Jewish and Christian Views on Bodily Pleasure

Their Origins and Relevance in the Twentieth-Century

Cherry

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781532647468
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Histoire des religions

At the beginning of the Common Era, Jewish renewal movements, including Jesus' ministry, had similar views: embracing moderate ascetic behavior. Over the next three centuries, however, they moved in opposite directions. Christianity came to firmly privilege anti-pleasure views and female lifelong virginity while the Babylonian Talmud strongly embraced positive views on bodily pleasures and female sexuality. The books most distinguishing feature is that it is the first time that one book contrasts in detail the evolution of Christian and Jewish ascetic beliefs. More than other books, it systematically presents the critical role played by Babylonian Jewry: how they became the center of world Jewry with the virtual extinction of the Palestinian community; their decisive rejection, more so than the Palestinian community, of any ascetic tendencies; and how they came to migrate to the European continent during the medieval period. It concludes by relating how the eighteenth-century Hasidic movement and the nineteenth-century Irish devotional movement reestablished the contrasting views that helps explain why Jewish immigrants and not Irish Catholics came to dominate twentieth-century vaudeville.

1

The Religious Setting

Increasingly, Republican politicians point to the “Judeo-Christian tradition” to rally the nation to their view of America’s uniqueness. During his 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney credited America’s world stature to “our Judeo-Christian tradition, with its vision of the goodness and possibilities of every life.”1 This association only grew with the 2016 presidential campaign and Trump presidency. Not surprisingly, candidate Ted Cruz claimed his policy proposals were based on Judeo-Christian traditions but so did the more moderate John Kasich. In a 2015 speech to the National Press Club, he said,

US public diplomacy and international broadcasting have lost their focus on the case for Western values and ideals and effectively countering our opponents’ propaganda and disinformation. I will consolidate them in a new agency that has a clear mandate to promote the core, Judeo Christian Western values and ideals that we and our friends and allies share: the values of human rights, the values of democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of association.2

In his July 2017 speech in Poland, President Trump spoke more generally about defending Western values but his then chief political advisor, Steve Bannon, has often explicitly stated that its source are Judeo-Christian values.3 By tracing the evolution of foundational Christian and Jewish beliefs, this book forceful questions the very notion of a unifying Judeo-Christian tradition.

There are certainly many similarities between the foundational tenets of Judaism and Christianity but the attitude towards bodily pleasures is not one of them. At the end of the fourth century, the Babylonian Talmud completed the religious transformation into rabbinic Judaism. It firmly rejected ascetic behavior, presenting a positive view of festive activities and female sexuality. At the same time, Augustine was finalizing the foundational doctrines of Christianity. He labeled the Jews “carnal Israelites” because Augustine believed that Jews were “of the flesh” rather than “of the spirit;” they satisfied bodily pleasures at the expense of enhancing the spirituality of their souls.

Both rabbinic Judaism and Christianity evolved through their understanding of the history and traditions of biblical Israel. From the Dead Sea through the Sea of Galilee, an Israelite kingdom was carved out a millennium before the Common Era. This backwater fiefdom was of little consequence to the various empire builders that contested for domination in the greater region. As a result, for most of the following centuries, except for the sixty-year Babylonian captivity, Israelites were able to select their own Jewish rulers complemented by religious leaders in charge of their Great Temple in Jerusalem.

The situation changed substantially with the Roman conquest of Judea in 63 BCE, ending Jewish rule. Now an administrator selected by Rome governed. The Jewish populace first looked to the priestly class for leadership. That segment, however, lost favor when Jews witnessed its siding with the wealthy-owning class instead of impoverished farmers and tradesmen. Many looked towards Jewish renewal movements that offered alternatives to the priestly class. The two most significant were Jesus’ ministry and the Pharisees.

This book will trace the evolution of these two movements through the end of the fourth century, particularly their views on bodily pleasures. It will indicate how the eighteenth century Hasidic movement in Eastern Europe and the nineteenth century devotional movement in Ireland reestablished these contrasting bodily pleasures beliefs. The book concludes by exploring how these religious differences help explain why Jewish immigrants rather than Irish Catholics came to dominate early twentieth century popular culture and how they contrasting views bring into question contemporary notions of unifying Judeo-Christian values.

The Christian Project

Twenty years after Jesus’ death, the Christian sect was struggling. Despite the determined effort of committed evangelists who spread Jesus’ prophetic sayings, the Jewish people had turned their backs. Outside Jerusalem, there were no Christian communities in the land of Israel, not even in the Galilee, Jesus’ birthplace and where he proselytized. Christianity consisted of a small group who lived in Jerusalem and a limited number of Diaspora Jews who had been converted during their pilgrimages to the Great Temple in Jerusalem. These converts formed isolated, small communities in the Mediterranean basin, whose faith in Jesus was nourished by the evangelists who periodically visited.

This stagnating Christian movement was transformed by Paul. He diagnosed its problems and offered solutions. First, remaining a Jewish movement was a loser! Few Jews were sympathetic to Jesus’ ministry and still fewer to the message of his evangelist disciples. The Christian message must be brought to the Gentiles and this could only be successful if circumcision was abandoned, as well as the dietary requirements based upon the Mosaic laws.

Recently, Reza Aslan gained widespread visibility following the publication of his best-selling book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. For Aslan, Jesus was the “Galilean peasant and Jewish nationalist who donned the mantle of the messiah and launched a foolhardy rebellion against the corrupt Temple priesthood and the vicious Roman occupation.”4 This stance was changed by Paul and his allies, Aslan argues:

The task of defining Jesus’ message fell instead to a new crop of educated, urbanized, Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews who would become the primary vehicles for the expansion of the new faith. As these extraordinary men and women, many of them immersed in Greek philosophy and Hellenistic thought, began to reinterpret Jesus’ message so as to make it more palatable. they gradually transformed Jesus from a revolutionary zealot to a Romanized demigod, from a man who tried and failed to free the Jews from Roman oppression to a celestial being wholly uninterested in any earthly matter.5

The image of Jesus as a social justice warrior has inspired some Christian movements to combat the inequities brought forth by the capitalist system. In the late nineteenth century, Protestants in the Midwest formed the Social Gospel movement to defend farmers against the avaricious behavior of bankers and grain traders. A century later, South American Catholics espoused liberation theology in support of land-less peasants. In the 1980s, Jesus’ condemnation of economic inequality led the US Council of Catholic Bishops to call for strong redistributionist policies, and this perspective continues to resonate in the pages of the Catholic journal Commonweal.

While religious scholars do not doubt the authenticity of Jesus’ social justice sayings, few consider him a revolutionary who sought redistribution. For Jesus, it would be God that punished the uncaring members of the wealth-owning class, and the punishment would be their inability to enter the gates of heaven: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25, Matt 19:24). Moreover, there is no evidence that Jesus’ ministry focused on freeing Jews from Roman oppression. The Romans executed a number of leaders in the Jewish renewal movement who, like Jesus, did not confront Roman rule. For example, John the Baptist urged Jews to go into the wilderness to lead ascetic lives in preparation for the end-time; and yet the Romans executed him.

To the extent that Jesus had revolutionary zeal, it was to challenge the priestly class who controlled the Second Temple. We are told in the Gospels that Jesus entered the Temple and “overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves” (Matt 21:12-17, Mark 11:15-19). This action has nothing to do with Roman rule but with Jesus’ belief that the priestly class was polluting the Temple.

The revolutionary nature of his actions, however, is undercut by a number of factors. While Jesus is crucified, no other member of his ministry is harmed. This suggests that rather than organizing a collective revolt, Jesus alone engaged in a symbolic action that was a nuisance to the priestly class and its Roman overlords. Indeed, in a scathing Washington Post review of Zealot, Stephen Prothero rejects Aslan’s claim that Jesus was a “‘revolutionary zealot who walked across the Galilee gathering an army of disciples’ to rain ‘God’s wrath . . . down upon the rich, the strong, and the powerful.’” Prothero points out:

What about the obvious problems with the argument that Jesus was not just a political revolutionary—as biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan and others have argued—but a violent one? What are we to make of Jesus’ apparent lack of interest in doing anything practical whatsoever to prepare for holy war? If he has come to fight for “a real kingdom, with an actual king,” where are his soldiers and their weapons? And why no battle plan? The short answer to these questions is that Aslan is more a storyteller here than a historian.6

Aslan also undermines his claims when he discusses the situation of the Jerusalem Christian community, which he believes faithfully followed Jesus’ ministry. Yes, there were persecutions, notably the murder of the evangelist Stephen three years after Jesus’ crucifixion, but Aslan notes: “The Jerusalem assembly continued to thrive under the shadow of the...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: The Religious Setting
• Chapter 2: Jewish Beliefs before the Common Era
• Chapter 3: Jewish Renewal Movements at the Beginning of the Common Era
• Chapter 4: Jesus’ Ministry
• Chapter 5: Paul: The Beginnings of Christian Anti-Pleasure Views
• Chapter 6: The Triumph of Ascetic Values
• Chapter 7: The Emergence of Rabbinic Judaism
• Chapter 8: Ascetic Values Confront Roman Society
• Chapter 9: Bodily Pleasures:Foundational Jewish Values
• Chapter 10: Forward through the Nineteenth Century
• Chapter 11: Relevance in the Twentieth Century
• Chapter 12: Judeo-Christian Myth
• Appendix
• Bibliography