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FAITH MEETS FAITH SERIES

Bursting the Bonds?

A Jewish-Christian Dialogue

on Jesus and Paul

Leonard Swidler

Lewis John Eron

Gerard Sloyan

Lester Dean

ORBIS BOOKS

Maryknoll, New York 10545

The Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America (Maryknoll) recruits and trains people for overseas missionary service. Through Orbis Books, Maryknoll aims to foster the international dialogue that is essential to mission. The books published, however, reflect the opinions of their authors and are not meant to represent the official position of the society.

Published by Orbis Books, Maryknoll, N.Y. 10545

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bursting the bonds?: a Jewish-Christian dialogue on Jesus and Paul /

by Leonard Swidler ... [et al.].

p. cm.-(Faith meets faith series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-88344-713-4 -ISBN 0-88344-712-6 (pbk.)

1. Jesus Christ-Jewish interpretations. 2. Paul, the Apostle,

Saint-Views on Judaism. 3. Judaism -Relations -Christianity.

4. Christianity and other religions -Judaism. 1. Dean, Lester.

II. Series: Faith meets faith.

BM620.B87

1990

232-dc20

90-39046

CIP

FAITH MEETS FAITH

An Orbis Series in Interreligious Dialogue

Paul F. Knitter, General Editor

In our contemporary world, the many religions and spiritualities stand in need of greater intercommunication and cooperation. More than ever before, they must speak to, learn from, and work with each other, in order to maintain their own identity and vitality and so to contribute to fashioning a better world.

FAITH MEETS FAITH seeks to promote interreligious dialogue by providing an open forum for the exchanges between and among followers of different religious paths. While the series wants to encourage creative and bold responses to the new questions of pluralism confronting religious persons today, it also recognizes the present plurality of perspectives concerning the methods and content of interreligious dialogue.

This series, therefore, does not want to endorse any one school of thought. By making available to both the scholarly community and the general public works that represent a variety of religious and methodological viewpoints, FAITH MEETS FAITH hopes to foster and focus the emerging encounter among the religions of the world.

Already published:

Toward a Universal Theology of Religion, Leonard Swidler, Editor

The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, John Hick and Paul F. Knitter, Editors

An Asian Theology of Liberation, Aloysius Pieris, S.J.

The Dialogical Imperative, David Lochhead

Love Meets Wisdom, Aloysius Pieris, S.J.

Many Paths, Eugene Hillman

The Silence of God, Raimundo, Panikkar

The Challenge of the Scriptures, Groupe de Recherches Islamo-Chrétien

The Meaning of Christ, John P. Keenan

Hindu-Christian Dialogue, Harold Coward, Editor

Christianity through Non-Christian Eyes, Paul J. Griffiths

The Emptying God, John B. Cobb, Jr., and Christopher Ives, Editors

Women Speaking, Women Listening, Maura O'Neill

Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered, Gavin D'Costa

FAITH MEETS FAITH

An Orbis Series in Interreligious Dialogue

Paul F. Knitter, General Editor

Already published:

Toward a Universal Theology of Religion, Leonard Swidler, Editor

The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, John Hick and Paul F. Knitter, Editors

An Asian Theology of Liberation, Aloysius Pieris, S.J.

The Dialogical Imperative, David Lochhead

Love Meets Wisdom, Aloysius Pieris, S.J.

Many Paths, Eugene Hillman

The Silence of God, Raimundo, Panikkar

The Challenge of the Scriptures, Groupe de Recherches Islamo-Chrétien

The Meaning of Christ, John P. Keenan

Hindu-Christian Dialogue, Harold Coward, Editor

Christianity through Non-Christian Eyes, Paul J. Griffiths

The Emptying God, John B. Cobb, Jr., and Christopher Ives, Editors

Women Speaking, Women Listening, Maura O'Neill

Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered, Gavin D'Costa

Contents

FOREWORD

viii

PROLOGUE

A JEWSH-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE ON JESUS

Leonard Swidler and Lewis John Eron

1. WHY CHRISTIANS NEED TO DIALOGUE WITH JEWS AND JUDAISM

ABOUT JESUS

Leonard Swidler

A Response to Leonard Swidler from Lewis John Eron

2. THE PROBLEM OF A JEW TALKING TO A CHRISTIAN ABOUT JESUS

Lewis John Eron

A Response to Lewis John Eron from Leonard Swidler

3. YESHUA'S PLACE IN THE JEWISH LIFE OF HIS TIME

Leonard Swidler

A Response to Leonard Swidler from Lewis John Eron

4. JESUS' PLACE IN THE JEWISH LIFE OF His TIME

Lewis John Eron

A Response to Lewis John Eron from Leonard Swidler

5. YESHUA: A TORAH-TRUE JEW?

Leonard Swidler

A Response to Leonard Swidler from Lewis John Eron

6. JESUS: A TORAH-TRUE JEW?

Lewis John Eron

A Response to Lewis John Eron from Leonard Swidler

7. YESHUA: MESSIAH? CHRIST? HUMAN? DIVINE?

Leonard Swidler

A Response to Leonard Swidler from Lewis John Eron

8. JESUS AND JUDAISM

104

Lewis John Eron

A Response to Lewis John Eron from Leonard Swidler

108

9. SUMMARY OF A JEWISH-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE ON JESUS/YESHUA

113

SELECT ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY ON JESUS AND JUDAISM

118

A JEWISH-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE ON PAUL

Lester Dean and Gerard Sloyan

10. INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM OF A JEW TALKING ABOUT PAUL

125

Lester Dean

11. DID PAUL REPRESENT OR MISREPRESENT THE JUDAISM OF HIS TIME?

131

Gerard Sloyan

A Response to Gerard Sloyan from Lester Dean

132

12. PAUL'S "ERRONEOUS" DESCRIPTION OF JUDAISM

136

Lester Dean

A Response to Lester Dean from Gerard Sloyan

r140

13. DID PAUL HAVE ANY PROBLEMS WITH THE LAW?

143

Gerard Sloyan

A Response to Gerard Sloyan from Lester Dean

145

14. PAU12S PROBLEMS WITH THE LAW

148

Lester Dean

A Response to Lester Dean from Gerard Sloyan

156

15. DID PAUL THINK THAT A PERSON COULD FOLLOW TORAH?

160

Gerard Sloyan

A Response to Gerard Sloyan from Lester Dean

162

16. ANY PERSON IS ABLE TO FOLLOW TORAH

165

Lester Dean

A Response to Lester Dean from Gerard Sloyan

167

17. DID PAUL THINK THAT JEWS AND JEWISH CHRISTIANS MUST

FOLLOW TORAH?

170

Gerard Sloyan

A Response to Gerard Sloyan from Lester Dean

173

18. JEWS AND JEWISH CHRISTIANS MUST FOLLOW TORAH

176

Lester Dean

A Response to Lester Dean from Gerard Sloyan

181

19. WHAT WAS PAUL'S HOPE FOR THE JEWS?

Gerard Sloyan

A Response to Gerard Sloyan from Lester Dean

186

20. PAUL'S HOPE FOR THE JEWS

Lester Dean

A Response to Lester Dean from Gerard Sloyan

193

21. WAS PAUL'S CHIEF FIGURE JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH OR THE

TRANSFER OF LORDSHIP

Gerard Sloyan

A Response to Gerard Sloyan from Lester Dean

196

22. TRANSFER OF LORDSHIP, SOLUTION OR PROBLEM?

Lester Dean

A Response to Lester Dean from Gerard Sloyan

204

23. SUMMARY OF A JEWISH-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE ON PAUL

SELECT ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY ON PAUL

EPILOGUE

AUTHORS

INDEX

Foreword

This book grew out of a number of formal and numerous informal dialogues among four scholars, two Jewish and two Christian. The occasion for precipitating these dialogues in this particular form was several extended dialogues-organized by Temple University’s Religion Department-that occurred mostly, though not exclusively, in Germany, both West and East, between 1980 and 1986. It was in the latter of these dialogues-in West Berlin and the German Democratic Republic-that essentially the present structure of a dual set of dialogues, one on Jesus and one on Paul, took shape.

Although each set focused its major attention on either Jesus or Paul, the four of us not only read each other’s written statements but also listened to each other’s verbal dialogues-sometimes in English and sometimes in German-and also shared in them.

The response to our dialogues, by Jews and by Christians, was so generally positive that we were encouraged to put them in a form for publication as a book, which is what we have done here.

We perceive this whole enterprise as an exercise in dialogue. It is an encounter in which each partner comes primarily to learn from rather than teach the other, though obviously if learning is to occur teaching must also-secondarily.

The structure of our verbal interchanges takes the form of statements on a topic concerning either Jesus or Paul, on which there has been contention in the past. Each opinion section is followed by another author’s response. The two parts of the book follow essentially the same format, with summary statements at the end of each of the two sets of dialogue. We have also added extensive footnotes and annotated bibliographies for those who wish to pursue the scholarly path further. Most of all, we hope that our readers will be stimulated to follow the path of dialogue.

Prologue

Why a book on this subject? Jewish scholarship is suspicious of treatments of Christian origins that stress Jewish roots. It tends to think that such works are covertly proselytizing in intent. Christian scholarship is suspicious of Jewish interest in the question, either supposing that those who address it will hold the gospel to contain little new or that only a confused approach is to be expected of Jews and Christians of such evident good will. As the learned in these matters know, the birth of Christianity from Israel was both painful and bloody. The relationship of the two religions to this day is that of a parent who asked for no such child and a rebellious, adolescent offspring. Can the story be retold in such a way as to foster any measure of reconciliation without studious avoidance of the facts?

The best reason for a dialectical exchange is that the hard-headed scholarship so much praised by both sides has often proceeded from a set of premises which led inevitably to polemics. There should be room for an approach based on mutual respect, since mutual suspicion has held the field for so long. Ignorance of the facts has also abounded, providing a perfect formula for misunderstanding. Add to this a lively suspicion of the other’s motives, especially when either side puts forward positions other than the long-familiar ones, and the possibilities for continuing antipathy are limitless.

Participants in any conversation between Jews and Christians at a scholarly level must face the possibility that a-fuller knowledge of history of the period, including the antagonisms expressed by each side, will lead to even more bitter feelings. A legend has long been cherished by each of the adversaries about the other. If historical research should disclose the offenses of the past to have been far worse than imagined, what then? “To know me is to love me” may be as foolish a claim in the exchange of religious histories as it is on bumper stickers.

Are inquirers into controversies of long standing to be trusted when they claim to lay bare all that they find? What if they are so bent on reducing tensions that their willingness to bring to light any data that could increase these tensions is questionable? Are the contributors to this volume, in particular, so predisposed to religious harmony that they are unable to make the case for Jewish- Christian dissonance? The period of the origins of the two traditions (since Judaism, as we know it, was an offspring of the religion of biblical Israel) was by any reckoning marked by certain oppositions. It remains to be seen whether the writers of this book are able to acknowledge them.

The writers are not only academic colleagues but friends. That is a suspicious detail in itself. To have an abhorrence of religious hatred and a love of religious peace may, as we have indicated, disqualify anyone for objective study. The persons engaged in this project are convinced that, whatever historical truth may signify, ignorance of that truth is its meanest counterfeit.

The data for a study of the Jewish parentage of Christianity are fragmentary. Except for the writings of the historian Josephus, there is on the Jewish side no contemporary mention of the Christian phenomenon. Josephus refers to John the Baptist, James of Jerusalem who was murdered in 62 C.E., and Jesus-the latter evidently edited theologically by Christian hands in such a way as to have Josephus acknowledge Jesus’ messiahship. The original text is, however, recoverable in a tenth- century Arabic translation by a Bishop Agapius, much shorter than the suspect Slavonic version, the so-called “Testimonium Flavianum.” Josephus’ sycophantic currying of Roman favor (he adopted the name of the imperial domus Flaviana by whom he was employed) disqualifies him in Jewish eyes as an accurate reporter on Jewish history, especially regarding the war of 67-73 C.E. In that engagement he acted first the coward, then the braggart. He may have written in Aramaic but his work is preserved in Greek, and it was Christians who preserved it. This has provided grounds for its not being taken seriously by Jews until very recent times.

The far greater reason for the lack of Jewish data was that the Jewish community opted for the Mishnah and Gemara as the continuation of the report on their life as a people. It might be noted in passing that there is no Jewish account from the period on exactly who were the Pharisees, Sadducees, or the community of Qumran except its own report (Josephus’ characterization of these “three philosophies” is too brief to be informative). We are left with the impression from Jewish sources that the Samaritans and those Greek-influenced, non-observant Jews designated “Epicures” were the only departers from Jewish centrality worthy of notice. There is a fair amount about Sadducees, Boethians, and Perushim in Jewish sources, but this information is of questionable worth and does not deal with most of the historical facts that interest us. It does, however, show a lack of Jewish unity during the period of Christian origins. Unfortunately, those who came to be called Christians did not figure in Jewish reckoning.

The Christian community’s record of its own earliest activities is not very extensive. Religious and scholarly attention to this relatively small corpus has been so intense that it gives a different impression. The events of the years 30 to 50-the latter the date of Paul’s first extant letter(s)-are sufficiently obscure as to be described by Christian historians as “the tunnel period.” Nothing Christian whatever remains in Aramaic, the lingua franca of most Jews of Palestine who believed in Jesus. The early chapters of what is known today as Luke’s Acts of the Apostles-what he called it we do not know, probably “my second book”-are largely a theological reconstruction from the late first century. Luke may well have had a Jerusalem source and Pauline journey-narrative sources, but, if he did, they were already worked up rhetorically in the manner of the historiography of that age.

The four gospels in their present form probably come from the last thirty years of the first century. All four derive from Palestinian traditions about Jesus’ life and teaching, but in the form in which they reach us they are much influenced by Hellenist Judaism. The Septuagint version was the Bible of all who contributed to the New Testament, as it was of diaspora Jews generally. There is some witness to the Masoretic Text in those twenty-seven books and also to targums on the Holy Scriptures. The latter may have been better known popularly than the text itself. Paul’s seven letters surely written by him are, paradoxically, the only testimony to Jewish life that we can positively date to the fifth decade of the century. These are, in what may be the sequence of their authorship, 1 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, Galatians, and Romans. Paul is the best candidate for having written the second Thessalonian letter; he provided the ideas if not the wording of Colossians. Ephesians is certainly a second-generation anthology of Pauline thought, as is 1 Peter; 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus were produced well after Paul’s lifetime, in part in a spirit opposed to his, although claiming perfect fidelity to him. The remaining Christian writings that make up the canon can be safely dated to the period 70-135 (James; 1, 2 and 3 John; Hebrews; Revelation; Jude; 2 Peter). The same is true of the non-canonical material equally important to the reconstruction of Christian beginnings (1 Clement, the Didache, the Shepherd of Hernias, and the epistles from shipboard of Ignatius of Antioch).

The Dead Sea scrolls are instructive as a reminder of the kinds of Judaism that may have been abroad in the first century. The Gnostic Christian library of Nag Hammadi on the upper Nile, discovered in 1945, can tell us something of gospel composition and the kinds of writing some Christians drew upon for their view of Christianity. None of the canonical books is extant in that collection. Highly germane to an exploration of Christian origins are the biblical books of the so-called “second canon,” namely those of the LXX that the rabbis of Yavneh dismissed as “not soiling the hands” (viz., not numinous enough to affect the handler). The extensive collection of Jewish writings dating from 165 B.C.E. to 135 C.E. known as the Pseudepigrapha. (“false writings” in the sense of not being acceptable guides to authentic Jewishness) shed light on the kind of Judaism in which the Christian movement originated. Listing the above sources requires immediately that a word be said about their status in their respective communities.

Jewish distaste for the writings of Josephus has already been mentioned. The same is even truer of the pseudepigraphic writings. They were either composed in Greek or else survived in Greek translation, the language of the despised oppressors (the ordinary Roman populace as well as the Greeks). Many feature apocalyptic dreams of a deliverance in the impending future that the Rabbis gradually repudiated. It took the Rabbis a full two centuries after 70 C.E. to accomplish this, but they eventually succeeded. This provides the paradox of Christianity as the preserver of the apocalyptic tradition of post-biblical Judaism while later Judaism officially let it languish. That has not kept it from flourishing as an underground stream in the kabbalistic tradition, but the Rabbis always professed to know little of it and have a poor view of what they did know. There remains, to be sure, a lively Jewish hope in the “days of Messiah,” but this is interpreted variously. Meantime, because of the evolution in Jewish thought, the eschatological or apocalyptic character of Christianity provides sufficient reason why Judaism, which is identical with rabbinism, is convinced it need not take Christianity seriously. No claimant to the title “the religion of Israel” which understood Judaism any way but halakhically has been allowed the distinction since the turn of the second century C.E. That includes any tradition based on end-expectation or mystical experience more than on halakhah, “walking in the way.”

The libraries from Qumran and Nag Hammadi were lost until our time. Historians knew of the movements only through the polemical remarks of their opponents, the “legitimate” streams within the Jewish and Christian traditions. With few exceptions, Jews and Christians alike have welcomed the discoveries from the Dead Sea and have accepted the scrolls as valuable witnesses to a sectarian group within Judaism. The same almost universal welcome cannot be found when we turn to the Gnostic writings. The literature is in Coptic, rather than in the more well-known languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek. But the problem extends beyond the difficulty of the language. These are writings that were judged to be heretical. Since they were rejected once before, should they not also be rejected now?

The Christian movement was increasingly influenced by Hellenism at the time the rabbis were throwing off this foreign cultural yoke. This means that by the year 200 the two had quite different vocabularies and practices. It might be thought that the ethnic basis of the religious community Israel, a basis that Christianity increasingly lacked after 70, would suffice to distinguish the two. In fact, however, Israel was significantly Hellenized in the days of Jesus, his disciples, and Paul, even in Palestine. Moreover, Judaism encompassed many Gentile proselytes and sympathizers, making it not easily distinguishable from the adherents to Jesus within it until after the fall of Jerusalem. The years 70-135 were critical ones for both communities, marking the time of solidification in self-awareness. The Christians defined themselves in terms of membership in Israel, although increasingly in contradistinction to Judaism. If Jews anywhere in the homeland or the diaspora defined themselves with reference to the new movement, there is no record of it. That is not to say, however, that when Paul was sending the epistles we have or when the roots of Mark’s gospel were being put down, there was no Jewish writing in a similar spirit without the mention of Jesus. Several Jewish apocryphal writings in Greek come to us from just that time. The rabbinic repudiation of the genre was a subsequent development.

In brief, the absolutely clear-cut distinction between the kinds of writing found in the earliest parts of the Christian collection and contemporary Jewish writing is something that comes later. It could well have been preceded by the destruction of certain Jewish religious writings because they conformed so little to the new, halakhic pattern, or the suppression of certain Christian writings because they conformed so much to Judaism. In any case, the “non-Jewish” character of the New Testament and cognate first-century documents that Jewish and some Christian scholarship tends to speak of can be claimed only if the fairly large body of writing outlined above is repudiated as not being Jewish. For some, only the discovery of first-century writings in Aramaic or Hebrew from Palestinian groups that believed Jesus to be the messiah can definitely reverse the judgment that the movement was not Jewish. In light of the Qumran and Nag Hammadi finds of this century, the suggestion of such future discoveries is not foolish.

It is possible to deny that the bulk of the Christian testament has come from sectarian Judaism only because it does not meet criteria proposed by the Judaism of a later time. To be sure, a tradition should be able to define what falls within and without its own self-imposed limits. That is not a problem. The question is: was there ever a time that portions of the New Testament might have qualified as fully Jewish? The bitterness that developed between the two traditions after the Bar Kokhba revolt in 130-135 C.E. already showed itself in the gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Letter to the Hebrews. This created a retrospective apologetic that declared certain matters unthinkable for Judaism and dogma for Christianity. An exhaustive knowledge of the post-biblical writings by Jews, especially the later ones before the Mishnah rendered them redundant, reveals a surprising latitude of belief within Judaism. There was also a wide latitude among early Christian groups that is easily forgotten. The Christian movement, a rival claimant to Jewish loyalties, became unthinkable as a form of Judaism because of its increasing Graeco-Roman cultural component. In the opposite direction, it was Judaism and not paganism that provided the greatest attraction to Christians to return to or, if they were Gentiles, to start practicing.

The direction in which this discussion is going seems to suggest that some good can be derived from establishing how close Christianity was to Judaism in its earliest phases. What purpose exactly would be served if such an affinity were provable? These two ways of being religious are different. They have been so almost from the beginning of the corporate memory of either at the time of the separation. The learned and the simple in both traditions so wish to maintain the difference that it may appear mischievous to put the two in a relation that did not continue very long. Why go back to the fork in the road if it achieves nothing but revive old resentments?

The way forward seems the better way to go: a harmonious existence built on respect and nurtured by common action to heal society’s ills. Hunger and homelessness, prejudice, and peace and armaments are public causes enough to draw on the ethical commitment of the two communities. A review of history not only appeals to very few but is seen by many as a way of ensuring that no practical measures will be taken. It is thought to be an academic exercise in the worst sense. Show us your deeds, the Jew says to the Christian. With far less right to make the demand, the Christian says the same to the Jew.

The reason the exploration contained in the following chapters should go forward is that religious hostilities flourish not only because antagonists do not know the traditions of the other but because they do not know their own. They rest secure in a double caricature, that of the religion which they see as the root of all their ills and that of the one they profess. Ignorance of where one’s religious family has been, and why its commitments are as they are, is the chief reason the vacuum is filled with a fictitious reading of “the other.” The prime benefit achieved by serious interreligious inquiry is a more secure hold on what one is committed to. This is not to say that looking at things as they were when a historic split was effected is the only fruitful way to proceed. It is, however, one that has merit. Buddhism coming forth from Hinduism, Puritan dissent from the established church, Conservative and Reform Judaism from European Orthodox Judaism: in every case it makes sense to ask what the issues were then and what they say to different traditions now. In brief, who are we religiously-whoever the “we” is-that we felt we had to leave the religious family that nurtured us, or dismiss from our company some of our number? Would we do it again? Could we do it again? There is nothing quite like this painful exercise to help discover who we are and whether we have sufficient grounds to go on in this way forever as we felt we had to at the time. If the answer has to be yes, can the separate existence be a matter of peace rather than harshness and enmity?

One important discovery in the Jewish-Christian situation might be that the Jesus of history, difficult as it is to reconstruct him, was a recognizable Jewish reformer whose utterances-however much edited by disciples-disclose him as a man of religious genius. That conclusion could either alienate Christians and Jews further or convince them that they can both claim him without validating the interpretation the other puts on him. Jews generally have no desire to claim Jesus as one of their own because of the pain to their people he symbolizes. If they were able to separate him from the faith tradition that centers on him, they might be able to see him as one of their great ones. Normally that is impossible. Christian affirmations of faith in the divine as well as human Jesus interfere with Jews’ considering him on any terms. On the other hand, many Christians want to see Jesus in opposition to Judaism rather than in agreement with it. Jewish denials of the divine nature of Jesus interfere with Christians’ considering him to be faithful to the Jewish beliefs and practices of his time.

There is another discovery that can come from dialogue. Christians read in their Scriptures the resistance to the gospel that its second- and third-generation proclaimers encountered. Some Christians attribute to “the Jews” the conscious resistance that this frustrated band first experienced. Unaware that all religious movements as described by their protagonists do the same, they read as history the record of sectarian struggle within a tradition. Seeing themselves there as “the Christians” -already a full-blown, non-Jewish group-they have no difficulty identifying with their fellow- religionists. Jews give the Christian Scriptures the same prima facie sort of reading, imposing the concept “anti-Semitic” on a literature that describes an internal struggle in a religious community whose real enemy is pagan political power. Reports on Christian origins from rabbinic sources might provide some perspective, but they might also only exacerbate the situation.

The point is that a polemical literature constitutes the only monumenta we have of Christian beginnings. It describes two tendencies or parties within a tradition, a land mass coming apart to form two continents. These tendencies would before too long be two religions. Their similarity in dissimilarity is their pain. This Humpty-Dumpty sundered beyond the power of all the horses and men of the great King to reassemble is almost impossible to envision. The inclination is to say, why bother? Too much acrimony has followed upon the initial fall. Besides, any semblance of primitive unity is irretrievable. But in the struggle to reconstruct history, some Jew or Christian is likely to say: “It is not as I was led to believe. My popular instructors (or my scholarly sources) had no inkling of a reading of the data like this one.” If any were to discover themselves the victims of an interpretation of first-century happenings in a patristic (talmudic, reformation) pattern, much would be achieved. Learning what happened in history may seem to make a small difference, but it can make all the difference.

The major discovery is that what have been portrayed as diametric oppositions prove often differences of emphasis; that what was spoken of as inconceivable in Jewish or Christian circumstances proves to have had a home there over a long period; that patterns of grace and law and righteousness and hope of the final triumph of God have been the common possession of the two. They are not undiscoverable in the other, as was so repeatedly and erroneously said.

The danger of reading any documents in a new way is that an inappropriate, romantic reconstruction or an economic revisionism or a Realpolitik of antiquity may prevail. Once an ideology has begun to spin its web there is no end to the possibilities. In the present instance a person may be bent on productive dialogue and for that reason may try to avoid over-optimistic presupposition. The net result may be the reasonable hypothesis that matters were of a certain character for a brief period in a small part of the Roman empire. The coexistence thus discovered did not endure for long, however, being shortly succeeded by the angry counterclaims of the threateners and the threatened. But the hypothesis of the situation in illo tempore seems unassailable. What has been gained?

The will to uncover and understand the truth may lead to unfamiliar conclusions such as that, while according to the gospels Jesus attacked the scribes and Pharisees, he was actually one of them. Or that Stephen was a supporter of the Law and temple sacrifice; his stoning was on cultural or linguistic grounds but not religious. Or that Paul was set against certain confused believers in Jesus but had no quarrel with Jews outside of believing Christian circles. Having encountered someone in ecstatic vision who rechanneled his apocalyptic enthusiasm, he continued to direct it toward diaspora Gentiles. Scenarios such as these are numberless. The only question to be asked is, what is the evidence for them? Given the glaring omissions in the extant documents, how plausible is the reconstruction and how would the acceptance of one or more of these scenarios change us, our tradition, and our view of the other and their tradition?

The essays in this collection are revisionist only because the authors think that the evidence in hand does not lead to familiar conclusions. The authors are not bent on novelty for its own sake, nor out to twist first-century data to yield a benign twentieth-century result. They do think that ignorance of certain realities in Jesus’ lifetime and Paul’s, compounded by the desire of Jews and Christians ever since to maintain a mutually antagonistic stance, has kept even the world of scholarship from an honest look at the data. Learned Christians have persisted in anti-Jewish readings of their own sources. Learned Jews have followed the Christian lead when, in fact, the same hard look they give to other aspects of their peoplehood might have disclosed the unfair burden much “critical” study of the New Testament has placed on them. Christians have had the necessary tools but not the will to achieve a better reading. Jews have a sense of the terrible injustice but no great desire to put critical scholarship to work on certain of their own first-century materials which they find of little value. Nor do Jews wish to examine those Christian writings that have touched them deeply in such negative ways because of their long experience of Christian responses to such efforts. Few Jewish or Christian scholars have bothered to master the basic medium of the other’s literature or language -biblical Hebrew yes, but not Aramaic or Greek-to be fully at ease in the elements of the problem.

If this seems to be written from a superior pose, it is a superiority to the determination of the last two centuries to read post-biblical and early Christian literature as if no continuity were involved, only a sharp break. The two destructions of Jerusalem, in 70 and 135, brought about a tremendous historical shift. So did the rise of the Jesus movement, however imperceptible it was to the bulk of Jews in its earlier stages. Not to know the precise social effects on Jewry of the double military repression in the land of Israel and elsewhere is a great handicap. Were it not for the huge lacuna of information, fragmentary data like the carving on the arch of Titus in the Roman forum and 1 Clement’s reference to Peter and Paul, the mentions of Hillel and Shammai in the Mishnah and Justin’s reconstruction of Trypho’s part of the dialogue would not loom so large.

The Pauline correspondence, the gospels, and the other Christian materials exist. So do the Pseudepigrapha, the Pirqe Avot, and the other tractates of the Mishnah. But because the two religious communities have viewed them as absolutely distinct literatures, one of them adversarial, each has disregarded the other except in a polemical spirit. There are exceptions, of course, but by and large this observation is true.

A further complication is the sixteenth-century breach in Western Christianity that has led to reading Paul as if he had written in the grace controversy of the fifth. As a result, chapter 11 of the epistle to the Romans has a long Christian history of interpretation about the sovereignty of the divine predestinarian will and surprisingly little about the Jewish people. “Works of the Law” became the rabbinic mitzvoth and Catholic Masses for the dead indiscriminately, since the two were understood as identical denials of justifying faith that became “the Gospel.” Neither Protestants nor Catholics have noted that Paul was saying important things to them about Jews and Judaism, things that could terminate their espousal of him as their champion of the Gentiles against his own people. It is a rare Jew who has explored Paul enough to conclude that he might have something to say to Jews about the Law in relation to God’s care for them and for the Gentiles. It is a rare Christian who has studied Jewish literature sufficiently to understand the Jewish background of Paul.

Both sides have built their defensive walls high. Those whose writings, canonical and other, testify to their origins as a new religious tradition have not been open to the possibility that these could tell against their dearest prejudices. Those who find themselves described there as persecutors of a religious minority in their midst have not been open to learning whether their centuries of being the persecuted had any such prehistory. All new births bring pain to mother and child. But also joy. The joy in this case will not come with the mother’s claiming the offspring, nor by the child’s recognizing the mother as she truly is. That may take centuries. The joy will come in the short term from another quarter. It will derive from the knowledge that there has been more misunderstanding than understanding. Simple ignorance is a heavy burden to bear. When it is crass or supine (medieval language for the willingly adopted or passively allowed) it becomes intolerable. To be quit of this weight can bring a spring in the gait, a livelier approach to life for the few who are thus unburdened. It can bring a new respect for the religiously other who has been feared or despised for numerous wrong reasons.

The essays that follow may themselves be marked by error, thereby adding to the confusion. But the authors are convinced that they have a few things right. They believe that it is better to try to find a new road to truth, even if they stumble, than complacently to follow the old road which they know leads to error. Authentic history is potentially everyone’s enemy. Ultimately it is a friend, but only to those who will accept its cauterizing of old wounds. The reflections that follow are written with the hope of increasing amity, not enmity. The physicians know that they above all need the healing.

PART I

A Jewish-Christian Dialogue on Jesus

Leonard Swidler Lewis John Eron

Why Christians Need To Dialogue with Jews and Judaism about Jesus

LEONARD SWIDLER

There are several very important reasons why Christians need to be in dialogue with Jews and Judaism about Jesus. The most significant of them can be summed up in the brief statement that Jesus was a Jew.¹ It is a truism that whatever sort of Christianity a person claims to profess, that Christianity must somehow ultimately be based on Jesus of Nazareth (or Yeshua, as he was called in Hebrew by his own followers). Therefore, it is vital that Christians learn who and what Yeshua was. This means learning what a Jew and Judaism are-and that is best done in dialogue with Jews and Judaism. In such a move Christians will come to know better their roots, or rather their root, in the Jew Yeshua who was born of the Hebraic tradition and was related somehow to the early rabbinic Jewish tradition. The primitive Christian church had the same origins. Very soon, however, Hellenist Jewish elements entered into nascent Christianity and played a great role in its subsequent development. In the third quarter of the first century Gentile Greek and Syrian elements were added.

Christians also need to be in dialogue with Jews and Judaism for the same reasons they need to be in dialogue with all other religions and ideologies-in brief: (1) to gain an insight into reality that they are not able to attain from their own standpoint in the world; (2) to learn to know themselves more profoundly, as it were, in the mirror of their dialogue partner, and (3) to come to know and appreciate Jews for what they truly are, rather than to denigrate them for what Christians distortedly think they are.

The third point leads to another major reason why Christians need to be in dialogue with Jews and Judaism. Namely, there exists a need to explore the overwhelmingly negative history of the relations of Christians with Jews throughout most of the two thousand years they have in common. From the Christian side this history can be largely summed up in two words: anti-Judaism (hatred of Jews on religious grounds) and antisemitism (hatred of Jews on ethnic and racial grounds)-a history of suspicion, denigration, oppression, hatred, robbery, rapine, murder, and genocide of Jews. The horrible paradox is that Christians claim to be the followers of Jesus, of Rabbi Yeshua, who was a Jew. They claim that he showed them how to live a human life, and therefore they try to imitate him. They speak-and, to be more personal, I should say we speak-of imitatio Christi. But when we Christians hate Jews, we hate what Yeshua was, a Jew. We hate, then, what we say we are trying to be, a kind of Jew, one who has been led to the one true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel, through Rabbi Yeshua whom we call the Christ. Then we Christians hate the people Israel, that “good olive tree onto which [we] wild shoots have been grafted,” as Paul described the Gentile Christian relationship to the Jewish people.

Thus, we Christians must reject anti-Judaism and antisemitism, not only on general humanitarian grounds, but also because they mean a hatred of those whom our Scriptures tell us are the chosen people of God (and Paul reminds us that God can never go back on the promises made to that people). We Christians must reject anti-Judaism and antisemitism because they mean hatred of the Jew Yeshua whom we Christians call Lord and say we love and imitate. Lastly, we Christians must reject anti-Judaism and antisemitism because they mean self-hatred. Instead of being anti-Semites, we Christians should be philo-Semites, for Yeshua, Jesus, was a Jew, and we Christians are his followers and members of his people, religiously if not ethnically.

In this Jewish-Christian dialogue we are going to concentrate on one figure who has been both a bond and a barrier between the Jewish and Christian traditions and peoples, the Jew Yeshua. Whole libraries have been written by Christians, and in the last hundred years a mounting number of books by Jews, on Yeshua the Jew.² The potential areas of interest are vast. Here, of course, we can focus on only a few topics. Even then, our remarks will be very limited. For my part, I wish to concentrate on three areas: 1) Yeshua’s place in the Jewish life of his time; 2) his attitude toward the Law; and 3) his relationship to messiahship and how his followers interpreted that relationship in the subsequent development of Christology.

First, it would be helpful, especially for Christians, to recall something about the meaning of the name of Jesus, for it will provide an insight into the Jewish tradition.

Jesus, we know, is simply a Latin form of the Greek Iesous. Even “Iesous” itself is not originally a Greek name, but rather a Greek form of a Hebrew name, “Yehoshua” (the biblical “Yoshua”) which means “YHWH [probably pronounced “Yahweh”] is salvation.” There is no difficulty in understanding the movement from Yehoshua, which in colloquial parlance would sometimes be abbreviated as Yeshua or even Yeshu, into the Greek and Latin transliterations Iesous and Jesus. However, in the movement of the name Yeshua from its original forms into the various languages used by Christians and others, unfortunately something important has been lost. To begin with, Jews no longer use the name Yeshua, nor indeed do Christians. (In fact, both the Hebrew and Greek forms as proper names disappeared from usage after the first century.)³ As a consequence, both Christians and Jews automatically think of Jesus as the name of someone other than a Jew. That simple fact tends to cut Christians off from the taproot of their religion, the Hebrew-Jewish tradition. Simultaneously, on the other side it also tends to cut Jews off from a very important son of their tradition, one who has become the most influential Jew of all history, surpassing in historical impact even such giants as Moses, David, Marx, Freud, and Einstein.

Yeshua is made up of two parts. The first, “Ye,” is an abbreviated form of the Hebrew proper name for God, “YHWH.” The second, “shua,” is the Hebrew word for salvation.⁴ However, the word salvation is one that to a large extent has been significantly altered in the Christian tradition from its meaning in Israelite religion and its root meaning in Greek and Latin. For the most part it has been given a restricted meaning since the third century C.E. Since that time, Christians have come to understand salvation to signify that when believers in Jesus Christ die, they will go to heaven if they have remained faithful. However, that is not at all what the word basically means. In its late Latin form, salvatio, it comes from the root “salv[u]” (the Greek form is “Soterion/soteria” from “sos”) meaning wholeness, health or well-being-hence, salutary and salubrious in English. A similar derivation is true of the Germanic word for salvation, heil, which adjectivally also means whole, hale, healed, healthy. In fact, this is also where the English word holy comes from. Being holy means being whole, leading a whole, a full life. If we lead a whole, full life, we are holy; we attain salvation, wholeness.⁵

Yeshua, then, means YHWH is salvation, wholeness; and the name YHWH is the Hebrew proper name of the one and only God who created everything that exists. The concept of monotheism is so taken for granted today that we do not realize what an extraordinary breakthrough this insight was in the history of humankind. The immediate implications for how one related to all other human beings and all reality were massive. If one lived in a nation that had its own god or gods, and all other nations also had their own god or gods, then the ethical rules developed by one god’s religion would not be applicable to those persons and things under other gods. Therefore, there was not one ethic that was valid for all human beings and for all the earth-until the insight developed that there was, in fact, one creator God of all human beings and of all reality.

Thus, the very name Yeshua is an assertion that YHWH is the source of wholeness for all human beings, for all things. It is a name that carries the very heart of the great contribution of the Hebrew people to humanity: ethical monotheism. There were of course many Jewish men who were named Yeshua besides Yeshua of Nazareth. Nevertheless, there is a special appropriateness in the fact that Yeshua of Nazareth was given this name, for it is through him that billions of non-Jews came to the Jewish insight of ethical monotheism, came to YHWH, came to salvation, to wholeness.

A Response to Leonard Swidler from Lewis John Eron

I agree most fully with your understanding that the fundamental reason for a person to enter interreligious dialogue is to learn about the other and one’s self. The purpose of dialogue is neither to convince nor convert. Its purpose is to provide the opportunity to learn.

Dialogue is not negotiation. In dialogue the participants do not trade beliefs or bargain dogmas. Rather they try to listen and share. In this light, I would like to respond to a number of the points you made:

(1) 1 assume that you want to call Jesus by the Hebraic form of the name, Yeshua, in order to remind Christians that he was a Jew. That is surely a good reason. Yet I feel that in the context of Jewish-Christian dialogue, a Christian’s calling Jesus of Nazareth by the name Yeshua is more of an impediment to dialogue than an aid. Yeshua is the name for Jesus used by members of the so-called Jews for Jesus cults in their attempt to convert Jews to their form of Christianity. For contemporary Jews, then, the name Yeshua has negative connotations.

In addition, I do not believe that Jews ever forgot that Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew. They may have considered him to have been a bad Jew, a false messiah, a misguided magician, or many other things, but he was always considered Jewish. Jews may be surprised to learn that Jesus did not see himself as any more than a reformer of-the Judaism of his age, but even when they pictured Jesus in a dark light, Jews remembered that Jesus was born a Jew.

(2) Your description of Christians as Jesus’ “followers and members of his people, religiously if not ethnically,” is also confusing in light of Jewish-Christian dialogue. Christian use of the concept of peoplehood lacks the deep historical, cultural, ethnic, and familial resonances in the Jewish use of the term. More helpful, I feel, is Paul van Buren’s distinction between God’s Holy People, the Jews, and God’s Holy Church, the Christians. The closest theological equivalent to the Jewish concept Am Yisrael, “the People Israel” is the Greek term ekklesia, “the Church.”

(3) Although you seem to feel that it is a great loss to the Jews that they were “cut off from a very important son of their tradition, one who has become the most influential Jew of all history,” I do not sense this loss.

For Christians, a loss of Jesus’ Jewish roots can result in a possible loss of identity. The Jews, on the other hand, at worst suffer from the lack of familiarity with a figure who has great significance for many in Western civilization, though little in Judaism.

I believe that Judaism as a cultural and religious system has little to gain and much to lose by anything but a carefully nuanced homecoming of Jesus. On the one hand, I believe that Jews have little to learn ethically and theologically from Jesus who, himself, is well situated in the Pharisaic/early rabbinic tradition. Yet, on the other hand, I feel that we Jews can learn a great deal from Christians.

Although I feel that Christianity is a remarkable and serious religious tradition, I do not find Jesus particularly engaging. My basic problem in this dialogue is to find a way to be able to tell Christians that although I respect and admire their tradition, my interest in Jesus is of a historical nature.

Unlike most Jews who write on Jesus, I have a much more positive view of Christianity than I do of Jesus. Despite the harsh treatment Jews received at Christian hands, I am intrigued and impressed by the religious creativity shown in the development of the Christian church from late antiquity to the present.

(4) Finally, I am surprised that you included Karl Marx in your list of influential Jews. I know there are some Jews who claim anyone as Jewish who has some Jewish ancestry. Although Jewish ancestry may be one of the ways of entering the Jewish people, unless we want to accept the criteria of our enemies, being Jewish involves much more than having “Jewish blood.”

Karl Marx, religiously and culturally, fits much better in the Christian camp. Although his father and mother were Jews who converted to Christianity, Marx had no connections to the Jewish tradition. He was a baptized and confirmed member of the Protestant church.

In fact, one of the great problems Jews, in general, and Jewish socialists, in particular, have with Marxism stems from Karl Marx’s misunderstanding of Judaism as an example of bourgeois capitalism. Not only did he disregard the Jewish self-understanding of being a historical people, but he also expressed his opinions on Jews and Judaism in highly negative terms using the most virulent language.

By the strict application of Jewish law that defines a Jew as one either born of a Jewish mother or converted to Judaism, one could argue that Marx was a Jew. Yet his Jewish origins played no role in his upbringing except as a curse that he could not escape. In that way alone, Marx was a typical deracinated, nineteenth-century Jew.

The Problem of a Jew Talking to a Christian about Jesus

LEWIS JOHN ERON

There is something very strange, if not wrong, when a Jew discusses Jesus of Nazareth for a predominately Christian audience as part of a Jewish-Christian dialogue. The role and function of the historical Jesus and the proclaimed Christ is a central Christian issue, not a Jewish one. It turns out that Jesus, his teachings, and his disciples did not, for better or worse, find their place in the tradition and history of the people Israel. Rather, they survived in the bosom of a collection of Gentiles who became known as the Church. Yet Jesus, as man and as Christ, has been the point of contact and, all too often, the point of conflict in the almost two-thousand-year-long relationship of the Church and the Synagogue.