Rethinking the Messianic Idea in Judaism

Michael L. Morgan, Steven Weitzman, Michael L. Morgan, Steven Weitzman

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780253014771
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

Over the centuries, the messianic tradition has provided the language through which modern Jewish philosophers, socialists, and Zionists envisioned a utopian future. Michael L. Morgan, Steven Weitzman, and an international group of leading scholars ask new questions and provide new ways of thinking about this enduring Jewish idea. Using the writings of Gershom Scholem, which ranged over the history of messianic belief and its conflicted role in the Jewish imagination, these essays put aside the boundaries that divide history from philosophy and religion to offer new perspectives on the role and relevance of messianism today.

PART 1

Blurred Lines and Open Secrets in Early Jewish Messianism

ONE

Messianism between Judaism and Christianity

Annette Yoshiko Reed

In “Towards an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,” Gershom Scholem famously proclaimed messianism as the defining difference between Christians and Jews: “It is here that the essential conflict between Judaism and Christianity has developed and continues to exist.”¹ Few today would contest his assertion. In fact, the notion is now so widespread as to seem obvious. In what follows, however, I would like to take this apparent obviousness as an invitation to look more closely. I reflect upon the prehistory, power, and limits of the trope of messianism as defining difference, and I examine some of the most influential articulations and subversions of the trope, past and present. What I shall suggest is that Christianity’s origins in Jewish messianism has served as a potent site for reflection on religious identity—not just in the first century, but in Late Antiquity and modernity as well.

At the heart of this chapter is a paradox: it may be a truism that the belief in Jesus as Messiah is what differentiates “Christian” from “Jew,” but this point of differentiation is predicated on the entanglement of their histories. By both ancient and modern accounts, after all, the origins of Christianity are part of Jewish messianism. Already in the first century CE, the New Testament literature attests the culling of proof-texts from Jewish scriptures to argue for Jesus’s status as the mashiah (Greek, christos) long promised to the Jews. Into Late Antiquity and well beyond, Christian authors richly continued the practice, even while decrying Israel as superseded by the church or proclaiming the Torah as abrogated by the Gospel. Likewise, within modern scholarship, the earliest movement surrounding Jesus is commonly characterized as a Jewish messianic sect.² Some scholars, in fact, reserve the term “Christianity” for a later age, when the movement reinvented itself as a distinct “religion.”³

Accordingly, Christianity’s origins in Jewish messianism have been amply discussed, not just in ancient Christian sources and modern scholarship about them, but also in studies of the phenomenology of Jewish messianism and assessments of Jesus’s place in Jewish history. This chapter is an experiment in bringing these discussions into conversation with one another around the question of the place of messianism in the production of Jewish/Christian difference. My aim is not to add to the rich corpus of studies that have sought to reconstruct early beliefs about Jesus against the background of Second Temple Judaism, nor to debate the determinative points of their divergence.⁴ Rather, I shall ask how the relationship between Jewish and Christian messianism has been represented, both in antiquity and in modernity. Although I shall consider sources penned from Christian as well as Jewish perspectives, my inquiry is ultimately oriented toward the open question of what we can learn about Jewish messianism from the case of Christianity.

In the process, I hope to shed light on the powerful but paradoxical place of Jewish messianism in Christian identity—both as an indelible mark of Christianity’s Jewish origins and as the point of its purportedly defining distinction. Disagreements over messianic beliefs about Jesus are often cited as exemplary of Jewish/Christian difference and as the ultimate cause for the differentiation of these “religions.” Often concurrent, however, is an acknowledgment of the commonalities on which this contestation is predicated (e.g., the very idea of a Messiah, the historiography of messianic hope, the exegetical practice of deriving and defending messianic claims from Jewish scriptures). In ancient Christian sources and in modern scholarship about them, attention to messianism thus threatens to expose shared roots, entangled histories, and overlapping identities, even in the course of assertions of essential or inevitable difference.

Among modern Jewish thinkers, Scholem is hardly alone in pointing to messianism as that which splits Christianity from Judaism. Yet, as we shall see, there is a striking lack of firsthand evidence for ancient Jewish counterparts to such assertions; if anything, we glimpse rabbinic resistance to Christian claims about the power of messianic and other beliefs to produce “religion” and difference. Ancient Christian sources often insist that Jews concur with Christians on everything about the Messiah except his advent and identity, and modern scholars often take such claims at face value.⁵ Ancient Jewish sources, however, model quite different approaches to mapping identity. That messianism and belief-based approaches to defining “Christian” are not mutually exclusive with lineage and practice-based approaches to defining “Jew” was pointed out already in Late Antiquity, particularly within so-called “Jewish-Christian” counter-histories of Christian origins.⁶ Consideration of the full range of relevant sources from Late Antiquity thus leads us to question some common assumptions about messianic debates between ancient Jews and Christians, while also opening some new perspectives on Jesus’s place among Judaism’s multiple Messiahs. A more integrative approach to the relevant late antique sources also highlights parallel dynamics at play in modern scholarship, illumining some of the process by which current notions about messianism and difference came to seem so natural.

Messianism and Difference

Scholem’s quip about messianism as “essential conflict” has been much repeated in research on Christian origins and Jewish messianism. Scholars have hotly debated his assessment of the precise character of the conflict between Jewish and Christian messianism; few, however, have questioned his characterization of this conflict as “essential.”⁷ It remains axiomatic that beliefs about “the Messiah” mark the boundary between “Christian” and “Jew.”

Interestingly, what Scholem asserted without argument in 1958 was already a common trope among Jewish thinkers concerned with Christianity. In a lecture from 1928, for instance, Martin Buber describes eschatological expectation as a point of commonality between Christians and Jews that is simultaneously an unbridgeable divide: “Your [Christian] expectation is directed towards a second coming, ours to a coming which has not been anticipated by a first. . . . Pre-messianically our destinies are divided. Now to the Christian the Jew is the incomprehensively obdurate man, who declines to see what has happened; and to the Jew the Christian is the incomprehensively daring man, who affirms in an unredeemed world that its redemption has been accomplished. This is a gulf which no human power can bridge.”⁸ That Jewish/Christian difference in the present had its ultimate roots in a defining moment of messianic differentiation in the past was memorably articulated a decade later by Joseph Klausner. In the essay “The Jewish and the Christian Messiah,” printed as an appendix to the third edition of The Messianic Idea in Israel, Klausner stresses that “at first, the only difference between Jews and Christians was that the former believed that the Messiah was still to come, and the latter that the Messiah had already come.”⁹

The maxims of Klausner and Scholem continue to set the tone for historical research on messianism, wherein comparisons of pre-Christian Judaism and the Jesus movement are often predicated on the claim of messianism’s special significance as the present point of conflict between Christianity and Judaism or as the pivot on which the two first “parted ways.” In the introduction to the 2007 volume The Messiah in Early Judaism and Christianity, for instance, Magnus Zetterholm can state without further explanation that “messianism scarcely constitutes a common ground for Jews and Christians and is certainly not the best starting point for Jewish-Christian relations. Rather, due to the unfortunate historical development of Jewish-Christian relations, ‘the Messiah’ has been the most important concept that distinguishes Christianity from Judaism.”¹⁰ One finds similar statements in contemporary Christian theological reflection on Judaism. Just as Buber’s above-quoted statement was positively cited by the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, so a similar emphasis on shared expectation and divided beliefs is central to the characterization of Judaism in the current Catechism of the Catholic Church.¹¹ Even when the trope of messianic belief as defining difference is questioned or nuanced—whether in scholarship on the New Testament or in contemporary calls for interfaith dialogue—it remains widely cited as the presumed “common sense” about the origins, essence, and intractability of Jewish/ Christian difference.¹²

Important, for our purposes, is what the trope assumes and effaces. Perhaps most notably, it hinges on the assumption of a coherent Jewish set of beliefs about a singular, awaited Messiah, as confirmed yet contradicted by claims about Jesus’s fulfillment of the role. It effaces, thus, the irrelevance of messianic and other beliefs for most Jewish (especially halakhic) approaches to determining Jewish identity. As a result, the emphasis on the differentiating force of messianic belief serves to naturalize not just modern views about the mutually exclusivity of “Jew” and “Christian,” but also distinctively Christian perspectives on “religion,” identity, and difference.

Precisely because the truth of the trope is not as self-evident as it first might seem, it may be instructive to unravel a bit of its genealogy. As we shall see, a number of ancient Christians assert that the belief that Israel’s awaited Messiah has already arrived is the only or main thing that separates Christians from Jews. Such assertions are prominent, as one might expect, among some of the early Christians most concerned with defining “Christianity” as distinct from “Judaism,” such as Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and other Gentile Christian authors of the contra Iudaeos tradition. Interestingly, however, such views are also voiced within sources that use the Jewishness of Jesus and his apostles to promote a vision of Christianity centered on monotheism and Torah observance. The following statement, for instance, is attributed to the apostle Peter in the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, a fourth-century Christian work commonly thought to preserve “Jewish-Christian” traditions: “The Jews have erred concerning the first coming of our Lord. But between them and us, there is disagreement about this matter alone. They themselves know and expect that the Messiah is coming. They do not know that he has come already in humility, namely, as the one called Jesus” (Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions 1.50.5–6). When we look more closely, then, what appears to be a simple difference is revealed to be potently ambivalent: if divergent messianic beliefs are a point of differentiation between Christians and Jews, it is only because messianism marks Christianity’s own origins as Judaism. Accordingly, so-called “Jewish-Christians” can argue for the essential identity of Judaism and Christianity on the exact same grounds that so-called “Gentile Christians” can argue for their essential difference.

For our understanding of Christianity’s Jewish messianism, I suggest that this ambivalence proves significant. Divergent messianic beliefs are often cited as a point of distinction between Christianity and Judaism in ancient Christian literature as well as in modern scholarly, theological, and popular writings. At the same time, however, messianic expectations remain emblematic of the roots of Christian faith in Jewish history and, as such, retain the power to blur the boundaries between them, even long after their supposed “parting of the ways.”

The dangerously doubled character of Christianity’s Jewish messianism, for instance, lies at the heart of one of the classic conundrums in modern scholarship on Christian origins: if the Jesus movement started out as a Jewish messianic sect, when and how did it cease to be such, and why is Christianity now a separate “religion”? An early and influential proposal was outlined by Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), one of the founding figures in the development of critical approaches to the New Testament. Significantly, for our purposes, it is by drawing upon the evidence of the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions that he argues as follows:

The first disciples of Jesus adhered as nearly as possible to the Jewish religion and to the national worship. The only thing that distinguished them fro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Blurred Lines and Open Secrets in Early Jewish Messianism
• Part II. Between Here and Eternity in Medieval Judaism
• Part III. Messianism and Ethics in Modern Jewish Thought
• Part IV. Politics and Anti-politics in Contemporary Jewish Messianism
• Part V. Messianism between Religious and Secular Imagination
• Contributors
• Index