Bible Books

010

Divergent Paths

The Partings of the Ways Between Christianity and Judaism and Their Significance for the Character of Christianity

James D. G. Dunn
(London: SCM; Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1991) 448 pp., $29.95.

Recent years have Witnessed a resurgence of interest in Jewish-Christian relations, an interest prompted, above all else, by the horrific events of the Holocaust. Many of the most important studies in the field—such as Jules Isaac’s Jésus et Israël (Fesquelle, 1959) and Marcel Simon’s Verus Israel (E. de Boccard 1964)—attempt to show that Christian anti-Semitism is a perverse misconstrual of the intentions of Jesus and his earliest followers. Perhaps the most influential and compelling discussion, however, was initiated by Rose mary Ruether’s Faith and Fratricide (Seabury, 1974), which argues that Christian opposition to the Jews is in fact the dark side of Christology—that any claim that Jesus is the Messiah necessarily leads to anti-Semitism.

By a quirk of history, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered at the outset of this renewed effort to locate the beginnings of Christian anti-Semitism. The scrolls have proved invaluable to students of Jewish and Christian antiquity, not least because they have forced scholars to reconsider the social, cultural and conceptual matrix of Jesus and the earliest Christians. For the first time, we have writings of a sectarian group of Jews living before the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E. Remarkably, these sectarians espoused a world view that corresponds in many respects to that embraced by Jesus. Thus, somewhat ironically, the scrolls have led historians to reconsider the Jewishness of Jesus even as theologians began to reexamine his followers’ antipathy toward the Jews.

New Testament scholars, including Lloyd Gaston, John Gager and Samuel Sandmel, have of course been involved in these discussions. Rarely, though, has a skilled exegete provided an exhaustive discussion of all the relevant New Testament materials so as to explain both the Jewishness of Jesus and the anti-Jewishness of his followers. The British scholar James Dunn, professor of New Testament at the University of Durham, has now taken up that task and has produced a thoroughly documented and stimulating study. Readers will find Dunn’s discussion learned but not daunting, engaging but not popularized. His book is important for anyone interested in understanding how an anti-Jewish form of Christianity could spring from a Jewish Jesus.

Dunn bases his arguments on the assumption (shared by New Testament scholars) that Christianity began as a sect of Judaism. To understand why the two religions eventually split, Dunn proposes to examine the nature of first-century Judaism and then to determine when, how and why Christians developed views that were at odds with it. Basing his reconstruction on the work of E. P. Sanders, Dunn contends that all Jews of the first century would have subscribed to four religious tenets—the four pillars, as he calls them, of Judaism: (1) monotheism, the belief that there is only one god; (2) election, the belief that God had made a covenant with his chosen people Israel; (3) Torah, the belief that God gave the Law of Moses to enable his people to remain true to the covenant; and (4) the Temple, prescribed in the Torah as the locus of sacrifice and worship for God’s chosen people.

Dunn examines the development of 011Christian attitudes in these four areas to determine when the new religion began to advance views contrary to Judaism. In each case, he finds that Jesus stood firmly within the confines of the Judaism of his day and that the parting of the ways resulted from later developments within Christianity.

The first pillar to crumble among Christians was adherence to the Temple; this occurred only after Jesus’ death. Even when Jesus “cleansed” the Temple and criticized its current function, he stood within a solid prophetic tradition with roots in the Hebrew Scriptures, Dunn argues. The real breach occurred later, when Stephen proclaimed that the death of Jesus vitiated the need for the Temple cult. According to Dunn, Stephen’s view was shared by his “Hellenist” companions (Greek-speaking Jewish-Christians in Jerusalem), by the apostle Paul (even though Paul never mentions the Jerusalem Temple in the letters that are indisputably his) and by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews.

According to Dunn, Jesus also did not criticize the covenant of the Torah per se, but attacked only the sectarian interpretations of it by such groups as the Pharisees and the Essenes. Here too, Jesus remained well within the acceptable contours of early Judaism. Again, the divergence came after Jesus’ death—this time with the apostle Paul. As Paul came to believe that belonging to the people of God only required faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection, he not only argued against the requirement that gentiles entering the church be circumcised, but also against the need for gentile Christians to follow Jewish food laws. By urging unrestricted table fellowship between Christian Jews and gentiles (Galatians 2), Paul went beyond the bounds of established Judaism (which held that the covenant required Jews to be distinct from outsiders) and thus led to a second parting of the ways.

As to the first pillar of Judaism, Jesus was, of course, avidly monotheistic, as were his earliest followers. When Christians, such as the author of the Fourth Gospel, began to portray Jesus as the Wisdom and the Word of God made flesh, however, some non-Christian Jews might easily have understood their religion as having two gods: Jesus and God. According to Dunn, however, these believers did not see themselves as having compromised their monotheistic commitments when they attributed to Jesus such lofty identity. This particular parting of the ways, writes Dunn, could have been avoided because Christianity and Judaism shared an unflagging commitment to monotheism, specifically a commitment to the God of the Hebrew Scriptures who created the world, chose his people Israel, gave them his law and promised them his Messiah. For Dunn, this assessment of the “true” nature of Christianity provides an arena for dialogue with Jews: The ultimate communities share create the basis for rapprochement.

Dunn demonstrates that the final parting of the ways between Christians and Jews did not occur, as some have claimed, with the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. Indeed, interaction between the two faith communities continued well into the following decades. The split was not made final until the second Jewish uprising against Rome, the Bar-Kokhba Revolt in 132–135 C.E., Simeon ben Kosba changed his name to Bar-Kokhba when he rose to prominence in this rebellion. The name “bar-Kokhba” means “son of the star” and reflects Balaam’s fourth oracle in Numbers 24:15–19, which promises a star out of Jacob to rescue the nation. Bar-Kokhba’s followers called him the messiah, which was unacceptable to Christians who called Jesus the messiah.

Dunn concludes his study by reflecting theologically on the significance of his findings, urging Jews and Christians to look beyond the history of their polemical relationships in hopes of establishing healthy relations between the two faiths. His perspective is decidedly Christian, and some readers will find his proposals implausible and overly optimistic. He asserts, for instance, that a salient trait of both Christians and Jews in the modern world is an eager expectation of a personal messiah, who could well be—could he not? Dunn asks—Jesus; and he urges Jews to be more open to the possibility of seeing in Jesus the “essential complement” of the Torah. Is this anything but Christian wishful thinking? Moreover Dunn’s passionate claim that Christianity is at its roots “non-exclusivistic” will strike most historians as extraordinary.

Nonetheless, the spirit of Dunn’s reflections is irenic and he deserves praise for his courageous attempt to move behind the hostilities to establish common ground between Jews and Christians. This much needed study will interest scholars of early Christianity and early Judaism and everyone concerned with the historical relations between these two great religions.

The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus

Marvin Meyer Interpretation by Harold Bloom
(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 130 pp., $16.00

This small volume offers the Coptic text and a facing English translation of the Gospel of Thomas, a noncanonical gospel.^a Thomas was discovered in its entirety only in 1945 as part of a cache of texts known as the Nag Hammadi Codices, named for the discovery site in upper Egypt. Parts of the gospel were known for many years from Greek fragments discovered in the 19th century.

Rather than narrating the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus, the Gospel of Thomas compiles 114 sayings 012attributed to Jesus. Thomas frequently parallels in content the canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, and it relates in form to the earliest (but conjectural) gospel, Q, a source thought to have been used by Matthew and Luke. For these reasons, many scholars regard Thomas as an important source of information about Christian origins and about Jesus himself.

This new volume by Marvin Meyer, professor of religion at Chapman University in California and a prolific writer on Gnostic Christianity, furnishes the reader with a balanced and thorough introduction to Thomas. Meyer uses his sophisticated understanding of the prevailing scholarship on Thomas to render a readable, efficient discussion of the critical issues. An extensive set of notes offers more detailed information on individual sayings. The notes transform this aesthetically pleasing book into a work of scholarship.

The book centers around the text and translation of Thomas. The English translation is based on the Coptic text of Thomas discovered at Nag Hammadi; the notes include variant readings from the Greek fragments of Thomas. Placing the Coptic text and English translation on facing pages adds an exotic touch that only those initiated into the mysteries of the Coptic language will find of practical use. The English translation is lucid and lively. Those familiar with Meyer’s earlier attempts to translate Thomas will find it a moderate rendering. Although in his first translation of Thomas, The Secret Teachings of Jesus (Random House, 1984) Meyer employed an idiosyncratic system for numbering the sayings, here he relies on a more conventional method. The translation bears much similarity to the translation of Thomas in the recently published The Complete Gospels (edited by Robert J. Miller [Polebridge, 1992]), in which Meyer played a key role. But in his new work Meyer returns to standard language (for example, he uses “kingdom” rather than “imperial rule,” as in The Complete Gospels) and he avoids colloquialisms.

A reading of the Gospel of Thomas by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University, follows Meyer’s notes on Thomas. Bloom enthusiasts will enjoy this eloquent, self-styled “gnostic sermon.” Bloom’s reading occasionally shows real insight. He writes, for example: “Seeing what is before you is the whole art of vision for Thomas’s Jesus…. Everything we seek is already in our presence, and not outside ourself. What is most remarkable in these sayings is the repeated insistence that everything is already open to you. You need but knock and enter.”

A greater awareness of biblical scholarship, for which Bloom shows his usual contempt, would enhance his perceptive intuitions about Thomas. Bloom’s blissful ignorance of scholarship on the Gospel of Thomas runs as an ironic subtext through his sermon on the virtues of gnosis (knowledge) in the one early Christian gospel that, in his view, got it right.

Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity

Jonathan Z. Smith
(London/Chicago: School of Oriental and African Studies, Univ. of London/Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990) 152 pp., $24.95

Scholars have long asked in what ways early Christianity is indebted for its shape and content to the other religions of the first century. Jonathan Z. Smith, the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities at the University of Chicago, argues in Drudgery Divine that modern scholarly investigation of the relationship between early Christianity (or the various “Christianities” of the period) and other ancient religions has largely been tainted by Protestant anti-Catholic bias, a bias that is rooted in the anti-papist apologetic of the Protestant Reformation. A major concern, of the book is to reopen the whole question of how comparative study ought to be carried out in research in the history of religions.

Smith first traces the origins of comparative research on Christian origins and convincingly delineates its anti-Catholic stance. Next, he takes up the issue of “uniqueness,” that is, how scholars have tended to speak of Christianity’s so-called distinctiveness as that which makes it intrinsically more valuable than the religions of its neighbors. Smith offers numerous 013examples of scholarly arguments, clearly laden with bias, for the “uniqueness” of primitive Christianity vis-a-vis other religions, or especially the “uniqueness” of primitive (by which he thinks some scholars really mean “Protestant”) Christianity over against the later pagan accretions that eventually contributed to Catholicism.

Smith then explores the various scholarly investigations of the Greek vocabulary of early Christianity in comparison with pagan religions, on the one hand, and the Bible and Judaism, on the other. The term mysterion (“mystery,” “secret”) is treated as a test case. Here Smith analyzes critically the contention that the New Testament (especially Pauline Christianity¹) use of the word should be understood against the background of Septuagint usage and/or Jewish apocalyptic usage (as a translation of the Aramaic raz) instead of the pagan Greek “mystery religions.” Smith concludes that many of these comparative studies are flawed, however, because “philology has served as a stratagem” whereby the “uniqueness of early Christianity” and its “non-derivative nature” are protected. Smith also shows, more convincingly, that Judaism has served Protestant scholarship in two quite different ways: as insulation for early Christianity to protect “influences” from the pagan environment, but also as a “legalistic” religion needing to be transcended by Christian faith.

The best part of the book is Chapter 4, “On Comparing Stories.” Here Smith treats the theme of the “dying and rising” god, especially as developed by James Frazer in The Golden Bough.² Smith shows the various ways in which the “vegetation deities,” Osiris, Adonis, Attis, Tammuz, et al., have been compared with the Pauline doctrine of Christ “dying and rising” (for example, in Romans 6). Numerous scholars in the 19th and early 20th centuries posited an “influence” of these nature religions on early Christian doctrine, but further research has exploded the notion of a widespread ancient pattern of the “dying and rising” god that could have influenced early Christianity. Late fourth-century hints of a revived deity, such as Attis, are now often seen as examples of Christian influence rather than the reverse, of course also often with apologetic motivation, protecting the “uniqueness of Christian doctrine.”

In discussing these scholarly vicissitudes Smith makes the cogent points that comparative work must be grounded in a principle of “parity” between religions and that it must recognize the role of historical development and change in religious traditions. In this context he rightly underscores the wide variety of views within early Christianity regarding the meaning of Christ’s death.

Smith’s concluding chapter, “On Comparing Settings,” concentrates on “salvation” as a means of delineating the importance of social setting and historical development in the study of ancient religions. Here he applies to the ancient Mediterranean religions the notion of two contrasting “world views,” what he calls the “locative” and “utopian.” A “locative” world view is “concerned primarily with the cosmic and social issues of keeping one’s 014place and reinforcing boundaries.” What it means to be saved, in this world view, is to keep things in their proper places. Death is unavoidable, and “what is soteriological [salvific] is for the dead to remain dead.” In the “utopian” world view, on the other hand, “salvation is achieved through acts of rebellion and transcendence. Smith says:

“modern scholars of religion [are unable] to conceive of a soteriological pattern with respect to death that does not involved a triumph over it, leading them to impose the inappropriate category of ‘dying and rising gods’ upon such locative traditions.

Smith identifies “locative” varieties of early Christianity and then contrasts them with Paul’s “thoroughly utopian understanding.” Smith concludes that “most of the [pagan] ‘mystery’ cults and the non Pauline forms of Christian tradition have more in common with each other” than with Pauline “utopian” Christianity.

In summary, Smith writes that “the history of the comparative venture reviewed in these chapters has been the history of an enterprise undertaken in bad faith. The interests have rarely been cognitive, but rather almost always apologetic.”

While Smith has shown in a convincing way how theological bias has often been the controlling factor in early Christian scholarship, he goes too far in painting the whole enterprise as “undertaken in bad faith.” For example, he gives rather short shrift to the, 19th-century German scholars of the “History of Religions School,” who would have been surprised by accusations of apologetic bias. And his attempt to uncover “apologetic concerns” in the work of Arthur Darby Nock³ is hardly convincing. Nock was no English divine; he was a classicist, and his own religious stance was that of an agnostic. Nock’s views on the meaning of the term mysterion in Paul have, indeed, stood the test of time. Smith is, no doubt correct to criticize Nock’s failure to see evidence in the New Testament of “a sharp cleavage between the teachings of Paul and of the Jerusalem community,” but Nock’s failure was scarcely caused by theological bias.

Smith’s distinction between “locative” and “utopian” forms of religion is useful, but it can hardly be used to distinguish different religious groups. For example, the very same Christians whom Smith uses as an example of a “locative” form of religion also went to church and listened to sermons of a “utopian” character.

Despite these criticisms, this is a highly provocative book. Here, as in his other works, Smith has given us reasons to think again about how work in the comparison of religious traditions ought to be carried out.

Assimilation Versus Separation: Joseph the Administrator and the Politics of Religion in Biblical Israel

Aaron Wildavsky
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1993) 236 pp. $32.95

The Hebrew Bible is a fundamentally political work, dealing with the question of how ancient Jewish society could be governed so as to be “one nation under God.” With the publication of Aaron Wildavsky’s study of Genesis 37–49, Assimilation Versus Separation (together with his earlier pioneering work, The Nursing Father: Moses As a Political Leader^b), it is clear that academic recognition of the Bible as political theory, long overdue, is finally at the threshold.

Wildavsky’s analysis begins with the political reality that informed the Books of Moses: It was the material splendor and a brutal idolatry of totalitarian Mesopotamia that Abraham fled to become a free philosopher-shepherd in the wild mountains of Canaan. His descendent Moses reared as an idolater in the Egyptian “house of bondage,” likewise revolted and led the entire Jewish people in the footsteps of the their forefathers. But how did the Jews get to be enslaved to idolatry in Egypt? Between the patriarchs and Moses, Wildavsky says, there was a “disjuncture,” an “anti-hero” named Joseph, who led the Jewish people into Egypt in search of physical salvation (from famine), but who 061was uninterested or unable to bring them out again.

Wildavsky gathers the evidence to show that Moses rejects Egyptian ways, while Joseph embraces them; Moses use all his gifts to destroy Pharaoh’s evil regime, while Joseph builds it up zealously; Moses prays to God and merits revelation, while Joseph never prays and is never addressed by God-instead making use of his Egyptian-style administrative skills and scientific wizardry (the dream-reading) to gather power for himself and his Pharaoh. True, Joseph asserts that God supports all this, but, Wildavsky says, that is what idolatrous dictators always say.

Wildavsky’s reading flies in the face of traditional Jewish and Christian commentaries, which have viewed Joseph as an exemplar of one kind or another. But perhaps these readings have missed the essentially political point of the Joseph stories, which portray him as the most power-hungry of the brothers, willing even to lead the Jews into the servitude of the idol-kings from which his forefathers had fled. Wildavsky amasses voluminous text-proofs—some of which are extraordinary in their power and elegance—to show that Joseph’s enslavement of a starving Egypt and the subsequent bondage of the Jews are meant to teach a negative lesson: that the problems of the Jewish people cannot in the end be resolved through foreign entanglements and despotic rule. Only Moses’ path can hope to save in the end.

Assimilation Versus Separation suffers from a tendency to be distracted by the arguments of other critics, as well as by problems in tangentially related texts—all of which would have been better relegated to footnotes. But the overall argument remains compelling. Even those who will resist going with Wildavsky the whole way will have to reexamine Joseph in light of his political reading of the Biblical narrative. More important, the book will surely serve as a paradigm for an essential new discipline, and for the incorporation of the Bible and other Jewish political works into the general study of political ideas.

“Be Fertile and Increase, Fill the Earth and Master It”: The Ancient and Medieval Career of a Biblical Text

Jeremy Cohen
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992) 375 pp., $16.95 (paper)

“God blessed them and God said to them, ‘Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth’” (Genesis 1:28). This pronouncement, directed to the first man and woman immediately after their creation, has been seen by some as divine warranty for the systematic manipulation and even exploitation of the earth’s natural resources, including its human inhabitants. But is this a valid interpretation of the verse’s meaning? Would it have signified such to its ancient readers? In this remarkable study Jeremy Cohen, who holds the Melton Chair of Jewish History at Ohio State University, sets out to explore the history of the interpretation of this verse within both Judaism and Christianity from antiquity through the late Middle Ages.

Cohen wisely begins his investigation with a thorough examination of the verse’s biblical importance. He scrutinizes its role in the creation narrative, and then collects and analyzes the frequent echoes of its language in other biblical books. One major conclusion—a very cogent one—is that the divine pronouncement of Genesis 1:28 to be fertile and increase is intimately bound to the covenant eventually established with Israel.

The crowning achievement of Cohen’s labors then follows—an impressive and exhaustive tracing of the verse through a labyrinthine maze of post-biblical Jewish and Christian texts. The sources are divided according to tradition and genre, with attention given to the verse’s utilization in legal, exegetical, homiletic and even mystical works.

Cohen raises many fascinating questions in the course of his study. What sort of status within nature is implied for humanity by Genesis 1:28? Is the divine directive a blessing or a commandment? If the latter, to whom is it addressed? To the man only? Or to man and woman? To all of humanity? Or just Israel? What are the implications of this verse for the role of sexuality in human life and institutions such as marriage? How can this directive be reconciled with the esteem enjoyed by virginity and celibacy in developing Christianity? Does the “mastery” endorsed by the second half of the verse possess limits? If so, what are they? Cohen’s investigation shows that, surprisingly, both Jewish and Christian interpreters have had a much greater interest in the divine directive for sexual reproduction than in the behest to achieve mastery and dominion over nature.

This book is a magnificent accomplishment. Cohen is to be congratulated for his erudite, insightful analysis of what proves on close examination to be an exceedingly complicated tradition.

Divergent Paths

The Partings of the Ways Between Christianity and Judaism and Their Significance for the Character of Christianity