The Jewish Gospels (10 page)

*
“The Rabbis” is a designation for the leaders of a group of Jewish teachers who produced the Mishna, the midrashim, and the two Talmuds, Palestinian and Babylonian. They flourished from the second through the seventh centuries
A.D.
in Palestine and Babylonia and were eventually accepted as the authoritative transmitters of Judaism. The authorities cited in this passage are all second-century Palestinians (
tannaim
), so even if the attributions are genuine, the text is later than the Gospels. Although the rabbinic parallel does illumine some aspects of Jesus' statement—namely, its scriptural basis—what is more important is that the Gospel attests to the antiquity of a rabbinic idea. What we see here is convergence (despite some vitally important differences) between two sets of Jewish traditions about the Sabbath, both of which permitted at least some healing on the Sabbath based in part on the same reasoning, namely, that the Sabbath was given to benefit those who keep it, not that the people are there to serve the Sabbath.

T
HE JESUS FOLK
were not alone on the Jewish scene. Other Jews had been imagining various human figures as achieving the status of divinity and sitting next to God or even in God's place on the divine throne. At about the time of the Book of Daniel, Ezekiel the Tragedian, an Alexandrian Jew, wrote:

I had a vision of a great throne on the top of Mount

Sinai

and it reached till the folds of heaven.

A noble man was sitting on it,

with a crown and a large sceptre in his

left hand. He beckoned to me with his right hand,

so I approached and stood before the throne.

He gave me the sceptre and instructed me to sit

on the great throne. Then he gave me the royal crown

and got up, from the throne.
¹

Here we have the crucial image of the divine throne and the emplacement of a second figure on the throne alongside of or even in place of the Ancient One. Within the context of Second Temple Judaism, “if we find a figure distinguishable from God seated on God's throne itself, we should see that as one of Judaism's most potent theological symbolical means of including such a figure in the unique divine identity.”
²
Following this principle, we see that in this text Moses has become God. Not such an impossible thought, then, for a Jew, even one who lived long before Jesus. If Moses could be God in one version of a Jewish religious imagination, then why not Jesus in another?

Jews at the same time of Jesus had been waiting for a Messiah who was both human and divine and who was the Son of Man, an idea they derived from the passage from Daniel 7. Almost the entire story of the Christ—with important variations to be sure—is found as well in the religious ideas of some Jews who didn't even know about Jesus. Jesus for his followers fulfilled the idea of the Christ; the Christ was not invented to explain Jesus' life and death. Versions of this narrative, the Son of Man story (the story that is later named Christology), were
widespread among Jews before the advent of Jesus; Jesus entered into a role that existed prior to his birth, and this is why so many Jews were prepared to accept him as the Christ, as the Messiah, Son of Man. This way of looking at things is quite opposite to a scholarly tradition that assumes that Jesus came first and that Christology was created after the fact in order to explain his amazing career. The job description—Required: one Christ, will be divine, will be called Son of Man, will be sovereign and savior of the Jews and the world—was there already and Jesus fit (or did not according to other Jews) the bill. The job description was not a put-up job tailored to fit Jesus!

The single most exciting document for understanding this aspect of the early history of the Christ idea is to be found in a book known as the Similitudes (or Parables) of Enoch. This marvelous text (which seems to have been produced at just about the same time as the earliest of the Gospels) shows that there were other Palestinian Jews who expected a Redeemer known as the Son of Man, who would be a divine figure embodied in an exalted human. Because it is unconnected with the Gospels in any direct way, this text is thus an independent witness to the presence of this religious idea among Palestinian Jews of the time and not only among the Jewish groups within which Jesus was active.

The Similitudes of Enoch

The Book of Enoch is a key part of the Bible of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church; it does not appear in Western Bibles, whether Jewish, Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant. The Book of Enoch contains five sub-books: the Book of the Watchers, the Similitudes of Enoch, the Astronomical Book, the Animal Apocalypse, and the Epistle of Enoch. These books, all purporting to have been written by the antediluvian Enoch, were separate works gathered together at some point, probably during the late first century
A.D.
Fragments of them have been found at Qumran (among the Dead Sea Scrolls), except for the Similitudes, and fragments are known from various Greek sources as well. Present opinion is almost entirely solid that the Book of the Watchers is the oldest bit of Enoch (third century
B.C.
) and the Similitudes, our present concern, the youngest, dating from the mid-first century
A.D.
All of the pieces are couched as visions beheld or shown to that ancient sage Enoch, and thus the text as a whole is an apocalypse, a revelation, similar to the Book of Daniel or the canonical New Testament book of Revelation.

The Similitudes and the Gospels

In the Similitudes of Enoch, a Jewish writer of sometime in the first century
A.D.
³
makes extensive use of the
term “Son of Man” to refer to a particular divine-human Redeemer figure eventually incarnated in the figure of Enoch, thus exhibiting many of the elements that make up the Christ story.
⁴
Enoch's “Son of Man” is the descendant in the tradition of Daniel's “one like a son of man.”
⁵
In the Similitudes of Enoch, Chapter 46, we are provided with the following vision of Enoch the visionary speaker:

There I saw one who had a head of days, and his head was like white wool.
⁶
And with him was another, whose face was like the appearance of a man; and his face was full of graciousness like one of the holy angels. And I asked the angel of peace, who went with me and showed me all the hidden things, about that son of man—who he was and whence he was [and] why he went with the Head of Days. And he answered me and said to me, “This is the son of man who has righteousness. . . .”

In the Enoch text, just as in Daniel and in almost the same wording, there are two divine figures, one again who is ancient and one who has the appearance of a man, the appearance of a “son of man,” a young man, or so it seems in contrast to the Ancient One. It is clear that Enoch knows exactly who the “head of days” is, but he wonders who Son of Man is. There is dramatic irony here. Although Enoch does not know who the Son of Man is, we do—the one who in Daniel comes with the Ancient of Days of the snowy
beard and two thrones as well. By the end of the Similitudes of Enoch, as we shall see below, Enoch will have become that Son of Man, much as Jesus does in the Gospels.

This book provides us with our most explicit evidence that the Son of Man as a divine-human Redeemer arose by Jesus' time from reading the Book of Daniel. Chapter 46 of the book actually provides an exciting demonstration of the process of that reading. We can see there how the chapter of Daniel has been used in the making of a new “myth,” in the case of the Similitudes; for other Jews, no doubt, the myth of the Messiah formed in the same way. The interpretative process that we observe in this case is an early form of the type of Jewish biblical interpretation later known as midrash.
^7
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Strikingly, however, Enoch's angel contradicts Daniel's. While Daniel's angel explains that the Son of Man is a symbol for the holy ones of Israel (the Maccabean martyrs), Enoch's angel explains the Son
of Man as a righteous divine figure. As we have seen in
chapter 1
of this book, this seems to have been the original meaning of the vision, a meaning the author/redactor of the Book of Daniel sought to suppress by having the angel interpret the Son of Man allegorically. What we learn from this is that there was controversy among Jews about the Son of Man long before the Gospels were written. Some Jews accepted and some rejected the idea of a divine Messiah. The Similitudes are evidence for the tradition of interpretation of the Son of Man as such a divine person, the tradition that fed into the Jesus movement as well. It is only centuries later, of course, that this difference in belief would become the marker and touchstone of the difference between two religions.

Son of Man speculation and expectation seem, then, to have been a widespread form of Jewish belief at the end of the Second Temple period. The Similitudes seem to have been not the product of an isolated sect but part of a more general Jewish world of thought and writing.
⁸
Jesus' God-man Messiahship was just what the Jews ordered, even if many didn't think he fit the bill (and many others outside of Palestine, at least, never heard of him).

In the Book of Enoch, this figure is a part of God; as a second or junior divinity, he may even be considered a Son alongside the Ancient of Days, whom we might begin to think of as the Father. Although the Messiah designation appears elsewhere also, it is in Enoch 48 that the
similarities to the Gospel ideas about Jesus are most pronounced. Here is this riveting passage in its entirety:

¹
In that place I saw the spring of righteousness, and it was inexhaustible, and many springs of wisdom surrounded it.

And all the thirsty drank from them and were filled with wisdom;

and their dwelling places were with the righteous and the holy and the chosen.

²
And in that hour that son of man was named in the presence of the Lord of Spirits,

and his name, before the Head of Days.

³
Even before the sun and the constellations were created,

before the stars of heaven were made,

his name was named before the Lord of Spirits.

⁴
He will be a staff for the righteous,

that they may lean on him and not fall;

And he will be the light of the nations,

and he will be a hope for those who grieve in their hearts.

⁵
All who dwell on the earth will fall down and worship before him,

and they will glorify and bless and sing hymns to the name of the Lord of Spirits.

⁶
For this reason he was chosen and hidden in his presence before the world was created and forever.

⁷
And the wisdom of the Lord of Spirits has revealed him to the holy and the righteous;

for he has preserved the portion of the righteous.

For they have hated and despised this age of unrighteousness;

Indeed, all its deeds and its ways they have hated in the name of the Lord of Spirits.

For in his name they are saved.

and he is the vindicator of their lives.

⁸
In those days, downcast will be the faces of the kings of the earth,

and the strong who possess the earth, because of the deeds of their hands.

For on the day of their tribulation and distress they will not save themselves;

⁹
and into the hands of my chosen ones I shall throw them.

As straw in the fire and as lead in the water,

thus they will burn before the face of the holy,

and they will sink before the face of the righteous;

and no trace of them will be found.

¹⁰
And on the day of their distress there will be rest on the earth,

and before them they will fall and not rise,

and there will be no one to take them with his hand and raise them.

For they have denied the Lord of Spirits and his Anointed One.

Blessed be the name of the Lord of Spirits.
⁹

This piece of beautiful religious poetry forms an absolutely pivotal text for illuminating the Christology of the Gospels—as well as for demonstrating the essential Jewishness of that phenomenon. First of all, we find here the doctrine of the preexistence of the Son of Man. He was named even before the universe came into being. Second, the Son of Man will be worshipped on earth: “All who dwell on the earth will fall down and worship before him, and they will glorify and bless and sing hymns to the name of the Lord of Spirits.” Third, and perhaps most important of all, in v. 10 he is named as the Anointed One, which is precisely the Messiah (Hebrew
mashiah
) or Christ (Greek
Christos
). It seems quite clear, therefore, that many of the religious ideas that were held about the Christ who was identified as Jesus were already present in the Judaism from which both the Enoch circle and the circles around Jesus emerged.