Multiple Judaisms

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The subject of this article—from Judaism to Judaisms—is not only about names, but about ways of looking at things. For nearly two thousand years both Jews and Christians have looked at Judaism as a single fixed thing—a kind of point.

Paradoxically, each religious community had reasons to adhere to this image. For oppressed Jews, this model served to emphasize their enduring fidelity to an ancient and unaltered tradition. In Christian-Jewish polemics, Jews identified Christianity as totally separate from Judaism. Triumphant Christians, on the other hand, argued for the absolute newness and uniqueness of Jesus of Nazareth—to support the contention that Christianity replaced an outmoded, sclerotic religion.

These different perspectives characterized not only early polemics and medieval theological conflicts, but extended well into modern times. Christian scholars defined the period between what they called the “Old” and the “New” Testament as the “intertestamental” period—a last, degenerative phase of the one Judaism.¹ This period provided a background against which the new faith fought and triumphed. For Jewish historians, however, the Second Temple period was simply an anonymous segment in the long history of the one Judaism.²

It took the Second World War and the Holocaust to change things. Even the most insulated consciences were affected. Although post-war Christian scholarship took a less derogatory approach to Judaism, the model of the one, single Judaism persisted, however, with only its most polemical traits eliminated. Christian and Jewish scholars continued to share the view that Pharisees represented “normative” Judaism of the Second Temple period, while the other forms of Judaism were simply “sects.”³

From this perspective, Jesus’ Jewishness seemed largely irrelevant. That he was born and lived a Jew was incidental. 039Recognizing the Jewishness of Jesus would implicitly have deprived him of his Christian element.⁴ If Judaism included Jesus, it could not—and presumably did not—include his teaching, his preaching, or his movement. When the one Christianity emerged, it was no longer a Jewish phenomenon. This was the inevitable result of defining Judaism and Christianity as entirely different ideological entities, which could only be compared in terms of opposition.

The legacy of this model of a single Judaism (totally separate from Christianity) still influences religious thought and underlies the entire structure of modern scholarship. In our universities and seminaries, Christian and Judaic studies remain two distinct, often non-communicating areas of study. Each requires different training and each addresses a different audience. Ancient confessional biases are sometimes unfortunately embedded in this framework.

Beginning in the 1970s, however, Judaism was no longer seen as a monolith, but as a developing, evolving religion with different stages in its history. As Shaye Cohen states, “The shift from Second Temple Judaism to Rabbinic Judaism was not a mere chronological transition but a substantive change…Judaism changed dramatically during the Persian, Hellenistic, Maccabean, Roman and Rabbinic periods.”⁵ The unity of Judaism is now demonstrated not by an unchanged ideological system, but by gradual, though consistent, evolution from one ideological system to the next. Instead of a point, we have a line. This new scholarly perspective stresses the continuity of Jewish tradition in terms of evolution.

This new approach was reflected in a change in terminology, as well. Previously, in the monolithic period, Judaism of the Second Temple period had been called “Intertestamental Judaism” or “Late Judaism,” in contrast to the floruit of the Judaism of the Bible and the Prophets. In these terms, Second Temple Judaism was the last degenerative phase of Judaism before the advent of Christianity. In the evolutionary model, the terminology changed. What had been called “Late Judaism” became “Early Judaism.” In this evolutionary model, Early Judaism evolved from the Israelite religion of the Bible and looks forward toward “Rabbinic Judaism,” the next stage. With this new terminology, “Early Judaism” became contemporaneous with the birth of Christianity. The same adjective could then be used in both cases: Early Judaism 040was contemporaneous with Early Christianity, thus emphasizing the close parallelism between the two. As Early Christianity was the first stage of Christian tradition, Early Judaism defined a period within Jewish tradition that was the beginning of something no less new and fresh: Rabbinic Judaism.⁶

The new model offers a framework for comparing Judaism and Christianity without the necessity of absolute opposition, yet without denying their profound differences. They are two distinct ideological traditions, two divergent chains that happened to share one link in their evolving, but unitary histories. One particular link, among the many, in the chain of Jewish tradition became the first link of developing Christian tradition.

This evolutionary model allows us to consider Jesus and his early followers as belonging to both the Jewish and the Christian tradition. From this historical viewpoint, the Jewishness of Christianity lasted long enough to support the claim that Jesus and his followers were entirely Jewish and, at the same time, were the creators of a new religion that would flourish out of and outside of Judaism. In the words of Lawrence Schiffman, the study of Second Temple Judaism enables us to understand “by what complex events and developments the Judaism of the Bible became that of the Talmud [i.e., Rabbinic Judaism]…[and] at the same time to understand how this Judaism serves as a backdrop and a background for an understanding of the rise of Christianity and early Christianity.”⁷

Likewise, the French scholar André Paul speaks of Second Temple Judaism as “something with a double face [une chose ambiguë]. It can be seen as ‘proto-Judaism’ [more precisely, proto-Rabbinic Judaism] or ‘proto-Christianity’ depending on which face is observed.”⁸

The recognition is now widespread that it is impossible to understand early Christianity apart from Judaism, or first-century Judaism apart from early Christianity. “Christianity arose among the Jews—it was once a part of Judaism,” says Hebrew University professor David Flusser. “Therefore if you want to analyze Christian origins, you have to study ancient Judaism. A researcher of early Christianity also must be a creative scholar in Judaism.”⁹ Conversely, specialists in early Judaism are now expected to have some competence in early Christianity.

In recent years, however, a more nuanced model has emerged. More and more scholars are realizing that differences among Judaic groups and ideologies cannot be adequately described as nuances within one normative system, or as the result of an evolutionary process that multiplied choices before selecting the predominant one. A fundamental characteristic of Judaism is its fragmentary nature—a plurality of groups, movements, and traditions of thought that have coexisted in a complex, dialectic relationship.

The most insightful pioneer of this new model is Jacob Neusner. While earlier scholars saw Judaism as a point, and more recent ones as a line, Neusner describes Judaism as a set of parallel systems in competition: “Whether we deal with a long period of time, such as a millennium, or a brief period of just a few centuries, the picture is the same…Judaisms flourished side by side. Or they took place in succession to one another. Or they came into being out of all relationship with one another.”¹⁰

Neusner has concerned himself primarily with the history of one of the many ancient Judaisms: Rabbinic Judaism, what he calls Judaism of the dual Torah—the written Torah (Scripture) and the oral Torah (Rabbinic literature, principally the Talmud). Neusner touches upon Christianity only incidentally. Yet Neusner’s definition of Judaism would seem to fit not only Rabbinic Judaism, but Christianity as well: “When a religious system appeals as an important part of its authoritative literature or canon to the Hebrew Scriptures of ancient Israel, or Old Testament, we have a Judaism.”¹¹

Neusner describes one analogy between Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity as follows:

While the world at large treats Judaism as “the religion of the Old Testament,” the fact is otherwise. Judaism inherits and makes the Hebrew Scriptures its own, just as does Christianity. But just as Christianity rereads the entire heritage of ancient Israel in light of “the resurrection of Jesus Christ,” so Judaism understands the Hebrew Scriptures as only one part, the written one, of the “one whole Torah of Moses, our rabbi.” Ancient Israel no more testified to the oral Torah, now written down in the Misnah^a and later rabbinic writings, than it did to Jesus 041as the Christ. In both cases, religious circles within Israel of later antiquity reread the entire past in light of their own conscience and convictions.¹²

Scholars now tend to place Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity on the same level as legitimate heirs of ancient Judaism. Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism grew out of the same soil and were formed at the same time. Each developed a normative system only from the second century C.E. onwards. Prior to that they were only two of the many Judaisms competing for supremacy or simply survival. “Palestinian Judaism was neither dormant nor orthodox,” says James Charlesworth. “It was vibrantly alive…There were not four sects, but at least a dozen groups and many subgroups. We should not think in terms of a monolithic first-century Palestinian Judaism; we contemplate…a variety of pre-70 Judaisms.”¹³

Many Second Temple Judaisms did not survive—the Essenes and the Sadduccees among them. The rabbis shared the victory of survival with another Jewish group—the Christians. As the Italian scholar Paolo Sacchi has recently pointed out, “the birth of Christianity did not mean the decline of Judaism, nor did the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism deprive Christianity of its Jewish roots.”¹⁴ Rabbinic origins paralleled Christian origins and the parting of the ways between these two varieties of pre-70 Judaism was a long and gradual process.¹⁵

The blood-tie relationship between Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity is thus not a parent-child relation; the latter was not born from the former. The two are more like “fraternal twins,” born of the same womb. As Alan Segal has written: “The time of Jesus marks the beginning of not one but two great religions of the West, Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity…As brothers often do, they picked different, even opposing ways to preserve their family’s heritage…Rabbinic Judaism maintains that it has preserved the traditions of Israel…Christianity maintains that it is the new Israel, preserving the intentions of Israel’s prophets. Because of the two religions’ overwhelming similarities and in spite of their great areas of difference, both statements are true.”¹⁶

Segal’s words are a strong call for the emancipation of historical research from the theological concerns that gave birth to the single Judaism model and which were not totally removed by the evolutionary model. The debate over whether Rabbinic Judaism or Christianity is the more authentic outgrowth of ancient Judaism (that is, which is “the true Israel”) originated in confessional polemics. In terms of Judaisms (plural), however, this debate no longer makes any sense. The Christian and the Rabbinic systems of thought are indeed distinct and always were. They were and are equally innovative, too. Christians reinterpreted the Old Testament in light of the New Testament. The Rabbis transformed the Hebrew Bible into the written side of the dual Torah revealed to Moses on Sinai.

Christians turned Judaism into a multinational religion; the Rabbis strengthened the idea of Judaism as the religion of the Jewish people. Christians reread the ancient Jewish scriptures typologically, as evidence of the eternal and preexistent Christ; the Rabbis developed from the same literature a normative corpus of written and oral Laws as evidence of the eternal and preexistent Torah.

“Does this mean,” asks James Dunn, “that in the last analysis Christianity and Judaism are two quite different kinds of religion, whose overlapping history and features are incidental and tangential? Or rather that each has to recognize the other as in some way constitutive of its own identity? The fact that both Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism share significant degrees of both continuity and discontinuity, with the formative period of late Second Temple Judaism important to both, encourages me to say ‘No’ to the first question and ‘Yes’ to the second.”¹⁷

From the viewpoint of an historian of religion, Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity are simply different outgrowths of ancient Judaism.¹⁸

38 The subject of this article—from Judaism to Judaisms—is not only about names, but about ways of looking at things. For nearly two thousand years both Jews and Christians have looked at Judaism as a single fixed thing—a kind of point. Paradoxically, each religious community had reasons to adhere to this image. For oppressed Jews, this model served to emphasize their enduring fidelity to an ancient and unaltered tradition. In Christian-Jewish polemics, Jews identified Christianity as totally separate from Judaism. Triumphant Christians, on the other hand, argued for the absolute newness and uniqueness of Jesus of Nazareth—to support the […]