We Have Ignored
the Jewishness of Jesus
at Great Cost
SOURCE: Peter Mikelic, The Toronto Star, 2 March 2002
(Copyright © 2002 Toronto Star, All Rights Reserved.)
"Neither Christian protest nor Jewish lamentation can annul the fact that Jesus was a Jew," wrote American Reform Rabbi S. Wise in 1913. As Christians worldwide journey with Jesus into the third week of their Lenten observance, a salient point needs to be addressed: namely, that reflection about his message and mission must respect Jesus' Jewishness. Not only was he a Jew from birth to death, but he never intended to be anything else.
How can the Jewishness of Jesus be appreciated, asks Episcopal Bishop John Spong poignantly in Liberating the Gospels (HarperCollins, 1996), "if one ignores the Jewish context, the Jewish mind-set, the Jewish frame of reference, the Jewish vocabulary, and even the Jewish history that shaped and formed the biblical writers?"
The centuries-long amputation of Jesus from his Jewish roots and the monotheistic faith of Judaism that nurtured him has not been without dire historical consequences, not for Jews nor Christians. Would there have been such bloody and brutal anti-Semitism, culminating in the Holocaust, if Jesus had not been divorced from his own people? Can he now somehow be unwrapped from the prejudicial Gentile-Aryan coverings and the ecclesiological-scriptural accretions in which he has been presented and worshipped now for two millennia? Can we regard Jesus as a Christian Messiah or spiritual Saviour of the world, asks N.T. Wright in The Meaning of Jesus (HarperCollins, 2000), when such a supposition is a "retrojection from later Christian theology"?
Forged in the fires of exile and persecution over centuries, Jesus' contemporaries eagerly expected a long-awaited, God-anointed Messiah who would alleviate their seething frustration against Roman occupation and polytheism, restore the Torah and the prophets to complete spiritual observance, as well as recover the historic grandeur that was once Israel. Jesus was certainly identified to be such a Messiah. The trouble is that he renounced the geo-political idea of an earthly statehood connected with the Davidic house - in fact failed to fulfil such nationalistic ambitions, because within two generations, the Romans razed Jerusalem in 70 C.E., levelled the Temple and dispersed the Jews. The heralding of Jesus as the Messiah was unquestionably Judaic in scope. But a major crisis occurred, says Geza Vermes in his most recent volume, The Changing Faces of Jesus (Viking, 2001), when his messianic identity was elevated to divinity, when nothing of the kind was expected among the Jews. His messiahship became sacrilegious and subsequently criminal only when Christians arrived at their divine assessment of Jesus' person, origin and mission. In fact, Marcus Borg, in his volume The God We Never Knew (HarperCollins, 1997), concludes that because "Jesus did not see himself as replacing Judaism or founding a new religion, he must be understood as a Jewish figure teaching and acting within Judaism."
Like John the Baptist and other prophets before him, Jesus believed himself sent to the Jews, preaching repentance as a precondition for faith.
Taking these observations to their "logical culmination" In Jewish Monotheism and Christian Trinitarian Doctrine: A Dialogue (Fortress Press, 1981), Orthodox Jewish scholar Pinchas Lapide argues that had Jesus not been transformed into a Gentile Messiah, much of what today is Christian - baptism, communion, cross, resurrection and New Testament - would have been appropriated as elements within Judaism. Though exceedingly speculative, this conclusion lays bare the unresolved complexity of the messianic problem which still persists between Judaism and Christianity today.
In The Crucified God (Harper & Row, 1974), Jurgen Moltmann says that had Jesus lived today, he would have been branded with a yellow Star of David and sent to the gas chambers of the holocaust. Jesus died, not in Auschwitz but on Golgatha and not because he denied his Jewishness. Rather, he captured a vision of God's Kingdom for everyone, in which evil is fought not with iron and steel, but with love and forgiveness. Unlike David, his precursor, this Jewish Messiah chose strange, unexpected weapons in battle for this Kingdom.
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