My Odyssey in New Testament Interpretation

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Karl Marx, when he was living in Highgate, London, was once asked to address a group of theologians. On his arrival, the meeting place was full of tobacco smoke, and Marx remarked, “Theologians always cloud the issues.” When I remind theologians of this, they invariably reply, “Yes, and you in biblical studies always simplify them.” If this be the case, the object we study, the Bible, is certainly not simple.

The first Bibles I ever saw were bound in black covers—Bible black as a poet called it. They stood out, unattractive and somehow odd and strange. They evoked the cromlechs—the large black stones, or megaliths—that dot so many hills in Great Britain. These black stones originally had a religious purpose. They conveyed the sense of awe and mystery and even terror that early Britons felt surrounded them.

For thousands of Jews and Christians, the Bible has been, and remains, a sacred, numinous, awesome book. Religious Jews believe that in the Bible the eternal has entered into time, the unseen has taken visible form, the unknown has become apparent, the intangible has become tangible in written documents that we can handle. The Law of God has become incarnate in print. For religious Jews, to read the scriptures, and even to quote from them, is to be put in touch with the divine order of being. That is why in Judaism the study of the Hebrew scriptures is worship. It is more important to study them than to obey them, it is said, because without study you will obey them in the wrong way.

But there is another aspect of the Bible that it is even more important to recognize. There are many sacred books, but not so many canonical books; that is, books that have been elevated by a religious community to be the rule of its life and faith, the authoritative source of its thinking and the ground of its identity—its foundation documents, as it were. Jewish identity and continuity are bound up with the scriptures. Jews are the people of the Book; the Bible, the book of a people.

The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of Christians. And because the Bible is the canonical authority for Jews and, through them, for Christians, it has exerted an immense influence on the life of Western Europe. European culture has its ancient roots in Egypt, Greece and Rome, but one of its chief sources is a book—the Bible. By today, the influence of that book has become worldwide.

Because of its sacred and canonical status, then, the Bible deserves attention: it is there, a black 011block, a megalith we cannot ignore. Millions are content simply to feel its strange presence, to recognize its sanctity and to treat it with awe. But they reject any intellectual engagement with it. For them, biblical criticism is impious. But this is to confuse reverence with obscurantism and piety with ignorance. We prefer to follow Plato: The unexamined life is not worth living, and to accept the unexamined book is unacceptable.

But how are we to examine it? There are four gulfs that separate us from the Bible.

First, there is the gulf of geography. I remember a book beginning with the words: “Hell is hot. Did you ever wonder why?” The reason given was that hell is a biblical concept, and since the Bible was written in the Near East, where the sun can burn one up and cause pain, hell was pictured as hot. In the Norse sagas, by contrast, hell is icily cold, because the Scandinavians find their enemy in snow and ice and cold. Dubious as all this may be, it points to a truth. Geographic factors do enter into our engagement with the Bible—the Bible belongs geographically to an alien Near Eastern world that we are required to enter if we wish to understand the Book. This geographic gulf is not now as serious as it once was. Modern photography and archaeology and travel literature have made us more familiar with the Middle East. The geographic strangeness of the Bible has been diminished, but it is still real.

The second gulf is the gulf of language. Languages are media of communication, but also of division. Do you recall your first visit to France, or Germany, or any country where English was not spoken? Even within one language there are problems in understanding: The United States and England, George Bernard Shaw once said, are separated by the same language. The Hebrew scriptures were written—apart from a few Aramaic passages—in Hebrew, a language which at that time was especially fitted for visions and prophecy, and especially for poetry. It was much less suited for abstract philosophical and scientific thought. The New Testament is written in common, or Koine, Greek, the Greek largely of the market place and the street. Simpler to understand than Classical Greek, one would expect, but, because it is influenced by Semitisms and Latinisms, presenting its own problems.

Can we ever fully understand another language? There are excellent translations of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, but translation is always a betrayal to some extent. Before I came to the United States, I served on the executive committee for the Bible translation called the New English Bible (NEB). The late Professor C. H. Dodd was the director. After 13 years, the translation was completed. Dodd had to prepare the preface to the translation. He had closed a rough draft of it by saying that “translation is an impossible art.” Members of the committee objected to the adjective “impossible.” Dodd did me the honor of asking me whether he should change it. We were both bilingual and knew that the adjective was justified. The adjective “impossible” remains in the preface. Every translation is only an approximation. Can we transcend the gulf of language? To some degree, yes. But how far?

Thirdly, there is perhaps an even greater gulf—the gulf of time. Even in one generation we become strangers. How many fathers understand their sons; how many mothers their daughters? How much more difficult to understand people whom we know only through documents written thousands of years ago, in a strange land and in strange languages. There is not only a generation gap, but a generations gap. And the acceleration of the pace of change in our time has made cultural change ever more inescapable. London in 1800 was more like London in 100 than London today. Can we enter into the minds of people living thousands of years ago?

The combined result of all these gulfs leads to the fourth gulf, which we can put as a question. To what extent is it possible for a people of one culture to enter into the minds of people of another culture?

Despite the difficulties, one can, nevertheless, to some degree enter the world of the Bible.¹ The task of the Bible student is to enter that world and bring back from it what he finds: He must go there and back again.

At this point the question of how to go there, how to enter the biblical world, becomes crucial. The approach one takes to any phenomenon 012determines to a large extent what one sees. I remember, on entering New York from the sea on board the now-scrapped S.S. Britannica, seeing a city of skyscrapers glittering and shimmering in the sun. Manhattan seemed a fairyland. Later, I came to New York overland by car from the New Jersey side, past miles of dreary houses and black, belching factories. I saw the seamier, darker side of the city; it seemed a wasteland. I got two very different views.

How can we best approach the Bible? Here I shall indicate the way I have tried to follow, confining myself to the New Testament.

Modern critical scholarship of the New Testament began about the end of the 18th century in Europe during the Enlightenment, the movement that aimed at replacing faith with reason. The approach scholars took was predictable. First, since the New Testament was a Greek document, the view was natural that the main instrument for examining it would be Classical Greek. This was also very convenient because most biblical/ theological scholars were then trained in the Latin and Greek Classics; it was naturally tempting for them to use their Classical skills in their biblical studies. In short, most biblical scholars looked at the New Testament through Greek colored spectacles and, of course, what they tended to see was very Greek. Many found parallels to the teaching of Jesus in the Greek philosophers; they regarded Paul as a devotee of the Hellenistic Mystery religions and viewed the Fourth Gospel (John) and the Epistle to the Hebrews as imbued with something like the Hellenistic philosophy of Philo of Alexandria. I am drawing all this in broad black-and-white strokes, but not false ones.

New Testament scholarship in Britain, until as late as the 1930s, was dominated by the Greek, or Hellenistic, approach. For example, the great Cambridge Three—J. B. Lightfoot, B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Holt—were first and foremost, although not exclusively, scholars of Greek. Although they tried admirably to be objective and fair to their sources, they, nevertheless, wore both English and Greek-colored spectacles. The strange elements they found in the New Testament that would not submit to the more-or-less rational and congenial Greek categories were relegated to unimportance and treated largely as a primitive vestige from secondary elements in early Christianity. These vestiges were primarily an embarrassment. For example, the kingdom of God—a standard Jewish phrase—was interpreted to mean simply society organized by love. Its revolutionary, eschatological^a dimension was sidestepped: The Gospel, according to some scholars, was the proclamation, centering on Jesus, of the Love of God and the brotherhood of man. This was the essence of Jesus’ teaching. And just as Jesus was turned into a refined Socrates or Plato, with touches of Francis of Assisi, or a sensitive English gentleman (except that he had no bowler hat and umbrella), so Paul—the fiery enfant terrible of early Christianity—was draped in Hellenistic mysticism, tinged and somewhat emasculated with Stoic philosophy. For Greek trained New Testament scholars, almost everything in the New Testament was suffused with a Greek light.

It was not only these scholars’s Greek training that led to this. For 19 centuries, with very rare exceptions, it had become customary to set Christianity over against Judaism as its antithesis. The Hebrew scriptures—which are never called the Old Testament in the New Testament—came to be called that. Implicitly the Old Testament was superseded by the new scriptures. The Old Testament stood for the law of God the judge over against the gospel of grace, of Christ the Son. Medieval Christendom relegated the People of the Book to the ghetto, and when the Reformation came, alas, the antithetical attitude towards Judaism, largely under Luther’s influence, became even more marked: The religion of law had to be superseded by the religion of grace, as if law and grace could not coexist.

Later, when historical criticism was applied to the Old Testament in the 19th century, this antithetical approach, which set the Old Testament against the New Testament, invaded the results of the new scholarship. The later history 013of the Jews was seen as one of decline to the aridity and banality of the law after the heights reached during the time of the prophets.

It is easy to caricature all this, and I do not wish to exaggerate, but it is fair to say that modern historical criticism until very recently did little to reveal any essential affinity between the New Testament and the Old Testament. Instead it concentrated on their differences. In this way, early historical criticism indirectly reinforced those scholars who thought of the New Testament in rather exclusively Greek terms.

Another reason for the preference for the Greek approach is seldom noticed. Paradoxically, it was the very movement called the Enlightenment, which elevated Reason with a capital R to supremacy and sought uniformity in all spheres, that reinforced an older approach in biblical studies. In countless directions the Enlightenment had immensely beneficial results; I would be the last to deny this. But in the biblical sphere, the Enlightenment helped to reinforce prejudice. For the Enlightenment, truth was universal: Truth is truth everywhere and for all peoples. What is not true for one is not true for another. What is truth for one is truth for all. There can be no particular truth given to anyone particular people or person, no individual truth. The notion that there is one Chosen People—the Jews—to whom has been given the truth—and a special truth—was anathema. In the universalism and uniformity at which the Enlightenment aimed, the Jews as a Chosen People with a special revelation had no place. Some have found a connection between this Enlightenment view and the persecutions of the 20th century. Some have suggested that Voltaire, the high priest of the Enlightenment, is in some ways the father of Hitler. But, in any case, the Enlightenment reinforced a pro-Greek stance among biblical scholars.

All these factors made it difficult for New Testament scholars—and Old Testament scholars—in the late 19th century to see the obvious. As a result, the Jesus of 19th century scholarship is largely Platonized; and Paul, John and the Letter to the Hebrews are Hellenized. This situation prevailed—although there were indications of a coming change, a few swallows before the summer—until the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.

Then a German scholar and a Swiss scholar dropped a bombshell into the world of New Testament studies. The German scholar was Johannes Weiss and the Swiss scholar was Albert Schweitzer. They convincingly demonstrated that the most significant words and concepts in the New Testament must be understood in terms of Jewish apocalyptic^b sources and eschatological thinking. Terms like the resurrection, kingdom of God, the son of man, the son of God, the judgment, justification, even Wisdom, were best to be understood in terms of Jewish literature and tradition, which had by New Testament times concentrated on the end of history in eschatology.

The evidence to which Weiss and Schweitzer appealed is so obvious to us now that one cannot imagine why it took so long to find it out. But it is the obvious that most easily eludes us.

Was the new thinking soon accepted? Not quite, even though it was obvious and even though the evidence produced by Weiss and Schweitzer could not be denied, it could be sidestepped and reinterpreted. In Britain there was a polite unease and awkwardness: Could British classicist New Testament scholars believe that Jesus of Nazareth was an apocalyptic, wild-eyed fanatic convinced that the end of the world was at the door and that by dying he would bring it on? Could the Jesus of Albert Schweitzer—surely a deluded Jesus—be the object of New Testament faith? Scholars—not only in Britain—did their best to reject or qualify all this. My own revered teacher, Professor C. H. Dodd, for example, who was essentially a Platonist, hardly ever referred to Schweitzer and implicity rejected his new evidence by re-Platonizing Jesus.

This was the situation even into the 1930s. But by then a serious question had been raised against what we may call the Christian-Classical alliance. At that time, several themes converged to 014convince me that this still predominant and almost exclusively Hellenistic approach to the New Testament had to be abandoned. First, I read the Greek New Testament itself. I came to it after years of immersion in Classical Greek and Semitic studies. Most of it I found easy to read. But to my amazement when I came to the Gospel of John, the so-called Fourth Gospel, I found it extremely difficult to translate, although I had been taught that it was the most Greek of all the Gospels. Its vocabulary is almost ridiculously simple. “I am the bread of life,” “I am the light of the world,” etc. Why, then, was it so difficult? It was because its prepositions and connecting terms and phrases, its relative pronouns particularly, were so awkward. But I discovered that, if these were translated into their Aramaic or Hebrew equivalents, they often made sense. I became convinced that what was in the scholarly mind the most Greek of the Gospels was in fact Semitic in its syntax and style. The Gospel of John was a Semitic document, it seemed to me, written in Greek. But, if so, what of the other New Testament documents? Could this be true of other parts of the New Testament as well?

About this same time, I was also reading in the literature of the Pharisees—the Mishnah (an authoritative collection of rabbinic legal discussions compiled around 200 A.D.) and other sources—and it became clearer and clearer that this literature was the product of the kind of world out of which much of the New Testament came. It was far nearer to the world reflected in the New Testament than were the Classical Greek and Hellenistic sources and illumined it more.

Thirdly, it was my good fortune at this time to come to know two extraordinary persons in England. One was a neighbor, an Anglican priest living in the small village of Barley in East Anglia, who had the finest private library of Judaica in the entire country and who did more to make his country aware of anti-Semitisim than any person I know—James W. Parkes². The other person was a Jewish refugee from Germany, Dr. (now Professor) David Daube, who at that time was Reader of Roman Law at Caius College, Cambridge. Daube became my tutor because, as an Orthodox Jew, he was intensely committed to Judaism and, at the same time, he was interested in Christian beginnings. Parkes and Daube compelled me to ask why Jews had suffered so much at the hands of Christendom; it was the time of Hitler. Contact with them, always immensly stimulating, gave me courage to pursue my hunch—now a conviction—about the essentially Jewish nature of many of the documents of the New Testament despite their Greek dress. (I must add that at the time I was unaware of all this and simply pursued my sources. One is not always aware of the Zeitgeist within which one works nor of the direct influences upon one.)³

Lastly, there was an archaeological discovery that, a little later, helped to redirect New Testament studies in the direction of a greater emphasis on its Jewish background—the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These were not as utterly revolutionary as was claimed at the time of their discovery. (Every new brush is thought to sweep clean.) But they did reveal certain aspects of Judaism that had hitherto been hidden or overlooked. The similarity of much in the scrolls, written in Hebrew, with much In the New Testament could not be denied. It became even clearer that the ark of the New Testament floated on Jewish waters.

The conviction that this was the right direction to follow led me to concentrate first on Paul. Paul had been pictured as the one who had taken the simple Palestinian Gospel of Jesus and transformed it into an elaborate Hellenistic Mystery religion, and who had attacked the law of Judaism. My method was to take the main elements in Paul’s thought—the concepts of the flesh, of sin, the people of Israel, Wisdom, the spirit, the death of Christ as sacrifice, the resurrection—and place all these, first, over against Hellenistic sources and, then, over against Semitic, Hebraic-rabbinic sources. In each case I was able to prove to my satisfaction that it was the latter that most illumined Paul. I expressed my conclusions with far more reserve than I could have, simply stating that many aspects of Paulinism previously labeled Hellenistic were better understood as Pharisaic. Despite the difficulties presented by the rabbinic sources, I was able to bring light to much in Paul that had 015previously been obscure.

Then another very different character attracted me—the person who wrote the first Gospel, the Gospel of Matthew. Few documents have been more influential in Christian history than the Gospel of Matthew, partly because of its priority of place in the New Testament canon. But few documents have been more elusive. We do not know who the author was and there is much debate still as to whether he was a gentile or a Jewish-Christian. I am convinced that he was a Jewish-Christian who wrote good Greek—not a rare phenomenon in die first century. I ventured to examine the Sermon on the Mount from the Pharisaic point of view. I can easily illustrate the kind of thing that emerges from this study. Making the assumption that Matthew was written toward the end of the first century, I asked what contemporary movements were likely to have impinged on him. The time was after the failed Revolt of the Jews against the Romans. In 70 A.D. Jerusalem was a city in ruins, the Jews were scattered, some sold into slavery. Palestine was desolate. The survival of Judaism seemed to be in jeopardy. So the Sages—the leaders of the Pharisees—along with some other Jews, gathered, some say at a place called Jamnia (Yavneh), to rescue Judaism from extinction. They probably fixed the number of books that Jews were to regard as authoritative (canonical), they ordained persons authorized to teach the Law and expound it (the Rabbis), and they established a calender for 016all Jews everywhere. What we call Rabbinic Judaism came into being like a phoenix from the ashes of the Revolt.

In the light of this background, I suggested that Matthew’s gospel, and particularly his Sermon on the Mount, was in part a reaction to Jamnia—a Christian response to it. The process that led to the codification of the Mishnah coincided with, and in a parallel way led to, the formation of the Gospel of Matthew.

I will illustrate this with only one point. The Sermon on the Mount has often been exaggeratedly praised as a piece of literature. It has many sparkling gems—individual sayings that are unforgettable—but their setting and arrangement has always been a problem. From a purely literary point of view, the Sermon on the Mount has always been very difficult to classify. But its arrangement is probably governed by Pharisaic tradition. In one of the tractates in the Mishnah we read: “On three things the world rests: Torah [the Law], Worship, and Deeds of social service [kindness].” This famous triad was in the air when the Pharisees were reorganizing at Jamnia, and Matthew, who was standing alongside that reorganization, used this triad, I believe, in arranging the Sermon or the Mount. He begins with Torah (5:17 ff.), moves on to true worship (6:1 ff.) and, finally, to deeds of kindness (7:7 ff.). The parallel is not exact, but it is sufficiently close to be plausible. In other ways, its seems to me, Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount is a kind of Christian counterpart to the Mishnah.⁴

When I had finished my study of the Sermon on the Mount, something happened that led me to a more specifically theological aspect of the relations between Judaism and the New Testament. Just before the Six Day War in 1967, I received a desperate letter from a distinguished Professor of Talmud at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Professor Ephraim E. Urbach. Dr. Urbach asked me to send a letter to The New York Times, in support of the Israeli cause and to get others to do likewise, which in due course I did. However, his letter was couched in religious language—Urbach is an Orthodox Jew. He quoted the scriptures to prove that Jews had a divine right to the Land of Israel. He assumed that as a Christian who had read the Hebrew scriptures, I would agree with him and that a New Testament student would automatically lend his support to the Israeli cause. I realized with a pang that despite my immersion in Judaism I had not paid attention at all to one of its peculiar emphases: The belief that there is an eternal connection between the God of Israel, the People of Israel and the Land of Israel. As one Jewish scholar had put it: “Judaism is a fortunate blend of a land, a people and God.” I was driven to consider this important doctrine of Judaism which, partly at least, is at the root of the conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis in the Middle East. I assume that this doctrine of an eternal connection between people and land rooted in a Divine Promise must have engaged early Christians who wrote the New Testament. But what did they make of it? Did they dismiss it, did they spiritualize it, did they transcendentalize it or did they—at least some of them—accept it? How do Christians in the New Testament view the Land of Israel? Finding the answer to this question was very difficult. So is the correlative question. If you accept this territorial doctrine of Judaism, what of the claims of others besides Jews who live in the land and who have lived there for centuries?⁵

I hope that I have said enough to show that during the last 50 years there has emerged what is in effect a silent revolution in our approach to the New Testament. To put it in a nutshell, the New Testament has been increasingly re-Judaized.

But there has naturally been a reaction to all this. In abandoning the predominantly Greek approach in favor of the Semitic, have we gone too far? Martin Luther once said that, as a group, human beings (and scholars belong to that category) are like a drunken peasant mounted on a donkey: If you push the person up when he falls on the left, he will fall down to the right; and if you push him up on the right, he will fall to the left. I was aware of this danger and, in fact, began my work on Paul by insisting that by the first century, Palestine, the home of the Jews, had already been for three centuries under direct Hellenistic influence, so that any neat division between what was Hellenistic and what was 017Semitic had to be rejected. The Pharisees have now turned out to be Hellenized and the rabbinic methods have turned out to be Aristotelian; Aristotle was the father of Rabbi Akiba. Out of the criticism of the old Hellenistic approach, there is emerging not simply a greater emphasis on the Jewish element, but also a recognition of the interpenetration, not the identity, of the Hellenistic and the Semitic. We have further begun to recognize that the Jews of the first century are not only Semitic, but also Mediterranean. The clear cut dichotomies or divisions between the Hellenistic and the Hebraic or Semitic are no longer acceptable. We now recognize more and more that to some extent by the first century Hellenism itself had been Hebraized and Judaism itself Hellenized. There are now also other dichotomies that the scholarship of the last 50 years has questioned—those between Pharisaic and Apocalyptic thought, and between Law and Gospel.

There is one other aspect of Judaism that we have recently learned to appreciate more fully. Especially since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it has become clear that before 70 A.D., in the time of Jesus, there was not one monolithic Judaism but many forms of Judaism. To understand such figures as Jesus and Paul, we have to ask not simply what was their relation to Judaism, but to which form of Judaism. In a sense, there were many Judaisms.

But you will be asking, what has all this to do with the significance of the New Testament? Is it important whether we think of it primarily as a Greek or Semitic document? I think it is, for many reasons. Let me remind you that the Bible has been the determinative canonical volume for the thinking of both the Jewish and Christian communities, and because these impinge in countless ways on the life of the world we live in, the way in which this canonical volume is interpreted becomes a matter of great importance. I shall mention three areas to illustrate this—three instances in which a Hellenistic interpretation of the New Testament may well have had an extraordinary influence on history.

The most obvious is that of the relationship between Jew and Gentile. History has been marred and stained by the absurdity and horror of anti-Semitism, partly—but only partly—because of our interpretation of the New Testament as a Greek document. This helped to create a climate within which anti-Judaism and later anti-Semitism became possible. Many of us have regarded Christianity as a new religion that superseded its mother religion, Judaism, and left it behind. Even Arnold Toynbee thought of Judaism as a fossilized form of religion. But the approach to the New Testament through Jewish eyes helps to correct this. Christianity in the New Testament is not a new, distinct religion over against Judaism, but a new interpretation of Judaism in the light of Christ. It does not abandon Judaism but rather absorbs it, so that the substructure of Christianity remains Jewish. Judaism, in other words, is not “before” Christianity, something that Christians have left behind, but rather somehow within it, something that Christians carry along with them. To recognize this essential continuity between the two faiths is a basis for mutual respect and engagement.

There is another area in which, some have suggested, the Hellenistic misinterpretation of the New Testament has had dire consequences—in the realm of politics and political theory. One of the major developments in 20th-century political life has been the emergence and development of Marxism. This occurred within Christendom. How could this happen? Marxism began in Germany and flourished in Russia, where Christian communities had been most Hellenized. Marxism, it is often claimed, arose in protest against a Hellenized form of Christianity that had forsaken its Jewish roots. In this view Marx was the unwitting heir of the Hebrew prophets who had been submerged and forgotten in a Christianity that had substituted individual piety and mystic absorption for social justice. Christianity, in this view, transferred interest from the proper ordering of society in this world, with which Judaism is concerned, to preparation for another world that promised riches and revelation in the sky as compensation for poverty and pain on earth. The communal, social and ethical concerns of Judaism, which Christianity had inherited, had been diluted and even abandoned by an increasingly Hellenized church. Thus Christianity had become the opium of the people and itself helped produce its own antithesis in a Marxism which developed into a kind of secular Jewish messianism—a religion that has its Messiahs in Marx and Lenin, its holy book in Das Kapital, its priesthood in the elite members of the Communist Party and its Kingdom of God in the hoped-for classless society of the future.

Thirdly, the claim has been made—and not only by Jews—that much of the permissiveness, moral confusion and legal nihilism of our time is a reaction to two factors:

(1) To a Hellenized asceticism paradoxically nurtured in a Puritanism that has misinterpreted the Hebrew scriptures. (True, there are some ascetic strands in Jewish apocalyptic thought that 018contributed to this, but only to a minor extent).

(2) To the alleged opposition between Gospel and Law, as if Law were a pariah, as it came to be viewed in much of the Protestant tradition of the West.

All this you will rightly claim is very speculative, and it is always dangerous to indulge in large, unprovable generalizations, although I do find much in them that is worthy of serious consideration. You will also rightly object that I have not pointed to the other side: the emphasis on newness in Christianity, its discontinuity with both Judaism and Hellenism. This question of newness, and the precise relation of the new to the old, I have deliberately ignored; it will have to await another occasion, although I am fully aware that for first century Jews and Christians the Gospel spelled “modernity;” it welcomed newness.

What, then, is the little harvest from what I have tried to say? It is simply this: that Judaism and Christianity need not be in opposition; that Christianity is not an anti-Judaic phenomenon, but itself, in its origin, a particular form of Messianic Judaism; that both Judaism and Christianity belong to the same family, so that the tension that inevitably exists between them need not develop into an antithesis.

I call it a little harvest because in 20 centuries since Jesus lived much has happened between Jews and Christians. So much, indeed, that merely to appeal to origins is not likely to allay mutual suspicions and distrust nor to counteract the horrors and distortions of history. Alas, history is in the saddle and rides us too much. But this little harvest may further help, however feebly, to initiate a new direction, a correction of misrepresentations and misinterpretations. To turn this small harvest into a full harvest will be the endless task facing the next generation. To encourage that generation as I myself have been encouraged, I quote the words of the rabbinic tractate Pirke Aboth (Sayings of the Fathers): “It is not given to you to complete the task, but also it is not given to you to desist from the task” of wrestling with the scriptures. The task of biblical interpretation is ongoing from generation to generation.

Karl Marx, when he was living in Highgate, London, was once asked to address a group of theologians. On his arrival, the meeting place was full of tobacco smoke, and Marx remarked, “Theologians always cloud the issues.” When I remind theologians of this, they invariably reply, “Yes, and you in biblical studies always simplify them.” If this be the case, the object we study, the Bible, is certainly not simple. The first Bibles I ever saw were bound in black covers—Bible black as a poet called it. They stood out, unattractive and somehow odd and strange. They evoked the […]