Location: University of Dayton, Sears Recital Hall

Meeting Topic: Viewing the New Testament Through Jewish Eyes

Speaker: Prof. Amy-Jill Levine, Vanderbilt Divinity School, Nashville, Tennessee

PRESENT: Approximately 100 people.

Felix Garfunkel opened the meeting at 7:30 PM by welcoming everyone to the Dialogue Open Meeting. He recognized the cosponsors of the Open Meeting, which include the Dayton Christian Jewish Dialogue, the University of Dayton Department of Religious Studies, the Archdiocese of Cincinnati Office for Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations, and the American Jewish Committee Cincinnati Chapter. Felix noted that he and his wife Erica had attended presentations by the speaker, Prof. Amy-Jill Levine, at two previous annual Chautauqua programs in New York, and they were very impressed with her. At this point, Felix turned the floor over to Lou Vera to introduce Prof. Levine.

Lou thanked Felix and Ken Rosenzweig for helping to arrange this event. Lou noted that she met Dr. Levine (A.-J.) at the National Workshop on Christian-Jewish Relations, held in Houston, Texas in 1999. A.-J.’s presentation at the National Workshop galvanized the conference. After discussing some of A.-J.’s numerous honors and accomplishments, Lou concluded her introduction with A.-J.’s own self description: "A Yankee Jewish feminist who teaches in a predominantly Protestant seminary in the buckle of the Bible Belt."

A.-J. began her presentation by asking the question, "What does it mean to view Jesus and Paul and the people they lived with as their own contemporaries would have viewed them? Jesus engaged in all his activities, teaching, healing, preaching, entirely in a Jewish context. Jesus’s contacts with gentiles were extremely rare. So how do Jewish eyes which saw him perceive him, and why did some people find him highly problematic and others were willing to give up their lives for him?

On the one hand, we look at the incarnation (assumption of an earthly form by a god, here Jesus) and take the time, the place, and the people to which it happened with great seriousness. On the other hand, Jews throughout the centuries (2,000 years) have been viewing these Christian stories; to Jews, these stories are inescapable. Even if we live in a secular society, Christianity is unavoidable in the United States. The pervasiveness of Christian messages in the media and elsewhere necessarily impinges on Jewish life in the world. Therefore, my presentation will focus on two things: how Jesus was viewed by his contemporaries; and the effect of the New Testament on Jews throughout the centuries, i.e., the effect on current Jewish eyes.

"Jesus, the Jew" has become a hot topic in recent years. Many Christian denominations have encouraged their clergy to inculcate in their parishioners taking seriously Jesus’s Judaism, partly in an attempt to recover the roots of both Judaism and Christianity and partly to encourage Christians to have more friendly feelings toward Jews. Is the message getting through to all clergy? No! Even when it gets to the clergy, is it actually being disseminated into the congregations? No! But it is a good effort, and it is a whole lot better than we had in the past.

The problem with many of these attempts to deal with "Jesus, the Jew" is that noone really knows what it means. For many Christians, Jesus is defined by the creed: he was born of the Virgin Mary, and he died and was resurrected. Thus, there is a tendency of Christians to over-universalize Jesus. The question of Jesus’s Jewishness becomes increasingly acute given contemporary difficulties in the Middle East. Some Islamicist propaganda has maintained that Jesus was not Jewish, and this just echoes some Nazi arguments that Jesus was really Aryan. Across the country, Christian organizations are either toning down or pulling out of Jewish-Christian dialogue groups because of the concern to increase Christian-Muslim dialogue and the fear that if Christians are dialoging with Jews, it will create a problem regarding Middle East politics. A.-J. emphasized that not all Jews are Israelis, and not all Jews are hard-liners with respect to the Israeli-Arab conflict. These associations are a form of contemporary stereotyping that is reminiscent of past Jewish stereotyping by Churches that all New Testament Jews are bad (except for Jesus, Paul and a few others), and all Jews are children of the devil.

The first thing we need to do is figure out what Judaism was in the first century of the common era. One source is the New Testament. It is an OK source, but it is not the best one. This is because the people who put together the New Testament, although many were Jews, were defining themselves over and against the local synagogue and local Jewish organizations that did not accept Jesus as the Messiah. To understand first century Judaism only by looking at the New Testament necessarily skews the data. For example, A.-J.’s students often read the writings of Paul in the New Testament to understand first century Judaism. They derive a picture of a Judaism that is obsessed with the minute details of what one can eat, what one can do on the Sabbath, family purity, and works righteousness (one must earn ones way into heaven). They conclude that all Jews in the first century were depressed, sanctimonious, hypocritical, and neurotic.

What do we know about Jesus as a Jew? We know that Jesus and his followers (men and women who followed him down from the Galilee to Judea) remained within Judaism, and their religion was a religion of action, rather than of belief. In other words, while both belief and action are important in Judaism, action tends to take precedence. There is a slight reversal in Paul where belief is seen as coming first and then action follows. The Gospel of Matthew has often been called the most Jewish of the gospels. In Matthew, there is an emphasis on action. Matthew emphasizes such actions as feeding the hungry or visiting people in prison, rather than reciting creeds.

What do most Jews of the first century, including Jesus, do? They meet in synagogues. When we think of synagogues today, we think of a building, but it is not clear that that is what was meant in the first century. The word synagogue comes from a Greek word meaning to gather together. Thus the synagogue was a place where Jews talked, studied, and got together. The motivation of these Jews was not to earn a place in heaven. Jews felt they already had a right relationship with God. They were followers of the ongoing Covenants with God and observed the laws of the Torah. They did not all interpret Torah in the same way, but they all acknowledged the Torah’s value and delighted in their traditions. Outside of Judaism, strict Sabbath observance or purity laws may appear to be restrictive, but inside the tradition, they are sources of delight. Did Jesus abolish dietary regulations? The answer is no. Jesus lived and died a kosher life. Nor does Jesus abolish Sabbath observance. Debates on kosher food laws and Sabbath observance that Jesus engaged in with the Pharisees did not concern whether the laws should be kept, but rather how they should be kept. Nor did Jesus favor avoiding the synagogue or the Temple. Following the Crucifiction, Jesus’s followers continued to worship in the Temple in Jerusalem. Jesus and his followers shared with other first century Jews a proud identification with the People Israel. They knew they were not gentiles and they were not Samaritans. Jesus and his followers participated in Second Temple Judaism. Jesus paid the Temple tax, and like all Jews of the time, Jesus and his followers identified themselves with the Temple. All Jews of the time, including Jesus, had on ongoing relationship with the one God, maker of heaven and earth, revealed in Torah. In other words, if one looked at Jesus through first century eyes, one would find no overt difference between Jesus and other Jews of his time on questions of diet, dress, worship, or practice. One would find some difference in belief and some difference in family values.

However, first century Judaism, like modern Judaism and Christianity, is marked by diversity. Jews argued in the first century like they do today, and they reveled in their diversity. While some Jews in the first century were proclaiming Jesus the son of David, the son of Abraham, and the special son of God, others were denouncing messianic claims about him, others had never heard of him, and some, although they had heard of him, did not care. It is a completely ridiculous idea that Jesus was against Judaism. He is in disagreement with certain Jewish groups. Nothing new there! Pharisees and Sadducees did not like each other. Zealots and Sadducees did not like each other. The people at Qumran only liked the people at Qumran, and they hated everyone else. But they were all Jews, and they were all parts of the system. This is analogous to all the differences among modern Jews: Ashkenazic and Sephardic, Ethiopian and Yemenite, Orthodox and secular, cultural Jews and Jews for Jesus. Somehow, they are all Jews. Why is all this not filtering down to Christian congregations? It is because most people do not want a Jewish Jesus. The more Jewish one makes Jesus, the less Christian he seems. Christian churches are gentile churches whose members generally do not observe the Jewish laws and practices, as Jesus did. If one puts Jesus in a Jewish context and gives him to the Church, he makes no sense, he is an alien. If one makes Jesus Jewish, one makes the churches uncomfortable. A.-J. thinks all religious institutions should be a little uncomfortable, because otherwise we get too complacent.

Most scholars of Christian origins lack expertise in Jewish sources; many New Testament professors went through divinity school without having taken a course in Judaism or even having had the opportunity to do so. At Vanderbilt where A.-J. teaches, students do not have to have a course in first-century Judaism. Many scholars, New Testament professors, and clergy go to their church libraries for information about Jews. Such libraries are often woefully out of date. Older books in such libraries tend to list rabbinic parallels to the New Testament in a very skewed manner. A lot of people have concluded that modern Jews are as they are described in the Old Testament. This perpetuates tremendous stereotypes of modern Jews.

The Lords Prayer is actually a very Jewish prayer. It is often thought that Jesus was the only Jew of his time who referred to God as father. Wrong! Jews referred to God as father all the time. Once one refers to God as father, one is making a political statement because the Roman Emperor was called father. Referring to God as father in heaven means the one we owe allegiance to is the God above, not the Roman Emperor. Furthermore, emphasizing the father in heaven over ones earthly father means that individuals should not rest assured because of their ancestry. According to the New Testament, John the Baptist counseled people not to rest on the laurels of their parents because God is even able to raise up children out of these stones. This is a very Jewish thing to say. Thus most Jews in the first century really liked John the Baptist. Jews tend to use circumlocutions for the name of God because the name of God is holy. In Christian seminaries, it is common to talk about Yahweh. A.-J. finds this highly problematic. Even in synagogue services, Jews refer to God as Adonai, and outside of services, Jews will tend to only say only Adoshem (the name). "Give us our daily bread" is also very Jewish. Although Jews yearn for ultimate redemption, they also want social justice in the present day. They do not want their children to go hungry. Also, Jesus’s miracles and parables make sense in a Jewish context. Parables are a Jewish storytelling form.

Was Jesus a Jew by belief and practice? Absolutely! Was he the Jewish Messiah? That depends on what connotation one brings to the term. For Peter and for Paul, two Jews, he was. For the vast majority of Jews, he was not. The point is that in the first century, there were multiple definitions of who was the Messiah. Only later, as Church and Synagogue split, did it no longer make sense to proclaim someone the Messiah. To yank Jesus out of his Jewish background and universalize him sells short Christian theology, Christian history, and human interaction. To omit Jesus from histories of Judaism obscures a part of Jewish tradition and so prevents Jews from appreciating their early diversity and from appreciating the choices the Rabbis made. It is bad enough that Christians do not know about Jesus the Jew; it is worse that Jews do not know anything about Jesus except what they get from popular culture.

What does it mean to read the New Testament through Jewish eyes today? Modern Jews reading the New Testament always do so with knowledge of all the history of Christian anti-Semitism. Fully to appreciate the New Testament and Jesus requires intimate familiarity with Jewish teaching. For example, when the Gospel writers put their stories of Jesus together, they had to follow some sort of model. The template that they had was the only scripture they knew, what came to be known as the Old Testament, what Jews call the Tanach. Many of the experiences of Jesus mirror similar occurrences in the Old Testament.

When A.-J. first read the New Testament, it was a very painful thing. A lot of it is very difficult, and what it says about Jews is not very nice. At that time, A.-J. became convinced that Jews and Christians need to study scripture together. We need to read the New Testament together to see what we share and what we have lost. Behind the polemics of the New Testament, we can start actually talking about what divides us. Jews need to know that when the New Testament says nasty things about Jews, the Christian reading partners do not think that that refers to the Jews sitting across the table. Jews and Christians need to read the Old Testament (the Tanach) together to know that the scripture that seems to be shared by Church and Synagogue is interpreted very differently. These are texts we need to study together because it will enrich us both. There are also more parochial reasons for such study. Jews need to read the New Testament because it helps us recover part of our own history. It is one of those great ironies of the world that the stories of Jesus tell us a great deal about Jewish life in the Galilee and Judea in the first century, and the only known Pharisee for whom we have written records is St. Paul. By looking at Jesus within his historical context, we Jews can not only recover part of our own history, we fill in the gaps that our kids just do not know. Conservative and Reconstructionist synagogues and Reform temples too quickly move their educational programs from the Maccabees in the mid-second century BCE to about two minutes on the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, and then to Rabbinic texts and Hillel. By skipping Christian origins, we fail to acknowledge the importance of the movement in which in dialogue and debate, Judaism came to found itself. This is not to say that the synagogue needs to evoke Jesus from the bemah (altar). Jesus’s ethical teachings can already be found in Jewish sources. On the other hand, if we are proud to claim people like Freud, Marx, Einstein, Disraeli, Elizabeth Taylor, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Adam Sandler, then we can make room for Jesus because at least his Jewish level of commitment was a bit higher.

But there is a less pleasant part to the New Testament. Not uncommon is the claim that the road to Auschwitz began with the gospels. Indeed, sponsored by the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, a couple of years ago a conference was held precisely on the question of whether the New Testament was responsible for the Nazi atrocity. Of all those who participated in this conference, I was the only one who suggested that the New Testament could be read as anti-Jewish. The fact that I was the only Jew invited to comment may have had something to do with it. Clearly, the New Testament has not always and everywhere been read anti-Jewishly. But there is enough in it to create negative reactions about Jews even in places without a history of anti-Semitism. What do we do with the Gospels and the Pauline text? It turns out that there are some very nasty materials in there and we have to deal with them. The Gospel of John chapter 8 states, "The Jews. You are of your father, the Devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him." And that is why Jews get asked, where their horns are, because we are "children of the Devil." Or, there is Paul who talks about the Jews who killed the lord Jesus (First Thesalonians). And then there is the Gospel of Matthew with its verse which has probably killed more Jews than any other, the so-called trial before the crowd whose historicity is highly questionable, where Pilate says to the crowd, why should I kill Jesus, he is perfectly innocent. And the crowd says crucify him, crucify him, his blood be on our heads and on the heads of our children. And when that verse was read in churches, as it continues to be read, on Palm Sunday and on Good Friday, good Christians would leave the churches and then go spill Jewish blood because that is what they thought the text was encouraging them to do. I think Matthew would have been appalled.

So is the New Testament anti-Jewish? The question of anti-Judaism is somewhat like the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography. It cannot be defined but we know it when we see it. The problem arises when different people assess the evidence. What is anti-Jewish to one reader is very pro-Jewish to another or simply neutral to a third. How do we determine who is right? The question whether the New Testament is anti-Jewish is probably the wrong question. To some people it is, and to some people it is not. We have to take both readings appropriately, and that is why Jews and Christians need to talk to each other. If you are simply reading the Gospel of John and there aren’t any Jews around, you might take it simply as a historically embedded document; but read the gospel with a Jew at the table and it takes on an entirely different connotation.

What do we do with the issue of anti-Judaism? If you went to a divinity school or took a course in New Testament, you would probably learn that the New Testament really is not anti-Jewish; the fault lies with the interpreters who got it wrong. The text is innocent. And in some cases, we find excuses for why the text is so hateful. A.-J. asks her students why does John say all these horrible things about the Jews? Their first response is that the Jews are throwing the Christian confessors out of the synagogue, so of course they say nasty things. A.-J. responds, so it is the Jews’ fault! This is an example of "blaming the victim." A.-J. then asks her students why the Jews were throwing the Christian confessors out? If there were a Christian who came into A.-J.’s synagogue and disrupted services by proclaiming Jesus as Lord, particularly during the reading of the silent Amidah prayer, and insisting that everyone in that congregation had to follow Jesus or they were doomed to Hell, A.-J. suspects some usher would come and "politely" remove him from the congregation. If Christian are being expelled from the synagogue, there might be some good reasons. Others argue that the New Testament anti-Judaism is simply a matter of Jews talking to other Jews, i.e., in house polemics. Matthew and John are Jewish; they are talking to other Jews. A.-J. does not thing so. The problem is that we do not know the authors and the audiences of the gospels. We talk about Matthew as being the most Jewish, but that is only in comparison to the other gospels.

Is the New Testament anti-Jewish? In Jewish ears, in my Jewish eyes, often it is. Do all readers of the New Testament interpret it anti-Jewishly? The vast majority do not. The problem is what happens when this stuff is read to children, people who have never met Jews, or is absorbed without a second thought. In the same way, there are people today who will pass sexist and racist comments, and "not mean a thing by them." But they hurt the people who hear them. So too with the New Testament and anti-Judaism.

So what do we do for ongoing dialogue? I think Jews should read the New Testament, and all rabbis should have to take a course in it. It shows us where anti-Jewish attitudes come from; it shows us the roots we share with the Church; and it gives us a part of our own history. I think Jews and Christians should read the Bible together, both the Old Testament (Tanach) and the New Testament, so we can see how a text sounds differently and appears differently to different ears and eyes. I think at the same time that we should note that although Jesus was a Jew, the church is a gentile institution, and that is why Christians for the most part do not adhere to Mosaic law. Jews should visit Christian churches, and Christians should visit Jewish temples and synagogues, so we can see what the other folks are doing. The more we know, the better off we are. But I do not think Christians should try to reappropriate Jesus’s Judaism by doing (what many Churches are doing today) things like holding Passover Seders. It is increasingly common in many churches to hold Passover Seders on the Thursday of Holy Week. Usually, this is followed by Eucharist. A.-J. says, "don’t do it." If interested, Christians might go to a seder at a Jewish person’s home or a community seder run by Jews. If the point is to recover the Jewishness of Jesus, Jesus the Jew celebrated seders; no Christians or gentile could have gotten in. Seders in Jesus’s time were restricted to Jews. Also, the New Testament makes it clear that Jesus is "our Passover." According to the Gospel of John, Jesus replaces the Passover meal, Jesus replaces the Passover sacrifice. Therefore, a Christian’s celebrating Passover is theologically inappropriate. Let Jesus be the Jew; let Christians be Christians. And do not let problematic passages go without commentary, and do not suppose that all people are hearing the text the same way.

Where are we then finally? If we view the New Testament with Jewish eyes from a first-century perspective, we see how firmly Jesus is embedded within Judaism, and we can see how this very Jewish man, although he makes sense in his own culture, has a story which is eventually appropriated by the gentile Church and stuck in Christian gospels and promulgated to the gentile Christians. And this very Jewish man who makes sense internally is repackaged and sounds very un-Jewish. That is unfortunate. Fully to understand Jesus, understand him within a Jewish context. Also, Christians should recognize that most Jews have not read the New Testament. Christians should not assume that Jews know particular material; but Christians should invite Jews to study with them, not for the sake of conversion, but for the sake of mutual understanding. Similarly, Jews should invite their gentile friends to a Sabbath service to hear the Torah being read and ideally hearing the Torah being discussed. The nice thing about where we are today is that A.-J. can look over and view Christianity with Jewish eyes and on the whole can be very pleased with what she sees; she hopes that Christians can do the corresponding thing. Then you will be what we refer to as "truly blessed." Thank you very much.

A.-J.’s formal presentation ended at 8:35 PM.

Dieter Walk asked about differences between Judaism and Christianity with respect to family values. A.-J. answered that the vast majority of Jews in the first century were "in to" the nuclear and the biological family. In other words, ones primary loyalty was to ones parents (i.e., the Fifth Commandment). Also, the First Commandment was to be fruitful and multiply. Jesus is interested in severing people from their natal (birth) family in the same way that people from the Dead Sea (Qumran) severed people from their natal families. So we have continuously in Christianity the rejection of the biological family over and against the family of faith. Jesus says to the man who wants to bury his father, let the dead bury the dead, you come follow me. He says, do not call anyone father because the only one you have is in heaven. The disciples talk about leaving everything and following him, and Jesus states in the Gospel of Luke, unless you leave father and mother and wife and children and home and family, you have no part of me. So Jesus is establishing what anthropologists would call a fictive kinship group in the same way that people in monasteries would do. Such alternative family values, although they were different than normative Jewish ones, may have been appropriate given they were expecting the Kingdom of God to break in at any moment. Jesus probably got into trouble for that, just as groups today will get into trouble if they take people out of their homes and insist that their new family is the family of faith rather than the original family. Dieter replied that Jesus’s own celibacy was a unique gift and A.-J. agreed; however, her concern was that the people who followed him wanted to sponsor that particular gift, which is why Peter talks about leaving home. Generally, married couples did not follow Jesus; it was single women and single men. A.-J. said that she felt the Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox communions got it right when they put in a role for celibacy. Protestants lost it and Judaism lost it. Jesus offered celibacy as a viable model. The more the early Church pushed celibacy, the more Judaism withdrew from it. A.-J. thinks that is a loss.

Erika Garfunkel asked whether Jews for Jesus should be considered part of the Jewish community? A.-J. replied that it depends on who one asks. A.-J.’s opinion is that if they want to call themselves Jews and are halachically observant (obey the Jewish law; keep Kosher, etc.), it is not her right to deny them the title Jews. The last person who got formally into the question of "who is a Jew" was Hitler, and A.-J. does not want to go there.

Marlene Maimon asked how did Jesus get his name. A.-J. explained the his name is Yeshu in Aramaic but it is Yesus in Greek. Then when the name is translated into German, the "y’s" get converted to "j’s." Marlene also said that she had read that Jesus got into trouble for performing miracles or faith healing on the shabbat (Sabbath). A.-J. replied that according to the New Testament he does get into trouble for that. However, rabbinic documents talk about what is permissible on the Sabbath, and it is only the ultra strict who would delay healing beyond the Sabbath; the majority of Jews say that if there is anything that decreased ones ability to appreciate the Sabbath, then one takes care of whatever that thing is first. So Jesus’s healings do make good sense on the Sabbath. Also, for the majority of healings which are reported on the Sabbath, it is hard to tell if they are healings in the technical sense. Are there Jewish faith healers? Yes, but the establishment did not like them either. Religious establishments never like charismatic healers and prophets. Marlene then asked how much A.-J. would attribute the development of the early Church to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the subsequent Diaspora. Did the destruction of the temple have much effect on the development of Christianity. A.-J. replied that the Church was already established and "going great guns" in the 40’s. So, she does not feel that the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE had much effect on the Church. Nor was there much effect on Judaism. Jews had already lived without a Temple, and had already developed mechanisms to perpetuate the religion without it.

Bert Buby asked about supersessionism in the New Testament, particularly Matthew and the Epistle to the Hebrews. How would A.-J. suggest that we handle this problem in the New Testament? A.-J. explained that supersessionism is the idea that Christianity replaces and completes Judaism. She said that the Epistle to the Hebrews is definitely a supersessionist document. It says that the whole system from the Old Testament is simply a prototype that Jesus fulfills. How do you deal with that today? You begin by acknowledging we have a supersessionist document, and then you might want to talk about how it plays out its supersessionism.

Someone asked why does one not hear more about James in the New Testament? Are Peter and James competing with oneanother? A.-J. replied that Peter and James are in rivalry, and Paul and James are in a greater rivalry. James is Jesus’ brother who is running the church in Jerusalem. James gets downplayed in Christian tradition because he favors the observance of the law. The killer for James was Martin Luther who called James an "epistle of straw." James is coming back in Roman Catholicism, and A.-J. thinks this is a very good thing.

Jack Kelley asked about the Pharisees and whether Christians are learning to draw nearer to them. A.-J. replied that we do not know very much about the Pharisees. Somehow the rabbis (including Hillel and Shamai) came out of the Pharisaic tradition.

Lou asked how A.-J. had happened to attend Catechism classes as a Jewish youth. A.-J. replied that she grew up in a Catholic neighborhood in Massachusetts where everyone was Catholic except for A.-J. She particularly appreciated the "smells and bells’ of Catholicism. She had a kind of ethnic Catholicism; she loved the candles and cookies. She also wanted the First Communion dress that all her friends were getting. When she was on the school bus in second grade, one of her classmates told her, "you killed our lord." So she was conflicted and she asked her parents to go to Catechism. The sisters who taught Catechism never put any pressure on A.-J., and she was allowed to ask whatever questions she wanted. She also played CYO basketball and attended CCD classes as a youth.

Jerry Kotler asked A.-J. about the dual covenant system of John Gager. A.-J. explained that, in this system, gentiles get in (are redeemed) by being gentiles and Jews get in by being Jews. A.-J. replied that Gager’s dual covenant system is a lovely system, but it is not Paul. She does not find the evidence in Paul that would support the dual covenant system. Jerry and Lorraine Kotler also asked about the phrase in the New Testament about turning the other cheek. Is this actually a part of the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam? In other words, once someone has hit you, you should give that person a second opportunity to make a better choice. A.-J. said that that is a lovely way of putting it. The concept comes from the Sermon on the Mount. It forces a person to confront their own violence.

The Open meeting adjourned at 9:00 PM.

Respectfully submitted,

Ken Rosenzweig, Secretary

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