Common Errors Made about Early Judaism

If you are either Christian or Jewish (or have been influenced by people who are), then you should read The Jewish Annotated New Testament. If you can't spare the time to read the whole book, then read the essays at the end. 

And if you can't read all the essays, for God's sake read "Bearing False Witness: Common Errors Made about Early Judaism," by co-editor Amy-Jill Levine.

Levine is an Orthodox Jewish woman who has devoted her scholarly career to studying Jesus and Christianity. Her earlier book The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus is a classic in the field. In other words, she knows whereof she speaks!

Here are ten misconceptions that Levine thinks both Jews and especially Christians have about Judaism circa the time of Jesus. They are not just trivial errors: they make it impossible to understand either Christianity or Judaism in context.

1. The contrast between Jewish "law" and Christian "grace" (and the belief that the "law" is impossible to fulfill). "In actuality," Levine points out, "Jews, then and now, did not find Torah observance any more burdensome than citizens in most countries find their country's law today."

2. The mistaken view of Judaism as religion of "works righteousness." Some Christians believe "Jews follow Torah in order to earn God's love or a place in heaven." But God's love is a given, a place in heaven is not a major Jewish concern, and that is not why Jews use Torah to guide their lives.

3. The erroneous idea that ritual purity laws were burdensome (see #1) and unjust. To Levine, this assumption makes a lot of Christian readings of the Good Samaritan and of Jesus healing a woman from hemorrhages go completely astray. By misunderstanding ritual purity and impurity, they miss the point of their own stories.

4. Related to #3, the idea that Jewish society at the time was uniquely misognynistic. Levine is a feminist, and she says that's nonsense. "Jewish women owned their own homes...served as patrons...appeared in the Temple... and in synagogues, had use of their own property...had freedom of travel...appear in public; and so on."

5. The counterfactual idea that Judaism permitted easy divorce, at the expense of women, when the marriage contract (ketubah) guarantees her right in the case of divorce, and guarantees them in advance.

6. Viewing sinners and tax collectors as "marginal" and "cast out" instead of as what they were: "people who violate the welfare of the community and who have deliberately removed themselves from the common good."

7. Ignoring Jesus' militant statements and Judaism's varied views of the messiah, from warrior-king to shepherd, in order to pretend Jesus was a pacifist and Jews rejected him for that reason.

8. The idea that Jews worshiped a distant, impersonal and completely transcendent God. Where, she implicitly asks, do you think Jesus got the idea that God is abba, Father?

9. The idea that the Temple hierarchy dominated and oppressed the population--when the Temple had more and more become the center of Jewish life in the Holy Land, and Jews loved going there.

10. The false dichotomy of exclusivism vs. universalism. Again, go back to the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible, if you want to find the roots of universalism as a messianic ideal--and study what the texts actually say about interactions between Jews and Gentiles if you want to know what was going on at the time. When anyone states, as in Acts 10, that association between the two is against some law, they are blatantly misstating the historical truth.

Read Levine's essay for yourself and follow her references back to the sources to learn more.