The Jewish Gospels (2 page)

Now to the personal example. On October 30, 2011, I heard the following Gospel passage read in my church (Church of the Messiah, Santa Ana, California):

Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi. But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father—the one in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted. (Matthew 23:1–12; New Revised Standard Version)

Jesus was surely one of the greatest polemicists of all time. It is thanks to him that the very word “Pharisee” has as its second definition in
Webster's College Dictionary
“a sanctimonious, self-righteous, or hypocritical person.” And it's clear, isn't it, in this passage from the Gospel of
Matthew that the sanctimonious, self-righteous, hypocritical persons whom Jesus has in his crosshairs do call one another “rabbi.” But all texts, including scripture, are read through the filter of what one “already knows.” Episcopalians who call their priests “Father” and Roman Catholics who call the pope “Holy Father” slide easily enough past “call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father—the one in heaven” because “everyone knows” that the term
father
is innocently used in these Christian contexts. More to the point, most Christian interpreters slide with equal ease past Jesus' injunction: “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses's seat; therefore,
do whatever they teach you and follow it
.” I myself have read and heard this passage for years but only on October 30, 2011, thinking about my draft of this foreword, did I really lock on to
do whatever they teach you and follow it.
Post-Boyarin, I can only read this passage as a
defense
of un-sanctimonious, un-self-righteousness, un-hypocritical adherence to the Law of Moses against sanctimonious, self-righteous, hypocritical exploitation of it.

So, then, I repeat the question: did Jesus keep kosher? If he had nothing against the Law, why couldn't he keep kosher? And come to think of it, is it not a rather absurd notion that the Jewish Messiah should disdain to eat like a Jew? But if you happen to be a Jewish reader of this foreword, please double back now and reread the quoted first paragraph of Boyarin's
chapter 3
, especially its ending:
“The ideas of Trinity and incarnation, or certainly the germs of those ideas, were already present among Jewish believers well before Jesus came on the scene to incarnate in himself, as it were, those theological notions and take up his messianic calling.” The Trinity a Jewish idea? The
incarnation
a Jewish idea? Yes, indeed! And if such thoughts as these seem unthinkable, I can only urge: read on. They may seem more thinkable after you read Boyarin's deeply informed analysis of the Jewish background to Jesus' application to himself of the strange title
Son of Man,
a designation that ought to mean simply “human being” but clearly, and paradoxically, bespeaks divinity far more than does the more modest, merely royal or messianic designation
Son of God.

The challenge that Daniel Boyarin delivers to Christians is, first, to surrender some of their claim to religious originality and, second, to think with him past a supposed Christian belief in the obliteration of nationality within the noble universality of the church. In an earlier book,
A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity,
Boyarin urged Christians to remember that the same Paul who wrote

There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong
to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise. (Galatians 3:28–29; New Revised Standard Version)

also wrote

I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew (Romans 11:1–2; New Revised Standard Version).

Daniel Boyarin belongs to a generation of Jewish-American scholars who have addressed the Christian scriptures with an unprecedented and pathbreaking frankness and freedom. They see Paul, who boasted that as a pupil of Gamaliel [a famous early rabbi] he was “thoroughly trained in every point of our ancestral law” (Acts 22:3), as far more rabbinically Jewish than Jesus, contrary to an earlier view that saw him as sanitizing Jesus for Gentile consumption.

For Christians, true, the distinction between male and female is ultimately ephemeral because men and women are ultimately “one in Christ Jesus,” but penultimately—which is to say, until the end of time—men and women do usually remain male and female, and Paul usually treated them as such. He was not the enemy of all difference. So also, then, for the difference between Jew and Gentile.
Titus, born Greek, could become a Christian Greek without undergoing circumcision, Paul stoutly insisted. Timothy, born Jewish but uncircumcised, had to be circumcised, Paul insisted by essentially the same token, so as to make a point for the benefit of Jews and Greeks alike. Timothy was to be a Christian, yes, but even as such he was to remain a Jew, a Christian Jew. In other words, the Jewish party was far from over when the Christian party began. On the contrary—and here is surely Boyarin's most mind-stretching correction—the Jews were the hosts, not the guests, at that Christian party, and what they were in practice at the start, he suggests, they can become again, at least in thought and in theory, even now.

Boyarin's challenge to Jews, then, is simply to recognize themselves or at least to imagine themselves in some semblance of this historic role, despite millennia of Christian scorn and persecution, despite even the Nazi Shoah, the ne plus ultra enactment of the malign and invidious thesis that Judaism and world Jewry are historically and existentially
over
. It is to recognize further that the Jewish engagement with Christianity has never, in fact, stopped at the null position of “what is new is not true, what is true is not new.” More than that has always been happening between the womb-embattled twins, however ready Jewish leadership may have been to declare otherwise, for a powerful strand of Jewish thought has always wanted world engagement—a definitive and dramatic triumph
upon the world religious stage. Thus did the Word of the Lord come to the prophet Zechariah saying:

Thus said the L
ORD
of Hosts: In those days, ten men from nations of every tongue will take hold—they will take hold of every Jew by a corner of his cloak and say, “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.” (Zechariah 8:23; Jewish Publication Society
Tanakh
)

Ten
goyim
clinging to the elbow of every
yid?
How many Jews are ready for
that?
There is something undeniably comic about Zechariah's vision. It makes me think of Philip Roth's novel
Operation Shylock
in which a proponent of “Diasporism,” a grandly eccentric dream of seeding Europe with new colonies of resettled Israelis, imagines how they will be received:

“You know what will happen in Warsaw, at the railway station, when the first trainload of Jews returns? There will be crowds to welcome them. People will be jubilant. People will be in tears. They will be shouting, ‘Our Jews are back! Our Jews are back!' The spectacle will be transmitted by television through the world.” (
Operation Shylock,
p. 45)

But strange as it must seem, even comic as it must seem, some such motif is not alien to Israel's collective
self-understanding. In the Book of Isaiah, the Lord God “who gathers the dispersed of Israel” does not stop there. He concludes, “I will gather still more to those already gathered” (Isaiah 56:8; Jewish Publication Society
Tanakh
), a line that comes at the end of a passage envisioning that the self-hating eunuchs and the cowed foreigners who imagine that they are unwelcome in the Temple of Solomon will someday know otherwise, for “‘My House shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples,' thus declares the L
ORD
” (56:7).

Such a prospect is good for a laugh, good for the kind of laugh the family laughed in my parable at the snapshot of Ben—Ben the family football player—singing the national anthem as the music teacher's favorite boy soprano, good for the kind of laugh they laughed at the shot of Josh—Josh the family minstrel—in his football equipment. But the family album (
read,
here, their respective scriptures) didn't lie, did it? Ben's treble did soar that day at “land of the
freeee
,” and Josh—didn't he actually score a touchdown in that game? Their history—their shared early life, as retained in the family album—concealed important clues to further possibilities in their adult lives. It just took the patience and the diligence of a Mr. Boyarin to see it.

Patient and diligent Daniel Boyarin has been through, by now, decades of scholarly endeavor. And it takes patience and diligence for even an intellectually prepared reader to assimilate what he has done, as any serious
reader of his massive
Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity
will testify. The book before you, however,
The Jewish Gospels,
is by design inviting rather than daunting. It is the user-friendliest book that Daniel has ever written, and perhaps the user-friendliest that he will ever write. Think of it as a bracingly short sail on rough seas under a captain of uncompromising competence, unsparing candor, unconventional procedures, but, beneath it all, unfailing goodwill and good humor. Back on shore, count on it, you will be breathless and sunburned, but you'll have seen land and sea—Christianity and Judaism—as you never saw them before.

Bon voyage.

I wish to thank the following friends who have helped me enormously in the production of this book over the years in which it gestated: Carlin Barton, Adela Yarbro Collins, John J. Collins, Susan Griffin, Joel Marcus, John R. Miles, Andy Ross (much more than an agent), Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Eliyahu Stern, and especially Marc Favreau (much more than an editor). This book has had a very nurturing gestational period. Among the prime nurturing environments are counted four meetings of the Enoch Seminar and its maestro, Gabriele Boccacinni, and two summer seminars at the Wissenschaft Kolleg in Greifswald, wonderfully organized and conducted by Andreas Bedenbender, who deserves better of academia. I thank, as well, all of the participants in those several meetings severally and collectively. None are guaranteed to endorse the final results, and some are sure to disagree with them more or less sharply.

—Greenfield

July 2011

I
F THERE IS ONE THING
that Christians know about their religion, it is that it is not Judaism. If there is one thing that Jews know about their religion, it is that it is not Christianity. If there is one thing that both groups know about this double not, it is that Christians believe in the Trinity and the incarnation of Christ (the Greek word for Messiah) and that Jews don't, that Jews keep kosher and Christians don't.

If only things were this simple. In this book, I'm going to tell a very different historical story, a story of a time when Jews and Christians were much more mixed up with each other than they are now, when there were many Jews who believed in something quite like the Father and the Son and even in something quite like the incarnation of the Son in the Messiah, and when followers of Jesus kept kosher as Jews, and accordingly a time in which the question of the difference between Judaism and Christianity just didn't exist as it does now. Jesus, when he came, came in a form that many, many Jews were expecting: a
second divine figure incarnated in a human. The question was not “Is a divine Messiah coming?” but only “Is this carpenter from Nazareth the One we are expecting?” Not surprisingly, some Jews said yes and some said no. Today we call the first group Christians and the second group Jews, but it was not like that then, not at all.

Everybody then—both those who accepted Jesus and those who didn't—was Jewish (or Israelite, the actual ancient terminology). Actually, there was no Judaism at all, nor was there Christianity. In fact, the idea of “a religion,” that is, one of a number of religions to which one might or might not belong, had not come on the scene yet and wouldn't for centuries. By the third century (or even earlier) Christianity became a name for what Christians called themselves, but Jews were not to have a name for their religion in one of their own languages until sometime in the modern period, perhaps the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Until then terms meaning Judaism as the religion of the Jews were used only by non-Jews.

So, then, what are we talking about? We are not talking about a separate institution, a separate sphere of “religion,” still less of a “faith” for Jews. We are talking about the complex of rituals and other practices, beliefs and values, history and political loyalties that constituted allegiance to the People of Israel, not a religion called Judaism. To get a sense of the absurdity of the proposition that Judaism is a religion the way Christianity is, let me consider a very
recent event. In March 2011, the
New York Times
published the results of a social scientific study of satisfaction with life among various groups in the United States. Asian Americans were considered to be the “happiest” ethnic group, while Jews were considered to be the “happiest” religious group, thus leading to the inexorable conclusion that Asian American Jews were the happiest folk in America. This result is obviously flawed, because we all sense that both Jews and Asian Americans are ethnicities, whereas Christianity is never considered as an ethnic category at all. In fact, for us Jewishness is a very mixed category that doesn't really map onto either ethnicity or religion alone. This has a good historical basis. As Paula Fredriksen has recently written, “In antiquity . . . cult is an ethnic designation; ethnicity is a cultic designation.”
¹
That remained the case for Jews right up into modernity and to a not inconsiderable extent remains so even now.
²
In this book, the term “Judaism” will be used as a convenience to refer to that part of Jewish life that was concerned with obedience to God, worship, and belief, though I recognize that the term is an anachronism.