Falsifying History is No Way to Support Your Cause

Recently, I had to restate some very basic facts about Jesus.

Jesus was a Jew. He lived and died in a land that the Roman Empire called Judea. He did not oppose the empire, but other Jews did.

Jesus of Nazareth was of course a Jew. He was the child of a Jewish mother, and that made him a member of the Jewish people. His doctrines were Jewish. He read the Torah in Hebrew and spoke Aramaic, just like all the Jews (and just like I read the Torah in Hebrew and speak English). Moreover, if he and all his original followers hadn’t been Jewish, they would never have heard the word “Messiah,” much less understood the concept. Jesus is the favorite Jewish man of millions of people in the world.

At the time Jesus of Nazareth lived (c. 4 BCE-33 CE), the land was called Judea, not Palestine. When Jews rose up against Roman tyranny, the Roman armies destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, prohibited Jews from entering the city (which they renamed Aelia Capitolina), and started using the name “Syria Palestina ” to emphasize the destruction of the Jewish state. It wasn’t “Palestina Capta” that the Emperor Vespasian put on his coins minted to celebrate his military victory: it was “Judea capta.”

Jesus is quoted in the Gospels as saying, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and render unto God the things that are God's." He is also quoted as saying, "My kingdom is not of this world." He was no Simon bar Koziba, nicknamed Bar Kochba, who led a military rebellion against Roman rule. He was not even Rabbi Akiba, who hoped Bar Kochba would be the Messiah to free the Jews. Roman rule was not an issue to him: the end of the world as he knew it, was.

These things are not in dispute among any one who has ever studied the history of that time and place. There is ample archeological and documentary evidence about Roman rule, Judea, the Jewish wars, and the origins of the concept of a Messiah. Jesus' teachings vary somewhat from one gospel to the other, but the basic message is clear.

Why do I have to go into these simple facts yet again? Because in the context of late 2023, a wrongheaded meme is circulating that says "Shoutout to all the Christians who've remained completely silent about the Palestinian genocide while they get ready to celebrate the birth of their favorite Palestinian man."

This is nonsense. I can recognize that I am not the audience for message, and I can attribute the meme to good intentions--but Jesus was not a Palestinian, he was a Jew, and that shouldn't make a difference in any way to our response to the horrific situation in Israel and Gaza as of today, December 22, 2023.

We can oppose the brutal attack on Israel on October 7th which killed 1200 people (Muslims, Christians, Druzes, Buddhists, and Jews) AND the total war that Israel has been waging in Gaza almost without interruption since (which has killed 15 times as many lives), AND work for a ceasefire and a lasting peace—all without falsifying history. And we must.

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.

Inheriting Abraham, by Jon D. Levenson

Someone once said that the U.S. and the U.K. are two nations divided by a common language. We both speak English, but oh, the different ways we speak it!

This brilliant little book by Levenson, the Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard, makes the same claim about Jewish, Christian, and Muslim conceptions of Abraham. Abraham is central to all of us, but in very different ways.

Abraham in Judaism

For Jews, broadly speaking, Abraham is the the first father of our people. In the Torah, God singled him out and commanded his allegiance, and Abraham proved worthy of God's trust through his actions. He circumcised himself and his sons Ishmael and Isaac, as God instructed. He didn't withhold his son Isaac when God told him to sacrifice Isaac (in the Akedah story). Abraham also argued with God about what justice required, so well that if only a few more righteous people lived in Sodom and Gomorrah, both cities would have been saved.

Some commentators go so far as to imagine that Abraham lived by the 613 commandments of the Torah even before they were given to Moses. The continuity between Abraham and the Jewish people is complete.

Jews are descendants of Abraham in a lineal way, but there are other biological descendants: the children of Ishmael. In the Torah, they are blessed with the promise of becoming great nations. Jews are blessed in the same way too, but we claim an additional legacy from Abraham. As a community, we inherit his commitment to God, and God to him. That is why converts to Judaism typically call themselves "son or daughter of Abraham" (and Sarah, in more liberal circles).

Converting to Judaism

Within the Jewish tradition, there are ways of recognizing Abraham's importance for people who are not descended from him in any way. This begins in the Torah: "All the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you" (Genesis 12:3) and continues in midrash that states that throughout their travels, Abraham and Sarah brought many people to an understanding of God. Judaism is not an either/or religion, however. Abraham can be a light unto the nations (as we are commanded to be, as a people) and still be specifically Avraham Avinu, Abraham our father.

Abraham in Christianity

Christianity, of course, originally sprang from Judaism. Beginning with Paul, however, Christians interpreted the figure of Abraham both as a foreshadowing of Jesus and as a proof that they--and not the Jews--were the proper descendants of Abraham.

This interpretation rested on two readings of Genesis that the Jewish tradition would not accept.

1. Reading Genesis 12:3 not as "All the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you" but through you, instead. The Jewish reading had people saying, "May you be like Abraham!" The Christian reading had them saying "We are like Abraham, and the message that he brought flows through us."
2. Making much of the fact that God chooses Abraham first and only later commands him to circumcise himself and his male children. In Paul's hands, this becomes proof that circumcision (and by extension, all the mitzvot, or commandments, of the Torah) are unnecessary. The nations of the world can become Christians without becoming Jews first.

For Christians, according to Levenson, Abraham's distinguishing feature was his faith in God. Since to many Christians, Jesus is God, their belief in Jesus makes them descendants of Abraham. 

From this perspective, people who do not put faith first, and people who do not believe in Jesus, are missing the point of Abraham and (in the case of Jews) spurning their inheritance. They are putting their salvation in peril. That is an unimaginable thing for a Christian to do, but not an issue that takes up much space in Judaism. Christians generally don't realize that Jews by and large leave questions of what happens after death up to God, and that Jews believe "The righteous of all nations have a place in the world to come" (Pirkei Avot 1:1). So, what is the point to Christians is beside the point to Jews.

For Christians, the meaning of Abraham is that Jews should give up rabbinic teachings and "go back to Abraham"--meaning to the Abraham imagined by Christians, who cares only for God and his own soul, not the one in Genesis who is clearly exercised over which of his biological sons will inherit from him. So, for Jews and Christians, being "Abrahamic religions" is a stumbling block to interfaith understanding as much as it is a spur to achieve it.

Abraham in Islam

No god but God, and Abraham was his prophet

 In Islam, Abraham is not the ancestor of the Jews nor the prototype of Christian faith. Abraham is a "muslim" in the literal sense: a person who submits to God.

For followers of Islam, what is most important about Abraham is his strict monotheism. The Qur'an stresses that Abraham was not a pagan or a polytheist, at a time when the vast majority of people were. In this way, Abraham the prophet was just like Muhammad the prophet, and the latter came to restore and amplify on the teachings of the former. Being a descendant of Abraham in any sense doesn't matter. What matters is sharing his belief.

The Torah shows Abraham meeting with and worshiping with priests who called God by other names than he did, and it does not show Abraham saying that only one God exists--simply that he, Abraham, will follow only one. Unlike Christians and Jews, however, Muslims are not bound by the stories in the Torah. If those stories conflict with Qur'an or with belief, they are free to regard them as garbled in transmission. So once again, Jews and Muslims being "Abrahamic" is a source of tension between them as much as it is an opportunity for mutual understanding.

One Abraham or Three?

Jew and Christians both claim to be Abraham's descendants and heirs. Muslims don't.

Jews and Muslims both think Abraham's monotheism means God has no body and no separate "persons." Christians think God has both.

Christians and Muslims both think everyone must eventually accept the truth of their religion to be saved from hell. Jews don't.

Levenson is drawing all these distinctions partly because he is a careful scholar, but partly because he is convinced that relations between Jews, Muslims, and Christians must be based on mutual respect. Sweeping these differences under the rug only keeps us from doing the more important work of understanding one another. I fully agree.

The Jewish Gospels, by Daniel Boyarin: a review

Boyarin argues that when Jesus claimed to be a divine being as well as the anointed king, he was saying something other Jews would understand and find normal. From Boyarin's perspective, the difference between Jesus' followers and other Jews was not that he claimed to be the unique Son of God but that most Jews didn't think he was that guy.

I'm not a biblical scholar. I'm a Jew, immersed in the Judaism of the 21st century CE. So, the challenge for me reading this book was to try to imagine myself in the 1st century, before most of what I know as Judaism had taken firm shape.

Unlike some of the other reviewers, I had no problem with the idea that Jesus kept kosher (the title of chapter three). It even made sense to me that he might have been aghast at the new ways of keeping kosher that the P'rushim (later called Pharisees by people who couldn't read Hebrew) introduced. These forerunners of the rabbinic movement had the radical idea that all Jews could live in a state of ritual purity--not just the priests--and that ordinary activities like cooking and eating could be made holy. On Boyarin's reading, Jesus was a conservative, saying "Don't add new rules to what the Torah already prescribes." I can't verify his reasons for saying that, but it seems plausible to me, perhaps because to my mind it makes the rabbis look as revolutionary as I think they were.

The idea that there were a lot of different ways of being Jewish at the time, and that Christianity was just one of them for centuries, also makes sense with what history I know.

Given that, there may even have been Jews who think what Boyarin thinks they thought: that the Messiah, son of David, would also be a divine figure. Boyarin uses ingenious readings of Jewish texts that are minor (Daniel) or totally obscure (First Enoch, Fourth Ezra) today, to back up this point.

According to his reading of these texts, "Son of Man" (ben adam, in the Hebrew) actually means a figure shaped like a man who sits on a throne at the right of God and then descends in the clouds to earth, to rule. "Son of God" actually means the divinely chosen ruler, who is a son of God the same way a bar mitzvah is literally a son of the commandment: he's under God's authority. (That is my comparison, not Boyarin's.) At some point, the two became identified.

Boyarin argues that these texts set up the expectation of a divine Messiah, that Jesus said he was that person, and that the Jews who rejected him understood what he was saying--it wasn't an innovation to them--but denied his claim to be The One.

This is completely intriguing, but I am dubious, for several reasons.

1. Boyarin cherry-picks the verses that support his argument.

2. When he comes across verses that seem to contradict his thesis, he writes them off as an editor trying to bring an unruly original text back into line. You can do anything with a text that way!

3. That picture of an orthodox editor implies that the view that the Messiah was NOT a divine figure was always the dominant one. The Christological idea that Boyarin says is "Jewish" may always have been as strange to most Jews as "Jews for Jesus" are to most Jews today.

4. Boyarin gives no evidence that Daniel (which was eventually included in the Jewish canon, or Tanach, but has no role in the liturgy) was widely read at the time. (A stray part of me wonders if Boyarin wants "Daniel" to be important because it's his first name.) Some of the other books he cites are only extant in the literature of the Ethiopian Jews. It may be just my ignorance, but I have no way of knowing whether those books were circulating in first-century Palestine or not--and Boyarin doesn't tell me. So is he making an argument that people in that time and place would find recognizable?

Finally, let's say for the sake of argument that Boyarin is right in every respect. I can understand why that would be important to a historian. But why in the world would it be important to the rest of us?

Judaism and Christianity may have parted ways later and over different issues than we used to think--but they did part. They have been separate religions for at least 1800 years now. Since the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, Jews have been persecuted in the name of Christianity. (I hasten to say that there have also been individual Christians who were great friends of Jews, even putting themselves at risk to do so.)

Harking back to a time when followers of Jesus were a recognized but minor Jewish sect does nothing to bring us closer together. Understanding where we are and how we differ today is a more productive path for Jews, Christians, and (I would add) the other children of Abraham, the Muslims, too.

Davening the Lord's Prayer

My parents used to sing us to sleep every night.  One of the songs that took a regular turn in the repertory was The Lord's Prayer, the Perry Como version, I think. And this could have been strange. We were a Jewish household, holding onto our identity in a nearly all-Christian suburb of Pittsburgh. The song is based on Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. Yet it seemed perfectly natural and in tune with what we believed.

Ten pages of The Misunderstood Jew, by Amy-Jill Levine, explain my childhood experience to me. Those are the pages where she shows, phrase by phrase, that the "Lord's Prayer" is made up of concepts that are entirely Jewish. In fact, she suggests that Christians would understand the prayer better if they knew more about its historical context. Follow this with me.

"Our father in heaven": Jews in the first century used the term Abba ("father") regularly, and even today Avinu (our father) is a common term in the Jewish prayerbook. Back then, it was also a political statement: a rejection of the Roman Caesar's claim to be the father of all his subjects.

"Hallowed be your name": every Jewish prayer service includes repetition of the Kaddish prayer, which begins "Magnified and sanctified be [God's] great name." And name in Hebrew is not just a word or a sound but the expression of God's active energy in our lives.

"Your kingdom come": this expresses the Jewish wish for the olam ha-ba, the "world to come," which is not an afterlife but the kingdom of God during the Messianic period. Again, this is a bold rejection of Rome's claim to be the ultimate sovereign.

"Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven": because the kingdom of God will create a world of justice and peace, here, where we live, and not exclusively in a spiritual realm.

"Give us this day our daily bread": Levine argues persuasively that this translation, in its redundancy, is missing the point. She would translate it "Give us tomorrow's bread today." Tomorrow's bread, for which we hunger, is precisely the Messianic age.

"And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors":  This is a Jewish idea as well. We help those who are in economic distress, which would have been the only reason to take on debt in an agricultural economy. We believe that God will help us in our distress and keep us from paying all that we owe for our actions, whether they are sins ("trespasses") or just falling short of the mark.

Levine says, "The Greek phrase usually translate as 'Lead us not into temptation' is better rendered 'Do not bring us to the test.'" If the Roman empire would persecute you for practicing your religion and give you a good job if you would renounce your people and your traditions, that is a test that no one should have to face. Jesus knew that, and ultimately had to face that inhuman trial himself.

"But deliver us from evil": better, "the evil one." Satan in the Jewish tradition was the prosecuting angel when we were put to the test, always arguing that we had failed. For first-century Jews facing the trials of the Roman empire, it must have felt like an evil enemy pursuing them at every turn.

So, what I learn from Levine is that we could understand the "Lord's Prayer" this way:

Avinu malkeinu, our father in heaven, the way that you use your power in our lives is holy. Bring about the world to come, the Messianic age, so that what you have commanded us will be our actual everyday lives. Let us taste that world now. Don't hold our wrongdoings against us. Be merciful as you have told us to be merciful. Especially, don't let worldly powers put us in a position where we have to pay a terrible price for doing the right thing. Release us from their justice which is no justice. You are our only God and ruler.

If Jesus were alive today and prayed this prayer, as a Jew I would respond, "Amen!"