The Jewish Gospels (23 page)

2
.
Ibid., 526.

3
.
Ibid., 526–27.

4
.
See Martin Hengel, “The Effective History of Isaiah 53 in the Pre-Christian Period,” in
The Suffering Servant: Isaiah 53 in Jewish and Christian Sources,
ed. Bernd Janowski and Peter Stuhlmacher, trans. Daniel P. Bailey (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2004), 137–45, for good arguments to this effect. Hengel concludes,
“The expectation of an eschatological suffering savior figure connected with Isaiah 53 cannot therefore be proven to exist with absolute certainty and in a clearly outlined form in pre-Christian Judaism.
Nevertheless, a lot of indices that must be taken seriously in texts of very different provenance suggest that these types of expectations could
also
have existed at the margins, next to many others. This would then explain how a suffering or dying Messiah surfaces in various forms with the Tannaim of the second century
C.E.
, and why Isaiah 53 is clearly interpreted messianically in the Targum and rabbinic texts” (140). While there are some points in Hengel's statement that require revision, the Targum is more a counterexample than a supporting text, and for the most part he is spot on.

5
.
Hengel, “Effective History,” 133–37, even makes a case that the Septuagint (Jewish Greek translation) to Isaiah (second century
B.C.
) may already have read the Isaiah passage as referring to the Messiah.

6
.
While it is universally acknowledged that vv. 14:61–64 are an unambiguous allusion to Daniel 7:13, scholars who cannot abide the idea that Jesus himself claimed messianic status or to be the Son of Man have either denied that these could have been Jesus' true words (Lindars) or understood them as Jesus speaking about someone else (Bultmann) (and see 13:25 as well). The clear sense of these words, however, as written by Mark in his Gospel is that here Jesus speaks of himself.

7
.
See the absolutely convincing Joel Marcus, “Mark 14:61: ‘Are You the Messiah-Son-of-God?'”
Novum Testamentum
31, no. 2 (April 1989): 139. Incidentally, the comparison between this passage and 8:31 demonstrates that Jesus answers questions about his Messiahship by using the term “Son of Man,” which is accordingly equivalent to Messiah in extension. He uses the term “Son of Man” in these instances because he is crucially calling up in both cases the Danielic context. This obviates the problem seen by some commentators to the effect that Jesus does not answer Peter affirmatively when Peter confesses him the Messiah. See Morna Hooker,
The Son of Man in Mark: A Study of the Background of the Term “Son of Man” and Its Use in St Mark's Gospel
(Montreal: McGill University Press, 1967), 104–5. Hooker herself suggests a similar interpretation to mine on 112; see 126 as well.

8
.
See Hooker,
Son of Man in Mark,
118–19, for a related reconstruction, and especially 120–22.

9
.
C.H. Dodd,
According to the Scriptures: The Sub-Structure of New Testament Theology
(London: Nisbet, 1952), 116–19. Dodd ascribed the transfer of this theme from the People of the Holy Ones of God (a corporate entity) to Jesus (an individual) on the basis of an alleged “Christian exegetical tradition which thinks of Jesus as the inclusive representative of the People of God.” The “Christian” exegetical tradition has its point of origin in Daniel 7, which was then naturally joined in the manner of midrash with the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 and to the Psalms of the Righteous Sufferer, for which there was apparently also a tradition of messianic reading. I think, however, that this is not a special Christian exegetical tradition but one that is plausible enough to have been the extant Jewish tradition even aside from Jesus.

10
.
I do not know early evidence outside of the Gospels for this particular way of reading the Daniel material as applying to a suffering Messiah, still less to a dying and rising one, and I have no reason to think that it did not fall into place in this particular Jewish Messianic movement. (As we shall see below, however, the reading of this as referring to the Messiah is not unknown to later rabbinic Judaism, not at all.) It should be noted that also in Fourth Ezra, discussed above in chapter 2, an
enemy arises to the Messiah, an enemy eventually defeated by him forever and ever.

11
.
This punctuation is Wellhausen's, as reported in Joel Marcus,
The Way of the Lord: Christological Exegesis of the Old Testament in the Gospel of Mark
(Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), 99.

12
.
Ibid., 97.

13
.
Ibid., 100.

14
.
Marcus's great insight was that the Gospel text thematizes the contradiction. He somewhat goes off track in the beginning of his discussion by citing (in the way of Dahl) the tannaitic rule of “two verses that contradict each other”; the correct comparison is to the midrashic form of the Mekhilta, which is given later. This initial confusion has some consequences, for which see below.

15
.
From here on, I will be following Marcus quite closely. Marcus,
Way of the Lord,
106.

16
.
It should be noted that in some respects the Matthean parallel goes in quite a different direction from Mark, especially by leaving out the crucial “It is written” statements in both instances. There is no midrash in Matthew here at all. For other entailed differences in this passage between the second and the first Gospels, see W.D. Davies and Dale C. Allison Jr.,
A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew,
International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1988), 712. If Marcus and I are right, then Mark is much closer to a Jewish hermeneutical form than Matthew at this point.

17
.
Marcus,
Way of the Lord,
108. Truth be told, in tannaitic literature much more often the first, but there are examples of the latter pattern as well in which the suggested interpretation is rejected. To my mind, saying “as it has been written” of the Son of Man that he will suffer is an entirely plausible scriptural inference. Marcus is still a bit misled by his confusion of two separate midrashic forms: (1) two verses that contradict each other and must be reconciled, and (2) a verse that contradicts the implication of an interpretive move that then can be refuted (as in the passages from the Mekhilta that Marcus correctly cites). It is only owing to this conflation that Marcus can
claim that “a hermeneutical rule for the treatment of a biblical text is here applied to a Christian midrash.” It is, moreover, the midrash of the scribes that is refuted here by Jesus. It is a virtue of Marcus's reading, as amended here, that it obviates the need to ascribe ineptitude to Mark (cf. Davies and Allison,
Critical,
710). The point nonetheless stands that Mark's text is a
lectio dificilior
here.

18
.
Origen,
Contra Celsum,
trans. with an introduction and notes by Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 50.

19
.
This version is almost certainly anterior to the Babylonian Talmud's parallel, which indicates that it is the Messiah, Son of Joseph, for whom they are mourning. This alternative Messiah, known only from the Babylonian Talmud and later texts, seems precisely to represent a sort of apologetic way of avoiding the implications of earlier traditions within which the Messiah suffers and/or is slain, such as is clear from the PT version of this tradition. David C. Mitchell, “Rabbi Dosa and the Rabbis Differ: Messiah Ben Joseph in the Babylonian Talmud,”
Review of Rabbinic Judaism
8, no. 1 (2005): 77–90, could hardly be more wrong in his interpretation of the rabbinic material. He insists that the Palestinian Talmudic text is tannaitic, notwithstanding the fact that it says “two Amoraim” explicitly; he considers the Babylonian Talmudic text primary and the Palestinian one secondary, and he seems to think that if the saying is quoted in the name of Rabbi Dosa, that means that it is something that actually was said by a figure who lived while the Temple still stood. Finally, he insists that a text cited explicitly as amoraic must be tannaitic simply because its diction is Hebrew and all Hebrew texts,
eo ipso,
are Palestinian and before
A.D.
200, which further reveals his innocence of rabbinic textual knowledge. I know of no evidence for a Messiah the son of Joseph before late antiquity. Claims to find one in the Hazon Gabriel of the first century
B.C.
seem highly suspect since this finding would be dependent on a very doubtful reading indeed. Israel Knohl, “The Apocalyptic and Messianic Dimensions of the Gabriel Revelation in Their Historical Context,”
Hazon Gabriel: New Readings of the Gabriel Revelation,
ed. Matthias Henze, Early Judaism and Its Literature, 29 (Atlanta: Society
of Biblical Literature, 2011), 43, may perhaps be correct in reading the name Ephraim in Il. 16–17 of this newly discovered text, but the reading is at best doubtful and in the opinion of some expert epigraphers impossible. See Elisha Qimron and Alexey Yuditsky, “Notes on the So-Called Gabriel Vision Inscription,”
Hazon Gabriel: New Readings of the Gabriel Revelation,
ed. Matthias Henze, Early Judaism and Its Literature, 29 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), 34. It seems rather a weak read
[sic]
on which to base a second Messiah nearly half a millennium before its attestation in the literature. See also papers of Adela Yarbro Collins and John J. Collins in same volume for further corroboration of this position. If the Palestinian Talmud, then, imagines a dead Messiah, it must be
the
Messiah and not a second or other Messiah of which it speaks. Note that the supposed existence of a “War Messiah” in rabbinic literature is a chimera. “The one anointed—
mashuah
not
mashiah
—for war” is a special priest and nothing else, as an examination of every place in rabbinic literature where the term occurs confirms easily. Holger Zellentin's interpretation of the Babylonian Talmudic passage may have some merit in finding an allusion to Christian passion narratives there, but his claim that it is based on an earlier narrative of a double Messiah seems shaky in the extreme to me; Holger Zellentin, “Rabbinizing Jesus, Christianizing the Son of David: The Bavli's Approach to the Secondary Messiah Traditions,” in
Discussing Cultural Influences: Text, Context and Non-Text in Rabbinic Judaism,
ed. Rivka Ulmer, Studies in Judaism (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2007), 99–127. To be sure, the BT does not seem to be inventing the concept here; rather, it is reflecting a known entity, but one for whom there is no prior evidence whatever within any extant text. When the Palestinian Talmud says that the Messiah died, therefore, it can only mean
the
Messiah.

20
.
The word for “disease” here means “leprosy” throughout rabbinic literature and is translated
leprosus
by Jerome as well (for the latter reference, see Adolph Neubauer,
The Fifty-Third Chapter of Isaiah According to the Jewish Interpreters
(Oxford: J. Parker, 1876–1877), 6.

21
.
But since it is only known from a volume of polemic Testimonia
(of a thirteenth-century Dominican friar), it might be considered suspect. See next note.

22
.
Raymondo Martini,
Pugio Fidei, Cum Observationibus Josephi de Voisin, et Introductione J. B. Carpzovj, Qui Appendicis Loco Hermanni Judœi Opusculum De Sua Conversion Ex Mscto . . . Recensuit
(Lipsiae, 1687), 674. Martini cites this text as from the fourth-century Midrash Siphre. I don't know if that citation is accurate, and one must question whether this is a real rabbinic text. On the other hand, although Martini was a polemicist, even his considerable powers as a Hebraist would not seem to have permitted him to forge a text in such fine midrashic style. Modern Jewish scholars from Leopold Zunz to my own teacher Saul Lieberman have accepted Martini's testimoniae as authentic texts.

23
.
Neubauer,
Fifty-Third Chapter,
23.

24
.
Ibid., 258.

25
.
Ibid., 78.

26
.
I am not claiming that therefore the followers of Jesus did not originate this particular midrash, rather, if and when they did so, the hermeneutical practice they were engaged in bespoke in itself the “Jewishness” of their religious thinking and imagination.

27
.
Martin Hengel, “Christianity as a Jewish-Messianic Movement,” in
The Beginnings of Christianity: A Collection of Articles,
ed. Jack Pastor and Menachem Mor (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 2005), 85, emphasis in original.

Epilogue

1
.
Adela Yarbro Collins, “Response to Israel Knohl, Messiahs and Resurrection in ‘The Gabriel Revelation,'” in
Hazon Gabriel: New Readings of the Gabriel Revelation,
ed. Matthias Henze, Early Judaism and Its Literature, 29 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), 97.

Acts
7:56
,
139

Acts
22:3
,
xviii

adoptionism,
84

“Against the Jews” (Chrysostom),
15

Alexander, Philip S.,
166n27

Alshekh, Rabbi Moshe,
155

Alter, Robert,
167n27

Ambrose, Saint,
15