Judaism in the New Testament

Practices and Beliefs

Bruce Chilton, Jacob Neusner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134814978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Judaism in the New Testament explains how the writings of the early church emerged from communities which defined themselves in Judaic terms even as they professed faith in Christ. These two extremely distinguished scholars introduce readers to the plurality of Judaisms of the period. They show, by examining a variety of texts, how the major figures of the New Testament reflect distinctly Judaic practices and beliefs.
This important study shows how the early movement centred on Jesus is best seen as `Christian Judaism'. Only with the Epistle to the Hebrews did the profile of a new and distinct Christian religion emerge.

1

JUDAISM IN THE NEW TESTAMENT OR THE NEW TESTAMENT’S PARTICULAR JUDAISM?

RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY WITHIN JUDAISM

Diversities within religions come to expression in a variety of ways. Examining all evidences of Christianity or of Judaism, within some broad limits, we find everything and its opposite. The very diversity of the written evidence (not to mention the archaeological evidence) shows what is at stake. Two sets of statements suffice. The Pope, heir of Peter, is head of the Church; all Church authority rests with the local presbytery; there is no Church authority at all. The Torah is the literal word of God in all details, so that, therefore, all who wish to be “Israel” must keep the Torah precisely as it is worded. The Torah expresses God’s will and purpose for humanity, but the formulation is this-worldly. The Torah is the work of humanity, the record of aspiration, not revelation. The first three statements clearly belong to any description of Christianity, the issue being a solely, particularly Christian one. But the three statements cannot all be true, since each contradicts the other two. All three in context clearly speak for a Christianity, but not for Christianity in general. That is why we have to take account of not only the definition of Christianity but also the delineation, within Christianity, of Christianities. And the same clearly pertains to Judaism. A statement that purports to state the truth about the Torah obviously belongs to Judaism; but these three statements, all of which cannot be true, certainly require us to recognize that there are diverse Judaisms.

Now the question emerges: precisely where and how, on what basis, shall we identify data that coalesce to form a single Christianity or a single Judaism? How am I supposed to know which statements, which I may find in a variety of writings, speak on behalf of one Judaism, which on behalf of another? And what is the starting-point?

A familiar definition of “Judaism” or of a Judaism responds to the rules of theology: one Judaism is right, another wrong. We therefore define Judaism by selecting those statements of truth, those norms of behavior and belief, that conform to a given theological position, and reject as irrelevant all contradictory statements, dismissing as heretical the books that contain them. So our work of defining Judaism commences with a theological principle, a fundamental idea governing the entire work of description. On that basis, we validate the resort to the-ism, that is to say, “Juda-ism,” by which we assume we refer to a systematic, orderly, coherent, proportioned, balanced, and authoritative statement of religious beliefs and norms of behavior.

This same “Judaism” can be analyzed (by appeal to its canon), advocated (by reference to arguments on behalf of its clearly defined propositions as to truth), and set forth in comparison and contrast to other religions, also presented as philosophically cogent theological systems. Indeed, nearly all definitions of Judaism derive from philosophical modes of thought and appeal in the end to a predetermined canon of accepted and authoritative writings. Then, to answer the question just now set forth, the data that instruct me on the positions of Judaism derive from the canon. We know the documents that bear weight because Judaism identifies those documents – and dismisses all others. And our starting-point is the intellectual construct, Judaism, itself.

That familiar, theological approach to the definition of a religion, here exemplified by Judaism, does not serve very well in describing a religion that contains a variety of writings that contradict one another and that self-evidently derive from diverse groups of persons. In the case of Judaism in the first centuries BC and AD, for example, we find a variety of documents that scarcely intersect. If we invoke any criterion we think likely to characterize a variety of writings – a single doctrine concerning the Torah, the Messiah, the definition of who and what is “Israel,” for example – we find no one answer present in all writings, and no point of agreement which unites them. Not only so, but both archaeological and text analysis insist that the various writings were produced by diverse groups and do not speak for one and the same community of persons at all.

If moreover we introduce conceptions paramount in prior writings, e.g. Scripture, or later writings, e.g. the Mishnah, Talmuds, and Midrash-compilations, we may well discover that the writings of the first centuries BC and AD do what they will with the former – there being no consensus on what any inherited ideas maintain – and exhibit entire ignorance of the latter. It follows that the theological approach to the definition of a religion, which utilizes philosophical methods in the search for a coherent statement of, and about, a religion, requires us to pick and choose among the data. But what, for purposes of a merely descriptive definition, validates doing so? And how are we supposed to know what to pick and what to discard?

It follows that where we find statements on behalf of Judaism, which clearly contradict other statements on behalf of Judaism, speaking descriptively and not theologically, we address not one right or true Judaism and another wrong or false Judaism but only two Judaisms. And everything that follows rests upon these two foundations: first, the definition of a religion is not a problem in theology, and, second, the definition of a religion takes account of diverse religious systems that all together form the data of that particular, encompassing religion. That is, first, if we hope to describe our data, leading to our work of analysis and interpretation, we shall find our work impeded if we introduce questions of truth or falsity. The reason is that answering those questions requires criteria of right and wrong, e.g. a clear definition of the character of revealed truth and the authority and standing of the Torah in particular. And, second, our task is to encompass all the data pertinent to a given religion, not only those data that cohere or that coincide with a particular theological, and anti-historical, presupposition or premise concerning description in general.

Doctrines of truth or error and the meaning, content, and character of revelation derive from theology; they are particular to the Judaism that appeals to those doctrines to validate its various positions on matters of conduct and conviction alike. If, then, we raise questions of truth or falsity in the description of a Judaism or of Judaism or of all Judaisms, we beg the very questions we propose to answer. This we do by invoking as an answer to the question what is in fact part of the question itself. Stated very simply: description of a religion cannot invoke theological norms, but can only encompass those norms within the labor of description itself.

In our view, we do best to start with documents that enjoy official status, that is, canonical writings. We investigate what those documents say, but then we ask also about the premises upon which their statements rest, the givens and the presuppositions exposed in explicit and articulated allegations. We turn, specifically, to the systemic documents – the writings held to bring to authoritative expression whatever a given religious system wishes to say. A systemic document is canonical writing accorded authoritative standing by a religious community. It contains information deemed both true and important, facts held to be consequential, bearing self-evident implications for conduct and conviction alike. The religious community preserves such a document because the writing stands for the community and sets forth a component of the community’s way of life and world-view.

But, in the nature of things, such a document may well convey facts or truths that others, outside of the community that values and preserves the document, accept as well. Not everything contained in canonical writings of a given group needs to be contrasted against opinions held in other circles or communities. Where a number of distinct groups have taken shape within a larger social world, all these groups, as well as the world in which they flourish, may well concur on a broad variety of topics. Consequently, a document that speaks for a specific and distinct group within that larger world may well go over ground quite familiar to others, outside the group itself. What that document says, then, constitutes the religious system’s explicit message. What the same document presupposes leads us deep into that system’s implicit conceptions, the deep, dense structure of its theory of how things are. In this book and its companions, we aim to identify principal parts of the Judaism – the Judaic religious system – that comes to explicit expression in the canonical writings of the Judaism of the dual Torah.

CHRISTIANITY A JUDAISM

The practice and belief of Judaism in the New Testament – a collection of writings produced for and by Israelites who revered the Torah as God’s word or, in secular terms, for and by faithful Jews, educated in Judaism – have long been treated as alien components of Christianity’s formative faith and its initial writing. That given of religion is contained in the title, Judaism in the New Testament, that is, a foreign body in a familiar one. But the earliest Christians insisted that they formed “Israel” and devoted rigorous thought to the demonstration that theirs was the Torah’s sole valid meaning and their Founder its unique medium of fulfillment. In due course they produced the New Testament, but for at least the first hundred years of Christianity their only revealed Scripture was that same Torah that (the rest of) Israel received as God’s revealed teaching. So far as possible, these same people appealed to the Torah to validate their faith and studied the Torah to explain it.

So by their own word what they set forth in the New Testament must qualify as Judaism, and they insisted (as vigorously as any other Judaic system-builders) the only Judaism. Judaisms known to us over time follow suit: ours is the Torah, and we form Israel, the holy people. True, early on, the Gospel of John would fiercely condemn “the Jews” and blame them for the crucifixion. But even John valued Israel and certainly adhered to the Torah as he read it. While later on a shift in category-formation distinguished between Judaism and Christianity, even here Christianity insisted on its patrimony and inheritance out of ancient Israel. Not only so, but Christianity would represent itself for all time as the sole valid continuation of the faith and worship of ancient Israel. That is to say, Christianity portrayed itself as (other) Judaisms ordinarily portrayed themselves, and out of precisely the same shared Torah at that.

Consequently, to distinguish between the religious world of the New Testament and an alien Judaism denies the authors of the New Testament books their most fiercely held claim and renders incomprehensible much that they said. Whether Jesus, insisting on his Judaic conception of God’s kingdom, or Paul, explaining how in his Judaic conception of Israel through Christ gentiles enter (are “grafted onto”) Israel, whether the Evangelists, linking Jesus to the house of David and much that he said and did to Israelite prophecy, or the author of the Letter to the Hebrews recasting the entire history of Israel from an account of salvation to one of sanctification – the picture is uniform. But then how can we grasp the New Testament’s Judaism if we do not treat its religion as (a) Judaism?

That simple observation explains why here we see the New Testament as the statement of Judaism (more suitably, a Judaism, among many), and further accounts for our insistence that Christianity’s practices and beliefs for its writers and their audience constituted (a) Judaism and are to be interpreted as such. Responding as we do to the self-understanding of the writings before us, how do we effect the simple change that strikes us as self-evidently required? As we shall explain in a moment, we simply bring to its logical conclusion the widely understood fact that, in antiquity as today, many Judaisms competed. Most knowledgeable people now reject the conception of a single Judaism, everywhere paramount. A requirement of theology, the dogma of a single, valid Judaism contradicts the facts of history at every point in the history of Judaism, which finds its dynamic in the on-going struggle among Judaisms to gain the position of the sole, authentic representation of the Torah. Further, along with the notion of a single official Judaism, we give up the notion of a unitary, internally harmonious Judaism, a lowest common denominator among a variety of diverse statements and systems. And logic further insists that we let go of the notion of an incremental, cumulative, “traditional” Judaism. At the same time, and for the same reason, we dismiss as vacuous and hopelessly general the notion of a single Judaism characteristic of a given age, e.g. the first century BC and AD, and we reject as groundless the conception that all documents of said age tell us about one and the same religious community, therefore, a single “Israel” and its Torah. It follows that the sources of a given period of time do not tell us about a single Judaism, characteristic of that time. They tell us about their writers’ premises, the Judaic thinking that underpins the Judaic system they have put forth – and that alone.

These closely linked conceptions – singular, harmonious, cumulative, and traditional – contradict the character of the evidence of all Judaisms of antiquity. If we open one set of coherent writings, we find one self-evidently valid answer to a cogent and pressing question, and if we open another set, we find a different answer to a different question. In the one, a given composite of proof-texts will predominate, in the other, a different composite, so it appears that one set of writings speaks of one topic to one group, another set of a different topic to another group. In all, viewed as a conglomerate, the various writings appear to form the statements of different people talking about different things to different people. And that view takes on even greater specificity when we realize that, so far as the diverse writings talk about the same issues at all, they present a mass of contradictions. Archaeological evidence for its part portrays synagogues rich in precisely the images that the written evidence tells us we should not find. So, in all, the conception of diverse, free-standing Judaisms best accommodates the evidence produced in ancient times (in secular categories) by Jews in the name of Judaism, or (in native categories) by Israel in the Torah.

Included in that statement is not only the iron datum that the New Testament writers saw themselves as Israelites teaching the meaning of the Torah, which none can contest, but also the givens of the authors of the documents at Qumran, the writers of the Elephantine papyri, the compositors of the Mishnah, the compilers of the Talmud, and the authorities behind the documentary statements of every other Judaism of antiquity. All writers addressing a community of faithful wrote on the premise that the writers and those who would value, preserve, and conform to those writings formed “Israel” and practiced the Torah (the native category for which the secular one is “Judaism”).

Accordingly, we do not conceive that all writings point to a single Judaism, because the points of differentiation and even contradiction produced by a comparison of one set of writings with another render such a conception unlikely. Then what to do? We concentrate not on all writings of a given period but on some sets of kindred writings to ask about the Judaism that forms the foundation and the premise of that set of writings. That is, once we recognize the diverse character of various bodies of Judaic writings, we take up a single body of what appear on the surface to be closely congruent documents and read them. It follows, in its method, ours is a documentary approach to the study of (a) Judaism. For we insist that each piece of writing or set of cognate writings tells us about the Judaism to which it wishes to attest. We reject the notion that all writings inform us about one and the same Judaism, because we see too vast a diversity, too complex a range of disagreement, among the various writings to allow all to speak to a single religious tradition, even to find the lowest common denominator for their supposedly common address.

Then what? Once we abandon the idea that all (acceptable, canonical) writings speak of one and the same Judaism, one that is cumulative, traditional, and paramount, then a new possibility comes to the fore. It is that each writing that speaks for a single, coherent community of Jews will tell us about its religious system – its Judaism – and, further, take its place in the arena of comparison and contrast with other such Judaic religious systems. We no longer treat all Judaisms as exemplary of one Judaism nor assign priority to one over another, nor, yet, treat one Judaism as in any way related to, influenced by, or dependent upon another Judaism, whether of the prior or of the same age. We may compare and contrast Judaisms (the system of the New Testament with that of the Mishnah, for example), and temporal considerations – the one comes prior to and influences the other, for example – no longer govern the making of comparisons.

And that observation brings us back to the task of this book and the question we here propose to answer. Once we have defined our interest as not a single Judaism supposedly covering everybody but the Christians (there are no other candidates for exclusion!), then, it follows, we take to heart the Christians’ insistence that they formed (an) Israel or a part of Israel, so their writings too have to be read alongside those of all other Judaic groups that saw themselves as (an) Israel or as part of Israel. But that changes the very framing of the question, what is the role of Judaism in the New Testament? It becomes, what does the New Testament look like when we understand it as the statement of a Judaism, that is, the religious world-view, way of life, and theory of “Israel” of a group of Jews whose writings we possess?

THE JUDAISM OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

Hence the proper title of this book should be “the Judaism of the New Testament,” since we regard the New Testament as the documentary statement of a community of faithful practitioners of (a) Judaism, comparable to the documentary statements – in other terms to be sure – of other communities of faithful practitioners of other Judaisms. We take seriously the insistence of diverse social groups of Jews that they formed (an) “Israel,” the (sole remnant of the) people whom God loved for their acceptance of the Torah at Sinai. Each such group, distinguishing itself from others of Israel (the people), set forth the Torah as it understood the Torah, and all groups defined for themselves an urgent question and a self-evidently valid answer that, for the respective groups, formed their Judaism. How do these broadly recognized facts concerning Judaisms in ancient times change matters so far as earliest Christianity’s greatest literary evidence is concerned? In the setting of the diversity of social groups and their viewpoints in ancient Israel, we therefore cannot treat the New Testament as a foreign body, asking about how an alien religion played its part in the formation of that body. We rather see a variety of Judaic religious groups as equally representative Judaisms, all of them heirs to the same Scripture, every one of them insisting on the unique truth it alone possessed.

We propose here to spell out the implications for the reading of the New Testament of the now wides...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• JUDAISM IN THE NEW TESTAMENT
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 JUDAISM IN THE NEW TESTAMENT OR THE NEW TESTAMENT’S PARTICULAR JUDAISM?
• 2 NO ORTHODOX, TRADITIONAL JUDAISM?
• 3 ANALYZING A JUDAISM
• 4 THEORY OF THE SOCIAL ENTITY
• 5 PAUL’S COMPETITORS, JESUS’ DISCIPLES, AND THE ISRAEL OF JESUS
• 6 PRACTICE: JESUS AND THE TORAH
• 7 THE TRANSFORMATION OF JUDAISM: FROMTHE SALVATION TO SANCTIFICATION
• Notes
• Index