated not Torah restrictions but rigorist innovations made by certain (not all) Pharisees. It was “an ancient halakhic principle that the Sabbath may be violated for human welfare,” and later traditions of the Rabbis used arguments similar to those made by Jesus. For example, in the Mekhilta tractate of the Mishna, Rabbi Natan says, “Profane one Sabbath for [the sick person] in order that he may keep many Sabbaths!” (61, 63).

Boyarin says that when Jesus defended his disciples by appealing to the example of David eating the showbread in the house of God, this was “not an attack on the Law or on alleged pharasic legalism but an apocalyptic declaration of a new moment in history in which a new Lord, the Son of Man, has been appointed over the Law” (67). This is what Jews would expect of a redeemer king in the end times—that he would be Lord of the Sabbath, just as Jesus said. Rather than starting a new religion, Jesus’ use of Son of Man language and treatment of the Sabbath to serve human need were “common coin—which . . . does not mean universal or uncontested—of Judaism already before Jesus” (70).

Third, Boyarin argues that Jesus was defending Torah in Mark 7 when he said all foods are clean. “According to the Torah, only that which comes out of the body (fluxes of various types) can contaminate, not foods that go in.” When the Pharisees insisted that food itself contaminates, they were changing the law. They were confusing kosher rules (where some foods are “permitted” and others “not permitted”) with rules for purity and impurity, which were kept separate by Torah. According to Boyarin, Jesus’ dispute here with certain Pharisees had “absolutely nothing to do with abrogating the Law; it is just putting it in its place. The interpretation that Jesus gives is to interpret the deeper meaning of the Torah’s rules, not to set them aside” (124-25).

Finally, Boyarin rejects the commonly held view that the Jewish messiah was never expected to suffer vicariously. “The notion of the humiliated and suffering Messiah was not at all alien within Judaism before Jesus’ advent, and it remained current among Jews well into the future following—indeed, well into the early modern period” (132). Boyarin says that rabbis of the Talmud and midrash taught the vicarious sufferings of the messiah in Isaiah 53.

If Boyarin is correct (and it would be difficult to argue with a scholar thought to be one of the greatest Talmud experts in the world), this has huge importance for both Christian and Jewish theology.

Christians should acknowledge that their Lord is far more Jewish than they imagined, and that their own faith might have to be rethought in significant ways. Jews might need to reconsider their own understanding of the founder of the community that has treated them so poorly for so long.

The earthquake has not happened yet, but these are perhaps the first rumblings.