Was the Early Church Jewish?

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In the twenty-third chapter of his gospel, Matthew describes Jesus speaking against the Pharisees and scribes. “Woe to you,” Jesus cries out, labeling these Jews “hypocrites,” “blind fools,” “blind men,” “serpents” and a “brood of vipers” (Matthew 23:13–36).¹ In Mark’s account of the cleansing of the Temple, Jesus condemns the Jewish leaders, saying, “My house shall be called a house of prayers for all the nations. But you have made it a den of robbers” (Mark 11:17). Also in Mark, when Jesus speaks about the Temple in Jerusalem, the center of the Jewish religion, he warns: “There will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down” (Mark 13:2). Paul says of the Law, the bond of unity of the Jewish people, “Christ is the end of the Law” (Romans 10:4). Revelation calls the Jewish synagogue a “Synagogue of Satan” (Revelation 2:9).

Additional examples of strong polemics against Jews can be found in the Gospel of John, Acts and Paul’s letters to the Romans. The Johannine Jesus accuses the Jews, “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own 034nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44).

The apostle Stephen’s speech in Acts 7 ends: “You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in hearts and ears, you always resist the holy spirit. As your fathers did, so do you” (Acts 7:51). As Paul is cast out of the synagogue in Antioch in Pisidia, Luke has him say to the Jews, “It was necessary that the word of God should be spoken first to you. Since you thrust it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles” (Acts 13:46). The same seems to be said in Romans 2:17–19: “You call yourself a Jew and rely upon the Law and boast of your relation to God and know his will and approve what is excellent, because you are instructed in the Law, and you are sure that you are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness.” After a series of charges against the Jews that they violate the Law, Paul concludes, “You who boast in the Law, you dishonor God by breaking the Law, for it is written, ‘The Name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you’” (Romans 2:23).

These polemical charges seem to indicate a radical separation of Jesus and his believers from the institutions that characterized Judaism. They indicate that, at least by the time these charges were made and composed (say, the end of the first century C.E.), Christianity was a new religion.

But was it? Had Christianity already broken from Judaism and formed a separate identity? Indeed, pious Christians and many others answer this question easily: Those believing in Jesus as a divine agent were part of a new religion. In support of this conclusion, they would point to the bitter polemics quoted above. Does the existence of such polemics speak for a radical separation between Jesus and Judaism, and in particular between Judaism and Jesus’ disciples after his death?

That is the question I wish to explore here, but before doing so I want to speak somewhat personally—of my own history. I am an ordained Lutheran minister, a German. From 1964 to 1984 I taught in the United States, since 1969 at Harvard Divinity School. I also taught periodically in my own country, Germany, where I returned to teach permanently in 1984. I’m now at the university of my hometown, Frankfurt am Main, the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University.

The classics school in Frankfurt that I had entered at the age of 10 in April 1939 was under the same roof as the Jewish high school. This struck me as very peculiar, given the propaganda and political activity of the late ’30s in Nazi Germany. The Jewish high school was named after Samson Rafael Hirsch, the famous Jewish scholar and rabbi of 19th-century Frankfurt. On our side of the building there was nobody who would answer my questions about that neighboring school, and before long the object of my boyish inquisitiveness ceased to exist. As part of the German war machine, a military censorship complex soon took over the Jewish part of the building and closed the Jewish high school. The Jewish students and their teachers disappeared. We, the students of the non-Jewish part of the building, wondered during study breaks where they, and the many Jews in the neighborhood of our school, had gone. As the yellow star on the clothes of Jewish fellow citizens appeared, it became very obvious to us youngsters that there were fewer and fewer Jewish people around. As the Nazis established a store “for Jews only” at the trolley stop near our school, the pain and hunger of the people with the Star of David showed more and more on their faces. Their number visibly dwindled. First, the men disappeared; then, gradually, the women and children. The adults at school or at home would not respond to our questions concerning the whereabouts of the Jews. Our curiosity remained latent and unanswered. The potential for dialogue between Christians and Jews represented by the history of our city and our school building was shattered.

The educational philosophy of our school aimed to impress upon us the connection between, and reconciliation of, the classical Greek and Roman tradition with the Christian tradition. Contained therein, however, was a latent claim not in conformity with the governing Nazi ideology that placed the pagan Aryan tradition above everything else. Our school proved its conformity, however, by allowing Judaism no mediating place in this concept of connection and reconciliation of classical Athens and Rome with Christianity. Of course, this omission was contrary to history. Prior to 1945, we had never heard the name, for example, of the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria. Even after 1945, education in our school was judenrein (Jew-free), even in the literal, most ghastly sense of the word. The postwar insensitivity of school and state toward Jewish tradition showed in the fact that the Jewish part of the war-damaged school building was not restored to its previous condition. The non-Jewish part of the school was left intact while the Jewish part was replaced by an ugly modern addition to our school. This act literally eradicated the memory of the Jewish school to its very foundations.

When we were young students, no one ever challenged our assumption that Christian identity was associated with the distinctiveness of Jesus and Christianity over and against Judaism. Christianity, in short, was thoroughly distinguished from and elevated above Judaism. Christian and classical education instilled this idea in us, and we were led to believe that our German identity built upon that distinctiveness. We learned that Greek and Latin culture were closer to us than Jewish culture. The uniqueness of Jesus and 035Christianity was presented to us as demonstrable and historically verifiable. Later, as a student of theology, I learned that this historical uniqueness was considered essential for understanding biblical revelation and Christian faith.

Recognition that the Jewish scriptures were also part of Christian scripture was not a serious appreciation of Jewish identity as such. Rather, conservative Christian scholarship simply presupposed the usurpation of the Jewish canon and tradition into mainstream Christianity. No room was left for the ongoing Jewish religion and its intellectual integrity; Judaism was barred from any challenge to Christian interpretation of biblical and extrabiblical Jewish texts. In conservative eyes, the Christians now had a hermeneutical monopoly over these texts and their interpretation.

Was the identity of the early “Christian” church² really distinct and different from Judaism? Was it a new religion—or an internal Jewish migration? That is the question I propose to explore here.

The passages quoted at the outset of this article would seem to represent the polemical drawing of borders between Jews and adherents of Jesus. This border is emphasized by the seeming importance of conversion to the early church. The most prominent example is the narrative of the conversion of Paul; Luke considers this event so important that he narrates it three times (Acts 9:1–29, 22:3–21, 26:9–20).

Missionary activity in Acts is first directed toward the Jews. Jews are exhorted to convert and enter the church of Jesus, the Christ. The story of Pentecost in Acts 2 is paradigmatic of Luke’s overall goal, namely, to describe the mission of the early church. Jewish pilgrims from around the world (Acts 2:5) ask Peter and his friends, “You people, what shall we do?” Peter answers, “Repent, and every one be baptized in the name of Jesus the Christ and for the forgiveness of sins” (Acts 2:37–38). Then Luke describes the success, “Those who accepted his word allowed themselves to be baptized, and on this day around 3,000 souls were added” (Acts 2:41), that is, to the community of Jesus, the Christ. Is this then a new religion?

Most take Paul’s mission to the Gentiles as evidence for the breaking away of the early Christian churches from Judaism. For example, in Paul’s polemic against the Law and the Jews in Second Corinthians 3, he describes the office of Moses, the lawgiver, as a “ministry of death” (2 Corinthians 3:7). He denounces the children of Israel as having hardened hearts; the reading of the Law causes this hardening. To fill out the polemical dichotomy, Paul places “us,” the adherents of Jesus, whom Paul takes to be the Christ, as opposites of the Jews (2 Corinthians 3:17–18). The Law is now the “Old Testament,” and about these “old” things Paul seems to say, “The old has passed away, behold, there is new creation!” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

All this evidence has led the church and much of theological and biblical studies to conclude that one can—indeed, one must—separate the early church from Judaism. Again, should it?

Let us first look at Jesus. Jesus was born a Jew and died a Jewish pilgrim to Jerusalem. Since Jesus saw time accelerating toward its imminent end, he admonished his fellow Jews to leave behind their routines in light of the inevitable rule of God. There was critique in such proclamation, but it built on biblical material and Jewish tendencies. It did not question God’s covenant with Israel or project any counter image to that covenant.

In contrast, the gospel tradition instead stressed and increasingly generalized the image of a Jewish opposition to Jesus, and did so a generation after Jesus’ death and even later. The death of Jesus plays a major role in the unfolding gospel stories. Historically, Jesus was crucified. The use of this Roman form of execution proves that the Romans were responsible for his death. Pontius Pilate was not known for listening and yielding to Jews. Yet the gospel tradition and Acts demonstrate a growing interest in the developing church since its second generation to move the blame away from the Romans and onto the Jews. This blame is not confined to the Jewish authorities; in later parts of the New Testament, it is extended more and more to the Jewish people as a whole. There are even places in the New Testament where the reference to the crucifixion is completely suppressed, where the cross is not mentioned at all (Acts 2:23, 3:15, 5:30, 10:39).³ In such cases, the readers are consciously deceived about the Roman involvement in the crucifixion. All this is later tendentious fabrication, only partly explained by the fear of Jesus-believers that the emphasis on the execution of Jesus by the Romans could endanger the members of the church. The fabrication could have been part of an attempt by later Jesus-believers to avoid portraying themselves as followers of a criminal tried and executed by the governing authorities of the empire. Since its third generation, much of the church clearly went beyond that; it made the Jews responsible for Jesus’ death, portrayed them as revolting against God’s agent, and therefore against divine revelation and covenant. This created room for an essentially Gentile church that saw itself as taking the place of Israel and the Jews in God’s plan of salvation.

Yet Jesus did not leave any organized movement, let alone a new religion. What we call the early church was the result of many different experiences. Although not limited to a specific calendrical date, these experiences of the first decades can be called “post-Easter experiences,” for lack of a better term. In many different ways, these experiences claimed an afterlife for Jesus on the basis of a variety of evidence. Still, the various post-Easter witnesses and the communities forming around them all called upon Jewish biblical traditions to explain the crisis of the crucifixion as well as the experiences that followed it. These post-Easter experiences 036were interpreted in light of Jewish biblical concepts. These people, therefore, remained fully within the hermeneutical horizon of Jewish holy scriptures and within Judaism’s ever-varying range of religious experiences.

Compare the Teacher of Righteousness who lived perhaps 150 or 200 years before Jesus and is referred to in the Dead Sea Scrolls. He was the point of orientation for the Qumran community that produced the scrolls (probably the Essenes) and remained so long after his death. But the Qumran community remained Jewish even though it opposed the priesthood controlling the Temple and followed a different cultic calendar.

True, Jesus was accused of blasphemy (Matthew 26:65). But charges of blasphemy had a long history in Israelite-Jewish tradition. Jewish scriptures contained writings whose authors denounced each other as heretics, particularly with respect to their view of the divinity. (For example, Jeremiah versus Hanania in Jeremiah 28, Amos and proto-Isaiah versus Nahum and Habakkuk, Deuteronomy versus Proverbs 10–29, and Job 28 versus Sirach 24.)

Even the deification of a human being is part of Jewish tradition. In the Jewish pseudepigraphic book of Enoch, usually dated to the third to first century B.C.E., Enoch’s exaltation contains elements of deification. First, Enoch appears as an angelic figure, then next to the throne of God like Gabriel (1 Enoch 24:1), then he is “head of the heavenly community” (1 Enoch 70) and finally he is identified with the Son of Man (1 Enoch 71), a clearly messianic term found also in Daniel (7:13–14)—a book within Jewish scriptures.

Like Jesus, Paul remained well within the Jewish tradition. Paul still saw himself as a Jew when he wrote his last letter to the Romans. Chapters 9–11 make this especially clear. In Romans 9:2–5 Paul says:

I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut from Christ for the sake of my sisters and brothers, my kin by race. They are Israelites, and to them belong the ownership, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the Law, the worship and the promises: To them belong the respected forebears, and of their race, according to the earthly origin, is the Christ.

Paul makes similar statements at the beginning of Romans 10 and 11.

Furthermore, Paul’s last visit to Jerusalem even included a visit to the Temple—a testimony to his Jewish piety.⁴ Indeed, this visit led to his arrest.

How then do we account for the New Testament polemics against the Jews and things Jewish? They must be seen in the context of biblical Jewish customs. The Jewish tradition is full of conflicts and antitheses. It is common to discredit the opposition during these conflicts. The tone can be so bitter that New Testament polemic against the Jews appears mild in comparison.⁵

Consider, for example, the conflict between Israel and Judah; that is, between the northern and southern kingdoms after the division of the empire of David and Solomon. Using language sharper than any New Testament polemic, Amos denounces the house of Israel, the northern kingdom:

I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings, I will not accept them, and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts I will not look upon. Take away from me the noises of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen.

Amos 5:21–23

Jeremiah sounds even more bitter. He condemns the Temple as a den of robbers (Jeremiah 7:11, a passage cited in Matthew 21:13, the story of Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple). He tells us that he was to buy a potter’s earthen flask and take the elders and priests to the Potsherd Gate. He was to break the flask there and say, “Thus says the Lord of the hosts: So will I break this people and this city, as one breaks a potter’s vessel, so that it can be never mended” (Jeremiah 19:11). In Jeremiah 15:1–4, the prophet speaks the words of the Lord:

Though Moses and Samuel stood before me, yet my heart would not turn to this people. Send them out of my sight, and let them go! And when they ask you, “Where shall we go?” you shall say to them, “Thus says the Lord: ‘Those who are for pestilence, to pestilence, and those who are for the sword, to the sword; those who are for famine, to famine, and those who are for captivity, to captivity. I will appoint over them four kinds of destroyers, says the Lord: the sword to slay, the dogs to tear and the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth to devour and destroy. And I will make them a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth.’”

Despite this fierce criticism of Israel, however, Jeremiah remains an Israelite prophet.

Closer to New Testament times, the first-century C.E. Jewish historian Josephus reports that a Jew from Egypt assembled 3,000 fellow Jews and went with them from Egypt through the desert to Jerusalem, following the same path as the Israelites of old during the Exodus.⁶ These people and their prophet arrived on the Mount of Olives opposite Jerusalem. The Egyptian Jewish prophet promised to bring down the walls of Jerusalem with one word, thus opening the way into the city for his followers. This was a strong condemnation of Jerusalem for being corrupt, hostile and no longer God’s city. The promise literally follows biblical doomsday prophecy. No military threat was associated with this procession. The prophet and his followers apparently trusted that a heavenly miracle would occur. While they 037waited for that heavenly event, the Roman troops moved against them with the Jews of Jerusalem as auxiliary forces. The Jews of Jerusalem helped annihilate the Jews from Egypt. Despite this polemical opposition of Jew against Jew, no one talks here of a split in Judaism or a division into two religions.

In short, Judaism of the first century was a colorful, pluralistic phenomenon. The additional variety that the early church introduced could not have made that much of a difference. Most of those who believed in Jesus as God’s agent lived and survived well in the Jewish matrix of the first century. As today, first-century Judaism was a religion of worldwide dimension; indeed it was a world religion. It spread not only over the Mediterranean but also beyond the Roman empire, particularly into the Parthian empire to the east.⁷ Its various groups united under a common relationship to the Temple and the Pentateuch. A definite canon of holy scriptures outside the Pentateuch, or Torah, however, did not yet exist in any exclusive sense. There were a great number of writings that various groups considered holy, but they differed among different people.

Even the Jewish priesthood was not a unified whole. For example, around 160 B.C.E., Onias IV, the son of the deposed and murdered high priest Onias III, founded a temple in Leontopolis, a city in Egypt.⁸ Onias IV was the legitimate offspring and heir of the family of Zadokites who had held the office of high priest since ancient times. This heir to the high priesthood had been illegally kept away from the Jerusalem Temple. By founding a temple cult in Egypt, Onias certainly contradicted the statutes of Deuteronomy, but did he establish a new religion? No, he remained a true Jew. For him, this step was necessary in order to maintain the true Judaism.

Josephus recounts how within Judaism there were different parties of varying beliefs and practices; these were not separate religions. These groups included, of course, the Sadducees and Pharisees. The Sadducees were more aristocratically inclined, while the Pharisees were more democratic. Josephus also tells us of the Essenes, who lived all over Palestine (not just at Qumran). Josephus also knew of numerous other messianic movements. During the Great Jewish Revolt against Rome (66–70 C.E.), the Zealots and Sicarii became prominent and divisive forces within Judaism.

In 70 C.E., after the Romans burned Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple, a sort of reconstruction of Judaism was required. During the process of restoration, various Jewish interest groups offered differing competitive programs. In the end, the program of the pharisaic rabbis won out. The Gospel of Matthew, a post-70 composition, represents a competing program of the reconstruction of Judaism. Matthew expresses this in a most pronounced way when he has Jesus say:

Do not think that I have to come to abolish the Law and the Prophets; I have not come to abolish, but to fulfill. I tell you in earnest: until heaven and earth pass away, not one iota, not one stroke shall pass away from the Law, until everything is going to happen. So whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others in this fashion shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps them and teaches others in this fashion shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds considerably that of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 5:17–20

With the death of Jesus in the early 30s, his followers had to reconstruct their movement just as Judaism in general would have to reconstruct itself after 70 C.E. The concept that Jesus was still alive of course required theological clarification and interpretation. The various responses presented by Jesus’ adherents clearly belong to wider Jewish interpretative traditions. Indeed, the very fact that people did not react uniformly already shows their basic relationship to the Jewish tradition. Further, the fact that a multiform and multicolored movement quickly originated from these responses corresponds to earlier interior migrations within Judaism.

Various Jewish options informed the responses of the early church to Good Friday (the Crucifixion) and the Easter experiences (the resurrection). Let us examine some of these responses of the early church.

One group, as reflected in the source known as Q^a and in the recently recovered Gospel of Thomas,^b saw Jesus simply as a wisdom teacher not affected by Good Friday at all.⁹ These texts do not discuss the Easter experiences as such. Instead they refer to it indirectly. They do this by claiming that Jesus ist he continuous voice of heavenly wisdom. The experience reflected here was that Jesus lived as wisdom herself in their communities. Thus he was presented to the communities through these continous wise pronouncements. In this permanent self-interpretation of the Jesus figure, people experienced Jesus as still alive.

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Others experienced Good Friday and Easter as a major interruption or crisis for which the teaching of Jesus brought no interpretative help. They saw in Good Friday and Easter an eschatological crisis and made them applicable to the present day as a sign of the final approach of the eschaton (end-time). This was a time of testing and judgment but also a time of anticipation of the new age in which there would be a reconstituted covenant of God with Israel. Thus understood, the Easter experiences were signs that the miraculous re-creation of Israel was happening already. Eschatologically guided groups like the Essenes (or Qumranites) or the disciples of John the Baptist provided models for defining present events in a Jewish eschatological perspective.

There were other responses to Good Friday and Easter by followers of Jesus for which there is no space to explore here, for example, reinterpreting Jesus in the light of gnostic wisdom: The visible reality that claims to rule and dominate everything is in reality only illusionary. Thus revelation becomes a saving and liberating reality.

Even Paul’s seeming rejection of the Law finds its roots in Jewish tradition, in such pre-Pauline Jewish gnostic texts as the Letter of Eugnostus and the Apocalypse of Adam. Paul builds his critical arguments against the Law on Jewish gnostic ideas like these that set transcendental divine powers against the will of the Lord or lords of this world. It is in this context that we must understand such Pauline proclamations as these: “Before faith came, we were confined under the Law” (Galatians 3:23; and “Now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian” (Galatians 3:25).

The famous statement in Romans 10:4 that speaks of Christ as the end of the Law means that Paul understands Christ as the end of all norm-setting and controlling power. Paul has learned from Jewish gnosticism that the Law of this world creates and maintains chaos. Indeed Jewish gnosticism was increasingly arguing that even the Law of Moses could not be kept out of this chaos. The “Law” of Romans 10:4 refers to this Law that causes chaos.

Thus, the early church was just one variation of multiple factions within Judaism, part of a vast lateral Jewish migration. These factions are not the opposite of Judaism but instead prove the width and range of Judaism in New Testament times. The early church, particularly in its multiformity, is typical of Judaism in this period.

Then, toward the end of the first century C.E., Jews and Christians began to develop their own identities, not only against each other but also against the huge range of other options available to both. These options were suddenly considered deviant. The main reason for this was survival and reconstruction vis-à-vis the threat and temptation of the Roman empire, demonstrated forcefully by both the First Jewish Revolt against Rome (66–70 C.E.) and its aftermath. The situation was intensified by the failure of the Second Jewish Revolt (132–135 C.E.). In Judaism at large, and in the various branches of the early church, sufficient numbers of people thought that one could and would have to come to terms with this Gentile political establishment, that is, Rome. These people sought goals and means that would guarantee identity in a way that would not endanger the survival of their own religious communities. The Jewish groups that gained the upper hand in the reconstruction of Judaism as well as various circles of the early church were increasingly of the opinion that either the Jesus tradition or the Jewish tradition without Jesus would be judged by the Romans as a liability. Those circles at the core of what would become either mainstream Judaism or mainstream Christianity saw each other as competing interests, since both were trying to avert Roman hostility and court the favor of the powers of state and society at each other’s expense. Thus the split occurred and the gap widened.

I have come to the end of my survey done in honor of my Jewish contemporaries in the Frankfurt of my youth. Any possible dialogue with them was broken off before it began. What I give here is a fragment of what could have been discussed under the same roof by teachers and students separated by centuries of tradition but sharing a common ground. I give it in honor of those who were killed by a diabolic mixture of arrogance and ignorance, of piety and atheism.

For almost 2,000 years, Christians have heard Paul’s warning in Romans 11:17–22, anticipating Gentile arrogance and opposition toward the Jews: “If some of the branches were broken off, but you, a shoot of a wild olive tree, were grafted in their place…Do not boast over against the branches…Do not think arrogantly but have fear; for if God did not spare the natural branches, then he would not spare you either…then you as well will be cut out.” Paul’s warning has gone unheeded, as innumerable anti-Jewish pogroms since late antiquity until today have been perpetrated either directly by Christians or under Christian collaboration. In consequence, later Christian churches exposed themselves by their actions under Paul’s curse as expressed in these verses from Romans 11.

Christians claim their identity on the basis of Jesus and the early church. How 052can they, or anyone, assume, particularly after the Holocaust, that Jesus, Peter or Paul would want to identify with Christians and not with the Jews?

For further details, see Dieter Georgi, “The Early Church: Internal Jewish Migration or New Religion?” Harvard Theological Review 81:1 (1995), pp. 35–68.

In the twenty-third chapter of his gospel, Matthew describes Jesus speaking against the Pharisees and scribes. “Woe to you,” Jesus cries out, labeling these Jews “hypocrites,” “blind fools,” “blind men,” “serpents” and a “brood of vipers” (Matthew 23:13–36).1 In Mark’s account of the cleansing of the Temple, Jesus condemns the Jewish leaders, saying, “My house shall be called a house of prayers for all the nations. But you have made it a den of robbers” (Mark 11:17). Also in Mark, when Jesus speaks about the Temple in Jerusalem, the center of the Jewish religion, he warns: “There will not […]