Jesus as an Historical Jew

The Jesus of history, the man who was born in Erets Yisrael and lived and died as a Jew is one (in Christian dogmatic theology) with the God who is beyond all limitations of time or space. A problem is how to reconcile the historical Jesus with the Christ of faith. Some have separated them entirely. Some have denied the human (Marcion) or the Divine (Unitarians). No one has completely united what is inherently incommensurate.

After the work of Albert Schweitzer at the turn of the century, bold attempts to discover the "real" Jesus of history were suspended, in the light of his proof that the gospels, as church documents, could only reveal the later Christ of the church. But in the 1950s the search was renewed, and now again the last decade has released a powerful desire to find out just who Jesus was. Inevitably, this brings the founder of Christianity (if, indeed, he was its founder) back to his Jewish roots. The historical Jesus turns out, not unexpectedly, to be Jewish through and through.

But is it possible to know anything for certain about that Jew of Nazareth? Or are we inevitably to get only another mirror image of ourselves, as Schweitzer predicted? Liberals see in Jesus a peasant revolutionary. Mystics find an eschatological seer. Christians Christianize their Jewish founder. We only get out what we put in. There seems to be no clear way back to the original Jesus of the first century in the Land of Israel.

A powerful example of the "peril of modernizing Jesus" (Cadbury) is to be found in a brilliant lecture delivered at the University of Arizona in 1995 by Susannah Heschel, "Transforming Jesus from Jew to Aryan: Protestant Theologians in Nazi Germany." Heschel shows that some of the most important New Testament scholars in Germany tried to prove that Jesus was racially not "Semitic" and ideologically the bitter enemy of "late" Judaism in its decadent form of the first century. They manipulated texts, transformed parables, reinterpreted the gospels to make them fit the Nazi view of a parasitic and dangerous Jewish religion and folk. No example could be imagined that proves more firmly that the Jesus we want is the Jesus we will get.

And yet...the Nazi Party did not buy the theologians' revisionary Jesus. They did not welcome the scholars into their hierarchy nor use the new image widely or cunningly. They simply did not, apparently, believe what these New Testament experts told them. They smelled a rat. They could not, or would not, believe that Jesus was a goy. That indicates that there are limits to misreading, that history will out, and that a fairly trustworthy image of Jesus can be unearthed by a scholarship that at least tries for objectivity, accuracy, and authenticity.

There is a consensus among the new searchers for the historical Jesus. They differ on many issues: How much of the gospel records Jesus's own words and deeds? How much of what Judaism did he know and practice? Which brand of the many varieties of Judaism did he prefer? But no one thinks of him as anything but a Jew, a "marginal Jew" as Meier claims perhaps, but a Jew nonetheless. A "Mediterranean Jewish peasant" maybe if Crossan is right, a charismatic, a magician according to Morton Smith, or God-knows-what-kind of Jew - but a Jew for sure. A Jew and nothing but a Jew. A Jew totally within his Jewish faith and his Jewish roots. A loyal, perhaps even a revolutionary Jew, but a Jew and not an Aryan, a Jew and not a Christian, a Jew and not a cipher or an enigma which can never be understood.

How, then, do we know which passages in the gospels reflect the words of Jesus? There are several criteria for authenticity that most of the new scholarship employs:

1. The criterion of dissimilarity. If a passage reflects neither a contemporaneous Jewish view nor the practice of the early church, then it probably is authentic. The compilers of the gospels would not invent something that reflected neither a Jewish nor a later Christian view.
2. In apparent contradiction, the criterion of compatibility with first century Judaism(s). Nothing that a first century Jew could not possibly have said or thought would Jesus have said or thought. How this fits in with the first criterion is difficult to say.
3. The criterion of multiple sources. If several evangelists (or Josephus) say the same thing, it is more likely to be the reflection of what Jesus did or said. Unfortunately, Josephus says very little about Jesus, and that little is contaminated by Christian interpolations.
4. The criterion of compatibility with what Jesus did. Jesus's actions may (or may not) authenticate what he said. Of course, we cannot be sure exactly what he did. Did he drive the money changers from the Temple? Did he die on the cross under Roman orders? Do these deeds justify the claim that he predicted the end of the Temple as he knew it, or the criminal's death that he would necessarily suffer?
5. The criterion of embarrassment. Nothing that would embarrass the writers is their own addition. If Jesus was said to be baptized by John, or said to have died an ignominious death, he probably did.
6. The criterion of translation. If the Greek text seems to be a translation from an original Aramaic (or Hebrew?) saying of Jesus, it is more likely to be accurate. If it is vivid, there is a presumption that it is no mere editorial addition to the text.

All of these criteria are relative, though none is useless. The historical Jesus can be recovered with a high degree of plausibility, but scholars will disagree on his nature.

For us Jews, the gospel narratives present a great many problems, not the least of which is a clear anti-Semitism, found especially in the stories of Jesus's trial and crucifixion, but also throughout the four gospels - animus against the Pharisees (which is to say the rabbis) and sometimes against the priests, the elders, or even the entire community of Jews. Is it possible to imagine that this anti-Jewish hostility was the true sentiment of Jesus of Nazareth, who was in every way a Jew? A marginal Jew, perhaps, a revolutionary Jew, as we have suggested, a dissenting Jew - but there were lots of dissenting Jews and they never became anti-Semites. All of the gospel narrators, the evangelists, were Jews, except perhaps for Luke. They were more or less committed Jews, Jews who knew the Hebrew Bible, and who knew the Jewish religion even when they held positions somewhat different from the version of that religion practiced by their co-religionists.

So the question of anti-Judaism remains, and it is impossible to resolve. Are the anti-Judaic, sometimes downright anti-Semitic, passages authentic to Jesus or not? We would tend to say "not." The New Testament is a document of the gentile Roman Catholic Church of the second, third and fourth centuries, and that Church has clearly revised the teachings of Jesus and the early stories about Jesus in order to give the Romans the benefit of all doubts and to make the Jews who later "rejected" Jesus look bad.

On the Jewish side, there has been a great deal of simple avoidance. We didn't talk about Jesus. We didn't think much about Jesus. We had no official view of Jesus, except occasionally a perverted and negative one. I wonder whether this was prejudice or fear or revulsion, or, perhaps, even a kind of attraction. Jesus was saying the kind of things about the Jewish religion that a lot of Jews would like to say but can't get away with. So we don't think about Jesus, we don't talk about Jesus, but in our heart of hearts he seems to be our brother. Like many of us, he, too, is a dissenting Jew.

The conventional Jewish view is that Jesus was a fairly good Jew but Paul was an anti-Semite who created Christianity. The problem is that Paul was at least as Jewish as Jesus. He calls himself a Pharisee. Sanders and Stendahl, among others, have proved that the letters of Paul are typical Jewish documents of a few later centuries. Paul certainly was not less Jewish than Jesus. One cannot any longer say that he was the founder of Christianity, unless one realizes that somehow Jesus gave him a lead, an entering wedge for a new religion. Religions are not invented out of nowhere. Paul did not create the Jesus of the New Testament.

Many have tried to place Jesus in the community of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which most people believe to have been an Essene community. The Essenes were in some ways very like Jesus, and in some ways very different. Let me list the similarities and the differences, following Professor Charlesworth.

God was the same for the Essenes and for Jesus. They shared the Hebrew Scriptures as their guiding source. A possible fondness for certain books is particularly interesting. Jesus and the Qumran Scrolls both quote the prophet Isaiah over and over again, and never quote the book of Esther. They seem to have had similar tastes; some pieces of the tradition and not others were important to both of them. They both read the scriptures in an eschatological, Messianic way. The Hebrew Bible was not just a book to be studied, or a law to be obeyed. It was a plan for the future, a plan written in code. Both Jesus and the Essenes were suspicious of the Temple cult. They both shared possessions, exemplified celibacy, and condemned divorce. They both reflect a mood of eschatological expectation, a new covenant for an old people. They breathed the same air of expectation, judgment and hope.

These similarities were striking enough to lead some of the early students of the Scrolls sometimes to identify Jesus with the Teacher of Righteousness and the early Christians with the (putatively) Essene community. But their dissimilarities are at least as important to an impartial observer. Jesus moved in entirely open circles of devotees and opponents while the Qumran community was almost hermetically sealed. They were committed to obey elaborate laws of purity;Jesus hardly credited even the common Jewish norms of purity. He was apparently a kind of missionary; his disciples clearly were, while the Essenes were uninterested in proselytes, since they believed the future lay with them in any case, He spoke in beautifully simple (though sometimes obscure) parables, they in a code, sealed with a thousand seals. They were hierarchical, authoritarian, reclusive. He was the founder of an open, welcoming community. They were predestinarian, basing themselves on an opaque, mystical interpretation of Scripture. He was attempting to open the Torah to existential relevance. Nor did the two agree on angelology, martyrdom, the Sabbath, the calendar or the resurrection of the dead, so far as we can tell.

It is difficult to place Jesus in any of the conventional streams of first century Judaisms. He is said to have debated with the Pharisees, but these proto-rabbis themselves are understood in vastly different ways by modern scholars. Thus, for example, the recent Encyclopedia of Religion, published by the University of Chicago, has two separate articles on the Pharisees, reflecting the different views of Jacob Neusner and Ellis Rivkin - and neither of these views has won widely consensual support. Anyway, many have thought that Jesus himself was a kind of Pharisee, though it seems to me better to think of him as an Am-haarets, a peasant with a genius for religion.

In what way was Jesus unique, or, at least, unusual?

He practiced celibacy and had no family nor did most of his apostles. He took a hard line on divorce, absolutely forbidding it, according to one source. He ignored the strictures on personal purity and went out to lepers and outcasts. He fraternized with sinners and apparently did not require repentance before admitting them to fellowship. He assumed a kind of personal authority that classical Judaism believed had given way to collegiality and debate among Rabbinic authorities. Thus, for example, he revised Sabbath legislation according to his own interpretation of Scripture.

He was said to have healed the sick and (like Elijah and Elisha in earlier times) to have resurrected the dead and given hope to many. It is far from clear whether or not he believed himself to be the promised Messiah, but if he did, he would not be the first Jew (or the last) to claim the title. All of these add up to the image of a somewhat unusual first-century Jew, but clearly one within the bounds of the possible.

The community around Jesus was necessarily stunned by his death, as the Habad Hasidim were by the death of the late Rebbe, who had also given them signs of his own Messiahship. The Nazarenes (or Ebionites) were left with narratives of his life and teaching in a community that had, perhaps loosely, surrounded him. At some time in the first century, they also began to believe that Jesus himself was present among them, and at that point they began to divide from what we used to call (after George Foot Moore) "normative Judaism." A resurrected Messiah is not in the scenario of any Judaism we know until Habad in this decade. But it was probably practice rather than theology that separated the Jewish Christians from their parent community. It was the introduction of uncircumcised non-Jews into the Christian church that finally solidified the separation.

Jews, as I said, have largely ignored Jesus. We have not felt compelled to explain why we "rejected" his claim or why we dissent from Christian views of human nature, Torah as law or the centrality of ethical performance. Some Jews have vilified Jesus (the Toldot Yeshu of the Middle Ages) or disputed that he was predicted by the Prophets or by the sages (in public disputations). Even the anti-rabbinic Karaites polemicized against Christian claims.

Liberal Jews often were the most insistent critics of Christianity, clearly because it could only be theological principles rather than halakhic practice that alienated them from the Church. Otherwise, Jesus as a non-halakhic Jew would have been too close to reformers for comfort. In this century, Joseph Klausner, a secular Zionist whose major field was modern Hebrew literature, wrote pioneering books on the historical Jesus and Paul from a Jewish perspective, books that have fallen into disuse, though successors have arisen in Israel and in the United States to take up a comparative analysis of Jesus in his own time and place. Claude Montefiore's beautiful studies of the gospels have also seen their day, like the Strack-Billerbeck side-by-side comparisons of the New Testament and later rabbinic sources. Martin Buber's brave attempt, in "Two Types of Faith," to salute a Jewish Jesus but to blame Paul for substituting Greek "pistis" (creedal affirmation) for Jewish "emunah" (religious trust) has not captured scholarly consensus either and is deeply resented by many Christians who otherwise respect Buber's religious philosophy.

In an earlier essay on "Jesus and the Jews" published in this journal in the summer of 1993, I concluded my study with a translation of the Alenu prayer which climaxes the Jewish worship service. I finish this conspectus by quoting an earlier and more polemical version of the same prayer, one that censorship later softened, but that shows the bitter rejection of Christianity that our predecessors often felt, in the wake of the church's persecution and calumny. Here is Kaufmann Kohler's translation of that pugnaciously monotheistic text:

It is incumbent upon us to give praise to the Lord of the Universe, to glorify Him who formed creation, for He hath not made us to be like the nations of the lands, nor hath He made us like the families of the earth; He hath not set our portion with theirs, nor our lot with their multitude;...for they prostrate themselves before vanity and folly, and pray to a god who can not help....But we bend the knee and prostrate ourselves and bow down before the King of the Kings of Kings, the Holy One, blessed be He! For it is He who stretched forth the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth, and the seat of His glory is in the heavens above, and His mighty dwelling-place (Shekinah) is in the loftiest heights. "He is our God, and there is none other." In truth, He is our King, there is none besides Him, as it is written in His Torah: "And thou shalt know this day and lay it to thine heart that the Lord is God in heaven above and upon the earth beneath: and there is none other."