The Jewishness of Jesus

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In 1906, Albert Schweitzer, the Alsatian physician, musician, philosopher and biblical exegete who spent 40 years of his life in central Africa ministering to the poor and sick, published a widely influential book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Schweitzer reviewed the history of scholarly efforts to extricate the historical Jesus from layers of theological tradition that had grown up about his life, and concluded not only that the scholars had failed to recover the historical Jesus but that the task was impossible. This conclusion, however, did not stop Schweitzer from offering his own reconstruction of Jesus as an eschatological^a visionary. Nor did the quest end with Schweitzer.

In recent years the quest for the historical Jesus has been taken up again—but with a new shape. In the 1950s and 1960s, Christian theologians, especially in Germany, embarked on a “new quest” that focused on Jesus’ consciousness and basic teachings. In the 1970s and 1980s, interest has shifted to the Jewishness of Jesus.

Central to this renewed interest in recovering the historical Jesus is an effort to understand Jesus as a first-century Palestinian Jew, to understand him in terms of the Jewish world in which he lived and died—in short, to understand the Jewishness of Jesus.

Part of the impetus for this resurgent concern with the Jewishness of Jesus comes from the newly available materials on which such a study can be based—most notably the Dead Sea Scrolls recovered in the late 1940s and early 1950s in caves in the Wadi Qumran. All of a sudden we have access to the library of a Jewish religious community organized along quasi-monastic lines preparing itself for the coming of. God’s kingdom.

The Qumran discoveries soon led to a full-scale review of other evidence for Second Temple Judaism. Among the documents found in the Qumran library,¹ in addition to the sect’s own literature, were some books of the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: 1 Enoch, Jubilees and the Testaments of the Patriarchs. The Qumran copies of these books authenticated the early date of composition of this extra-biblical Jewish literature—or at least of those parts of the books found in the Qumran caves. These books had previously been known only in later copies.

The Qumran community itself was quickly and correctly identified as a community of Essenes, but the documents in the Essene library were not all composed by the Essenes. Other Jewish groups apparently lay behind some works.

This, of course, led to a renewed interest in the once-neglected study of the Old Testament 034Pseudepigrapha. In recent years the study of the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha has been enriched by ample bibliographic resources, critical editions of texts, new translations in various languages and reliable introductions.² This wealth of scholarly resources has added an immense new body of material for the study of Second Temple Judaism in its rich diversity.

An examination of the Jewishness of Jesus has also been encouraged by recent salutary developments in Christian-Jewish relations. The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions declared:³

“Since the spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews is thus so great, this sacred Synod wishes to foster and recommend that mutual understanding which is the fruit above all of biblical and theological studies, of brotherly dialogues”

These words led many Catholics, especially in the United States where the largest Jewish community in the world lives and where Judaism is the most prominent non-Christian religion, to explore the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. This movement within Catholicism in turn has lent renewed vigor to already existing Protestant-Jewish efforts at mutual understanding. This too has led to a renascence of interest in the Jewishness of a Jesus.

But, alas, for all this renewed interest, it cannot yet be said that we have made great progress in terms of a scholarly consensus, either in recovering the historical Jesus or in understanding the Jewishness of Jesus. Despite the new material available and many years of serious research, we have come to recognize obstacles in the way.

In the sense, the more we know, the less we know.

Of course, on the most basic level all can agree about the about the Jewishness of Jesus. That Jesus was born, lived and died a Jew in the land of Israel in what we call the first century A.D. cannot be doubted. Jesus taught in Aramaic to an almost exclusively Jewish audience, used Jewish teaching methods (parables, proverbs, symbolic actions, etc.) and presupposed conditions in the land of Israel. The Jewishness of Jesus’ teaching may be summarized as follows: Jesus of Nazareth stood for the great religious ideas of Israel as they are found in the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish tradition. His teachings on God, obedience to God’s will, creation, expiation for sin, covenant, the piety of the poor, the better righteousness, eschatology (the end of time) and fidelity are consistent with his Jewish heritage. Through Jesus the great heritage of Israel has been mediated to all nations.⁴

But when we go beyond these basics, the answers are not so simple. I would like to discuss here three methodological problems in understanding the Jewishness of Jesus. The first relates to the previously unsuspected variety of first-century Judaism. The second relates to the nature of our sources about Jesus’ life. The third relates to the varying theological perspectives of Christians and Jews regarding the life and death of Jesus. Each of these methodological cruxes, in its own way, impedes the development of a consensus as to the nature of Jesus’ Jewishness.

Judaism in Jesus’ Time—Its Varieties

Everyone would agree that the historical Jesus must be understood within the context of Judaism. But what Judaism?

There was a time not too long ago when it seemed easy to understand Judaism in Jesus’ time. The major sources were the Gospels and the rabbinic corpus. The rabbinic corpus included the Mishnah, Tosefta, Talmuds and Midrashim. Jews could be divided into two primary parties—Pharisees and Sadducees—and a few fringe groups, as described by the first-century Jewish historian, Josephus. The Pharisees were Jesus’ chief opponents in the Gospels. Their spiritual descendants were the rabbis. The Sadducees were religious traditionalists who rejected the Pharisees’ traditions and beliefs. In addition to the Pharisees and Sadducees, there were some other shadowy groups such as the Essenes, the Zealots and the “people of the land,” all living at the margins of Jewish life.

But this simple picture of Palestinian Judaism in Jesus’ time no longer exists.

We have already noted how the renewed 035interest in the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, sparked by the finding of fragments of these documents in the Dead Sea caves, has vastly expanded our understanding of the varieties of Second Temple Judaism.

Equally important, however, in the revision of our picture of Palestinian Judaism around the turn of the era has been the growing recognition that Jews had been part of the Hellenistic world since the time of Alexander the Great. From the late fourth century B.C. onward, Jews were, to a considerable extent, using Greek language, Greek economic patterns, Greek military formations and Greek cultural expressions. Even the Hasmoneans,^b who did so much to revitalize Jewish life in the second century B.C. against the inroads of Hellenization, ended up adopting many Hellenistic ways. The upshot of all this is that Palestinian Judaism can now be interpreted only as part of the wider Greco-Roman world, not as a hermetically sealed Jewish enclave.⁵

In addition, the archaeologists and historians have been busy making this picture of early Judaism even more complicated. Perhaps their most interesting general finding has been the recognition of regionalism in Palestine at the turn of the era; that is, Jewish life differed between Galilee and Jerusalem and even between northern and southern Galilee.⁶

Finally, there has been an ongoing reassessment of the rabbinic writings. We are now much more cautious in retrojecting into Jesus’ day what is 036found in the code of Jewish oral law known as the Mishnah (put in final form around 200 A.D.) or in the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds (from the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.). These sources are only occasionally reliable indicators of an earlier period of Jewish life. Even less valuable for forming a picture of first-century Judaism are so-called midrashic collections, interpretive rabbinic expansions of biblical stories. For example, Genesis Rabbah is dated about 400 A.D. While today there is a greater appreciation of the creativity and coherent vision of the rabbis as they worked out their version of Jewish life in the second and third centuries A.D., this heightened appreciation has also led to more than a little doubt whether it is proper to look upon them as the lineal continuation of the Pharisaic movement in Jesus’ time.⁷

Thus, the more we know, the less we know.

True, a good deal more is known about Palestinian Judaism in Jesus’ day than was known 40 years ago. But we are far less confident about simple and neat pictures. What emerges from all this research is not one Judaism—we can no longer speak of normative Judaism in Jesus’ time—but of a variety of Judaisms.

In light of these developments during the past 40 years, the obvious question is this: What was the Jewish context in which we should try to understand the life of Jesus? It is not surprising that, in accord with the new developments, a number of new approaches to the context of Jesus’ life have emerged.

To illustrate the almost dazzling variety of these new approaches, I will simply give a short description of seven different images of Jesus that have been proposed by scholars in recent years, the differences relating to the different Jewish backgrounds against which they have chosen to locate their image of the historical Jesus. The list could easily be extended, but seven is enough to illustrate the methodological problem I am describing.

Depending on the Jewish background against which the historical Jesus is seen, he can be and has been described as an eschatological prophet, as a political revolutionary, as a magician, as a Hillelite or proto-Pharisee, as an Essene, as a Galilean charismatic and as a Galilean rabbi.

For Ed P. Sanders in Jesus and Judaism (1985), the historical Jesus was an eschatological prophet whose hortatory public proclamations looked to the restoration of God’s temple and people.⁸ Sanders focuses on what Jesus did in the Jerusalem Temple (see Mark 11:15–19; Matthew 21:12–13; Luke 19:45–46) and on what he said 037about the Temple (see Mark 13:2; Matthew 24:2; Luke 21:6 and Mark 14:58; Matthew 26:61). What Jesus did in the Temple symbolized his expectation that God would soon provide a new temple from heaven. Jesus called sinners to accept his promise of the kingdom, without demanding their repentance (which would involve restitution and/or sacrifice). Sanders explains his portrait of Jesus as an eschatological prophet within a setting of then current Jewish forms of restoration eschatology. Found chiefly in the late prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible (Isaiah 40–66, Haggai, Zechariah) and in extra-biblical apocalyptic works, this restoration eschatology looked to God’s intervention to bring about a purified and renewed form of Judaism in which God would be worshipped properly.

By contrast, other scholars⁹ see the historical Jesus as a political revolutionary. Perhaps the most noteworthy example of the revolutionary theory was presented in Jesus and the Zealots (1967) by S. G. F. Brandon, who tried to answer the question, “Why did the Roman governor of Judea decide to execute Jesus for sedition?” The Zealots were Jewish, anti-Roman revolutionaries who fought against Rome in the First Jewish 038Revolt (66–73 A.D.). Some scholars trace the Zealot movement back to Jesus’ time. Brandon concluded that though Jesus himself was probably not a Zealot nor part of the Zealot resistance to Rome, the inclusion of Simon the Zealot among his followers indicated that the profession of Zealot principles and aims was not incompatible with close participation in Jesus’ mission. Note that Brandon did not call Jesus himself a Zealot. But he did suggest a sympathy on Jesus’ part to political revolutionaries and their ideas.

A still more extreme image of the historical Jesus paints him as a magician, performing miracles just like the ones described in the Greek magical papyri mainly from the third century A.D. and later. According to Morton Smith¹⁰ in Jesus the Magician (1978), one can discern behind the Gospels’ portrayal of Jesus an earlier Jesus whose practices were close to those criticized by the scribes (see Mark 3:20–30). On the basis of reports about Jesus in the Gospels and about magic and magicians in Jewish and pagan sources, Smith used the hypothesis that Jesus was a magician to explain Jesus’ irregular birth, his sojourn in Egypt, his manic behavior, his claim to be God’s Son, his exorcisms and cures and his death as a messianic troublemaker.

Harvey Falk in Jesus the Pharisee (1985) presents us with something of a double exposure, for he presents Jesus as both a Hillelite Pharisee and an Essene.¹¹ He situates Jesus within the School of Hillel, in terms of the doctrinal struggle between the School of Hillel and the School of Shammai for control of the Jewish community of Palestine. The Shammaites usually urged a literal and conservative approach to the Torah, whereas the Hillites were more flexible and accommodating. Jesus was closer to Hillel than to Shammai. Jesus, according to Falk, remained an Orthodox Jew all his life and never wished his fellow Jews to change any aspect of their traditional faith.

Falk claims that in about 20 B.C. the School of Shammai got the upper hand, enabling it to dominate the formal public institutions that governed the Jewish community. What got Jesus into trouble with the regnant Shammaites, according to Falk, was his desire to establish a religion for gentiles that did not require adherence to all the commands of Judaism.

Falk goes on to define Jesus’ background as the Essene branch of the Pharisaic movement gathered around Hillel. As strange as it may sound to traditional Christian ears to hear Jesus called a Pharisee, it has long been recognized that Jesus had more in common with the Pharisees than with the Sadducees, Jewish revolutionaries and other known groups. There may be something to the claim that Jesus associated with Pharisees, though our increased knowledge about the diversity in Second Temple Judaism should caution us against too easily accepting the identification of Jesus as a Hillelite Pharisee.

When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered the late 1940s, it did not take long for some scholars to argue that Jesus was an Essene. The references in the scrolls of ritual washings immediately sparked connections with John Baptist and early Christian baptism. Texts describing the community’s meals and meetings, hopes for God’s intervention in history and approach to scripture seemed to confirm theory that John the Baptist and Jesus were both Essenes.

Further study and reflection on the Qumran scrolls, however, led to the gradual abandonment of this theory by most scholars and its replacement by the idea that Jesus’ movement was parallel to and independent from that of the Qumran Essenes. Thus, by relating Jesus directly to the Essenes, Falk has revived an old and now discredited theory. By tying the Essenes to the Pharisaic Hillelites he has gone beyond what most scholars of Second Temple Judaism will allow. I doubt that Falk will get any scholarly support for his theories. Nevertheless, it is significant that the Essene theory about Jesus has been revived.

Geza Vèrmes, in Jesus the Jew (1981), paints a picture of Jesus as a Galilean charismatic.¹² Vèrmes describes Jesus as a first-century Jewish holy man entirely dedicated to the call for repentance and the coming kingdom of God, as someone uniquely aware of his filial relationship to God and eager to communicate it to others. In explaining Jesus’ charismatic teaching and life style, Vèrmes places Jesus alongside such charismatic Jewish holy men as Honi the Circle-Drawer and Hanina ben Dosa. These latter two were Jewish holy men active in Galilee around Jesus’ time. Their miracles paralleled some of those attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. Vèrmes’s picture of Jesus appears against a background of rabbinic literature about Galilee, supplemented by the history of Josephus.

Still another portrait of Jesus pictures him as Galilean rabbi. This portrait of Jesus is painted against a background of the Targums. According to Bruce D. Chilton in his Galilean Rabbi and His Bible (1984), Jesus knew an exegetical tradition associated with the Book of Isaiah that was substantially preserved in the Targum of Isaiah and took for granted his hearers’ familiarity with that tradition.¹³ The Targums are Aramaic 039translations and paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible. Without equating the extant Targum of Isaiah and the traditions within it, Chilton contends that Jesus made use of the “interpreted Scripture” of his day much as the rabbis did some years later.

This list of seven portraits could easily be extended. I have simply arbitrarily stopped at seven images against seven backgrounds. Some of these portraits I obviously take more seriously (eschatological prophet, Galilean charismatic) than others. Nevertheless, there are at least shreds of evidence for each image and background. The point in making such a list is to illustrate how difficult it is to be exact about the precise Jewish context of Jesus. Our increased understanding of Judaism’s diversity has made it even more difficult to be sure exactly what kind of Jew Jesus was and against which historical background we should try to understand him. The root of the problem is that the new discoveries and the restudy of already available materials have revealed a much more complicated and diverse picture of Palestinian Judaism in Jesus’ time than was imagined 40 or 50 years ago. Since we know more now than we did then, we also know how little we really do know about Judaism in Jesus’ time and how hard it is to put together what we know into a coherent package.

Jesus in the Ancient Sources

The second methodological problem involved in placing Jesus the Jew in his proper Jewish context concerns the nature of the ancient sources about Jesus.

The most extensive ancient sources about Jesus are of course the four canonical Gospels.^c These Gospels are complicated documents for 20th-century historians. They describe Jesus of Nazareth, who exercised a public ministry of preaching and healing and was put to death as “King of the Jews” about 30 A.D. But these Gospels were written some 40 to 60 years after Jesus’ death. They presupposed the Easter event, his resurrection three days after his burial. These Gospels were intended to speak mainly to those who already believed in the decisive significance of Jesus. They were expressed in such a way as not only to describe Jesus in his original setting but also to address the problems facing the Christian communities of a later time. Between the time of Jesus and the final composition of the Gospels, the traditions about Jesus were handed on in a complex and probably unsystematic process and were reshaped in light of the needs and concerns of various Christian groups. This complicated process of tradition—from Jesus through the early communities to the Gospels—over a fairly long period of time has been widely accepted today by a broad range of scholars studying Christian origins.

Recognition of the complex nature of our chief sources about Jesus has been one of the factors that has led historians and theologians over the past 200 years on the so-called quest for the historical Jesus.¹⁴ The idea behind this quest is go beneath the surface of the Gospels, to peel away the accretions made in the process of transmission, and so to arrive at Jesus of Nazareth—as he really was. But to the extent this process of peeling away the accretions is unreliable or disputed, the recovery of the historical Jesus may be impossible.

For this reason, many scholars despair of the task as simply too speculative—and often circular. Let us look briefly at two rules developed supposedly to isolate in the Gospels the authentic sayings and teachings of Jesus, as opposed to those of his later followers and the emergent Church. Scholars often enunciate two seemingly directly contradictory criteria for identifying authentic teachings of the historical Jesus. Some modern scholars use the criterion of similarity, while others use the criterion of dissimilarity. According to the criterion of dissimilarity, to be authentic a saying or teaching of Jesus must be so nearly unique that it cannot be ascribed to Judaism or to the early Church.¹⁵ Christian scholars have sometimes used the dissimilarity principle to determine what was most distinctive 040or unique about Jesus. The criterion of similarity, on the other hand, holds that whatever does not fit into the context of Judaism in Jesus’ time must be attributed to the early Church or to the Evangelists. Jewish scholars and Christian scholars especially sympathetic to Judaism sometimes use the similarity principle to situate Jesus within Judaism.

Both criteria are circular and beg the question. The criterion of dissimilarity assumes that Jesus’ authentic teaching is not Jewish. It makes Jesus dissimilar to or discontinuous with Judaism. It wrenches Jesus out of his Jewish context and turns him into a kind of creative genius or eccentric (depending on one’s perspective), transcending his culture. It fails to acknowledge the Jewishness of Jesus, or at least dismisses it as uninteresting and unimportant.

The criterion of similarity encounters the opposite problem. It assumes that Jesus the Jew remained entirely within the boundaries of Judaism. The conclusion that necessarily follows from this question-begging criterion is that Jesus’ teaching has been misunderstood or mistranslated, that it was in fact only part of an inner-Jewish conflict and that it has been distorted by the early Church’s mission to the gentiles. The picture of Jesus that emerges from such presuppositions is that of a basically loyal and observant Jew, with perhaps a few odd ideas. Whatever differs from Judaism is dismissed as uninteresting or unimportant or simply mistaken.¹⁶

There is no obvious scientific way out of this dilemma. In practice, many of us are satisfied to embrace the Jewishness of Jesus and to assume a basic continuity from Jesus through the early Church to the Gospels. But this approach neither denies nor resolves the critical problems.

Theological Differences Between Jews and Christians

The third methodological problem stems from the fact that the Jewishness of Jesus is often considered in the context of Jewish-Christian dialogue. The search for the Jewishness of Jesus, in its true historical context, is happily an endeavor that engages Jewish as well as Christian scholars, frequently working together. Yet this raises a methodological problem that must be frankly addressed: Christians and Jews differ in the theological significance that they attach to Jesus’ life and death. For Jews, Jesus is another Jewish teacher and another victim of oppression. For Christians, Jesus is that and more. He is the authoritative interpreter of the Torah,^d whose death brought about the possibility of right relationship with God.

Jesus was a Jewish teacher. Much of his teaching, according to the Gospels, stands well within the boundaries of the Jewish Torah and the traditions of Judaism’s wisdom literature.^e Nevertheless, the Gospels present Jesus as the climactic revelation of God, surpassing and fulfilling the revelations accorded previously to the people of God. In this theological perspective, Jesus emerges as the authoritative interpreter of the Torah.¹⁷ Not only can he say what it means (as Hillel and Shammai did), but he can even abrogate it or bypass it.¹⁸

Jesus’ death likewise has a different theological significance for Christians and Jews, as reflected in a surprisingly productive scholarly dialogue over the past 30 years.¹⁹ Indeed, on some matters consensus exists: The final legal responsibility for Jesus’ death lay with Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor. Jesus was executed as a perceived political threat (“the King of the Jews”), according to a Roman mode of punishment. The Evangelists deliberately played down Roman responsibility and played up Jewish involvement. The precise degree of Jewish involvement in the events leading to Jesus’ death, however, is still disputed. Were the chief priests and elders the initiators of the procedure, merely active collaborators, passive spectators or unwilling agents? At any rate, it is now recognized that, when the Passion narratives begin, the Pharisees drop out of sight. Even if the rabbinic movement carried on Pharisaism, the rabbis can hardly be assigned some sort of “inherited guilt” for Jesus’ death.

The Gospels and other New Testament writings portray Jesus as Savior of the World. They see his death as carried out according to God’s will and 041a divine Plan. They use such terms as redemption, reconciliation, justification, atonement to express what has happened as a result of Jesus’ death.

On such matters Jews and Christians cannot be expected to agree. The point here is that their differing theological perspectives create a methodological obstacle to reaching a consensus about the historical Jesus. Our different theological commitments have an effect on the effort to recover the Jewishness of Jesus or at least the historical Jesus.

Both Jews and Christians agree that Jesus was a Jewish teacher and that Jesus was a victim of oppression. From these two facts, however, Christians and Jews have drawn different conclusions and can stay together regarding Jesus’ identity only part of the way. At some point along that way we necessarily confront the theological issues raised so eloquently from the Jewish perspective by Samuel Sandmel:²⁰

“We [Jews] have not believed that Jesus was the Messiah; we have not been willing to call him Lord; we have not believed that the Logos became incarnate as Jesus; we have not believed that Jesus was, or is, the very Goodness of God. [W]e believe that man must make his own atonement, not have atonement wrought for him ”

While we must frankly recognize this theological divergence, Jews and Christians alike should welcome the recent attention given to the, Jewishness of Jesus as a help to mutual under standing and religious cooperation. Yet it is also important to recognize the problems involved in talking about the Jewishness of Jesus. The frank recognition of our theological differences how ever, does not detract from our continuing need to work together in the scholarly search for the Jewishness of Jesus.

(This article has been adapted and expanded from Father Harrington’s presidential address before the Catholic Biblical Association at Georgetown University, August 6, 1986. The original text has been published in the Catholic Biblical Quarterly 49 [1987], p. 1ff.)

In 906, Albert Schweitzer, the Alsatian physician, musician, philosopher and biblical exegete who spent 40 years of his life in central Africa ministering to the poor and sick, published a widely influential book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Schweitzer reviewed the history of scholarly efforts to extricate the historical Jesus from layers of theological tradition that had grown up about his life, and concluded not only that the scholars had failed to recover the historical Jesus but that the task was impossible. This conclusion, however, did not stop Schweitzer from offering his own reconstruction of Jesus as an […]