Jesus, an Emerging Jewish Mosaic

Jewish Perspectives, Post-Holocaust

Daniel F. Moore

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780567105943
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Since Martin Buber in Two Types of Faith acknowledged Jesus as his "great brother, " other Jewish writers have sought to ascertain a place for Jesus within the larger context of Jewish history. In the aftermath of the Shoah, specifically in the afflicted consciousness of humanity, Jew and Christian alike began to ask how this tragedy could have happened, especially among and against people of faith. In an effort to assure that such a tragedy never happens again, the focus of some fell upon Jesus, previously the obstacle to reconciliation, but now perceived as the obvious and most viable bridge to span the chasm and assuage the wound of anti-Jewish and anti-Christian sentiments. Still others chose to join and expand the academic quest for the historical Jesus, adding Jewish voices to the effort to explore more rigorously and objectively the figure of Jesus in historical writing. In this unique and illuminating volume, Father Daniel F. Moore presents the historical identity of Jesus through lens of such Jewish scholars as Schalom Ben-Chorin, David Flusser, Geza Vermes, and Jacob Neuser. A useful book for those interesting in ecumenical discourse and Jesus studies.

1
“From a Different Angle”

I do not think that it was ever my assumption that my Jewish eyes would see better than Christian eyes, but only that they would see from a different angle.

Samuel Sandmel, The First Christian Century in Judaism and Christianity, 144

Samuel Sandmel, 1911–1979

Samuel Sandmel, born in Dayton, Ohio, on September 23,1911, received his rabbinical training at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, receiving an MHL degree. He was ordained a rabbi in 1937. After completing his PhD in New Testament at Yale in 1949, Sandmel accepted a professorship in Jewish studies offered to him by Dr. Harvie Branscomb, the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University and former Chairman of Biblical Studies at Duke University.¹² At Vanderbilt University from 1949–1952, Sandmel held the Hillel Chair of Jewish Religion and Thought. Returning to Hebrew Union College in 1952, Sandmel was named Provost of the College in 1956, a position that he held until 1965. He was a member of the Society of Biblical Literature, serving as its president in 1961. In 1966, Sandmel was named Distinguished Service Professor of Bible and Hellenistic Literature at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. In 1968–69, he was Visiting Honorary Principal of the Leo Baeck College in London. He was awarded honorary degrees from the University of Vermont, Xavier University in Cincinnati, and Rosary College in River Forest, Illinois. In 1979, Sandmel was honored as the Helena Regenstein Professor of Religion at the University of Chicago, Divinity School. He is the author of twenty books; among them are A Jewish Understanding of the New Testament, We Jews and Jesus, and Judaism and Christian Beginnings. Sandmel’s most influential work concerning the New Testament was his SBL (Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis) presidential address (1961), published as “Parallelomania” in Journal of Biblical Literature (1962).

On occasion Samuel Sandmel has described himself as both “a specialist in the literature of early Christianity and Judaism of the age, and hence, a professional, not an amateur”; and as “an apologist for Jew and Judaism.”¹³ It is within these parameters, as a Jewish New Testament scholar, that Sandmel engages in a discussion of Jesus of Nazareth and an appropriate Jewish grasp of him and Christianity. We Jews and Jesus is the hallmark of his endeavor.

In We Jews and Jesus, Sandmel seeks to provide “a calm and balanced understanding of where Jews can reasonably stand with respect to Jesus.”¹⁴ Positioning the German Enlightenment’s quest for historical objectivity and the subsequent Die Wissenschaft des Judentums¹⁵ among German Jewish intellectuals as the hinge pin upon which the “reversal of historic attitudes”¹⁶ between Jews and Christians turn, Sandmel broadly yet deftly traces the historical development of these attitudes as they relate specifically to Jesus. He reviews the attitudes, first among the Jews, who before this watershed, viewed Jesus either negatively or not at all. Sandmel then focuses on the body of Christian scholarship that captures, or attempts to capture, modern attitudes concerning Jesus. In this latter section, Sandmel acquaints his Jewish readers with the New Testament sources, especially the Gospels and the Letters of Paul, which provide the memories, albeit redacted memories, from which various portraits of Jesus are sketched. He necessarily introduces and discusses the methodologies employed by Christian and, since the Enlightenment, Jewish scholars, himself included, to weigh the historical validity of those memories. Remarkably, he offers to his Jewish reader a nontechnical distillation of a vast body of technical scholarship. Sandmel provides “a reasoned and reasonable approach by a modern Jew,”¹⁷ introducing the body of Jewish and Christian scholarship from the nineteenth century and early twentieth century on the quest for the historical Jesus. Sandmel concludes We Jews and Jesus with comments on the implications inherent therein for Jewish-Christian relations.

Jesus, Jewish Nazir, Icon of Western Culture

I once spoke, on the spur of the moment, of likening the portrait of Jesus to an oil painting rather than a photograph; if one stands too near an oil painting, he sees the brush marks rather than the portrait.

Samuel Sandmel, We Jews and Jesus, 108

This portrait of Jesus, of which Sandmel speaks, is captured primarily upon an uncommon canvas: the Gospels. To apprehend the historical Jesus who emerges from the Gospel texts is somewhat complicated for both the Christian and the Jew. Having presented a concise summary of pertinent Jesus research, Sandmel admits to the futility of a continued quest for the Jesus of history given both the nature of the Gospels as primary sources, though redacted sources, and the demonstrated difficulties at arriving at scholarly objectivity. He asserts:

There is, then, no unmistakable agreement on the Jesus of history to be found in the labors and written works of New Testament scholars. What Schweitzer said almost sixty years ago is just as true now, that the Jesus of history is beyond recovery, and that the Jesus of Gospel scholars of the nineteenth century, and of the twentieth, never existed, for that Jesus emerges more from the intuition and from the anachronisms of the scholars than from the pages of the Gospels.¹⁸

Even so, Sandmel admits that he, like his predecessors, could offer some clever portrait of Jesus, such as Jesus as an Essene or a Pharisee or a prophet or even a rabbi. However, he refrains from doing so, not wanting to add to the multiplicity of diverse and contradictory images, which abound as the fruit of previous Christian and Jewish scholarship. This multiplicity of images highlights the essential problem for Sandmel: the Gospels.¹⁹

Sandmel cannot conceive of a way to get to Jesus beneath these texts, which stand at such a distance from the Jesus of history. Though skilled in critical analysis and exegesis, he despairs of the effort: “I know of no way to separate the strands and to end up with some secure and quantitatively adequate body of material. I simply do not know enough about him [Jesus] to have an opinion, and I surely do not have enough to set him, as it were, in some single category.”²⁰

Conclusively, he asserts: “But beyond this, it is my conviction that the Gospels are not telling about the man that scholarship seeks, but about the human career of a divine being. To search the Gospels for the man seems to me to involve a distortion of what is in the Gospels. New Testament scholarship has not succeeded in isolating the man Jesus, Jesus the Jew.”²¹ The Jesus of history is beyond recovery. “We cannot be precise about Jesus. We can know what the Gospels say, but we cannot know Jesus.”²²

Sandmel, frustrated by the inability to retrieve from the tangled matrix of the Gospel fabric the Jesus of history, suggests that, if asked, one could suspend the debate concerning historical reliability and consider the Jesus who emerges from “the essence of the Gospels.”²³ This is what Sandmel does.

To appreciate Sandmel’s Jesus, recall his earlier distinction between a photograph of Jesus and an oil painting. We, with Sandmel, are invited to step back from the portrait, lest we become too preoccupied with the brushstrokes and painter’s technique, and observe the painting from a different perspective: a Jewish perspective.

A Reform Jew, a rabbi, and New Testament scholar,²⁴ Sandmel broadly describes Jesus as a gifted leader, teacher, and loyal Jew.²⁵ He asserts that Jesus felt that the end of the world was imminent and that he himself was the Messiah. Sandmel asserts that scholars who disagree with him are incorrect.²⁶ But here too precision eludes him. He echoes what he previously asserted: “Precisely what kind of man Jesus was—a teacher, a leader, a wonder-worker, a prophet, a social reformer, a political rebel—cannot be ascertained. But that Jesus was a Jew, a son of the Synagogue, is beyond doubt.”²⁷ Sandmel can ascribe to the historical Jesus no originality or uniqueness either in his teaching or his martyrdom.

Sandmel disallows that Jesus should be regarded by Jews as one who has religious significance for them. Any void or religious incompleteness that a Jew might experience would not be filled by the figure of Jesus.²⁸ However, he does allow and encourage Jews to embrace Jesus as, if you will, an unavoidable icon of Western culture. This would be especially relevant for Jews who participate in Western culture. Sandmel explains: “The figure of Jesus is part of Western culture, and I hold myself in all truth to be a legatee of and a participant in Western culture. In this sense, the figure of Jesus comes into my ken inevitably, just as he comes into the ken of all Western Jews. I cannot value him above the martyr Socrates, but I cannot conceive of myself as unaware of him or isolated from him.”²⁹

He compares the inevitability of encountering Jesus to that of encountering the music of Bach, and he notes that many Jews do not hesitate to embrace Bach.³⁰ That Jews may find some aspect of Jesus—his person, life, or influence—to admire should not be feared, least of all by Jews.

Schalom Ben-Chorin, 1913–1999

Schalom Ben-Chorin, born Friedrich (Fritz) Rosenthal in Munich on July 20, 1913, studied philosophy, history of art, and the science of comparative religions while in Munich. Having experienced Nazi brutality at the hands of the Gestapo, the twenty-one-year-old Rosenthal fled Germany in 1935 for Palestine. In Jerusalem, the city that was to become his permanent home, Rosenthal adopted his preferred name, Schalom Ben-Chorin (peace son of liberty), his pseudonym since 1931. The Israeli Ben-Chorin distinguished himself as an author, lecturer, journalist, philosopher, and theologian, publishing more than thirty books on Jewish historical and cultural themes. He was one of the founders of Har-El Synagogue in Jerusalem in 1958 and a key figure in establishing Progressive Judaism in Israel. A protégé of Martin Buber, Schalom Ben-Chorin, an ardent ecumenist, is perhaps best remembered as a pioneer in promoting interreligious dialogue between Jews and Christians and improved relations between Israel and Germany. In recognition of his work and scholarship, Ben-Chorin received many honors, among them: professor, honoris causa, at the University of Stuttgart; and doctorate, honoris causa, from the University of Munich. In 1975, he was invited to the University of Tübingen as a visiting professor. With the publication of Bruder Jesus: Der Nazarener in jüdischer Sicht³¹ in Munich in 1967, Ben-Chorin joined a diverse group of twentieth century Jewish scholars in their quest to better understand and appreciate Jesus from a Jewish perspective. Bruder Jesus was translated into English in 2001 and published as Brother Jesus: The Nazarene through Jewish Eyes in the United States.

Schalom Ben-Chorin is perhaps unique among modern Jewish authors writing on Jesus in that he has encountered Jesus, not merely through the Christian Gospels. In his foreword to Brother Jesus, he explains:

Over and over again I have met him, as it were, in the streets of the Old City, but also on the hills of Galilee and especially on the banks of Kinnereth, the Sea of Gennesaret. Over and over again I have heard his brotherly voice, which calls to us and teaches us how the law is to be fulfilled through love. This is the way I see Jesus of Nazareth. This is the way I hear him. Not as exalted Lord but as the picture of my “eternal brother.” . . . This picture has engraved itself in my soul, and only from this perspective can I bear witness—Jewish witness—to the Rabbi from Nazareth, not to the Christ of the Church.³²

The book is addressed primarily to Christians. Throughout Brother Jesus, the prose of which is more akin to a conversation than a scholarly treatise—though scholarship informs the narrative—Ben-Chorin presents Jesus from a Jewish perspective. Clearly embracing a Jewish Heimholung Jesu (bringing home Jesus), Ben-Chorin’s interests lie in recovering from the Gospel the Jewish Jesus of history, not the Hellenic Christ of faith. To do this, “to recover Jesus’ picture from the Christian overpainting,”³³ Ben-Chorin seeks to discern beneath the Greek text of the Christian Gospels the oral Hebraic-Aramaic Jesus tradition that underlies it.³⁴ His hermeneutic? Intuition.

Ben-Chorin distinguishes between intuition, which he uses; and fantasy, which he rejects as irresponsible reinterpretation: “Intuition, as I understand it, grows out of a lifelong familiarity with the text and allows it to be interpreted subjectively. Subjectively, to be sure, but not in an unbridled fashion.”³⁵ He describes this approach as “intuitive interpretation,” which “proceeds from a deep kindred empathy with Jesus within the Jewish world in which he lived, taught, and suffered.”³⁶

In a journal article, Ben-Chorin clarifies his approach: “Although the principle of intuition is here expressly admitted, anything imaginary is vigorously avoided, and only what seems exegetically possible is presented.”³⁷ Intuitive interpretation strides the middle ground between “an unverifiable historical position, on the one hand, and theological-literary fantasy, on the other.”³⁸

Admittedly influenced by Martin Buber,³⁹ Ben-Chorin defines his position: “Jesus is for me an eter...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Convergence
• 1. “From a Different Angle”
• 2. Of Glass and Stone: Sources and Inquiry
• 3. Creative Variations: Intuition and Imagination
• 4. Jesus within Judaism: A Triptych
• 5. Jesus, Jewish Brother: Varying Motifs
• 6. “Novelty and Originality”
• Conclusion: “Theology’s Masquerade”
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Related Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page