A Social History of Christian Origins: The Rejected Jesus [1 ed.] 1032288493, 9781032288499, 9781032288505, 9781003298809

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A Social History of Christian Origins

A Social History of Christian Origins explores how the theme of the Jewish rejection of Jesus – embedded in Paul’s letters and the New Testament Gospels – represents the ethnic, social, cultural, and theological conflicts that facilitated the construction of Christian identity. Readers of this book will gain a thorough understanding of how a central theme of early Christianity – the Jewish rejection of Jesus – facilitated the emergence of Christian anti-Judaism as well as the complex and multi-faceted representations of Jesus in the Gospels of the New Testament. This study systematically analyzes the theme of social rejection in the Jesus tradition by surveying its historical and chronological development. Employing the social-psychological study of social rejection, social identity theory, and social memory theory, Joseph sheds new light on the inter-relationships between myth, history, and memory in the study of Christian origins and the contemporary (re)construction of the historical Jesus. A Social History of Christian Origins is primarily intended for academic specialists and students in ancient history, biblical studies, New Testament studies, Religious Studies, Classics, as well as the general reader interested in the beginnings of Christianity. Simon J. Joseph is Lecturer in Early Christianity at the University of California, Los Angeles (CA). He holds a Ph.D. in Religion (New Testament) from Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of five books, including, most recently, Jesus, the Essenes, and Christian Origins.

Routledge Studies in the Early Christian World

Reconceiving Religious Conflict New Views from the Formative Centuries of Christianity Edited by Wendy Mayer and Chris L. de Wet The Slave Metaphor and Gendered Enslavement in Early Christian Discourse Double Trouble Embodied Marianne Bjelland Kartzow Between Jews and Heretics Refiguring Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho Matthijs den Dulk The Silencing of Slaves in Early Jewish and Christian Texts Ronald Charles A New Perspective on the Use of Paul in the Gospel of Mark Cameron Evan Ferguson Valentinus’ Legacy and Polyphony of Voices Piotr Ashwin-Siejkowski Carpocrates, Marcellina, and Epiphanes Three Early Christian Teachers of Alexandria and Rome M. David Litwa Living Martyrs in Late Antiquity and Beyond Surviving Martyrdom Diane Shane Fruchtman A Social History of Christian Origins The Rejected Jesus Simon J. Joseph For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-the-Early-Christian-World/book-series/SECW

A Social History of Christian Origins The Rejected Jesus

Simon J. Joseph

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Simon J. Joseph The right of Simon J. Joseph to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-28849-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-28850-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-29880-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/b22959 Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

vi 1

PART I

25

1

The Jewish Problem

27

2

Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ

42

3

Theorizing Rejection

83

4

Criteria of Rejection

94

5

“Do This in Memory of Me”

101

PART II

113

6

“He Was Despised and Rejected by Men”

115

7

The Rejection of the Law

136

8

The Rejection of Israel

156

9

The Rejection of the Collection

160

10 The Jewish Rejection of Jesus Conclusion Bibliography Index

170 181 184 240

Acknowledgments

The publication of this study – my fifth monograph on the Jesus tradition – marks the culmination of a long-term research project focused on the relationship between early Judaism and Christian origins. Over the last five years, I have had the privilege of teaching full-time as Lecturer in Early Christianity in the Interdepartmental Program for the Study of Religion at the University of California, Los Angeles, CA. I would like to thank Carol Bakhos, Bill Schniedewind, and my other colleagues in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures for the welcoming academic environment within which I have researched and written this work. Teaching religion at a public university – in one of the most religiously diverse cities in the United States – comes with special challenges, not least of which is creating a safe intellectual space for critical discourse in the academic study of religion. The present work reflects this welcoming but challenging discursive environment. Here I revisit a range of topics I have explored elsewhere related to the study of the historical Jesus, the Gospels, and Christian origins within a new critical framework utilizing the interrelationships of ethnicity, identity, and memory. I would like to thank Amy Davis-Poynter and Marcia Adams of Routledge for facilitating the publication of this study as well as the press’s editorial team for shepherding it through the publication process. I would also like to thank the three reviewers who made numerous constructive suggestions for revision. Special thanks to William E. Arnal and Zeba A. Crook for their constructive comments. This book is dedicated to my wife, Jennifer, who made it both possible and worthwhile.

Introduction

Skandalon, paradox, disowned, and “forsaken,” he walks the world homeless, like a ghost, wandering through the ruined remains of the ancient past, still searching for a friendly face or a willing hand. He comes to us now from that time and place, challenging our assumptions with his first-century Otherness. In a common cliché misattributed to Albert Schweitzer, the “quest” for the historical Jesus has been compared to peering into a well, only to find one’s own image and likeness,1 allegedly rendering such “quests” problematic insofar as the independent researcher is unable to extricate their subjective presuppositions from their critical analysis of the historical sources. Schweitzer’s scathing criticism of such “quests” did not prevent him, however, from providing his own idiosyncratic interpretation of the historical Jesus. Nor has it deterred subsequent scholars from periodizing post-Schweitzerian research into different kinds (or even eras) of “quests.”2 Historically speaking, the critical study of Christian origins has long been “dominated” by ideological and “theological agendas,”3 particularly those appealing to Christianity’s unique, exceptional, and/or incomparable status in the history of religion.4 Since the Enlightenment, however, the study of Christian origins has made significant advances by utilizing the methods and theories derived from the social sciences and the comparative study of religion.5 The category of religion,6 like all conceptual categories,7 is socially constructed.8 Like all categories, “religion” can also be ideologically deployed and implicated in discourses of power.9 Nonetheless, Religious Studies (Religionswissenschaft), insofar as it relativizes and “subordinates” confessional truth-claims to the critical principles of analogy and comparison,10 problematizes the relationship between confessional and critical perspectives,11 and so challenges the theoretical privileging of a sui generis conceptualization of religion,12 suggests that analogical comparisons drawn from other religious traditions can shed new light on the Jesus story.13 As an emergent “science,” the study of religion depends on and presupposes the description of “religious” phenomena, but also aspires to provide critical and theoretical explanations of “religious” phenomena.14 The posthumous publication of Hermann Samuel Reimarus’s Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes as anonymous “Fragments” explicating “The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples” (1774–1778), for example, DOI: 10.4324/b22959-1

2

Introduction

has long been credited with introducing the concept of an essential discontinuity between Jesus and the early “Church.”15 For Reimarus, Jesus was born, lived, and died as a Jew, a failed political messiah whose disciples (falsely) claimed had been raised from the dead.16 Similarly, in 1835, David Friedrich Strauss published Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, an exploration of the Gospel story as myth.17 Steering a middle way between rationalistic reductionism and apologetic supernaturalism, Strauss’ appeal to the language of myth was controversial in his day, but his “basic claims – that many of the gospel narratives are mythical in character, and that ‘myth’ is not simply to be equated with ‘falsehood’ – have become part of mainstream scholarship.”18 After Strauss, the category of myth became increasingly common in New Testament studies.19 The emergence of The Jesus Seminar in 1985 – 150 years after the publication of Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet – further explored the possibility of redescribing Jesus along critical lines of inquiry by carefully sifting through the sayings of Jesus, rendering the principle of discontinuity virtually axiomatic in Jesus Research.20 Since the mid-1990s, the Redescribing Christian Origins project has utilized a range of theoretical perspectives derived from the social sciences in identifying alternative methodological approaches to the study of Christian origins. These experiments include reconsidering the messianic conception of Jesus, the early Jerusalem community, and Paul’s use of the Greek term Christos, each analyzed as constituent elements in an emergent “Christian myth.”21 The study of Christian origins is thus now characterized by explorations of the power of myth,22 including the “myth of Christian uniqueness” (where “uniqueness” is virtually synonymous with and a cipher for superiority),23 the Christian “myth of persecution,”24 the Christian myth of Jewish persecution,25 and/or the “myth of a Gentile Galilee.”26 The idea that Jesus was a myth is now also part of this wider trend,27 although the key question here is whether critical scrutiny of the sources sufficiently warrants this conclusion.28 The overwhelmingly vast majority of qualified experts in the fields of Biblical and Religious Studies hold that it does not. Nonetheless, it is now common to refer to Christianity in “mythic” terms, although this use of the term myth should not be confused with popular conceptualizations relegating myth to the realm of the irrational, the counter-factual, and/or the untrue. Rather, in this context, a myth is regarded as a legendary narrative of sacred origins,29 an “ideology in narrative form.”30 Accordingly, the figure of Jesus – that is, the firstcentury Jew described by Paul as “born of a woman,” “born under the Law” (Gal 4:4), “born of the seed of David according to the flesh” (Rom 1:3), and whose “brother” led a movement after his death (Gal 1:19; 2:9) – can be regarded as a mythic element in an emergent “Christian” tradition provided we understand the sacralization process in and through which Jesus became “messiah.” This appeal to the language of myth presupposes a critical historiographical principle: that the historical Jesus is theoretically distinct from the Jesus of the Gospels, the latter of which represents a historical figure transformed by post-Easter Christology.31 That is, there is no historical Jesus without the willingness, in principle, to distinguish between the Gospels’ (re-)presentation(s) of Jesus and the historical figure

Introduction 3 of Jesus, including the categories, characterization, and canonical boundaries of that figure.32 * This study is an exploration of the themes of social rejection and (dis)continuity in the early Jesus tradition.33 Previous studies have explored the relationship between the Jesus tradition and early Jewish texts, messianism,34 mysticism,35 asceticism,36 sacrifice,37 violence,38 and halakhic discourse.39 The present project expands on these studies by further exploring the social history of the Jesus movement in terms of ethnicity, identity, and memory,40 proposing a new explanatory model of early Christian origins as a sociological process of contradistinction fueled by the perception and experience of social rejection. Briefly, this study proposes that the rapid transformation of the early Jesus movement’s initial inclusion of Gentiles within a Jewish/Gentile binary into a Jewish/Christian dichotomy was the result of a socio-ethnic conflict within the Jesus movement that quickly developed into an ethno-religious conflict between “Jews” and “Christians.” This transformation produced the myth of the Jewish rejection of Jesus and later justified the Christian rejection of Jews. The rhetorical construction of “the Jew(s)” as rejecting (Jesus) in Paul’s soteriology facilitated the idea that “the Jew(s)” had rejected Jesus as a “people/ethnos” and that the covenant now belonged to “Christians.” Simply put, the social, ethnic, cultural, and theological circumstances in and through which early Christ-followers constructed the mythic trope of “the Jewish rejection of Jesus” created significant “memory distortion” in the early Jesus tradition.41 The present project, therefore, is not intended simply to provide my own reconstruction of Christian origins; it is also intended to better elucidate the historical processes in and through which Christianity emerged as well as the discursive disciplinary framework within which reconstructions of Christian origins must proceed: the identification of Jesus as a first-century Jew within a structurally “Christian” discourse.42 The historical datum that “Jesus war kein Christ sondern Jude” has long informed critical biblical scholarship.43 The Jewish Jesus of history was native to the land, language, culture, customs, religion, and people of Judea. That is, the historical Jesus was an indigenous Judean.44 While the term indigenous is normally reserved for Native/First peoples who live within a complex nexus of land, language, and kinship relations,45 it is also a relational category that can be used more generally to describe politicized relationships and counter-narratives. As such, indigeneity acknowledges discontinuity, facilitates a diachronic critical analysis of competing and coexisting cultural contexts, and recognizes ambiguity in the construction of social identities navigating contested ideological terrain within a post-colonial context. The ongoing discussion over whether Ἰουδαῖος should be translated as “Jew” or “Judean” illustrates, for example, how appeals to Jesus’s Jewishness can profitably be seen as attempts to re-indigenize a Christian tradition still searching for its historical roots in first-century Judaism.

4

Introduction

In recent years, however, repeated emphases on the essential continuity of memory, whether conceptualized as the reliability of the “eye-witnesses,”46 or the memorable “impact” that Jesus made on his disciples,47 indicate that there is considerable support for continuity-models in the study of early Christian origins.48 Critics now recognize the post-Easter context(s) within which Jesus was “remembered,”49 yet a key element in that context is socio-ethnic conflict.50 The quest for the historical Jesus involves investigating an ancient discursive site before the term “Christian” emerged in contradistinction to “the Jew.” This requires developing explanatory models of the socio-psychological dynamics which gave rise to that contradistinction in the first place. The Gospels represent seminal moments in a conflicted social history.51 The author of Mark’s Gospel, for example, was almost certainly aware of and sympathetic to the content of Paul’s letters,52 many of which are preoccupied with social conflicts within his communities (ekklēsiai). The recovery of social history from texts may be fraught with methodological difficulties, not least of which would be the “community” fallacy that presupposes a close association between texts and “communities.”53 Nonetheless, one can hardly deny that different socio-ethnic groups co-existed in the early Jesus movement. Even a cursory glance at the Pauline corpus illustrates this point. Historical (re)constructions of Christian origins thus rightly recognize that linguistic, geographical, ethnic, and social diversity, disagreement, and difference characterize this context. Paul’s letters, in particular, document social conflicts marking intra“Christian” relationships,54 a point highlighted long ago by Ferdinand Christian Baur and the Tübingen School.55 Although many of Baur’s particular conclusions have not aged very well – namely, his uncritical use of the Pseudo-Clementine literature and his Hegelian identification of Judaism as a particularistic foil to a universalistic Christianity56 – the idea that Paul was in conflict with the Jerusalem leadership remains a lasting contribution.57 Historically, the figure of Jesus was relocated from Jewish to Christian contexts. Consequently, re-locating Jesus within Judaism is necessary simply because Jesus was dis-located from his original context, facilitating the emergence of a “Christian” ekklēsia in relationship to but also opposed to Jewish customs, ideas, and practices as well as the first Jewish members and leaders of the Jesus movement. In a history written by winners (in a zero-sum game), the losers were ultimately cast in the role of the lost cause (“Jewish-Christianity”), the “late” form of a corrupted tradition (spätjudentum), and/or as an early version of a tradition soon to expand beyond ethnic borders (a Jewish “matrix”). “The Jew(s)” thus serve(d) to anchor, ground, and launch the “Christian” project. Consequently, attending to the social context(s) inscribed in the Jesus tradition requires listening for oppressed, silenced, erased, marginalized, and forgotten voices and narratives dis-placed (dislocated) from the Gospel story.58 Divisions between Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus (eventually) led to the marginalization and disappearance of Jewish followers of Jesus insofar as they were ultimately identified as heretical. Some might prefer to relegate this division between Jewish and Gentile followers to a later era where it does not reflect on the earliest disciples as heretical, but whether it began in the first century, with Paul’s subordination of Judean leadership, hostile

Introduction 5 remarks about the Law, and Gentile/Judean Judaizing (the terminus a quo), or in the second century, as attested by the letters of Ignatius of Antioch,59 and/or later, in the fourth century when “Jewish-Christian” sectarians were declared heretical (the terminus ad quem), we know that this division happened. The disappearance of “Jewish-Christianity” is evidence – in its absence – of that historical process. If it is a truism today to say that histories are written by winners, the truth in this case is that both sides lost. The Christian tradition dispossessed itself by dissociating “the Jew” from its socio-religious identity while Jewish tradition erased Jesus from its historical memory. And so it was that the man became an “enigma,” hidden and revealed, forgotten, and “forsaken” by both groups of his own. * In contemporary academic discourse, rhetorical appeals to forgotten “voices from the margin(s)” have now become de rigueur.60 The most exhaustive study of Jesus’s “marginality” – the six-volume magnum opus, A Marginal Jew – is written by John P. Meier, a Catholic priest-scholar firmly ensconced in academic and ecclesiastical halls of power.61 Meier does not suggest that Jesus was marginal in the sense of being historically insignificant. On the contrary, in such contexts, Jesus is perhaps better understood as “the central Jew.”62 Rather, Meier proposes that Jesus’s marginality refers to our inability to locate him within a particular sectarian Jewish milieu as well as to Jesus’s own self-marginalization in Jewish society. Jesus was apparently not an important person in his own time and lost his life in the humiliating position of being crucified. That is, Jesus was marginal in the sense that his teachings were not “mainstream” in first-century Judaism. Jesus was also a socially and economically marginal figure from rural Galilee who supported other marginalized figures. For Meier, Jesus’s “marginality” is both a rhetorical anchor undergirding his monumental project as well as a deeply ironic contrast to Jesus’s contemporary centrality and significance. Jesus’s Jewishness, however, can also be seen as a sign of marginality, an inconvenient truth that early Christians struggled to reconcile with their own increasingly non-Jewish identity. Consequently, it is no small irony that the historical Jesus – that is, the historically Jewish Jesus – has been described as irrelevant or “useless” to “the Church” insofar as the historical Jesus is different from (and potentially corrective to) the confessional (Christological) construct of “the Church.”63 This perceived (ir)relevancy of Jesus Research is largely the result of re-locating Jesus within Judaism. In this context, however, Jesus Research is not “useless” as much as dangerous insofar as a Jewish historical Jesus owes no loyalty to contemporary Jewish or Christian identity, challenges institutional histories, destabilizes religious norms, threatens socio-religious conformity, and refuses to inhabit any space or location other than his own.64 This Jesus may alternately be a first-century footnote in Jewish history, a figure “useless” to contemporary Christians, or a man wandering, homeless, with nowhere to go. *

6

Introduction

In the ancient Mediterranean world, cultural, linguistic, and geographical associations related ethnic groups, “peoples,” or, ἔθνη, to land and ancestral customs. Ethnicity and antiquity were the primary indicators of religio in the ancient Mediterranean world.65 The concept of ethnicity reflects an attachment between a group of people and their ancestral territory.66 The term Ἰουδαῖος, for example, was an ethnic, religious, and geographical reference to an “inhabitant of Judea … a Judean by religion and culture.”67 The Judeans were an ἔθνος, a people, a group with “cultural, linguistic, geographical, or political unity.”68 The Judeans came from the tribe of Judah and the region took its name from the tribe (Yehudah, ‫ ;יהודה‬Ἰουδαῖος).69 Like ancient Greeks and Romans,70 ancient Jews also tended to see the world in bipolar terms, as Jews and “Gentiles,” the people of Israel and the “nations” (ἔθνη).71 The use of the term “Gentile” is problematic, however, as it presupposes a Jewish conceptualization of the non-Jewish “nations” or ἔθνη,72 although it serves here to draw attention to this conceptual binary in traditional Jewish thought. It also highlights the emergence of a certain subset of “the Gentiles” that were ultimately identifiable as “Christian.”73 The early Jesus movement was first comprised of ethnic Judeans. By the mid-first century, however, it was a mixed ethnic configuration of Jews and Gentiles. This mixed ethnic movement initially shared membership in a new conceptualization of an eschatological Israel,74 but the Gentile wing of the movement rapidly subordinated the Jewish wing of the movement to an increasingly dominant ethnically Gentile “Christian” identity. Early Christian identity was then constructed as trans-ethnic, non-Jewish, and universalistic,75 obfuscating the heart of the conflict now as a dichotomy between an ethnic, particularistic religion and a trans-ethnic, universal religion instead of a social conflict between an elect remnant of an ethnos (Jewish Christ-followers) and the ethnē (the “nations”) coexisting within a single emergent religious system. The relationship between Judaism and Christianity was thus informed by the ancient rhetoric of “ethnic reasoning,” where claims and constructions of fictive kinship could produce new social, cultural, and religious identities.76 The modern concept of ethnicity, although etymologically derived from ancient conceptualizations of multiple ἔθνη, represents both frames of reference, incorporating both genetically inherited ancestry and customs as well as culturally constructed and contested claims of common ancestry.77 Ethnic groups are made by their boundaries and relationships, but those boundaries are dynamic, often permeable, and always in a state of flux.78 Similarly, the concept of “race,” or perhaps of “protoracism,”79 has been located in Greek antiquity insofar as the phenotypical features of “other” peoples were often associated with stereotypes of inferiority.80 The term “race” may strike some as anachronistic compared to the term ethnicity, given the latter’s cognate relationship to the Greek term ἔθνος,81 but ancient ethnic prejudices clearly informed later histories of prejudice and discrimination articulated and conceptualized in racial categories.82 The Greek word γένος can be translated as “people,” as when Paul refers to his earlier life in comparison to many among his γένει (Gal 1:14), when he refers to danger from his own γένους (2 Cor 11:26), and when he refers to himself as “a

Introduction 7 member of the γένους of Israel” (Phil 3:5). In some contexts, the terms γένος and ἔθνος may even be relatively interchangeable (cf. 1 Pet 2:9). In other contexts, a γένος can refer to a “kind” or “class.” The translation of γένος as race may be defensible insofar as the Greek term focuses on common lineal descent, geography, and shared ancestry – and therefore conceptually overlaps with the modern concept of race – but remains problematic insofar as it may import ideologicallyloaded modern notions of biological determinism.83 Ancient conceptualizations of race were not over-determined by skin color – a marked divergence from modern conceptualizations of race.84 Nonetheless, it is useful to distinguish between race and ethnicity in antiquity insofar as the former can be conceptualized as relatively fixed aspects of identity based on environmental and geographical coordinates with the latter being more subject to cultural modification.85 This distinction may help facilitate more analytical precision in differentiating between ancient Jews/ Judeans, Christ-believing Jews/Judeans, and non-Judean Christ-believers, that is, individual members of social groups who were able to move from (or between) one social and ethnic identity to another. The relationship between Jewish and Gentile Christ-followers is analyzed here as a series of socio-ethnic conflicts that led to the sociological, psychological, literary-scribal, historical, and theological dissociation of Jews and Judaism from Christians and Christianity.86 In this discursive context, ethnicity is seen as both “fixed” and “fluid,” both inherited and constructed.87 If the historical Jesus was involved in an intra-Jewish conflict with his contemporaries, the post-Easter Jesus movement not only inherited this earlier social conflict; it also developed new internal socio-ethnic conflicts between Jewish and Gentile followers. In the Gospels, both the intra-Jewish conflicts and the internal conflicts within the movement are transferred to “the Jew(s)” as the common enemy of an emergent “Christian” identity, a process which we see culminating in the composition of the book of Acts, where the resolution of these conflicts is worked out in a narrative of ecclesiastical unity and harmony, obscuring both the very real conflicts of the apostolic period as well as its consensual arrangement of two missions (Jews and Gentiles), two sociological wings of a single movement (Jews and Gentiles), and a two-stage process, envisioned by Paul, of Israel’s future redemption. * Today there is no word, term, title, or category that better symbolizes the difference between Jews and Christians than the identification of Jesus-as-Christ, messiah (‫)משיח‬. The identification of Jesus as (the) Christ became a dividing line between Jesus’s Jewish followers and other Jews,88 as well as a cornerstone of New Testament theology.89 This attribution of “messianic” themes to the life story of Jesus – that is, the sacralization of the person of Jesus – created an ideological borderline between his (Jewish) followers and non-believers. Yet the word “messiah” is an ethnic term originating in ancient Judean royal and Davidic traditions. Contemporary scholars of early Judaism now recognize a complex plurality of messianic figures, ideas, texts, and traditions.90 This variety does make it difficult

8

Introduction

to speak of singular or monolithic “messianic expectations.”91 Nonetheless, there is no substantial debate about the origins of Jewish messianism.92 Royal Davidic hopes played a central role in this tradition.93 The “messiah” was popularly envisioned as a Davidic king who would “destroy the enemies of Israel and institute an era of unending peace.”94 Some Jews may have opted out of endorsing these popular messianic beliefs. Others may have come to identify Simon bar Kosiba (Kokhba) as the messiah.95 More recently, some contemporary Jews have even identified Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson as the messiah.96 These messianic claims have not convinced the vast majority of Jews simply because neither Bar Kokhba nor Rabbi Schneerson ever succeeded in satisfying the expectations held by the vast majority of Jews. Evidently, a number of first-century Jews identified Jesus as “anointed,” messiah (‫)משיח‬, Χριστός.97 Given Jesus’s public teaching about a present and/or coming “Kingdom” of God, his popular following, and his execution as “king of the Jews,” it seems clear that Jesus was executed under political charges.98 Yet Jesus’s evident failure to fulfill a variety of Davidic messianic expectations complicated the movement’s ability to persuade most Jews that the redemption of Israel had begun. Jesus was executed for a political crime that could easily be translated into the language of a royal messianic claim, but for most Jews, the identification of Jesus-as-Christ was a “stumbling block.” It is certainly possible that the historical Jesus possessed a prophetic self-understanding, perhaps inspired by Isaiah’s description of one “anointed” by the Spirit (61:1), and that this self-understanding played a contributive role in the identification of Jesus as messianic, but the disciples’ claim that Jesus was the Davidic messiah,99 a claim repeated in Paul’s letters,100 and the Synoptics,101 is less secure. The family of Jesus does seem to have claimed Davidic descent, even though this put them in political danger during the reign of Domitian (Eccl. Hist. 3.20.1– 6). Early Church records illustrate that Jesus’s family held leadership roles in the first two centuries. The history of Christianity reports a series of Jesus’s family members known as the Desposynoi (Δεσπόσυνοι) (“those belonging to the Lord/ Master”).102 Yet here the social memory of the early Church Fathers begins to grow increasingly hazy. Eusebius tells us that Jesus’s brother Jude’s two grandsons were interrogated by Domitian and after their release continued to lead their communities until the reign of Trajan. According to Julius Africanus, the family of Jesus possessed a genealogy tracing their descent from David. On the other hand, Mark’s Jesus implies that the messiah cannot be the son of David because David calls the messiah his “Lord.”103 What is clear is that both Paul and the Gospels redefined the Davidic messiah tradition in light of Jesus’s life and death. That does not necessarily mean that Jesus thought of himself as a royal (Davidic) messiah. Some of Jesus’s first Jewish followers may have hoped that Jesus was or would become this messiah. What is virtually certain, however, is that some Jews became convinced that Jesus was this messiah after his crucifixion. The identification of Jesus-as-Christ, whatever its historical origins may have been, catalyzed the nascent “Christian” Jesus movement into an increasingly more activated prophetic, eschatological, and apocalyptic missionary program. It is within

Introduction 9 this multi-ethnic post-Easter period that we can first locate the early emergence of the term “Christian” as an identity-marker. The term “Christian” (Χριστιανός), derived from the Greek adjective and title Χριστός, is first found in the book of Acts (ca. 100 CE),104 where it is associated with the city of Antioch, the place where “the disciples were first called ‘Christians’ (Χριστιανούς)” (Acts 11:26). Around 108 CE, Ignatius contrasts “Christianity” (Χριστιανισμὸς) with “Judaism” (Ἰουδαϊσμὸς).105 The term’s first non-Christian appearance, however, is in a letter from Pliny the Younger to the Roman Emperor Trajan (ca. 110 CE).106 This is the procedure I have followed, in the case of those brought before me as Christians (Christiani) … threatening them with execution … The infection of this superstition (superstitio) has extended not merely through the cities, but also through the villages and country areas, but it seems likely that it can be halted and corrected. Assuming, then, that (most of) Jesus’s followers identified Jesus-as-Christ (Χριστός), at what point(s) are we justified in calling these first Christ-followers “Christians?”107 It is not entirely clear whether the use of the term “Christian” in Acts 11:26 should be taken as a referent to an ethnically mixed ekklēsia in Antioch or to the apparently non-Jewish sect referred to by Pliny. If we accept the former referent, then the term Christian originated as a social identity that could be shared by Jews and Gentiles; if we accept the latter, then it is a term referring to the Gentile wing of the ekklēsia who were publicly recognizable as non-Jews both by themselves and by Roman officials who could then be seen as subsequently adopting the term as antithetical to (the) “Jew(s).”108 Historically speaking, the earliest Jesus movement was Jewish. It would be historically anachronistic, therefore, to describe Jesus’s first followers as “Christians,” especially since the term “Christian” is only first attested in the early second century.109 How, then, are we to avoid projecting an anachronistic identity onto a group of Jews who did not self-identify as “Christian?”110 Some scholars suggest that we simply stop calling Paul a “Christian,”111 since Paul’s terms of reference were Jews and Gentiles (whether or not they were “in Christ”). Should we then identify Jesus’s first Jewish followers as “proto-Christians?”112 Or should we reserve the term “Christian” for non-Jewish (second century) Gentile followers of Jesus, considering that it was Paul’s explicit purpose to make room for Gentiles in this new movement that facilitated the emergence of a “Christian” identity constructed vis-à-vis contradistinction? New Testament, rabbinic, and Greco-Roman writings point to a predominantly Gentile context for and interpretation of the term “Christian.” The rhetorical and discursive shift implicit in the (re)description of the Jesus movement from “Jewish” to “Christian” (or, conversely, from a “Christian” to a “Jewish” movement) is complicated insofar as the Jesus movement is: first, indisputably Jewish before 30 CE, second, a mixed movement of Jews and Gentiles post-30 CE, and third, a predominantly Gentile movement by the early second century CE.

10

Introduction

If the historical goal is to identify the earliest moment(s) when the term “Christian” signifies “non-Jewish(ness),” then it is historiographically illegitimate to use the term to describe followers of Jesus prior to 70 CE as Jews predominated the movement before the composition of the Gospels. To use the term “protoChristian” for these Jews collapses the distinction between a Jewish movement and its transformation into something other-than-Judaism. On the other hand, to deny the term “Christian” to this nascent movement problematically dissociates the term “Christian” from seminal moments in which this movement embraced and integrated non-Jewish elements in its early formation. Given this antithetical contradistinction between Jew and Christian in antiquity, this discussion of dualmembership or transit between the two is further complicated by terminological imprecision. It has been suggested, for example, that the category of “conversion” should be sent off for early “retirement.”113 Given its anachronistic status for Paul, who uses the vocational language of being “called” to become an apostle rather than converting to “Christianity,”114 and its misrepresentation of Paul’s ekklēsia comprised of neither “converts” nor “Godfearers” (θεοσεβής),115 we can adopt Paul’s own preferred terms for Gentiles as “turning” to the God of Israel via adoption.116 Paul’s concept of a non-Judean social identity “in Christ” was not a Jewish sect, but rather a “new creation.”117 Whether or not the term “Christian” originally signified Jewish and Gentile Christ-followers or, as seems more likely, non-Jewish Gentile Christ-followers, there is no doubt that the term underwent a discursive shift from shared concept to exclusive category, along with the presupposition that Christianity was (and is) a non-Jewish religion. This discursive shift parallels the process of social differentiation between ancient Jewish and non-Jewish followers of Jesus. Historiographically speaking, terms like “Christian(ity)” and “the Church” may be anachronistic for the first century – which is why it is preferable to use Paul’s own preferred term, ekklēsia (“assembly”), to refer to his “multi-ethnic” associations of Jews and Gentiles “in Christ”118 – but there are already indications in the Gospel of Mark of an emergent social formation in contradistinction to “the Jew(s).” It is within this process of socio-literary differentiation that the figure of “Jesus” began to sustain different configurations in competing cultures. Eventually, this contradistinction process left no room for Jews who followed Jesus. The end-result was the subsequent invention of heresy, the depository of unwanted and unacceptable combinations of incompatible elements.119 Today the category of “Jewish-Christianity” represents a term variously understood as a form of Judaism, a sub-sect of Christianity, a hybrid of both, and/or a term that should be “dismantled” altogether.120 While some categories should indeed be sent off for “retirement,”121 “Jewish-Christianity” is not one of them. We still need a category that distinguishes ethnically Jewish members of the Jesus movement from ethnically non-Jewish members of that movement, whether or not either group identified itself as “Christian.” That is, we need to remember – not marginalize or erase – those Jewish voices from antiquity who resist(ed) facile categorization.122 *

Introduction 11 The construction of Christian identity involved both a separation from and an ideological construction of Judaism.123 Christians became a new ethnos,124 different from Jews,125 who became the signifier of that which was not Christian.126 This relationship has been conceptualized as “the-Parting-of-the-Ways,”127 or “the Jewish/Christian schism,”128 with Jews and Christians understood as representing two distinct social groups and religious traditions,129 monolithic abstractions simplifying complex, intersecting, and overlapping traditions and communities, with the utility of these abstractions leading to their reification as stable, continuous entities over time.130 Ideological continuities between Early Judaism and Rabbinical Judaism were identified on behalf of a historically and culturally continuous Judaism while ideological continuities between Jesus and Christianity were often assumed, despite the indisputable Jewishness of Jesus rendering that continuity problematic.131 Ultimately, this “Parting-of-the-Ways” model was inscribed in and through the New Testament, which led to the Christian conception and construction of Judaism. Contemporary critical studies on “Jewish/Christian relations” in Late Antiquity range from exploring ancient Jewish identity,132 current Jewish and Christian inter-religious dialogue,133 and rhetorical appeals to familial, parental, and sibling metaphors,134 to the sociological dynamics involved in contradistinctive identity formation.135 Many scholars today challenge the assumption of a singular “moment(s)” in which Jews and Christians “parted ways.” Some argue that the “ways” never “parted.”136 Others argue that they “parted” early on. Still, others opt for “fine-tuning” between the two extremes.137 The picture of two “paths” deviating from a common point of origin is now too simplistic an image to convey the range of ongoing interaction between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity.138 On the other hand, we need not deny the development of relational fissures that littered the “paths” of these two constituencies. The animus generated within the “Jewish-Christian schism” was both rhetorical and real.139 In Late Antiquity, Jewish/Christian relationship(s) moved far beyond the mockery, hostility, and suspicion directed at Jews in the Greco-Roman world.140 Whether the origins of an alleged “Judeophobia” can be found in ancient Egypt (amid accusations of “impiety”) and/or in Hellenistic and Roman literary contexts suspicious of Jewish separateness (manifest in Jewish resistance to polytheistic Hellenism), such undercurrents clearly informed “Christian” perceptions of “Jewish” identity. This transition from curiosity and dislike of Jewish customs and beliefs (e.g., circumcision, Sabbath observance, dietary restrictions) into outright hostility and violence against Jews (e.g., in the destruction of the Elephantine Temple in 410 BCE and the Alexandrian riots in 38 CE) may have originated as a tributary stream in ancient ethno-political, cultural, and geographical conflicts, but it soon escalated into a titanic struggle between two intimately related but intractably exclusive monotheisms until it became the “Western tradition” of anti-Judaism.141 Shifting power dynamics in Late Antiquity overwhelmingly favored Christian redefinitions of Judaism (rather than Jewish critiques of Christianity). Focusing on the negative effects of this relationship, however, only partially explains the historical emergence of these dynamics and discourses.142 The identification of

12

Introduction

the Jesus movement as a “new religious movement” (NRM), for example, presupposes the early Jewish sectarian milieu within which it emerged, but must be qualified so it does not obfuscate the multi-ethnic context within which that movement developed nor import the derogatory modern connotations of the term “cult” (cultus).143 The Gentile wing of the Jesus movement may have first been conceived and developed from within a Jewish “sect,” but its members emerged as a “non-Jewish” movement that came to distinguish themselves from Jewish/ Judean identity even while they claimed equal and elect status as “Israel.”144 Our conceptual terms and categories must be sufficiently honed in order to accurately describe and explain this development. This study explores how the generative power of social rejection produced the mythic trope of “the Jewish rejection of Jesus.” The social memory of rejection – a memory fueled by powerful emotions – served as a catalyst in social identity formation, a process of social differentiation inscribed in the New Testament. In recent years, the social-scientific study of emotion in the early Jesus movement – although still somewhat neglected in New Testament scholarship – has yielded significant preliminary results.145 Since emotions “arise in the course of social relations and interactions” and illuminate “social processes,” they play a major role in “marking social boundaries and attending to points of transition.”146 Here I argue that an alleged “Jewish rejection of Jesus” – based on, but not accurately reflecting the actual circumstances of the historical Jesus’s relationship to his fellow Jews – served as the archetypal or prototypical template of this social history and laid the scriptural foundation for two contradistinctive religious systems as oppositional paradigms. By foregrounding the complex socio-psychological factors involved within the (perceived) social rejection of Jesus, his movement, and the early mixed ekklēsia, this project challenges the common assumption that the Gospels accurately “remember” a “Jewish rejection of Jesus.” By methodologically prioritizing the chronologically earliest layers of textual data – the letters of Paul – this study also explores how and why social rejection was transferred to “the Jew(s)” in the Gospels and inscribed in(to) the Jesus tradition as “scripture,”147 contributing both to the study of Christian origins as well as to the study of Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple period.148

Notes 1 For the original passage, see George Tyrrell, Christianity at the Crossroads (London and New York: Longmans, Green and Co, 1909), 44: “The Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of Christian darkness, is only the reflection of a liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well.” For the correct attribution, see John C. Poirier, “Seeing What is There in Spite of Ourselves: George Tyrrell, John Dominic Crossan, and Robert Frost on Faces in Deep Wells,” JSHJ 4 no. 2 (2006), 127–38. The mistaken attribution is to Albert Schweitzer, Von Reimarus zu Wrede: Eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1906); ET: The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (trans. W. Montgomery; New York: Macmillan, 1910). 2 For criticism of this approach, see Dale C. Allison Jr. Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and Its Interpreters (New York: T & T Clark, 2005),

Introduction 13

3 4

5

6

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18: “It has not been very helpful to divide all the post-Schweitzerian activities into chronological segments or different quests.” Cf. Fernando Bermejo Rubio, “The Fiction of the ‘Three Quests’: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Historiographical Paradigm,” JSHJ 7 no. 3 (2009), 237: “whereas ‘Old Quest’ is a misleading expression as a descriptive category, ‘No Quest’ is simply nonsense, and ‘New Quest’ is useless as an epoch-describing label, ‘Third Quest’ is only a figment of the scholarly imagination.” For a recent attempt to name a “new” questing period, see James Crossley, “The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus,” JSHJ 19 (2021), 261–4. James G. Crossley, Why Christianity Happened: A Sociohistorical Account of Christian Origins (26-50 CE) (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006), 2. Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). On using Judaism as a way to insulate early Christianity from pagan influences, see Burton L. Mack, “After Drudgery Divine,” Numen 39 no. 2 (1992), 225–33. Gerd Theissen, Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity (trans. John Bowden; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978); idem, Social Reality and the Early Christians: Theology, Ethics, and the World of the New Testament (trans. Margaret Kohl; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992); John C. Gager, Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Christianity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975); Daniel J. Harrington, “Social Concepts in the Early Church: A Decade of Research,” TS 41 (1980), 181190; C. Osiek, What Are They Saying About the Social Setting of the New Testament? (New York: Paulist, 1984); D. Tidball, An Introduction to the Sociology of the New Testament (Exeter: Paternoster, 1983); Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Anthony J. Blasi, Early Christianity as a Social Movement (TSR 5; New York: Peter Lang, 1988); R. Rohrbaugh (ed.), The Social Sciences and New Testament Interpretation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996); Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Social Description of Early Christianity,” RSR 1 (1975), 19–25; Bruce J. Malina, The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology (London: SCM, 1981); The Social World of Jesus and the Gospels (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); Dietmar Neufeld and Richard E. DeMaris, Understanding the Social World of the New Testament (London and New York: Routledge, 2010). For an introduction to social scientific analysis, see John H. Elliott, What is Social Scientific Criticism? (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993). On re-describing Christian origins, see further Burton L. Mack, “On Redescribing Christian Origins,” MTSR 8 no. 3 (1996), 247–69; cf. William E. Arnal, “What Branches Grow out of this Stony Rubbish? Christian Origins and the Study of Religion,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 39 no. 4 (2010), 549–72. Russell McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); T. Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Talal Asad, Geneaologies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993); Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jerusalem (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), xi: “there is no data for religion … Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy.” On the conceptual utility of “Gnosticism,” for example, see Karen L. King, “Factions, Variety, Diversity, Multiplicity: Representing Early Christian Differences for the 21st Century,” MTSR 23 (2011), 217–37; Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton University Press, 1996). Kevin Schilbrack, “Religions: Are There Any?,” JAAR 78 no, 4 (2010), 1112–38, here 1113–4, 1117–26. On the constructed category, see also Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

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9 Schilbrack, “Religions: Are There Any?,” 1115–6, 1131–5. 10 Jonathan Z. Smith, Teaching Religion: Essays by Jonathan Z. Smith (ed. C. I. Lehrich; New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 7. Cf. Russell T. McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2001), 3–20. 11 Tim Jensen and Mikael Rothstein, eds., Secular Theories on Religion: Current Perspectives (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000), 7. 12 McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion. 13 See now Dale C. Allison, Jr., The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Criticism, History (New York and London: T & T Clark, 2021), 292. 14 Cf. Daniel L. Pals, Nine Theories of Religion (third edn.; New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 340. 15 Reimarus: Fragments, in Charles H. Talbert (ed.), tr. Ralph S. Fraser (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970); Hermann Samuel Reimarus, The Goal of Jesus and His Disciples, trans. George Wesley Buchanan (Leiden: Brill, 1970); idem, Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes, in Gerhard Alexander (ed.), 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1972). 16 On critical precursors to Reimarus, see Jonathan C. P. Birch, “The Road to Reimarus: Origins of the Quest for the Historical Jesus,” in Keith Whitelam (ed.), Holy Land as Homeland? Models for Constructing the Historic Landscapes of Jesus (Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011), 19–47. 17 David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet, 2 vols. (Tübingen: Osiander, 1835); The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, trans. George Eliot/Marian Evans, 3 vols. (London Chapman brothers, 1846). 18 Marcus Borg, “David Friedrich Strauss: Miracle and Myth,” The Fourth R 4–3 (May– June 1991). On Strauss, see further Horton Harris, David Fredrich Strauss and His Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); Marilyn Chapin Massey, Christ Unmasked: The Meaning of The Life of Jesus in German Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). 19 Rudolf Bultmann, Neues Testament und Mythologie. Das Problem der Entmythologisierung der neutestamentlichen Verkündigung (München: C. Kaiser, 1985 [1941]). 20 Cf. Robert Funk, Roy Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? (New York: Scribner, 1993). 21 Cf. Merrill P. Miller, “Introduction to the Papers from the Third Year of the Consultation,” in Ron Cameron and Merrill P. Miller (eds.), Redescribing Christian Origins (SBL SS 28; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004), 33–41, at 33. 22 Burton L. Mack, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), 40: the New Testament texts represent “the myths of origin imagined by early Christians seriously engaged in their social experiments. They are data for early Christian mythmaking.” See also idem, The Christian Myth: Origins, Logic, and Legacy (New York: Continuum, 2001). 23 John Hick and Paul F. Knitter, The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987). For criticism, see Gavin D’Costa, Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990). 24 Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (New York: Harper One, 2013). 25 D.R.A. Hare, The Theme of Jewish Persecution of Christians in the Gospel according to Saint Matthew (SNTS MS 6; Cambridge University Press, 1967). 26 Mark Chancey, The Myth of a Gentile Galilee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 27 See Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014). For an evaluation, see M. David

Introduction 15 28 29

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Litwa, How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths (Synkrisis; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 22–45. On Jesus-agnoticism, see Raphael Lataster, Questioning the Historicity of Jesus: Why A Philosophical Analysis Elucidates the Historical Discourse, Philosophy and Religion 336 (Leiden: Brill, 2019). Geoffrey S. Kirk, The Nature of Greek Myths (London: Penguin, 1974, 23, describes myths as traditional stories that explain origins. Cf. Edmund Leach, “Anthropological Approaches to the Study of the Bible during the Twentieth Century,” in Gene M. Tucker and Douglas A. Knight (eds.), Humanizing America’s Iconic Book (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982), 73–94, 74: “a sacred tale about past events.” Cf. Alan Dundes, “Madness in Method Plus a Plea for Projective Inversion in Myth,” in Laurie L. Patton and Wendy Doniger (eds.), Myth and Method (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 147–59, 148: “a sacred tale of how the world or mankind came to be in their present form.” On mythology in the Jesus tradition, see Justin Meggitt, “Popular Mythology in the Early Empire and the Multiplicity of Jesus Traditions,” in Sources of the Jesus Tradition: Separating History from Myth (ed. R. Joseph Hoffmann; Amherst: Prometheus, 2010), 55–80. Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 147; idem, Between History and Myth: Stories of Harald Fairhair and the Founding of the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Robert A. Segal, Theorizing about Myth (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999); idem, Myth: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Andrew Von Hendy, The Modern Construction of Myth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Bronislaw Malinowski, “Myth in Primitive Psychology,” in Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1954 [1926]), 93–148; Radcliffe Edmonds, Myths of the Underworld Journey: Plato, Aristophanes, and the ‘Orphic’ Gold Tablets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); William Doty, Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2000); Walter Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979); Michael Wood, In Search of Myths and Heroes: Exploring Four Epic Legends of the World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005). It is reasonable to require evidence-based arguments in support of the historicity of Jesus. Such arguments, however, will not persuade intractable or resolute skepticism. For a popular, trade-level book arguing for the historical existence of Jesus, see Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Harper One, 2012). For critical reviews of Jesus Mythicism, see Simon Gathercole, “The Historical and Human Existence of Jesus in Paul’s Letters,” JSHJ 16 no. 2–3 (2018), 183–212; Daniel N. Gullota, “On Richard Carrier’s Doubts: A Response to Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt,” JSHJ 15 (2017), 310–46. Funk, Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels, 2: “The question of the historical Jesus was stimulated by the prospect of viewing Jesus through the new lens of historical reason and research rather than through the perspective of theology and traditional creedal formulations … what the authors of the gospels said about Jesus could be distinguished from what Jesus himself said. It was this basic distinction between the man Jesus and the Christ of the creeds that the quest of the historical Jesus began.” This “distinction between the historical Jesus … and the Christ of faith” was the first “pillar” of “modern biblical criticism” (3). On social history, see M. Fairburn, Social History: Problems, Strategies and Methods (Macmillan: London, 1999); P. N. Stearns (ed.), Encyclopedia of Social History (Garland: New York, 1994); Hunt L. and V. E. Bonnell (eds.), Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

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34 Simon J. Joseph, The Nonviolent Messiah: Jesus, Q, and the Enochic Tradition (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014). 35 Simon J. Joseph, “‘I Shall be Reckoned with the Gods’: On Redescribing Jesus as a First-Century Jewish Mystic,” JSHJ 18 no. 3 (2020): 220–43. 36 Simon J. Joseph, “The Ascetic Jesus,” JSHJ 8 (2010): 146–81. 37 Simon J. Joseph, Jesus and the Temple: The Crucifixion in its Jewish Context (SNTS MS 165; Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); idem, “‘In the Days of His Flesh, He Offered Up Prayers’: Reimagining the Sacrifice(s) of Jesus in the Letter to the Hebrews,” JBL 140 no. 1 (2021): 207–27; idem, Jesus, the Essenes, and Christian Origins: New Light on Ancient Texts and Communities (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2018), 148–62. 38 Joseph, The Nonviolent Messiah; idem, “A Social Identity Approach to the Rhetoric of Apocalyptic Violence in the Sayings Gospel Q,” HR 57 no. 1 (2017), 28–49; idem, Jesus, the Essenes, and Christian Origins, 122–31. 39 Joseph, Jesus, the Essenes, and Christian Origins, 75–6, 99–100. 40 On “social history,” see Gager, Kingdom and Community, 11, referring to “social teachings, social impact, social surroundings, or social institutions” (11). 41 On “memory distortion” in the early Jesus tradition, see Zeba Crook, “Matthew, Memory Theory and the New No Quest,” HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies 70 no. 1 (2014), 1–11, http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/hts.v70i1.2716. 42 That is, what follows is not a “defense” of the historicity of Jesus, but a critical analysis of socio-historical factors which led to the introduction of contradictory and irreconcilable elements in the Jesus tradition. 43 Julius Wellhausen, Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien (Berlin: Georg Reimar, 1905), 113. 44 Simon J. Joseph, “An Indigenous Jesus: Methodological and Theoretical Intersections in the Comparative Study of Religion,” MTSR 34 (2022), 238–66. 45 James L. Cox, From Primitive to Indigenous: The Academic Study of Indigenous Religions (London: Routledge, 2007), 89. On indigeneity as relational, see Bjørn Ola Tafjord, “Indigenous Religion(s) as an Analytical Category,” MTSR 25 (2013), 221–43. 46 Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. 47 Dunn, Jesus Remembered. 48 Larry W. Hurtado, “Interactive Diversity: A Proposed Model of Christian Origins,” JTS 64 (2013), 445–62, takes aim at the “trajectories” model by conceding diversity, but argues that its central claim – that “discrete types of originating early Christianity … developed somewhat independently” is characterized by “conceptual inadequacy” (447), insinuating that the use of the term “trajectory” implies a “predictable flight path.” Hurtado notes that “early Christianity was a far more complex phenomenon than is represented in a trajectories model” and attempts to counter-balance this “diversity” by claiming that there was “a well-attested ‘networking’” in place at the same time (454). Yet much of Hurtado’s data for social “networking” could also be interpreted as evidence of various efforts to contest, control, and combat “difference.” 49 Jens Schröter, “Memory, Theories of History, and the Reception of Jesus,” JSHJ 16 (2018), 85–107, esp. 85–92. 50 For a “continuum approach” addressing both continuity and discontinuity, see Tom Holmén (ed.) Jesus from Judaism to Christianity: Continuum Approaches to the Historical Jesus (London: T & T Clark, 2007); Tom Holmén (ed.), Jesus in Continuum (WUNT 289; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012). On the Christological question, see Jörg Frey, “Continuity and Discontinuity between ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’: The Possibilities of an Implicit Christology,” RCatT 36 no. (2011), 69–98. 51 Mack, A Myth of Innocence, 9: the “task” is to “account for the formation of the gospel itself in the context of a later social history, not to use it as a guide to conjure up chimeras at the beginning.”

Introduction 17 52 On this relationship, see Michael F. Bird and Joel Willitts (eds.), Paul and the Gospels: Christologies, Conflicts and Convergences (LNTS 411; London and New York: T & T Clark, 2011); Oda Wischmeyer and David Sim (eds.), Paul and Mark: Two Authors at the Beginnings of Christianity (BZNW 198; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014); Eve-Marie Becker, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Mogens Müller (eds.), Mark and Paul: Comparative Essays, Part II: For and Against Pauline Influence on Mark (BZNW 199; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014). See also David Oliver Smith, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul: The Influence of the Epistles on the Synoptic Gospels (Eugene: OR, Resource, 2011); Tom Dykstra, Mark, Canonizer of Paul: A New Look at Intertextuality in Mark’s Gospel (St. Paul, MN: OCABS Press, 2012); Robyn Faith Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 132. 53 On the fallacy of reifying a “Q community,” for example, see Simon J. Joseph, “The Quest for the ‘Community’ of Q: Mapping Q Within the Social, Scribal, Textual, and Theological Landscape(s) of Second Temple Judaism,” HTR 111 no. 1 (2018): 90-114. Cf. Stanley K. Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’ and the History of Early Christianity,” MTSR 23 no. 3-4 (2011), 238–56, esp. 239–49. 54 Lüdemann, Opposition to Paul. Hurtado, “Interactive Diversity,” 455, notes that “there are also indications of far more adversarial interactions as well” as common “Christian” concepts in play in Paul’s ministry, especially those promoting “a different gospel” (Gal 1:6). Accordingly, “‘Interaction’ can be of various types … from more positive to highly negative” (456). 55 See, for example, F. C. Baur, Paul, the Apostle of Jesus Christ: His Life and Work, His Epistles and His Doctrine, second ed., (trans. Eduard Zeller; London: Williams and Norgate, 1876). 56 Anders Runesson, “Particularistic Judaism and Universalistic Christianity? Some Critical Remarks on Terminology and Theology,” Studia Theologica 54 no. 1 (2000), 55–75. 57 Lüdemann, Opposition to Paul, 1. 58 On the “politics of interpretation” and “memory” in Jesus Research, see Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (London: SCM, 1995); “Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation,” HTR 90 no. 4 (1997), 343–58. 59 Magnus Zetterholm, The Formation of Christianity in Antioch: A Social-Scientific Approach to the Separation between Judaism and Christianity (London: Routledge, 2003), 3. 60 R. S. Sugirtharajah (ed.), Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2006); Fernando F. Segovia, Decolonizing Biblical Studies: A View from the Margins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000). 61 John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 1: The Roots of the Problem and the Person, ABRL (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 6–9. 62 On Jesus as the “central Jew,” see André LaCocque, Jesus the Central Jew: His Time and His People, ECL 15 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015). 63 Scot McKnight, “Why the Authentic Jesus Is of No Use for the Church,” in Chris Keith and Anthony LeDonne (eds.), Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2012), 173–85, 175. For an attempt to discredit historical Jesus Research within a confessional context, see Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels (New York: Harper One, 1997). 64 Susannah Heschel, “Jesus as Theological Transvestite,” in Miriam Peskowitz and Laura Levitt (eds.) Judaism Since Gender (New York: Routledge, 1997), 191: the Jewishness of “Jesus, I argue, functions as a kind of theological transvestite, calling into question the constructions of Christianity and Judaism and destabilizing the

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Introduction boundaries between them.” Cf. Paula Fredriksen, “Mandatory Retirement: Ideas in the Study of Christian Origins whose Time has Come to Go,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 35 no. 2 (2006), 231–46, 244: “the ancient dead are radically independent of us, and they lived in a world different from ours. We understand them better by respecting that difference.” Fredriksen, “Mandatory Retirement,” 235. Philip S. Alexander, “In Defence of Normativity in the Study of Judaism,” in Daniel R. Langton and Philip S. Alexander, eds., Normative Judaism? Jews, Judaism and Jewish Identity: Proceedings of the British Association for Jewish Studies (BAJS) Conference 2008 (Melilah: Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies; Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Manchester, UK/Gorgias Press, 2012), 3–15. On “Jewishness” as a national folk-narrative, see Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (London and New York: Verso, 2009). Markus Cromhout, Jesus and Identity: Reconstructing Judean Ethnicity in Q (Matrix: The Bible in Mediterranean Context. Eugene: Cascade, 2007), 4–5. Anthony J. Saldarini, Matthew’s Christian-Jewish Community (CSHJ; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 59. Josephus, A.J. 11.173; C. Ap. 1.777; A. J. 18.196. Steve Mason, “Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History,” JSJ 38 (2007), 457–512; John H. Elliott, “Jesus the Israelite was neither a ‘Jew’ nor a ‘Christian’: On Correcting Misleading Nomenclature,” JSHJ 5/2 (2007), 119–54; John J. Pilch, “Are There Jews and Christians in the Bible?,” HTS 53/1–2 (1997), 119–25; David M. Miller, “The Meaning of Ioudaios and its Relationship to Other Group Labels in Ancient ‘Judaism,’” CBR 9 no. 1 (2010), 98–126. For criticism, see Seth Schwartz, “How Many Judaisms were There? A Critique of Neusner and Smith on Definition and Mason and Boyarin on Categorization,” JAJ 2 (2011), 203–38. Tim Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 56–69; Jonathan M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Shaye D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 1. See also Erich S. Gruen, “Jewish Perspectives on Greek Culture and Ethnicity” in Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity (ed.) I. Malkin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 347–73. On the Jews’ social marginality, see Avi Avidov, Not Reckoned Among Nations: The Origins of the So-Called “Jewish Question” in Roman Antiquity (TSAJ 128; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009). On the Jews’ social integration, see Seth Schwartz, Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). See, for example, the discussion in Neil Elliott, The Arrogance of Nations: Reading Romans in the Shadow of Empire (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), 44–50. Love L. Sechrest, A Former Jew: Paul and the Dialectics of Race (LNTS 410; London: Continuum, 2009), 15, views Christians as a “third race” alongside Jews and pagans: “Christian identity in Paul as one in which those who had been born Gentiles or Jews receive in Christ a new and separate ethno-racial identity.” Cf. E. P. Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1983), 171–9. On the concept of “Israel,” see Jason A. Staples, The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism: A New Theory of People, Exile, and Israelite Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs, 41, noting how Paul addresses Gentile “communities of ‘brothers’ or ‘brothers and sisters’” as a “new kinship” that does not “entirely replace what is understood as ‘physical’ kinship,” but rather “interweaves various forms of kinship construction so that gentiles … are now adopted into the lineage of Abraham.” Johnson Hodge explains that if

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82 83 84 85 86 87 88

“oppositional ethnic construction (Jews/non-Jews) defines the problem, aggregative ethnic construction (gentiles-in-Christ linked to Israel) defines the solution” (67). On the rhetorical construction of the “Gentile” (Christian) vis-à-vis “the Jew,” see Terence L. Donaldson, Gentile Christian Identity from Cornelius to Constantine: The Nations, the Parting of the Ways, and Roman Imperial Ideology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020). On the use of “racial” or “ethnic” reasoning in early Christianity, see Denise K. Buell, Why This New Race? Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); “Early Christian Universalism and Racism,” in The Origins of Racism in the West (eds. Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler; Cambridge University Press, 2009), 109–31; “God’s Own People: Specters of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Early Christian Studies,” in Prejudice and Christian Beginnings: Investigating Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies, eds. Laura S. Nasrallah and Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), 159–90; “Challenges and Strategies for Speaking about Ethnicity in the New Testament and New Testament Studies,” Svensk Exegetisk Årsbok 49 (2014), 33–51; Caroline E. Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Cavan Concannon, “When You Were Gentiles”: Specters of Ethnicity in Roman Corinth and Paul’s Corinthian Correspondence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford University Press, 2008); Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Todd Berzon, “Ethnicity and Early Christianity: New Approaches to Religious Kinship and Community,” CBR 6 no. 2 (2018), 191–227. On the emergence of the modern concept, see Siân Jones, The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and in the Present (New York: Routledge, 1997), 56–83. Frederik Barth (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference (Bergen: Universitets Forlaget, 1969). Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 23, defining racism as “An attitude towards individuals and groups of peoples which posits a direct and linear connection between physical and mental qualities.” Although see Erich S. Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity, Martin Classical Lectures (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), 352. Frank M. Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Lloyd A. Thompson, Romans and Blacks (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989). See the essays in Nasrallah and Schüssler Fiorenza, eds., Prejudice and Christian Beginnings. On ancient Greeks and Romans not seeing themselves as “white,” see James H. Dee, “Black Odysseus, White Caesar: When Did ‘White People’ Become ‘White’?,” Classical Journal 99 (2004), 157–67. Denise McCoskey, Race: Antiquity and its Legacy (Ancients and Moderns) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Isaac, The Invention of Racism, 27. On the fixity and fluidity of ethnicity, see esp. Buell, Why This New Race, 5–10. Zetterholm, The Formation of Christianity in Antioch, suggests that we abandon the term “Christianity” to describe the predominantly Gentile first-century non-Jewish Jesus movement as anachronistic until the second century. Buell, Why This New Race, 5–10. George W. E. Nickelsburg, “Jews and Christians in the First Century: The Struggle Over Identity,” Neotestamentica 27 no. 2 (1993), 365–90, esp. 366: “the church’s dif-

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99 100 101 102 103 104

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Introduction ferentiation and separation were caused by elements that were native, and sometimes integral, to Judaism itself.” See, for example, Joshua W. Jipp, The Messianic Theology of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020), 1: “the messianic identity of Jesus of Nazareth is not only the presupposition for, but is also the primary … content of, New Testament theology.” Jacob Neusner (ed.), Judaisms and their Messiahs at the Turn of the Christian Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); John J. Collins, The Scepter and the Star: Messianism in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls (2d edn.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010); Gerbern S. Oegema, The Anointed and his People: Messianic Expectations from the Maccabees to Bar Kochba (JSPSup 27; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 303; Kenneth E. Pomykala, The Davidic Dynasty Tradition in Early Judaism: Its History and Significance for Messianism (SBLEJL 7; Atlanta: Scholars, 1995), 271; Marinus de Jonge, “The Use of the Word ‘Anointed’ in the Time of Jesus,” NovT 8 (1966): 132–48. On the former point, see Géza G. Xeravits, King, Priest, Prophet: Positive Eschatological Protagonists of the Qumran Library (STDJ 47; Leiden: Brill, 2003), 2. On the latter, see Collins, The Scepter and the Star, 18, 21. On the Near Eastern ideal of divine kingship, see N. A. Dahl, “Messianic Ideas and the Crucifixion of Jesus,” in The Messiah: Developments in Earliest Judaism and Christianity (ed. J. H. Charlesworth; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 384. Collins, The Scepter and the Star, 52. Collins, The Scepter and the Star, 78. Matthew V. Novenson, “Why Does R. Akiba Acclaim Bar Kokhba as Messiah?,” JSJ 40 (2009), 551–72; Peter Schäfer, Der Bar Kokhba-Aufstand: Studien zum zweiten jüdischen Krieg gegen Rom (TSAJ 1; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1981). Berger, The Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference; Simon Dein, “What Really Happens When Prophecy Fails: The Case of Lubavitch,” Sociology of Religion 62 (2001), 383–401; Joel Marcus, “The Once and Future Messiah in Early Christianity and Chabad,” NTS 47 (2001), 381–401; Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). See Joseph, The Nonviolent Messiah, 93-110. On “king of the Jews” as an ethnic “slur”, see (Gideon) Wongi Park, The Politics of Race and Ethnicity in Matthew’s Passion Narrative (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Gideon Wongi Park, “Deracializing the Matthean Jesus: ‘King of the Judeans’ on Trial,” Ph.D. dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 2016. Wassén and Hägerland, Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet, 183, suggest that Jesus “may have begun to accept the role of a messianic king” during his last visit to Jerusalem. Rom 1:3; 15:12. Matt 1:18–25; Luke 1:31–35, 68–69; 2:1–8; Mark 12:35–37. Eusebius, Eccl. Hist. 3.19–20.7; 3.32.5–6. Mark 12:35–37; cf. Ps. 110:1. Anders Runesson, “The Question of Terminology: The Architecture of Contemporary Discussions on Paul,” in Mark D. Nanos and Magnus Zetterholm, eds., Paul within Judaism: Restoring the First-Century Context of the Apostle (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 53–78. Ignatius, Letter to the Magnesians, 10. Pliny, Epistulae 10.96. Cf. Tacitus, Ann. 15.44.3; Suetonius, Nero 16.3. James D. Tabor, Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 178–9, identifies Paul as the “second” founder of “Christianity” because he wants “to reserve the use of the term ‘Christian’ to describe a form of the faith associated with Jesus, his brother James, Peter, and the rest of the twelve apostles.”

Introduction 21 108 See the discussion in Philippa L. Townsend, “Who Were the First Christians? Jews, Gentiles, and the Christianoi,” in E. Iricinschi and H. M. Zellentin (eds.), Heresy and Identity in Late Antiquity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 212–30. Townsend proposes that the first use of the term did not refer to Jewish followers of Jesus and was not the result of Roman polemic. Rather, the term originated within Gentile circles as an emic kinship term identifying those “of Christ.” 109 On “Christianity” as a second-century discursive “invention,” see William Arnal, “The Collection and Synthesis of ‘Tradition’ and the Second-Century Invention of Christianity,” MTSR 23 no. 3-4 (2011), 193-215. 110 Pamela Eisenbaum, “Paul, Polemics, and the Problem of Essentialism,” BibInt 13 (2005), 224–38; idem, Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle (New York: Harper One, 2009), 169. 111 Eisenbaum, “Paul, Polemics, and the Problem of Essentialism,” 237; Gager, Reinventing Paul, 23–4. 112 Anthony Le Donne, The Historiographical Jesus: Memory, Typology and the Son of David (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009), 93 n. 3, refers to “proto-Christians” as “the particular Jewish messianic circle that began to emerge around the ministry of Jesus that would eventually become a Christological circle composed of both Jews and Gentiles.” 113 Paula Fredriksen, “Mandatory Retirement: Ideas in the Study of Christian Origins whose Time has Come to Go,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 35 no. 2 (2006), 231–46. On conversion, see also Paula Fredriksen, “Paul and Augustine: Conversion Narratives, Orthodox Traditions, and the Retrospective Self,” JTS 37 no. 1 (1986), 3-34; idem, “Judaism, the Circumcision of Gentiles, and Apocalyptic Hope: Another Look at Galatians 1 and 2,” JTS 42 no. 2 (1991), 532–64: 547; Christine Hayes, Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 114 Krister Stendahl, Paul Among Jews and Gentiles (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976); “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” HTR 56 no. 3 (1963), 199–215, esp. 205. 115 For the proposal of dismantling the category of “God-fearer,” see Ross Shepard Kraemer, “Giving up the Godfearers,” Journal of Ancient Judaism 5 no. 1 (2014), 61-87. In response, see Paula Fredriksen, “If It Looks like a Duck, and It Quacks like a Duck … On Not Giving Up the Godfearers,” in A Most Reliable Witness: Essays in Honor of Ross Shepard Kraemer, in Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Nathaniel P. DesRosiers, Shira L. Lander, Jacqueline Z. Pastis, and Daniel Ullucci (eds.) (Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2015), 25–34. The term “Godfearer” has been subject to sustained criticism for its “static meaning,” conceptual and theoretical flaws, and monolithic assumptions (62). The term serves as a conceptual and theoretical bridge between “pagan” Gentiles and early “proto-Christian” Gentiles who joined the movement. Moreover, “the category … seems to survive not because ancient evidence justifies it but at least in part because it seems so useful for particular modern historiographical projects about the development of Christianity” (63). As such, it functions as a crossover category normalizing what would later become Gentile Christian identity. Fredriksen describes a “godfearer” as “a pagan who voluntarily assumes … or who supports … or who utilizes … some aspects of Jewishness” (33). 116 Fredriksen, “Mandatory Retirement,” 232–7, 237. 117 Wayne Meeks, “Breaking Away: Three New Testament Pictures of Christianity’s Separation from the Jewish Communities,” in J. Neusner and E. S. Frerichs (eds.), ‘To See Ourselves as Others See Us’: Christians, Jews, ‘Others’ in Late Antiquity (Chico: Scholars Press, 1985), 106: “Socially, however, the Pauline groups were never a sect of Judaism.” 118 Since the term was used in ancient Judaism for the synagogue (where it does not refer to a physical structure) (pl. synagogai) as a semi-public gathering of a community of

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Introduction Jews within which political, cultural, and religious discussions took place, the term ekklēsia signals that we are neither re-inscribing “Church History” nor presupposing supersessionist thought in Paul’s own theology. See Ralph J. Korner, The Origin and Meaning of Ekklēsia in the Early Jesus Movement (AJEC 98; Leiden: Brill, 2017). Reed, Jewish Christianity and the History of Judaism. On early “Jewish Christianity,” see Ferdinand Christian Baur, “Die Christuspartie in der korinthischen Gemeide, der Gegensatz des petrinischen and paulischen Christentums in der alten Kirche, der Apostel Petrus in Rom,” Tübinger Zeitschrift für Theologie 4 (1831), 61–206; Martin Bauspieß, Christof Landmesser, and David Lincicum, eds., Ferdinand Christian Baur und die Geschichte des frühen Christentums (WUNT 333; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014); Gerd Lüdemann, Opposition to Paul in Jewish Christianity (trans. E. Boring; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989); John Toland, Nazarenus, or Jewish, Gentile, and Mahometan Christianity (London: J. Brotherton, 1718); The Rediscovery of Jewish Christianity: From Toland to Baur, F. Stanley Jones (ed.) (History of Biblical Studies 5; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012). On “Gentile Christianity,” see Terence L. Donaldson, “‘Gentile Christianity’ as a Category in the Study of Christian Origins,” HTR 106 (2013), 433–58. Daniel Boyarin, “Rethinking Jewish Christianity: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (to which is Appended Correction of my Border Lines),” JQR 99.1 (2009), 7–36, 7, argues that “the term ‘Jewish Christianity’ always functions as a term of art in modernist heresiology.” See now also Matt Jackson-McCabe, Jewish Christianity: The Making of the Christianity-Judaism Divide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 3. Fredriksen, “Mandatory Retirement,” 232, criticizes “conversion,” “monotheism,” “legal religion,” and “nationalistic religion,” conceding that she has “gone into print” with these terms. Karin Hedner Zetterholm, “Jesus-Oriented Visions of Judaism in Antiquity,” Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis 27 (2016), 37–60. Judith M. Lieu, Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3. Buell, Why This New Race? On the lack of first-century evidence for the idea of a “third race,” see Judith Lieu, “Self-Definition vis-à-vis the Jewish Matrix,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 1: Origins to Constantine (ed.) Frances M. Young and Margaret M. Mitchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 214–29, here 214. John F.A. Sawyer, Sacred Languages and Sacred Texts (London: Routledge, 1999), 85. Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, 21. Steven T. Katz, “Issues in the Separation of Judaism and Christianity after 70 CE: A Reconsideration,” JBL 103 (1984), 4376; Philip S. Alexander, “‘The Parting of the Ways’ from the Perspective of Rabbinic Judaism,” in James D. G. Dunn (ed.), Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways A.D. 70 to 135 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 1–25; Martha Himmelfarb, “The Parting of the Ways Reconsidered: Diversity in Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations in the Roman Empire, ‘A Jewish Perspective,’” in Interwoven Destinies: Jews and Christians Through the Ages (ed. Eugene J. Fisher; New York: Paulist, 1993), 47–61; John G. Gager, “Jews, Christians, and the Dangerous Ones in Between,” in Interpretation in Religion (ed. Shlomo Biderman and Ben-Ami Scharfstein; Philosophy and Religion 2; Leiden: Brill, 1992), 249–57; Judith M. Lieu, “‘The Parting of the Ways’: Theological Construct or Historical Reality?,” JSNT 56 (1994), 101–19; Tobias Nicklas, Jews and Christians? Second Century ‘Christian’ Perspectives on the ‘Parting of the Ways’ (Annual Deichmann Lectures 2013; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014). Joshua Ezra Burns, The Christian Schism in Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 12, offers a “Jewish history of the Christian schism,” suggesting that the split took place definitively in the fourth century, since Tannaitic texts view “Jewish Christians” as Jews, but minim, whereas the later

Introduction 23

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135 136

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Amoraim only knew Gentile Christians, and regarded them as outside Israel. On the schism, see also Judith Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century (Edinburgh: T & T, 1996). F. J. Foakes-Jackson (ed.), The Parting of the Roads: Studies in the Development of Judaism and Early Christianity (London: Arnold, 1912); Parkes, The Conflict Between Church and Synagogue; James D. G. Dunn, The Partings of the Ways: Between Christianity and Judaism and Their Significance for the Character of Christianity (London: SCM, 1991); (ed.), Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways, AD 70 to 135 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992); Neither Jew nor Greek: A Contested Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 509–74. William Horbury, Herodian Judaism and the New Testament (WUNT 193; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 221–35, 230, posits “continuity” between Second Temple Judaism and rabbinic tradition, arguing that the New Testament “belongs to a series of developments of Jewish interpretive tradition, running from the Septuagint and the Scrolls to the Targums and rabbinic literature.” For an exploration of the themes of continuity and change between early Judaism and Christianity, see George W. E. Nickelsburg, Ancient Judaism and Christian Origins: Diversity, Continuity and Transformation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003). Lawrence H. Schiffman, Who was a Jew? Rabbinic and Halakhic Perspectives on the Jewish Christian Schism (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1985). Jennifer M. Rosner, Healing the Schism: Barth, Rosenzweig, and the New JewishChristian Encounter (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015); John Howard Yoder, The JewishChristian Schism Revisited (eds. Michael G. Cartwright and Peter Ochs; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). Alan F. Segal, Rebecca’s Children: Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World (Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). See also Timothy A. Gabrielson, “Parting Ways or Rival Siblings? A Review and Analysis of Metaphors for the Separation of Jews and Christians in Antiquity,” CBR 19 (2021), 178-204. Gregory Bateson, “Culture Contact and Schismogenesis,” Man 35 (1935), 178-83, uses the term “schismogenesis” to describe the process in and through which people define themselves against an other. Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, eds., The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007); Anders Kolstergaard Petersen, “At the End of the Road – Reflections on a Popular Scholarly Metaphor,” in The Formation of the Early Church (ed. Jostein Ådna; WUNT 183; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 45–72; Adele Reinhartz, “A Fork in the Road or a Multi-Lane Highway? New Perspectives on ‘The Parting of the Ways’ Between Judaism and Christianity,” in The Changing Face of Judaism, Christianity, and Other Greco-Roman Religions in Antiquity (ed. Ian H. Henderson and Gerbern S. Oegama; Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 2006), 278–93; Paula Fredriksen, “What ‘Parting of the Ways’? Jews, Gentiles, and the Ancient Mediterranean City,” in The Ways That Never Parted, 35–64. Joshua Schwartz, Review of Annette Yoshiko Reed, Jewish-Christianity and the History of Judaism: Collected Essays, RBL (August 2020), https://www.bookreviews .org/pdf/12544_13979.pdf [accessed August 2020]. Becker and Reed, “Introduction: Traditional Models and New Directions,” in The Ways That Never Parted, 1–33, 24: “the need to focus with renewed energy and intensity on Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, before settling on any new generalizations about Judaism and Christianity during this period.” Cf. Miriam S. Taylor, Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity: A Critique of the Scholarly Consensus (Studia Post-Biblica 46; Leiden: Brill, 1995), 195: “The focus on Judaism as stimulator of antagonism effectively succeeds in shifting the focus away from internal soul-searching in the Christian camp, in order to distribute the blame and divide the responsibility in accounting for the generation of prejudice. For

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Introduction if anti-Judaism is described as emerging out of a social conflict, then it can be characterized as the by-product of an historical rivalry in which both parties might be said to be equally involved, and equally responsible.” Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes Toward the Jews in the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Christine Hayes, “Judeophobia: Peter Schäfer on the Origins of Anti-Semitism,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 6 no. 3 (1999), 261–73; Cf. Erich S. Gruen, The Construct of Identity in Hellenistic Judaism (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 313–32. Jonathan Judaken, “Rethinking Anti-Semitism,” American Historical Review 123 no. 4 (2018), 1122–38, 1131–2, defines Judeophobia as encompassing “denigration of Judaism, defamation of the Jewish character, discrimination against Jews, their racialization, and at its extreme, efforts at their destruction.” Judaken suggests privileging the term “Judeophobia” for three reasons: (1), first because it “defamiliarizes readers” and covers “five modes of Judeophobic discourse,” including “stereotypes, prejudice, discrimination, racialization, and murder” (1131–2); (2) second, because it “lends itself more readily to periodization” (1131); and (3) third, because it “readily links” to other “phobias” signifying “subjects of anxiety or unsubstantiated fear or resentment, but also fascination or even envy” (1133). David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013). David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), xxiv, refers to “the surprising logic of hatred as a preservative force” in accounting for “Jewish survival.” Eyal Regev, “Early Christianity in Light of New Religious Movements,” Numen 63 (2016), 483–510, 483, refers to “identifying several common characteristics shared between early Christianity and modern New Religious Movements (NRMs) or cults.” See also idem, “Were the Early Christians Sectarians?,” JBL 130 no. 4 (2011), 771– 93. G. Nelson, “The Spiritualist Movement and the Need for a Re-Definition of Cult,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 8 (1969), 152–60, 152, defines “cults” as “religious movements which make a fundamental break with the religious tradition of the culture.” See also R. Wallis, “The Cult and Its Transformation,” in R. Wallis (ed.), Sectarianism: Analyses of Religious and Non-Religious Sects (London: Peter Owen, 1975), 35–49. On the need for its non-use in academic discourse, see J. T. Richardson, “Definitions of Cult: From Sociological-Technical to Popular-Negative,” Review of Religious Research 34 (1993), 346–56, 355. On the term’s popular (negative) meaning, see also E. V. Gallagher, “Compared to What? ‘Cults’ and New Religious Movements,” History of Religions 47 (2008), 205–20. John H. Elliott, “The Jewish Messianic Movement: From Faction to Sect,” in Philip F. Esler (ed.), Modeling Early Christianity: Social-Scientific Studies of the New Testament and Its Context (New York: Routledge, 1995), 75–95; “Phases in the Social Formation of Early Christianity from Faction to Sect: A Social Scientific Perspective,” in Peder Borgen, Vernon K. Robbins, and David B. Gowler (eds.) Recruitment, Conquest, and Conflict: Strategies in Judaism, Early Christianity, and the Greco-Roman World (ESEC 6; Atlanta: Scholars, 1998), 273–313. Stephen C. Barton, “Eschatology and the Emotions in Early Christianity,” JBL 130 no. 3 (2011), 571–91. See also Matthew A. Elliott, Faithful Feelings: Rethinking Emotion in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2006). Barton, “Eschatology and the Emotions in Early Christianity,” 579–80. On methodologically prioritizing the letters of Paul, see Tabor, Paul and Jesus. On the latter, see now Michael Bar-Asher Siegal and Jonathan Ben-Dov (eds.), Social History of the Jews in Antiquity: Studies in Dialogue with Albert Baumgarten, TSAJ 185 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021); Albert I. Baumgarten, The Flourishing of the Jewish Sects in the Maccabean Era: An Interpretation, JSJ Sup 55 (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Martin S. Jaffee, Early Judaism: Religious Worlds of the First Judaic Millennium (second edn; Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 2006 [1997]).

Part I

1

The Jewish Problem

I Since the Enlightenment, biblical scholars, historians, and theologians have attempted to construct the historical Jesus from the fragmentary remains of the ancient past. Scholars continue to disagree about the best tools, methods, and results, but there is now a near-universal consensus that Jesus was a Jew who engaged in legal controversies with his contemporaries over how to understand and implement the Torah.1 There is now also an ever-growing body of research excavating the social, rhetorical, historical, and theological structures of antiJudaism in early Christianity,2 and the New Testament,3 as well as anti-Semitic ideology in New Testament studies.4 This research includes the conceptualization of Second Temple Judaism as Spätjudentum (“Late Judaism”) in the History-ofReligions-School (Religionsgeschichtliche Schule),5 as well as within the academic study of religion (Religionswissenschaft).6 These studies have illuminated how the Otherness of the Jewish Jesus was domesticated within the Christian tradition, first as a formative element shared by Jewish Christ-followers, then appropriated in supersessionism,7 dispossessing “The Jews,” including Jesus’s Jewish followers, of their ethnic and religious heritage, their divine election, and any residual claim they may have once had on Jesus. For decades, the scientific or scholarly (wissenschaftlich) approach to knowledge could still identify Second Temple Judaism as a “late,” corrupted development of ancient Israel or, alternatively, relegate Judaism (Judentum) to an early, primitive, tribal, and materialistic stage in the evolutionary development of religion, fated to die and disappear.8 Scholars also sought to understand early Christianity as preceded and influenced by the non-Jewish Hellenistic cultures of Greece and Rome. Both strategies served to subordinate Judaism and to protect Christian identity from being contaminated by its inferior other. A prevailing assumption in the study of ancient “anti-Semitism,” for example, presupposes that it is “the unique religious, cultural, and social characteristics of Judaism itself” that represent “the causes of what later becomes known as ‘anti-Semitism.’”9 In short, ancient anti-Jewish sentiment was a natural response to Jewish election or “chosenness,” among other disagreeable aspects of Jewish social identity.10 Alternatively, another school of thought argues that ancient anti-Semitism was DOI: 10.4324/b22959-3

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The Jewish Problem

based on circumstantial, but “very concrete political conflicts,”11 although it typically attributes the origins of this politically contingent form of “anti-Semitism” to the Maccabean revolt. It may well be impossible, however, to adjudicate between these approaches. Rather, it may be necessary to combine both,12 especially when considering the particular, local context(s) associated with ethnic expansionism within the early Jesus movement. Historically, this centuries-long development of anti-Jewish discourse and ideological anti-Semitism reached its zenith in Germany, where the Jew was conceived as a dangerous, foreign, alien element in the national body of the German people (Volk),13 infecting the superior Aryan race through Verjudung (“Judaization”).14 Anti-Semitism, a racially-inflected cipher for the ancient Christian rejection of the Jew,15 also gave birth to the pogroms of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe;16 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion;17 and the Shoah (‫)שואה‬, the Endlösung der Judenfrage. By the end of the nineteenth century, German theological anti-Semitism (Antisemitismus)18 – despite the Jewish community’s desire to integrate and assimilate German culture19 – participated in a widespread European discourse on der Judenfrage (the “Jewish Question”).20 Ultimately, Nazi influence on Biblical Studies,21 especially in the work of Gerhard Kittel and Walter Grundmann,22 along with the Catholic Church’s cooperation with the Third Reich under Pope Pius XII,23 led to a reckoning with the legacy of ancient anti-Judaism. Repudiations of anti-Semitism also led to the emergence of Jewish nationalism, Zionism, and the birth of the state of Israel,24 but the “Final Solution,” as the Nazis referred to their genocidal program of extermination,25 represented generations of pathological hatred focused through the homicidal expediency of war.26 In light of this ancient legacy of anti-Judaism, it is not surprising that Jesus has generally been thought to belong almost exclusively to Christianity as the central symbolic identity marker of European Christendom. The Jewish(ness of) Jesus could thus function alternately as either a necessary but nominal soteriological guarantor of Christianity or as an inconvenient truth, the loss and rediscovery of which corresponded – culturally and chronologically – to the recovery of the historical Jesus.

II By the early 1970s, Christian reflection on the history of anti-Semitism in light of the Shoah, the post–Vatican II era of inter-religious dialogue, the emergence of Religious Studies departments in American universities, and the publication of Geza Vermes’s Jesus the Jew (Collins) in 1973, with its provocative identification of Jesus’s healing activities as characteristic of Galilean Jewish hasidim,27 led to the historical Jesus’s Jewishness entering the mainstream of public Christian consciousness. By the mid-1980s, this appeal to Jesus’s Jewishness was ubiquitous, a rhetorical generalization amenable to serving a variety of ideological purposes.28 The work of the Jesus Seminar, for example, made headlines in the media while more conservatively minded scholars,29 including those for whom the degree and extent of Jesus’s Jewishness could serve as a kind of “criterion of authenticity,” complicated that public scholarly discourse. Jesus’s Jewishness

The Jewish Problem 29 became a malleable, fluid category, an ideological cipher capable of masking and/ or sustaining a range of contemporary interests. The otherness of Jesus’s Jewishness represents a certain degree of historical, ethnic, cultural, and religious distance or discontinuity between the historical Jesus and the Christian tradition.30 Emphasizing Jesus’s Jewishness can also serve as a rhetorical defense against the charge of anti-Judaism. Such appeals serve the construction of contemporary Christian identity insofar as Christian tradition can be authorized vis-à-vis the devout Torah piety of Jesus.31 One could even say that the current climate of re-Judaizing revisionism – which includes rhetorical appeals to the Jewishness of Jesus, Paul, the Gospels, Christianity, and the New Testament – represents efforts to correct earlier eras in which Jewishness was deployed for other than scholarly purposes.32 Here Jewishness becomes the cultural guarantor of Christian authenticity.33 The rhetorical effects derived from (nominally) recognizing Jesus’s Jewishness have proven to be a powerful method of correcting stereotypes about Jews and Judaism as well as distancing Christian scholarship from complicity in the Shoah/Catastrophe. The complicated legacy of anti-Judaism in German Protestant scholarship, in particular, motivates contemporary efforts to correct this theological legacy. Jesus has thus become a social, cultural, and symbolic scholarly icon,34 complicating historical construction with non-historical factors. Indeed, it is precisely because Jesus is now an iconic cipher – the quintessential symbol of “Western/ Christian” culture – that every scholar, not to mention every individual participant in that culture, feels entitled to (re-)make Jesus in their own image and likeness. The image and figure of “Jesus” has become a form of cultural currency and capital capable of sustaining innumerable competing projects. Consequently, alleged questions about the “historical Jesus” are not necessarily about the historical Jesus. On the contrary, “Jesus” is often used to represent other contemporary interests, whether those interests are to promote diversity, equality, social justice, and women’s rights or to advance particular economic theories, politics, ethnicity/ race relations, and/or the “reception history” of the Christian tradition.35 In a seminal publication, William Arnal incisively analyzed contemporary discourse on the figure of Jesus and identified four obstacles facing researchers. First, Jesus’s “cultural prominence” has overdetermined his historical significance: Jesus Research is often less about its ostensible subject and more about other interests masked in a discourse conducted in bad faith. Second, our sources “exacerbate[s] the situation” since Jesus is inscribed as “a theological entity” within them and our historical inquiries read these texts against the grain of their intended objectives. Third, the historical Jesus is all too often conflated with the Jesus movement and its post-crucifixion transformation into “Christianity” within which the “image” of Jesus was itself “the product of mythmaking and legendary accretions.”36 Consequently, the “discontinuity between the behavior and teaching of the historical Jesus” and “the beliefs and doctrines of what became the Christian religion” may be irreconcilable. Like the historical Jesus, the “Jewish” Jesus – or the “Jewish-but-not-thatJewish” Jesus – can also serve a number of purposes.37 Rhetorical appeals to

30

The Jewish Problem

Jesus’s Jewishness are implicated in strategic claims of social capital, power, and authority. It has been suggested, for example, that (too much contemporary) Jesus Research represents a “pattern of finding ways for Jesus to ‘transcend’ or intensify Judaism, or at least find a get-out clause or do something new and unparalleled.”38 Jesus’s Jewishness has been appropriated as a cipher or foil with which to covertly assert a Christian Jesus’s superiority over this constructed image of Judaism.39 On the other hand, insufficient attention has been paid to the normative assumptions associated with first-century “Jewishness.”40 The problem with the appeal to Jesus’s Jewishness is not that it is incorrect. The problem is that it is insufficient. It does not tell us enough about “what sort of Jew” Jesus was.41 No contemporary scholar denies Jesus’s Jewishness, but many pay only nominal lip-service to that “Jewishness” while having Jesus “transcend this Jewish identity in some way” because he does something “new and unparalleled” involving the Torah and/or the Temple.42 Nonetheless, historical discontinuities between the Jewish Jesus and Christianity do not render the study of the historical Jesus irrelevant; on the contrary, that is what makes the historical Jesus an interesting figure insofar as we still do not know what kind of Jew Jesus was. The Jewish Jesus, although conceded by all, is desired by few insofar as he conforms neither to rabbinical Jewish nor to contemporary Christian interests.43

III For generations, he was remembered as a heretic.44 The Babylonian Talmud accuses Yeshu[a] (‫ )ישוע‬of deception, “sorcery, and enticing Israel to apostasy,”45 crimes punishable by death,46 for which he was “hanged on the eve of Passover.”47 Another tradition remembers him as the illegitimate child of a man named Pantera.48 The Toledot Yeshu (‫ )ספר תולדות ישו‬49  portrays him as a sorcerer, his powers derived from his use of the Divine Name,50 only to be exposed as illegitimate and fleeing in shame.51 This Jesus of Jewish tradition is the mirror-image of Christian anti-Judaism, a legacy of rabbinical polemic undermining the reputation of its alleged founder.52 By the early Talmudic era, however, the power-balance and dynamic between Jew and Christian was highly unequal, and Jews tempered their criticism of Christianity’s founding figure. Since the end of the eighteenth century, and coinciding with the emergence of Jewish biblical scholarship on Second Temple Judaism,53 there has been a sustained Jewish interest in the figure of Jesus.54 This interest has also given rise to Jewish and Christian scholarship on Jewish scholarship on Jesus.55 For many modern Jews, this focus on the Jewishness of Jesus represents various “attempts to secure a prominent place in Western civilization, to gain normalcy and even centrality in that civilization.”56 The “cultural hybrid” of the Jewish Jesus is present in the works of Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Graetz, Abraham Geiger, Kaufman Kohler, and the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement as well as modern Yiddish, Hebrew, and Jewish literary, intellectual, and artistic circles, where it functions as “an innovative form of anti-Christian polemics and criticism.”57 One example of this cross-cultural pollination is the crucified Christ as a symbol

The Jewish Problem 31 of the Jews in their suffering, persecution, and rejection by Christians. Indeed, in 1838, Joseph Salvador published Jésus-Christ et sa doctrine (Jesus and His Teachings) – “the first modern history of Jesus written by a Jew”58 – suggesting both that Jesus was an Essene and that the “Hebrew people played an important role as a symbol of suffering humanity.”59 Salvador thus became “the first modern Jewish thinker to explicitly appropriate the symbolism of Christ’s passion in order to elucidate the meaning of Jewish history.”60 In his 11-volume work, History of the Jews, Heinrich Graetz also argued that Jesus was “a member of the Jewish sect of the Essenes” whose purpose was not to create a new religion, but rather to reform Judaism.61 Jesus was drawn to the Essenes and the people of Galilee were drawn to his “Essene teachings.”62 Christianity was dependent on Judaism for its existence and its ideas as “an offshoot of the sect of the Essenes.”63 Jesus’s followers were “like the Essenes, from whose midst Christianity has certainly sprung.”64 Moreover, Essene traditions – through Jesus, John the Baptist, and their followers – were preserved and continued by “Jewish-Christians” and “heretical” Ebionites.65 Similarly, Kaufman Kohler, an early proponent of Reform Judaism,66 also asserted that John and Jesus were “members of the Essene party”67 For some Jewish scholars, the Essene hypothesis of Christian origins served a number of purposes. First, it boosted “Jewish self-esteem in the face of Christianity’s success.”68 Second, it de-stabilized normative self-definitions of Judaism and Christianity.69 Third, it supported revisionist readings of early Christianity in which Jesus was firmly embedded in a Jewish context.70 And fourth, it emphasized the Jewish origins of Christianity.71 As an alternative narrative of Christian origins, the Essene hypothesis became a distinctive feature in biblical scholarship, Western esotericism,72 and popular culture. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 – a library of ancient Jewish manuscripts associated with the Essenes – only provided further support for this hypothesis, suggesting to some that a number of Essenes, although perhaps not Qumran Essenes, joined the Jesus movement.73 In sum, a symbiotic relationship between modern Jews and the historical figure of Jesus has facilitated the integration of the former into Western society, but on increasingly Jewish terms, reversing centuries of “Christian explanations of Jewish suffering” based on the Jewish rejection of Jesus.74 This integration of Jesus within modern Judaism has also begun to reverse centuries of Jewish hatred, fear, and distrust of (the Christian) “Jesus.” Kaufman Kohler could thus suggest that the Jewish nation was “the man of sorrows from whose wounds flow the balm of healing.”75 Similarly, Joseph Krauskopf could also appeal to the crucifixion of Jesus – performed regularly as the Passion Play in Oberammergau, Austria – as “a meaningful emblem for Jewish martyrdom.”76 It was Israel, after all, not Jesus, who was the “Suffering Servant” of Isaiah 53.77 This identification of theJew(s)-as-Crucified was recognized by Christian writers, both before and after the Shoah,78 but it was especially prominent among modern Jewish writers, novelists, and artists.79 Jewish literary engagement with Jesus fascinated modern Hebrew and Yiddish writers who found in him “a designator of the modern Jewish Self,” a self that is found in the very figure who once “served as the ultimate Other.” By

32

The Jewish Problem

reclaiming their long-lost “brother”– a Jesus “different from both the Christian figure and the old Jewish perception of it” – many Jewish writers attempted to reclaim what was “missing in their old Jewish Self.”80 Recent Jewish Studies on Jesus have taken different turns.81 Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, for example, talks about a “Kosher Jesus,” arguing that Jesus never claimed to be a Jewish messiah, but was rather “a wise and learned rabbi who despised the Romans … [and] worked to rekindle Jewish ritual observance of every aspect of the Torah.”82 Jesus, the “lost son” of Israel, was a devout and observant Jewish rabbi. In a similar vein, Zev Garber suggests that there was “a line of basic continuity” between Jesus and the Pharisees, but significant disagreements and conflicts arose when Christians asserted that Jesus was divine.83 A religious zealot, Garber’s Jesus is not the “pacifistic Christ” of the Gospels, but a would-be-king marketed to Gentiles for Roman consumption, an agent of “parochial Jewish nationalism.”84 The modern Jew can “identify with the faith and fate of Jesus but not faith in Jesus.”85 Garber’s presuppositions, namely, that Jesus was essentially Pharisaic in orientation as well as “a political revolutionary sympathizer involved in the Jewish national struggle against Rome,”86 receive little to no support, however, from contemporary specialists.87 Alternatively, Reform Rabbi Michael J. Cook wants modern Jews to “engage” the New Testament in Interfaith dialogue, Jesus Research, and academic studies on the “Gospel Dynamics” that gave rise to early Christianity.88 David Klinghoffer, an Orthodox Jewish journalist, even suggests that “the Jewish rejection of Jesus” allowed Christianity to become a non-Jewish or multi-ethnic religion, so Christians should really be grateful that the Jews rejected Jesus.89 To be sure, (liberal) Jews and Christians are getting along better today than ever before. The Jewish Jesus is now not only recognized as a historical fact; he can also serve as a strategic move of Jewish self-empowerment within a predominantly Christian society and culture.90 Jewish reclamations of Jesus can also represent therapeutic engagements with(in) that culture.91 Amy-Jill Levine, for example, presents herself as both a Conservative Jew and a New Testament/ Yankee Bible scholar teaching at a Christian Divinity School to good effect, producing accessible and popular presentations of Jesus as The Misunderstood Jew (HarperOne, 2007),92 with Jesus as the focal point of her Interfaith dialogue. The publication of The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford University Press) in 2011 also represented a milestone in Jewish scholarship on New Testament writings.93 The publication of Dabru Emet (‫ )דברו אמת‬in 2000 – a document signed by over 200 rabbis – further points to common ground between Jews and Christians, including the conviction that (1) Jews and Christians worship the same God, (2) seek authority from the same book, (3) accept the moral principles of the Torah, and (4) can work together for justice and peace.94 More controversially, Dabru Emet calls for Christians to recognize Jewish land-claims in Israel, denies that Nazism was a Christian phenomenon, and concludes that Jewish-Christian conflicts will not be resolved “until God redeems the entire world as promised.” Dabru Emet is an attempt to break new common ground in dialogue, but it does not quite take into account the fact that the Christian worship of Jesus is regarded

The Jewish Problem 33 as idolatry to many Jews. Moreover, the document’s attempt to downplay the role of Christian theology in the history of anti-Judaism, anti-Semitism, and the Shoah remains open to question. In December 2015, a group of Orthodox Rabbis recognized “the ongoing constructive validity of Christianity as our partner in world redemption,”95 affirming that the Christian religion is neither “an accident nor an error, but the willed divine outcome and gift to the nations.” Christianity can thus be legitimized insofar as it renounces anti-Judaism and affirms the legitimacy of its “elder brother.” Despite this unprecedented embrace of the Christian faith, however, the fine print re-inscribes the boundaries: it was the divine will to “separate” the two “partners” because of their irreconcilable “differences.” Jewish and Christian differences are not so easily dissolved. Facile attempts to do so – to say, for example, that “everything” in the “Jewish Gospels” could already be found in pre-Christian Judaism,96 or that pre-Christian Judaism already embraced a suffering-and-dying messiah concept – is to neglect the cardinal rule of critical comparison: differences make a difference.97 Jesus may have been Jewish, but the divine Christ is still a dividing line between Jews and Christians.98 Jews may attempt to “reclaim” Jesus as one of their own, but Jewish reclamation projects tend to be regarded as inadequate by Christians unless they affirm Christian claims about Jesus.99 In 1984, Donald Hagner described the “Jewish reclamation of Jesus” as at an “impasse,”100 lamenting the virtual absence of any claims of “uniqueness or originality” made on Jesus’s behalf. Here Jesus was being “seen to belong increasingly and exclusively within (the) Jewish dimensions,” but what that also meant was that Jewish scholars had “not truly confronted the Jesus of the Gospels,”101 nor his “astounding newness.” Their work fell “considerably short of the mark.”102 The Jewish Jesus – like its historical, cultural, chronological, and structural correlate, the historical Jesus – is often regarded as an inadequate substitute for the Christian Christ.103 Here, once again, the Jew is found wanting.104 The Jewish Problem is not, therefore, that it is simply difficult to determine precisely what kind of Jew Jesus was. The Jewish Problem is simply that Jesus was Jewish.105

Notes 1 Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz, Der historische Jesus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 29; Tom Holmén, “The Jewishness of Jesus in the ‘Third Quest,’” in Jesus, Mark and Q: The Teaching of Jesus and its Earliest Records (JSNT Sup 214; Sheffield, 2001), 143–62; Jesus from Judaism to Christianity: Continuum Approaches to the Historical Jesus (London: T & T Clark, 2007); D. J. Harrington, “The Jewishness of Jesus: Facing Some Problems,” CBQ 49 (1987): 1–13; Max Wilcox, “Jesus in the Light of his Jewish Environment,” ANRW II: Principat, vol. 25: Vorkonstantinischen Christentum; Leben und Umwelt Jesu (eds. H. Temporini and W. Haase; Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1982), 131–95; B. J. Lee, The Galilean Jewishness of Jesus: Retrieving the Jewish Origins of Christianity (New York: Paulist, 1988); I. Zeitlin, Jesus and the Judaism of his Time (Cambridge: Polity, 1988); B. D. Chilton and C. A. Evans (eds.), Jesus in Context: Temple, Purity, and Restoration (AGJU 39; Leiden: Brill, 1997). 2 James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue: A Study in the Origins of Anti-Semitism (London: Soncino, 1934); Alan T. Davies (ed.), Antisemitism

34

3

4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12

The Jewish Problem and the Foundations of Christianity (New York and Toronto: Paulist Press, 1979); Craig A. Evans and Donald A. Hagner (eds.), Anti-Semitism and Early Christianity: Issues of Polemic and Faith (Fortress, 1993); Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Seabury, 1974; repr. edn. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 1996); Jules Isaac, Jésus et Israël (Paris: Albin Michel, 1948); Krister Stendahl, “Anti-Semitism,” in Bruce M. Metzger and Michael David Coogan (eds.), The Oxford Companion to the Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 32–34; Walter Laqueur, The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Avner Falk, Anti-semitism: A History and Psychoanalysis of Contemporary Hatred (Westport: Praeger, 2008); Guy Stroumsa, Contra Iudaeos: Ancient and Medieval Polemics Between Christians and Jews (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996); Ross Shepard Kraemer, The Mediterranean Diaspora in Late Antiquity: What Christianity Cost the Jews (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Lillian C. Freudmann, Antisemitism in the New Testament (Lanham: University Press of America, 1994); Gregory Baum, The Jews and the Gospel: A Re-examination of the New Testament (Westminster, MD: Newman, 1961); Terence L. Donaldson, Jews and Anti-Judaism in the New Testament: Decision Points and Divergent Interpretations (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010); Willehad Eckert, N. Levinson, and M. Stöher (eds.), Antijudaismus im Neuen Testament? Exegetische und systematische Beiträge (Munich: Kaiser, 1967); Howard Clark Kee and Irvin J. Borowsky (eds.), Removing the Anti-Judaism from the New Testament (Philadelphia: American Interfaith Institute, 1998); Luke T. Johnson, “The New Testament’s Anti-Jewish Slander and the Conventions of Ancient Polemic,” JBL 108 (1989), 419–41; idem, “Anti-Judaism and the New Testament,” in Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus, vol. 2: The Study of Jesus (ed.) Tom Holmén and Stanley E. Porter (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 1609–38. George Foot Moore, “Christian Writers on Judaism,” HTR 14 (1921), 197–254; E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1977). Gerd Lüdemann (ed.), Die ‘Religionsgeschichtliche Schule’: Facetten eines theologischen Umbruchs (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996). Diane M. Segroves, “Racializing Jewish Difference: Wilhelm Bousset, the History of Religions and the Discourse of Christian Origins,” Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 2012. Terence L. Donaldson, “Supersessionism and Early Christian Self-Definition,” JJMJS no. 3 (2016), 1–32. Amy Newman, “The Death of Judaism in German Protestant Thought from Luther to Hegel,” JAAR 71 no. 3 (1993), 455–87. This view is broadly identifiable as the “substantialist” or “essentialist” approach. Schäfer, Judeophobia, 2, 3: “The distinctiveness of the Jews, which is the result of the special nature of their religion, and in particular their separation from other social groups, has become the standard reasoning offered by the ‘substantialist’ interpretation.” Cf. C. Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum im Werk Deutscher Alhistoriker des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Leiden: Brill, 1988). Cf. Gürkan, The Jews as a Chosen People, 1–2. Cf. Marcel Simon, Verus Israel: Étude sur les relations entre Chrétiens et Juifs dans l’Empire Romain (135–425) (Paris: Editions de Boccard, 1948), 202. Schäfer, Judeophobia, 4. Schäfer, Judeophobia, 7–8: “neither … is adequate to explain Greco-Roman antiSemitism (as a matter of fact, they hardly exist in their pure form, as in most cases scholars adopt a blend of both, with different emphases on either side) … I would opt for a harnessing of both approaches – substantialist and functionalist – in research on ancient anti-Semitism.”

The Jewish Problem 35 13 Jakob Fries, Über die Gefährdung des Wohlstandes und Charakters der Deutschen durch die Juden (Heidelberg: Mohr u. Winter, 1816). 14 Steven E. Aschheim, “The Jew Within: The Myth of ‘Judaization’ in Germany,” in Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg (eds.), The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1985). 15 On modern anti-Semitism’s differentiation from ancient anti-Judaism, see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: World Publishing Company, 1951, 7); William Klassen, “Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity: The State of the Question,” in Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006), 1: 5–12; Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism. 16 Heinz Dietrich Löwe, “Pogroms in Russia: Explanations, Comparisons, Suggestions,” Jewish Social Studies 11 no. 1 (2004), 16–24. 17 Published in Russian in 1903, the Protocols is an anti-Semitic forgery of a Jewish plan for world domination. 18 Anders Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism: German Biblical Interpretation and the Jews, from Herder and Semler to Kittel and Bultmann (Studies in Jewish History and Culture 20; Leiden: Brill, 2009); Dirk Rupnow, “Racializing Historiography: Anti-Jewish Scholarship in the Third Reich,” Patterns of Prejudice 42 no. 1 (2008), 27–59; William I. Brustein and Ryan D. King, “Anti-Semitism in Europe Before the Holocaust,” International Political Science Review 25 no. 1 (2004), 35–53; Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (twenty-first edn.; München: F. Bruckmann A-G, 1936 [1899]). 19 Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743–1933 (New York: St. Martins Press, 2003). 20 On the Jewish Question/Problem, see Bruno Bauer, Die Judenfrage (Braunschweig: Freidrich Otto, 1843); Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (Paris, 1844); Theodore Herzl, Der Judenstaat: Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage (Leipzig and Vienna; M. Breitenstein, 1896). 21 Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Alan Davies, “The Aryan Christ: A Motif in Christian Anti-Semitism,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 12 no. 4 (1975), 569–79; Alan E. Steinweis, Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Maurice Casey, “Some Anti-Semitic Assumptions in the ‘Theological Dictionary of the New Testament,’” Novum Testamentum 41 no. 3 (1999), 280–91; Shawn Kelley, Racializing Jesus: Race, Ideology and the Formation of Modern Biblical Scholarship (London and New York: Routledge, 2002); Marshall D. Johnson, “Power Politics and New Testament Scholarship in the National Socialist Period,” Journal for Ecumenical Studies 23 no. 1 (1986), 1–24; Stephen R. Haynes, “Who Needs Enemies? Jews and Judaism in AntiNazi Religious Discourse,” Church History 71 no. 2 (2002), 341–67; Peter M. Head, “The Nazi Quest for an Aryan Jesus,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 2 no. 1 (2004), 55–89; Christian Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse: Jewish Studies and Protestant Theology in Wilhelmine Germany (trans. Barbara Harshav and Christian Wiese; Leiden: Brill, 2005). 22 Robert Eriksen, Theologians Under Hitler (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985); “Assessing the Heritage: German Protestant Theologians, Nazis, and the ‘Jewish Question,’” in Robert P. Ericksen and Susannah Heschel (eds.), Betrayal: The German Churches Under the Third Reich (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), 22–39. 23 David Cymet, History vs. Apologetics: The Holocaust, the Third Reich, and the Catholic Church (Lexington Books, 2010). 24 On the relationship between Zionism and colonialism, see Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel, “Introduction: Engaging Colonial History and Jewish

36 25

26

27

28

29 30

31

32

33 34 35 36 37

38 39

The Jewish Problem History,” in Colonialism and the Jews (eds.) Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 1–25. Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); David Cesarani (ed.), The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation (London: Routledge, 1994); Paul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Götz Aly, “Final Solution”: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews (London: Arnold, 1999). Uriel Tal, “Religious and Anti-Religious Roots of Modern Anti-Semitism,” in Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Third Reich: Selected Essays (New York: Routledge, 1984), 171–90. See also William I. Brustein, Roots of Hate: Anti-Semitism in Europe before the Holocaust (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973). On the hasid theory, see Hilde Brekke Moller, The Vermes Quest: The Significance of Geza Vermes for Jesus Research (LNTS 576; London and New York: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2017); Shmuel Safrai, “Jesus and the Hasidim,” Jerusalem Perspectives 42–44 (1994), 3–22. William E. Arnal, The Symbolic Jesus: Historical Scholarship, Judaism, and the Construction of Contemporary Identity (London: Equinox, 2005), 5. In an ad hominem review, Fernando Bermejo Rubio describes Arnal’s work as “no haya más que la vanidad de quien quiere ganarse a toda costa fama de intelectual crítico, maestro de la sospecha y enfant terrible, y la ambición de ampliar curriculum” (133); “Agendas ocultas tras el “Jesús judío”? Reflexiones críticas en torno al libro de William Arnal, The Symbolic Jesus,” Letras de Deusto 117 no. 37 (2007), 99–134. Johnson, The Real Jesus. Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Christ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth: King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Cf. Barbara U. Meyer, Jesus the Jew in Christian Memory: Theological and Philosophical Explorations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 52, 65: a “practicing, Torah-observant and halakhically committed Jew … knowledgeable about the written and oral Torah, observant of contemporaneous Jewish law, and an active, even passionate, participant in halakhic discussion.” Samuel Sandmel, “Palestinian and Hellenistic Judaism and Christianity: The Question of the Comfortable Theory,” Hebrew Union College Annual 50 (1979), 137–148, 138 n. 3, already noted how in “some Christian circles” a “predisposition to regard Jewish elements in Christianity as inherently superior, and, indeed, more ‘authentic’ than hellenistic elements.” Cf. Robert M. Price, Judaizing Jesus: How New Testament Scholars Created the Ecumenical Golem (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2021), 9. Arnal, The Symbolic Jesus, 75. James G. Crossley and Chris Keith (eds.), The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming). Arnal, The Symbolic Jesus, 77. James G. Crossley, Jesus and the Chaos of History: Redirecting the Life of the Historical Jesus (Biblical Refigurations; New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 4; “A ‘Very Jewish’ Jesus: Perpetuating the Myth of Superiority,” JSHJ 11 (2013), 109–29, esp. 116; “Jesus the Jew Since 1967,” in Halvor Moxnes, Ward Blanton, and James G. Crossley (eds.), Jesus Beyond Nationalism: Constructing the Historical Jesus in a Period of Cultural Complexity (London: Equinox, 2009), 119–137. Crossley, Jesus and the Chaos of History, 117. Crossley, Jesus and the Chaos of History, 119.

The Jewish Problem 37 40 Crossley, “The Next Quest,” 261, notes how “the implicit anti-Judaism of much of the so-called ‘Jewishness of Jesus’ debate” has been “exposed,” but does not reflect on how “the Jewishness of Jesus” also serves anti-“Christian” rhetorical agendas. 41 John P. Meier, “Jesus the Jew: But What Sort of Jew?,” Eugene C. Burke, CSP Lecture on Religion and Society, University of California, David, October 2001, https://m .youtube.com/watch?v=WxeKunPwmp4, [accessed December 30, 2019]. 42 Crossley, Jesus and the Chaos of History, 4. 43 The idea that the historical Jesus should conform to and align with the (Evangelical) Jesus of “the Church” is articulated in Robert M. Bowman Jr. and J. Ed Komoszewski, “The Historical Jesus and the Biblical Church: Why the Quest Matters,” in Jesus, Skepticism & the Problem of History: Criteria & Context in the Study of Christian Origins (eds. Darrell L. Bock and Ed Komoszewski; Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2019), 17–42. 44 Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times, and Teaching (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1925), 26; 51: “the book contains no history worth the name.” 45 b. Sanh. 43a. 46 m. Sanh. 7.4. 47 b. Sanh. 43a. 48 This tradition can also be found in the writings of Celsus, particularly his treatise On the True Doctrine, but in Celsus’s version, the man is a Roman soldier named Panthera (as quoted in Origen’s Contra Celsum I.28, 32, 33, 69). See also Antti Laato, “Celsus, Toledot Yeshu and Early Traces of Apology for the Virgin Birth of Jesus,” Jewish Studies in the Nordic Countries Today/Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis 27 (2016), 61–80. 49 Robert E. Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 111–122. 50 The Talmudic rabbinical criterion of blasphemy is the utterance of the divine name (m. Sanh. 7.5), but Jesus does not pronounce the divine name. Other Talmudic references include b. Sanhedrin 43a–b; 103a–b; 107b; Jerusalem Shabboth 14.4/13; 104b; b. Gittin 56b, 57a; Babylonian Sotah 47a; Babylonian Abodah Zarah 17a; Tosefta Hullin 2:24; Qohelet Rabbah 1.8; Babylonian Abodah Zarah 27b; Tosefta Hullin 2.22f. 51 Gustav Dalman, Jesus Christ in the Talmud: Midrash, Zohar, and the Liturgy of the Synagogue (New York: Deighton, Bell, and Co., 1893); J. Maier, Jüdische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Christentum in der Antike (EdF 177; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1982). Peter Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton University Press, 2007), does not regard this passage as historically reliable. See also Peter Schäfer, Michael Meerson, and Yaacov Deutsch, Toledot Yeshu (“The Life Story of Jesus”) Revisited: A Princeton Conference (TSAJ 143; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011); Michael Meerson and Peter Schäfer, Toledot Yeshu: The Life Story of Jesus, 2 vols. (TSAJ 150; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014); David Biale, “CounterHistory and Jewish Polemics Against Christianity: The Sefer Toldot Yeshu and the Sefer Zerubavel,” Jewish Social Studies 6.1 (1999), 130–45; Philip Alexander, “Jesus and his Mother in the Jewish Anti-Gospel (the Toledot Yeshu),” in Infancy Gospels: Stories and Identities, ed. C. Clivaz, et al. (WUNT 281; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 588–616; John Gager and Mika Ahuvia, “Some Notes on Jesus and his Parents: From the New Testament Gospels to the Toledot Yeshu,” in Envisioning Judaism: Studies in Honor of Peter Schäfer on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday (eds.) R. S. Boustan, K. Herrmann, R. Leicht, A. Y. Reed, and G. Veltri (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 997–1019. For earlier works, see Samuel Krauss, Das Leben Jesu nach jüdischen Quellen (Berlin: S. Calvary, 1902); R. Travers Herford, Christianity in Talmud and Midrash (repr. New York: Ktav, 1903 [1975]); Hermann Strack, Jesus, die Häretiker und die Christen nach den ältesten jüdischen Angaben (Leipzig: J. C.

38

52 53 54

55

56 57 58

The Jewish Problem Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1910); Morris Goldstein, Jesus in the Jewish Tradition (New York: Macmillan, 1950); Jacob Z. Lauterback, “Jesus in the Talmud,” in Rabbinic Essays (New York: Ktav, 1973 [1951]); Johann Maier, Jesus von Nazareth in der talmudischen Überlieferung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978). On Jesus as “founder,” see C. H. Dodd, The Founder of Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 90. On German Jewish biblical scholarship, see Nils H. Roemer, Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). For Jewish scholarship, see Joseph Klausner, Yeshu ha-Notsri (Jerusalem: Shtibl, 1922); Jesus of Nazareth; Joseph Salvador, Jésus Christ et sa doctrine: histoire de la naissance de l’église, de son organization et de ses progrès pendant le premier siecle (2 vols. Paris: A. Guyot et Scribe, 1838; 2nd ed.; Paris: M. Lévy Frères, 1864–65); Claude G. Montefiore, The Synoptic Gospels: Edited with an Introduction and a Commentary (3 vols.; London: Macmillan, 1909; 2nd ed.; 2 vols. 1927; repr. New York: Ktav, 1968); Abraham Geiger, Das Judentum und seine Geschichte in zwölf Vorlesung (3 vols.; Breslau: Schletter, 1864; 2nd ed.; 3 vols.; Breslau: Skutsch, 1865), 108–48; Hans-Joachim Schoeps, Das Leben Jesu: Versuch einer historischen Darstellung (Frankfurt: Eremiten, 1954); Asher Finkel, The Pharisees and the Teacher of Nazareth (AGSJU 4; Leiden: Brill, 1974); Schalom Ben-Chorin, Brother Jesus: The Nazarene through Jewish Eyes (Athens: University of Georgia, 2001); David Flusser, Jesus in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Rowohlts monographien; Renbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1968); Jesus (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969); Judaism and the Origins of Christianity (New York: Adama Books, 1987); Vermes, Jesus the Jew; Jesus and the World of Judaism (London: SCM, 1983); The Religion of Jesus the Jew (London: SCM, 1993); Jesus in His Jewish Context (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003); The Gospel of Jesus the Jew: The Riddell Memorial Lectures Forty-Eighth Series Delivered at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne on 17,18 and 19 March 1981 (Newcastle upon Tyne: University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1981); The Changing Faces of Jesus (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 2000); Lawrence H. Schiffman, “The Jewishness of Jesus,” in Jews & Christians speak of Jesus (ed. Arthur E. Zannoni; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), 37–53; Alan F. Segal, “Jesus and First-Century Judaism,” in Jesus at 2000 (ed. Marcus J. Borg; Boulder: Westview Press/Harper Collins, 1997), 55–72; Susanna Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago Studies in the History of Judaism; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (New York: Harper Collins, 2009); Yaakov Ariel, “Christianity Through Reform Eyes: Kaufmann Kohler’s Scholarship on Christianity,” American Jewish History 89 no. 2 (2001): 181–91; Beatrice Bruteau (ed.), Jesus through Jewish Eyes: Rabbis and Scholars Engage an Ancient Brother in a New Conversation (New York, 2001); Shaul Magid, American Post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 133–56. Donald A. Hagner, The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus: An Analysis and Critique of Modern Jewish Study of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Academie Books, 1984); Matthew Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); “Reclaiming Jesus and the Construction of Modern Jewish Culture,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley and Graduate Theological Union, 2000. Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi, 2. Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi, 7, 8–9. Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi, 27. Cf. Salvador, (2 vols., Paris, 1838).

The Jewish Problem 39 59 Paula Hyman, “Joseph Salvador: Proto-Zionist or Apologist for Assimilation?,” Jewish Social Studies 34 no. 1 (1972), 9, citing Salvador, 2:78–79. 60 Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi, 28. 61 Heinrich Hirsch Graetz, History of the Jews (vol. 2: From the Reign of Hyrcanus (135 B.C.E.) to the Completion of the Babylonian Talmud (500 C.E.) (Pennsylvania: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1893); Geschichte der Juden (11 vols.; Leipzig: O. Leiner, 1870), III: 285. Hagner, The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus, 62. See also Jonathan M. Elukin, “A New Essenism: Heinrich Graetz and Mysticism,” JHI 59/1 (1998): 135–48; Simon Dubnow, History of the Jews (trans. M. Spiegel; South Brunswick: T. Yoseloff, 1967–73). 62 Elukin, “A New Essenism: Heinrich Graetz and Mysticism,” 137. 63 Elukin, “A New Essenism: Heinrich Graetz and Mysticism,” 140; Hagner, The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus, 171. 64 Graetz, History of the Jews, 4:57. 65 Annette Yoshiko Reed, Jewish Christianity and the History of Judaism (TSAJ 171; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 286, notes that “The Christian account of Christian origins” is “presented as the product of a double erasure – first of the Jewishness of the Essene Jesus” and then of “the antiquity of ‘Jewish-Christianity’ by later heresiologists.” Reed notes that “Graetz reminds his reader – in multiple asides – that Christianity is actually ‘Essenism, interwoven with foreign elements’” (247, citing Graetz, History of the Jews, 2:142). 66 Ariel, “Christianity through Reform Eyes,” 181–91. 67 Kaufmann Kohler, The Origins of the Synagogue and the Church (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 205. 68 Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, 134. 69 Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, 239. 70 Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, 128, 14. 71 On the anxiety of influence, see Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, 233. 72 Reender Kranenborg, “The Presentation of the Essenes in Western Esotericism,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 13/2 (1998): 245–56; Per Beskow, Strange Tales about Jesus: A Survey of Unfamiliar Gospels (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983); 73 Émile Puech, review of Joseph, Jesus, the Essenes, and Christian Origins, RB 127 no. 3 (2020): 451–453, 453: “Il est probable que plusieurs, qumraniens exclus, sont entrés dans la nouvelle Voie, comme le laissent entendre l’absence de leur mention mais leur influence dans le NT, ainsi que leur absence dans le judaïsme rabbinique.” 74 Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi, 55–57. So also Emil Hirsch, The Jews and Jesus (Chicago, 1890), 22. 75 George Berlin, Defending the Faith: Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Writings on Christianity and Jesus (New York, 1989), 53–54, citing Kaufman Kohler, Reform Advocate 10 (December 21, 1895), 745. 76 Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi, 55 (emphasis added), citing Joseph Krauskopf, A Rabbi’s Impressions of the Oberammergau Passion Play (Philadelphia: Rayner, 1901). 77 Krauskopf, A Rabbi’s Impressions, 152, noting that it was “the Jew” who walked “the way of the cross … the real Suffering Messiah … the real Saviour of Man.” 78 Joseph Bonsirven, Les juifs et Jésus (Paris: G. Beauchesne et ses fils, 1937): “Like Jesus, the Jews have not ceased to mount Golgotha; like him, they are always nailed to the cross”; Francois Mauriac, foreword to Eli Wiesel, Night (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), x; Franklin Littell, The Crucifixion of the Jews (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 6, 16, referring to the Holocaust as the “crucifixion and resurrection of the Jewish people” and “the shocking possibility that this event may be the confirmation of the calling of the Jewish people to be the Suffering Servant.”

40

The Jewish Problem

79 See especially the work of Marc Chagall. On Jesus in Israeli art, see Amitai Mendelsohn, Behold the Man: Jesus in Israeli Art (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2017), 54–61. 80 Neta Stahl, Other and Brother: Jesus in the 20th-Century Jewish Literary Landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 194. See also Neta Stahl (ed.), Jesus among the Jews: Representation and Thought (London and New York: Routledge, 2012). 81 See the essays in Zev Garber (ed.), Teaching the Historical Jesus: Issues and Exegesis (Routledge Studies in Religion; London and New York, 2014). 82 Shmuley Boteach, Kosher Jesus (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2012). For a Messianic Jewish response, see Michael Brown, The Real Kosher Jesus: Revealing the Mysteries of the Hidden Messiah (Lake Mary, FL: FrontLine, 2012). 83 Zev Garber, “Introduction,” The Jewish Jesus: Revelation, Reflection, Reclamation (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2014), 4. 84 Garber, “The Jewish Jesus: A Partisan’s Imagination,” 14. 85 Garber, “Introduction,” 8. Cf. “Reflections on Jesus,” Shofar 27 no. 2 (2009), 128–37. 86 Zev Garber, “The Jewish Jesus: A Partisan’s Imagination,” in Z. Garber (ed.), The Jewish Jesus: Revelation, Reflection, Reclamation (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2011), 13. 87 Joseph, Jesus, the Essenes, and Christian Origins, 21–22. 88 Michael J. Cook, Modern Jews Engage the New Testament: Enhancing Jewish WellBeing in a Christian Environment (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2008). 89 David Klinghoffer, Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western Civilization (New York: Doubleday, 2005). 90 See, for example, Tikva Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter Ochs, David Fox Sandmel, and Michael A. Signer (eds.), Christianity in Jewish Terms (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000). 91 Abel Mordechai Bibliowicz, Jews and Gentiles in the Early Jesus Movement: An Unintended Journey (New York: Palgrave, 2013); Jewish-Christian Relations: The First Centuries (Columbus, OH: Biblio, 2016), 19, noting that “Jewish-Christian relations stand on a complex trajectory that originates in Jewish-Gentile relations within the Jesus movement.” 92 Levine, The Misunderstood Jew. 93 The Jewish Annotated New Testament (eds.) Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, (second edn.; New York: Oxford University Press, 2017 [2011]). 94 Dabru Emet (“Speak Truth”). 95 “To Do the Will of Our Father in Heaven: Toward a Partnership between Jews and Christians,” Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding and Cooperation, Israel. 96 Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New York: The New Press, 2012). 97 Cf. Gabriele Boccaccini, Paul’s Three Paths to Salvation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020), 101: “The idea that the messiah could suffer and die was not foreign to the Jewish tradition.” On the contrary, when the idea of a suffering and dying messiah does appear in rabbinical Jewish texts in post-Christian rabbinical literature, it is a Christian idea “re-appropriated” by the rabbis. 98 Steven Katz, “Christology: A Jewish View,” Scottish Journal of Theology 24 no. 2 (1971), 184–200, 199–200: “Jesus knew, undeniably knew, that history must be the judge of his, as well as all, messianic claims … it seems valid to reject Jesus’ claim because one does not see the historical actuality of these claims.” 99 Hagner, The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus, 278, concluding that “the Jewish understanding of Jesus and his teaching can in the end only be regarded by Christians as unsatisfactory.” 100 Hagner, The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus, 284. 101 Hagner, The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus, 285. 102 Hagner, The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus, 286.

The Jewish Problem 41 103 Hagner, The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus, 286. 104 Hagner, The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus, 286, suggests that Jewish scholars’ perspectives allow them to make “contributions,” but “also hinders them from a true perception of Jesus and his teaching.” Hagner thus laments the fate of the Jew: “tragically … those who in many ways are the closest to Jesus, the Christ, are at the same time the farthest away from him.” 105 I allude here to Rudolf Bultmann’s programmatic statement that it was the “thatness” of Jesus’s existence (“Das ‘Daß’ des Gekommenseins”) that authorized Christian tradition. See Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus (Berlin: Deutsche Bibliotek, 1926).

2

Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ

In the academic study of religion, the conceptual utility of categories,1 including the category of religion itself,2 has become a central site of ongoing debate.3 In this chapter, I examine four categories used in Jesus Research: (1) “common Judaism”, (2) asceticism, (3) apocalypticism, and (4) (non)violence. In each case, I explore how the use of these categories has been complicated by a (pre-)dominantly Christian discourse, rendering the categories analytically ambiguous insofar as each represents a wide array of interpretive possibilities on a continuum of continuity and discontinuity vis-à-vis Jesus and his Jewish context, preventing researchers from being able to reach consensus on critical questions. This analysis of categories in Jesus Research also illustrates how “Jewish” tradition is conceptualized vis-à-vis its relational contradistinctive, “Christian” tradition.

I Introduced by E. P. Sanders, the concept of “common Judaism” identifies a number of identity markers in ancient Judaism as relatively “common” constituent factors of ancient Jewish identity.4 The most “common” of these would be monotheism, or worship of the God of Israel, participation in synagogues, shared perceptions of what constituted purity and holiness, and the significance of the Torah. There are significant historical problems, however, attending to the facile use of the concept of a “common Judaism.”5 First, the concept constructs a kind of “normative Judaism,” and so prescribes normative religious identity. Second, it is an arguably essentialist scholarly construct, identifying a nexus of beliefs and practices that define (determine) the essence of an ethno-religious identity. Third, it is a potentially heresiological construct insofar as it inscribes (prescribes) border lines between acceptable and unacceptable levels and degrees of religious observance. Fourth, it reifies Judaism as a stable set of institutions that marginalizes deviant and non-observant members of the community. Fifth, it is a corrective construct insofar as it is responding to an over-emphasis on the diversity of ancient “Judaisms,” but it is also a polemical, reactionary construct that traffics in continuity (normativity) as opposed to discontinuity (diversity), thus serving apologetic interests.6 Sixth, its corrective emphasis on the “common people” (of the land) (‫ – )עם הארץ‬alluding to a polemical rabbinic concept (bPes. DOI: 10.4324/b22959-4

Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ 43 49ab) – reflects a postmodern historiographical turn to ordinary people vis-àvis a perceived over-emphasis on elitist, sectarian Judeans like the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Essenes. In doing so, the term neglects Diasporan Jewish diversity and downplays the social, religious, and political influences of elitist Judeans on the “common” people. Seventh, the concept of “common Judaism” marginalizes the eschatological fervor characteristic of this period, an ideological development which not only gave birth to the Jesus movement and Christianity, but was also “largely responsible for the three Jewish revolts between AD 66 and 135/6.”7 Despite its apparently common sense, then, the concept of a “common Judaism” complicates our ability to recognize continuity and discontinuity, similarity and difference, the common and the heterodox, within a single religious continuum.8 That is, the more we rely on “common Judaism” to inform our construction(s) of the historical Jesus – by attempting to locate Jesus “within a largely problem-free ‘common Judaism’ and to make him a Jew devoted to the Torah like others” – the more we risk making false, misguided, and/or “one-sided judgments.”9 The contemporary re-description of Jesus as a man deeply rooted in the land, language, culture, and tradition of his people is now one of the “10 Ideas That are Changing the World” (according to Time magazine).10 This re-Judaization of the historical Jesus, however, does not necessarily support, authorize, or guarantee the reliability of “Christian memory” about Jesus.11 The “Christian memory” of Jesus’s Jewishness may provide some common ground between Jews and Christians, but it can also be perceived as destabilizing normative Christian truth-claims.12 The Gospels, after all, do not tell us much about Jesus’s childhood or education.13 Scholars continue to debate whether Jesus could read or write.14 Luke has Jesus displaying astonishing intelligence in the Temple at age 12 “sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.”15 The people are “astonished” and ask “How does this man have such learning (γράμματα), when he has never been taught (μεμαθηκώς)?”16 According to the author of the Gospel of Mark, Jesus was a “carpenter” who came from Nazareth.17 The Gospel tradition of Jesus being a carpenter is contested.18 At face value, there seems to be good reason to think that Jesus was indeed a tektōn (τέκτων), that is, a builder or craftsman who worked with wood and stone.19 After all, the author of Mark flatly states that Jesus was a carpenter. Paul, however, never mentions it while Matthew states that Jesus was only the son of a carpenter (“Is this not the son of the carpenter?”).20 Similarly, Luke identifies Jesus simply as the son of Joseph (“Is this not the son of Joseph?”).21 If it is reasonable to think that the authors of Matthew and Luke may have “found it embarrassing” that Jesus was a “carpenter,”22 it is also possible that Jesus’s occupation as a “carpenter” (τέκτων) may have led to his itinerant ministry as a healer,23 especially since Jesus does not seem to have self-identified as a carpenter during his ministry.24 We also do not have any compelling evidence of Jesus’s occupation (or even his whereabouts) during his so-called “missing years” between the ages of 12 and 30. The identification of the historical Jesus as a “peasant” from the village of Nazareth, even an “insufferably ordinary” young man from Nazareth,25 may be a “common” truism, but it does not adequately explain Jesus’s religious formation

44 Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ or his opposition to and from the politico-religious elite of Judea, data that are difficult to account for in the rural village life of Nazareth. Moreover, the Gospels do not say that Jesus actually lived in Nazareth during his adult life. The Gospels present us with a portrait of a man filled with religious conviction, authority, and charisma. He teaches.26 He heals.27 The Spirit leads him into the wilderness. He raises the dead.28 He exorcises demons. Yet the Gospels do not portray Jesus as a man who had to earn his authority. He simply receives it via the Holy Spirit and divine adoption. The Gospels, in other words, sidestep the question of Jesus’s religious development.29 The identification of Jesus as a “normative Jew,” therefore, is a significant departure from the Gospels’ representation of Jesus. In sum, the concept of a “common Judaism” is suspect because it constructs a kind of “normative Judaism,” is arguably essentialist, potentially heresiological, reifies Judaism, serves “apologetic” interests, neglects Diasporan Jewish diversity, and marginalizes the eschatological fervor of early Judaism.30 Consequently, we should be wary of any facile appeal to Jesus as a “normative Jew” practicing “common Judaism,” especially when it comes to adjudicating Jesus’s “religious” observance of Jewish Law.31 * In the rabbinical tradition, the term halakhah (‫ – )הלכה‬derived from the Hebrew ‫הלך‬, or “the way one walks” – refers to the particular “way” one interprets, follows, and practices the Torah.32 In the New Testament book of Acts, the term “the Way” (ἡ ὁδός) is used as a collective self-designation.33 In the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Yahad (‫ )יחד‬is identified as “those who have chosen the Way” (‫ )דרך‬while those who leave the community are “those who turn aside from the Way.”34 The Yahad was “the perfect Way.”35 While both groups seem to have had scriptural precedents in mind,36 especially Isaiah 40:3 (“Prepare the Way of the Lord”), a secondary association with each group’s approach to the Torah can also be inferred. Both groups developed a distinctive halakhah (‫)הלכה‬.37 Both groups were inspired by the idea of following the will of God as “the Way.”38 The question, then, of whether Jesus kept kosher, violated the Sabbath, or declared “all foods clean” are not actually questions about Jesus’s ethnicity or “Jewishness,” but rather of his religiosity, and can best be answered based on comprehending Jesus’s halakhic principles of interpretation.39 Did Jesus violate purity laws by eating with “sinners,” mingling with “tax-collectors,” or healing the diseased?40 Or did Jesus defeat the sources of impurity as a result of his divine purity,41 triumphing over the “forces of death” that result in ritual impurity?42 Although there does not seem to be any substantial evidence that the historical Jesus systematically “challenged the purity system,”43 the evangelists portray Jesus as embodying divine authority over Jewish Law and able to override halakhic observances. Here it is important to maintain the distinction between a historical Jesus and the Gospels’ portrayal(s) of Jesus,44 the latter of which do indeed develop a distinctive approach to Jesus’s relationship to the Law.45

Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ 45 The Jesus of the Gospels restores the sick to health and the dead to life. He cleanses lepers, heals a hemorrhaging woman, exorcises evil spirits, and heals on the Sabbath. In traditional Christian theology, this is understood as Jesus’s opposition to Judaism, the Law, and ritual purity.46 It has recently been argued, however, that Jesus did not oppose the ritual purity system; rather, Jesus opposed ritual impurity itself.47 That is, Jesus was not opposed to Judaism; Jesus was opposed to Satan. The evangelists envision a Jewish world under the influence of Satan. In the Gospels, the figure of Jesus is an agent of God who justifies his halakhic decisions based on his divine authority and identity. The idea that Jesus could challenge, contest, and overcome the very source of ritual impurity itself (the “forces of death”) is therefore based less on re-locating a historical Jesus “within the thought world of ancient Judaism” and more on the re-construction (re-inscription) of a narrative world within which Jesus transcends the limitations of ethnic/particular Jewish observance as a divine agent. In the historical context of the Gospels, then, this literary-narrative framework legitimizes Jesus’s halakhic violations and reflects the evangelists’ efforts to legitimize Gentile nonobservance of Jewish Law by appealing to Jesus as precedent,48 thus authorizing a trans-Jewish religious movement’s non-observance of Jewish Law. The Jesus movement was an ethnically mixed movement moving beyond Jewish ethnic boundaries, purity laws, and dietary observances. That is, in part, why the Markan Jesus emphatically “declares all foods clean” (Mark 7:19), violates the Sabbath, and disregards the sacrificial system: because “Jesus” serves as the authoritative guarantor of just such behavior by Gentile followers of Jesus. The Markan Jesus, in other words, is not challenging the sources of ritual impurity simply to preserve and protect the ritual purity system. On the contrary, by “declaring all foods clean,” the Markan Jesus (that is, Mark) intends to change – if not “abolish” – Jewish dietary restrictions. The Gospel of Mark represents Jesus as one who changes the terms and conditions of divine revelation, not simply a “faithful Jew” who conforms to the assumptions of “common Judaism.” Take, for example, Jesus’s healing of the “leper” (Mark 1:40–44), one of the few passages in which Jesus seems to support the purity laws, the priests, and the Temple cult.49 Here Jesus heals a “leper” and instructs him to go to the priest and “offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them” (μαρτύριον αὐτοῖς) (NRSV). According to the book of Leviticus, a priest would then pronounce whether leprosy had been removed and purity regained, which would require the sacrifice of two birds.50 It would seem, then, that here Jesus upheld “what Moses commanded.” Yet things are not what they seem. If this were simply an act of deference to priestly authority, it would be quite peculiar in a Markan narrative which culminates in Jesus’s violent confrontation with the Temple’s authorities. Moreover, Mark does not tell us that the man actually went to the priests or performed any sacrifices.51 All we are told is that the man “went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word” (Mark 1:45), suggesting he did not (need to?) go to the priests. This passage thus sets the stage for Jesus’s later confrontation with the Temple and is more plausibly read as an early narrative foreshadowing of the Temple conflict that climaxes later in Mark’s

46

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Gospel. To take this narrative scene and saying at face value is to pay insufficient attention to its literary-rhetorical function in Mark’s Gospel, often in order to assert it as evidence of Jesus’s religious “normativity.”52 Mark’s Jesus does not defer to priestly authority; he challenges it: μαρτύριον αὐτοῖς is better translated “as a testimony against them.”53 This was a provocative “infringement of priestly prerogative” that reveals a narrative “tension” in Jesus’s ministry.54 This Markan passage should not be read as deference to priestly authority or a vestige of early pre-Markan pro-Temple Jesus tradition.55 That would be a naïve reading in the wider context of the Markan narrative. The Markan Jesus is not deferring to priestly authority; he is challenging priestly authority.56 Mark 1:40–44 does not provide us with unambiguous evidence of Jesus’s support for the purity laws, but rather with Mark’s narrative foreshadowing of Jesus’s imminent confrontation with the Temple. So while Jesus is represented by the evangelists as one whose divine power “transcends the power that creates the ritual impurity,”57 we should not obscure this narrative foreshadowing of Jesus’s hostility toward the Temple’s administration nor disregard the Markan Jesus’s emphasis on interior purity rather than Pharisaic traditions of ritual purity. Matthew follows Mark by including the leper-cleansing (8:2–4), but Matthew adds other (Sondergut) sayings that correct the impression that Jesus was hostile toward the priests and the Temple. It is the Matthean Jesus, after all, who emphasizes “mercy, not sacrifice” (9:13; 12:7). It is also the Matthean Jesus who presupposes that his hearers make gift-offerings in the Temple: “So when you are offering (προσφέρῃς) your gift (δῶρόν) at the altar (θυσιαστήριον)” (Matthew 5:23–4). Should we read this latter passage as reliable evidence of the historical Jesus’s support for (and participation in) the sacrificial system? Or is it more reasonably read as Matthew’s attempt to provide the impression that Jesus did indeed do so? The fact that this saying is not multiply attested and is found only in Matthew’s Gospel shifts the center of evidentiary gravity toward it being Matthew’s hand at work, an attempt to correct Mark’s antinomianism.58 Moreover, the fact that this passage – referring to Jesus’s disciples being able to “offer” their gifts at the “altar” – runs contrary to cultic protocol in the Jerusalem Temple, where only priests could conduct sacrifices, indicating it is less a “memory” of Jesus’s ministry and more a composition of Matthean creativity.59 Even a passage as apparently pro-Torah as Matthew 5:17 – where Jesus claims that his goal is to “fulfill” (πληρῶσαι) the Law – seems to be in conversation with a rival “Christian” opinion that Jesus has come to “abolish” (καταλῦσαι) the Law.60 Matthew is a creative author. He often views Mark’s account as inadequate,61 replaces Mark’s account with his own, corrects Mark’s language, extends its length, and eliminates offensive features.62 For example, where Mark criticized Jesus’s family and the Twelve, Matthew rehabilitates their reputation. Where Mark shows a relative disinterest in Jesus’s teachings and the ritual demands of the Torah,63 Matthew’s Jesus is an expert interpreter of the Torah. Where the Markan Jesus declares “all foods clean” (7:19c), the Matthean Jesus omits Mark’s parenthetical comment, disagreeing with Mark’s representation of Jesus. Consider again then, the question of Jesus’s dietary habits. According to Mark,

Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ 47 Jesus declared “all foods clean” (καθαρίζω πάντα τὰ βρώματα) (7:19c). Mark’s narrative rejection of kashrut seems virtually certain.64 Yet biblical scholars tend to regard Mark 7:19c as a parenthetical aside, meaning that the historical Jesus did not declare “all foods clean,” although Mark wishes that he had. That is why the verse is inserted within parentheses in the NRSV. There is no good reason to think that the historical Jesus sought to abolish the laws of kashrut.65 But the Markan Jesus just may have. Here Jesus is engaged in legal debate, and so may be taken to “assume” its importance in Jewish life, but that does not mean that the Markan Jesus affirms the purity laws.66 Mark is writing for Gentile Christ-followers who do not keep the food laws, which is why he needs to explain Jewish customs to them.67 The question, therefore, of whether the historical Jesus kept kosher requires attending to the social context of a text’s narrative audience. We should not force the text to reveal an “observant” Jesus in order to rehabilitate the Markan Jesus. There is also no need to suggest that what Mark meant was that all kosher foods were clean (as if that needed to be stated or explained to his Gentile audience).68 Matthew 15:1–20 follows Mark, but omits this problematic Markan saying, showing us that Matthew was not comfortable with the Markan impression that Jesus “abolished” the food laws or rendered “all foods clean.” Mark served a Gentile ekklēsia that did not follow purity laws – and sought authoritative support for their abstinence from such laws in “Jesus.” The historical Jesus did not oppose “the purity laws” (itself a monolithic abstraction),69 but may have displayed a relative disinterest in certain laws.70 This disinterest could be understood as both acknowledging their cultural legitimacy as well as prioritizing other matters,71 but it does not mean that he was “indifferent” to all purity laws.72 Jesus may well have been “liberal” on some purity matters and “rigid” on others.73 It is apparent, after all, that Jesus’s healing activities intersected with ritual purity concerns on numerous occasions.74 Yet for most Jews, contracting ritual impurity was simply a recurring fact of life, not a sinful act.75

II The historical Jesus lived in a world where the renunciation of wealth, possessions, family relations, and sex could be regarded as philosophical ideals.76 These practices fall under the modern category of asceticism (ἄσκησις), the training, exercise, or discipline of the mind, will, and body toward a goal higher than those provided by nature. The Greek word askēsis was used both as an adjective describing an object as “having had much effort put into its making” as well as a noun referring to “prolonged effort,” such as that associated with military or athletic training.77 Many philosophers embraced “ascetic” practices in order to pursue a good, virtuous, and moral life.78 Some followed the Platonic ideal of disinterested social service; others critiqued cultural norms and traditions. Some practiced withdrawal or flight from the world (anachōrēsis).79 Others were students of self-control (enkrateia).80 Apollonius of Tyana, for example, is said to have renounced meat, wine, and marriage,81 developing a reputation for holiness, wisdom, and charismatic healing powers.82 Ascetic practices involved

48 Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ various techniques through which control is imposed over one’s senses, actions, and thoughts in order to achieve a goal higher than those provided by natural impulses.83 Nonetheless, there is considerable variety in how ascetic renunciatory practices have developed in different cultural traditions. French sociologist Émile Durkheim even argued that “almost all religions” include exemplary individuals who “make a point of extreme self-denial,” identifying these “ascetics” as “highly respected” people who “serve as an ideal for everyone.”84 The historical Jesus was a Jewish ascetic.85 The Jesus movement was an ascetic movement.86 The Gospels describe Jesus as instructing his followers to leave their families,87 and to renounce their homes,88 possessions,89 and security.90 The Jesus tradition displays a notable lack of concern for material needs.91 Discipleship was rigorous,92 requiring separation from family,93 the rejection of social norms,94 and the acceptance of poverty and martyrdom.95 To identify the Jesus tradition as participating in an ascetical discourse, therefore, is not to “resort to a weak definition” of asceticism in order to “embrace the gospels as ascetic.”96 On the contrary, it is to map the Jesus tradition within its wider cultural landscape, a world that knew multiple variations of ascetic renunciation.97 Jesus’s opponents may have called him a “glutton and a drunkard,” a “friend of tax collectors and sinners” (Luke 7:31–35), but these polemical accusations are not objective descriptions. Jesus may have enjoyed eating, drinking, and socializing, but that doesn’t mean he was consumed by physical desires or a “drunkard.” Jesus may have had a number of female disciples, but that does not mean that he engaged in sexual activity with them. Jesus may have enjoyed his food, but that doesn’t mean he denied the validity of fasting. The Temptation narratives clearly portray him as undergoing a prolonged period of fasting (Luke 4:1–13). These narratives also represent a time of preparation that included prayer, fasting, and solitude, portraying Jesus’s rejection of the Devil and his offer of “all the kingdoms of this world.” The Gospel tradition clearly “remembers” this preliminary period of time as Jesus rejecting – that is, overcoming – the world in self-renunciation.98 The Christian theological tradition may “remember” Jesus as a Jewish ascetic, but residual Protestant and scholarly suspicions of Catholic tradition, martyrdom, and sacrifice interfere with this recognition.99 Other (theological) objections betray a reluctance to identify Jesus as having had to work for his spiritual development. Traditional Christian theology – with its emphatic subordination of “faith” over “works” – is reluctant to embrace any religious view that promotes “working” for one’s spiritual progress and tends to portray Jesus as a divine (human) being born without sin, rejecting the idea that Jesus developed spiritual discipline, exerted spiritual effort, or “worked” for or earned his spiritual achievements. The tradition “remembers” Jesus’s self-renunciation and affirms his role as “an ideal for everyone,” but renders these attributes ambiguous due to an inherent tension of simultaneously affirming Jesus’s uniqueness and divinity. Since the publication of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (Doubleday, 2003), for example, there has been a revival of interest in Jesus’s marital status, especially concerning his relationship with Mary Magdalene.100 Since it was relatively normal for Jewish men and rabbis to marry,101 perhaps Jesus, too, was married.

Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ 49 Yet celibacy, like marriage, was also part of first-century Jewish culture.102 It is not difficult to detect an underlying suspicion of sexuality in the Jesus tradition. John the Baptist seems to have been unmarried. Paul recommends celibacy but does not require it.103 The Jesus of the Gospels endorses a way of life that rejected both marriage and children in favor of voluntary celibacy. Disciples should not only avoid adultery; they are not even to look at a woman with lust.104 Sexual desire was a dangerous temptation that needed to be controlled. The Matthean Jesus even praises those who maintained a life of celibacy “for the sake of the kingdom of heaven,”105 adding “Let anyone accept this who can,” commending those willing to practice celibacy, but not requiring this path for everyone. A similar pattern of ascetic renunciation attends Jesus’s relationship with his family. The Gospel of Mark tells us that Jesus’s family wanted to “restrain” him because people were saying that he was “crazy,” “mad,” “out of his mind,” or “beside himself.”106 When Jesus visits his family in Nazareth, Mark tells us that he wasn’t welcomed there, since “prophets are not without honor except in their hometown, among their own relations, and in their own house.”107 The Gospel of John tells us that Jesus’s brothers had no faith in him.108 Many sayings indicate that Jesus was in conflict with his family.109 It is likely that some of this antifamily sentiment in the Gospels reflects intra-“Christian” conflict over leadership roles in the post-Easter Jesus movement. It is unlikely, however, that the historical Jesus ever literally hated his family or advocated hatred of family. Jesus’s rhetoric of hatred – in its literary, social, rhetorical, and theological context(s) – does not advocate literal hatred, but rather the renunciation of one’s family obligations, the renunciation of family, wealth, possessions, home, and self-interest. The hatesaying is a classic instance of figurative and hyperbolic language.110 Disciples would need to be willing to give up their families, wealth, status, and possessions to “follow” him. This was an ethic of detachment to family:111 “He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.”112 Jesus’s “family” included those who followed the will of God.113 A “marginal” Jewish ascetic with strained family relations and an ambiguous relationship to sexuality does not conform to normative assumptions about “common Judaism.”

III The authors of the Gospels represent Jesus as a prophet (προφήτης/‫)נביא‬. In early Judaism, the prophetic tradition was a centuries-old legacy of ancient Israel. To call Jesus a prophet in this context was to connect him to the history of Israel. Theoretically, we could also use the term in a critical and cross-cultural comparative context to refer to any spokesperson for the divine. To call Jesus a Jewish prophet, however, is to re-employ a category that also makes ontological claims about communication with God.114 Caution is in order, therefore, as the term easily slips from its etic function as a descriptive category to an emic signifier of Jesus’s (ontologically) divine powers. The term can thus be used to describe how Jesus’s followers regarded him as well as to imply that Jesus really was a prophet, confusing critical comparison and covert confession.

50

Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ

The authors of the Gospels clearly shaped Jesus’s sayings and deeds to fit the profile of a prophet.115 He speaks for God. He stands for the poor. He challenges the royal and the priestly powers. He predicts his own betrayal, suffering, trial, death, and resurrection.116 He predicts the destruction of the Temple.117 And he predicts the arrival of a heavenly Son of Man. Jesus “had little in common,” however, with “learned soothsayers.” To what extent, then, were Jesus’s sayings and deeds focused on predicting future events as opposed to his public performances and reputation as a healer, teacher, and cultural critic?118 To call Jesus a prophet not only exacerbates an ancient Jewish polemic accusing Jesus of false prophecy119 – a crime punishable by death according to the Torah120 – it also suggests he may have been mistaken. Consider these prophecies: Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with [in] power.121 Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.122 [F]or truly I tell you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.123 If we take these Gospel passages at face value, then Jesus predicted an end-time that never came. If Jesus expected an “imminent … cosmic act of destruction,” then Jesus was wrong.124 If Jesus believed that “this generation” would not “pass away before all these things take place,” then Jesus was mistaken.125 The end did not come. The dead did not rise. Yet none of this spelled the end of the movement. The followers of Jesus simply recalibrated their expectations, recalculated the end-time, and redefined what it meant for Jesus to be the messiah. That is, Jesus’s followers experienced cognitive dissonance, the social-psychological state of being unable to reconcile contradictory beliefs, which frequently results in innovative solutions attempting to resolve this tension.126 In the case of the “prophetic” Jesus, it should be readily apparent that a portrait of Jesus as a fallible prophet would not have been perceived as a particularly auspicious beginning. That is one reason – the Gospels’ apparently embarrassing depiction of a prophetically fallible Jesus – that many are inclined to affirm this aspect of the Gospels as historically authentic. The problem with this assumption, however, is that the evangelists did not intend to portray Jesus as a “failed” or fallible prophet. On the contrary, the Gospels – written 40–70 years after Jesus’s death – narrate the present and future hopes and expectations of Jesus’s followers. Jesus’s alleged predictions, therefore, can either be read as genuine (albeit failed or mistaken) prophecies of the end-time and/or as Vaticinium ex eventu, “prophecy after the event,” prophetic utterances attributed to “Jesus” but composed by the evangelists. The latter model explains these failed predictions as reflecting the heightened eschatological expectations of the evangelists in the mid- to late-firstcentury CE.127 The former renders Jesus fallible; the latter transfers the error to the evangelists. The authors of the Gospels, like Paul, believed that they were indeed

Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ 51 living in the end-time just prior to Jesus’s return. That is why “Jesus” encourages his followers to keep the faith: these “prophecies” would (very soon) be fulfilled in their present lifetimes. * Since the turn of the twentieth century, especially following the publication of Johannes Weiss’s Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes (1892) and Albert Schweitzer’s Das Messianitäts- und Leidensgeheimnis: Eine Skizze des Lebens Jesu (1901), and Von Reimarus zu Wrede: Eine Geschichte der Leben-JesuForschung (1906), the identification of Jesus as an “apocalyptic prophet” has become a central site of debate as well as the default model in Jesus Research.128 Although Schweitzer’s “apocalyptic Jesus” was a product of his own personal response to modernity, not least of which was his rejection of a “liberal” Jesus,129 this portrait served as a new synthesis in Jesus Research, replacing both the canonical “Christ of faith” as well as the liberal nineteenth-century Jesus.130 Schweitzer’s view thus came to have a kind of canonical authority in biblical scholarship. As Ernst Käsemann put it, “apocalyptic is the mother of all Christian theology.”131 The Jesus of the Gospels may not have been interested in delineating the periodization of history nor preoccupied with astronomy, calendrical calculations, or “cosmic cartography”132 – characteristic features of the early Jewish apocalypses – but he was now “a stranger and an enigma,” the Apocalyptic One. Our question, however, is whether this synthetic modern scholarly construct of apocalyptic(ism) accurately reflects the worldview of the historical Jesus and/or whether the category itself imposes on the data – via circular logic and selective reading – an “apocalyptic Jesus” that never was. In 1979, the Uppsala Congress on Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East defined apocalypse as “a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an other-worldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation and spatial, insofar as it involves another supernatural world.”133 Although the Greek term apocalypse (ἀποκάλυψ ις) refers solely to divine revelation and not to any particular content of revelation,134 the Uppsala definition’s ambiguous reference to the “temporal” nature of “apocalyptic” revelation has resulted in a certain conflation of the category of apocalypticism with temporal emphases. Subsequent studies have explored the social setting(s) and contexts in which “apocalyptic” literature emerged as scribal responses to perceived political oppression as well as literary expressions of elite privilege.135 The prototypical examples of the genre apocalypse are the book of Daniel, the Enochic Book of the Watchers, and the book of Revelation. Since these texts are characterized by pronounced dualism, heightened eschatology, and explicit claims to divine revelation, these features became associated with the (synthetic) construction of apocalypticism as a worldview. This worldview, informed by the preeminent influence of the Christian book of Revelation, with its “highly catastrophic” narrative of destruction,136 came to represent apocalypticism

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as shorthand for “cosmic catastrophe.”137 According to this now relatively common definition, apocalypticism envisions an imminent final solution (eschatology) to the conflict of good and evil with punishment and reward for the wicked and the faithful. Bart Ehrman provides an accessible summary of this now common view: to say that Jesus was “a first-century Jewish apocalypticist” is “a shorthand way of saying that Jesus fully expected that the history of the world as we know it … was going to come to a screeching halt, that God was soon going to intervene in the affairs of this world, overthrow the forces of evil in a cosmic act of judgment, destroy huge masses of humanity, and abolish existing human political and religious institutions. All this would be prelude to the arrival of a new order on earth, the Kingdom of God. Moreover, Jesus expected that this cataclysmic end of history would come in his own generation, at least during the lifetime of his disciples.”138 This definition of “apocalypticism” has essentially rendered the term a synonym for the (delusional and mistaken) belief in an imminent, violent end-time. Since Jesus believed that he received divine revelation, it does seem fitting to describe him as “apocalyptic.” If Jesus believed that God was experientially present in his ministry, that too makes it fitting to describe Jesus as an “apocalypticist.”139 But that would not mean that Jesus’s worldview necessarily conformed to some grand narrative of “Second Temple Apocalypticism” synthetically extrapolated from a variety of Jewish and Christian texts like the book of Revelation. For example, if we take imminent violence as programmatically indicative of “the apocalyptic worldview,” then the Gospels’ portrayal of Jesus’s predictions of an imminent violent end-time would simply confirm that Jesus was, by definition, “apocalyptic” in this “traditional sense,” especially if these sayings are presumed to be authentic.140 Here the definition of “apocalyptic” as indicative of imminent violence predetermines a portrait of Jesus characterized by error, delusion, and failure. This appeal to an allegedly “traditional” definition of apocalypticism also proceeds by presupposition and circular reasoning: since apocalypticism is conceptualized as signifying a violent and imminent end-time (based, in part, on the book of Revelation), and the Gospels clearly portray Jesus as invoking such a scenario, then Jesus must have been “apocalyptic” in this normative, “traditional sense.”141 Our challenge, then, is this: how are we to reconcile the evangelists’ use of “apocalyptic” rhetoric in their portraits of Jesus with our own critical use of the constructed category of “apocalypticism” without conflating the historical Jesus and the Jesus tradition? To be sure, our earliest evidence of the Jesus movement (Paul’s letters) do indeed anticipate imminent violence in light of the movement’s Christological, eschatological, and soteriological beliefs. Yet the beginnings of the Jesus movement – originating in Jesus’s relationship to John the Baptist – are not so easily defined as “apocalyptic” in that sense. The lynchpin in the case for the apocalyptic Jesus is an allegedly “thoroughgoing” apocalyptic continuity (or “trajectory”) from John the Baptist through Jesus to the Jesus movement.142 This common appeal to apocalyptic “continuity” from John the Baptist through Jesus to Paul, however, is chronologically illusory.143 Josephus’s description of John

Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ 53 the Baptist arguably “shows no hint of Christian colouring.”144 Moreover, John the Baptist is not described by Josephus in “apocalyptic” terms, undermining one of the two bookends of the argument from continuity.145 There is no talk of divine wrath, imminent judgment, or a “coming one” here. The Synoptic Baptist should not be conflated with Josephus’s Baptist.146 Josephus’s John is a popular teacher with a “mass following,” but he is not portrayed as a fire-and-brimstone “apocalyptic” preacher. Josephus tells us that John was “a good man” (ἀγαθὸν ἄνδρα) who preached virtue and righteousness. He delivered persuasive “sermons.”147 He had such great powers of speech that the crowds “were aroused to the highest degree by his sayings (καὶ γὰρ ἤρθησαν ἐπὶ πλεῖστον τῇ ἀκροάσει τῶν λόγῳν),” for he had an “eloquence that had so great an effect on men (τὸ ἐπὶ τοσόνδε πιθανὸν αὐτοῦ τοῖς ἀνθρώποις).”148 He “exhorted the Jews to lead virtuous lives, to practice justice toward their fellow men and piety, and so doing to join in baptism (τοῖς Ἰουδαίος κελεύοντα ἀρετὴν ἐπασκοῦσιν καἰ τὰ πρὸς ἀλλήλους δικαιοσύνῃ καὶ πρὸς τὸν θεὸν εὐσεβείᾳ κρωμένοις βαπτισμῷ συνιέναι). His popularity led Herod Antipas to put him to death out of fear of John’s growing authority.149 Josephus seems readily able to discuss a variety of prospective prophetic, messianic, and royal claimants, but he does not describe John in such terms.150 The fact that Josephus represents a non-“Christian” Jewish perspective on the Baptist problematizes the identification of John as “apocalyptic.” The Baptist was simply remembered by Josephus as a popular, charismatic teacher. It is the early Jesus tradition – in Q and Mark, and subsequently in Matthew, Luke, and John – that paints a different picture of the Baptist as Jesus’s forerunner and eschatological guarantor despite the Baptist’s independent “ministry” and authority. And it is from these “Christian” sources that we derive an “apocalyptic” portrait of the historical John – and the historical Jesus.151 A second factor undermining the “traditional” portrait of an apocalyptic Jesus is the attribution of the title Son of Man to Jesus, along with the end-time narrative associated with his “coming.”152 The identification of Jesus as the Son of Man remains a contested site in Jesus Research. A common school of thought is that Jesus used this expression to refer to himself since the term was “rarely or never used by the early Christ-believers.”153 Another school of thought is that a number of “statements in which Jesus is identified as the Son of Man” are simply “later fabrications.”154 Given the cultural, geographical, chronological, and ideological correspondences between the early Jesus tradition and the first-century composition of the Enochic Book of Parables – where the expression “Son of Man” is used as a messianic title155 – there is good reason to think that “Son of Man” was not the historical Jesus’s idiosyncratic self-expression. A third factor that needs to be considered in any examination of Jesus’s “apocalyptic” profile is its temporal orientation: the Gospels contain a number of present Kingdom sayings that complicate any picture of an exclusively “imminent” or future expectation of revelation. Given that the “apocalyptic” profile of John the Baptist, the titular use of the Son of Man, and the temporal nature of the Kingdom of God are each contested attributions to the historical Jesus, it is surprising to find contemporary

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specialists claiming that “a non-apocalyptic interpretation of Jesus’s message is rarely forwarded in recent scholarship” for “good reasons.”156 What, then, inspires such scholarly confidence in the “apocalyptic Jesus?” First, the apocalyptic Jesus paradigm dovetails quite nicely – in evidentiary continuity – with the extant data. Second, it makes sense of that data within a Second Temple Jewish context. It is possible, therefore, to identify Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet based solely on the strength and explanatory power of this paradigm.157 Yet the apocalyptic Jesus model is as popular with those who emphasize Jesus’s apocalyptic fallibility as it is with those who regard it as a compelling narrative portrait to counter a liberal progressive Jesus.158 It has been suggested, for example, that (some) scholars who resist the “apocalyptic” Jesus are motivated by a desire for a Jesus “relevant” to their own twenty-first-century lives.159 Yet surely those disenchanted with Christianity (and its ongoing apocalyptic legacy) can be motivated by the “relevance” of a fallible Jesus in their own lives as well. For Christian scholars, however, the alleged failure of Jesus’s prediction of an imminent endtime hardly represents an insurmountable problem: faithful exegetes have been extending the imminent arrival of the Parousia for 2,000 years.160 Moreover, the apocalyptic Jesus’s worldview continues to function as a powerful vehicle for Christian theology, underwriting contemporary truth-claims of an exclusive salvation and a “unique” moment in world history.161 One may reasonably conclude, therefore, that the “traditional” apocalyptic Jesus – because it represents such a formidable confluence of evidence and interests shared by many scholars – will continue to dominate the discourse and render non-apocalyptic portraits of the historical Jesus suspect.162 While sustained conversations about the limitations of this category will no doubt continue,163 what seems fairly clear at this point is that “apocalypticism” does not necessarily signify imminent violence. Yet the term continues to serve as shorthand for imminent catastrophic judgment in the popular vernacular. It is not surprising that this definitional imprecision has led some scholars to propose abandoning the category altogether.164 Yet we need not abandon the category as much as analyze and problematize it. Since the term is a scholarly invention describing a wide variety of ancient, medieval, and modern notions of revelatory discourse and defaults to facile sketches which function as little more than scholarly convention, we should proceed with caution. If the historical Jesus believed that he received direct divine revelation, then whether or not he ever made (imminent) end-time predictions, it is justifiable to identify Jesus as apocalyptic.165 Yet just as identifying Jesus as Jewish without qualifying what kind of Jew he was is insufficient, so too is it insufficient to call Jesus an apocalypticist without qualifying what kind of apocalypticist he was. In other words, just as we should be wary of constructing a normative Judaism, so too should we be cautious in constructing a normative apocalypticism. Apocalyptic worldviews sustained multiple variations of “restoration eschatology,”166 including politico-military revolution and quiescent Urzeit/Endzeit visions embracing the renewal of creation.167 The idea, for example, that Jesus could affirm Jewish “restoration eschatology” without realizing that the Temple’s

Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ 55 sacrificial system did not represent the Edenic ideal of nonviolence seems unlikely. The Gospels, of course, transfer the soteriological efficacy of the Temple cult to Jesus and his followers; the ekklēsia becomes the eschatological sanctuary of the “new covenant.” Yet the Gospels also portray this transference – symbolically enacted in Jesus’s own ministry – as a transition from Jewish to Gentile “Christian” election. Second Temple Jewish texts and traditions certainly do document the conceptualization of Israelite “restoration eschatology,” but there are critical distinctions to be made between a general conceptualization, the specific form it took in the teachings of the historical Jesus, and the varied ways in which the evangelists portray Jesus as fulfilling the restoration of Israel. We need a working model, in other words, that accounts for Jesus’s own distinctive legal reasoning and revelatory visions of restoration.168 The Jesus of history was clearly in conversation with Jewish prophetic and apocalyptic traditions, but that does not mean that his worldview can or should be conflated with each and every extant apocalyptic text.169 Similarly, Jesus would have been well aware of popular conceptions of Davidic royalty, but that doesn’t mean he agreed with them. Jesus would have been familiar with apocalyptic traditions, but that doesn’t mean his interpretation of those traditions can or should be understood as the equivalent of an apocalyptic opiate, deluding both himself and the masses. We can indeed presume that Jesus had a particular apocalyptic vision, but we should not shoehorn him into a predetermined conceptual model of “apocalyptic” violence while disregarding nonviolent sayings and traditions, rendering them irrelevant by relegating them to the status of a temporary “interim ethic.” If Jesus was “remembered” as a teacher of nonviolence,170 but some scholars find a nonviolent Jesus “a bit too convenient,”171 it is also “a bit too convenient” to disregard Jesus’s nonviolent sayings and traditions while foregrounding violence as a central characteristic of apocalypticism. Jesus may or may not have been “thoroughly peace-loving,” but Jesus’s message about the Kingdom of God can hardly be taken as conceptually synonymous with “apocalypticism” (in the “traditional sense”) as Jesus’s Kingdom was not only inaugurated during his lifetime, but also evidently and experientially present.172 Whatever else it may signify, then, Jesus’s Kingdom does not necessarily refer to an imminent violent end-time.

IV The Jesus of the Gospels is “regularly and consistently portrayed as a teacher of nonviolence.”173 The Gospels “go out of their way to depict” a nonviolent Jesus.174 Jesus was remembered as requiring a nonviolent response to the political realia of his day. Early Christians were known for pacifist principles and practices.175 In other words, Jesus’s nonviolent ethic seems to have created a distinctive social model of behavior followed relatively faithfully by his followers for centuries. The fact that Christian tradition could so faithfully follow in Jesus’s footsteps – and not attempt to justify political revolt, insurrection, sedition, or interpersonal violence – seems to attest to the authority inherent in this dominical imperative. In short, whether or not we can critically establish that the historical Jesus actually

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said “love your enemies,” “turn the other cheek,” and “put down your sword,” the nonviolent gist of these sayings seems fairly clear. But is this a case where the gist of the Jesus tradition gets it wrong?176 To be sure, there are unmistakably violent streaks running throughout the Jesus tradition. In many New Testament texts, Jesus predicts threats of eschatological harm.177 Jesus is often portrayed as envisioning an end-time of “imaginary violence.”178 He acts as an agent of violence with a “whip of cords” (φραγέλλιον ἐκ σχοινίων) to drive animals out of the Temple.179 His followers are described as carrying “swords.” A number of scholars even see Jesus as a violence-prone revolutionary.180 Different versions of this proposal have been offered by Robert Eisler,181 S.G.F. Brandon,182 Hyam Maccoby,183 and, more recently, by Dale Martin,184 Reza Aslan,185 and Fernando Bermejo Rubio.186 Yet facile conflations of “the life – and times – of Jesus of Nazareth” will not do.187 Critical discussions about the relationship between the historical Jesus and the topic of violence should proceed by first conceding that violence is not simply descriptive; it is also a categorical label that renders an act unethical.188 That is, the term is tendentious, a declarative act of power that transforms another act, thought, or belief into negative and illegitimate terms. Moreover, there are different critical conceptualizations of what constitutes illegitimate force – with violence often identified as the intention to cause harm – in and through acts or words of physical, verbal, emotional, mental, social, structural, and systemic violation.189 The question of whether the historical Jesus was “violent” and/or “nonviolent” has thus become a central site of critical debate. At face value, for example, Jesus’s crucifixion does give credence to the claim that Jesus was executed for sedition.190 Yet the Romans also crucified people for defamation of the emperor,191 “stirring up the people,”192 and military desertion.193 Josephus also reports Romans crucifying Jews for no apparent reason at all.194 The fact that Jesus was accused of sedition does not thereby explain the crucifixion.195 Moreover, to categorically deny the explanatory power of a conspiratorial collaboration of Jewish authorities is to deny one of the central narratives in the Jesus tradition.196 Proponents of the revolutionary Jesus hypothesis must comb through the Gospels in search of any possible hint of violence lurking below the surface in order to compile them into a revolutionary portrait.197 Bermejo Rubio, for example, assembles 35 elements of the Jesus tradition into a tour de force of an allegedly historical “pattern,” obfuscating the fact that assembling disparate elements of tradition into a “pattern” is a constructive act of scholarly agency, not necessarily the “discovery” of a pattern lurking “behind” the surface of the texts. One also cannot identify sedition as a recurring “pattern” without recognizing the recurring “pattern” of nonviolent or even anti-violent sentiments in the tradition as well.198 The Jesus-as-politicalrevolutionary “pattern” must be read into the texts via eisegesis while obfuscating the diachronic nature of the Gospels, disregarding the halakhic conflicts as their social context, and resorting to arguments from editorial “tampering” to make the case.199 At the same time, it asserts that exegetes are simply failing to note the “obvious” meaning of many passages.200 The idea that a violence-prone Jesus has been “tampered” with as an attempt to curry favor with the Empire by portraying

Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ 57 Jesus as teaching a non-political Gospel of nonviolence is further complicated by the fact that Jesus was executed for the crime of sedition as a would-be “king of the Jews.” The idea that the evangelists only introduced “nonviolence” as a secondary ideology into the developing tradition is also undermined by the fact that the tradition’s appeal to rhetorical violence actually escalates in the last decades of the first century. For some critics, of course, any claim that Jesus advocated nonviolence smacks of “theological” and/or confessional special pleading.201 Yet the historical Jesus was a theologically-interested and invested human being. Similarly, the Jesus tradition was created by theologically-invested authors. The social structures of the Jesus movement, economic pressures on rural Judea and Galilee, the political landscape(s) of the Herodian era, and ideological and theological streams of thought and practice all shaped the lives of first-century Jews. In this context, our disciplinary boundaries between history and theology can be misleading, especially considering the categorical ambiguity of the term “theology.” Since there is a distinction between “confessional theology” and “non-confessional theology,” the latter of which does not make normative and/or metaphysical claims,202 it is important to keep in mind that although biblical texts do raise a number of concerns relevant to (and worthy of) contemporary ethical reflection,203 ancient theological beliefs also represent historical data. Historically speaking, therefore, it is necessary to account for the different representations of “Jesus” and “God” in the biblical tradition. In other words, it is the historian’s job to account for the literary and theological developments embedded within the early Jesus tradition. The historical Jesus’s theology is a historical problem to be discussed with historical arguments evaluated on their historical merits. The historical Jesus’s worldview can only be understood within a world characterized by socio-political unrest, violence, and oppression.204 Relegating the nonviolent sayings of Jesus to the status of secondary apologetic literary invention, a historically violent Jesus can be transformed into a critic of violence and an antithetical foil to the rebellious and violent “Jew(s).”205 On the other hand, the sayings tradition clearly remembers Jesus as a teacher of interpersonal nonviolence.206 Love Your Enemies. Turn the Other Cheek. Put Down Your Sword. Bless Those Who Curse You. Blessed are the Peacemakers. The Gospels depict Jesus as advocating a variety of nonretaliatory responses to violence.207 Jesus calls disciples to be “peacemakers” (εἰρηνοποιοί).208 Jesus describes God’s unconditional and universal providence of sunshine and rain.209 The Inaugural Sermon of Q is “characterized by nonviolence.”210 A number of sayings emphasize nonjudgment, mercy, and forgiveness.211 The imperative to “love enemies,”212 in particular, is punctuated by imperatives to pray for enemies, turn the other cheek,213 walk the extra mile,214 and not judge,215 sayings that represent an extension of the biblical mandate to “love your neighbor.”216 Various sayings can be read as promoting both violence and nonviolence. This recognition can result in cognitive dissonance: the cognitive inability to reconcile apparently dissonant data. Some critics choose to avoid the problem by denying the problem and/or by trivializing it as a non-problem.217 Others modify the

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dissonance by minimizing the data: the (non)violence is not really that (non)violent. Still others redescribe the problem by expanding the data set so that one or the other side of the debate predominates. David Neville, for example, certainly “grapples” with “troubling texts,” but he also argues that “various Gospel portrayals of the vehement Jesus are compatible with – and perhaps even indispensable to – the composite canonical configuration of Jesus as a person of peace.”218 Conversely, Hector Avalos focuses on “the Bad Jesus,” emphasizing the reprehensible aspects of the Gospels’ Jesus.219 What both scholars have in common, however, is that neither attempt to (re)construct a historical Jesus.220 The problem, therefore, remains: the Jesus tradition can be read as both providing apologetic cover for an early period of unfulfilled eschatological violence and/or as a direct response to the movement’s perceived failure and rejection. How, then, are we to adjudicate the relationship between Jesus and violence? Did Jesus teach an “interim ethic,” a temporary strategic approach adopted while anticipating the imminent arrival of the Eschaton, at which time this ethic would change or become permanent?221 Or was nonviolence a late, learned, and strategic political response to the overwhelming military might of the Roman empire before it became a religious ideal?222 If it seems “too convenient” (to some) to view Jesus as “thoroughly peace-loving,”223 does that mean that Jesus should be viewed – as if by default – through the lens of a “thoroughgoing eschatology” and associated with a “necessarily violent” imminent vision of the End?224 To be sure, some of Jesus’s sayings do invoke visions of violent judgment. The “sword saying,” for example, has been described as a saying calling for “violence.”225 On the other hand, this insinuation – that Jesus “deliberately creates conflict” – has been described as contradictory to “other sayings of Jesus in which he recommends unqualified love.”226 Accordingly, when Jesus says “I have not come to bring peace … but a sword,” most scholars recognize that the word “sword” functions here as a symbol of conflict and division. Are such appeals to “figurative language” in this passage really apologetic attempts to “mitigate or eliminate” the “violent sentiments” of the passage?227 Was Jesus’s “primary purpose” to foment violence within families?228 In its dual literary context, the Matthean Jesus brings a “sword” (μάχαιραν) whereas the Lukan Jesus brings “division” (διαμερισμόν). In both cases, the rhetorical effect is antithetical, but the Matthean “sword” functions as a metaphor for family conflict, as is evident with the literary allusion to Micah 7:6. Yet even if the saying does invoke eschatological “woes” (a questionable inference),229 the Matthean Jesus is not portrayed here as an agent of physical violence, but rather one whose role causes conflict within families divided in their loyalties toward him. Moreover, the sword-saying should be read in light of the cross-saying which qualifies its interpretation (Matt 10:38), signifying not the generation of violence by disciples, but rather its infliction upon them.230 Like the “two swords” saying in Luke, which can be read as a creative innovation of Isaianic scriptural prophecy,231 Matthew’s figurative use of the word “sword” hardly justifies portraying the historical Jesus as ideologically prone toward violence. What about the “Temple tantrum?” All four Gospels portray Jesus as disturbing commercial operations in the Temple. John’s Gospel describes Jesus making

Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ 59 a “whip of cords” (φραγέλλιον ἐκ σχοινίων) to drive “all of them” out of the Temple.232 John, however, does not tell us that Jesus actually used this “whip of cords” to strike anyone. Jesus is reported to have overturned the tables of the money-changers – presumably using physically violent force to do so – so it should be conceded that Jesus’s act in the Temple, as portrayed in the Gospels, could be described as acting violently toward tables and chairs.233 Yet Jesus’s use of force does not require us to identify this as an act of physical violence against animals or people. It has also been suggested that this “whip of cords” was simply used to move animals by “shooing” them away without striking them.234 Consequently, those who read John’s account as evidence that Jesus used a “whip” to beat people are reading this into the text as an act of eisegesis.235 To use the word violence to describe Jesus’s interpersonal ethic confuses more than it clarifies.236 Jesus’s actions, even taken at face value in symbolic narratives – of which the “Temple tantrum” is a classic example – do not point toward a “violent” Jesus.237 On the other hand, identifying Jesus’s discourse on nonviolence does not mean confusing Jesus’s approach with Gandhi’s satyagraha or Martin Luther King Jr.’s “redemptive” suffering either. The Gospels do not represent a systematically coherent principle of nonviolence, but we do find similar principles – like the Dharmic tradition of ahimsa – present within the wider ancient world in which Jesus lived, as in the teachings of the Buddha, Mahavir, and Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita (10.5; 13.8; 16.2).238 More importantly, nonviolence was a scriptural ideal inscribed in the very first chapter of Genesis. Nonviolence is not only an active principle in the first century of the common era; it is also explicable within the socio-political context of first-century Judea, where biblical traditions of a paradisial Eden were conflated with future expectations of a prophetic and apocalyptic end-time. The Jesus tradition’s emphasis on nonviolence is neither unique in the history of religion nor unique in the history of early Judaism. There were cultural precedents of nonviolent resistance in first-century Judaism.239 Josephus documents several examples of first-century Jewish nonviolent resistance to systemic violence (B.J. 2.174; 2.197). Philo refers to helping the enemy (QE 2.11).240 The book of Proverbs anticipates Jesus’s command to love enemies by calling for food and water to be given to them, although a close reading of Proverbs 25:21–22, and Paul’s interpretation of the passage, illustrates that the motivation for kindness to one’s enemies is different from Jesus’s motivation: “If your enemy is hungry, give him food; if he is thirsty, give him a drink of water, for so you will heap live coals on his head.” Paul’s phrasing is just another way of saying, “‘Vengeance is mine,’ sayeth the Lord.” On the contrary, Jesus’s ethical instruction on nonviolence is grounded “in a particular understanding of the imitation of God.”241 His command to “love your enemies” is not simply a “reformulation of earlier Jewish ideas.”242 Rather, it is a “radicalization” of the imperative to love one’s neighbor,243 an ethical imperative based on God’s forgiveness. Jesus’s stance is thus not entirely unprecedented in first-century Judaism, but it does introduce a scripturally informed and politically practical “principle” of nonviolence in early firstcentury Judaism. This is a principle which, as Judith Butler has recently pointed

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out, continues to function as a viable strategic option in social, ethical, political, and philosophical discourse.244 If the lynchpin in the case for a violent Jesus is “thoroughgoing” apocalyptic continuity between John the Baptist, Jesus, and the Jesus movement,245 this appeal to apocalyptic “continuity” is complicated by the fact that Josephus does not describe John the Baptist in “apocalyptic” terms.246 The case for Jesus’s “apocalyptic continuity” is further undermined insofar as it must embrace – on principle – the historicity of apparently contradictory elements in the Jesus tradition. When it comes to the question of Jesus’s apparent (in)consistency, however, we have an insoluble problem.247 Jesus’s inconsistency has been attributed to his uncertainty,248 fallibility,249 indecisiveness,250 and/or psychological confusion, permitting critics to posit that Jesus was capable of changing his mind and/or holding complex threads of thought together without making any apparent effort to systemically reconcile them.251 This appeal to inconsistency as a critical virtue – as if the impasse of our evidentiary limitations can so easily be turned into cogent historical arguments – may be a genuinely sincere attempt to make sense out of apparently confused and confusing accounts. But it may also amount to being a capitulation to the inconsistencies of the Gospels’ representations of Jesus. Such appeals to Jesus’s inconsistency serve apologists who affirm the infallibility of the Gospels, polemicists who foreground violent declarations in the Gospels, and critical scholars unable or unwilling to adjudicate between them. At the same time, quests for consistency that require literary or thematic parsing of the Jesus tradition have sometimes been unfairly mocked as seeking a kind of “foolish” naivete motivated by a “theological gripe.”252 An historical Jesus, however, is not required to bear the weight of the Gospels’ contradictions nor reconcile their inconsistencies in his person. The question, in other words, is this: what if the historical Jesus was “consistent,” but the evangelists were not consistently faithful to his teachings? Since we do not have any compelling reason to think that Jesus’s views on violence developed, changed, or suffered a “crisis” during his ministry,253 this would seem to suggest that Jesus was relatively consistent about his views from the very beginning of his public career. But this need not have prevented the evangelists from introducing their own theological modifications into the developing tradition. In fact, we know that they did so. Presupposing a theoretical model of sociological discontinuity, therefore, makes better sense of the evidence. The social history inscribed in the Gospels is that of a Jewish movement transforming into a predominantly Gentile movement hostile to Jews. Identifying critical discontinuities between Jesus and the subsequent apocalyptic narrative of Paul’s letters and the Gospels suggests that while the latter must be understood as referring to an apocalyptic Davidic messianic agent of eschatological violence, the historical Jesus can arguably be understood as a teacher of ethical instructional and practical nonviolence. The evidence is simply inconclusive as to whether his stance on nonviolence was temporary – that is, a strategic “interim ethic” – or based on principles within his own personal theology. In Christian theology, the concept of an “interim ethic” has been useful as a way of relativizing and “confining” the radicality of Jesus’s call for

Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ 61 ethical perfection.254 It is a “convenient” way of dismissing Jesus’s instructions on nonviolence as inherently unrealistic or other-worldly, and not as a practical manual for this worldly instruction, ethical guidance, and conflict resolution. The irony, however, is that whereas the concept of an “interim ethic” presupposes the fulfillment of the Eschaton (and its failure to appear undercuts the ethical validity of this “interim ethic”), it seems fairly clear that we are still living in this “interim” period, presumably still awaiting a Kingdom and commanded to live as if it were (still) partially present. The evident fact that the Parousia had not arrived, the Kingdom had not come, and “this generation” passed away does not mean that the evangelists found these prophecies embarrassing.255 The evangelists included many sayings of Jesus left unfulfilled because they believed that their fulfillment was still imminent. They believed in Jesus’s resurrection from the dead and the (imminent) arrival of the Eschaton. Resurrection belief played a catalytic role in amplifying the apocalyptic language in the emerging tradition: post-resurrection speculation informs and influences the memory of the pre-Easter sayings of Jesus.256 In other words, the evangelists re-configured the early Jesus tradition to conform to their own apocalyptic expectations of an imminent divine judgment. The confluence of these two streams of pre- and post-Easter sayings introduced ambiguous, inconsistent, and discontinuous elements into an emergent tradition reflecting a movement still struggling to reconcile inherited and developing tensions with its nonviolent ethic and dominical imperative. Historically speaking, our earliest evidence should be privileged, based on the critical principle of chronological prioritization. In Synoptic studies, this is the Double Tradition, the material shared by Matthew and Luke, otherwise known as Q (Quelle = Source). The instructional wisdom of Q’s “Inaugural Sermon,” sometimes identified as Q’s “formative stratum,”257 is “characterized by nonviolence.”258 Q may only be “a source for the historical Jesus,”259 but the “gap between Jesus and Q is probably not too great.”260 In fact, “the entire teaching material which is attributed to Jesus points away from his being a revolutionary in a way that would actually have threatened Rome.” Consequently, “either the evangelists have not only invented the Jewish trial scenes, but also an enormously rich body of teaching material, while completely hiding Jesus’s true views,” or Jesus was “no revolutionary in the political sense of the word. The latter seems overwhelmingly the more likely hypothesis.”261 Instructional nonviolence is reliable “gist memory” of the historical Jesus.262 * Did the historical Jesus advocate nonviolence because nonviolence was a revelation of the Kingdom or because nonviolence was a temporary “interim” strategy foreshadowing life in the Kingdom (which would be inaugurated by violence), rendering the ethic irrelevant once the Eschaton failed to arrive?263 In either case, the Jesus tradition introduced increasingly virulent appeals to apocalyptic violence, but this distinction between the historical Jesus and the Jesus of the Gospels recognizes an escalation of violence in the Jesus tradition without ascribing that

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escalation to the historical Jesus. In this context, positing discontinuity between John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul is not an attempt to “firewall[s] Jesus of Nazareth from eschatological error, imputing temporal miscalculation to the post-crucifixion community.”264 It is simply good history.265 If the Gospels contain “eschatological error[s],” why must they be imputed to the historical Jesus? Our earliest evidence does not provide a clear picture of apocalyptic continuity between Jesus and the Jesus tradition, but rather one of sociological discontinuity between early Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus. The Gospels are not simple transcripts of Jesus’s teachings, but creative compositions that draw from, and develop, Jesus traditions while reflecting and representing the present concerns of their authors. Those concerns included remembering the past, but they also involved defending their own positions and challenging rivals, whether those rivals were Jews, Gentiles, or other Christ-followers. To shift our focus from the Jesus of history to the rhetorical function of the Gospels’ appeal to violence is to ask a different set of questions. What I have been proposing up to this point is that although the imminent violence of an end-time judgment is indeed associated with resurrection language in Paul’s letters (c. 30–60 CE), the fact that the end did not arrive did not lead to the conclusion that the use of resurrection language may have been a “category error.”266 On the contrary, the evangelists, writing between 70–100 CE, not only maintained this earlier conviction of an imminent violent judgment (associated with resurrection language); they also reimagined its imminent fulfillment in light of the destruction of the Temple while retroactively projecting this as prophecy in the life and teachings of John the Baptist and Jesus, re-casting both leaders into “apocalyptic” progenitors of a now Gentile-dominant true Israel. How, then, should we explain the presence of nonviolent instruction in the early Jesus tradition? The arguments for a violent revolutionary Jesus posit that it belongs to a secondary stratum of the post-70 CE period – but fail to explain how nonviolence entered the tradition other than to invent a “pacifistic” Jesus via apologetic accommodation. This model also neglects the socio-political context within which strategic nonviolence was an effective solution to political conflict. The “traditional” apocalyptic worldview explains this instruction as authentic, but only as an “interim” ethic anticipating the imminent violence of the endtime judgment: one lives as if the Kingdom had arrived, but since the end-time failed to arrive and/or has been indefinitely postponed, this instruction tends to be relegated to the period of Jesus’s historical ministry. There is another way of understanding this stratum’s presence in the early tradition that explains it as an authentic reflection of Jesus’s own theological worldview – that is, as a firstcentury instructional ethic of principled nonviolence developed in response to the “traditional” apocalyptic worldview – but whether or not one concludes that the historical Jesus required nonviolence as a temporary or as a permanent way of life for his followers, our interests here are more in understanding the appeal to violent language attributed to Jesus. As we will see, there were good reasons for the evangelists to appeal to apocalyptic violence. The language of violence served multiple purposes in promoting the truth-claims of an emergent movement facing

Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ 63 opposition and provided an effective repertoire of rhetorical threats and weapons against perceived enemies while consoling the faithful. Violence, whether real, perceived, or imagined, can produce both destructive and generative effects.267 In the context of early Judaism, many Jews competed over what they perceived to be the scarce resource of divine election. The rhetoric of violence served an “adaptive” function in a hostile environment and a useful way to mobilize emotional resources toward the defense and survival of emergent, but vulnerable, group identities.268 Since Jewish identity was characterized by both fear of loss of “cultural territory” and externalized anger as a defensive action and response,269 the production of imagined narratives of religious judgment served to transfer this fear onto a perceived common enemy, which in turn served to unify groups against that common enemy.270 This projection of righteous anger served both to deflect fear and create a sense of confidence and power, creating “antisocial emotions like resentment,”271 which led to the “hunger for revenge.” Expressed in religious terms, this impulse to defend one’s group identity resulted in the demonization of enemies and fantasies of their imminent “end-time” judgment. The Gospels contain inconsistent traditions not because Jesus was inconsistent, but because inconsistent traditions were useful resources in adapting to different cultural and social situations.272 Scriptural inconsistencies may be frustrating for the historian, but they “can be considered a virtue in a cultural system that needs to draw upon different messages as environmental conditions change.”273 The rhetorical appeal to apocalypticism, the so-called “mother of all Christian theology,”274 originated in early Jewish sectarian ideologies contesting rival claims of election where it was used as a weapon of judgment, revenge, and punishment. It also became the dominant discourse in and through which contradistinctive identity processes were shaped and formed, obfuscating the very socio-ethnic conflicts that helped give rise to the need to appeal to apocalyptic discourse in the first place.

Notes 1 King, “Factions, Variety, Diversity, Multiplicity”; Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism.” 2 Schilbrack, “Religions: Are There Any?,” here 1113–14, 1117–26. On the constructed category, see also Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept. 3 McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion; Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; Asad, Geneaologies of Religion; Smith, Imagining Religion. 4 E.P. Sanders, Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah: Five Studies (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990); Judaism: Practice and Belief 63 BCE–66 CE (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992); Wayne O. McCready and Adele Reinhartz (eds.), Common Judaism: Explorations in Second-Temple Judaism (rev. edn.; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011 [2008]); Fabian E. Udoh, Susannah Heschel, Mark Chancey, and Gregory Tatum, Redefining First-Century Jewish and Christian Identities: Essays in Honor of Ed Parish Sanders (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008). 5 Martin Hengel and Roland Deines, “E.P. Sanders’ ‘Common Judaism,’ Jesus, and the Pharisees,” JTS 46 no. 1(1995), 1–70.

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6 Hengel and Deines, “E.P. Sanders’ ‘Common Judaism,’” 54, refer to Sanders’ “common Judaism” as an “apologetic, harmonizing” portrait of “a relatively peaceful and conflict-free ‘common Judaism’ devoted to the temple and the priesthood.” 7 Hengel and Deines, “E.P. Sanders’ ‘Common Judaism,’” 54. 8 Hengel and Deines, “E.P. Sanders’ ‘Common Judaism,’” 53, suggest that “Instead of speaking of an ideal and harmonious ‘common Judaism,’ it would be much more appropriate to proceed from the idea, not of diverse ‘Judaisms,’ as is currently fashionable, but of a ‘complex Judaism’ which formed a stable community only over against the outside and in difficult conflict situations (and not always even then), but which on the inside constantly had to seek workable compromises in order to face foreign rule as a nation.” 9 Hengel and Deines, “E.P. Sanders’ ‘Common Judaism,’” 16. 10 David Van Biema, “Re-Judaizing Jesus,” Time 171 no. 12 (March 13, 2008), http:// content.time/com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601080324,00.html [accessed December 25, 2019]. 11 Meyer, Jesus the Jew in Christian Memory, 12, argues that the “Jewishness” of Jesus may be useful as a signifier in the service of Christian thought and theology insofar as “taking the Jewishness of Jesus seriously helps to express the particular inner grammar of Christian thought.” 12 David Mishkin, “The emerging Jewish views of the messiahship of Jesus and their bearing on the question of his resurrection,” HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 71 no. 1 (2015), Art. # 2881, 7 pages. 13 On the question of Jesus’s early education, see Jerome H. Neyrey, “‘How does This Man have Learning, Since He Is without Education’ (John 7:15),” BTB 48 no. 2 (2018), 85–96. 14 On ancient literacy, see Kim Haines-Eitzen, The Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 117–18. 15 Luke 2:46–47. 16 John 7:15. 17 Mark 1:9. The composition of the Gospel of Mark is traditionally attributed to “John Mark,” the companion of Paul (Acts 12:25) and companion of Peter (1 Pet 5:13). 18 Chris Keith, Jesus Against the Scribal Elite: The Origins of the Conflict (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014), 44–63, notes that several manuscripts of Mark’s Gospel read “son of the carpenter” at Mark 6:3, although these may be scribal assimilations to Matthew 13:55. 19 Cf. Justin Martyr, Dial. 88; Inf. Gos. Thom. 13.1–3; Origen, Cels. 6.34; 6.36. See also Ken M. Campbell, “What was Jesus’ Occupation?” JETS 48.3 (2005): 501–20; Richard A. Batey, “Is not this the Carpenter?” NTS 30 (1984): 249–58. On τέκτονες in antiquity, see Kai Ruffing, Die berufliche Spezialisierung in Handel und Handwerk: Untersuchungen zu ihrer Entwicklung und zu ihren Bedingungen in der römischen Kaiserzeit im östlichen Mittelmeerraum auf der Grundlage griechischer Inschriften und Papyri (2 vols.; Pharos 24; Leidorf, Rahden, 2008), 1: 131; “Die regionale Mobilität von Händlern und Handwerkern nach den griechischen Inschriften,” in E. Olshausen and H. Sonnabend (eds.), “Troianer sind wir gewesen” – Migrationen in der antiken Welt (Geographica Historica 21; Stuttgart, 2006), 133–140. 20 Matt 13:55. 21 Luke 4:22; cf. John 6:42. 22 Marco Frenschkowski, “Itinerant Charismatics and Travelling Artisans: Was Jesus’ Travelling Lifestyle Induced by His Artisan Background?,” in Markus Tiwald (ed.), The Q Hypothesis Unveiled: Theological, Sociological, and Hermeneutical Issues Behind the Sayings Source (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2020), 191–222, here 195. 23 Frenschkowski, “Itinerant Charismatics and Travelling Artisans.”

Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ 65 24 Gerd Theissen, Studien zur Sociologie des Urchristentums (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1979), 111: “Eine hohe Identifikation mit dem Hand-werk kann kaum vorhanden gewesen sein.” 25 Meier, A Marginal Jew, 2:352. One wonders, of course, how Meier knows that Jesus was “insufferably ordinary” as a young man. On peasants, see George M. Foster, “What Is a Peasant?,” in Peasant Society: A Reader (eds. Jack M. Potter, Mary N. Diaz & George M. Foster; Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1967), 2–14; Eric R. Wolf, Peasants (FMAS; Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966). 26 Mark 1:22. 27 Mark 9:29. 28 Mark 5:25–34; 5:35–42. 29 Paul Hollenbach, “The Conversion of Jesus: From Jesus the Baptizer to Jesus the Healer,” ANRW II 25 (1982), 196–219, here 202: “There is an assumption, again usually based on theological commitments, that Jesus, at least in his mature years and certainly throughout his public career, did not change, grow, or develop in his thought and strategy in response either to inner psychological or outer environmental factors.” 30 Hengel and Deines, “E.P. Sanders ‘Common Judaism,’ Jesus, and the Pharisees,” 54. 31 Sanders, Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah, 125, states that “The synoptic Jesus lived as a law-abiding Jew.” Meyer, Jesus the Jew in Christian Memory, 51, regards “the view of Jesus himself as fundamentally observant as constitutive for any discourse on Jesus the Jew.” Crossley, “The Next Quest,” 262–263, suggests that “The Next Quest will analyse and contextualise ancient claims and perceptions of what it meant to be Jewish … without imposing scholarly judgment on who was and was not a proper Jew.” 32 L. H. Schiffman, “The Dead Sea Scrolls and Rabbinic Halakhah,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls as Background to Postbiblical Judaism and Early Christianity: Papers from an International Conference at St. Andrews in 2001 (ed. J. R. Davila; STDJ 46; Leiden: Brill, 2003), 3–24; Paul Heger, The Pluralistic Halakhah: Legal Innovations in the Late Second Commonwealth and Rabbinic Periods (SJ FWJ 22; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003). 33 In Acts 9:2, for example, Paul is portrayed as persecuting those “who belonged to the Way” (τῆς ὁδοῦ ὄντας). Cf. Acts 24:5; 22:4; 19:9; 24:14, 22. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Semitic Background of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 282–283: “the same absolute use of ‘the Way’ occurs in the Qumran writings to designate the mode of life of the Essenes … the close similarity of usage suggests in this case Essene influence.” Cf. S. V. McCasland, “The Way,” JBL 77 (1958), 222–230; J. Andrew Cowan, The Writings of Luke and the Jewish Roots of the Christian Way: An Examination of the Aims of the First Christian Historian in the Light of Ancient Politics, Ethnography, and Historiography (LNTS 599; London and New York: T&T Clark, 2019). 34 1QS 9.17–18; CD 1.13; cf. 20.18. 35 1QS 8.18, 21; 9.5, 6, 8, 9. 36 Deut 5:33; 10:12; 30:16; 42:24; Zech 3:7. 37 On “the halakic Jesus,” see John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 4, Law and Love, AYBRL (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Joseph, Jesus and the Temple; Tom Holmén, Jesus and Jewish Covenant Thinking (BI; Leiden: Brill, 2001); Thomas Kazen, Scripture, Interpretation, or Authority? Motives and Arguments in Jesus’ Halakic Conflicts, WUNT 320 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 30–31. 38 On the Jewish “way of life” as a theoretical category in the study of early Jewish and Christian identity construction, see David G. Horrell, “Religion, Ethnicity, and Way of Life: Exploring Categories of Identity,” CBQ 82 no. 1 (2021), 38–55.

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39 On Jesus’s “eschatological halakhah,” see Joseph, Jesus, the Essenes, and Christian Origins. 40 James D.G. Dunn, “Jesus and Purity: An Ongoing Debate,” NTS 48 no. 4 (2002), 449–467. 41 Craig L. Blomberg, “The Authenticity and Significance of Jesus’ Table Fellowship with Sinners,” in D.L. Bock and R.L. Webb (eds.), Key Events in the Life of the Historical Jesus: A Collaborative Exploration of Context and Coherence (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010). 215–50, 244; James D.G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered (Christianity in the Making 1; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 603, 639–42; Craig A. Evans, “‘Who Touched Me?’ Jesus and the Ritually Impure,” in B.D. Chilton and C.A. Evans (eds.), Jesus in Context: Temple, Purity, and Restoration (AGJU 39; Leiden: Brill, 1997), 353–76. 42 Matthew Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels’ Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within First-Century Judaism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020). 43 Cecilia Wassén, “The Jewishness of Jesus and Ritual Purity,” Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis 27 (2016), 11–36, 12. See also James G. Crossley, The Date of Mark’s Gospel: Insight from the Law in Earliest Christianity (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2004); Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, 197–207. 44 Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death, xi, states that “This book is not about the historical Jesus … not trying to get behind the Gospels to uncover the real Jesus … not to weigh the literary evidence in order to discover data of historical value.” Thiessen regards “the methodology of most historical Jesus research … too blunt to do what historical Jesus scholars require.” Nonetheless, Jesus’s followers “remember him in a certain way” because this “must shed some light on the historical realities” that prompted the writing of the Gospels (xii, emphasis added). 45 Paula Fredriksen, review of Matthew Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death, RBL (2021), describes (apparently approvingly) how this monograph proceeds by “disposing” of historical Jesus research “in a few deft paragraphs.” Fredriksen echoes (and seconds) Thiessen’s call to “work sympathetically to understand ancient Jewish thinking about ritual purity on its own terms” (5), apparently concluding that the Gospels represent just such “Jewish thinking about ritual purity.” To my mind, this approach confuses the Gospels’ representation of Jesus as a divine agent with the ritual purity realia of first-century Jewish culture, a world already quite far removed from the Gentile-dominant social and cultural world of the evangelists’ readers. It is also to read the Gospels outside their literary-compositional contexts as late-first century texts that are not simply presenting their Jesus as just one more “Jewish” voice in an ongoing Jewish discussion of Jewish Law, but rather re-conceptualizing the ongoing role of Jewish Law for (mostly Gentile) Christ-followers by employing “Jesus” as the divine guarantor establishing legal precedents. 46 Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death, 173: “the Jesus of the Gospels is a Jesus who seeks to observe the Jewish Law and who provides legal defenses of his actions on the basis of the Jewish Law.” 47 Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death; cf. Jacob Milgrom, “The Rationale for Biblical Impurity,” Janes 22 (1993), 107–111; Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “Pollution, Purification and Purgation in Biblical Israel,” in Carol L. Meyers and M. O’Connor (eds.), The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman in Celebration of His Sixtieth Birthday (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1983); Hyam Maccoby, Ritual and Morality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 48 Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death, 180, describing Jesus as the agent of God who “goes on the offense against impurity.” 49 Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, 203–04, refers to Mark 1:40–44 as “A manifest example of this embeddedness of purity rules” in Jesus’s ministry, although conceding that “There is no way to know whether anything like this exchange between Jesus and a leper ever actually took place.” William Arnal, Review of Paula Fredriksen, Jesus of

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Nazareth: King of the Jews, The Jewish Quarterly Review 90 no. 3/4 (2000), 439– 442, 439, refers to this as “a more or less monolithic caricature of an astonishingly un-Hellenized Judaism, 440, which leads to conclusions about how “neither Jesus nor Paul took issue with Torah or purity laws, since purity laws were taken for granted by all Jews of the time … This is an illegitimate use of context which, basing itself on a static and reified notion of religion, seems to preclude substantial diversity or innovation. The fact is, early Christian literature, including that written by Jews … is overtly hostile to purity considerations, implicitly hostile to the Temple and Jerusalem, and divided on Torah,” 441. Lev. 14.2–4, 4–8; 13.17, 50. This is reminiscent of Mark 16:8, where the women, although commanded by “a young man dressed in a white robe,” to proclaim Jesus’s resurrection, ultimately say “nothing to anyone.” Cf. Wassén, “The Jewishness of Jesus and Ritual Purity,” 25–26: “First, we should note the obvious: the story is not presented as one portraying a conflict in any way. In other words, Mark does not lead his audience to interpret the story as an example of how Jesus challenged Jewish laws … It is also evident that this record shows Jesus respecting and encouraging observance of the laws concerning the purifications which include examination by a priest and the offering of a sacrifice … there is no example in any of the healing stories … that he in any way would have challenged contemporary norms concerning ritual purity regulations.” Emilio G. Chavez, The Theological Significance of Jesus’ Temple Action in Mark’s Gospel (TST 87; Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2002). See also Mark 6:11. E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (New York: Penguin, 1993), 224, sees Jesus as being in agreement with “standard Jewish advice, which reflects endorsement of the sacrificial system.” On the healed leper as a witness intended to confront the priests, see E. K. Broadhead, “Mark 1,44: The Witness of the Leper,” ZNW 83 (1992), 257–265, here 260–63; “Christology as Polemic and Apologetic: The Priestly Portrait of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark,” JSNT, 47 (1992), 21–34, esp. 24–5; Jarmo Kiilunen, Die Vollmacht im Widerstreit: Untersuchungen zum Werdegang von Mk 2,1—3,6 (ASFDHL 40; Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1985), 33 n. 17; R. Banks, Jesus and the Law in the Synoptic Tradition (SNTS MS 28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 103; Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990), 153; H.C. Cave, “The Leper: Mk 1:40–45,” NTS 25 (1979), 245–50, esp. 249–50; C.R. Kazmierski, “Evangelist and Leper: A Socio-Cultural Study of Mk 1.40–45,” NTS 38 (1992), 37–50, esp. 46–8. Holmén, Jesus and Jewish Covenant Thinking, 329 n. 316. William R. G. Loader, Jesus’ Attitude towards the Law: A Study of the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 22, sees Jesus’s act as affirming priestly authority. Robert L. Webb, “Jesus Heals a Leper: Mark 1.40–45 and Egerton Gospel 35–47,” JSHJ 4.2 (2006), 177–202, here 200. Cf. 200: “the expression … could be understood as ‘as a witness against them’ or ‘as a witness to them.’ This latter view … provides another hint of an antagonistic relationship between Jesus and the priests.” Crossley, Date, 87–88, suggests that Mark 1:40–44 is “[o]ne of the clearest examples of Jesus upholding the Temple system,” but acknowledges that εἰς μαρτύριον αὐτοῖς can be read “in the sense of a witness against the priests.” This “can hardly be taken in the sense of a direct confrontation with the purity system” (88), but “it may be Mark’s anticipation of priestly opposition to Jesus.” Lloyd Gaston, No Stone on Another: Studies in the Significance of the Fall of Jerusalem in the Synoptic Gospels (NovT Sup 23; Leiden: Brill, 1970), 91: “When here the leper is not only healed but cleansed, then the prescribed sacrifice no longer makes any sense. That the man is nevertheless told to go to the priest and offer his sacrifice does not contradict this.” Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death.

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58 Michael Patrick Barber, “The Historical Jesus and Cultic Restoration Eschatology: The New Temple, the New Priesthood and the New Cult,” Ph.D. dissertation, Fuller Theological Seminary, 2010, 204, suggests that “it would seem entirely unlikely that Jesus would have completely rejected the validity of the cult.” Indeed, Barber views Matthew 5:23-24 as authentic Jesus tradition insofar as “no text describes early Christians bringing sacrifices to the temple nor do any offer instruction regarding etiquette for participating in the cultic activity there” (687). Barber’s appeal to the criterion of dissimilarity can be countered by the fact that this passage is exclusively Matthean and conforms to Matthew’s efforts to rehabilitate the (Pauline) Markan Jesus’s critical stance toward the Temple. Consequently, I disagree with Barber’s assessment that “the presence of this saying is completely inexplicable unless it is considered authentic” (226 n. 68). The fact that Matthew is typically dated to post-70 CE points points, to my mind, to the opposite conclusion: Matthew had good reasons to introduce a pro-cultic saying into his gospel in order to represent what a Torah-and cult-observant Jesus might have said. Moreover, Matthew’s Great Commission clearly envisions pre- and post-resurrection circumstances within the movement. 59 Dale C. Allison Jr., Studies in Matthew: Interpretation Past and Present Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 73–74. 60 Price, Judaizing Jesus, 52–53: “it seems impossible not to take the adjacent verses as Matthean embellishment. That they cannot go back to Jesus in any case is evident from the fact that verse 17 already knows of a rival Christian opinion that Jesus ‘came to’ abolish the scriptures, theological language interpreting the ministry of Jesus, a figure of the past. Jesus cannot have said this.” 61 J. Painter, Mark’s Gospel: Worlds in Conflict (NTR; London: Routledge, 1997), 4–6; W. R. Telford, The Theology of the Gospel of Mark (NTT; Cambridge University Press, 1999), 164–169; Joel Marcus, Mark 1–8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 27; New York: Doubleday, 2000), 73–75; “Mark—Interpreter of Paul,” NTS, 46 (2000), 473–487; J. Svartvik, Mark and Mission: Mk 7:1–23 in its Narrative and Historical Contexts (CBNTS 32; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2000), 344–347. 62 T. J. Weeden, Mark – Traditions in Conflict (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971), 50. 63 B. Repschinski, Nicht aufzulösen, sondern zu erfüllen: Das jüdische Gesetz in den synoptischen Jesuserzählungen (FzB 120; Würzburg: Echter, 2009), 143–216. 64 Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 356: “The comment of v. 19c takes a giant step further and implies, at the very least, that the observance of the food laws for followers is not obligatory”; Cf. Marcus, Mark, 458: “anyone who did what the Markan Jesus does in our passage, denying this dietary distinction and declaring all food to be permissible (7:19), would immediately be identified as a seducer who led the people’s heart astray from God (cf. 7:6).” This is an “explicit revocation of the OT kosher laws ascribed to Jesus by Mark.” 65 If he had, this teaching would not need to have been “revealed” to Peter in a dream (Acts 10). 66 John van Maaren, “Does Mark’s Jesus Abrogate Torah? Jesus’ Purity Logion and its Illustration in Mark 7:15–23,” JJMJS no. 4 (2017), 21–41, 26, suggests that Mark 7:15 “assumes the relevancy of purity laws” and that “Jesus’s response is that impurity does not take place, not that it does not matter–Mark’s Jesus has a positive evaluation of the purity laws.” 67 Note how van Maaren, “Does Mark’s Jesus Abrogate Torah?,” 22, refers to Jesus’ and Mark’s concern for “purity matters” is “only natural for a text written … before the emergence of any post-Jewish form of Christianity.” 68 Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels, argues that the Markan Jesus was not criticizing Pharisaic customs about eating with defiled hands, but rather to the Laws of Purity that the Pharisees tried to impose on other Jews. On Jesus’s observance of kashrut,

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71 72

73

74 75 76

77 78

79 80 81 82

see also Crossley, The Date of Mark’s Gospel, 192. Cf. van Maaren, “Does Mark’s Jesus Abrogate Torah?,” 38: “in the Marcan narrative, 7:19c must also refer to kosher food.” Paula Fredriksen, “Did Jesus Oppose the Purity Laws?,” BR 11 no. 3 (1995), 18–25, 42–47. Thomas Kazen, Jesus and Purity Halakhah: Was Jesus Indifferent to Impurity? (CBNTS 38; Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 2002), 344: “Jesus’ behavior may be understood as indifferent, and there are signs that it was interpreted as such by his adversaries.” Cf. Scripture, Interpretation, or Authority?, 118. Meier, A Marginal Jew, 4: 415, refers to Jesus’s “studied indifference.” Kazen, Jesus and Purity Halakhah, 346–347, referring to the Kingdom. Cecilia Wassén, review of Simon J. Joseph, Jesus, the Essenes, and Christian Origins, DSD 27 no. 2 (2020), 323–325, 324, states that “Joseph claims that Jesus appears to have been indifferent to ritual impurity,” but fails to note my reference to Kazen (Jesus and Purity Halakhah: Was Jesus Indifferent to Impurity?) and his use of the language of “indifference.” Cecilia Wassén, “Jesus’ Table Fellowship with ‘Toll Collectors and Sinners’: Questioning the Alleged Purity Implications,” JSHT 14 (2016), 137–157, 149 n. 51: “Jesus’ more liberal attitude is apparent concerning halakhic details such as tithing or eating grain from the field on the Sabbath. But he demonstrates a rigid attitude in his ethical teaching.” Cecilia Wassen, “Jesus’ Work as a Healer in Light of Jewish Purity Laws,” in Bridging between Sister Religions: Studies of Jewish and Christian Scriptures Offered in Honor of Prof. John T. Townsend, ed. Isaac Kalimi (BRLJ 51; Leiden: Brill, 2016), 87–104. On moral impurity, see Jonathan Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 26–31. On asceticism, see Steven Fraade, “Ascetical Aspects of Ancient Judaism,” in Jewish Spirituality: From the Bible through the Middle Ages (ed. A. Green; New York: Crossroad, 1986), 253–88; Dale C. Allison, Jr., Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), 198; Fraade, “The Nazirite in Ancient Judaism,” in Vincent L. Wimbush (ed.), Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity (SAC; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), 213–23. H. Dressler, The Use of Askeō and its Cognates in Greek Documents to 100 A.D. (Catholic University of America Patristic Series, 78; Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1947). On Greco-Roman asceticism, see A. Meredith, “Asceticism—Christian and Greek,” JTS 27 (1976): 313–32; A.A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California,1986), 107–22; J. M. Rist, Stoic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); A. Erskine, The Hellenistic Stoa: Political Thought and Action (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); James A. Francis, Subversive Virtue: Asceticism and Authority in the Second-Century Pagan World (University Park: Pennsylvania University State Press, 1995); A. J. Malherbe, “Self-Definition among Epicureans and Cynics,” in Jewish and Christian Self-Definition (eds. B. F. Meyer and E. P. Sanders; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), 46–59. P. Cox, Biography in Late Antiquity: A Quest for the Holy Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 25. Kallistos Ware, “The Way of the Ascetics: Negative or Affirmative?,” in Vincent L. Wimbush and Richard Valantasis (eds.), Asceticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3–15, 4. F. C. Conybeare, Philostratus: The Life of Apollonius of Tyana: The Epistles of Apollonius and the Treatise of Eusebius (2 vols.; London: W. Heinemann and New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927), ix. Francis, Subversive Virtue, 107.

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83 See Richard Valantasis, “Constructions of Power in Asceticism,” JAAR 63 (1995), 797; “A Theory of the Social Function of Asceticism,” in Asceticism, 544–52. 84 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology (trans. Joseph Ward Swain; New York: The Macmillan Co., 1915), 309–14. Cf. Walter O. Kaelber, “Asceticism,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 1: 441–45; Averil Cameron, “Ascetic Closure and the End of Antiquity,” in Asceticism (eds. V. L. Wimbush and R. Valantasis; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 151. 85 Joseph, “The Ascetic Jesus,” 146–81. Patterson, “Asceticism and the Early Jesus Tradition,” in Asceticism and the New Testament (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 50; J. Duncan M. Derrett, “Primitive Christianity as an Ascetic Movement,” in Vincent L. Wimbush and Richard Valantasis (eds), Asceticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 89, 93; Allison, Jesus of Nazareth, 216: those who portray Jesus as non-ascetic “have misconstrued the evidence.” See also Wayne A. Meeks, The Moral World of the First Christians (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986), 104–05: “many of the sayings of Jesus seem to demand an ascetic detachment.” See also Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth, 405: Jesus’s teachings constituted an “extremist ascetic ethical system.” 86 On the Jesus movement as “ascetic,” see Patterson, “Asceticism and the Early Jesus Tradition,” 50; Derrett, “Primitive Christianity,” 89, 93: “Christian asceticism was impressive from the first.” See also J. Lachowski, “Asceticism (in the New Testament),” in New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 1: 937–38: following Jesus “implies an ascetic renunciation by the disciple.” Helmut Koester, Introduction to the New Testament: History and Literature of Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), 2:148–49, points out that discipleship “implies renunciation of the world and of its social bonds.” On asceticism in the New Testament, see Mary Ann Tolbert, “Asceticism and Mark’s Gospel,” in Asceticism and the New Testament, 39; Vincent L. Wimbush, “The Ascetic Impulse in Ancient Christianity,” TT 50 (1993–94): 417–28; Vincent L. Wimbush (ed.), Semeia 58: Discursive Formations, Ascetic Piety and the Interpretation of Early Christian Literature (Atlanta: Scholars, 1992). 87 Q 9:57–62. 88 Mark 1:16, 10:28, Matt 8:20, 10:5, 10:23. 89 Mark 10:25, Mark 10:28, Matt 10:10, 6:19, 6:33–34, Luke 6:24. 90 Matt 5:38, 10:17; Q 12:22–31; 11:3, 9–13. 91 Q 10:2–11; 12:22, 30. 92 Q 13:24. 93 Q 9:59–60a, 14:26, 12:51–53, Mark 10:29–30, 1:20, Matt 8:22, Luke 8:19–21. 94 Q 9:59–60, 61–62; 14:26. 95 Q 9:57–58; 12:4–7, 13–14, 22–31, 33–34; 14:27; 17:33; 16:13. 96 John S. Kloppenborg, “Making Sense of Difference: Asceticism, Gospel Literature, and the Jesus Tradition,” in Vincent L. Wimbush and Leif E. Vaage (eds.), Asceticism and the New Testament (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 149–56, 155 (emphasis added): “While similarities may be identified between the Jesus tradition, ascetical discourse, and martyrological stories, it seems to me to be fundamentally unhelpful to resort to a weak definition of asceticism that would allow one to embrace the gospels as ascetic.” Kloppenborg prefers a “strong” definition of asceticism which would exclude the Gospels as ascetic literature. Kloppenborg claims that “on the face of it, none of the characters of the Jesus tradition – except for John the Baptist – seems remotely ascetic” (150). He suggests that we adopt a definition of asceticism that “excludes the canonical gospels but excludes them in a disciplined, and therefore illuminating, manner.” 97 Vincent L. Wimbush, “Renunciation Towards Social Engineering (An Apologia for the Study of Asceticism in Greco-Roman Antiquity),” Occasional Papers of the

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Institute for Antiquity and Christianity 8 (Claremont, CA: Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, 1986), 1. John 16:33. Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), esp. 342–52. Birger A. Pearson, “Did Jesus Marry?” Bible Review (Spring 2005): 32–39, 47. See also Karen L. King, The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle (Santa Rosa: Polebridge, 2003); Jane Schaberg, Mary Magdalene Understood (New York: Continuum Press, 2006); The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian Testament (New York: Continuum, 2004); Ann Graham Brock, Mary Magdalene, The First Apostle: The Struggle for Authority (HTS 51; Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2003). Anthony Le Donne, The Wife of Jesus: Ancient Texts and Modern Scandals (London: Oneworld, 2013), 141–42, suggests that Jesus “might have been married in his young adulthood,” but was probably not the “marrying type.” On sexual asceticism in early Judaism, see Matthew Black, “The Tradition of the Hasideaean-Essene Asceticism: Its Origin and Influence,” in Aspects du JudéoChristianisme: Colloque de Strasbourg 23–25 avril 1964 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), 19–32; Joseph M. Baumgarten, “The Qumran-Essene Restraints on Marriage,” in Archaeology and History in the Dead Sea Scrolls (ed. L. H. Schiffman; Sheffield: JSOT, 1990), 13–24. Allison, Jesus of Nazareth, 1999), 198; Fraade, “The Nazirite in Ancient Judaism,” 213–23; “Ascetical Aspects of Ancient Judaism,” 261. On Essene celibacy, see Pierre Benoit, ‘Qumran and the New Testament,’ in Paul and Qumran: Studies in New Testament Exegesis (ed. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor; Chicago: Priory, 1968), 9: “the eunuchs by choice (Mt 19:12) are probably the Essenes, as the religious ideal of celibacy is not attested anywhere else in Palestine at that period.” 1 Cor 7:26, 29, 31. Matt 5:27–28. Matt 19:12. Saldarini, “Asceticism and the Gospel of Matthew,” 22, points out that it is far more likely that those who make themselves “eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom” are to be understood as celibates. W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, Jr., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to Saint Matthew (3 vols.; ICC; Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1988–1997), argue that Matt. 19:10–12 refers to those able and willing to commit to life-long celibacy. See also T. W. Manson, The Sayings of Jesus (London: SCM, 1949), 215–16. Mark 3:20–21, 31–34. Mark 6:1–6; cf. Matt 13:53–58. John 7:1–5. Q 14:26. See also the Gospel of Thomas, L. 55, 101. Cf. Mark 9:43–48. Hector Avalos, The Bad Jesus: The Ethics of New Testament Ethics (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2015), 89, appeals to the Elephantine Aramaic texts, Deuteronomy 13, Epictetus, Mesopotamian texts, and the Gospel of Thomas’ parallels to the Gospels in an effort to prove that Q/Luke 14:26 portrays Jesus as advocating a literal “hatred” of family. Mark 3:20, 31–35. Matt 10:37. Mark 3:31–34; Luke 11:27–28; Luke 9:59; 12:51–53. Bruce Chilton, The Way of Jesus: To Repair and Renew the World (Nashville: Abingdon, 2010). Mark 6:15; 8:28; Matt 21:11; 21:46; 26:68; Luke 4:16, 24; 7:16; 24:19; Acts 3:22; 7:37; John 1:21; 4:19; 6:14; 7:40; 7:52; 9:17. Mark 9:31. Cf. Luke 13:32–33. On the non-historicity of this “prophecy,” see Paula Fredriksen, “Gospel Chronologies, the Scene at the Temple, and the Crucifixion of Jesus,” in F. E. Udoh (ed.), Redefining

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Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ First-Century Jewish and Christian Identities: Essays in Honor of Ed Parish Sanders (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 246–82. Cecilia Wassén and Tobias Hägerland, Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet (trans. Cian J. Power; London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 98. On Jesus as mistaken, see Paula Fredriksen, “What You See Is What You Get: Context and Content in Current Research on the Historical Jesus,” Theology Today 52 no. 1 (1995), 75–97, 95. Cf. Paula Fredriksen, “Compassion is to Purity as Fish is to Bicycle: And Other Reflections on Constructions of ‘Judaism’ in Current Work on the Historical Jesus,” in John S. Kloppenborg and John W. Marshall, eds., Apocalypticism, Anti-Semitism and the Historical Jesus: Subtexts in Criticism (London and New York: T & T Clark, 2005), 56–67, 63. Deut. 13:2–6; 18:22. Mark 9:1. Mark 13:30. Matt 10:23. Cf. Mark 9:1; 13:30; 14:62. Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 160; Allison, Jesus of Nazareth, 166: he “did in fact erroneously hail the end as near.” Cf. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 479: he was “proved wrong by the course of events.” Fredriksen, “Compassion is to Purity as Fish is to Bicycle,” 63: “he ends up being wildly wrong in his time-keeping.” Philip Vielhauer, “Gottesreich und Menschensohn in der Verkündigung Jesu,” in Festschrift für Günther Dehn, zum 75. Geburtstag am 18. April 1957 (Neukirchen: Kreis Moers, Buchhandlung Erziehungsvereins, 1957), 51–79. On “cognitive dissonance,” see Leon Festinger, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956), 25. See also Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957); Elliot Aronson, “The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance: A Current Perspective,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 4 (1969), 1–34; Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts (Boston: Mariner, 2020). Scholars attributing this to Jesus’s error include Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet, 160; Allison, Jesus of Nazareth, 166; Fredriksen, “Compassion is to Purity as Fish is to Bicycle,” 63. Johannes Weiss, Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes (3rd edn.; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964 [1892]); Albert Schweitzer, Das Messianitäts- und Leidensgeheimnis: Eine Skizze des Lebens Jesu (3 edn.; Tübingen: Mohr, 1956 [1901]); idem, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 330–403. Cf. 1 Cor 7:31; 26–29, 10:11; 1 Thess 4:13. For criticism, see Marcus J. Borg, “An Orthodoxy Reconsidered: The ‘End-of-the-World-Jesus,’” in L. D. Hurst and N. T. Wright (eds.), The Glory of Christ in the New Testament: Studies in Christology in Memory of George Bradford Caird (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 207–17. As a site of debate, see Robert J. Miller, ed., The Apocalyptic Jesus: A Debate (Santa Rosa: Polebridge, 2001). See further Crispin Fletcher-Louis, “Jesus and Apocalypticism,” in Tom Holmen (ed.), Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 2877–2909; Edith M. Humphrey, “Will the Reader Understand? Apocalypse as Veil or Vision in Recent Historical-Jesus Research,” in Michel R. Desjardins and William E. Arnal (eds.), Whose Historical Jesus? (SCJ 7; Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1997), 215–237. Ward Blanton, “Albert Schweitzer’s Apocalyptic Jesus and the End of Modernity,” in Halvor Moxnes, Ward Blanton, and James G. Crossley (eds.), Jesus Beyond Nationalism: Constructing the Historical Jesus in a Period of Cultural Complexity (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014 [2009]), 57–78, 58.

Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ 73 130 Schweitzer, Von Reimarus zu Wrede, 396. 131 Ernst Käsemann, “The Beginnings of Christian Theology,” in New Testament Questions of Today (London: SCM, 1960), 102. 132 Fletcher-Louis, “Jesus and Apocalypticism,” 2885. 133 John J. Collins, “Introduction: Towards the Morphology of a Genre,” in J. J. Collins (ed.), Semeia 14, Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre (1979), 1–20, 9; The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature (2nd ed.; (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); Apocalyptic Thinking in Early Judaism: Engaging with John Collins’ The Apocalyptic Imagination, eds. Sidnie White Crawford and Cecilia Wassen (JSJ Sup 182; Leiden: Brill, 2018). See also Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East: Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Apocalypticism, Uppsala, August 12–17, 1979, eds. David Hellholm (Tubingen: Mohr, 1983). 134 See Christopher Rowland, “Apocalypticism: The Disclosure of Heavenly Knowledge,” in The Mystery of God: Early Jewish Mysticism and the New Testament, ed. C. Rowland and C. R. A. Morray-Jones, CEINT 12 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 13–31. On apocalypticism as claims to special knowledge, see Matthew Goff, “Apocalypticism, Esoteric Revelation, and the Cultural Politics of Knowledge in the Hellenistic Age,” HBAI 5 no. 3 (2016), 193–211. 135 Philip R. Davies, “The Social World of Apocalyptic Writings,” in R. E. Clements (ed.), The World of Ancient Israel: Sociological, Anthropological and Political Perspectives: Essays by Members of the Society for Old Testament Studies (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 251–271; Lester Grabbe, “The Social Setting of Early Jewish Apocalypticism,” JSP 4 (1989), 27–47, 29: “there is no necessary connection between apocalypses and apocalyptic communities.” On the power-dynamics between colonial and indigenous societies as a lens through which ancient Jewish texts could be studied, see Philip F. Esler, “Political Oppression in Jewish Apocalyptic Literature: A Social-Scientific Approach,” Listening: Journal of Religion and Culture 28 (1993), 181–199. For criticism of social scientific approaches, see D. C. Sim, “The Social Setting of Ancient Apocalypticism: A Question of Method,” JSP 13 (1995), 5–16. 136 Carol Newsom, “Foreword,” in Kelly J. Murphy and Justin Jeffcoat Schedtler (eds.), Apocalypses in Context: Apocalyptic Currents through History (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016), x–xi: “we often form concepts by thinking of a prototype example that we use as a point of reference. Because of the dominance of Christian culture in the west and the familiarity of people with the book of Revelation in the Christian canon, the book of Revelation often serves as the prototype of what we think of as an apocalypse – a revelatory vision in which the events of the end times are described in vivid detail. These events are highly catastrophic … however, the book of Revelation is actually a fairly anomalous example of the genre apocalypse.” 137 Justin Jeffcoat Schedtler and Kelly J. Murphy, “Introduction – From Before the Bible to Beyond the Bible,” in Kelly J. Murphy and Justin Jeffcoat Schedtler (eds.), Apocalypses in Context: Apocalyptic Currents through History (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016), 4: “What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word ‘apocalypse?’ Armageddon. Catastrophe. Devastation. The End.” 138 Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, x (emphases added); cf. his fuller delineation of the term including “cosmic dualism,” “historical pessimism,” “ultimate vindication,” and “imminence” (120–123). Cf. Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 111–48, esp. 112 n. 1. Cf. Miller, “Introduction,” in The Apocalyptic Jesus, 6: “a kind of eschatology that envisions the end of history coming soon and brought about by an overpowering divine intervention preceded by cataclysmic events.” 139 This study retains the term “apocalyptic” in reference to the historical Jesus. In The Nonviolent Messiah, 88, I suggested that “the apocalyptic Jesus” should be retired,

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Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ but not by “abandoning the concept and the cultural, historical, and theological matrix of restorative eschatology.” Wassén, review of Joseph, Jesus, the Essenes, and Christian Origins, 324, claims that I “reject the common reconstruction of Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, as that role is traditionally understood” and do not provide “an in-depth analysis of Jesus’s (supposedly inauthentic) predictions about an imminent end involving a (necessarily violent) judgement.” On the problem of such characteristic or list-like approaches to genre, see Carol Newsom, “Spying Out the Land: A Report from Genology,” in R. Boer (ed.), Bakhtin and Genre Theory in Biblical Studies (SBL Sem St 63; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007), 19–31, 20. Dale C. Allison Jr., “A Plea for Thoroughgoing Eschatology,” JBL 113 no. 4 (1994), 651–668, here 664: “The main arguments in this essay are arguments from continuity.” Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet, 137–139, follows the same argument (“The Beginning and End as Keys to the Middle”): John “predicted that God was about to destroy his enemies and reward his people … [he] appears to have preached a message of coming destruction and salvation,” 138. Cf. Allison, “Plea,” 658. Steve Mason, “Jüdische Quellen: Flavius Josephus,” in Jens Schröter and Christine Jacobi (eds.), Jesus Handbuch (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 165–170, 166. The wording is Mason’s original English phrase of the published German. A. J. 18.117. Wassén and Hägerland, Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet, 92, argue that “We have no reason to doubt the general gist of John the Baptist’s fiery proclamations of imminent judgment,” although they concede that “This aspect of the Baptist’s preaching is entirely absent from Josephus.” They suggest that this is because of Josephus’s alleged “aversion to apocalyptic movements.” On the invention of the “apocalyptic” representation of John the Baptist, see William E. Arnal, “Redactional Fabrication and Group Legitimation: The Baptist’s Preaching in Q 3:7–9, 16–17,” in John S. Kloppenborg (ed.), Conflict and Invention: Literary, Rhetorical, and Social Studies on the Sayings Gospel Q (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1995), 165–80. John P. Meier, “John the Baptist in Josephus: Philology and Exegesis,” JBL 111 no. 2 (1992), 225–237, 234, suggests that Josephus’s portrait is “obviously apologetic” insofar as “all these strange, disruptive, or disturbing ideas can have no place in Josephus’s presentation,” concluding that Josephus may have “suppressed them.” Meier claims that this “suppression” of eschatological and messianic expectations is “a commonplace among students of Josephus” (n. 26). Moreover, Meier contends that if the Synoptic Baptist did not exist, we would have to invent him: “something like it would have to be invented to supply the material that Josephus either suppresses or simply does not know.” A.J. 18.118. A.J. 18.118; Jewish Antiquities, Books XVIII–XIV (trans. L. H. Feldman; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, repr. 1996). A.J. 18.5.2. Meier, “John the Baptist in Josephus,” 234, counters this point simply by stating “One need only think of his [Josephus’s] presentation of the Essenes compared to the various eschatological and messianic hopes expressed in the literature of Qumran.” The difference, however, is that the Qumran literature is literature whereas John the Baptist is an historical figure. On the Baptist in Q, see Joseph, Jesus, Q, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, 130–148. Simon J. Joseph, “The Promise of Providence and the Problem of the Parables: Revisiting Prayer in the Sayings Gospel Q,” in Daniel A. Smith and Christoph Heil (eds.) Prayers in the Sayings Gospel Q (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019), 57–87. Wassén and Hägerland, Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet, 173: “this term was rarely or never used by the early Christ-believers … it must therefore derive from the historical Jesus.”

Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ 75 154 Wassén and Hägerland, Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet, 176. 155 See Joseph, “The Promise of Providence and the Problem of the Parables,” 57–87. Nickelsburg, “Jews and Christians in the First Century,” 369–370, argues that Jesus’s messianic identity was “related to the traditions now attested in the Parables of Enoch.” 156 Wassén and Hägerland, Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet, 113–127, 113. 157 Allison, Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet. 158 Examples of the former would be Bart Ehrman (Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet) and Paula Fredriksen (Jesus of Nazareth). Representative examples of the latter (scholars seeking to counter the liberal Jesus) would be John P. Meier (A Marginal Jew) and N. T. Wright (Jesus and the Victory of God). 159 Ehrman, Jesus, 127, referring to those who “want to make Jesus into something else – a proto-feminist, for example, or a Neo-Marxist, or a countercultural Cynic.” 160 Christopher M. Hays, in collaboration with Brandon Gallaher, Julia S. Konstantinovsky, Richard J. Ounsworth OP, and Casey A. Strine, When the Son of Man Didn’t Come: A Constructive Proposal on the Delay of the Parousia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016), 20. 161 Cf. Litwa, How the Gospels became History, 218. 162 William E. Arnal, “Making the Re-Making the Jesus-Sign: Contemporary Markings on the Body of Christ,” in William E. Arnal and Michel Desjardins (eds.) Whose Historical Jesus (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1997), 308–319, 314, notes how the “apocalyptic Jesus” model makes “any efforts to reconstruct a Jesus for whom an imminent future apocalyptic expectation is not a central part of his self-conception or agenda appear to be a self-serving ‘Jesus in one’s own image’ of the sort unmasked by Schweitzer … The corollaries to this line of reasoning are that the non-apocalyptic Jesus, since congenial, is therefore not historical; meanwhile, those who advocate an apocalyptic Jesus have nothing to gain thereby, and thus their conclusions are more reliable, more likely to be based on the facts of the matter alone.” There may be “a desire to make him ‘different,’ a desire motivated by tendencies just as strong as those lending impetus to ‘Jesus the sage,’ 314. On the other hand, see James Crossley, “The End of Apocalypticism: From Burton Mack’s Jesus to North American Liberalism,” JSHJ 19 no. 2 (2021), 171–90, 176: “The construction of apocalypticism and eschatology as something which distorted and damaged the earlier message can be seen as a partial reaction against the conservative Right and the accompanying support from right-wing Christianity.” 163 On genre as denoting a “constellation” of characteristic features, see Hindy Najman, Destruction, Mourning and Renewal in 4 Ezra and its Precursors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). On utilizing genre based on “prototypical” models, see Benjamin G. Wright III, “Joining the Club: A Suggestion about Genre in Early Jewish Texts,” DSD 17 no. 3 (2010), 260–85; cf. Newsom, “Spying Out the Land,” 19–31. 164 T. Francis Glasson, “What is Apocalyptic?,” NTS 27 (1981), 105. 165 Dominical error is irrelevant to the question of genre. Cf. Dale C. Allison, “The Eschatology of Jesus,” in J. J. Collins (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism (3 vols.; New York: Continuum, 1998), 1: 267–302, 278: “even in the unlikely event that they were all created by the early church, that is still no sound reason to deny an apocalyptic outlook to Jesus.” 166 On Jesus as a prophet of “restoration eschatology,” see E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1985). 167 Nicholas King, review of Joseph, Jesus and the Temple, The Heythrop Journal 61 no. 6 (2020): 1035, suggests that the view of a “paradisal return” and an Eden-like Temple “without blood sacrifices” (Joseph, Jesus and the Temple, 206) may represent “a touch of anachronism.” 168 Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, 77–90. 169 Cf. Marius Reiser, Jesus and Judgment: The Eschatological Proclamation in Its Jewish Context (trans. Linda M. Maloney; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 144.

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170 See Bart Ehrman, Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior (New York: Harper One, 2016), 169. 171 Wassén, review of Joseph, Jesus, the Essenes, and Christian Origins, 325: “when it comes to his reconstruction of Jesus as thoroughly peace-loving, I find it a bit too convenient that all the evidence to the contrary (e.g. Matt. 11:21–24; cf. Luke 10:13–15) is simply dismissed as secondary traditions when many historical Jesus scholars would have different opinions on this.” Yet Wassén and Hägerland, Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet, 1, assert that Jesus could not “possibly” have said both “My God, my God, have you forsaken me?” and “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (1) because these sayings (apparently) “contradict” one another, utilizing a criterion of contradiction as an interpretive tool for (non)-historicity. 172 Luke 11:20. 173 Ehrman, Jesus Before the Gospels, 169. 174 Dale B. Martin, Biblical Truths: The Meaning of Scripture in the Twenty-First Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 218. 175 Theissen, Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity, 64–65, 99–110, refers to the Jesus movement as the “peace party.” 176 On the “unreliability of gist memory,” see Crook, “Matthew, Memory Theory and the New No Quest,” 5. On its reliability, see K. E. Bailey, K. E. “Informal controlled oral tradition and the Synoptic Gospels,” Asia Journal of Theology 5 no. 1 (1991), 34–54; Craig S. Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 145; Robert K. McIver, Memory, Jesus, and the Synoptic Gospels (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011). 177 Joseph, “A Social Identity Approach,” 28–49. 178 John S. Kloppenborg, “The Representation of Violence in Synoptic Parables,” in Eve-Marie Becker and Anders Runesson, eds., Mark and Matthew I: Comparative Readings: Understanding the Earliest Gospels in Their First Century Settings (WUNT 271; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 323–351, 323. 179 John 2:13. 180 See the discussion in Joseph, The Nonviolent Messiah, 23–38. 181 Robert Eisler, ΙΗΣΟΥΣ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΥΣ ΟΥ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΥΣΑΣ: Die messianische Unabhängigkeitsbewegung vom Auftreten Johannes des Täufers bis zum Untergang Jakobs des Gerichten nach der Neuerschlossenen Eroberung von Jerusalem des Flavius Josephus und den Christlichen Quellen (RB 9; 2 vols.; Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1929–1930); ET: The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist, trans. Alexander Haggerty Krappe (London: Methuean & Co., 1931). 182 S. G. F. Brandon, The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church: A Study of the Effects of the Jewish Overthrow of A.D. 70 on Christianity (London: SPCK, 1957 [1951], 102–109; Jesus and the Zealots: A Study of the Political Factor in Primitive Christianity (New York: Scribner, 1967). 183 Hyam Maccoby, Revolution in Judaea: Jesus and the Jewish Resistance (London: Orbach and Chambers, 1973). 184 Dale B. Martin, “Jesus in Jerusalem: Armed and Not Dangerous,” JSNT 37.1 (2014), 3–24; “Response to Downing and Fredriksen,” JSNT 37 no. 3 (2015), 334–45. 185 Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Doubleday, 2014). 186 Fernando Bermejo Rubio, “Has the Hypothesis of a Seditionist Jesus Been Dealt a Fatal Blow? A Systematic Answer to the Doubters,” Bandue 8 (2013), 19–57; “Jesus and the Anti-Roman Resistance: A Reassessment of the Arguments,” JSHJ 12.1/2 (2014), 1–105. 187 Cf. Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, who attempts to construct a portrait of Jesus by conflating him with a generalized atmosphere of political Jewish zeal.

Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ 77 188 David Riches, “Aggression, War, Violence: Space/Time and Paradigm,” Man 26 no. 2 (1991), 281–297, 285. 189 Pierre Bourdieu, “Symbolic Violence,” in Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois, eds. Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology (Wiley Blackwell Readers in Anthropology; Hoboken: Wiley, 2004), 272–274. 190 Bermejo Rubio, “Jesus and the Anti-Roman Resistance,” 45. 191 Seutonius, Domitian 10.1; Quintillian, Institutio Oratoria 9.2.65. 192 Paulus, Sententiae 5.22.1 193 Livy, Ab urbe condita 30.43.13 194 War 5.447–49. See Brian Pounds, “The Crucifiable Jesus,” Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University, 2015. 195 Contra Bermejo Rubio, “Jesus and the Anti-Roman Resistance,” 74–75: “the conundrum remains only as far as the seditious hypothesis is repressed and rejected.” 196 Cf. Bermejo Rubio, “Jesus and the Anti-Roman Resistance,” 75: “A ‘typical’ explanation of Jesus’ crucifixion is that he made a decisive break with Judaism.” 197 Bermejo Rubio, “Jesus and the Anti-Roman Resistance,” 1–105. 198 Bermejo Rubio, “Jesus and the Anti-Roman Resistance,” 8–15. 199 Cf. Bermejo Rubio, “Jesus and the Anti-Roman Resistance,” 23: “It is necessary to … carry out a painstaking historical reconstruction to tie up the loose ends and to discern a seditionist Jesus behind the appearances (which do indeed present a very different image of him).” Cf. 36: “In the Gospel accounts, distorted though they are, there are surviving scraps and snippets of historical likelihood which can be assembled and be used as helpful building blocks in order to understand Jesus.” Moreover, this thesis must also resort to an argument from tampering: “the potentially disconcerting material has been tampered with,” 23. That is, when the evidence is inconclusive or unfavorable to his thesis, “the Christian tradition” may have “dropped evidence.” 200 Bermejo Rubio, “Jesus and the Anti-Roman Resistance,” 84: “many passages whose meaning is obvious enough in themselves … virtually become cruces interpretum.” 201 Rollens, review of The Nonviolent Messiah, for example, refers to my allegedly “theological perspective,” “theological interpretation,” “theological investigation,” and theological “endgame” (“to reveal a nonviolent historical Jesus”). Cf. Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 139: “We show our fellow historians disrespect … if we imagine our chief task to be the perilous investigation of authors rather than the critical evaluation of their arguments.” 202 On the critical distinction between “confessional theology” and “non-confessional theology,” see Donald Wiebe, “The Failure of Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 13 no. 4 (1984), 401–422, 403: “I find it helpful to distinguish ‘confessional theology’ from ‘non-confessional theology’ … Confessional theologies presume the existence of some kind of Ultimate, Transmundane Reality whereas non-confessional theologies recognize the cultural reality of ‘the gods’ … and attempt rationally to account for it but without presuming that such an account is possible only on the supposition that ‘the Ultimate’ exists.” Cf. Francis Watson, “A Reply to My Critics,” in Writing the Gospels: A Dialogue with Francis Watson, ed. Catherine Sider Hamilton and Joel Willitts (LNTS 606; London and New York: T&T Clark, 2019), 227–248, 248: “theological relevance has to do with subject matter alone, not with the interpreter’s personal orientation towards it.” 203 Joseph, The Nonviolent Messiah, 22, 47, 49–50, 54, 65–67, 68–69, 78–79, 88–89, addresses such concerns. 204 Christopher Bryan, Render to Caesar: Jesus, the Early Church, and the Roman Superpower (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 34, identifies four distinctive political options: 1 “Acceptance of and full cooperation with Roman

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Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ rule”; 2 “Acceptance of Roman rule, coupled with a willingness on occasion to question or even challenge nonviolently the justice or appropriateness of its actions”; 3 “Nonviolent rejection of Roman Rule”; and 4 “Violent rejection of Roman rule.” Jesus’s ministry points to “the second of our four options,” 42. On the idea of the “pacifistic” Jesus as gospel propaganda, see Bermejo Rubio, “Jesus and the Anti-Roman Resistance,” 15, 26, 63. Cf. Martin, “Response to Downing and Fredriksen,” 340 n. 7; Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots, 283–321. Ehrman, Jesus Before the Gospels, 169: “throughout all of our traditions, Jesus is regularly and consistently portrayed as a teacher of nonviolence … Throughout independent accounts of Jesus’s life he is shown to promote loving and submissive nonviolence … the abundant number of such pacifist statements on the lips of Jesus should give us pause and make us suspect that they might well represent accurate memories of his teachings.” Cf. Jack David Eller, Cruel Creeds, Virtuous Violence: Religious Violence across Culture and History (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2010), 351: “A pacifist Christianity clearly has scriptural origins. In the celebrated Beatitudes, Jesus informs his listeners that the blessed include the meek … the peacemakers … Christians are urged to be merciful, in emulation of God … Christians are told to love their enemies, and, more, to do good to those who hurt them … The lesson appears to be one of utter passiveness and actually benevolence toward wrongdoing.” Robert Knapp, The Dawn of Christianity: People and Gods in a Time of Magic and Miracles (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 127: ‘there is little hint in the tradition that he was … involved in action to hasten Yahweh’s rule in present time. Unlike the Sicarii, he did not combine an ideology of violence with one of social justice. In fact, he never called for violent action to redress broad social justice issues … Only working from a prior conviction of Jesus as political agitator can produce Jesus as a revolutionary from the evidence we have.’ Matt 5:9; cf. Matt 5:38–48 // Luke 6:27–32). Dieter Lührmann, “Lieber eure Feinde (Lk 6,27–36/Mt 5,39–48,” ZTK 69 (1972), 412–38. Cf. Catherine Hezser, “Seduced by the Enemy or Wise Strategy? The Presentation of Non-Violence and Accommodation with Foreign Powers in Ancient Jewish Literary Sources,” in R. Albertz and J. Wöhrle (eds.), Between Cooperation and Hostility: Multiple Identities in Ancient Judaism and the Interaction with Foreign Powers (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 221–250, 248: “By blessing peace-making and non-violence early Christians seem to have turned a necessity into an ideal.” Matt 5:45. John S. Kloppenborg, “The Function of Apocalyptic Language in Q,” in Society of Biblical Literature 1986 Seminar Papers (Atlanta: Scholars, 1986), 224–35, 235; cf. idem, “Symbolic Eschatology and the Apocalypticism of Q,” HTR 80.3 (1987), 287–306. Q 6:20; 6:27, 28, 35c–d; Q 6:31; Q 6:32–34; Q 6:36; Q 6:37–39; Q 7:22; Q 14:16–18, 21, 23; Q 15:4–5a, 7; Q 15:8–10; Q 17:3–4. Matt 5:44–45 // Luke 6:27–28, 35c–d. Cf. 1 Thess 5:15; Rom 12:17; 1 Pet 3:9. On enemylove, see John Piper, “Love Your Enemies”: Jesus’ Love Command in the Synoptic Gospels and in the Early Paraenesis: A History of the Tradition and Interpretation of Its Uses, SNTSMS 38 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Matt 5:39b // Luke 6:29. Matt 5:41 // Luke 6:29–30. Matt 7:1–2 // Luke 6:37–38. The biblical command to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18) has sometimes been taken to refer exclusively to Israelite neighbors. Yet Lev 19:34 states that even the “alien” is included (“you shall love the alien as yourself”). Despite its extent and scope, a four-volume Handbook on Jesus Research does not contain a single entry on the topic of Jesus and violence. Cf. Tom Holmén and Stanley

Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ 79 218 219 220

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E. Porter (eds.), Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus (4 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 2011). David J. Neville, The Vehement Jesus: Grappling with Troubling Gospel Texts (Studies in Peace and Scripture: Institute of Mennonite Studies; Eugene: Cascade, 2017), 8 (emphasis added). Avalos, The Bad Jesus. Neville, The Vehement Jesus, states that he is “unable to reach back to an unmediated Jesus for the purpose of adjudicating between conflicting textual representations of Jesus.” Instead, Neville “write[s] from a Christian perspective … focus[ed] on the biblical Gospels” (1 n. 1). For his part, Avalos was a self-identifying historical Jesus agnostic. Fredriksen, “Compassion is to Purity,” 63: “Jesus’ ethics end up confined to what he thought would be the brief interim between his proclamation of the Kingdom and its advent.” Lührmann, “Liebet eure Feinde (Lk 6,27–36/Mt 5,39–48,” 412–38. Cf. Hezser, “Seduced by the Enemy or Wise Strategy?” Wassén, review of Joseph, Jesus, the Essenes, and Christian Origins, 325. Allison, “A Plea for Thoroughgoing Eschatology,” 651–668. Matt 10:34–36 // Luke 12:51. Cf. Sarah Rollens,“The Bible isn’t ‘pro-life’ – and the Old Testament God isn’t ‘more violent’ than the New one,” Independent (Sept. 7, 2021), https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/old-testament-god-pro-life-texas-abortion b1915844.html?fbclid=IwAR0iVERjzRKljwpLWR_KfXzh8KbyRSOrJjEf1 7Y0gtanjzNad58qZRw1My0 [accessed September 7, 2021): “Jesus deliberately calls for violence and eschews peace.” Funk, Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels, 174. Avalos, The Bad Jesus, 92. Avalos, The Bad Jesus, 91. Robert C. Tannehill, The Sword of His Mouth: Forceful and Imaginative Language in Synoptic Sayings (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975), 140–47, 142: “This reference to Scripture may call to mind a broader prophetic-apocalyptic motif of the breaking of family relationships in the final tribulation … stirring the fears and hopes associated with this motif.” See also Ben F. Meyer, Aims of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1979), 202–219; Dale C. Allison Jr., The Intertextual Jesus: Scripture in Q (Harrisburg, Pa: Trinity Press International, 2000), 132–134; Brant Pitre, Jesus, the Tribulation, and the End of the Exile: Restoration Eschatology and the Origin of the Atonement. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005. 198–216. Neville, The Vehement Jesus, 30, notes the contextual juxtaposition of the two sayings. Rollens, review of The Nonviolent Messiah, misreads my discussion of the Lukan Jesus as an historical Jesus discussion. Cf. Joseph, The Nonviolent Messiah, 27–28. John 2:15. For discussion, see N. Clayton Croy, “The Messianic Whippersnapper: Did Jesus Use a Whip on People in the Temple (John 2:13)?,” JBL 128 (2009): 555–68; Andy Alexis-Baker, “Violence, Nonviolence and the Temple Incident in John 2:13– 15,” BibInt 20 (2012): 73–96. Avalos, The Bad Jesus, 110–126, argues that Jesus’s actions in John should be interpreted as “violent” since Jesus is portrayed as using “violence” against people. John 2:14–15; Matt 21:12–13; Mark 11:15–17; Luke 19:45–46. See Mark R. Bredin, “John’s Account of Jesus’ Demonstration in the Temple: Violent or Nonviolent?” BTB 33 (2003): 44–50. Thomas R. Yoder Neufeld, Killing Enmity: Violence and the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 15. Neville, The Vehement Jesus, 179: “in the Johannine version of this incident, to describe Jesus’s actions as violent is to indulge in hyperbole … his conduct is nonviolent and harmless.”

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236 Avalos, The Bad Jesus, 113, provides no “documentation” that Jesus used a whip to strike anyone and concedes that John 2:15 is an insoluble problem: “In the end, the point is not so much that Jn 2.15 can only be interpreted violently or peacefully. The point is that so much of biblical … scholarship is still focused on avoiding a portrait of Jesus that might be objectionable” (125–126). Cf. Ronald J. Sider, If Jesus is Lord: Loving Enemies in an Age of Violence (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019). 237 Wassén and Hägerland, Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet, 190, refer to Jesus’s “attack in the sanctuary” and describe Jesus as having “acted violently within the sanctuary” based on arguments from multiple attestation (Synoptics and John) and incredulity (“it is very hard to explain why this tradition would have arisen at all if it is not based on a real event”). Yet the Markan Jesus speaks and acts in ambiguous parables. The relationship between John and the Synoptics is debated. And there are good reasons why Mark would have sought to describe Jesus in opposition to the Temple’s administration, even if it meant resorting to literary invention. 238 Martin, Biblical Truths, 219, claims that “a principle of nonviolence cannot be found, as far as I know, in the ancient world. It is a modern invention.” This may be true for the (hermetically sealed?) Mediterranean world, not that of the far East where the “principle” of ahimsa had been developed for centuries prior to the common era. 239 Josephus, War 2.169–174; Ant. 18.55–59; War 2.184–203; Ant. 18.261–309; Philo, Legatio ad Gaium 38.299–305. 240 Avalos, The Bad Jesus, 48, claims that Jesus “is not the originator of the concept of loving your enemy, which is already found in both Jewish and ancient Near Eastern sources centuries before Jesus.” He argues that “Non-Christian writings from before the time of Jesus, as well as those contemporary with Jesus, enunciate the love of enemies,” 35, citing Philo (Quaest. In Exod. 2.11), who refers to helping the enemy, and 1QS 10.17–18, which affirms not exacting vengeance on the enemy. 241 Cf. Rom 12:20. Fletcher-Louis, “Jesus and Apocalypticism,” 2900, notes that Jesus’s “pacifism” is sometimes interpreted by scholars as strategic in light of the coming judgment, but “this is not the explanation given in the sources: they rather ground this ethic in a particular understanding of the imitation of God.” 242 Per Bilde, The Originality of Jesus: A Critical Discussion and a Comparative Attempt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 104. Bilde admits that the Gospels present this imperative as “close to unique” and concedes that Jesus’s “originality” is “found in parts of his ethical teachings,” 107. On Jesus’s enemy-love as something new or original, see E. P. Sanders, “The Question of the Uniqueness in the Teaching of Jesus,” The Ethel M. Wood Lecture, Feb. 15 1990, University of London, 1990, 13–14. On the absence of (early Jewish) parallels, see David Flusser, Jesus in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, 68–69; Dodd, The Founder of Christianity, 67; Piper, “Love Your Enemies,” 19–65, 64. 243 A. Nissen, Gott und der Nächste im antiken Judentum: Untersuchungen zum Doppelgebot der Liebe, WUNT 15 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1974), 304–39; Piper, “Love Your Enemies,” 19–65. 244 Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (London: Verso, 2020). 245 Allison, “Plea,” 664: “The main arguments in this essay are arguments from continuity.” 246 A.J. 18.117. On the invention of the “apocalyptic” representation of John the Baptist, see Arnal, “Redactional Fabrication and Group Legitimation,” 165–80. 247 Dale C. Allison Jr., Resurrecting Jesus, 27–55, 48–50; Joseph, The Nonviolent Messiah, 83. 248 Ben Witherington III, The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew from Nazareth (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1995), 96, in relation to the timing of the end-time. 249 Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 479; Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, 160; Allison, Jesus of Nazareth, 166.

Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ 81 250 Stephen J. Patterson, “An Unanswered Question: Apocalyptic Expectation and Jesus’ Basileia Proclamation,” JSHJ 8 no. 1 (2010), 67–79. 251 So, for example, E. P. Sanders’ suggestion that Jesus could say “both sorts of things” when it came to his teachings about salvation and judgment (Jesus and Judaism). 252 Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 129. 253 Tucker S. Ferda, “Jesus and the Galilean Crisis: Interpretation, Reception, and History,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2016, 251, does not deny the possibility of identifying “theological or thematic tensions,” but concludes that “the evidence is strongly suggestive that Jesus was on the whole consistent in aims and message,” 275. 254 Cf. Fredriksen, “Compassion is to Purity,” 63 (emphasis added): “Jesus’ ethics end up confined to what he thought would be the brief interim between his proclamation of the Kingdom and its advent.” 255 Contra Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, 94: “Those who argue that Jesus himself was non- or even antiapocalyptic explain these later stages as a misrepresentation of his teaching. But then we need to ask: Why would the later tradition repeat something already seen not to be true? Why invent a tradition that would already be an embarrassment?” 256 Allison, “Plea,” 658, moves from the disciples’ belief in Jesus’s “resurrection” to the general resurrection back to Jesus, claiming that “the most natural answer” explaining “the habit of associating the end of Jesus with eschatological themes” is that “while he was yet with them, followers” believed the Kingdom would “appear immediately.” Second, this nexus of belief is thought to have been “in accord with a well-known scenario … suffering before vindication, tribulation followed by resurrection.” Allison thus conflates Jesus’s own apocalypticism with this constructed grand narrative of apocalypticism, concluding that Jesus himself “proclaimed imminent eschatological judgment and redemption,” 667. 257 Llewellyn Howes, The Formative Stratum of the Sayings Gospel Q: Reconsidering Its Extent, Message, and Unity, WUNT 2.545 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021). 258 Kloppenborg, “The Function of Apocalyptic Language in Q,” 235; cf. Kloppenborg, “Symbolic Eschatology and the Apocalypticism of Q,” 287–306. 259 John S. Kloppenborg Verbin, Excavating Q: The History and Setting of the Sayings Gospel (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000), 352, claims that “Q is an important source for the historical Jesus, but it is only one of several. It is neither complete nor is it unalloyed.” 260 Cf. John S. Kloppenborg, “The Sayings Gospel Q and the Quest of the Historical Jesus,” HTR 89 (1996), 343–344: “given the generally conservative nature of transmissional processes, the gap between Jesus and Q is probably not too great … important continuities between Jesus and Q surely exist.” 261 Cf. W. D. Davies and E.P. Sanders, “Jesus: From the Jewish Point of View,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 3: The Early Roman Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 618–677, 670. 262 Dale C. Allison Jr., Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010), 305–386, here 312–13: “most of this material [Q 6:27–42] circulated together from the start … it represents, by and large, the work of a single individual.” There is “no explanatory advantage” in attributing this material (Q 6:27–42) to anyone other than Jesus. 263 Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet, 162, acknowledges that “Many people” think of Jesus as “a great moral teacher whose ethical views can help produce a better society” but Jesus “did not see it that way. He did not propound his ethical views to show us how to create a just society.” On the contrary, Jesus’s ethics were all about preparing for the imminent “judgment of God.” 264 Paula Fredriksen, “Al Tirah (‘Fear Not!’): Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology, from Schweitzer to Allison, and After,” in Tucker Ferda, Daniel Frayer-Griggs, and Nathan

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Jewish Jesus, Christian Christ C. Johnson (eds.), “To Recover What Has Been Lost”: Essays on Eschatology, Intertextuality, and Reception History in Honor of Dale C. Allison Jr. (NovT Sup 183; Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2021), 15–38, 19. Contra Fredriksen, “Al Tirah (‘Fear Not!’),” 19: “so much current New Testament work” is “conceived as history and defended by appeals to history,” but serves to “anachronistically distinguish” Jesus from his “native ancient Jewishness.” While allegedly “protecting the historical Jesus from error, comes at a very high cost. It cuts him off from our earliest evidence about him, rendering it fundamentally irrelevant to historical work. What happens if we instead posit vital connections between the mission of Jesus and the post-crucifixion missions in his name?” Simon J. Joseph, “The Resurrection as Category Error: A Response to The Resurrection of Jesus,” BBR 32 no. 3 (2022), 287-293. Stephen T. Asma, Why We Need Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 163, recognizes that “religion regularly produces fear and rage in its adherents” for the sake of “defensive and offensive struggle,” but it can also “help mobilize the adaptive uses of violence.” That is, religion is “a cultural mechanism of emotional management” that is “adaptive—leading to the survival of human individuals and groups,” but can serve as a vehicle for “conflict” which sometimes “works even better” than cooperation, 179, especially when a perceived need for defense is present. In such cases, “cultural mechanisms that elicit helpful emotions during appropriate environmental challenges constitute an important means of survival.” Asma, Why We Need Religion, 180, noting how the transition from “fear to rage” is effective because “fear forces us to focus our attention on potential dangers.” Robert C. Fuller, “Spirituality in the Flesh: The Role of Discrete Emotions in Religious Life,” JAAR 75 no. 1 (2007), 25–51, 33. Fuller, “Spirituality in the Flesh,” 35, noting how “Apocalyptic literature linked experiences of fear, anger and resentment with culturally elaborated eschatological hopes, and thereby forged lasting communal and theological bonds among early Christians.” Asma, Why We Need Religion, 189. Asma, Why We Need Religion, 198. Asma, Why We Need Religion, 194–195. Käsemann, “The Beginnings of Christian Theology,” 102.

3

Theorizing Rejection

Introduction The Jews rejected Jesus. This historical truism seems so firmly established in the popular imagination – on allegedly historical grounds – that it seems pointless to contest it. After all, for most Jews, Jesus was, and still is, a failed messiah. He did not fulfill messianic expectations. Israel’s enemies were not defeated. The kingdom of Israel was not restored. The exiles did not return. The end-time did not arrive. And the “world to come” is not yet with us.1 He failed to unite the people. He failed to usher in a new era of peace. He failed to overthrow the Romans. His ministry was a failure. And he died a failure, broken on the cross. The Gospels tell us stories about a man rejected by his family, rejected by his people, and rejected by the ruling powers of Judea, but vindicated by his Father, the God of Israel. To be sure, it might seem counter-intuitive today to think of Jesus as “rejected.” After all, Jesus is a success story par excellence. Yet the theme of rejection is so deeply embedded in the New Testament that it cannot be ignored, even if it is an over-simplification that both reveals and conceals historical kernels. This theme provides a powerful lens through which we can review the emergence, growth, and development of the Jesus tradition and the socialpsychological dynamics that led to the Jewish/Christian schism,2 with Judaism and Christianity ultimately becoming oppositional paradigms.3 I The experience and perception of social rejection can play a major role in psychological development.4 Interpersonal rejection and family estrangement – that is, rejection and/or ostracism by individuals and groups – can have a variety of effects on mental and emotional health, including personality disorders, depression, aggression, and the desire for revenge.5 Social rejection has been linked both to the development of self- versus other-awareness,6 as well as to the construction of social group identity.7 Studies on the effects of social rejection on the religious also suggest that it may lead to “an aggressive adherence to religion” as a common social-psychological coping response and reaction to the experience of social exclusion and rejection.8 The sociology of rejection, therefore, is a pertinent area DOI: 10.4324/b22959-5

84 Theorizing Rejection of study through which religious conflict(s) can be understood. Second Temple Jews, for example, developed a dialectical tension between acceptance and rejection of the cultural practices associated with Hellenism.9 Although the perception of rejection can certainly result in an experience of rejection – whether or not actual rejection takes place – there is no question that extreme perceptions and experiences of rejection can lead to traumatization. In recent years, trauma theory has developed a number of analytical tools facilitating the study of traumatic experiences on the psyche.10 Simply put, psychological trauma is the result of overwhelmingly stressful experiences that the psyche is unable to process and consequently internalizes, leading to the development of a wide range of coping response mechanisms, including the re-experiencing of painful memories (“flashbacks”) characterized by memory “triggers,” the loss of memory (“amnesia” and “dissociation”), and “trauma-bonding,” in which relationships with the source(s) of trauma are retained. There may also be unconscious impulses to “re-enact” traumatic events, as well as to “act out” various forms of dysfunctional addictions to trauma and violence. Since memory changes under stressful conditions, trauma theory has predominantly been developed in association with war-time experiences and PostTraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), with the Holocaust or Shoah representing a major example of remembered trauma.11 More complex PTSD analyses have also explored the role of trauma in long-term social behavior and various personality disorders.12 Since 9/11, there has also been an increased emphasis on social and political trauma. In the field of Biblical Studies,13 in particular, trauma is increasingly being used as “a hermeneutical lens for biblical interpretation,”14 with insights derived from psychological, sociological, literary, and cultural studies. Literary trauma theory explores “the ways that texts may function in witnessing to trauma, and on the ways that texts may facilitate recovery and resilience.”15 The representation of trauma (in texts) is central to this process since texts become “representations of trauma as much through what is unspoken as through what is spoken.”16 These developments in individual and social psychology allow us to make several key observations about the role of trauma in early Christianity. The letters of Paul and the Gospel of Mark are two examples of what could be called “crisis-literature” in the New Testament. These writings reflect social crises in the mid-first century and commemorate the remembered trauma of Jesus’s crucifixion internalized, socialized, and ritualized within an ekklēsia that identified this traumatic event as generative of its founding myth or story of origins. This story of the rejection, persecution, suffering, trial, torture, and execution of Jesus – juxtaposed by his providential release from death and the catharsis of his divine vindication – became the kerygma, resulting in the ritual performance of a symbiotic union with Jesus in and through the Eucharist. This ritual commemoration also identified a narrative causal agent of Jesus’s suffering (“The Jews”) alongside its original referent as divine causality (prophetic predestination) while transferring the divine power of this transaction to the ekklēsia. This ritual performance perpetuated a cycle of trauma through its commemoration as

Theorizing Rejection 85 a narrative drama. Ritual actors and participants now saw themselves as suffering the rejection, persecution, suffering – and ultimate vindication – of their savior, inscribing a social memory of rejection that was mythic, generative, and identityforming. This nascent Christian tradition became a mythic construct perpetually reenacted as well as a social-psychological complex born from the remembered trauma of Jesus’s life and death undergirded by the ambivalent theology of a God of election and rejection. II The portrayal of Yahweh as a God of rejection is a major theme in the Hebrew Bible.17 There are multiple examples where Yahweh is described as “rejecting” Israel, occasionally, circumstantially, and temporarily.18 In this context, rejection is the antithesis of election or chosenness.19 Biblical theology often seeks to resolve the tension between election and rejection as dual aspects of covenantal relationship. The representation of Yahweh as a God (capable) of anger, offense, judgment, and rejection is counterpoised by the representation of Yahweh as a God of mercy, forgiveness, love, and compassion. This became a central axis of the Jewish/Christian schism, but the psychological effects of this theodicy of covenantal justice on the Jewish imagination – of lament and vindication, exile and redemption, reward and punishment, abandonment and salvation – also became foundational elements of a tradition attempting to reconcile the tension of these binary oppositions.20 The fear of divine rejection and retribution became a scriptural tradition as well as a social-psychological predisposition.21 In the Hebrew Bible, the theme of rejection can be found in a number of narratives. Cain and Abel, for example,22 represent the first two sons of Adam and Eve, with God accepting Abel’s sacrifice and rejecting Cain’s. Similarly, the story of Isaac and Ishmael illustrates how two “brothers” were treated by Abraham, one being “chosen,” the other “exiled.”23 The story of Joseph also signifies familial rejection, albeit in this case the favored son is rejected by his own brothers.24 The intertestamental apocalyptic literature represented by the Enochic Book of the Watchers, the Book of Jubilees, the sectarian Qumran texts, and the Book of Daniel are also characterized by a pronounced dualistic worldview envisioning a final Judgment of the conflict of good and evil with God rewarding (accepting) the righteous and punishing (rejecting) the wicked. The rise of sectarianism in the Second Temple period exacerbated this potentiality for intra-Jewish rejectionism.25 It was now increasingly possible for particular Jewish groups to consider themselves the “true Israel,” the eschatological “remnant” of the “elect,” and/or condemn their (fellow Jewish) opponents as unfaithful, “sinners,” and illegitimate. Qumran sectarianism is a classic example of this tendency, but it is also found in the writings of the early Jesus movement. In the New Testament, the theme and motif of divine rejection runs throughout Paul’s letters, the Gospels, and the parables of Jesus.26 In 1 Thessalonians, our earliest “Christian” text, Paul implicates “the Jews/Judeans” (Ἰουδαίων) in Jesus’s death: “who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out; they

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displease God and oppose everyone … but God’s wrath has overtaken them at last” (1 Thess 2:14–15). The authenticity of this passage has been disputed,27 but the somewhat “anti-Jewish” tone and content of 1 Thess 2:14–15 is found elsewhere in Paul’s letters. In Romans 11:20, for example, Paul writes that Jews have been “broken off” or “cut off” from the tree of Abraham “because of their unbelief” and will not be grafted back until the future, when God’s “wrath” against them comes to an end (cf. Rom 11:11–29).28 Several Synoptic parables focus on the possibility of being “rejected” from the Kingdom of God.29 The Jewish rejection of the Kingdom of God has even been described as a “hermeneutical key” to the Double Tradition (Q).30 The Gospels inscribe themes and narratives associated with or dependent on the dynamics of rejection. The theme of rejection can thus be studied synchronically and diachronically in the history, reception, and development of the Jesus tradition: the rejected stone becomes the cornerstone. The Suffering Servant must suffer. The Son of Man comes to give up his life as a ransom payment. The Lord humbles himself “unto death.” The Markan Jesus dies, “forsaken” on the cross. The rejected Jesus of Nazareth. The Jesus of the Beatitude of Rejection. Even the way we describe the Gospels’ “passion narratives” – that is, as “suffering stories” – re-inscribes the theme. An alleged Jewish rejection of Jesus thus became a central theme of Christian rejectionism, justifying the rejection of Judaism.31 III In recent years, the social scientific study of ethnicity and identity have increasingly been utilized as analytical tools in biblical scholarship.32 Since the construction of Christian identity drew from both real and perceived experiences of social conflict, differentiation, prejudice, and discrimination – experiences which can be understood along a continuum of social rejection – it is fitting that social identity theory has increasingly been adopted in studies of the New Testament.33 Social identity is an individual’s self-concept derived from perceived membership in social groups.34 Developed in the 1970s and 1980s at Bristol University, social identity theory studies the social psychology of intergroup relations and discrimination. It is a research method that explains how group identity is constructed in and through the exclusion of others, by discrimination, prejudice, stereotyping, and intergroup conflict. In the social sciences, identity is a general term used to describe an individual or group’s comprehension of him, her, or itself as a discrete, separate entity.35 In this context, social identity is understood to be socially constructed and characterized by the erection of boundaries that both enclose and exclude.36 That is, identity is a constellation of socially constructed subject positions constantly in flux.37 It is not innate, but constructed and fought for and over in social space.38 An identity implies an “other,” an excluded absence.39 The construction of identity is characterized by the creation of difference and the exclusion of the other; that is, it not only excludes difference, it also produces difference.40 Since the social order is threatened when the “symbolic boundaries” between categories are threatened, compromised, or undermined,41 such perceived

Theorizing Rejection 87 violations of boundaries generate the expulsion of that which is foreign, alien, or other,42 that is, the “site of difference.”43 Since ethnic groups are made by their boundaries,44 and constructed through values, norms, and moral codes,45 these boundaries have symbolic aspects that capture a variety of subjective meanings and condense a worldview by evoking emotional responses that draw on a mythic past and sum up a set of values.46 Much of this symbolic expression of community refers to a putative past or tradition.47 The past is a resource, but it is also “a selective construction of the past which resonates with contemporary influences,”48 often as an invention of tradition.49 When socially constructed boundaries are undermined, tension increases and communities will often aggressively reaffirm boundaries in an attempt to resolve this tension.50 Social collectivities construct boundaries as part of the process of exclusion.51 One group will attempt to secure for itself a privileged position at the expense of others through a process of subordination. Social closure functions as a form of exclusion and usurpation: a dominant group can monopolize and appropriate the resources of a subordinate group. Peter Berger describes this as “conceptual nihilation,” a way of eliminating the perceived threat of an alternative symbolic universe.52 While it would be misleading to suggest that social identity inevitably leads to conflict, social conflict is an important element in consolidating social identity.53 Conflict serves a “group-binding function,” facilitates group definition, and strengthens group structures.54 Ideology intensifies conflict.55 The closer the relationship, the more intense the conflict, since any challenge to a group’s symbolic universe is treated as a threat to the very existence of the group itself.56 Conflict also serves to construct identity regardless of whether participants are aware of these dynamics or not.57 Social identity theory suggests that a relatively simple sense of distinctiveness can lead people to act in discriminating ways.58 Studies show that individuals display favoritism when an in-group is central to their self-definition and a given comparison is meaningful or the outcome is contestable. The mere act of individuals categorizing themselves as group members is sufficient to lead them to display in-group favoritism.59 Individuals seek to attain distinctiveness by differentiating their in-group from a comparison out-group.60 The goal of this differentiation is “to maintain or achieve superiority over an out-group.”61 People strive to be the same as and different from other people in order to attain an “optimal distinctiveness,” categorizing others into groups while minimizing differences within in-groups and accentuating differences in out-groups.62 Social competition manifests when one group attempts to change or improve its social location, a dynamic which often leads to social conflict between groups.63 Social identity theory suggests that there is a tendency to exaggerate perceived similarities and differences between members of in-groups and out-groups. This categorization produces stereotyping, bias, and discrimination.64 Social categorization leads to the construction(s) of stereotypes, socially shared (collective) representations of groups that get perpetuated over time,65 embedded in culture and society,66 and institutionalized through socialization channels.67 Intergroup attitudes also become embedded in language and communication.68 Once formed, intergroup attitudes become institutionalized

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as part of the structure of societal institutions.69 Moreover, the tendency to attribute negative qualities in out-groups to “essences”70 further creates “insurmountable category divides” that make it extremely difficult to improve intergroup relations.71 From a social identity perspective, then, the history of Judaism and Christianity represent two sociologically distinct but theologically antithetical systems that have been constructed – over virtually two millennia – in and through “insurmountable category divides,”72 coded identity-markers signifying complex systems of language, ritual, culture, textuality, theology, and social practice.73 The following chapters explore a number of ways in which social rejection played a generative role in responding to both real and perceived crises in the early ekklēsia and led to the rapid construction of Christian identity. We will explore how social memory served as both a conservative and creative tool, how the rejection and crucifixion of Jesus, the emergence of a mixed ethnic community movement, and the social conflicts generated by negotiating the status of non-Jewish members within the early Jesus movement shaped this process. We will begin by examining how the critical tools, methods, and theories of Biblical Studies and Jesus Research have been shaped by this cultural memory.

Notes 1 Samuel Sandmel, We Jews and Jesus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 32–33. 2 Douglas Hare, “The Rejection of the Jews in the Synoptic Gospels and Acts,” in Anti-Semitism and the Foundations of Christianity (ed. Alan T. Davies; Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2004), 27–46; Paula Fredriksen and Adele Reinhartz, eds., Jesus, Judaism, and Christian Anti-Judaism: Reading the New Testament after the Holocaust (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002). 3 Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, eds. The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007 [2003]), 2; John J. Collins, “Cult and Culture: The Limits of Hellenization in Judea,” in Hellenism in the Land of Israel (eds. J. J. Collins and G. E. Sterling; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 38–61, esp. 38. 4 See Kipling D. Williams, Joseph P. Forgas, and William von Hippel, The Social Outcast: Ostracism, Social Exclusion, Rejection, and Bullying (Sydney Symposium of Social Psychology 7; New York: Taylor and Francis, 2005); Mark R. Leary (ed.), Interpersonal Rejection (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Bregtje Gunther Moor, Eveline A. Crone, and Maurits W. van der Molen, “The Heartbrake of Social Rejection: Heart Rate Deceleration in Response to Unexpected Peer Rejection,” Psychological Science 21 no. 9 (2010), 1326–33; Stephanie S. Rude, Francesco A. Mazzetti, Hoimonti Pal; and Melissa R. Stauble, “Social Rejection: How Best to Think About It?,” Cognitive Therapy and Research 35 no. 3 (2011), 209–16; C. Nathan DeWall and Brad J. Bushman, “Social Acceptance and Rejection: The Sweet and the Bitter,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 20 no. 4 (2011), 256–60. 5 Jeroen Stouten, David De Cremer, and Eric van Dijk, “When being disadvantaged grows into vengeance: The effects of asymmetry of interest and social rejection in social dilemmas,” European Journal of Social Psychology 39 no. 4 (2009), 526–39; Lowell Gaertner, Jonathan Iuzzini, and Erin M. O’Mara, “When rejection by one fos-

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6 7 8

9 10

11 12 13

14 15 16 17

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21

ters aggression against many: Multiple-victim aggression as a consequence of social rejection and perceived groupness,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44 no. 4 (2008), 958–70. Yanine D. Hess and Cynthia L. Pickett, “Social Rejection and Self-Versus OtherAwareness,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46 no. 2 (2010), 453–56. Megan L. Knowles and Wendi L. Gardner, “Benefits of Membership: The Activation and Amplification of Group Identities in Response to Social Rejection,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34 no. 9 (2008), 1200–13. N. Aydin, P. Fischer, and D. Frey, “Turning to God in the Face of Ostracism: Effects of Social Exclusion on Religiousness,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 36 no. 6 (2010), 742–53, here 751. So also Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (Garden City: Doubleday, 1964 [1927); Civilization and its Discontents (trans. J. Strachey; New York: Norton, 1961 [1930]). J. Goldstein, “Jewish Acceptance and Rejection of Hellenism,” in Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, vol. 2: Aspects of Judaism in the Greco-Roman Period (ed.) E.P. Sanders, et al. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981), 64–87. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, eds., Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1996); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996); Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). J. Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992). See also C. Courtois, “Complex trauma, complex reactions: Assessment and treatment,” Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training 41 no. 4 (2004), 412–25, on “complex trauma.” Elizabeth Boase and Christopher G. Frechette, eds., Bible Through the Lens of Trauma (Semeia Studies 86; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2016); David G. Garber, “Trauma Theory and Biblical Studies,” Currents in Biblical Research 14 (2015), 24–44; David M. Carr, Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); Eve-Marie Becker, Jan Dochhorn, and Else Holt, eds., Trauma and Traumatization in Individual and Collective Dimensions: Insights from Biblical Studies and Beyond (SANt 2; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014). Christopher G. Frechette and Elizabeth Boase, “Defining ‘Trauma’ as a Useful Lens for Biblical Interpretation,” in Bible Through the Lens of Trauma (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2016), 2. Frechette and Boase, “Defining ‘Trauma’ as a Useful Lens for Biblical Interpretation,” 10. Frechette and Boase, “Defining ‘Trauma’ as a Useful Lens for Biblical Interpretation,” 11. Monica Jyotsna Melanchthon, “Rejection by God: The History and Significance of the Rejection Motif in the Hebrew Bible,” Th.D. dissertation, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, 1995; Rejection by God: The History and Significance of the Rejection Motif in the Hebrew Bible (Studies in Biblical Literature 22; Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001). See also Brian L. Webster, “Divine Abandonment in the Hebrew Bible,” Ph.D. dissertation, Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, 2000. Jer 7:29; Deut 32:19; 1 Sam 15:23; Lam 5:22; Hos 4:6; Ps 78:59. On the concept of “chosenness,” see S. Leyla Gürkan, The Jews as a Chosen People: Tradition and Transformation (Jewish Studies Series; London and New York: Routledge, 2009). Melanchthon, “Rejection by God,” 326, traces the origins of this motif to the ancient Near East, where the concept of divine abandonment (that is, rejection) was associated with the destruction of city-states. Conversely, military victory could be envisioned as a distinctive sign of divine election. Disobedience could thus be associated with divine desertion or rejection. Webster, “Divine Abandonment in the Hebrew Bible,” 1: “the greatest fear for the worshipper(s) being that God will abandon them.”

90 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31

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Theorizing Rejection Gen 4:1–18. Gen 16–21. Gen 37–50. Baumgarten, The Flourishing of the Jewish Sects in the Maccabean Era. Karl Edmond Pagenkemper, “An Analysis of the Rejection Motif in the Synoptic Parables and Its Relationship to Pauline Soteriology,” Th.D. dissertation, Dallas Theological Seminary, 1990. On its authenticity, see Frank D. Gilliard, “The Problem of the Antisemitic Comma Between 1 Thessalonians 2.14 and 15,” NTS 35 (1989), 481-502; Markus Bockmuehl, “1 Thessalonians 2:14–16 and the Church in Jerusalem,” TB 52 no. 1 (2001), 1–31; Todd D. Still, Conflict at Thessalonica: A Pauline Church and its Neighbours (JSNT Sup 183; Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 24–25; Karl Paul Donfried, Paul, Thessalonica, and Early Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 195–208. The case for interpolation has been made by Birger Pearson, “1 Thessalonians 2.13–16: A Deutero-Pauline Interpretation,” HTR 64 (1971), 79–94; G. E. Okeke, “1 Thessalonians 2.13–16: The Fate of the Unbelieving Jews,” NTS 27 no. 1 (1980), 127–36; Daryl Schmidt, “1 Thess 2:13-16: Linguistic Evidence for an Interpolation,” JBL 102 no. 2 (1983), 269–79. On the state of the problem, see Matthew Jensen, “The (In)authenticity of 1 Thessalonians 2.13–16: A Review of Arguments,” CBR 18 no. 1 (2019), 59–79. For Paul’s appeal to God’s “wrath,” see Rom 2:5, 8; 3:5; 4:15; 5:9; 9:22; 12:19. Matt 13:24–30, 36–43; 13:47–50; 22:1–14; Luke 14:15–24; 13:22–30; Matt 24:45–51; Luke 12:41–46; Matt 25:1–13; 25:14–30; 25: 31–46; Luke 19:11–27. See Hyung-Dong Kim, “A Study of Q: The Kingdom of God and Its Rejection as a Hermeneutical Key in Q,” Ph.D. dissertation, Drew University, 1998. On Christian responses to the Jewish rejection of Jesus, see Samuel Krauss, The Jewish-Christian Controversy, Vol. I: History, From the Earliest Times to 1789 (edited by William Horbury; TSAJ 56; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995). See also A. Lukyn Williams, Adversus Judaeos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935); Bernhard Blumenkranz, Les auteurs chrétiens latins du Moyen Age sur les Juifs et le Judaisme (Paris; Dudley, MA/Leuven: Peeters, 2007); Heinz Schreckenberg, Die christlichen Adversus-Judaeos-Texte und ihr literarisches und historisches Umfeld (13.–20. Jh. (Frankfurt am Main/New York: Peter Lang, 1994). Atsuhiro Asano, Community-Identity Construction in Galatians: Exegetical, SocialAnthropological and Socio-Historical Studies (London: T & T Clark, 2005); Coleman A. Baker, “Studying Early Christian Identity: From Ethnicity and Theology to SocioNarrative Analysis,” Currents in Biblical Research 9, no. 2 (2011), 228–37; William S. Campbell, Paul and the Creation of Christian Identity (London: T & T Clark, 2006); Philip A. Harland, Dynamics of Identity in the World of the Early Christians (London: T & T Clark, 2009); Bengt Holmberg and Mikael Winninge, eds., Identity Formation in the New Testament (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008); Bengt Holmberg (ed.), Exploring Early Christian Identity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008); Carol A. Newsom, The Self as Symbolic Space: Constructing Identity and Community at Qumran (Leiden: Brill, 2004). See the T & T Clark Handbook to Social Identity in the New Testament (ed.) J. Brian Tucker and Coleman A. Baker (London: T & T Clark, 2013); Raimo Hakola, “Social Identities and Group Phenomena in Second Temple Judaism,” in Explaining Christian Origins and Early Judaism: Contributions from Cognitive and Social Science (ed.) P. Luomanen, I. Pyysiäinen, and R. Uro (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 259–76; Petri Luomanen, “The Sociology of Knowledge, The Social Identity Approach and the Cognitive Science of Religion,” in Explaining Christian Origins and Early Judaism, 199–229. Social Identity Theory was introduced in biblical studies in 1996, with Philip F. Esler, “Group Boundaries and Intergroup Conflict in Galatians: A New Reading of Gal. 5:13–6:10,” in Ethnicity and the Bible (ed.) M. G. Brett (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 215–40. M. A. Hogg and G. M. Vaughan, Social Psychology, (London: Prentice Hall, 2002). For identity theory, see Peter J. Burke, “The Self: Measurement Requirements form

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35 36 37 38

39 40

41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56

an Interactionist Perspective,” Social Psychology Quarterly 43 (1980): 18–29; George McCall and Jerry Simmons, Identities and Interactions (New York: Free Press, 1978); Sheldon Stryker, “Identity Salience and Role Performance: The Importance of Symbolic Interaction Theory for Family Research,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 30 (1968): 558–64; Ralph H. Turner, “The Role and the Person,” American Journal of Sociology 84 (1978): 1–23. See Paula M. L. Moya and Michael R. Hames-Garcia, eds., Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Lieu, Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World, 98. Dominick La Capra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 5; Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay, Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996), 4. Jonathan Rutherford, “A Place Called Home: Identity and the Cultural Politics of Difference,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (ed.) Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 9–27, 24. Cf. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness, 5. Hall and Gay, Questions of Cultural Identity, 5. Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity in Question,” in S. Hall, D. Held, and T. McGrew (eds.), Modernity and its Futures (Cambridge: Polity, 1993); Elizabeth A. Castelli, Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1991), 36–58, esp. 41; see also Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’” in Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader (ed.) Margaret Wetherell, Stephanie Taylor, and Simeon J. Yates (London: Sage, 2001), 332. Hall, “The Spectacle of the Other,” 330. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). Rutherford, “A Place Called Home,” 10. On difference, see Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’” 324–44; M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas, 1981), 293–94; Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 1966). Barth (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. For critique, see Sacha Stern, Jewish Identity in Early Rabbinic Writings (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 135–38, 197–98; Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1986), 49, 97. Anthony P. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (New York: Tavistock, 1985), 9. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community, 21. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community, 98–99. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community, 99. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Judith Lieu, Neither Jew nor Greek? Constructing Early Christianity (London: T & T Clark, 2002), 208: “identity is to do with ‘the invention of tradition,’ the discovery of a past for the sake of the present.” Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community, 50. Max Weber, Economy and Society (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), 43–46; Frank Parkin, Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 108. Lewis Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict (New York: Free, 1956); Georg Simmel, Conflict (Glenroe, Ill: Free, 1955). Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict, 33, 72. Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict, 111. Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict, 141; Gager, Kingdom and Community, 83.

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57 Gager, Kingdom and Community, 88. 58 Henri Tajfel and John C. Turner, “The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior,” in Psychology of Intergroup Relations (ed.), Stephen Worchel and William G. Austin, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1986), 7–24, esp. 13. For a helpful overview, see Michael A. Hogg and Dominic Abrams, “Intergroup Behavior and Social Identity,” in The Sage Handbook of Social Psychology (ed.) M. A. Hogg and J. Cooper (Los Angeles: Sage, 2007), 335–60; D. Abrams and M. A. Hogg, eds., Social Identity and Social Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999); D. Capozza and R. J. Brown, eds., Social Identity Processes (London: Sage, 2000); N. Ellemers, R. Spears, and B. Doojse, eds., Social Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999); M. A. Hogg and D. Abrams, Social Identifications: A Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations and Group Processes (London: Routledge, 1988); D. Abrams and M. A. Hogg, eds., Social Identity Theory: Constructive and Critical Advances (New York: Springer, 1990). 59 J. C. Turner, “Social Categorization and the Self-Concept: A Social Cognitive Theory of Group Behavior,” in Advances in Group Processes: Theory and Research (ed.) E. J. Lawler (Greenwich, CT.: JAI Press, 1985), 2:77–121. 60 Tajfel and Turner, “The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior,” 16. 61 Tajfel and Turner, “The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior,” 17. 62 George R. Goethals, “A Century of Social Psychology: Individuals, Ideas, and Investigations,” in The SAGE Handbook of Social Psychology (ed.) Michael A. Hogg and Joel Cooper (Los Angeles: Sage, 2007), 3–23, esp. 16. 63 Hogg and Abrams, “Intergroup Behavior and Social Identity,” 340. For criticism, see Richard Jenkins, Social Identity, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008), 113; Rupert Brown, “Social Identity Theory: Past achievements, current problems and future challenges,” European Journal of Social Psychology 30, no. 6 (2000): 745–78; D. T. Gilbert, R. B. Giesler, and K. A. Morris, “When comparisons arise,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 (1995): 227–36. 64 J. C. Turner, “Social categorization and the Self-Concept,” 77–122; J. C. Turner and P. J. Oakes, “Self-categorization theory and social influence,” in The Psychology of Group Influence (ed.) P. B. Paulus, 2nd ed. (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1989), 233–75. 65 G. M. Gilbert, “Stereotype Persistence and Change Among College Students,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 46 (1951): 245–54; M. Karlins, T. L. Coffman, and G. Walters, “On the Fading of Social Stereotypes: Studies in Three Generations of College Students,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 13 (1969): 1–16. 66 Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1954). 67 J. M. Jones, Prejudice and Racism, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996); T. F. Pettigrew, “Personality and Sociocultural Factors in Intergroup Attitudes: A CrossNational Comparison,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 2 (1958): 29–42; T. F. Pettigrew, “Normative Theory in Intergroup Relations: Explaining Both Harmony and Conflict,” Psychology and Developing Societies 3 (1991): 3–16. 68 In language, see H. Giles (ed.), Language, Ethnicity, and Intergroup Relations (London: Academic Press, 1977); A. LeCouteur and M. Augoustinos, “The Language of Prejudice and Racism,” in Understanding Prejudice, Racism, and Social Conflict (ed.) M. Augoustinos and K. J. Reynolds (London: Sage, 2001), 215–30; S. H. Ng and J. J. Bradac, Power in Language: Verbal Communication and Social Influence (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1993). In communication, see B. M. DePaulo and L. M. Coleman, “Talking to Children, Foreigners and Retarded Adults,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51 (1986): 945–59; A. Maass and L. Arcuri, “The Role of Language in the Persistence of Stereotypes,” in Language, Interaction and Social Cognition (ed.) G. R. Semin and K. Fiedler (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1992), 129–43. 69 T. F. Pettigrew, “New Black-White Patterns: How Best to Conceptualize Them?,” Annual Review of Sociology 11 (1985): 329–46.

Theorizing Rejection 93 70 D. C. Medin and A. Ortony, “Psychological Essentialism,” in Similarity and Analogical Reasoning (ed.) S. Vosnaidou and A. Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 179–95. 71 D. T. Miller and D. A. Prentice, “Some Consequences of a Belief in Group Essence: The Category Divide Hypothesis,” in Cultural Divides: Understanding and Overcoming Group Conflict (ed.) D. A. Prentice and D. T. Miller (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), 213–38. 72 Joseph, “A Social Identity Approach,” 28–49. 73 Lieu, Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World.

4

Criteria of Rejection

Since the Enlightenment, critical biblical scholars have studied biblical literature as historical texts, attempting to understand them within their historical context, not as divine revelation.1 This methodological principle – recognizing critical distinctions between history, a text, and the meaning ascribed to (or inscribed in) a text – is now foundational to the academic study of biblical literature. Accordingly, a central insight has emerged: the Gospels are as much about the social contexts of the people who wrote them as they are reliable memories of a historical Jesus. In the early twentieth century, the emergence of form criticism (Formgeschichte) – one of the foundational methods of New Testament Studies – envisioned the Gospels as the culmination of a complex compositional process representing several decades of oral tradition. Developed by Karl Ludwig Schmidt,2 Martin Dibelius,3 and Rudolf Bultmann,4 form critics analyzed the New Testament Gospels by identifying the “history of the form” (die Geschichte der Form) of each individual unit according to its proposed respective genre. Once these “forms” had been identified, they could then be classified and categorized according to their hypothetical origin (Sitz im Leben), with Jesus’s sayings, stories, and traditions either identified as “authentic” to the Sitz im Leben of Jesus’s ministry or representative of the early Church (ekklēsia). Form critics presupposed an extended period of oral tradition prior to the composition of the Gospels as well as a distinction between an early Palestinian cultural matrix and a secondary Hellenistic milieu. They also recognized that many of Jesus’s sayings and stories were shaped by the needs of the communities that transmitted them, providing the theoretical foundations that would come to determine how the Jesus tradition came to be understood.5 Since the early twentieth century, the form-critical method, which appealed to the archaeological metaphor of excavation in its attempt to dig through the literary remains and textual sediment of the Jesus tradition and get back to the original stratum, has appealed to many.6 The form critics developed a number of “criteria of authenticity” to differentiate between historically “authentic” and “inauthentic” sayings and traditions. For decades, these criteria were used by scholars as the central method in historical Jesus Research. In recent years, however, a broad consensus has emerged conceding that the criteria of authenticity are imperfect tools in reconstructing a historical Jesus.7 Most scholars still accept modified versions DOI: 10.4324/b22959-6

Criteria of Rejection 95 of these critical tools, including the criteria of multiple attestation, recurrent attestation,8 and plausibility,9 as well as the principle of embarrassment,10 suggesting that it is not necessarily the criteria per se that prevent or complicate critical judgment, but rather our insufficient data. The criterion of multiple attestation depends on contested judgments regarding which sources are independent.11 The criterion of embarrassment depends on knowing what the authors of the Gospels and their audience(s) might have found embarrassing. Accordingly, if we cannot determine which sources were independent and which elements were embarrassing – predominantly because we do not have enough information about these sources, their authors, and/or their interests – then our criteria will inevitably yield inconclusive results. In this chapter, I argue that the criterion of dissimilarity and the criterion of rejection represent methodological lenses in and through which the “rejection” of the Jewish Jesus and “the Jewish rejection of Jesus” continue to be re-inscribed in Jesus Research, paving the way toward anti-Judaic readings of the Gospels.12 The criterion of dissimilarity – intended to identify what was distinctive about Jesus through identifying his difference from Judaism as opposed to his distinctiveness within Judaism13 – was introduced by Rudolph Bultmann in 1921,14 and further developed by his student, Ernst Käsemann, in 1953. The criterion was conceptualized as providing solid “ground” upon which to build the critical foundations of Jesus Research: In only one case do we have more or less safe ground under our feet; when then are no grounds either for deriving a tradition from Judaism or for ascribing it to primitive Christianity.15 The emergence of the criteria among Bultmann’s students was a reaction to his Jesus-skepticism as well as to his form-critical and existentialist-theological approach in favor of establishing greater historiographical continuity between the Jesus of history and the kerygma.16 This “New Quest of the Historical Jesus,” coined by James M. Robinson in 1959,17 was a response to the perceived illegitimacy of such a quest and an attempt to formulate foundational tools designed to identify and isolate authentic tradition.18 In doing so, the New Quest was envisioned as correcting both form-critical approaches as well as “First Quest” methodologies.19 Unfortunately, the criterion also resulted in “a methodologically determined intensification of the separation of Jesus from Judaism and/or from the basic elements of Jewish theology.”20 By imagining that Jesus broke with the framework of Jewish thought,21 the use of the criterion was intended to discover the essence of Christianity,22 which was conceptualized as incomparably unique.23 The criterion thus represented a theoretical development of “structural anti-Judaism.”24 The criterion was conceived in anti-Judaism, “the theological rejection of the Jewish religion.”25 The criterion identified Jesus’s dissimilarity from Judaism as the defining feature of Christianity. The presupposition that a historical Jesus can be distinguished from Judaism founders on its own illogicality: Jesus can only be distinguished within Judaism.

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The criterion of dissimilarity also functions as a covert criterion of divinity, presupposing that the transcendent otherness (or uniqueness) of Jesus cannot be corralled into either the ethnic category of “Jew” or “Greek” (cf. Gal 3:28).26 Jesus, like (or as) God, is conceptualized as not (really) Jewish, but transcendent of all ethnicities and “partialities” (Rom 2:11; Acts 10:34). This conceptualization of Jesus-as-divine facilitates the depiction of Judaism as ethno-nationalistic, particularistic, and legalistic, a binary contradistinction to Jesus (and Christianity) as inclusive, universalistic, and grace-centric. A residual theological prejudice against Judaism was thus configured as a “critical” principle of historical judgment. This critical ambivalence toward Jesus’s Jewishness became an indelible aspect of the history of the Quest.27 The New Quest emphasized Jesus’s continuity (“similarity”) with the Church and his discontinuity (“dissimilarity”) with Judaism. On one hand, the criterion perpetuated the conceptualization of Jesus as independent of (from) his Jewish context, facilitating Christian theological convictions of Jesus’s uniqueness and divinity; on the other hand, the criterion suggested that Jesus could not be easily reconciled to the normative frameworks of rabbinical Judaism or orthodox Christianity. Dissimilarity helped preserve Jesus’s historiographical otherness to and for the contemporary historian. The tension inherent in this critical dynamic of continuity/discontinuity, however, could not be resolved by collapsing or exaggerating Jesus’s difference to or within Judaism. This conception of Jesus proceeded by extraction – that is, by removing Jesus from his Jewish context-matrix and by extrapolating principles or insights introduced by Jesus as symbolically representative of the emergence of a new socio-religious (Christian) orientation vis-à-vis Judaism. Recognizing the theoretical illegitimacy of the criterion of dissimilarity, Dagmar Winter and Gerd Theissen sought to replace the criterion of dissimilarity with the criteria of plausibility, “contextual appropriateness,” and “contextual distinctiveness.” This new criterion allows Jesus to engage in debate and even conflict with his contemporaries without being portrayed as opposed to Judaism.28 The criterion points to a central insight: Jesus occasionally said and did things offensive enough to be regarded as a controversial, divisive, and even dangerous first-century Jew. Like the criterion of dissimilarity, the criterion of rejection also ran the risk of driving Jesus Research toward similar conclusions.29 Sometimes associated with the criterion of coherence,30 the criterion of rejection evaluates traditions portraying Jesus in a controversial light. The logic behind its use is that traditions illuminating Jesus’s “crucifiability” help us better understand his social world. For many, Jesus’s rejection (via Roman execution) is also a major plank in the foundation of his identification as a royal messianic candidate (“King of the Jews”), a title (titulus) and charge allegedly inscribed on the cross upon which he was crucified.31 The criterion has proved useful in delimiting the ways in which the historical Jesus can be constructed, making it necessary for scholars to not only explain why Jesus was crucified, but also to portray Jesus as a man controversial enough to get crucified. As John P. Meier puts it, a Jesus who “did not threaten or alienate people … is not the historical Jesus.”32

Criteria of Rejection 97 At first sight, the criterion of rejection seems to make common sense. Yet as we have seen, there were many offenses for which the punishment of crucifixion could be ordered by Roman authorities (including banditry, murder, sedition, treason, desertion, and rebellion), including relatively arbitrary and ad hoc charges.33 The criterion also circumscribes how Jesus is portrayed and can effectively rule out portraits of Jesus as a wisdom teacher.34 Moreover, the mere fact of the crucifixion does not adequately explain why Jesus was crucified. If there were many reasons why one might get crucified in first-century Judea, there were also many circumstantial factors involved in why Jesus, in particular, was crucified. The criterion creates a closed hermeneutical circle of interpretation: Jesus’s rejection is presupposed in every explanation of who he was, what he taught, and what he did.35 Historical explanations are constrained by the way(s) they can get Jesus to the cross: Jesus simply must have been “so offensive to at least some of his [Jewish] contemporaries that he was crucified.”36 The crucifixion of Jesus can be seen as the end-result of a series of conflicts which included legal disagreements with his contemporaries, criticisms of priestlyeconomic exploitation, a social critique of Pharisaic-religious customs, and intimations of political unrest, all of which converge in a high priestly conspiracy and collaboration with Rome.37 That is, the crucifixion represents a “trajectory of memory,”38 not simply because it affirms one of the most repeated themes in the re-telling of the life of Jesus,39 corresponds to the authorial intention of the Gospels as narratives,40 and so represents an example of “recurrent attestation,”41 but more so because it still offers something to a “Church” concerned that the purpose of Jesus Research is, by definition, “to take apart the Church’s Jesus.”42 The criterion of rejection – like the criterion of dissimilarity – is not a tool to be discarded, but rather a tool to be problematized in the history of Jesus Research, illustrating the disciplinary impulse to distinguish and/or dissociate Jesus from Judaism. The criteria of dissimilarity and rejection both reflect and re-inscribe centuries of Christian anti-Judaism, a cultural-theological bias against the early Jewish matrix of Christianity, and facilitate the construction of anti-Jewish readings of the Jesus tradition. The critical analysis of structural anti-Judaism illustrates how Christian interests and prejudices shaped the formulation of critical tools in Jesus Research.

Notes 1 Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), xi–xii, notes that Spinoza was “the first to argue that the Bible is not literally the word of God but rather a work of human literature.” 2 Karl Ludwig Schmidt, Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Handwörter für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft (vol. 2; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1928); Der Rahmen der Geschichte Jesu (Berlin: Trowitzsch und Sohn, 1919). 3 Martin F. Dibelius, Die Formgeschichte des Evangeliums (repr.; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1959 [1919]); ET: From Tradition to Gospel (trans. Bertram Lee Woolf; Scribner Library 124; New York: Scribner, 1965 [1934]).

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4 Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition (trans. John Marsh; rev. ed.; New York: Harper & Row, 1963 [1921]), 1: “the task which follows for historical research is this: to separate the various strata in Mark and to determine which belonged to the original historical tradition and which derived from the work of the author.” 5 Chris Keith, “The Indebtedness of the Criteria Approach to Form Criticism and Recent Attempts to Rehabilitate the Search for an Authentic Jesus,” in Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne (eds.), Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity (New York and London: T & T Clark, 2012), 25–48; “Memory and Authenticity: Jesus Tradition and What Really Happened,” ZNW 102 (2011), 155–177. 6 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (trans. A.M. Sheridan; New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972); Mack, A Myth of Innocence; Kloppenborg, Excavating Q; John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2001). 7 Keith and Le Donne, Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity. For earlier reservations, see Morna Hooker, “On Using the Wrong Tool,” Theology 75 (1972), 570–81; Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 92–97, 191–92; Rafael Rodríguez, “Authenticating Criteria: The Use and Misuse of a Critical Method,” JSHJ 7 (2009), 152-167; Dale C. Allison, Jr., “How to Marginalize the Traditional Criteria of Authenticity,” in Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus (ed.) Tom Holmén and Stanley E. Porter (4 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 2011), 3–30. See also D. G. A. Calvert, “Examination of the Criteria for Distinguishing the Authentic Words of Jesus,” NTS 18 (1972): 209–19, at 211; M. Eugene Boring, “Criteria of Authenticity: The Beatitudes as a Test Case,” in Foundations and Facets Forum I (1985): 3–38, 3. 8 Allison, Constructing Jesus, 19–20. 9 Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter, The Quest for the Plausible Jesus: The Question of Criteria, trans. M. Eugene Boring (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002). 10 Keith, “The Indebtedness of the Criteria Approach to Form Criticism,” 47–48, refers to “defend[ing] the usage of the category (not criterion) of ‘embarrassment’ in early Christianity as a means of postulating the actual past … One fruitful area of future research, therefore, is the identification of various elements in the logical structure of individual criteria of authenticity that scholars may recover and use in another methodological structure.” 11 Sanders and Davies, Studying the Synoptic Gospels, 323; Dennis Polkow, “Method and Criteria for Historical Jesus Research,” (ed.) Kent H. Richards, Society of Biblical Literature 1987 Seminar Papers (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987), 336–56, at 350–51; Meier, A Marginal Jew, 1: 174–75; Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 75; Jens Schröter, “The Historical Jesus and the Sayings Tradition: Comments on Current Research,” Neot 30 (1996): 151–68, at 158. 12 Hooker, “On Using the Wrong Tool,” 570–81; David L. Mealand, “The Dissimilarity Test,” SJT 31 (1978): 41–50; Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, 16–17, 252–55; R. T. Osborn, “The Christian Blasphemy: A Non-Jewish Jesus,” in Jews and Christians: Exploring the Past, Present, and Future (ed.) James H. Charlesworth (New York: Crossroad, 1990), 211–38; Tom Holmén, “Doubts about Double Dissimilarity: Restructuring the Main Criterion of Jesus-of-History Research,” in Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evans (eds.), Authenticating the Words of Jesus (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 47–80; Richard B. Hays, “The Corrected Jesus,” First Things 43 (1994): 43–48, at 45. For responses to Hooker, see Reginald H. Fuller, “The Criterion of Dissimilarity: The Wrong Tool?” in Christological Perspectives (ed.) Robert F. Berkey and Sarah A. Edwards (New York: Pilgrim, 1982), 42–48; Craig A. Evans, “Jesus’ Dissimilarity from Second Temple Judaism and the Early Church,” in Memories of Jesus: A Critical Appraisal of James D. G. Dunn’s Jesus Remembered (ed.) Robert B. Stewart and Gary R. Habermas (Nashville: B & H Academic, 2010), 145–58. For its early formulation, see Norman Perrin, Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 39;

Criteria of Rejection 99

13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20 21

22

23 24

25 26

idem, The New Testament: An Introduction: Proclamation and Parenesis, Myth and History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 281; Ernst Käsemann, “The Problem of the Historical Jesus,” in idem, Essays on New Testament Themes (SBT 41; London: SCM, 1964), 15–47, at 37; Sanders and Davies, Studying the Synoptic Gospels, 316; Theissen and Winter, The Quest for the Plausible Jesus. For the formulation of the criterion of dissimilarity as identifying what was distinctive within Judaism, see James H. Charlesworth, Jesus Within Judaism: New Light from Exciting Archaeological Discoveries (New York: Doubleday, 1988). Bultmann, Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition; The History of the Synoptic Tradition, 205. Käsemann, “The Problem of the Historical Jesus,” 37 (emphasis added). Michael B. Metts, “Neglected Discontinuity between Early Form Criticism and the New Quest with Reference to the Last Supper,” in Darrell L. Bock and J. Ed Komoszewski (eds.), Jesus, Skepticism & the Problem of History (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2019), 67–90. James M. Robinson, A New Quest of the Historical Jesus (London: SCM, 1959). Rudolf Bultmann, “The Primitive Christian Kerygma and the Historical Jesus,” in Carl E. Braaten and Roy A. Harrisville (eds.), The Historical Jesus and the Kerygmatic Christ: Essays on the New Quest for the Historical Jesus (Nashville: Abingdon, 1964), 15–41, 18: “The Christ of the kerygma is not a historical figure which could enjoy continuity with the historical Jesus.” Metts, “Neglected Discontinuity,” 68. Winter, The Quest for the Plausible Jesus, 122. See also Keith, “The Indebtedness of the Criteria Approach to Form Criticism,” 28 n. 14; cf. “Memory and Authenticity,” 155–77. So F. Hahn, “Die Frage nach dem historischen Jesus und die Eigenart der uns zur Verfügung stehenden Quellen (Vortrag 1960),” in Die Frage nach dem hisorischen Jesus (eds. F. Hahn, W. Lohff, and G. Bornkamm; EvFo 2; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960), 7–40, here 38. Winter, The Quest for the Plausible Jesus, 123, argues that the “demarcation over against Judaism” became “the decisive criterion of authenticity” because “a hermeneutical presupposition had been changed: the model of the ‘genial and heroic personality,’ which had left its traditional context behind, was replaced by the theological concept of the kerygma that transcended the boundaries of everything human … Jesus drops out of the Jewish context.” Winter, The Quest for the Plausible Jesus, 132, identifies this “extreme position” – associating “difference” (or dissimilarity) with that which is “‘without any analogy’ and ‘underivable’” – as reflecting “a notable theological dimension.” Dagmar Winter, “Saving the Quest for Authenticity from the Criterion of Dissimilarity: History and Plausibility,” in Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity, 118: “The criterion of dissimilarity to Judaism is based on a history of religions or comparative religion approach as it contrasts Christian and Jewish faith and concepts.” Its “main problem” is its “distinction assumed between Jesus and Judaism, presenting Jesus as the first Christian, possibly even in stark opposition to his first Jewish followers.” See also Winter, “The Dissimilar Jesus: Anti-Semitism, Protestantism, Hero-Worship and Dialectical Theology,” in Soundings in the Religion of Jesus: Perspectives and Methods in Jewish and Christian Scholarship (eds. Bruce Chilton, Anthony Le Donne, and Jacob Neusner; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), 129–42. Winter, The Quest for the Plausible Jesus, 67. Winter, “Saving the Quest for Authenticity,” 120: “Bultmann’s dialectical theology stressed the otherness of God. It was not the life of the historical Jesus but the postEaster message which was central for his theology … When the New Quest in the 1950s regained interest in Jesus, the theological theme of otherness – of which Bultmann had spoken with reference to God’s transcendence – was subtly historized.” Cf. Günter

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30

31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38

39 40

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Bornkamm, Jesus of Nazareth (trans. Irene Fraser and Fraser Mcluskey with James M. Robinson; New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 56: “Jesus belongs to this world. Yet in the midst of it he is of unmistakable otherness.” Winter, “The Dissimilar Jesus,” 131. Winter, “Saving the Quest for Authenticity,” 127. Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (trans. Hubert Hoskins; London: Collins, 1979 [1974]), 97, refer to “the execution criterion” or “The Criterion of the Rejection of Jesus' Message and Praxis: His Execution”; Meier, A Marginal Jew, 1:177: a “criterion of rejection and execution”; Craig A. Evans, Jesus and his Contemporaries: Comparative Studies (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 14, suggests that this criterion “should be given first place”; N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 2; London: SPCK, 1996), 86. Stanley Porter, Reading the Gospels Today, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 52, describes the criterion as “a form of the criterion of coherence.” On the criterion of coherence, see Jack T. Sanders, “The Criterion of Coherence and the Randomness of Charisma: Poring Through Some Aporias in the Jesus Tradition,” NTS (1998): 1–25; Charles E. Carlston, “A Positive Criterion of Authenticity,” BR 7 (1962): 33–44; Polkow, ‘Method and Criteria for Historical Jesus,” 350; Meier, A Marginal Jew 1:174–75; Robert W. Funk, Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1996), 138. See also Gerd Theißen and Annette Merz, “The Delay of the Parousia as a Test Case for the Criterion of Coherence,” LS 32 (2007): 49–66; Theißen and Winter, The Quest for the Plausible Jesus, 17. A. E. Harvey, Jesus and the Constraints of History (London: Duckworth, 1982), 33. Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 4, 16. Pounds, “The Crucifiable Jesus.” Meier, A Marginal Jew, 1:177. Pounds, “The Crucifiable Jesus,” 11: “there is a tacit assumption that Jesus must have engaged in a bare minimum of provocative activity to suffer such a fate … Another common theme … is the use of Jesus’ execution as an authenticator of his Jewish religious conflicts portrayed in the gospels … and it is assumed that those rejecting him are his Jewish contemporaries. At one point or another, the historicity of virtually every conflict or polemical motif found in the gospels is taken to be at least partially authenticated by the crucifixion.” Christopher M. Tuckett, “Sources and Methods,” in Cambridge Companion to Jesus (ed. Markus Bockmuehl; Cambridge University Press, 2010), 121–37, 136. Joseph, Jesus and the Temple, 15–29. Anthony Le Donne argues that Jesus Research should be less about establishing “what really happened” than “chart[ing] trajectories of memory refraction that have been propelled forward by the initial perceptions of Jesus by his contemporaries” (The Historiographical Jesus, 5, 13). Cf. Keith, “The Indebtedness of the Criteria Approach to Form Criticism,” 46–7 (emphasis added): “Either one should dispense with the theological interpretations in the narratives of the Gospels in order to reconstruct critically the past, or one should begin with these theological interpretations as the crucial links to the past.” Morna Hooker, “Foreword: Forty Years On,” in Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity, xiii-xvii, here xvii; cf. “Christology and Methodology,” NTS 17 (1971), 480–87; “On Using the Wrong Tool,” 570–81. Jens Schröter, “The Criteria of Authenticity in Jesus Research and Historiographical Method,” in Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity, 49–72, here 68: “[the Gospels] have taken up their traditions and historical information about Jesus’ activity in Galilee and integrated them into their own narratives, making the Jesus story transparent for their own time.” Allison, Constructing Jesus, 19–20. McKnight, “Why the Authentic Jesus Is of No Use for the Church,” 175.

5

“Do This in Memory of Me”

The Quest for the Historical Jesus presently emphasizes Jesus’s Jewish context, but still labors under the weight of centuries of structural anti-Judaism. If anything, recent Jesus Research even errs on the side of caution in attempting to (over) correct this legacy of anti-Judaism. In recent years, form-critical models have also been challenged as fundamentally inadequate to the task.1 New hermeneutical and epistemological considerations implicit in the emergence of postmodern historiography have called into question the methodological and theoretical assumptions of form-criticism. This new historiography exposes and reevaluates the complex process in and through which history is constructed. The critical tools, methods, and approaches used in Jesus Research have now all come under scrutiny, with the criteria of authenticity, in particular, questioned for their probative value. The dynamic processes of oral tradition are also being reexamined as potentially illuminative, and “memory approaches” have been proposed as a way of changing the form-critical conversation about the history of the Jesus tradition.2 Many of these discussions are concerned with the question of access to the past as commemorated (“remembered”) in textual sources and so have come to focus on the nature, function, and interpretation of memory. These discussions represent more than a mere conflict of competing metaphors, whether of excavation (where one attempts to get back to earlier “layers”) and/or the living continuity of memory (where one works with present traces of the past). Postmodern historiography questions the very idea that one can get behind, under, or back to historical persons or events,3 that is, to an “original” Jesus.4 It has been suggested, for example, that since our sources do not “mediate an unambiguous picture of the past,” then our goal cannot be to reach “the one Jesus behind the texts” (“des einen Jesus hinter den Texten”), but rather we must move “in front of (“vor”) the sources” in order to construct a conceptual abstraction based on a critical evaluation of those sources.5 It may be true, of course, that we cannot get to a Jesus “behind the Gospels” in the sense of accessing an uninterpreted actual past,6 but this appeal to the alleged impossibility of getting “behind the Gospels” seems to function more like a rhetorical flourish than a substantive correction. Indeed, the use of the prepositional phrase “behind” (“hinter”) is potentially misleading as its ambiguity can signify both temporal (as in “prior to” or “before”) as well as spatial meanings (as in “under” or “beneath”). Yet the DOI: 10.4324/b22959-7

102 “Do This in Memory of Me” idea that an oral tradition preceded (and thus lay chronologically “behind” the composition of the Gospels) is now a truism in New Testament studies. In this sense, getting “behind the Gospels” is simply an attempt to better understand the dynamics involved in the generation and transmission of oral tradition while conceding that the extant data is insufficient for anything other than tentative results.7 Alternatively, there is another way of getting “behind the Gospels”: by reconstructing a sequence of known historical events prior to the composition of the Gospels. In this case, getting “behind the Gospels” is simply an attempt to better understand the social, literary, and historical processes through which the narrated “memories” of Jesus were transmitted and recorded. In general terms, memory or remembrance (‫ )זכור‬has always played a central role in Jewish history, whether it was “remembering” to observe the Torah or the Sabbath, or the commemoration of a national narrative.8 Social memory theory, however, has recently been proposed as a new paradigm for explaining the emergence of the Jesus tradition,9 a new lens through which religious figures such as the Teacher of Righteousness can be viewed as “received” and “remembered” by their community.10 Significant efforts have also been made to apply social memory theory to the historical Jesus and the figure of Paul,11 encouraging us to explore how and why these seminal figures were remembered in different ways and what purposes these “memories” served. Conceived by French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs,12 a student of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), who conceptualized sacrality as a social construct, social memory (mémoire sociale) was initially theorized as a social phenomenon associated with group identity and development.13 Halbwachs argued that memory was constituted by “social frameworks,”14 and shaped by social structures and dynamics.15 These frameworks provide the “cultural systems of meaning” that give structural coherence to memories. Ritual performances also “recall” the past and imbue it with meaning.16 Communication forms memory.17 Discourse both preserves and constructs memory, modifying meaning and significance as memories are translated into symbolic forms, words, actions, and objects.18 Historical events can thus be represented within a commemorative cycle that emphasizes the symbolic meaning of those events for the community.19 In this process, historical details become less important than symbolic meaning(s).20 Like Halbwachs, German Egyptologist Jan Assmann foregrounds “the representation of the past in light of the needs of the present.”21 Assmann uses the term “communicative memory” (kommunikative Gedächtnis) to describe social groups still close to their foundational memories.22 This could be described as the time of “eyewitness and living memory.”23 The focal point of collective memory is the memory of individuals whose identity is connected to the group.24 The community’s identity and continuity depend on its resignification of these memories.25 Origin stories mark “the group’s emergence as an independent social entity,”26 serving as “commemorative narrative(s).”27 A society’s “founding narrative” provides the generative power of memories capable of driving social development.28 Social memory can also represent moral values and stabilize a group’s worldview.29 These commemorative narratives represent “moral and

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cosmological ordering stories,”30 becoming a “model for society.”31 There is a dynamic relationship between the past as an authoritative model and the present as a regenerative creative context.32 This dynamic process of early “communicative memory” comes to an end, however, when those who could claim a living connection to the original generation(s) pass away.33 Direct memory (“communicative memory”) produces a crisis of memory when it reaches a certain threshold.34 The community then turns toward more sustainable forms of transmission and develops “cultural memory” (kulturelle Gedächtnis).35 In some cultures, writing becomes a medium of memory, fixing memory in form, a cultural innovation that leads to the loss of “communicative memory.” In many cultures, rituals also bring individuals into connection with community memory. Cultural memory is commemorated in “artifactual” forms (e.g., writing) and/or ritual practices,36 bringing formative events to a community’s present existence,37 “rendering visible and stabilizing collective identity by presenting it in symbolic and dramatic form.”38 Communities impress the present upon their memory of the past.39 Commemorative ritual preserves and perpetuates memory.40 Since commemorative acts are central to cultural formation, mobilizing systems and symbols of meaning,41 social memory can be conceptualized as a “Symbolsystem,”42 with the “symbolische Figuren” of culture represented as “Erinnerungsfiguren” (memory configurations).43 The language of ritual facilitates preservation by “remembering” events even as it transforms their representation.44 The community “in-corporation” of the past renews the community in and through the ritualized act of remembering.45 For Assmann and Halbwachs, then, social memory is constructive, generative in its creativity, and capable of re-shaping the past to serve the needs of the present, of “inventing” tradition.46 In Moses the Egyptian, for example, Assmann argued that the cultural representation of Egyptian religion played a central role in the construction of Western cultural and religious identity, particularly in Judaism’s ability to distinguish between the binary of true and false religion.47 Assmann described this as “the Mosaic distinction,”48 an exclusive monotheism that initiated religious rejectionism.49 It was the “collective memory” of Egypt, not Egypt’s actual past, that served as a foil in the construction of Judean religion.50 It was “the image of the Jew” – resurfacing as “the suppressed memory of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten” – that provided the raw material for the emergence of Hellenistic Egyptian anti-Judaism as an unconscious cultural memory conflation of Moses, Akhenaten, and monotheism.51 It was not the historical Moses, but the “remembered Moses” that facilitated the construction of competing “Moseses” in the Torah. While Halbwachs and Assmann posited a relative dissociation from an actual past, other theorists emphasize the present’s continuity with the past. This school of thought has been described as the “continuity perspective” and allows for a stronger role of the past’s impingement upon and preservation in the present.52 Here the past serves as a framework for the social recognition, organization, and interpretation of the present.53 Social memory is thus conceived as connecting the present to the past by “recalling events that have unified, animated, oriented

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or re-oriented the community in fundamental ways, and by presenting these watershed moments as frameworks for evaluating and navigating through current circumstances.”54 As a process, social memory is “a general rubric for inquiry into the varieties of forms through which we are shaped by the past,”55 a process that is neither entirely constructive nor preservative of the past. These intra-disciplinary theoretical debates about the continuity and/or discontinuity of social memory indicate that “social memory theory – as theory – neither affirms nor denies the reliability of the Gospel tradition.”56 Social memory theory can be used both to support and undermine the reliability of any given memory-tradition.57 Early theorists focused on the constructive nature of memory. Unsurprisingly, many scholars informed by social memory theory posit significant discontinuities between the historical Jesus and the Gospels. Jens Schröter, for example, suggests that Jesus did not understand his death as a salvific death for the forgiveness of sins even though that is how the early Jesus movement came to “remember” it. Rather, Jesus understood his death as establishing the “reign of God, which his followers would advocate in the future and at whose completion he would be present again.”58 The Gospels represent interpretations of events infused with scriptural allusions and historical reminiscence.59 Consequently, it is not clear whether the events of Jesus’s life were remembered by “eyewitnesses” and/or whether those memories were reliable.60 While there are “almost certainly accurate” memories embedded in the Gospels,61 there are also inaccurate memories,62 competing “memories,” and “counter-memories” within the emergent Jesus tradition.63 The historiographical principles informing social memory theory are sound: the present impinges on the past; we construct narrative accounts of past events in present-time; past and present combine to form social memory. Social memory, however, is not “convertible” with historical continuity.64 The application of social memory theory to Jesus Research is therefore complicated insofar as it potentially obfuscates the socio-historical discontinuities of a Jewish Jesus movement that rapidly identified itself as “Christian.” Social memory theory proposes a new starting point for critical investigation: rather than beginning one’s inquiry by attempting to recover “a pre-Christian Jesus,” one presupposes Jesus’s identity as (the) Christ as a datum to be explained. Yet this methodological shift subtly prioritizes the Gentile “Christian” context within which the tradition was inscribed, rather than the early Palestinian Jewish matrix within which it originated, and thus privileges “Christian memory.”65 Our first desideratum, however, should be determining what the Jesus tradition is before attempting to assess its historical reliability. Since early Christians came to think of Jesus as the icon of a new social formation vis-à-vis his rejection by and hostility toward Jews and Judaism, the Jesus tradition represents a textual inscription of social memory in ethnic transition. The historical Jesus almost certainly experienced some degree of social rejection during his actual ministry.66 The Jesus tradition is indeed “marked by disappointment and a struggle to respond to rejection.”67 Yet the Gospels’ “memories” also represent various shifting social contexts within which those memories were circulated, reproduced, and

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(re-)inscribed.68 This foundational re-description of the Jesus tradition presupposes social and ethnic conflict as the central components of its literary-cultural matrix. Yet the critical historian’s task remains: attempting to determine whether any given social memory is historical or not, not simply to explain how those social memories came to exist.69 Social memory theory is a welcome advance. Its historiographical principles do helpfully re-orient the historian’s gaze, providing a new analytical lens for the emergence of the Jesus tradition, contextualizing that tradition within social group settings, and highlighting the dynamics of oral tradition in relationship to the Gospels as artifacts of memory.70 On the other hand, the presuppositions of social memory theory are not altogether dissimilar from those assumed by form critics. The form critics were not infallible detectives of the authentic. A number of their presuppositions – that Palestinian tradition chronologically preceded Hellenized tradition and that the oral period was prior to rather than complementary to a concurrent literary period – are anachronistic and/or misguided. Palestinian Judaism was a kind of Hellenized Judaism.71 A number of early Christians were self-evidently literate. The form critics were over-confident about their ability to identify the Sitze im Leben of disparate Jesus traditions and sort them into their respective categories. Form-critical tools were inadequate, but form-critical principles, which presupposed critical distinctions between events, experiences, and memories and their re-collection within community contexts, remain valid.72 Historical events lead to chronologically successive and overlapping “memories,” with varying degrees of continuity. In the case of Jesus, however, our limitations are not based on the fallibility of (presentist) memory per se, but rather in the failure of the extant evidentiary record to serve as an effective control on historical (re)construction.73 The form critics were correct insofar as they theorized that “underlying historical connections” could be either “subsumed or heavily transformed to serve contemporary community needs.”74 The form critics also recognized that we cannot easily separate authentic from inauthentic materials because that is what the evangelists intended to accomplish: to make history. It is not that form-critical scholars naively assumed they could easily “separate ‘authentic’ Jesus tradition from ‘inauthentic’ Jesus tradition.”75 Nor do the particular difficulties associated with the Jesus tradition justify the claim that historians cannot “separate and recover historical reality from individual or group interpretation of that reality.” To programmatically endorse such a view would call into question the very idea that it is possible to distinguish between an “authentic” (that is, an historical) Jesus tradition and an “inauthentic” (non-historical) one. The evangelists were not simply data collectors compiling disparate units into coherent narratives, but rather creative authors of the tradition. Nonetheless, the form-critical principle that there was an oral tradition preceding a written tradition remains valid. The form critics may have been over-confident about their ability to discern the generic forms of that tradition and their settings-in-life, yet the principle that Jesus traditions were (re)deployed in different social contexts remains valid. The form critics over-simplified (and under-theorized) the oral

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period, yet their recognition of a 40-year era between the death of Jesus and the composition of Mark remains valid. Form-critical literary tools were not up to the task of ascertaining historically authentic Jesus tradition, yet their distinction between “dominical” and “ecclesiastical” tradition remains valid. The form critics over-exaggerated a Palestinian/Hellenistic binary, yet their methodological and sociological distinction between Jesus’s (Palestinian) Judean context and his subsequent followers’ Diasporan context remains valid. Early Christian writings represent the reception of Jesus. In recent years, new methods associated with Rezeptiongeschichte (“reception history”) and Wirkungsgeschichte (the “history of effects”)76 have recognized the social dimensions inherent in studying the Jesus tradition.77 Paul, for example, tells the Corinthians that he “received (παρέλαβον) from the Lord” that which he had “delivered” to them (1 Cor 11:23; 15:3), appealing to the implicit authority and authenticity of this proclaimed tradition that he presumably shared with the Jerusalem leaders. Paul’s appeal to “receiving” tradition authorizes both his account of the Lord’s Supper (“on the night in which the Lord Jesus was handed over,” 1 Cor 11:23) and Christ’s atoning death as the fulfillment of Scripture (“that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,” 1 Cor 15:3), both of which are generally regarded as pre-Pauline in origin. This conceptualization of the Jesus tradition as “received” infers that its “reception” – that is, its acceptance – was due to its dominical and divine authority; its recognition by Paul represents a conceptual antithesis to rejection. The Gospel of John, for example, opens by declaring that “He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him” (οὐ παρέλαβον).78 That is, his “own people did not accept him.”79 The “reception” of Jesus, therefore, points not simply to a single story, but to complex social tensions within and discontinuities between Jesus and his Jewish contemporaries. In the canonical Gospels, for example, Jesus’s death is linked to the Temple’s destruction, signifying God’s judgment of its administration. Christian texts extend God’s rejection of the Temple to “the Jews” and Judaism.80 Rabbinical Judaism rejects this interpretation and portrays the Temple’s destruction either as a form of judgment or as God’s failure to save his “house.”81 JewishChristian traditions remember the Temple’s destruction as God’s judgment on the sacrificial system itself. Jews, Christians, and Jewish-Christians remembered the past differently. Intra-Christian competition led to the production of different Jesus traditions – some of which can be read as redactional and/or as counter-narratives – illustrating how a “received” tradition can be both affirmed and reconfigured in alternative frameworks of a shared history. Critical analyses of the social memory of rejection, therefore, play a significant role in understanding the construction of Christian identity. Social memories of rejection, oppression, or persecution do not necessarily correspond to actual experiences of rejection, oppression, or persecution. It is enough that a perception and literary-rhetorical representation of experience is registered. Indeed, it is virtually certain that the authors of the Gospels not only “received” social memories of rejection, but re-deployed those memories in new compositions and traditions. Similarly, the authors of the Jewish Christian

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Gospels both “received” social memories and re-deployed others’ in constructing their own counter-narratives. Our goal, then, is not to re-inscribe the received tradition because we presume it preserves a reliable gist memory.82 Rather, our work begins with a historical and sociological observation: two distinctive social and ethnic group orientations were not able to reconcile, and one ultimately subordinated the other through the curated composition, production, and “reception” of authoritative texts. Let us proceed, then, by conceding that Jesus generated and experienced hostility among his contemporaries. Here the Gospels could well be said to preserve the gist of genuine memory, whether or not any particular narrative scenes preserve the ipsissima verba of Jesus. Second, this memory of hostility was re-inscribed (and exacerbated) by subsequent rifts between Jesus’s followers and their contemporaries, now transferred and retrospectively retrojected as conflict narratives between Jesus and his contemporaries. Our third proposal – that the Jewish leadership of the Jerusalem ekklēsia may not have been as welcoming toward Paul’s Gentile Christ-followers as Acts would have us believe – will require further unpacking, but its historical outcome, the construction of a new non-Jewish Gentile Christian identity, was facilitated by portraying Jesus as rejected by, and then rejecting in turn, “his own people.” The Jesus tradition represents a complex picture of the reception and rejection of Jesus deployed in the service of constructing “Christian” identity. To affirm continuity between the Jesus of the Gospels and the historical Jesus is therefore to affirm (some degree of) discontinuity between the historical Jesus and Judaism. The circular logic of discontinuity surfaces in the criterion of dissimilarity, but the Gospels, as textual narratives of discontinuity, were preceded by the socio-ethnic discontinuity of Torah observance by Gentile Christ-followers. The “new creation” of a non-Jewish ekklēsia could not change the fact or resolve the problem that its social foundations were ethnically Jewish. Nor could it erase the movement’s original members. The Gospels provided a solution. Here Jesus is portrayed as Jewish, but in conflict with his contemporaries, driving a wedge between Jesus and his ethno-cultural matrix, liberating Jesus and his Gentile followers from being bound to the ethnic limitations of Jewish culture. By portraying Jesus as both continuous and discontinuous from Judaism, the Gospels met the needs of Gentiles who were both continuous and discontinuous vis-à-vis Judaism. The Jesus tradition reflects this ambivalence toward the preservation of Judean traditions because there were troubling ethnic ambiguities about the status of non-Jewish members in the movement. This ethnic ambiguity is embedded in the “received tradition.” Social memory theory, like reception history, foregrounds how Jesus was “received” by Gentile Christians. This discursive shift from Jewish matrix to Gentile reception occurred in Gentile Christian cultural contexts. The “reception” of Jesus was already an interpreted tradition: “Jesus” was (re)configured to meet the needs of non-Jews, not (just) to preserve reliable memories of Jesus. Naturally, Gentile Christ-followers had little interest in observing Jewish customs. Consequently, social memory and reception history approaches – insofar as they foreground the continuity of memory within the Christian tradition – cannot

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retrieve the lost history and forgotten memory of a Jewish historical Jesus without re-contextualizing that tradition within a complex configuration of social conflict between Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus.

Notes 1 A. J. M. Wedderburn, Jesus and the Historians (WUNT 269; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010). 2 On the role of memory in the formation of the Jesus tradition, see Alan Kirk, Memory and the Jesus Tradition (The Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries 2; London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2018), 1. See also Memory and Memories in Early Christianity: Proceedings of the International Conference Held at the Universities of Geneva and Lausanne (June 2–3, 2016), Simon Butticaz and Enrico Norelli (eds.) (WUNT 398; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018); Ritva Williams, “Social Memory,” BTB 41 no. 4 (2011), 189–200. 3 Jens Schröter, Jesus of Nazareth: Jew from Galilee – Savior of the World (trans. W. Coppins and S. Brian Pounds; Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014), 17, eschews an “original” Jesus as his goal “cannot be to reach the one Jesus behind the texts but to reach a conception grounded on the weighing of plausibilities, which as an abstraction from the sources always moves in front of the sources” (17). Cf. Jesus von Nazaret. Jude aus Galiläa – Retter der Welt (Biblische Gestalten 15; Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2012). Idem, From Jesus to the New Testament, 30. 4 Schröter, Jesus of Nazareth, 17. 5 Schröter, Jesus of Nazareth, 17; Cf. Schröter, Jesus von Nazaret, 34: “Ihr Ziel kann deshalb nicht das Erreichen des einen Jesus hinter den Texten sein, sondern ein auf Abwägen von Plausibilitäten gegründeter Entwurf, der sich als Absraktion von den Quellen stets vor diesen bewegt.” 6 Keith, Jesus’ Literacy, 61: “From the perspective of social memory theory, scholars in search of authentic Jesus traditions might as well be in search of unicorns …. Not only are there no longer Jesus traditions that reflect solely the actual past, there never were.” 7 Eric Eve, Behind the Gospels: Understanding the Oral Tradition (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014). 8 On the relationship between Jewish “memory” and “history,” see Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish History; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982; New York: Schocken Books, 1989); Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 9 On collective memory, see especially Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1925); La Topographie légendaire des Evangiles en Terre Sainte: étude de mémoire collective (1941); La mémoire collective (Paris: Presses Univeristaires de France, 1950); On Collective Memory (trans. L. A. Coser; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); The Collective Memory (Francis J. Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter (ed.), (New York: Harper and Row, 1980); Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrif, Erinnerung und Identitat in frühen Hockkulturen (München: Beck, 1992); “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique 62 (1995), 125–33; Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies (trans. Rodney Livingstone; Cultural Memory in the Present; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (München: C.H. Beck Kulturwissenschaft, 1999). 10 Loren T. Stuckenbruck, “The Teacher of Righteousness Remembered: From Fragmentary Sources to Collective Memory in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Memory in the

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12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30

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Bible and Antiquity (L. Stuckenbruck, S.C. Barton, and B.G. Wold (eds.); WUNT 212; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 75–94. Jens Schröter, Erinnerung an Jesu Worte: Studien zur Rezeption der Logienüberlieferung in Markus, Q und Thomas (WMANT 76; Neukirchen: Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1997); cf. From Jesus to the New Testament: Early Christian Theology and the Origin of the New Testament Canon (trans. W. Coppins; Waco: Baylor University Press, 2013), 25; Allison, Constructing Jesus, 1–30; Rafael Rodríguez, Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance and Text (LNTS 407; London: T & T Clark, 2010); Le Donne, The Historiographical Jesus; Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus Before the Gospels, 131–226; Sandra Huebenthal, Reading Mark’s Gospel as a Text from Collective Memory (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020); Dunn, Jesus Remembered; Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (second edition; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017 [2006]). On the figure of Paul, see Benjamin L. White, Remembering Paul: Ancient and Modern Contests over the Image of the Apostle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Halbwachs, Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire; La Topographie légendaire des Evangiles en Terre Sainte; La mémoire collective; On Collective Memory. Alan Kirk, “Social and Cultural Memory,” in Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher (eds.) Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity (Semeia 52; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), 1–24, 2. Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, 134–40, 157; Gérard Namer, Mémoire et société (Paris: Méridiens Lincksieck, 2000), 50–1; Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 189. Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, 156–7; Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 80; Namer, Mémoire et société, 230; John R. Gillis, “Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3–24, here 6. Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, 88–9, 111–2. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 53. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 116. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, 218–19, 225; Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 11, 41–2. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 116; Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 40, 51–2. Keith, “Social Memory Theory and Gospels Research,” 362. Cf. 365: “like Halbwachs’s collective memory, [Assmann’s] cultural memory is not concerned with the actual past and the discipline of ‘history’ in the sense of verification of historical claims.” Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 50–6; “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” 125–33; Religion and Cultural Memory; A. Assmann, Erinnerungsräume; Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis: Zehn Studien (Munich: Beck, 2000), 22–3. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 32; Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, 88. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, “Schrift, Tradition und Kultur,” in Paul Goetsch, Wolfgang Raible, and Hans-Robert Roemer (eds.), Zwischen Festtag und Alltag: Zehn Beiträge zum Thema Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit (Tübingen: Narr, 1988), 25–49, here 27. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 30, 132–3. Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4–7. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, 7. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 168–9, 296. Barry Schwartz and Eugene F. Miller, “The Icon and the Word: A Study in the Visual Depiction of Moral Character,” Semiotica 61 (1986), 69–99, here 96. Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 54.

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31 Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), xi, 304. 32 Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 79–80, 168–9. 33 Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 56; Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, 37–8. 34 Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 11; Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, 29. 35 Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 218–21; Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, 53–4. 36 Y. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, 5; Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, 19–20; “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” 125–133, here 130–1; Casey, Remembering, 218. 37 Lewis A. Coser “Introduction: Maurice Halbwachs,” in Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (ed., trans., Lewis A. Coser; Chicago: University of Chicago Press); 1–34, here 25; Casey, Remembering, 224–5, 237. 38 Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, 28. 39 Peter Burke, “History as Social Memory,” in Thomas Butler (ed.), Memory: History, Culture, and the Mind (New York: Blackwell, 1989), 97–113, here 101. 40 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Themes in the Social Sciences; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 70; Casey, Remembering, 224–5. 41 Schwartz, “Memory as a Cultural System,” 908–9. 42 Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 58–9, 139–40; Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, 17–8, 252; Sarah Bennett Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 78–83. 43 Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 52, 168. 44 Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, 21. 45 Casey, Remembering, 227, 253–4; Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 21, 143. 46 Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Tradition,” in The Invention of Tradition, 5; Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, 80. 47 Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism (trans. Robert Savage; Stanford University Press, 2010), 2. 48 Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). See also Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory, 9; Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2011). 49 Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 18. 50 Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 9. 51 Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 43. 52 Keith, “Social Memory Theory and Gospels Research,” 373. See Barry Schwartz, “Christian Origins: Historical Truth and Social Memory,” in Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher (eds.), Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity (Semeia 52; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), 43–56, here 44. On memory’s “continuity” with the past, see also Le Donne, The Historiographical Jesus, 14. On simultaneous continuity and discontinuity, see also Rodríguez, Structuring Early Christian Memory. 53 Barry Schwartz, “Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in World War II,” ASR 61 (1996), 908–27, here 908; “Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Past,” QS 18 (1995), 263–70, here 266. 54 Williams, “Social Memory,” 192. 55 Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins, “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998), 112. 56 Chris Keith, “Social Memory Theory and Gospels Research: The First Decade (Part One),” EC 6 no. 3 (2015), 354–76, here 357. For a different formulation, see Alan Kirk, “Ehrman, Bauckham and Bird on Memory and the Jesus Tradition,” JSHJ 15

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(2017), 88–114, esp. 113: “the fixation on reliability is to be lamented as a diversion of memory theory to a subsidiary debate that, in any case, memory theory per se cannot decide.” For the latter, see Ehrman, Jesus Before the Gospels, 131–226. The idea that an actual past impinges upon and constrains wild invention and fabrication is arguably untrue given Elizabeth Loftus’s decades of study on “false memory syndrome.” Schröter, Jesus of Nazareth: World, 198–9. Nonetheless, Schröter, “Historical Jesus and the Sayings Tradition,” 153–4, still regards it as methodologically illegitimate to “drive a wedge between ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’” for this “presupposes that we can have a more appropriate approach to Jesus than the early Christian writings themselves had.” On the role of interpretation in “eyewitness” testimony, see Samuel Byrskog, Story as History—History as Story: The Gospel Tradition in the Context of Ancient Oral History (WUNT 123; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000). Judith C. S. Redman, “How Accurate are Eyewitnesses? Bauckham and the Eyewitnesses in the Light of Psychological Research,” JBL 129 (2010), 177–97. On the unreliability of memory, see also Allison, Constructing Jesus, 1–30. Allison concludes that “our Synoptic writers thought that they were reconfiguring memories of Jesus” (459). See also J. Fried, Der Schleier der Erinnerung: Grundzüge einer historischen Memorik (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2004). Ehrman, Jesus Before the Gospels, 144: “there are gist memories of Jesus recorded in the New Testament that are almost certainly accurate. At the same time, there are a lot of details – in fact entire episodes – that are almost certainly not accurate.” On the unreliability of memory, see Zeba A. Crook, “Collective Memory Distortion and the Quest for the Historical Jesus,” JSHJ, 11 (2013), esp. 64–76. On “counter-memory,” see Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Cornell University Press, 1980). Cf. Kloppenborg, Formation of Q, “literary history is not convertible with tradition history.” Schröter, “Historical Jesus and the Sayings Tradition,” 155: “The concern for the person of the historical Jesus should probably be shifted to a quest to find out how the rays of the phenomenon Jesus, his preaching and fate, are refracted in the different early Christian writings.” On Jesus’s alleged (Galilean) rejection, see Tucker S. Ferda, Jesus, the Gospels, and the Galilean Crisis (Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2019); “Jesus and the Galilean Crisis.” Ferda, “Jesus and the Galilean Crisis,” 8. In response to Schröter, “Historical Jesus and the Sayings Tradition,” 153: “every approach to the historical Jesus behind the Gospels has to explain how these writings could have come into being as the earliest descriptions of this person.” Cf. Le Donne, The Historiographical Jesus, 128: “The historian’s job is to tell the stories of memory in a way that most plausibly accounts for the available mnemonic evidence.” See especially Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher, “Jesus Tradition as Social Memory,” in Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher (eds.), Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity (Semeia Studies 52; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), 25–42. Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine During the Early Hellenistic Period (second ed.; trans. John Bowden; 2 vols.; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974 [1969]), 104. For criticism of Hengel’s thesis, see L. H. Feldman, “Hengel’s Judaism and Hellenism in Retrospect,” JBL 96 no. 3 (1977), 371–82. This is true despite Hooker, “On Using the Wrong Tool.” Chris Keith, “Social Memory Theory and Gospels Research: The First Decade (Part Two),” Early Christianity 6 no. 4 (2015), 523, argues that form criticism was (is) misguided insofar as its “division of the gospel tradition into traditions that reflect the past … or the present … stands in direct opposition” to Halbwachs’s “insights concern-

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ing memory formation.” Since “all memory is constructed from the perspective of the present, there is no ‘tradition’ or ‘memory’ that can be extricated from those present social frameworks. From this perspective, the concomitant form-critical notion that one could sift through the layers of the Jesus tradition in order to excavate earlier tradition from later ecclesiastical accretions is thoroughly misguided.” In addition to the limitations due to the extant evidentiary record, one might also note that despite the programmatic claim that “all memory is constructed from the perspective of the present,” there can be substantial differences in chronology and cultural context(s) between competing “memories.” Paul Foster, “Memory, Orality, and the Fourth Gospel: Three Dead-Ends in Historical Jesus Research,” JSHJ 10 (2012), 191–227, 197; Ernest van Eck, “Memory and Historical Jesus Studies: Formgeschichte in a New Dress?,” HTS Teologiese Studies/ Theological Studies 71 no. 1 (2015), 1–10. See now also the critical history of the field in Tuomas Havukainen, The Quest for the Memory of Jesus: A Viable Path or a Dead End? (Contributions to Biblical Exegesis & Theology 99; Leuven: Peeters, 2020); cf. The Quest for the Memory of Jesus: A Viable Path or a Dead End? (Åbo, Finland: Åbo Akademi University Press, 2017), 283, 285: “the memory approach displays such a wide variety of methodological viewpoints that it cannot be deemed one coherent school of thought … one ought to refrain from declaring it a new beginning for historical Jesus research.” Keith, “Social Memory Theory and Gospels Research: The First Decade (Part Two),” 525. Mark Knight, “Wirkungsgeschichte, Reception History, Reception Theory,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 33 no. 2 (2010), 137–46. On “reception history,” see Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (trans. Timothy Bahti; Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982). Chris Keith, Helen K. Bond, Christine Jacobi, Jens Schröter (eds.), The Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries (3 vols.; London: T & T Clark, 2019). John 1:11. On John’s representation of “The Jews,” see Ruth Sheridan, Retelling Scripture: ‘The Jews’ and the Scriptural Citations in John 1:19–12:15 (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Roger L. Omanson, “Translating the Anti-Jewish Bias of the New Testament,” The Bible Translator 43 no. 3 (1992), 301–13. NRSV translation. Adam Gregerman, Building on the Ruins of the Temple: Apologetics and Polemics in Early Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism (TSAJ 165; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck: 2016). Gregerman, Building on the Ruins of the Temple. Allison, Constructing Jesus.

Part II

6

“He Was Despised and Rejected by Men”

I Philippians 2:5–11, an early and perhaps pre-Pauline composition, proclaims that it was Jesus’s willing obedience and submission to God that secured his divine place in heaven. That is, Jesus “offered” his life to God and made his life sacred, a sacrifice (sacrificium). This sacralization of Jesus’s life and death not only commemorated the crucifixion as a sign of divine grace mediating atonement for sin; it also remembered this death as vindicated by resurrection. Resurrectionbelief transformed Jesus’s followers into an elect remnant. Jesus’s rejection by his contemporaries was now reversed by God, extending his now-elect status to his followers who “remembered” this death by participating in ritual meals of “communion” and “thanksgiving.” This cultic, rhetorical, and theological identification of Jesus’s death as a sacrifice facilitated the transformation of Jesus’s followers into a wider movement by utilizing the common language of the Mediterranean world.1 Sacrificial ritual comprised one of a “set of cultural norms that bound together the elite” of the Empire and was understood as the “normal and natural way to express piety towards the gods,”2 functioning as part of the “basic common cultural vocabulary” that united different ethnic groups and communities, including Judeans, with(in) the Greco-Roman world. Typically, sacrifice referred to animal and vegetable offerings “made sacred” by the act of offering,3 usually via fire and smoke, thereby transforming the “offering” into a “sacrifice” (θυσία).4 We could cast our comparative net even wider by incorporating the sacrificial lexicon of the Vedic, Upanishadic, Buddhist, and Jain traditions, but even when religious specialists substituted liquid, vegetable, or “spiritualized” offerings for animals, their discursive language could still presuppose the theoretical and practical efficacy of sacrifice.5 In the Hebrew Bible, a wide variety of cultic practices are outlined in the book of Leviticus, including whole burnt offerings (‫)עלה‬, cereal and grain offerings (‫)מנחה‬, communal meal offerings (‫) זבח שלמים‬, the vow offering (‫)נדר‬, the thanks offering (‫)תודה‬,6 as well as “sin” and “guilt” offerings (‫)חטאת‬, in which parts of an animal are burnt and partly consumed (‫)אשם‬. Different sacrifices served different functions, but what most sacrifices had in common is that they were originally conceived as voluntary gifts.7 The language of sacrifice could also be metaphorically DOI: 10.4324/b22959-9

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extended to conceptualize the “offering” or giving of oneself. In some philosophical circles, the self was even conceived as a sacred offering, rendering animal sacrifice no longer as necessary, desirable, or efficacious. The criticism of animal sacrifice as corrupted, illegitimate, or improperly administrated could also lead to alternative forms of sacrifice.8 In the Maccabean literature, the death of a martyr (μάρτυς) is described as an atoning sacrifice offered to God for the nation.9 A martyr’s death atones because of their complete faithfulness in/to God.10 These texts illustrate how some Jews could view the death of a martyr being “offered” on behalf of many – as in 2 Maccabees, where the deaths of a mother and her seven sons are represented as atoning sacrifices (7:32–38) – although this conclusion stands in some tension with both the Torah and prophetic passages proscribing the transfer of sin (cf. Exod 32:30–35; Deut 24:16; Ezek 18:4, 20; Jer 31:29–30), illustrating the position that individuals are responsible for their own sins.11 The Jewish Hellenistic martyr tradition developed from and alongside the Greco-Roman concept of voluntary and vicarious self-sacrifice on behalf of others. We do not know, however, whether the identification of Jesus’s life and death as sacrificial and salvific was based on Jesus’s self-understanding of his own death,12 a secondary development among his Aramaic-speaking followers in Jerusalem,13 an interpretation created by Greek-speaking “Hellenists,”14 and/or an “unintended” exegetical innovation of Judean or Diasporan Jews preaching to Gentiles prior to Paul joining the movement in Antioch or Damascus.15

II In the history of the study of religion, various attempts have been made to explain why Jesus’s life and death were “remembered” as a “sacrifice.” The primitivist notion of the totem, for example, was introduced by William Robertson Smith as a way of conceptualizing the representation of an animal or spirit-being that symbolized an individual or group. According to Smith, early Israelite sacrifice itself originated as a communal meal forming a social bond as a “totemic sacrament.”16 For Smith, then, Christianity’s commemoration of Jesus’s sacrificial death was “totemic.”17 Introduced into English as a misrepresentation of an Anishinaabe/ Ojibwa word referring to clan or kinship,18 and misconceived as a cross-cultural category, the term had a significant impact on the work of E.B. Tylor,19 James G. Frazer,20 Sigmund Freud, and Émile Durkheim.21 The idea that the lives and customs of “primitive” peoples reflected earlier stages in the evolution of humankind and that totems and totemic rituals were vestiges or “survivals” of primordial, violent impulses had a direct affect on Freudian theory.22 Since “primitive” peoples (allegedly) ritually killed and consumed the totem animal in a ritual feast as a sacrifice, Freud suggested that totemic sacrifices symbolized the community’s re-enactment of the primeval murder of the father who was divinized after his ritual murder. The emergence of religion was a guilt-relieving social institution substituting animal sacrifices and sacred meals for the community’s repressed memory of murder.23 The totemic animal was then

“He Was Despised and Rejected by Men” 117 reduced to a simple sacrificial gift, its original significance lost or forgotten, and the ritual preserved and perpetuated as a “survival.”24 Like Smith, Freud also suggested that the sacrament of Christian communion commemorated an ancient crime: the divine son punished for the sins of the primordial rebellion, its original significance long forgotten as a “survival.”25 Like Freud, Émile Durkheim also saw totemism as the original form of religion.26 Durkheim sought to identify the social function of religious beliefs, myths, legends, and objects as symbolically representative of the society that attributed sacredness to them. Totems functioned as symbols representing and reinforcing group cohesion, providing the theorist with the simplest, “elemental” data with which to understand the sociology of religion. Since totemism was regarded as the simplest form of religion, “the totemic principle” of projecting the sacred onto an animal or object could be applied to any symbol, whether a crucifix or a national flag. Totemism served to externalize the abstract concept of the sacred, reinforce social solidarity, facilitate the internalization of the sacred, and provide the foundations for belief in the existence of gods. These appeals to totemism in early anthropological, psychological, and sociological theories of religion were based on the explanatory power of an alleged “totemic principle,” yet these theories were compromised by their appeals to primitivism as a grand narrative privileging contemporary Western society as comparatively civilized.27 The association of totemism and primitivism led to the discrediting of totemism as an explanatory model. Today, totemic theory is easily criticized as a classic example of functionalist reductionism, a new myth of origins identifying Christ’s sacrifice as a “survival” of an earlier era in the history of humankind. Totemism conflated disparate customs, cultures, and peoples in search of a grand narrative, presupposing both evolutionism and progress in the development of religion by relegating “primitivism” to an earlier stage in the development of humankind. Despite this theoretical failure, however, the invention of “totemism” did produce an insight useful in the study of Christian origins: the life of Christ functioned as a symbolic repository of a social group’s externalized identification of the divine and their internalized relationship to the divine. In The Golden Bough (Macmillan and Co., 1890–1910), a comparative study of “primitive” religious customs and beliefs, James G. Frazer also claimed to have discovered an ancient myth underlying the seasonal cults associated with the worship of vegetation gods like Osiris, Tammuz, Attis, and Adonis.28 Frazer suggested that the ritual killing and eating of the sacred totem by its clan could be the earliest form of the rites of sacrifice. Frazer also suggested that the concept of the ritual “scapegoat” could be explained as a primordial rite thought to expel the sins of the community by the magical principles of association and contagion. In these bold strokes, the idea of “the slain god,” celebrated through the names of Osiris, Adonis, Thammuz, Attis, and Dionysus, could be conceived not only as symbolizing “the death and resurrection of vegetation,”29 but the very origins of religion as a primitive superstition founded in a primordial act of murder.30 Frazer’s appeal to the concept of “dying and rising gods” in antiquity indirectly but unmistakably drew the Jesus tradition into its comparative orbit.

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In the ancient Mediterranean world, the cultic worship of gods like Dionysus and Osiris provided social and religious identities beyond general civic obligations.31 The Mysteries involved an experiential communion with the divine after a period of purification, testing, and initiation.32 The most prominent cult was the Eleusinian Mysteries (Ἐλευσίνια Μυστήρια), annual rites dedicated to Demeter and Persephone in Greece, although the Roman world included a variety of voluntary cults dedicated to different gods.33 The identification of Jesus as a deity providing “salvation” (σωτηρία) from the (this-worldly) coming “wrath” along with eternal life (“resurrection”) was a recognizable expression of what has been described as emergent “salvation religion” in the ancient Mediterranean world.34 Sacrificial discourse provided the language of communication and spoke to the conceptual thought-world of early Christ-believers. Paul’s letters appeal to this wider discourse in seeking to establish a reciprocal relationship between his Gentile ekklēsiai and the Jerusalem ekklēsia. In Phil 4:18, Paul describes a gift from the Philippians as “a fragrant aroma, an acceptable sacrifice pleasing to God” (ὀσμὴν εὐωδίας θυσίαν δεκτήν εὐάρεστον τῷ θεῷ), clearly transferring sacrificial language to an economic transaction between his community and his ministry. Like the Mystery cults of antiquity, the ekklēsia was understood as dispensing the secrets of life, death, and rebirth as revealed in and through the worship of, participation in, and communion with Christ. And like the gods, Jesus was thought to have revealed the life of the Spirit, embodying a pattern of birth, death, resurrection, and ascension of the soul.35 Christianity developed rites of initiation and fellowship, interpreting the life, teachings, and example of their Master as the key to salvation. Indeed, as early as the second century,36 notable resemblances between the Mysteries and Christian traditions led critics to suggest that cultic devotion to Jesus was patterned after the cultic worship of the gods. In the nineteenth century, the History of Religions School (Religionsgeschichtliche Schule) identified a number of “parallels” between early Christian beliefs and rituals and contemporary religions in the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean world.37 The identification of Jesus as a “dying-and-rising god” was the product of such comparison.38 Similarly, the suspicion that the early Christian Eucharist was influenced by, if not based on, “sacramental” meals in the mystery religions was presupposed by Rudolf Bultmann who claimed that “the idea of communion brought about by the sacramental meal is … widespread in primitive and classic cults. But in the mysteries … it is communion with a once dead and risen deity, in whose fate the partaker receives a share through the sacramental meal … Paul himself shows that the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper stands in this context in the history of religion.”39 There is little documentary evidence that initiates of Eleusis, Mithras, Serapis, or Isis believed they were consuming their respective deities as a “sacrament” in their cultic meals.40 The Dionysian mysteries, however, have been identified as a contender for early Christian imitation (mimesis) insofar as the Dionysian meal was participatory, with initiates consuming the god-in-proxy.41 If the Dionysian cult included the consumption of ὠμοφαγία (the eating of raw flesh) as implied in Euripides’

“He Was Despised and Rejected by Men” 119 Bacchae,42 then this meal could be regarded as a kind of divine communion.43 The author of the Gospel of John, in particular, seems to be in conversation with the Dionysian tradition,44 especially where Jesus insists that only those who have “eaten the flesh (φάγητε τὴν σάρκα) of the Son of Man and drunk his blood (αἷμα),” that is, only those “chewing” (τρώγων) his flesh will have “eternal life” (ζωὴν αἰώνιον) (John 6:53–54).45 Since sacrificial rites were commonly associated with communal meals in antiquity, and patron deities were often thought to preside over them,46 it is reasonable to consider the possibility of influence from the Mystery cults on the early Christian Eucharist.47 The Mystery cults may have played an indeterminate role in shaping early Christian rituals and theology.48 Denying any influence from the Mysteries only serves to perpetuate the myth of Christian “incomparability,” insulate Christianity from its rivals, and reinforce its border lines with paganism and Judaism.49 Paul’s letters contain explicit appeals to mystery-language.50 Paul uses mystery-language to proclaim the revelation of a new, but ancient, mystery: the crucified messiah as the μυστήριον of God. To be sure, Paul’s use of the term μυστήριον draws from the Jewish apocalyptic tradition.51 The book of Daniel, with its references to divine mystery (‫)רז‬, translated as μυστήριον in the Septuagint,52 inspired a number of compositions using mystery-language.53 In this context, a “mystery” could refer to “wisdom that was previously hidden but has been revealed,” that is, to divine revelation.54 Paul deploys μυστήριον as a rhetorical term in the face of competition, apostolic rivalry, and community division. Nonetheless, Paul’s Corinthian audience could be anticipated to understand his use of mystery-language as appealing both to their own Greco-Roman cultural lexicon as well as his own ancestral Jewish apocalypticism. The critical study of Eucharistic traditions benefits from recognizing that it was rapidly associated with the concept of sacrifice.55 The “words of institution” attributed to Jesus (Luke 22:19, 20; 1 Cor 11:25; Matt 26:28; Mark 14:24), the conjunction of blood with covenant language (Matt 26:28; Mark 14:24; Luke 22:20; 1 Cor 11:25), and Jesus’s instruction to re-perform the act in remembrance of his death (Luke 22:19; 1 Cor 11:24) all point in this direction.56 That being said, the origins of the Eucharist continue to represent a “mystery” insofar as it drew on the memory of Jesus’s fellowship meals, historical reminiscences of Jesus’s “last supper,” the festival of Passover, the identification of Jesus’s death as a “sacrifice,” the ekklēsia’s celebration of the “Lord’s Supper,” allusive appeals to cultic communion, voluntary association meals, banquet practices, memorial meals, and drinking wine in honor of a god.57 In a social context, oriented toward the ritual telling and (re-)enacting of mystery-narratives as a central component of initiatory (co-)participation, the sacrificial death of Jesus provided a ready-made drama with a colorful cast of exotic characters, a story of redemption, vindication, and divine triumph, and a shared story that served cathartic needs in a chaotic and unjust world in and through the social and ritual identification with a wronged victim. The fact that this was a violent death only further heightened the heroic, tragic, and cathartic elements invested in its narrative retelling. This sacralization of Jesus’s death

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made meaning out of a historical figure’s political execution; it also made sense in the context of a new religious movement’s attempt to situate itself within the diverse cultic marketplace of antiquity. The sacralized-sacrificial figure of Jesus came to represent a divine image and presence around which a social formation developed in contradistinction to its rivals. The suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus became social memories commemorated and re-enacted as ritual,58 with the Eucharist representing a rite of communion (κοινωνία) par excellence (1 Cor 10:16), renewing social cohesion as a “ritual sign language” of symbolic meaning, a cultural hybrid of Jewish and pagan constituent elements.59

III The earliest evidence of the Eucharistic tradition (εὐχαριστία) is Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor 11:23–26), where he reminds his hearers that he has previously shared with them the meaning associated with Jesus’s last meal: For I received (παρέλαβον) from the Lord (ἀπὸ τοῦ Κυρίου) what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was handed over (παρεδίδετο), took bread, and when he had given thanks (εὐχαριστήσας), he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ Likewise, he also took the cup, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance (ἀνάμνησιν) of me.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim (καταγγέλλετε) the Lord’s death until he comes. Paul is at pains here to point out that the meaning of this ritual action – presumably performed regularly within his ekklēsiai – is the association of the Lord’s Supper, especially its constituent elements of bread and wine, with Jesus’s death. Yet while Paul appears to depend on a “received” tradition regarding Jesus’s death-and-resurrection in 1 Cor 15, where he specifically notes that “whether it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you have come to believe (1 Cor 15:11),” here he claims to have personally “received” revelations about Jesus’s last meal directly “from the Lord.” It is not readily apparent, therefore, that Paul “received” this tradition from Jesus’s disciples.60 Rather, it would seem that it was the risen Jesus himself who told Paul that the bread was his body and the wine his blood.61 Paul “received from the Lord” an account in which Jesus identified his body and blood with bread and wine (1 Cor 11:23–25; cf. Gal 1:11–12), an account subsequently echoed and narrativized in Mark 14:22–24. The Didache, however, provides an alternative Eucharist in which Jesus does not identify his body and blood with bread and wine (Did. 9:2–3), suggesting the existence of alternative Eucharistic traditions in which Jesus’s fellowship meals and/or “last supper” was not associated with his death. The historical Jesus may

“He Was Despised and Rejected by Men” 121 have regularly participated in table fellowship, and may have even provided a ritual and conceptual alternative to animal sacrifice.62 Jesus and/or his followers may have even been associated with circles critical of and/or dissociated from the Temple cult in Jerusalem.63 Nonetheless, despite Paul’s ethnic identity as a Judean, which technically justifies positing the origination of the metaphorical consumption of wine as blood as a “Jewish” innovation, this metaphor is unlikely to have resonated within a religiously Jewish context.64 Ancient and ancestral Jewish proscriptions of the consumption of blood would have deterred even the most metaphorically minded Jew(s) from endorsing this ritual meaning.65 What we have here, then, is an exegetical conundrum. Our earliest evidence of the Eucharistic tradition states that Paul received this tradition not from Jesus’s disciples, or a shared tradition, but directly “from the Lord.”66 Identifying bread and wine with Jesus’s flesh and blood, however, introduces an idea which (most) Jews would have found unpalatable, if not repulsive. It turns out, however, that Paul is not speaking to Jews here, but rather to ex-pagan Gentiles who would not have necessarily been offended by the idea of a sacramental meal providing divine communion with a deity. Since we know, in other words, that the earliest identification of the Eucharistic sacraments of bread and wine with Jesus’s flesh and blood took place within a Greek socio-rhetorical context and Paul, a Greekspeaking Diasporan Jew, was communicating to a Corinthian congregation of (ex-) pagans who could no longer utilize their local shrines and temples nor offer sacrifices to their deities, it is reasonable to conclude that Paul spoke to them in terms they could understand, that is, in cultic terms of sacrifice, initiation, mysteries, sacred meals, fellowship, divine consumption, and communion. Here we have, then, “a case apart, one involving such radical discontinuity with Judaism that it does not fit with the rest of the story of the Jew from Nazareth.”67 If the identification and consumption of sacramental wine as Jesus’s blood originated within a non-Jewish socio-cultural context, the association of blood and sacrifice nonetheless resonated with Jewish symbolism and facilitated the identification of Jesus’s death as justification (Rom 5:9–11), reconciliation (Rom 5:10–11; 2 Cor 5:15–17), and atonement for sin (Gal 1:4; 3:10–14). There were, of course, good social-psychological reasons why Jesus’s disciples were predisposed to seeking forgiveness for their “sins.” After all, a number of them had just betrayed or abandoned him in his greatest hour of need.68 These disciples had access to scriptural resources which helped them make sense of Jesus’s enigmatic ministry within the salvation history of Israel.69 Jesus would be “remembered” as being “handed over” by God, but “betrayed” by Judas and “The Jews.” Jesus’s death would be “remembered” as a model for discipleship,70 an atoning sacrifice for sin, and a propitiation for the “wrath” of God. By appealing to an ancient sacrificial discourse that included the Greco-Roman concept of voluntary, vicarious self-sacrifice on behalf of others,71 and the Maccabean martyr tradition,72 the disciples not only came to identify Jesus as the coming Son of Man,73 they also searched the Scriptures and found the enigmatic “suffering” Servant of Isaiah, the one whose noble death bears the sins of others.74

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IV He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows.75 The Christian theological tradition identifies Jesus as the Servant of “the Gospel According to Isaiah 53.”76 Today, “Christian” readings of Isaiah 53 are predominantly predictive insofar as they interpret the passage as obliquely referring to Jesus as “one of the clearest prophecies of Jesus the Messiah in the Hebrew Scriptures.”77 The text, therefore, continues to be used as a missionary tool in the Christian evangelizing of Jews.78 Contemporary Jews, however, do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah of Isaiah 53 and so the text serves both to “predict” the suffering and death of Jesus as well as to perpetuate the Christian myth of the Jewish rejection of Jesus for failing to recognize Jesus as the Messiah of Isaiah 53.79 The interpretative problems are legion. First, this passage is the fourth of four Servant Songs,80 and there is more than one way to identify the Servant in its literary and historical context.81 Second, Christian readings of Isaiah 53 tend to claim that a single, individual Servant emerges from these Songs as the progressive culmination of the Isaianic sequence, as if the Songs were intended to reveal this mysterious figure, emphasizing this individual in contradistinction to identifying the Servant as the nation (Isa 49:3).82 Third, a number of post-Christian rabbinical commentators do interpret the Servant as the Messiah,83 but likely in reaction to Christian readings of Isaiah 53.84 Fourth, the dominant Jewish reading identifies the Servant as the collective nation of Israel-Jacob, since the Servant is repeatedly identified as Israel in earlier chapters.85 In Isaiah 43:10, God says “You are my witnesses … and my Servant” (‫) אתם עד … ועבדי‬, demonstrating that the Servantas-Israel could be described in both singular and plural grammatical forms. Consequently, the narrative arc can be read as a story of Gentile kings reacting in amazement as they realize that God’s Servant-Israel took the burden of their sins. The Servant would thus be the collective personification of God’s Chosen People fulfilling their destiny: the nation of Israel as the Servant and scapegoat for the nations of the world. The critical interpretation of Isaiah 53 is not only complicated by competing theological readings, but must wrestle with extensive redaction that resulted in a composite text capable of sustaining multiple readings.86 Early Christ-followers reading the Greek translation of Isaiah 53 in the Septuagint (LXX) learned about an individual Servant who was “handed over” (παρέδωκεν) by God (53:6) and bore “the sins of many” (ἁμαρτίας πολλοὺς) (53:12): He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with grief … Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted,87 But he was wounded because of our transgressions,88 Crushed because of our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole,

“He Was Despised and Rejected by Men” 123 and by his bruises we were healed … And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all …89 For he was cut off from the land of the living,90 stricken because of the transgression of my people.91 And they made his grave with the wicked and in his death(s) with the rich …92 Yet it pleased Yahweh to bruise him with pain. When you make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed. He shall prolong his days …93 By his knowledge my righteous Servant will justify many, and he shall bear their iniquities …94 He poured out his soul unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. And he bore the sin of many,95 and made intercession for the transgressors.96 Who is this mysterious Servant? A number of passages in Isaiah 53 read as if they are referring to an individual figure. Some scholars, therefore, see the Servant of Isaiah 53 as originally based on or inspired by a historical individual who lived in exilic or post-exilic Israel.97 These passages, however, now sit (uneasily) alongside other passages referring to the Servant-as-Israel.98 Yet even if we accept individualized readings of certain passages in this composite text, this would not justify reading Isaiah 53 as referring to an “anointed” figure: there is no such reference in the text. In fact, it is Cyrus who is identified as “the Lord’s anointed” (or “messiah”) in Isaiah 45:1. This text has been read as a prophetic foreshadowing of the life of Jesus, but it is not openly presented as a messianic prophecy. There are also no clear references to the Servant’s death or resurrection. The Servant is not “killed.” He will “live to see his offspring,” his descendants (Isa 53:10). It follows, then, that the Servant is not resurrected. Isaiah 52:13–53:12 does envision the Servant as being in danger of a violent death. Similarly, Isaiah 53:8–9 states that “He was cut off from the land of the living” and that “they prepared his grave,” while Isa 53:12b notes that “He poured out his soul to death.” None of this is decisive, however, considering Isaiah 53:10, which envisions the Servant’s vindication. That is why many scholars view Isaiah’s prophecy as Vaticinium ex eventu, a closed hermeneutical circle: Jesus was the Messiah because he fulfilled the prophecies of Isaiah 52–53. In the New Testament, Paul’s letters confirm an early association between Jesus and Isaiah 53: the fate of the Servant was transferred to Jesus’s death – now seen through the scriptural lens of Isaiah’s Servant – as salvific. Just as the Lord “handed him over” (παρέδωκεν) “for our sins” (LXX Isa 53:6; παρεδόθη, 12), so too was Jesus “handed over” (παρεδίδετο) for [our] “transgressions.”99 The Servant Songs were picked up as prophetic passages anticipating their fulfillment in the life of Jesus (Matt 8:17; Luke 22:37). This was evidently a “revelation” to Jews who did not expect a dying messiah (Acts 8:26–39).

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Since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, biblical scholars have searched through the Qumran corpus looking for any evidence of a pre-Christian Jewish suffering and dying Davidic messiah tradition. The results have been negligible.100 The Qumran corpus has not yielded any compelling evidence that any Jews identified Isaiah 53 as a prophecy foretelling the sacrificial atoning death of the royal Davidic messiah. Simply put, then, there is no pre-Christian Jewish evidence of Isaiah 53 being read as a prophecy foretelling the rejection and/or atoning death of a royal Davidic messiah. That is because the concept was first catalyzed by the sacralized death and proclaimed resurrection of Jesus.

V The New Testament writings have been described as representing a coherent “pattern” or “memory” of sacrifice and discipleship.101 This pattern can be found in Paul’s letters, the Synoptic Gospels, and the Gospel of John.102 The author of the Gospel of Mark, in particular, has been described as intending “to make their narrative of Jesus a pattern for Christian existence.”103 Moreover, this pattern has been appealed to as evidence of an essential thematic continuity in early Christian thought. There are significant problems, however, with such claims of continuity. The Gospels do not speak with a single voice.104 It is the Christian tradition that collected the canonical Gospels, conflated their narratives, and produced (constructed) an overarching “pattern” of meaning. It is less, then, that a single, coherent, consistent, and continuous pattern emerged and developed and more that a pattern was constructed as a consciously crafted identity-formation.105 This alleged “pattern” of continuity is the end-result of a canonical (selective) process that facilitates harmonizing readings and collapses differences. Another problem with this argument from continuity is that Paul – our earliest source of this alleged pattern – not only dominates the canonical collection of the New Testament, but is inconsistent when it comes to explaining whether “the gospel” is based on direct revelation (Gal 1), received as traditional instruction (e.g., 1 Cor 15), or heard as a “word of the Lord.” Moreover, if Paul’s gospel was the same as others, there would not seem to have been any reason for friction between them, but there was friction between them. Recent studies have also argued that John’s Gospel was not hermetically sealed from Pauline influence or the Synoptics.106 Since the Gospel of John was the latest of the four Gospels to be written (allowing its author more time to become familiar with the Synoptics), and shares a number of features with the Synoptics (a Temple incident, Jesus as the sacrificial Lamb), the literary relationship between John and the Synoptics remains an open question. Accordingly, we cannot easily appeal to the alleged independence of Paul’s letters, the Synoptic Gospels, and John as an argument for the coherence of early Christian thought on the meaning of Jesus’s death. Methodologically, the New Testament writings should be read in chronological sequence: that is, Paul’s letters should be read before assessing the Gospels for information about Christian origins. It is in Paul’s letters that we first detect an emergent sacrificial pattern attributed to Jesus’s death: a death “set apart”

“He Was Despised and Rejected by Men” 125 by his followers from all other executions in the first century as “sacred.” This attribution of sacredness quickly found support in scripture and ritual commemoration. It is not surprising that early Jesus-followers turned to the Scriptures in their quest for meaning. The earliest textual representations of Jesus converge on a common retelling of the story of Jesus’s life, death, and vindication: the “passion narrative,”107 the righteous hero,108 the rejected emissary of Wisdom,109 the rejected-and-suffering Son of Man, the Judean martyr who dies in atonement for the sins of the nation,110 the “Suffering Servant” of Isaiah 53. An evident appeal to Isaiah 53 in the early Jesus tradition not only provided a catalytic key to the identification of Jesus’s life, trial, suffering, and death in sacrificial terms; it also provided an astonishing new interpretation of the Davidic messiah tradition now “remembered” as securing Gentile freedom from, if not rejection of, traditional Jewish circumcision, Sabbath, holidays, food restrictions, ritual observances, and the binding authority of the Torah itself.

Notes 1 Cf. Philippa L. Townsend, “‘Another Race? Ethnicity, Universalism, and the Emergence of Christianity,” Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 2009, 208–17, 240–8. 2 James B. Rives, “Animal Sacrifice and Political Identity in Rome and Judaea,” in Jews and Christians in the First and Second Centuries: How to Write Their History, eds. Peter J. Tomson and Joshua J. Schwartz (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 105–25, 108–9; cf. “Between Orthopraxy and Orthodoxy: Constantine and Animal Sacrifice,” in Costantino Prima e Dopo Costantino: Constantine Before and After Constantine (eds. Giorgio Bonamente, Noel Lenski, and Rita Lizzi Testa; Bari: Edipuglia, 2012), 153–163. 3 Kathryn McClymond, Beyond Sacred Violence: A Comparative Study of Sacrifice (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008). 4 On sacrifice as celebratory meal, see Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks (trans. Paula Wissing; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 5 Stephanie W. Jamison, “The Principle of Equivalence and the Interiorization of Ritual,” in Philosophy and the End of Sacrifice: Disengaging Ritual in Ancient India, Greece and Beyond (The Study of Religion in a Global Context; eds. Peter Jackson and Anna-Pya Sjödin; Sheffield, UK and Bristol, CT: Equinox, 2016), 15—32, 31: “even when sacrifice is denigrated in such speculations, it still provides the universally accepted measure of value.” 6 Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (ABD 3; New York: Doubleday, 1991), 413–21. 7 Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function (trans. W. D. Halls; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), originally published as “Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice,” L’Année sociologique 2 (1898): 29–138; Baruch A. Levine, In the Presence of the Lord: A Study of Cult and Some Cultic Terms in Ancient Israel (SJLA 5; Leiden: Brill, 1974), 14–30. On the theme of reciprocity, see Aaron Glaim, “Reciprocity, Sacrifice, and Salvation in Judean Religion at the Turn of the Era,” Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 2014. 8 Rives, “The Theology of Animal Sacrifice,” 192, notes that a common feature of these critiques is not the rejection of the principle or practice of “sacrifice,” but a preference for non-animal sacrificial offerings. On the other hand, the Essenes do

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“He Was Despised and Rejected by Men” not seem to have participated in the sacrificial cult (Prob. 75). For Philo’s critique of symbolic as opposed to literal observance, see On the Migration of Abraham 89–93. 4 Macc 6:28–9; cf. 2 Macc 7:32–8. Cf. Jan Willem van Henten, The Maccabean Martyrs as Saviours of the Jewish People: A Study of 2 and 4 Maccabees, JSJ Sup 57 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), where the martyrs are described as dying in perfect loyalty to God and the Law as examples of “faithfulness.” 2 Macc 6:28, 7:9, 37; cf. 4 Macc 5:16, 9:1–8, 16:17–22. Cf. Josephus on the Essenes. For the discursive exploration of this theme in Late Antiquity, see Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford University Press, 1999). Cf. 2 Macc 7:32, where the seventh son states that “we suffer because of our own sins.” In 4 Macc, the martyrs are innocent, suggesting that the sons die “for” the sins of the nation. Eleazar asks God to forgive Israel through his death (6:28–9), that is, “for” them (6:28). Cf. Schröter, Jesus of Nazareth, 198–9, suggests that Jesus did not understand “his death as a salvific death for the forgiveness of sins or as a sacrifice that was to be offered to God. Rather, his death meant the completion of his own activity for the establishment of the reign of God, which his followers would advocate in the future and at whose completion he would be present again.” Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Early Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 101; Martin Hengel, Studies in Early Christology (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1995), 11. James D. G. Dunn, “When Did the Understanding of Jesus’ Death as an Atoning Sacrifice First Emerge?,” in Israel’s God and Rebecca’s Children: Christology and Community in Early Judaism and Christianity: Essays in Honor of Larry W. Hurtado and Alan F. Segal (eds. D. B. Capes, A. D. DeConick, H. K. Bond, and T. Miller; Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007), 169–82, suggests this identification emerged among Greek-speaking “Hellenists” driven from Jerusalem. On the Gentile mission as “unintended,” see Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews, 140. Robert Alun Jones, The Secret of the Totem: Religion and Society from McLennan to Freud (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 95, refers to Smith’s concept as a “totemic sacrament.” Cf. William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: The Fundamental Institutions (Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1889). Smith, The Religion of the Semites (third edn.; A & A Black, 1927), 439. James G. Frazer, Obituary for William Robertson Smith, Fortnightly Review LX (1894), 800–7; cf. The Gorgon’s Head (London: Macmillan, 1927), 278–90. In his 1894 revision of The Religion of the Semites, Smith reveals the implications of his theory: “That the God-man died for his people, and that His death is their life, is an idea which was in some degree foreshadowed by the older mystical sacrifices. It was foreshadowed, indeed, in a very crude and materialistic form, and without any of those ethical ideas which the Christian doctrine of the atonement derives from a profounder sense of sin and divine justice. And yet the voluntary death of the divine victim, which we have seen to be a conception not foreign to ancient sacrificial ritual, contained the germ of the deepest thought in the Christian doctrine.” E. Sidney Hartland, “Totemism,” in Encyclopedia of Religions and Ethics (ed. James Hastings: New York: T & T Clark, 1921), 393, suggests that the word derives from the Ojibwa word ototeman (“his brother-sister kin”). The term was introduced into English in 1791. See John Long, Voyages and Travels of Indian Interpretor and Trader (London: Forgotten Books, 2013 [1792]), 86. On the theoretical origins of totemism, see John Ferguson McLennan, “The Worship of Animals and Plants,” Fortnightly Review 6 & 7 (1869–70).

“He Was Despised and Rejected by Men” 127 19 E. B. Tylor, “Remarks on Totemism, with a special Reference to some Modern Theories Respecting It,” Journal of Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 28 no. 1/2 (1889), 138–48, here 141. 20 James G. Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy: A Treatise on Certain Early Forms of Superstition and Society (4 vols.; London: Macmillan and Co., 1910), 3. James G. Frazer, Totemism (Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1887), 95, noted that “no satisfactory explanation of the origin of totemism has yet been given.” 21 William Robertson Smith, “Sacrifice,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (1886), 138, noting that “certain ideas” lie “at the very root of true religion, the fellowship of the worshippers with one another in their fellowship with the deity, and the consecration of the bonds of kinship as the type of all right ethical relations between man and man … and in the mystic sacrifices the deity suffers with and for his people and lives again in their new life.” See also Smith, “Animal Worship and Animal Tribes among the Arabs and in the Old Testament,” Journal of Philology 9 no. 17 (1880), 75–100. 22 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (trans. A. Brill; Boston: Beacon Press, 1913). 23 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (trans. Patrick Gregory; Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977). For criticism, see David Frankfurter, “The Study of Evil and Violence without Girard,” 17–21. Burton L. Mack, “The Innocent Transgressor: Jesus in Early Christian Myth and History,” Semeia 33 (1985), 135–65, critiques Girard’s reading of the Gospels as obscuring the narratives as “myths which conceal the social conflict in early Christianity.” 24 Freud, Totem and Taboo. 25 E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom (London: John Murray, 1871), 19. 26 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life; “On Totemism,” History of Sociology 5 no. 2 (1985), 79–121. 27 Franz Boas, “The Origin of Totemism,” American Anthropologist 18 no. 3 (1916), 319–26. Albert Alexandrovich Goldenweiser, “Totemism: An Analytical Study,” Journal of American Folklore (1910), 179–293, 179, idem, “Form and Content in Totemism,” American Anthropologist 20 no. 3 (1918), 280–95. For an attempt to rehabilitate the analytical rubric, see Adolphus Peter Elkin, The Australian Aborigines: How to Understand Them (Sidney: Angus & Roberston, 1938); “Studies in Australian Totemism Sub-Section, Section and Moiety Totemism,” Oceania 4 no.1 (1933), 65–90; “Cult-totemism and mythology in northern South Australia,” Oceania 5 no. 2 (1934), 171–92; “Totemism in north-western Australia,” Oceania 3 no. 4 (1933), 435–81. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism (trans. Rodney Needham; Boston: Beacon Press, 1963); Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958). On Lévi-Strauss’s effect on the theoretical discrediting of totemism, see Esther Pasztory, Thinking with Things, Toward a New Vision of Art (Texas: University of Texas Press, 2005), 17: “Lévi-Strauss put an end to almost a century of European obsession with totemism.” For an attempt to reintroduce totemism into academic discourse, see Samuel Kipkemei Kigen, “Totemism Re-examined: A Study of Totems and their Relevance Today with Special Reference to the Keiyo Community in Kenya,” Ph.D. diss., University of Vienna, 2018. 28 James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (London, 1890), xiii. 29 Frazer, The Golden Bough, 278–9. 30 Frazer’s second edition of The Golden Bough (1910) speculated that Jesus “was really a member of the group of dying and reviving gods that included … Attis, Adonis, and Osiris.” Cf. Robert Ackerman, J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work (Cambridge University Press, 1987), 169.

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31 Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Hugh Bowden, Mystery Cults of the Ancient World (Princeton University Press, 2010); Jan Bremmer, Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014). On trade-associations, see John S. Kloppenborg, “Associations in the Ancient World,” in A-J. Levine, D. C. Allison, and J. D. Crossan (eds.), Historical Jesus in Context (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 323– 38; “Edwin Hatch, Churches and Collegia,” in Origins and Method: Towards a New Understanding of Judaism and Christianity (ed. B. H. McLean; Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), 212–38. 32 Knapp, The Dawn of Christianity, 80. On the comparison with early Christianity, see Bruce Metzger, “Considerations of the Methodology in the Study of the Mystery Religions and Early Christianity,” HTR 48 (1955): 1–20; Devon Wiens, “Mystery Concepts in Primitive Christianity and in its Environment,” ANRW II.23.2 (New York: De Gruyter, 1980), 1248–84. 33 On the use of the term salvation in this context, see Theodora Suk and Fong Jim, “‘Salvation’ (Soteria) and Ancient Mystery Cults,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 18–9 no. 1 (2017), 9–26. 34 Glaim, “Reciprocity, Sacrifice, and Salvation in Judean Religion,” 291. 35 Meyer, Ancient Mysteries, 4. 36 Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, 69; 1 Apol. 21. 37 For critique, see Carsten Colpe, Die religionsgeschichtliche Schule (FRLANT 60; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1961). 38 Erwin R. Goodenough, By Light, Light: The Mystic Gospel of Hellenistic Judaism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935). For criticism, see E. S. Frerichs and J. Neusner (eds.), Goodenough on the History of Religion and on Judaism (BJS 121; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986). On their existence, see Tryggve Mettinger, The Riddle of Resurrection: ‘Dying and Rising Gods’ in the Ancient Near East (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 2001); “The Dying and Rising God: The Peregrinations of a Mytheme,” in Ethnicity in Ancient Mesopotamia (ed. W. H. van Soldt; Leiden: Nederlands Institut voor het Nabije Oosten, 2005), 198–210. For further criticism, see Litwa, How the Gospels became History, 39–42, 39. 39 Rudolf Bultmann, The Theology of the New Testament (2 vols.; trans. K. Grobel; London: SCM, 1978), 148. See also Richard Reitzenstein, Hellenistic Mystery Religions (Pittsburgh Theological Monographs 15; Pittsburgh: Pickwick, 1979 [1910]), 77–9; Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1913), 153–67; Wilhelm Heitmüller, Taufe und Abendmahl bei Paulus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1903), 35–7, 51–3; Erwin R. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman World (New York: Pantheon, 1958). 40 W. L. Willis, Idol Meat in Corinth (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985), considers the evidence inconclusive. 41 See Lewis R. Farnell, “Sacrificial Communion in Greek Religion,” The Hibbert Journal 2 (1904), 308, 312–3; The Cults of the Greek States (Oxford: Clarendon, 1909), 5.177: “in its primary meaning it [the omophagia] is an ecstatic sacramental act of communion”; G. E. Mylonas, “Mystery Religions of Greece,” in Vergilius T. A. Fern (ed.), Ancient Religions (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), 176. 42 See Clement, Protrep. 2.12.2. See also Cretans, frag. 472.10–2 and 15, where the chorus refers to “his [Dionysus’] feasts of raw flesh” (τὰς ὠμοφάγους διᾶτας). See also E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 277: “If you want to be like god you must eat god … And you must eat him quick and raw.” G. S. Kirk, The Bacchae of Euripides (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970), 7, sees the omophagia as a “late development.” 43 Helmut Koester, History, Culture, and Religion of the Hellenistic Age (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), 181. See also W. K. Guthrie, The Greeks and their Gods (Boston: Beacon House, 1950), 49: “This primitive communion … was achieved by consum-

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ing the flesh and blood of the god in his animal form, a culmination which we have seen referred to by Euripides.” Dennis R. MacDonald, The Dionysian Gospel: The Fourth Gospel and Euripides (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017), 64–7. See also Peter Wick, “Jesus gegen Dionysos? Ein Beitrag zur Kontextualisierung des Johannesevangeliums,” Biblica 85 no. 2 (2004), 179–98. Cf. Esther Kobel, Dining with John: Communal Meals and Identity Formation in the Fourth Gospel and its Historical and Cultural Context (BIS 109; Leiden: Brill, 2011), 221–49, esp. 247: “By consuming the animal’s raw flesh along with wine, both of which represent the deity, followers shared in the vital forces of their god. They substantially ingested the god.” J. P. Kane, “The Mithraic Cult Meal in its Greek and Roman Environment,” in John R. Hinnels (ed.), Mithraic Studies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975), 2: 313–51, 321. Contra G. H. C. MacGregor and A. C. Purdy, Jew and Greek: Tutors Unto Christ (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1937), 236; Martin Hengel, The Son of God (trans. John Bowden; London: SCM, 1976), 28; A. D. Nock, Early Gentile Christianity and Its Hellenistic Background (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 183; John F. McConnell, “The Eucharist and the Mystery Religions,” CBQ 10 (1948), 29–41, 30, lamenting how “comparativists have failed in their melancholy task of smearing the holiest of our rites by connecting it with the pagan Mysteries.” Otto Pfleiderer, The Early Christian Conception of Christ: Its Significance and Value in the History of Religion (London and New York, 1905); Martin Brückner, Der sterbende und auferstehende Gottheiland in den orientalischen Religionen und ihr Verhältnis zum Christentum (Tubingen: Mohr, 1908). Cf. Jaime Alvar, Romanising Oriental Gods: Myth, Salvation and Ethics in the Cults of Cybele, Isis and Mithras (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 165; trans. and ed. Richard Gordon; Leiden: Brill, 2008), 13: “Christianity and the mysteries resemble on another because they offered analogous solutions to the needs generated in certain sectors of the society of the Roman Empire.” Smith, Drudgery Divine, 83. 1 Cor 2: 1; 1 Cor 15:51; Rom 11:25. Cf. Mark 4:11; 1 Cor 2:7, 13:2; Eph 3:3, 9; Col 1:26, 4:3; Rev 10:7. For further correspondences, see Justin, Apology 1.29.2; Lucian, Peregrinus 11; Origen, Against Celsus 3.59. Benjamin L. Gladd, Revealing the Mysterion: The Use of Mystery in Daniel and Second Temple Judaism with Its Bearing on First Corinthians (BZNW 160; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 263: “the technical term μυστήριον originates from the book of Daniel” and “is thoroughly apocalyptic” (cf. Dan 2:18, 19, 27–30, 47; 4:9). Dan 2:18, 19, 27–30, 47; 4:9 [4:6 MT]. Greg K. Beale, The Use of Daniel in Jewish Apocalyptic Literature and in the Revelation of St. John (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984). Cf. Gladd, Revealing the Mysterion, 32, 39, 50. See Jørgen Podemann Sørensen, “The Sacrificial Logic of Cultic Meals in Antiquity,” Early Christianity 7 (2016), 447–67; Andrew McGowan, “Eucharist and Sacrifice: Cultic Tradition and Transformation in Early Christian Ritual Meals,” in Matthias Klinghardt and Hal Taussig (eds.), Mahl und religiose Identität im frühen Christentum. Meals and Religious Identity in Early Christianity (Tübingen: Francke, 2012), 191– 206. Joseph, Jesus and the Temple, 239, arguing that the Eucharist originated as “a postEaster commemorative meal that rapidly developed into a ritual cultic meal.” D. E. Smith, From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002); H. Taussig, In the Beginning Was the Meal: Social Experimentation and Early Christian Identity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009). On ritual studies, see Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); R. L. Grimes, Research in Ritual Studies: A Programmatic

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“He Was Despised and Rejected by Men” Essay and Bibliography, ATLA Bibliography Series 14 (Metuchen, NJ: ATLA and Scarecrow Press, 1985). Theissen, A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion, 81, 82, describing Ur-Christianity as a “universalization of values and norms which had hitherto been attached to a particular ethnos” as well as a “partial acculturation to pagan values and norms.” McConnell, “The Eucharist and the Mystery Religions,” 38, notes the issue: “it is true that Paul says that he received it from the Lord, apo tou kyriou, and to many this is decisive.” Cf. Steve Mason, “Paul’s Announcement (τὸ εὐαγγέλιον): ‘Good News’ and Its Detractors in Earliest Christianity,” in Josephus, Judea, and Christian Origins: Methods and Categories (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2009), 291: “Since he firmly insists that he received the εὐαγγέλιον from Christ and not from any human, that seems the best way to understand all of his verbally similar remarks on the subject.” Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus, 138. Bruce Chilton, “Eucharist: Surrogate, Metaphor, Sacrament of Sacrifice,” in Albert I. Baumgarten (ed.), Sacrifice in Religious Experience, Studies in the History of Religions XCIII (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2020, 175–88. See, for example, Nickelsburg, “Jews and Christians,” 369, referring to Jesus’s followers who “may have been associated with some Jewish group or sect … before their association with Jesus,” and the suggestion that “parallels” with the Qumran texts “point in this direction.” Feldman, “Hengel’s Judaism and Hellenism in Retrospect,” 382: “Judaism’s quarrel with Paul is … for combining pagan mystery-cult ideas with Judaism, notably in the sacrament of the eucharist.” Cf. F. Gerald Downing, “Jesus and Cynicism,” in Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 1129: “there is no plausible Jewish context, no otherwise suggested Galilean Jewish context in which this might seem acceptable”; J. Fenton, “Eating People,” Theology 94 (1991). 414–24, 416: “the taboo against eating a human body and drinking any sort of blood was so strong, that it is impossible to imagine any Jew of the first, or any other, century seriously inviting his friends to do it”; Hyam Maccoby, The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 118: “The followers of Jesus in Jerusalem, who were pious Jews and would have regarded the idea of eating Jesus’ body and drinking his blood as repugnant, never practiced this rite”; idem, Paul and Hellenism (Philadelphia: Trinity, 1991), 115: “Paul, not Jesus, was the originator of the eucharist … the eucharist itself is not a Jewish, but an essentially Hellenistic rite, showing principal affinities not with the Jewish qiddush, but with the ritual meal of the mystery religions.” Cf. Theissen, A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion, 13233: “The identification of bread and wine with the body and blood of Christ touches on one of the deepest taboos in Judaism … The invitation to drink blood – even if this was a ‘symbolic’ way of drinking blood – would necessarily have been an abomination to any Jew.” Theissen recognizes that “this violation of the blood taboo” represents “an argument for denying that the historical Jesus spoke the words of institution,” but claims that these words “were already current in Jewish Christianity” as Paul “knows them and hands them on.” Theissen overlooks the fact that Paul explicitly states that he “received” his knowledge of the last supper “from the Lord.” Furthermore, Theissen appeals to the ritual context of the Eucharist as somehow justifying the violation of this ancient taboo, implying that it could even be dominical. Cf. Chilton, “Eucharist: Surrogate, Metaphor, Sacrament of Sacrifice,” 176, recognizes that “if Jesus’ words are taken with their traditional, autobiographical meaning, his last supper can only be understood as a deliberate break from Judaism.” Chilton seeks a “more historical way” to understand the origins of the Eucharist, namely, one that “takes account of the cultural changes which the development of the movement involved … the Gospels are composite products of the various social groups which were part of Jesus’ movement from its days within Judaism to the emergence

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of Christianity as a distinct religion.” Chilton’s interpretation of the “words of institution” has Jesus articulating “a new and scandalous dimension of meaning” (179): when Jesus said “This is my blood,” what he meant, in other words, was “this wine is my alternative to the blood of sacrifice.” As Chilton notes, “his words can have had only one meaning. He cannot have meant, ‘Here are my personal body and blood;’ this is an interpretation which only makes sense at a later stage … wine was his blood of sacrifice … that is the most natural meaning” (180). Jesus “made his meals into a rival altar.” Chilton thus solves a central problem: “The cultic interpretation places Jesus firmly with the Judaism of his period … [and] enables us to explain sequentially the understandings of eucharist within earliest Christianity.” Ultimately, the Eucharist “can only be understood as a consciously non-Judaic and Hellenistic development” (184). On the prohibition of consuming blood, see Gen 9:4–5; Lev 7:26–7; 17:10–2, 14; 19:26; Deut 12:16 23–4; 15:23. See also especially Michael J. Cahill, “Drinking Blood at a Kosher Eucharist? The Sound of Scholarly Silence,” BTB 32 no. 4 (2002), 168–81, 168: “The fact of the Jewish blood prohibition presents a problem for those who insist on the historicity of the New Testament texts that relate the institution of the Eucharist. This fact has not been given sufficient weight … the notion of Jews drinking blood would be inconceivable even to those with the barest acquaintance with Jewish dietary requirements and with the Jewish blood taboo.” Tabor, Paul and Jesus, 15: “Jesus would have considered this sort of language about eating flesh and drinking blood, even taken symbolically, as utterly reprehensible, akin to magic or ritual cannibalism. Despite what Paul asserts, it is extremely improbable that Jesus ever said these words. They are Paul’s own interpretation of the meaning and significance of the Eucharist ceremony that he claims he received from the heavenly Christ by a revelation.” Cahill, “Drinking Blood at a Kosher Eucharist?,” 174 (emphasis added). Cf. further, 176: “one could reasonably argue that the moment when Christians in their Eucharist saw themselves as drinking the blood of Jesus was the moment when the decisive break with Judaism took place.” Allison, The Resurrection of Jesus. Morna D. Hooker, “Did the Use of Isaiah 53 to Interpret His Mission Begin with Jesus?,” in Jesus and the Suffering Servant: Isaiah 53 and Christian Origins (eds. William H. Bellinger, Jr. and William R. Farmer; Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1998), 88–103; Jesus and the Servant: The Influence of the Servant Concept of Deutero-Isaiah in the New Testament (London: SPCK, 1959). Hooker rejects the idea that Jesus introduced the motif into the tradition. Mark 8:34. Euripides, Iphigeneia among the Tauri 21–4; Alcestis 14; Plato, Menexenus 237a, 243a, 246b; Livy, History of Rome 8.9. Cf. Williams, Maccabean Martyr Traditions. Boccaccini, Paul’s Three Paths to Salvation. Joel Marcus, The Way of the Lord: Christological Exegesis of the Old Testament in the Gospel of Mark (Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992); “The Old Testament and the Death of Jesus: The Role of Scripture in the Gospel Passion Narratives,” in John T. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Death of Jesus in Early Christianity (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1995), 205–33. Isa 53:3‫ נבזה וחדל אישים איש מכאבות‬. See The Gospel According to Isaiah 53: Encountering the Suffering Servant in Jewish and Christian Theology (eds. Darrell Bock and Mitch Glaser; Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2012). See also Darrell L. Bock and Mitchell Glaser, To the Jew First: The Case for Jewish Evangelism in Scripture and History (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2008); Mitch Glaser, Isaiah 53 Explained (New York: Chosen People Ministries, 2010). Mitch Glaser, “Introduction,” in The Gospel According to Isaiah 53, 21.

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78 Richard E. Averbeck, “Christian Interpretations of Isaiah 53,” in The Gospel According to Isaiah 53, 33–60, here 37, describes this as “unhistorical, hermeneutically naïve, and perhaps even exegetically dishonest.” For counter-missionary opposition to Christian readings, see Rabbi Tovia Singer, Let’s Get Biblical: Why Doesn’t Judaism Accept the Christian Messiah? (2 vols.; Forest Hills, NY: Outreach Judaism, 2014), esp. 1:91–128, here 93: “It is precisely for this reason that until this day Christians are baffled by the Jewish rejection of Jesus … The belief that the messiah was to suffer and die is an idea that early Christians invented.” 79 Glaser, “Using Isaiah 53 in Jewish Evangelism,” 231. 80 Bernhard Duhm, Das Buch Jesaia: übersetz und erklärt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1892). 81 Joseph, Jesus and the Temple, 220–8. 82 Chapman, Review of Joseph, Jesus and the Temple, 737–40, notes that a collectiveIsrael interpretation of Isaiah 53 is “limited” and suffers from “neglecting how the Servant Songs progressively become individualized to a single representative who restores Israel and atones for their sins (Isa. 49:6–8; 53:4–6).” Chapman’s preferred interpretation of a “progressive” trajectory envisions Isaiah 53 as the ultimate revelation of an “individualized” Servant. 83 Targum Jonathan; Talmud (Sanh. 98b); Ruth Rabbah; Midrash Tanchuma; Yalkut Shimoni; Rambam (Maimonides), Letter to Yemen (Iggeret Teman); Ramban (Nachmanides). See Samuel R. Driver and Adolf Neubauer (eds.), The Fifty-Third Chapter of Isaiah according to the Jewish Interpreters (repr. edn.; Oxford: J. Parker, 1876–7; New York: Ktav, 1969). Martin Hengel claimed that Isaiah 53 was interpreted in a “messianic” sense in pre-Christian Judaism based on Isa 52:14 in 1Q1saa (“I anointed his appearance”). See Hengel, “The Effective History of Isaiah 53 in the Pre-Christian Period,” in B. Janowski and P. Stuhlmacher (eds.), The Suffering Servant: Isaiah 53 in Jewish and Christian Sources (Grand Rapids, 2004 [1996]), 101–5. 84 Craig A. Evans, “Isaiah 53 in the Letters of Peter, Paul, Hebrews, and John,” in Darrell L. Bock and Mitch Glaser (eds.), The Gospel According to Isaiah 53: Encountering the Suffering Servant in Jewish and Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2012), 151: “At the outset it should be made clear that there was no pre-Christian understanding of the Servant as Messiah.” 85 Rashi; Ibn Ezra; Radak; cf. Origen, Contra Celsum 1.55. On Rashi’s commentary, see Joel E. Rembaum, “The Development of a Jewish Exegetical Tradition Regarding Isaiah 53,” HTR 75 no. 3 (1982), 289–311, here 310: “Born out of the Church’s need to explain the suffering of Jesus, its Christ, and its Son of God, this interpretation provided Jews with an explanation of how they, God’s chosen people, could undergo suffering on a national scale. At the same time, an exegetical tradition that has had profound socio-religious implications for Jews contributed to the development of a ‘collective’ understanding of Isaiah 53.” Rashi seems to have been the first (major) Jewish interpreter to read Isaiah 53 as referring to the nation of Israel, although Origen had already noted that the Jews of his time interpreted the passage as referring to Israel. 86 Michael L. Brown, “Jewish Interpretations of Isaiah 53,” in The Gospel According to Isaiah 53, 61–83, here 75–6: “the references to the Servant as a people actually end with 48:20 while the references to the Servant as an individual come into indisputable focus beginning with chapter 49 and continuing through the end of chapter 53. Thus, by the time we reach Isaiah 52:13, the spotlight is on a person, not a people.” 87 Isa 53:4 (LXX): “this one bore our sins and on account of us he was grieved” (οὗτος τὰς ἁμαρτίας ἡμῶν φέρει καὶ περὶ ἡμῶν ὀδυνᾶται). 88 Isa 53:5 (LXX): “but he was wounded because of our sins, and he was made infirm on account of our lawless deeds” (αὐτὸς δὲ ἐτραυματίσθη διὰ τὰς ἁμαρτίας ἡμῶν καὶ μεμαλάκισται διὰ τὰς ἀνομίας ἡμῶν). The MT reads Isa 53:5 as “because of our

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transgressions” (‫ )מפשעינו‬and “because of our iniquities” (‫ )מעונתינו‬instead of “for our transgressions” and “for our iniquities.” The Servant was hurt because of sinful acts, not (vicariously) “for them.” Isa 53:6 (LXX): “and the Lord handed him over for our sins” (καὶ κύριος παρέδωκεν τῇ ἁμαρτίας ἡμῶν). The MT of Isaiah 53:8 refers to the Servant’s “affliction” in the plural: “they were stricken/afflicted,” translated in the NRSV as “he was stricken/afflicted.” Isa 53:8 (LXX): “Because of the lawless deeds of my people he was led unto death” (ἀπὸ τῇ ἀνομιῶν τῇ λαοῦ μου ἤχθη εἰς θάνατον). Isa 53:8 (‫) מפשע עמי נגע למו‬. In the NRSV, it is an individual who is afflicted (“he was stricken”). Brown, “Jewish Interpretations of Isaiah 53,” 76, argues that “sound contextual exegesis” requires the reference to “my people” in Isa 53:8 being God’s use of the first person, not a Gentile king, citing Isa 52:13 (“my servant”) and Isa 53:11 (“my righteous servant”). Alternatively, Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., “The Identity and Mission of the ‘Servant of the Lord,’” in The Gospel According to Isaiah 53, 87–107, 90, interprets the passage as Isaiah speaking “by the inspiration of the Spirit of God,” to declare that the Servant was “cut off … for the transgression of my people.” Kaiser recognizes that “many Jewish people” read ‫ למו‬as a plural “they” (not “him”) and translate the passage as “for the sin of my people they were stricken,” but argues that ‫ למו‬can also be used as a singular pronoun (Genesis 9:26, 27; Isaiah 44:15). See also David Baron, The Servant of Jehovah: The Sufferings of the Messiah and the Glory That Should Follow (1922; repr. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1954), 109 n. 2. In the MT, ‫ למו‬may be a synonym for ‫ להם‬meaning “them,” “for/from them,” or “to them,” suggesting that it is the nation (Israel) that is stricken. Indeed, the word is usually translated as a plural form (see Isa 16:4; 23:1; 26:14; 30:5; 35:8; 43:8; 44:7; 44:15; 48:21; 53:8), except in Isa 44:15. Isa 53:9 uses the plural form for “in his deaths” (‫ )במתיו‬instead of “in his death.” This compound expression is a combination of a preposition and a noun. The noun ‫מתיו‬, is the inflection in the possessive third person singular, masculine gender of the plural noun ‫מותים‬, the plural of the root noun ‫( מות‬death). The Hebrew term for “in his death” would be ‫מותים‬, not ‫במתיו‬. Michael L. Brown, “Jewish Interpretations of Isaiah 53,” in The Gospel According to Isaiah, 75, reads this as “an intensive plural, referring here to a violent death. Such usage of intensive plurals is extremely common in Hebrew, and there are other biblical examples for the plural ‘deaths’ being used for an individual in Ezekiel 28:8 and 10.” Isa 53:10 (LXX): “If you should offer for a sin offering the thing for your life, he shall see seed a long-lived” (εὰν δῶτε περὶ ἁμαρτίας τῆς ψυχὴ ὑμπων ὄψεται σπέρμα μακρόβιον). In the MT, “an offering for sin” ( ‫ )אם תשים אשם נפשו יראה זרע יאריך ימים‬is a conditional statement about Israel, not a reference to the vicarious atonement by the Servant (NRSV: “When you make his life an offering for sin”). The NRSV translates ‫ אשם‬as “an offering for sin” because it is used as a guilt offering, not a sin offering (Lev 5:15; Num 6:12), but it is also used to refer to a sin or an iniquity committed with intent (Jer 51:5; Prov 14:9). The conditional form of the verse suggests that if Israel admits guilt and repents then there will be a “reward.” The “seed” (‫ )זרע‬of reward refers to blood offspring, that is, physical descendants. Isa 53:11 (LXX): “and their sins he shall bear” (καὶ τοῦ ἁμαρτίας αὐτῶν αὐτὸς ἀνοίσει). Isa 53:11 (MT): ‫בדעתו יצדיק צדיק עבדי לרבים ועונתם הוא יסבל‬. Isa 53:12 (LXX): καὶ αὐτὸς ἁμαρτίας πολλῶν ἀνήνεγκε. LXX 53:12: “and was handed over (παρεδόθη) because of their iniquities.” Isa 53:12 (LXX): “his soul was delivered up unto death … and he himself bore the sins of many and he was handed over because of their lawless deeds” (παρεδόθη εἰς θάνατον τῶν ψυχὴ αὐτοῦ ... καὶ αὐτὸς ἁμαρτίας πολλοὺς ἀνήεγκεν καὶ διὰ τῶν αὐτῶν παρεδόθη). Marc Brettler and Amy-Jill Levine, “Isaiah’s Suffering Servant: Before and After Christianity,” Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 73 no. 2 (2019): 158–73.

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98 Anti Laato, Who Is the Servant of the Lord? Jewish and Christian Interpretations on Isaiah 53 from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (SRB 4; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2012), 10, 40, suggests that the individual features of the Servant originally referred to Josiah (d. 609 BCE), but were then reinterpreted to refer to the “righteous and faithful Israelites” in exile (47). 99 Rom 4:25. Cf. 1 Cor 11:23; 15:3–4; Rom 5:19; Phil 2:7–8. 100 See the discussion in Joseph, Jesus, the Essenes, and Christian Origins, 156-162. The dying “anointed” figure in Daniel 9 is a priestly “anointed” figure, not a Davidic messiah. The only other pre-Christian Jewish contender is 4Q541, the Levi Apocryphon, from Qumran, which refers to the cultic atonement of an eschatological high priest. 4Q541 is an Aramaic non-sectarian text dated to the second century BCE. Since the text refers to the individual’s “atoning” function, the figure has been identified as a high priest, and could therefore be described as “anointed.” This figure will be opposed by the people of “his generation” (“they will utter many words against him,” 9 i 5–6), but will “atone for all the children of his generation” (9 i 2). Since 4Q541 does refer to the figure’s atoning function, it is reasonable to think that the text refers to a high priest who will be opposed by “his generation.” The author also makes several allusions to Isaiah 52:13–53:12. This individual is not described as a royal Davidic messiah. Moreover, 4Q541 does not say that this individual will be put to death. On this text, see George J. Brooke, “4QTestament of Levi and the Messianic Servant High Priest,” in From Jesus to John: Essays on Jesus and New Testament Christology in Honour of Marinus de Jonge, ed. M. C. DeBoer, JSNT Sup 84 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1993), 83–96. The text does not refer to the “crucifixion” of the figure, as suggested by Émile Puech, “Fragments d’un apocryphe de Lévi et le personnage eschatologie, 4Q Test–Lévi (c–d[?]) et 4QAJa,” in The Madrid Qumran Congress: Proceedings of the International Congress on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Madrid 18–21 March, 1991, 2 vols., ed. J. Trebolle Barrera and L. Vegas Montaner (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 475– 78. According to Puech, fragment 24 describes the high priest being asked not to mourn and not to commit fault by condemning an innocent person to the cross (É. Puech, Qumrân Grotte 4.XXII: Textes Araméens, première partie: 4Q529-549 (DJD 31; Oxford: Clarendon press, 2001), 252, which Puech reads as proof that high priests used crucifixion. See also Torleif Elgvin, “Trials and Universal Renewal – the Priestly Figure of the Levi Testament 4Q541,” in Vision, Narrative, and Wisdom in the Aramaic Texts from Qumran: Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium, 14–15 August, 2017 (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 78–100; Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli, “A Suffering Messiah at Qumran? Some Observations on the Debate about ‘1QIsaa,’” RevQ 24 no. 2 (2009), 273–81. Brooke, Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament, 151 (emphasis added). Brooke suggests that this is “a Jewish text whose author used the Servant passages of Isaiah to support the idea that there was to be an eschatological priest who would suffer, possibly even that the suffering involved death, death that would lead to joyous benefits for others” (153). 101 Johnson, The Real Jesus, 162, adding that “This pattern was not a late invention but rather an early memory, perhaps the earliest of formative memories, concerning ‘the real Jesus.’” 102 Johnson, The Real Jesus, 163. 103 Larry W. Hurtado, “Mark’s Presentation of Jesus,” in Anthony Le Donne (ed.), Christology in Mark’s Gospel: 4 Views (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2021), 81–103, 89: “The author sought to make the narrative of Jesus a pattern for Christian existence.” 104 Robert J. Miller, “The Jesus of Orthodoxy and the Jesuses of the Gospels: A Critique of Luke Timothy Johnson’s The Real Jesus,” JSNT 68 (1997), 101–20, 105, countering that “if we allow the gospels to speak on their own terms, they do not manifest a single pattern.” Johnson’s alleged “pattern is not actually derived from the gospels, but rather is imposed on them.”

“He Was Despised and Rejected by Men” 135 105 Sandra Huebenthal, “Huebenthal Response to Hurtado,” in Christology in Mark’s Gospel, 109: “Mark was an identity-forming text, designed to be the founding story of Jesus-followers.” 106 Helen Bond, “The Reception of Jesus in the Gospel of John,” paper presented at the Memory and the Reception of Jesus in Early Christianity Conference, St. Mary’s University, 11-11 June 2016; Eve-Marie Becker, Helen K. Bond, and Catrin H. Williams, eds., John’s Transformation of Mark (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021); Paul N. Anderson, “John and Mark: The Bi-Optic Gospels,” in Robert Fortna and Tom Thatcher (eds.), Jesus in Johannine Tradition (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 2001), 175–88. 107 Burton L. Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of the Christian Myth (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1995), 157; idem, Myth and the Christian Nation: A Social Theory of Religion (Religion in Culture: Studies in Social Contest and Construction; London: Equinox, 2008); The Rise and Fall of the Christian Myth: Restoring our Democratic Ideals (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). 108 George W. E. Nickelsburg, “The Genre and Function of the Markan Passion Narrative,” HTR 73 (1980), 153–84; Resurrection, Immortality and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism (HTS 26; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 48–58. Nickelsburg identifies narratives of the Suffering Righteous (rescued by God) in Genesis 37–41, Ahiqar, Esther, Daniel 3, 6, and Susanna. See also Wisdom of Solomon 1–5, 2 Macc 7. See also David Seeley, Deconstructing the New Testament (Biblical Interpretation 5; Leiden: Brill, 1994), 177. 109 Q 7. 110 4 Macc 6:28–9; 17:21. Cf. Jarvis J. Williams, Maccabean Martyr Traditions in Paul’s Theology of Atonement: Did Martyr Theology Shape Paul’s Conception of Jesus’s Death? (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2010).

7

The Rejection of the Law

I The figure of Paul has long haunted the Jewish imagination.1 Long associated with the Christian rejection of Judaism,2 the apostle Paul is both a divisive figure as well as a focal point for “Christian memory.” The traditional view of his ministry is that Paul broke with Judaism and rejected the Torah after his “conversion” to Christianity. In the early 1980s, a “New Perspective on Paul” challenged this view,3 arguing that Paul remained within Judaism,4 but opened the way for Gentiles to be included as Israel without requiring Gentile Torah observance.5 This model holds that Paul encouraged Jewish followers of Jesus to relax their Torah observance in order to facilitate fellowship with Gentiles “in Christ.” This New Perspective attempts to rehabilitate Christian views of Judaism by rejecting the idea that Judaism was a religion of legalism and works of righteousness. Nonetheless, this Perspective still tends to find something wrong with Judaism,6 only now identifying its error as ethnocentric nationalism and insulated particularity. This view still situates Judaism within a binary framework where it is defined as both inferior and antithetical to Christianity. More recently, a Radical New Perspective,7 the Paul-within-Judaism school,8 holds that Paul did not part ways with Judaism at all, but continued to observe the Torah and encouraged Jewish followers of Jesus to do so as well. On this view, Paul’s apparently hostile statements about Judaism were directed toward Gentiles tempted to accept the Judaizing tendencies of rival apostles,9 although Paul insisted that Gentiles obtained their salvation in Christ apart from the Law.10 Since Paul is primarily addressing Gentiles,11 it makes sense for Paul to insist that Gentiles were exempt from keeping the Law.12 Scholars holding this view also point out that Paul refers to the “advantage” of the Jew, states that “circumcision is of value” (Rom 2:24), that righteousness is “attested by the Law and the prophets” (Rom 3:21), and that the Law is holy, just, and good (Rom 7:12–16). In this view, Paul was a Torah-observant Jew who has been misunderstood by both Jews and Christians as the architect of Christian supersessionism. The rehabilitation of the historical Paul as a Torah-observant Jew who did not intend to create a separate religion called “Christianity” is a remarkable development in contemporary Pauline Studies.13 Such efforts commendably problematize DOI: 10.4324/b22959-10

The Rejection of the Law 137 the history of anti-Jewish interpretation in Biblical Studies.14 Historically speaking, reading Paul “within Judaism” also makes eminent sense, given the nature of ancient ethnic identity. In what follows, I too seek to (re-)locate Paul within a mid-first-century Judean and Mediterranean context by paying close attention to his undisputed letters and avoiding the anachronistic terminology of “Christianity,” but without making normative assumptions about whether Paul’s (fixed) ethnic Judean identity necessarily corresponds to a normatively religious Judean identity and practice.15 That is, I want to understand how Paul represented his own identity and relationship to his ancestral customs using the theoretical framework of continuity and discontinuity “within Judaism.”16 Paul’s Torah observance is thus a hypothesis to be tested, not a datum to be presumed, particularly when it comes to the choices Paul needed to make in Gentile or pagan social contexts.17 We cannot preclude the possibility that Paul could have left aspects of his ethnic identity and ancestral customs behind while still maintaining an ethnic Jewish identity. The question of Paul’s conformity and/or apostasy vis-à-vis Torah observance is thus a relational consideration within a first-century Jewish social context.18 There is no consensus on the precise circumstances that led Paul to conceive of his distinctive mission to Gentiles. In Paul’s letter to the Galatians, he indicates that he was “called” (καλέσας) by God “so that” (ἵνα) he “might proclaim him [his Son] among the Gentiles” (εὐαγγελίζωμαι αὐτὸν ἐν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν) (Gal 1:16), suggesting a close link between his “Damascus” experience and his “apostolic” mission to the Gentiles. It may be that Paul was active in Ἰουδαϊσμός – that is, vigorously engaged in promoting Law observance to Gentiles, including circumcision – before his alleged commission.19 It may be that his mission to Gentiles was the end-result of being rejected by Jews.20 Paul’s approach to a Gentile mission may have also been a result of the rejection of his own “apostolic” status after his alleged “commission” from Christ.21 Paul’s letters provide an evidentiary basis for the claim that his apostolic status was under fire and suspicion during his mission to the Gentiles (1 Cor 9:1, 3). Paul’s insistence that he had been “set apart” or “selected” (ἀφορίσας) from the womb by God (Gal 1:15) and specially charged with this mission, in conjunction with his self-reference as one “untimely born” (NRSV) or “miscarried” (ἔκτρωμα) (1 Cor 15:8),22 further support this conclusion. It may have been Paul’s contested status as an apostle – that is, the suspicion and/ or denial of his experience as genuine and/or legitimating – in conjunction with his prior personal history of persecution, that led to Paul’s rhetorical indignation and hostility at this perceived injustice and inspired his self-description as one “aborted” or “rejected” by the other apostles. Paul’s self-perception as one whose authority was questioned, contested, and/or rejected helps explain his astonishing autonomy and independence of spirit.23 His use of the metaphor of abortion, of being unwanted and/or rejected at the very “birth” of his new identity (as an apostle) “in Christ,” also seems to have been compensated by his explicit claim of having been born with a special commission directly from God. In sum, it may well have been the generative power of the rejection of Paul’s apostolic status by Law-observant Jews that launched a (relatively) Law-free mission to Gentiles.24

138 The Rejection of the Law Like most Jews, Paul was familiar with the traditional Jewish binary of Israel and the nations (ἔθνη). Paul understood that most Jews had not accepted Jesus as the Davidic messiah, but he also thought that some Jewish Christ-followers were actively misrepresenting the truth of the “gospel.” The problem, for Paul, was that some Jewish Christ-followers and perhaps some Gentile Christ-followers were trying to persuade Gentiles to become (like) Jews. Paul insisted that Gentile Christ-followers must stop worshipping other gods and turn to the God of Israel, but must not become Jews. From Paul’s perspective, Gentile “conversion” would have violated the “gospel” because Gentiles needed to be incorporated into Israel as Gentiles to fulfill the prophecies of the end-time. Gentile conversion would have undermined the “promise” God made to Abraham and extended to the nations. It would also have violated Paul’s understanding of Gentile freedom from the Law. But if that is how Paul understood the relationship between Gentile Christ-followers and the ritual observances of the Torah, how did Paul see his own ethnic Jewish identity vis-à-vis the Law? It is reasonable to presume that Paul, as a Jewish apostle to Gentiles, held different expectations for Gentile followers than he did for Jewish followers of Jesus.25 Paul, for example, seems to have quickly determined that Gentile male Christ-believers did not need to be circumcised.26 Gentiles were not to “convert” to Judaism. Gentiles were “not subject to the Law” (Gal 5:18). At the Jerusalem meeting, Paul agreed that he would go (only) to the Gentiles whereas Peter and James would go “to the circumcised” (Gal 2:9). This implies a kind of “two missions” model of early evangelism, with two distinct communities of practice: Gentiles to be brought into ethnic Israel, but not replacing ethnic Israel; and ethnic Jews, but both co-existing “in Christ.” Accordingly, if Paul’s only sphere of authority was instructing Gentiles as Gentiles without presuming to instruct Jewish followers of Jesus on the Law (let alone advocating its subordination, relaxation, or abrogation), then, Paul was simply acting as an eschatologicallyoriented Diasporan Jew. Jews were not being replaced by Christians; rather, Gentiles were being included in God’s plan of salvation. Paul’s “greatness,” then, according to this model, would lie not in his “demarcating the new religion from Judaism,” but rather “in the fact that he maintains the continuity with Judaism,” envisioning this movement as the “fulfillment of Judaism.”27 There are several indications, however, that the historical Paul did not limit himself to this view of two separate, distinct missions (one to Jews, another to Gentiles; one facilitated by James and Peter, the other by himself),28 but rather assumed that his vision and authority also extended to Jews and Jewish Torah observance.29 A first indication is that Paul openly criticized Peter for withdrawing from shared table fellowship with non-Jews in Antioch. We do not know the precise reasons why Paul called Peter a “hypocrite,” but the common view is the latter’s new-found reluctance (under James’ instruction) to eat potentially nonkosher Gentile food.30 That is, Paul objected to Peter’s withdrawal because Paul thought that Peter should continue eating with Gentiles, that is, to continue eating potentially non-kosher food because Peter, like Paul, was no longer “under [the] Law” (ὑπὸ νόμον).31 The implication here is that Paul observed the Law when

The Rejection of the Law 139 evangelizing other Jews (1 Cor 9:20), but not when he interacted with Gentiles. In such circumstances, Paul ate Gentile food that was potentially unclean (1 Cor 10:25–28).32 Paul also seems to have assumed he had the authority to determine what Jews, like Peter, should do for the sake of Gentile fellowship “in Christ.”33 These inferences are supported by Paul’s statement that nothing is “unclean” since “all food is clean (καθαρά)” (Rom 14:14, 20). It is reasonable to assume that if Paul ate with Gentiles, he could have been perceived by other Jews as non-observant. Paul’s interest in accommodating Gentile inclusion in a mixed ekklēsia may have led him to relax Jewish dietary restrictions without thinking that he was violating the Law. These proposals strain in light of Paul’s explicit statement that “all food is clean” (Rom 14:20).34 Halakhic interpretations of the Torah were still in flux in the mid-first-century CE,35 but flexible interpretations can only go so far when faced with the decision of whether or not to eat foods explicitly forbidden in the Torah as opposed to when the status of the food is more ambiguous.36 And whereas there is no good reason to doubt that Peter, Paul, and James were in agreement about the non-necessity of Gentile circumcision, there is no indication that these leaders ever reconciled their disparate views on mixed table fellowship after Paul left Antioch. A second indication that Paul may have overstepped his authority on Jewish observance of the Law is that Paul refers to the Torah in disparaging ways. It is difficult to reconcile the proposal that Paul remained a Torah-observant Jew with the tone of many of Paul’s statements regarding the Law. A third indication that Paul did not consider his authority bound, limited, or restrained only to the “uncircumcised” is that Paul’s citation of the formulaic creed affirming the unity of fellowship in Christ – “there is neither Jew nor Greek … for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28) – suggests that what Paul had in mind was the social construction of a new (shared) identity “in Christ.”37 Assuming for the moment, however, that Paul intended to honor the socio-ethnic differentiation of Jews and Greeks (based on the Jerusalem agreement) while affirming the cultic equality of Jews and Greeks “in Christ,” let us first recall that Paul ultimately envisioned reconciling two distinct social groups: Jews and Gentiles. Who, then, were those “under [the] Law,” Jews and/or Gentiles?38 In a number of passages, this distinctive phrase refers to Gentiles who mistakenly attempt to adopt Jewish practices only to find themselves under the Law’s burden and curse.39 In these passages, the phrase “under the Law” serves as a warning to Gentiles, not Jews.40 On the other hand, Paul uses the first person plural to refer to how Christ redeemed “us” (ἡμᾶς) from “the curse of the Law” (ἐκ τῆς κατάρας τοῦ νόμου) (Gal 3:13), how “we [Jews?] were imprisoned and guarded under the Law” and how the Law was “our disciplinarian until Christ came” (Gal 3:23).41 Such language seems to make little sense unless Gentiles were once also obliged to follow the Law, that is, unless Gentiles have also been under the jurisdiction of the Law.42 But in what specific sense were Gentiles generally conceptualized as being “under the Law?”43 One might surmise that Jews and Gentile “Judaizers” may be “under the Law,” but it was empirically obvious to all concerned that Gentiles had not been given the Mosaic Law. Moreover, when Paul refers explicitly to Christ himself as a Jew born “under [the] Law” (ὑπὸ νόμον) (Gal 4:4), the

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attribution seems decisive: it is the Jews who are “under [the] Law.”44 At the same time, being “under the Law” could simultaneously mean “under the (former) age of the Law,” that is, “under” the universally cosmic conditions of existence prior to God’s divine intervention and provision of freedom from the Law for both Jews and Gentiles “in Christ.” In this sense, Gentiles were indeed “under the Law,” but in this new age, Gentiles were not to be forced or even encouraged to follow the Law. Nonetheless, the redemption of salvation was provided “to the Jew first” (Ἰουδαίῷ πρῶτον) and then to the Gentiles.45 If Paul believed that Gentiles were not to come “under the Law,” what can we surmise about the status of Jews vis-à-vis the Law? If the “Christ event” had secured freedom from the Law for Gentiles-in-Christ, can we say the same for Jews? In 1 Cor 9:20–21, Paul states that “to the Jews I became like a Jew” (ἐγενόμην τοῖς Ἰουδαίοις ὡς Ἰουδαῖος) and to those “under the Law (ὑπὸ νόμον), [I became] as one under the Law,” parenthetically adding that he himself was “not … under the Law” (μὴ … αὐτὸς ὑπὸ νόμον) (1 Cor 9:20–21). It is theoretically possible to read 1 Cor 9:20 – where Paul refers first to Jews and then to “those under the Law” – as two distinct and separate categories of identity. In this reading, Paul would be first addressing Jews and then addressing Gentiles who had mistakenly placed themselves “under the Law,” perhaps recalling an earlier phase of his ministry when he endorsed a more “Judaizing” approach. But then why would Paul need to remind readers that he was “not … under the Law” at all if the phrase referred exclusively to Judaized Gentiles? We may surmise, then, that Paul’s new-found freedom from the Law was the direct result of God’s divine intervention “in Christ” and that other Jews would also need to receive Christ in order to be justified and attain salvation “not … under the Law.” Since God shows “no partiality” (Rom 2:6–16), it is “every knee [that] should bend … [and] every tongue [that] should confess that Jesus is Lord” (Phil 2:9–11). The “good news” (εὐαγγέλιον) is “the power of God for the salvation (σωτηρίαν) to everyone (παντὶ) who is faithful, first to the Ἰουδαίῳ and then to the Greek” (Rom 1:16). Paul’s soteriology recognized and maintained a prioritized distinction between Jews and Gentiles (Rom 2:9–11; 3:9; 3:29–30; 10:12–13), but presupposed that both Jews and Gentiles required Christ as a prerequisite for their respective salvation. On this view, then, Jews could continue observing Torah as long as they understood that Torah observance could not save them, must not compromise the unity and equality of fellowship “in Christ,” and must not be imposed on Gentiles. The Torah, of course, was not traditionally conceived as securing “salvation” (soteria) for Israel; nonetheless, Paul found the Torah soteriologically inadequate in light of his new-found life “in Christ.” It was one thing, however, to say that Gentiles-inChrist were not obligated to follow Jewish Law; it was quite another to suggest to his fellow Jews that the Law was soteriologically inadequate for Jews.

II How, then, are we to understand Paul’s relationship to the Law (νόμος)?46 Why does Paul say that he has “died to the Law” (Gal 2:19)? How could Paul be both

The Rejection of the Law 141 a Jew and one “not … under the Law?”47 Did Paul observe or reject the Law?48 Alternatively, did Paul observe most of the Law, only to make an exception when participating in the Eucharist, which he regarded as taking place at least partially in the Kingdom, the only place where Jew and Greek, male and female, and slave and free were equal?49 When Paul declared all foods clean, did he mean only for Gentiles despite making this statement to both Jews and Gentiles (Rom 9; 14:14, 20)? Did Paul adopt Torah observance in the company of Jews, but privately believe that he was “not … under the Law” (1 Cor 9:20)?50 He says that the Law is “holy, just and good” (Rom 7:12), but also an enslaving power that brings about death (Gal 4:1–10; Rom 5:20). He claims to be both “overthrowing” and upholding the Law (Rom 3:31). He talks about dietary matters, but suggests they are unnecessary (Rom 14:1–5, 21). He says that Gentiles “in Christ” can “eat anything” (14:2) and that circumcision is “nothing,” although “obeying the commandments of God is everything” (1 Cor 7:19).51 One might be forgiven for concluding that Paul seems inconsistent on Torah observance.52 As an “apocalyptic Jew,”53 Paul’s understanding of the Torah was contingent on recurring “revelation” (ἀποκάλυψις), central features of which were the resurrection kerygma and the soteriological efficacy of “Christ crucified.” That is why Paul claimed that “from now on (ἀπο τοῦ νῦν) … we regard no one according to the flesh (κατὰ σάρκα), even though we once regarded (ἐγνώκαμεν) Christ according to flesh, now we regard him no longer that way” (2 Cor 5:16). Paul’s ambiguous relationship to the Jewish Law after his transformational experience “in Christ” and his mission to plant new ekklēsiai of ex-pagans also seems to have led him to assume a certain ethnic fluidity (and social mobility) in observant practice, allowing him to refer to his “former way of life in Judaism” (ἀναστροφήν ποτε ἐν Ἰουδαϊσμῷ) (Gal 1:13) and to self-identify as one who had become “all things to all people” (τοῖς πᾶσιν γέγονα πάντα) (1 Cor 9:22). The term Paul uses to describe his “former way of life” – in Ἰουδαϊσμός – although often translated simply as “Judaism,”54 signifies zealous efforts in promoting a Jewish way of life among non-Jews.55 Yet just as Paul could refer to members of the ekklēsia as former Gentiles,56 so too could he regard himself as having lived a “former” life “under the Law.” When Paul says “to the Jews I became like a Jew” (ἐγενόμην τοῖς Ἰουδαίοις ὡς Ἰουδαῖος) and to those “under the Law (ὑπὸ νόμον), [I became] as one under the Law,” just as he could be “outside the Law” (ἀνόμοις) to those outside the Law, it is difficult not to conclude – especially given his parenthetical aside that he himself was “not … under the Law” (μὴ … αὐτὸς ὑπὸ νόμον) (1 Cor 9:20–21) – that Paul’s “Jewishness” and, presumably, by extension, the extent of his Torah observance, was malleable, circumstantial, and contingent on a case-by-case basis.57 Paul’s “former” life “within Judaism” does not mean that Paul now considered himself outside of Judaism or a non-Jew.58 Nonetheless, Paul was now a believer “in Christ” and this changed his understanding, relationship to, and observance of the Law.59 The author of Acts is clearly aware of the ambiguity of this dual identity – which is likely why Paul’s name is first identified as “Saul” (Σαύλου),60 shifting to “Paul” (Παῦλος) only after Peter launches the Gentile mission.61

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There is no clear, compelling, or unambiguous evidence, therefore, to support the claim that Paul remained a Torah-observant Jew. When Paul states that “To the Jews I became as a Jew … To those under the Law I became as one under the Law (though I myself am not under the Law”) (1 Cor 9:20–21), it does not mean that Paul “no longer considered himself to be a Jew.”62 Paul’s ethnic identity as a Jew was fixed.63 In Galatians 2:15, Paul is emphatic: “we are Jews by birth” (Ἡμεῖς φύσει Ἰουδαῖοι). In 2 Cor 11:22, he affirms his identity as a Hebrew, an Israelite, and a descendant of Abraham. Paul’s letter to the Romans refers to his “kinfolk” (συγγενεῖς) who were fellow Jews (Rom 16:7). Romans 11:3 uses the same term to refer to his “kinfolk according to the flesh, who are Israelites” (τῶν συγγενῶν μου κατὰ σάρκα οἵτινές εἰσιν Ἰσραηλῖται). These are unmistakable self-references affirming his own Judean/Jewish ethnic identity. At the same time, there are also unmistakable references to ethnic fluidity in 1 Cor 9:20–21 as well as to an implied flexibility of practice, allowing for ongoing participation in a way of life that was no longer binding. Paul was ethnically Jewish “by birth,” but his identity “in Christ” now allowed for a certain freedom from his former commitment to being religiously Jewish in terms of Torah observance. The claim, therefore, that Paul was a Torah-observant Jew must do more than simply assert that Paul was Torah-observant based on normative assumptions about ancient ethnic Jewish identity and practice. After all, the Paul “within Judaism” approach is not simply or exclusively a historical discourse, but also resonates with multiple contemporary interests, including “reclaiming” a “Jewish” Paul, destabilizing early Christian identity, defending early Jewish ethnicity and religion, polemicizing against Christian assumptions about Christian origins, and transferring anti-Jewish “Christian” rhetoric to the post-Pauline period.64 Consequently, those who claim that Paul was Torah-observant must also explain why Paul made numerous statements about (his) being free from the Law “in Christ.”65 One might argue, for example, that Paul expected Gentile Christfollowers to only serve kosher food to Jewish Christ-believers.66 One might argue that Paul’s declaration that “everything is clean” (Rom 14:20) only applied to Gentiles (who would be serving food to Christ-believing Jews). One might also argue that Paul allowed Jewish Christ-believers to eat whatever was offered to them as long as they didn’t know (or ask) where the meat came from. These proposals are plausible explanations for how a Torah-observant Paul could have maintained such a lifestyle. The problem is that these are mere possibilities without much evidence to support them as correct explanations. The idea that Paul encouraged Jewish members “in Christ” to remain Lawobservant may be a reasonable inference given 1 Cor 7:17, where Paul states that each member of the ekklēsia should “lead the life that the Lord has assigned” them and “remain in the condition” in which they were “called” (7:20).67 Yet here Paul states that circumcision is “nothing” (οὐδέν) while keeping the “commandments of God” (ἐντολῶν Θεοῦ) is “everything” (1 Cor 7:19). For Jews, however, circumcision was not “nothing.” Circumcision was one of the “commandments of God!” It would seem then that whatever Paul meant here by “commandments,” it was not the Mosaic Law per se since the term “commandments” also applies

The Rejection of the Law 143 to Gentiles.68 When Paul states to Gentiles that circumcision is “nothing” (οὐδέν) in relation to “keeping the commandments of God” (τήρησις ἐντολῶν Θεοῦ), this should not be read as Paul’s advocacy of Jewish Torah observance. This is a juxtaposition of two different registers or meanings of “law” that should not be conflated with the Mosaic Torah, which Paul does not expect Gentiles to keep.69 Let us suppose, however, that Paul is referring to Mosaic Law,70 and making the case that Jews should remain Jews and Gentiles Gentiles, albeit “in Christ.” If so, then Paul does not seem to have followed his own advice since he changed his own behavior toward Gentiles when he was “called” as he no longer regarded himself as “under the Law.” It is not particularly surprising, therefore, when scholars conclude that “Paul’s mission to the Gentiles involved a rejection of the Torah.”71 On one hand, then, Paul remained “within Judaism” because he could not stop being Jewish: he was born, raised, and remained Jewish. On the other hand, Paul claimed identity “in Christ” and operated within a social context of recruiting, instructing, and regularly interacting with non-Jewish ex-pagan Gentiles now “in Christ.” Paul may have rejected the idea of privileging the Jew over the Greek “in Christ” (cf. Gal 3:28; Rom 2:11), but does this mean that Paul thought that Jewish and Gentile identity would now be subsumed within a new universal identity “in Christ” that transcended this binary?72 Unlike Jews/Judeans, Christ-followers were not a recognizable ethnos because they lacked a “homeland” and a people’s ancestral customs.73 It is this ambiguous status of the non-Judean Christfollower – a status that Paul did not share (as he was recognizably Judean) – that continues to complicate our discussion. In contemporary categories, then, yes, Paul remained an ethnic Jew, but he also reconfigured his religious Jewish identity and practice.74 The evidence suggests that he did so in ways that were offensive to a number of contemporary Jews, whether Christ-followers or not. He created a new religious movement of nonJews who were introduced to the ethical, theological, and eschatological aspects of Jewish tradition, but were not ethnically, culturally, or religiously bound to Jewish Law and/or its ancestral customs. He also scandalized his fellow Jews by insisting that these new recruits be treated as equal members of the Israelite covenant without following or adhering to the ancestral rites and customs of the Jews/Judeans.75 In his most heated moments, Paul launched hostile rhetorical missives and verbal attacks on his Jewish colleagues. Were they also scandalized and offended by Paul’s non-observance of the Law? The apostle “Paul” thus remains a site of ambiguous difference. He equivocates at will, being “all things to all people.” He moves between the Jewish and Gentile worlds as both an Israelite and as one “in Christ.” Accordingly, contemporary attempts to navigate the tension between a Paul fully “within Judaism” and one who includes non-Jews in a “new creation” where there is neither “Jew nor Greek” in Christ (Gal 3:28) may obfuscate his efforts to forge a new identity within which those “in Christ” may live.76 To be sure, Paul did not even have a “good term for the ekklēsia’s non-Jewish ex-idol-worshippers.”77 Nonetheless, it was this very ambiguity – that is, Paul’s exegetical, ethnic, cultural, and religious ambiguity – that informed his ministry and subsequently provided his later

144 The Rejection of the Law interpreters with so many alternative trajectories.78 It was a temporal ambiguity between an era “under the Law” and a new era “in Christ” which promised freedom from the Law that confused his contemporaries. It was an ambiguity of identity – increasingly intolerable in the local and specific socio-ethnic contexts of inter-Jewish conflict in the Jesus movement – that facilitated the emergence of a distinctive “Christian” identity.79 In other words, the emergence of a distinctive “Christian” identity can be seen as both the reception of the term ethnē as signifying the ancestral inheritance of Israelite prophecy and a rejection of the ambiguity inherent in being assigned a subordinate identity as a “Gentile” in the traditional Jew/Gentile binary. This led to the construction of a new identity that could signify either a shared, complementary identity or a supersessionist identity that sought either to co-exist with or to replace Jewish Christ-followers.80 That is, despite the initial signification of honor attributed to the term ethnē as the eschatological fulfillment of Paul’s scripturally-informed narrative of salvation, the ambiguity inherent in still being addressed as Gentiles (Rom 11:13) while simultaneously also being former Gentiles now “in Christ” (1 Cor 12:2) was resolved by constructing a new trans-ethnic identity as “Christian.”

III If Paul was a Torah-observant Jew, it is difficult to understand how he could say that he was “no longer under the Law.” Yet if Paul, as a Jew, claimed that he was no longer “under the Law,” then it is difficult to see how he could not have communicated that same message of freedom from the Law to other Jews. If Paul was a Torah-observant Jew, it is difficult to explain how he could have described his former life as “loss” or filth (σκύβαλα) (Phil 3:8) without offending and scandalizing other Jews. It would seem to follow, then, that Paul earned his reputation as someone subversive of Jewish Torah observance.81 That is, Paul did not think he was obligated to observe the Torah or keep the food laws. Nor does he seem to have required Jews to do so (Rom 3:8; Acts 21:21).82 Paul seems to have earned his reputation as a Jew pulling Jews away from the Law.83 Accordingly, to identify Paul as an “observant Jew” argues beyond the evidence, conflates Paul’s ethnic and religious Jewish identity, and obfuscates Paul’s missionary efforts to Gentiles in the construction of a “non-Jewish” movement.84 Did Paul observe the dietary laws and keep the Sabbath? He does not say. What he does say is that he had “died to the Law” (Gal 2:19) and that he was no longer “under the Law.” Other Christ-following Jews may not have agreed with Paul that they were no longer “under the Law.”85 Paul’s reputation – as a Jew turning Jews away from the Law while encouraging Gentiles to abandon their civic duties in worshipping the gods – explains his punishments from synagogues.86 Jews heard Paul saying that the Torah was inadequate,87 that the Torah had failed, but Christ had triumphed, that the Torah was unable to correct the sin of Adam, but that Christ had corrected this, “redeem[ing] those who were under the Law” (Gal 4:5), that is, those under the “curse” of the Law (Gal 3:13), that the Torah had only been a temporary provision until Christ (Gal 3:23–24) redeemed Jews from

The Rejection of the Law 145 the “curse” of the Law (Gal 3:13),88 but that now there was “the Law of Christ” (ὁ νόμος τοῦ Χριστοῦ),89 that the Law was given in order to correct and prevent sinful acts (Gal 3:19), but was only temporary: “until the coming of the seed to whom the promise was made.” From Paul’s perspective, he was now free from the Law and taught – by his own example – other Jews to do the same. Paul seems to have thought that at least an elect remnant of the Jews of “Israel” would turn to faith in Christ as their salvation (Rom 11:26), but he could not envision a legitimate form of “Judaism” that refused to recognize Jesus as Christ. The implication is that Paul thought that Jews “in Christ,” such as himself, were no longer “under the Law” while Jews not “in Christ” were.90 If there is no evidence that Paul ever advocated that Jews should abandon the Law, there is not much evidence that Paul advocated that Christ-believing Jews should continue to observe the Law either. Paul may have thought that Torah observance was an unnecessary, but relatively harmless option for Jewish Christfollowers.91 Paul’s focus, however, was the ekklēsia, a new social formation binding two different kinds of people together “in Christ.” These were not communities of Torah-observant Gentiles or “God-fearers.”92 These were not Gentile “converts” to Judaism, or Gentile “Judaizers.” This was not a “third race” of people, a new ethnos and “creation” “in Christ.”93 These new communities were now part of “the larger family of Israel,”94 an Israel now centered “in Christ.” Paul was not attempting to create a new “religion.”95 Rather, Paul thought his activities were fulfilling the narrative history of Israel. Paul did not just anticipate the Gentiles streaming to Jerusalem to worship the God of Israel in “eschatological pilgrimage.”96 Rather, Paul was working under the conceptual umbrella of an inclusive “Israel” incorporating both Jews and Gentiles. For Paul, the eschatological restoration of Israel was being accomplished “in Christ,” but not all Ἰουδαῖοι were Israel. Rather, a select remnant of Ἰουδαῖοι were being saved as Israel, but this new Israel now also includes a number of the ἔθνη.97 Since the God of Israel is the God of all nations, Paul’s apocalyptic logic reconceptualized an end-time in which God reconciled (some) Gentiles. The Gentile mission was the fulfillment of the promise God made to Abraham, that through him “all the nations” would be blessed (Gal 3:8). But whereas other Jewish Christ-believers insisted on Torah observance, Paul disagreed because he was convinced that God was now fulfilling the divine promise made to Abraham, now reconfigured as their [the Gentiles’] ancestor in faith and righteousness, forever intertwining the fate of both Jew and Gentile “in Christ.” To be sure, Paul could lavish praise on his people: “to whom belong the divine adoption as sons (υἱοθεσία), and the glory (δόξα), and the covenants (διαθῆκαι), and the giving of the Law (νομοθεσία), and the [Temple] cult (λατρεία), and the promises (ἐταγγελί αι), to whom belong the fathers (πατέρες), and from whom Christ is born, according to the flesh (κατὰ σάρκα) (Rom 9:4–5). Paul could affirm that “All Israel will be saved” (Rom 11:26), but it will not be without Christ. He could refer to his own “faultless” (ἄμεμπτος) Jewish past (Phil 3:6), now counted as “loss.”98 He could even reject the idea that God had “rejected his own people” (Rom 11:1), but he would not compromise on rejecting the Law as binding on Christ-believers,

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whether Jew or Greek.99 Nor would he compromise on insisting that “salvation,” however it was conceived, was only possible “in Christ.” If contemporary Pauline Studies have successfully defended Paul against the charge of “Christian” supersessionism,100 they have not yet rehabilitated his reputation for soteriological intolerance and exclusivism, rhetorical weapons which were soon to be useful in the construction of Christian identity and supersessionism. In the end, however, Paul’s personal frustrations with his own people who refused to recognize Jesus, the conflicts he engendered in establishing the terms of Gentile admission into his ekklēsiai, and the ambiguous implications of non-binding Torah observance among his fellow Jews “in Christ” still represent irresolvable points of tension within his conceptual framework.101

Notes 1 Daniel R. Langton, The Apostle Paul in the Jewish Imagination: A Study in Modern Jewish-Christian Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1. 2 Donald A. Hagner, How New Is the New Testament? First-Century Judaism and the Emergence of Christianity (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), 99: “Paul’s polemical rejection of the law [in Galatians] … presents perhaps the most radical discontinuity with Judaism in the Pauline corpus.” Paul is the “apostle of newness” (136). 3 James D.G. Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul,” BJRL 65 (1983), 95–122; idem, The New Perspective on Paul: Revised Edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008). See also Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” 199–215. 4 On continuity and discontinuity between Paul and Judaism, see the essays in Paul and Judaism: Crosscurrents in Pauline Exegesis and the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations, eds. Reimund Bieringer and Didier Pollefeyt (London/New York: T & T Clark International, 2012). 5 James D. G. Dunn, “Was Paul Against the Law? The Law in Galatians and Romans: A Test-Case of Text in Context,” in Tord Fornberg and David Hellholm (eds.), Texts and Contexts: Biblical Texts in Their Textual and Situational Contexts (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1997), 455–75. 6 Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 552. Cf. Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People, 154, 165 n. 38. 7 Cf. Eisenbaum, “Paul, Polemics, and the Problem of Essentialism”; idem, Paul Was Not a Christian, 169 (emphases added), asserts that “Paul always treats Israel’s sacred texts with reverence and respect,” concluding that “Whenever Paul seems to speak negatively of Torah, he is not, in fact, condemning the Torah per se … Paul never condemns Torah. Neither does he devalue, diminish, or degrade it; it remains the Word of God. Paul’s infamous remarks are always condemnations of non-Jews adopting Torah observance” (170). 8 Matthew V. Novenson, “Whither the Paul within Judaism Schule?,” JJMJS 5 (2018), 79–88. 9 Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism. 10 See especially Gal 2:15; Phil 3:5; 2 Cor 11:22; Rom 9:3–4; 11:1. 11 Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian, 216–9, argues that Paul’s letters were intended to discourage Gentile Torah-observance. Israel’s justification was already secured by the covenant or Torah; it is only Gentiles who need justification through Jesus’s atoning death. 12 Mark D. Nanos, The Mystery of Romans (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996); The Irony of Galatians: Paul’s Letter in First-Century Context (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002);

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“The Letter of Paul to the Romans,” in The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version (ed. A.-J. Levine and M. Z. Brettler; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 253–86; Lloyd Gaston, Paul and the Torah (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1990); John G. Gager, The Origins of AntiSemitism: Attitudes toward Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Stanley K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Peter J. Tomson, Paul and the Jewish Law: Halakha in the Letters of the Apostle to the Gentiles (Assen: van Gorcum, 1990). For a helpful survey of recent Pauline scholarship, see Magnus Zetterholm, Approaches to Paul: A Student’s Guide to Recent Scholarship (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009). John Gager, Who Made Early Christianity? The Jewish Lives of the Apostle Paul (American Lectures in the History of Religions; New York: Columbia University Press, 2015): 13: “What we call Christianity is not just post-Pauline; it is un-Pauline.” Paula Fredriksen, Paul, the Pagan’s Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 71. Cf. Logan Williams, “‘Is Torah-Observance the Essence of Judaism? An Historical and Decolonial Critique of the ‘Paul within Judaism’ Schule,” a paper presented at the British New Testament Society conference (Paul 2021 Programme). Cf. Steve Mason, “Paul without Judaism: Historical Method over Perspective,” in Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (ed. Ronald Charles; LNTS 628; London and New York: T & T Clark, 2021), 9–39, 14. On apostasy in antiquity, see Stephen G. Wilson, Leaving the Fold: Apostates and Defectors in Antiquity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004), 23–65. On Paul as an apostate, see John M. G. Barclay, “Paul among Diaspora Jews: Anomaly or Apostate?,” JSNT 60 (1995), 89–120; Tabor, Paul and Jesus. On Paul as an (non-) “apostate,” see James D. G. Dunn, “Paul: Apostate or Apostle of Israel?,” ZNW 89 (1998), 256–71, 258. Dunn denies that Paul “broke with the law” (270). Rather, “Paul saw the gospel as the completion of the law, not as its abrogation.” Dunn nonetheless differentiates the Torah from Jewish “identity markers,” including “circumcision, sabbath and dietary laws,” but each of these elements represent Torah observance! Barclay, “Paul among Diaspora Jews: Anomaly or Apostate?,” 111–2, is helpful here: “There is no neutral standard by which one may measure whether a Jew is an apostate because the term is the product of a relative judgment … defined by the societal reaction.” On Paul’s apostasy, see also Alan F. Segal, Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 133: “the Jewish community … would probably judge him on his personal practice and on the basis of his recommendations for others.” Terence L. Donaldson, Paul and the Gentiles: Remapping the Apostle’s Convictional World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997); “Israelite, Convert, Apostle to the Gentiles: The Origin of Paul’s Gentile Mission,” in Richard N. Longenecker (ed.), The Road from Damascus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 62–84. Francis Watson, Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles: Beyond the New Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007). Matthew Wesley Mitchell, “Paul’s Gospel and the Rhetoric of Apostolic Rejection: A Study of Galatians 1:15–17, 1 Corinthians 15:8, F. C. Baur, and the Origins of Paul’s Gentile Mission,” Ph.D. dissertation, Temple University, 2005, 101: Paul’s “turn to the Gentiles” was the result of “the rejection of his apostolic commissioning and status.” Mitchell, “Paul’s Gospel and the Rhetoric of Apostolic Rejection,” 137: “Paul’s reference to being an ‘abortion’ (reading ἔκτρωμα in its normal sense) refers simply to his place among the apostles. That is, he portrays himself as something that is cast aside or rejected in the manner of an aborted fetus, most likely with respect to his claims to equal authority with the other apostles.”

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23 Mitchell, “Paul’s Gospel and the Rhetoric of Apostolic Rejection,” 164: “Paul’s Gentile mission is not grounded solely in his experience of the risen Jesus, but also upon the rejection of his claims to this [Damascus] experience.” 24 Matthew Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem (Oxford University Press, 2018), 14, suggests that Gentiles could not “convert” to Judaism unless they were circumcised on the “eighth day.” 25 Cf. Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, 107, 108 (emphases added): “Paul never defends his Law-free mission to the Gentiles … Paul says repeatedly that the source of his Law-free gospel was not human tradition but the vision of the Risen Christ.” Fredriksen, “Paul – Apostle to the Pagans,” 12–20, objects to the term “Law-free gospel,” arguing that Paul’s ex-pagan Gentiles “are brought in as Jewishly-acting (that is, as Judaizing) gentiles.” For Fredriksen, this means no circumcision, no Sabbath observance, no attendance at festivals, and no keeping kosher. This reads, to my mind, as relatively “Law-free.” On the other hand, these followers are to worship the Jewish God, abstain from idol worship, love their neighbors, follow a Jewish Messiah, and acquire the correct knowledge of the Jewish Scriptures. These requirements do indeed represent a kind of “Judaizing” of pagans. On the relationship between a “Law-free” gospel and a “Law-free” Paul, see further Paula Fredriksen, “Why Should a ‘Law-Free’ Mission Mean a ‘Law-Free’ Apostle?,” JBL 134 no. 3 (2015), 650, noting that Paul’s commitment to “uncircumcised Christfollowing pagans” tells us “nothing at all” about his “own level of Jewish observance.” 26 Joshua D. Garroway, The Beginning of the Gospel: Paul, Philippi, and the Origins of Christianity (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), argues that the very term “gospel” is Paul’s own creation signifying his announcement of salvation for Gentiles without the Jewish Law. Garroway suggests that Paul participated in an early Gentile mission to God-fearers preaching conversion to Judaism and circumcision for salvation (Gal 5:11), but subsequently claimed to have received a revelation that shifted his teaching regarding the Jewish Law as a criterion of salvation for Gentiles. 27 Theissen, A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion, 226 (emphasis added). Cf. 231. 28 Cf. Foster, “An Apostle Too Radical,” 8: “Paul was primarily concerned with calling gentiles … [but] it does not appear that he limited his missionary activities to gentiles exclusively … Paul was active in persuading Jews to follow his own example and to identify as Christ believers.” Foster points out that Paul states that he “became as a Jew” to Jews and “to those under the law he became as one under law,” evidently “incomprehensible statements from one who regarded himself as still being a Jew and as still being under law.” Simply put, Paul “no longer regarded himself as a Jew or as one compelled to observe Torah requirements” (9). 29 Fredriksen, “Paul – Apostle to the Pagans,” 20: “Anything Paul says about Jewish law, then, he says first of all with reference to his gentile auditors. The Law was a curse for gentiles. The works of the Law, circumcision especially, was fleshly slavery for gentiles.” Cf. Foster, “An Apostle Too Radical for the Radical Perspective on Paul,” 4, who emphasizes that the text “speaks of a unified human state: ‘cursed is everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the Law’ (Gal 3.10).” Paul does not say that “the Law acted as a mediator and schoolmaster only for gentiles.” Being “in Christ” means being “entirely free from the observance of the Law, from which there is a release” (5). 30 Alternatively, on the problem being “seating arrangements” within the ekklēsia, see Nanos, Mystery of Romans, 347–54; “What Was at Stake in Peter’s ‘Eating with Gentiles’ at Antioch?,” in The Galatians Debate, ed. Mark D. Nanos (Peabody: MA: Hendrickson, 2002), 282–318, 296–301; “The Inter- and Intra-Jewish Political Context of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians,” in Mark Nanos (ed.), The Galatians Debate: Contemporary Issues in Rhetorical and Historical Interpretation (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2002), 396-407. According to Nanos, the problem was not

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about the Jewish dietary laws, which he presumes were observed by Gentiles, but rather the mixed company of Jews sharing table fellowship with uncircumcised Gentiles. On the issue being the non-circumcised status of Gentiles, see also Magnus Zetterholm, “Purity and Anger: Gentiles and Idolatry in Antioch,” Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 1 (2005), 16–24. Zetterholm argues that food was not an issue in Antioch because Gentile followers could (would!) have conformed to the Jewish dietary laws (“which makes it improbable that there was anything wrong with the food from a Jewish perspective” [16]). Rather, it was the “purity status of these Gentiles” that came to the surface, appealing to Paul’s statement in Galatians that Peter withdrew out of fear of the “circumcision faction.” Zetterholm, however, proceeds by “Assuming that food was not the problem” (18, emphasis added), concluding that it was primarily a question of “too close relationships between Jews and Gentiles … expressed in a certain form of table-fellowship” that created the “reaction.” Rudolph, A Jew to the Jews, 38–40, makes an interesting analogy to the modern “ultra-Orthodox” understanding that non-kosher foods are not “unclean” in themselves (cf. Rom 14:14). The status of impurity is attributed to certain foods; they are not inherently “unclean.” Karin Hedner Zetterholm, “The Question of Assumptions: Torah Observance in the First Century,” in M. D. Nanos and M. Zetterholm (eds.), Paul Within Judaism: Restoring the First-Century Context to the Apostle (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 79–103, argues that Paul was Torah observant and intent on “establishing a halakah concerning idol food for Jesus-oriented gentiles, or teaching them an existing local Corinthian Jewish halakah” (99), concluding that “nothing in his reasoning seems to indicate that he had abandoned Jewish law” (103). Zetterholm admits, however, that “our knowledge of halakah in the first century” does not necessarily “permit[s] us to determine whether or not Paul was Torah observant, and, if so, to what degree” (80). Nonetheless, Zetterholm argues by analogy, appealing to contemporary flexibilities in modern Jewish halakhic practice as a way of framing her discussion of ancient Jewish halakhic diversity. On Paul’s concern for Gentile Christ-followers, see further Tomson, Paul and the Jewish Law, 216-220; Zetterholm, “Purity and Anger,” 11–6. Thomas R. Schreiner, “Response to Mark D. Nanos,” in Four Views On The Apostle Paul (eds. S. N. Gundry and M. F. Bird; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), 194–6. As James D. G. Dunn, Review of M. D. Nanos and M. Zetterholm (eds.) Paul within Judaism, Journal of Theological Studies 66 no. 2 (2015), 782–4, 782, puts it, “‘Nothing unclean in itself’ (14:14) hardly indicates that Paul still observed the laws on unclean foods.” Cf. Heger, The Pluralistic Halakhah, 2: “religious rules were determined by tradition, and by the ad hoc decisions pronounced by various erudite men who enjoyed respect and obeisance in their respective communities.” In 1 Cor 8–10, Paul seems to advocate a “don’t ask” position on the question of food/ meat offered for sale in the Corinthian marketplace (1 Cor 10:25–28). Lieu, Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World. The phrase appears ten times in Paul’s undisputed letters (Gal 3:23, 4:4, 5, 21, 5:18; Rom 6:14–15; 1 Cor 9:20). Similar phrases include “in the Law” (ἐν νόμῳ) (Gal 3:11, 5:4; 2:19; Rom 2:12, 23; Phil 3:5), ἔννομος (1 Cor 9:21), and ἐν τῷ νόμῳ (Rom 2:20; 3:19; 7:23; 1 Cor 14:21). As a Pauline expression first introduced by Paul’s Jewish opponents in Galatia, see Joel Marcus, “‘Under the Law’: The Background of a Pauline Expression,” CBQ 63 no. (2001), 72–83. Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs, 198 n. 44: “Paul makes clear that being ‘under the Law’ is the particular plight of gentiles (Gal 3:23; 4:5, 21; 5:18; Rom 6:14, 15). The Law becomes, for gentiles, like a prison or a captor to whom they are enslaved

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The Rejection of the Law (Gal 3:23; Rom 7:6, 25).” Cf. Gaston, Paul and the Torah, 29–30; Stowers, Rereading, 278; Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People, 81–6; Räisänen, Paul and the Law, 18–23. Todd A. Wilson, “‘Under Law’ in Galatians: A Pauline Theological Abbreviation,” JTS 56 no. 2 (2005), 362–92, esp. 363–4, suggests this phrase was a shorthand reference to a phrase referring to not falling “under the curse of the Law” (ὑπὸ τὴν κατάρν τοῦ νὸμου) (Gal 3:10, 13). Terrence L. Donaldson, “The ‘Curse of the Law’ and the Inclusion of the Gentiles: Galatians 3.13–14,” NTS 32 (1986), 94–112, 94, differentiates between the possibility that this refers to “an inclusive group of Jewish and Gentile Christians” and “Jewish Christians exclusively.” Those “under the Law” should “be taken as applying to Jews exclusively” (96), especially since the term is “clearly restricted to Jews” in 1 Cor 9:20. In sum, “Christ through the cross redeemed Israel from the curse of the law so that the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles” (97). So also Hans Dieter Betz, Galatians: A Commentary on Paul’s Letters to the Churches in Galatia (Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), 148; Richard Hays, The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1–4:11 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 78; N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1991), 143, 151–2; Ben Witherington, Grace in Galatia: A Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998), 236. So Sung Eun Lim, “‘Under the Law’: The Significance of the Phrase in Paul’s Thought,” Ph.D. dissertation, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2017, arguing that the phrase represents “a universal human plight” (219). On the Gentiles’ relationship to (and falling “under”) the Law, see also Hyun-Gwang Kim, “Redeemed From the Curse: Paul’s Understanding of the Law and Gentiles in the Light of Hellenistic Judaism,” Ph.D. dissertation, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2008. Kim argues that Gentiles were “under the Law” conceptualized as natural Law. So Douglas J. Moo, “Israel and Paul in Romans 7.7–12,” NTS 32 no. 1 (1986), 123: “Although he uses the term in more than one way, it is clear that νόμος, in the vast majority of occurrences, designates the Mosaic Law. And, in this sense, νόμος is Israel’s peculiar possession.” Cf. Dunn, The New Perspective on Paul, 448. On this common rhetorical motif (“to the Jews first”), see Rom 1:16; 2:9–10. Ben Witherington, The Paul Quest: The Renewed Search for the Jew of Tarsus (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 66; Donald A. Hagner, “Paul as a Jewish Believer – According to His Letters,” in Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries (ed. Oskar Skarsaune and Reidar Hvalvik; Peabody: Hendrickson, 2007), 104; David A. Carson, “Atonement in Romans 3:21–26,” in The Glory of the Atonement: Biblical, Historical and Practical Perspectives: Essays in Honor of Roger Nicole (ed. Charles E. Hill, Frank A. James III; Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 393; James D. G. Dunn, The New Perspective on Paul (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 441; Heikki Räisänen, Paul and the Law (2d ed.; WUNT; Tübingen: Mohr, 1987), xii; Wright, The Climax of the Covenant, 211; Colin Kruse, Paul, the Law and Justification (Leicester: Apollos, 1996), 287; Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle, 128–59, 625–69. Many see 1 Cor 9:19–23 as evidence of Paul’s non-observance or inconsistent observance. See Räisänen, Paul and the Law, 75, n. 171: “1 Cor 9.20f is absolutely incompatible with the theory of an observant Paul.” On Paul as a Torah-observant Jew, see David J. Rudolph, A Jew to the Jews: Jewish Contours of Pauline Flexibility in 1 Corinthians 9:19–23 (WUNT II.304; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011). Nanos, The Mystery of Romans, argues that Paul denied abandoning the Torah because he allegedly made a Nazirite vow and sacrificed in the Temple in Acts (21:19–26). Nanos also seems to support the historicity of Acts’ apostolic decree (Acts 15:19–20). Following Nanos, Boccaccini, Paul’s Three Paths to Salvation, 151, argues that Paul was simply

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no longer “under the power of sin,” not that he was “free from the obligations of the Mosaic covenant.” On Paul’s ongoing Torah observance, see William S. Campbell, “‘I Rate All Things as Loss’: Paul’s Puzzling Accounting System: Judaism as Loss or the Re-Evaluation of All Things in Christ?,” in Celebrating Paul: Festschrift in Honour of J. A. Fitzmyer and J. Murphy-O’Connor, O.P., and Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J. (ed. Peter Spitaler; CBQSS; Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 2012), 39–61; J. Brian Tucker, Remain in Your Calling: Paul and the Continuation of Social Identities in 1 Corinthians (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011), 89–114. On Paul’s withdrawal from Torah observance, see Sechrest, A Former Jew: Paul and the Dialectics of Race; Stanley E. Porter, “Was Paul a Good Jew? Fundamental Issues in a Current Debate,” in Christian-Jewish Relations through the Centuries (ed. Stanley E. Porter and Brook W. R. Pearson; JSNT Sup; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 148–74. Boccaccini, Paul’s Three Paths to Salvation, 152: “Paul insists that ‘in Christ’ there is perfect equality, which derives from their common condition of sin … Such equality is particularly apparent in the communal meals in which the new community gathers before the angels (1 Cor 11:10) and already anticipates the reality of the world to come.” Nonetheless, “it does not appear that for Paul equality is a criterion applicable to everyday life” (153). Foster, “An Apostle Too Radical,” 9: “Paul was engaged in activities that were aimed at persuading Jews to become Christ believers … while in order to achieve this larger goal Paul was willing to adopt Jewish practices and compliance with the law, he no longer regarded himself as a Jew or as one compelled to observe Torah requirements.” Cf. Gal 5:6; 6:15. James D.G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 328–9. David Anthony Bennett Shaw, “The ‘Apocalyptic’ Paul: An Analysis and Critique with Reference to Romans 1–8,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2020; J. P. Davies, Paul Among the Apocalypses? An Evaluation of the ‘Apocalyptic Paul’ in the Context of Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Literature (LNTS 562; New York/ London: Bloomsbury/T & T Clark, 2016); David B. Bronson, “Paul and Apocalyptic Judaism,” JBL 83 no. 3 (1964), 287–92; Vincent P. Branick, “Apocalyptic Paul?,” CBQ 47 no. 4 (1985), 664–75; J. Christian Beker, Paul’s Apocalyptic Gospel: The Coming Triumph of God (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982); Marion L. Soards, “Paul: Apostle and Apocalyptic Visionary,” BTB 16 no. 4 (1986), 148–50; R. Barry Matlock, Unveiling the Apocalyptic Paul: Paul’s Interpreters and the Rhetoric of Criticism (JSNTSup 127; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996). Mason, “Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism”; idem, “Paul Without Judaism,” 9–40. Mason appeals to the Maccabean literature for the only extant pre-Christian uses of the term (2 Macc 2.21; 8.1; 14.38; 4 Macc 4.26. Matthew V. Novenson “Paul’s Former Occupation in Ioudaismos,” in Galatians and Christian Theology, eds. Mark Elliott, et al (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2014), 24–39, translates ἀναστροφήν as “occupation” and differentiates between Paul’s “activist” program in promoting a Jewish way of life and his unbroken continuity in faithfully following his “ancestral traditions.” Novenson admits that his proposal that the verb Ἰουδαϊζω, “to judaize,” or to “act like a Jew,” is something non-Jews do whereas the noun Ἰουδαϊσμός refers to “the defense and promotion of Jewish customs by Jewish people” runs “contrary to the rules of etymology, but it is the case.” Concannon, “When You Were Gentiles.” Rudolph, A Jew to the Jews, 153–9, 194–201, suggests that Paul’s reference to “the Law” is actually to Pharisaic sectarian halakhah, not the Mosaic Law itself. Markus Cromhout, “Paul’s ‘Former Conduct in the Judean Way of Life’ (Gal 1:13) … Or Not?,” HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 65 (1) (2009), Art. #127, 12 pages. DOI: 10.4102/hts.v65i1.127, 10, concluding that Paul “saw himself as primar-

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The Rejection of the Law ily belonging to a new family or ethnos, the body of the Messiah, distinct from ethnic Israel and the Gentiles.” Cf. Foster, “An Apostle Too Radical,” 10: “Paul, who spoke of his former life in Judaism, described his own new identity as being that of one had (sic) ‘believed in Christ’ (Gal 2.16).” Acts 7:58; 9:4; 9:17; 22:13; 22:7; 26:14) Acts 13:9. In his letters, however, Paul refers to himself as “Paul” (Παῦλος) (1 Thess 1). Rudolph, A Jew to the Jews, 2. Gal 2:15; 1 Cor 9:20; 2 Cor 11:22; Phil 3:5–6; Rom 9:1–5; 10:1–2; 11:1. On the question of contemporary Jewish and Christian theological and apologetic influences on the Paul Within Judaism approach, Jörg Frey, “The Relativization of Ethnicity and Circumcision in Paul and His Communities,” 2, argues that “scholars of the Paul within Judaism school are no longer solely concerned with understanding and locating the apostle within pluriform contemporary Jewishness. Rather, Jewish scholars such as Mark Nanos and Paula Fredriksen programmatically attempt to deny the relevance of Paul’s statements for contemporary and later Judaism.” Frey continues: “the political effect of this view or even the aim of the views mentioned is to delegitimize any further Christian critique of Judaism.” A paper presented at “The Paul within Judaism Symposium,” hosted by Ridley College on 21–24 September 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BimT657ZKY [accessed January 11, 2022]. Mitchell, “Paul’s Gospel and the Rhetoric of Apostolic Rejection,” 195, suggests that those who “present a Paul who understands that the Law need not concern Gentiles, in the name of universal salvation” and make “attempts not to portray ‘Judaism’ or ‘the Law’ in a negative light” may really be making “attempts to explain away Paul’s negative statements about the Law.” Rudolph, A Jew to the Jews, 12, describes Paul’s approach of being “all things to all people” a “foolhardy strategy” that would not have fooled Jews who would have seen his behavior as “unprincipled and devious, thus bringing his message into disrepute” (13). That, of course, is precisely what did happen to Paul’s reputation! Rudolph does not attempt to “prove that Paul was a Torah-observant Jew,” but rather to “demonstrate that scholars overstate their case when they use 1 Cor 9:19–23 as incontrovertible evidence that Paul was not Torah observant” (18). Rudolph, A Jew to the Jews, 42, considers this a “plausible interpretation,” namely that Paul “assumed that all of the food (‘everything’) on the table was indeed clean by Lev 11 standards” when Jews and Gentiles ate together because Gentiles, “out of sensitivity to their Jewish brothers and sisters, were generally not bringing pork or shellfish to the common meals” (43). See esp. J. Brian Tucker, “Remain in Your Calling”: Paul and the Continuation of Social Identities in 1 Corinthians (Eugene: Pickwick, 2011), 89–114. Rudolph, A Jew to the Jews, 83, seems to recognize this problem when he asks “Why does Paul emphasize ‘obeying the commandments of God’ in the middle of elucidating his ecclesiastical rule that Jesus-believing Jews and Gentiles are to remain in their respective callings? A reasonable explanation would seem to be … that Jewish and Gentile believers in Jesus have different sets of commandments to keep … Paul likely held that God’s commandments [for Gentiles].” Cf. Tomson, Paul and the Jewish Law, 271–2. See Brian S. Rosner, Paul and the Law: Keeping the Commandments of God (New Studies in Biblical Theology 31; Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013); idem, “Paul and the Law: What he Does not Say,” JSNT 32 no. 4 (2010), 405–19; Philip la Grange du Toit, “Paul’s Reference to the ‘Keeping of the Commandments of God’ in 1 Corinthians 7:19,” Neotestamentica 49 no. 1 (2015), 21–45, 43: “1 Cor 7:19b can neither be understood as requiring any kind of believer in Christ to be fully Torah observant nor be interpreted as implying that Paul would be fully Torah observant himself.”

The Rejection of the Law 153 70 So Rudolph, A Jew to the Jews, 83. Cf. Markus Bockmuehl, Jewish Law in Gentile Churches: Halakhah and the Beginning of Christian Public Ethics (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000), 170-171: “The apostle himself in 1 Corinthians 7:17–20 makes clear that his ‘rule for all the churches’ is for Jews to keep the Torah … and for Gentiles to keep what pertains to them – and only that. In either case, what matters are the applicable commandments of God.” So also Frank Thielman, Paul and the Law: A Contextual Approach (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1994), 101. 71 Himmelfarb, “The Parting of the Ways Reconsidered,” 48 (emphasis added). 72 For the former, see Tucker, “Remain in Your Calling”;“You Belong to Christ”: Paul and the Formation of Social Identity in 1 Corinthians 1–4 (Eugene: Pickwick, 2010); Rudolph, A Jew to the Jews; Campbell, Christian Identity. For the latter, see David G. Horrell, “‘Becoming Christian’: Solidifying Christian Identity and Content,” in Handbook of Early Christianity: Social Science Approaches (eds., A. J. Blasi, P-A. Turcotte, and J. Duhaime; Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2002), 309–35. 73 “Steve Mason and Philip F. Esler, “Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities: Grounds for a Distinction,” NTS 63 (2017), 493–515, 503: “ethnē were not, and ethnic groups are not, just any group of people who felt or feel close to each other … ethnē were associated with a place, and with the laws and customs that had taken formative shape there in the homeland.” Cf. David G. Horrell, “Judaean Ethnicity and ChristFollowing Voluntarism? A Reply to Steve Mason and Philip Esler,” NTS 65 (2019), 1–20, who strives to maintain the ambiguous boundaries between the categories of ethnos and voluntary association in early Christian identity formation. 74 On the question of Paul’s (not) “abandoning” Judaism, see Matthew V. Novenson, “Did Paul Abandon Either Judaism or Monotheism?,” in Bruce W. Longenecker (ed.), New Cambridge Companion to Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 239–59. 75 Bibliowicz, Jewish-Christian Relations, 61–2: “what Gentile followers of Paul did or did not do would be of no interest to mainstream first-century Jews – unless Paul acted against Torah observance among Jews, or attempted to lure Jews away from Torah observance … Paul’s words and activities suggest that he did attempt to lure Jews and God fearers away from Judaism … I am not fully convinced either that Paul’s anti-Judaic and anti-Law statements can be explained solely as rhetorical techniques or as limited to Gentile audiences. A ‘non-anti-Jewish’ Paul may fit modern sensibilities and minds, but may have little in common with the first-century charismatic and exclusivist Paul.” 76 Troels Engberg-Pedersen, “Does Ethnicity Matter,” Syndicate (June 9, 2020), https:// syndicate.network/symposia/theology/paul-the-pagans-apostle/ [accessed January 12, 2022], argues that Jews and non-Jews “in Christ” “may well maintain ethnic diversity,” citing Gal 5:6, 6:15, and 1 Cor 7:19. Consequently, this “alternative” would “allow Jews to follow their traditional ethnic practices” while raising the “key point” that just as Gentiles “in Christ” now embodied an ambiguous ethnic status visà-vis their own ethnic ancestry, so “may it not also be in some way similarly relevant to Jews?” 77 Fredriksen, Paul, the Pagan’s Apostle, 117. 78 Matthew Thiessen and Paula Fredriksen, “Paul and Israel,” in The Oxford Handbook of Pauline Studies, in Matthew V. Novenson and R. Barry Matlock (eds.) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), argue that Paul “was an ethnic essentialist,” and so bypass the crux of the problem: the ambiguous identities of non-Jewish expagans. Cf. Terence L. Donaldson, Judaism and the Gentiles: Jewish Patterns of Universalism (to 135 CE) (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008), 4: “it was not until the Hellenistic period that it was even possible to think of ethnic identity as a culture that an outsider could adopt.” 79 Horrell, “Religion, Ethnicity, and Way of Life,” 55: “a sense of being a ‘people’ is unlikely to be straightforwardly categorizable as either ethnic or religious but may

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The Rejection of the Law encompass both in complex and historically variable ways, and in ways that underline the fuzzy overlaps between both categories.” Donaldson, Gentile Christian Identity from Cornelius to Constantine, 318: “we can take it as probable that non-Jews would have found the term [ethnē] off-putting and would have been reluctant to accept it as an ascribed identity.” On the other hand, non-Jews willing to accept membership in a Jewish group “would have been predisposed to accept this new identity” (319). Mason, “Paul Without Judaism,” 40, refers to “a fairly unified picture, though still beginning and partial, of one Judaean who consciously abandoned his ancestral custom.” Paul’s encounter with Christ “displaced the ethnos-polis-nomos foundations of ancient identity.” N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, Vol. 4 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 1:359: “Paul did not himself continue to keep the kosher laws, and did not propose to, or require of, other ‘Jewish Christians’ that they should, either.” Rom 7:1–5; Gal 4:2–29; 1 Cor 9:20–22; Acts 21:21. Cf. Mark Nanos, Reading Paul within Judaism (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017), xiii: Paul was “a Torah-observant Jew … a Jew within Judaism, practicing and promoting a Torah-defined Jewish way of life for followers of Christ.” On the identification of Paul as an “observant Jew” as the “starting point of our conversation,” see Boccaccini, Paul’s Three Paths to Salvation, 20. Gal 2. See Larry W. Hurtado, “Jesus’ Death as Paradigmatic in the New Testament,” SJT 57.4 (2004): 413–33, here 428: “Paul’s own existential move to a faith stance in which he entrusted himself wholly to the redemptive efficacy of Jesus’s crucifixion and surrendered his previous promotion of full Torah observance as requisite for being found righteous by God.” 2 Cor 11:24–7; 1 Cor 9:20–22. See also Meeks, The First Urban Christians, 26; Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, 190–2. Wright, Paul, 1434, argues that Jewish believers should not “continue to be completely Torah-observant.” Contra Tomson, Paul and the Jewish Law, 270–4; “Paul’s Jewish Background in View of His Law Teaching in 1 Cor 7,” in Paul and the Mosaic Law (ed. J. D. G. Dunn; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1996), 251–70, here 267–9; Rudolph, A Jew to the Jews, 205, 210; Bockmuehl, Jewish Law in Gentile Churches, 170. Wright, Paul, 862. See Tabor, Paul and Jesus, 185–202, 190. Joshua Garroway, “Paul: Within Judaism, Without Law,” in David Lincicum, Ruth Sheridan, and Charles M. Stang (eds.), Law and Lawlessness in Early Judaism and Christianity (WUNT 420; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019), 49–66, 64, noting how 1 Cor 9:20–21 “clarifies parenthetically what he considers himself authentically to be … he is not under the Law … he distinguishes between the Mosaic Law and Christ’s Law (or God’s Law). He is not subject to the Mosaic Law; he is subject to God’s Law, which is Christ’s Law, which is the Law of Faith, which is the love commandment expressed in the Mosaic Law, and through which the Mosaic Law is fulfilled.” On a ceremonial Law-free Paul, see Garroway, “Paul: Within Judaism, Without Law,” 56: “Abundant evidence nevertheless indicates that Paul’s statements about the obsolescence of the Law are universally applicable … the Law has become obsolete for Jews as well as Gentiles.” Joshua D. Garroway, Paul’s Gentile-Jews: Neither Jew nor Gentile, but Both (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), argues that Paul’s converts were “Gentile-Jews.” Garroway differentiates “Gentile Jews” from Jewish Christ-followers and Gentile converts who accepted circumcision, observed the Torah, and became “Jews.” Paul’s converts were honorary Jews. Watson, Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles, 51–4.

The Rejection of the Law 155 94 Townsend, “‘Another Race? Ethnicity, Universalism, and the Emergence of Christianity,” 37: “Rather than imagining his communities as either fully assimilated into the Jewish people, or as a separate people altogether, Paul seems to have viewed them as a distinct branch of the larger family of Israel.” Cf. Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs, 117: “Paul has not come up with a simple solution in which, for example, gentiles-in-Christ (now descendants of Abraham) become Ioudaioi, or those in Christ (both Jews and gentiles) become a new group called Christians. Instead he seems to imagine that Christ-following gentiles are affiliated with Israel – sharing some characteristics but retaining a necessary separateness.” 95 Boccaccini, Paul’s Three Paths to Salvation, 161–2, states that “Paul was not supersessionist; he never intended justification by faith as a substitute for judgment according to each one’s deeds or a replacement of the Mosaic torah. He expected all those justified and now living in Christ to be saved because their past sins had been forgiven and their life was now full of good deeds.” To say that “all humans must believe in Christ in order to be saved is a misrepresentation of Paul’s preaching, since the last judgment for all will be according to each one’s deeds.” 96 Matthew V. Novenson, “What Eschatological Pilgrimage of the Gentiles?,” in František Ábel (ed.), Israel and the Nations: Paul’s Gospel in the Context of Jewish Expectation (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2021), 61–73, questions this common motif in Pauline Studies by pointing out that Paul does not explicitly cite Isaiah 2:2–4; 25:6; 56:6–7; 66:1820; or Zech 8:22–23; 14:16. See also Michael E. Fuller, The Restoration of Israel: Israel’s Regathering and the Fate of the Nations in Early Jewish Literature and Luke-Acts (BZNW 138; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006). 97 Cf. Staples, The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism; idem, “Reconstructing Israel: Restoration Eschatology in Early Judaism and Paul’s Gentile Mission,” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2016, 483–602. 98 Paul Foster, “Paul – Apostle to the Pagans,” The Expository Times 132 no. 3 (2020), 128–32, 131, describes how “Paul now evaluates his life by those criteria … Instead of valuing those attainments as being of consequence for his status with God, he now counts them as loss.” 99 Michele Murray, Playing a Jewish Game: Gentile Christian Judaizers in the First and Second Centuries CE (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004), argues that the evidence for Judaizing represents the efforts of Gentile, not Jewish, Christbelievers. 100 J. Brian Tucker, Reading Romans After Supersessionism: The Continuation of Jewish Covenantal Identity (Eugene: Cascade, 2018). 101 Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness, 109–39, referring to “ethno-religion.”

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The Rejection of Israel

Paul’s letter to the Romans is the apostle to the Gentiles’ most theologically articulated statement on the “rejection” of Israel.1 At the time of its composition, Paul’s mission to the Gentiles (ca. 50 CE) was in full swing. He had been “calling” Gentiles to the God of Israel for 17 years while simultaneously trying to maintain a workable relationship with the Jerusalem ekklēsia. He claimed to have been authorized – that is, given the “right hand of fellowship” – by James, Peter, and the Jerusalem “saints.” He had agreed to go to the “uncircumcised” and “remember the poor.” But something happened in Antioch that compromised his standing in Jerusalem. Scholars continue to debate the nature of this disagreement and whether or not it signified Paul’s presumption that Jews should relax their Torah observance, specifically their observance of the dietary laws, when in fellowship with Gentile followers of Christ. In either case, Paul does not seem to have left Antioch in good standing with Peter (or Barnabas) nor do we have any indication in his subsequent letters that the relationship was ever mended prior to his subsequent return trip to Jerusalem. If this historical reconstruction is accurate, then Paul’s reputation may have been under severe suspicion and criticism at the time of his correspondence to the ekklēsia in Rome. The Roman ekklēsia was predominantly Gentile in constituency immediately after Claudius’s expulsion of the Jews (ca. 49–55 CE).2 Accordingly, it may have been an opportune time for Paul to appeal to this new shift in power dynamics in the capital and thereby bypass the problematic status he’d reached among the Jerusalem leadership. Soliciting the Roman ekklēsia – an ekklēsia he did not himself establish or create – directly for their spiritual and financial support of his ministry, Paul sets out to explain his understanding of “the Gospel.”3 It is in his letter to the Romans that Paul is at his most conciliatory, avoiding the overtly hostile rhetoric on display in his letters to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Corinthians, and Philippians, addressing an ekklēsia he has not founded, regarding matters of Jewish ethnicity, identity, and culture, rendering Romans a repository of relatively distinctive formulations of theology. At this point in his career, Paul faces several difficult problems, the first and foremost being how to explain the fact that the majority of contemporary Jews have failed to recognize – that is, have rejected – Jesus as messiah? If Jesus was the messiah, then why didn’t God make Jesus’s messianic authority more DOI: 10.4324/b22959-11

The Rejection of Israel 157 obvious, compelling, conclusive, and undeniable to ethnic Israel? Paul invokes here the (biblical) concept of the “remnant” (9:27).4 It is only a select number of the present body of Israel who are being “saved.” At the same time, the spiritual “children” of Abraham are being chosen by God to represent a part of “true” Israel (9:31). The rejection of Jesus by (ethnic) “Israel” is thus a precondition or prerequisite for the salvation of Gentiles, which in turn will lead to the salvation of “all Israel.” Israel may have “zeal for God” (9:2), but they lack “knowledge,” specifically the knowledge that Christ is the “end [telos],” that is, the fulfillment or completion of the Law (9:4). Paul concludes that it was the divine will that Israel be made “jealous” (9:19) while Gentiles entered the covenant and attained their “salvation.” It is, in short, Israel’s rejection of Jesus the messiah that allowed for Gentiles to be “saved.” The ethical and spiritual failure of the Jews (as ethnic Israel) facilitated the salvation of Gentiles (as spiritual Israel). Does that mean that God has “rejected” (ἀπώσατο) his people (11:1)? No! Paul held that a select portion or “remnant” (λεῖμμα) of ethnic Israel – including, of course, himself – had already been “saved.” The rest, however, have temporarily been “hardened” and remain in a state of stumbling and darkness.5 Yet their “trespass” has also resulted in the “salvation” (σωτηρία) of the Gentiles (11:11): their “rejection (ἀποβολὴ) is the reconciliation (καταλλαγὴ) of the world” (11:15). It was thus God’s will for Israel to become “jealous” of the Gentiles, which would cause them to turn back and recognize Christ, an “acceptance” (πρόσλημψις) likened to “life (ζωὴ) from the dead (νεκρῶν)” (11:15). Israel may have temporarily rejected Jesus-as-Christ, but God has not rejected Israel.6 The fate of Israel is to be “saved.”7 In the end, “all Israel will be saved” (πᾶς Ἰσραὴλ σωθήσεται) (11:26). That is the “mystery” (μυστήριον) of God. At present, the Gentiles are being grafted into the “wild olive tree” (11:17). Yet there is still hope for (ethnic) Israel to be “grafted” back into the tree (11:23). It was necessary, however, for (ethnic) Israel to (temporarily) “reject” Jesus the messiah in order for the “fullness” (πλήρωμα) of the Gentiles to be saved (11:25).8 Paul, in other words, does not accept his fellow Jews’ reluctance to embrace Jesus as messiah as a valid option; on the contrary, Paul’s presupposition is that (ethnic) “Israel” should have “accepted” Jesus as messiah, but failed to do so. Nonetheless, even ethnic Israel’s failure to recognize Jesus as messiah is part of God’s plan. Paul thus introduces an intractable problem for his people: they are affirmed in their divine heritage, but condemned for failing to recognize Christ. They are children of the “patriarchs,” but ignorant of the truth. Theirs is “the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, and the promise” (9:4), but they have “stumbled.” This is the Catch-22 of “the Jew.” * According to Paul, the Jewish “rejection” of Jesus is not attributed to God’s failure to properly identify Jesus’s messianic credentials. Ethnic Israel’s failure to recognize her messiah is, rather, a character defect that has the “mysterious” effect of facilitating the “salvation” of Gentiles. Israel is both to be praised (for its preservation

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of the “promise”) and blamed for its moral failure, even though this moral failure is woven into God’s plan. In the end, God will redeem (a “jealous”) ethnic Israel, but only on the condition that Israel recognizes Jesus as messiah.9 It is difficult to recognize a “two covenant theology” in this eschatological narrative.10 After all, it is not until Jews recognize Jesus as messiah (according to God’s plan) that Jews will be “saved.” This may have been Paul’s spontaneous ad hoc interpretive innovation intended to solve the immediate problem of explaining why most Jews were not turning to Jesus as messiah (as well as addressing his own personal failure to persuade Judean and Diasporan Jews), but one also notes a certain ironic audacity in Paul describing ethnic “Israel” as “jealous,” unenlightened, hardened, and unredeemed without Christ to a mixed ekklēsia of Jews and Gentile Christ-followers. Here Paul introduces one of the earliest exegetical themes in “Christian” tradition: the idea that Jesus’s (Jewish) disciples are uncomprehending (4:13; 6:52; 7:18; 8:14–21), misunderstanding (6:37; 8:31-33; 9:38–41), “hard-hearted” (8:17), blind, and deaf (8:18). That is, it was Paul’s ideological “Jews” – functioning as a foil for Gentile salvation and God’s “mysterious” plan – that came to represent a conceptual template for subsequent mythologizing about “the Jewish rejection of Jesus.” Paul’s final solution to the Jewish problem would leave a heavy footprint in “Christian” history and theology, condemning Jews to an interminable fate of darkness, jealousy, blindness, ignorance, and hostile contempt in perpetuity. If this back-handed compliment was Paul’s attempt to gain favor among and support from the mixed ethnicity of the Roman ekklēsia for his ongoing ministry to the Gentiles, we can only wonder how it was received by Jews/Judeans increasingly familiar with Paul’s strained and ambiguous relationship to the Law, his apparent privileging of Gentile access to “salvation” at the expense of the Jews/ Israel, his insinuation that Israel was blind and ignorant, his open insubordination to the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem, and his dismissive attitude toward those who only knew Jesus “according to the flesh.” One might very much want Paul to be an inclusive, egalitarian Jew, providing us with a two-path solution to the question of salvation, but Paul’s generous invitation to the nations (Gentiles) seems to have been an inspired insight (revelation) that he did not fully work out in dialogue with Jesus’s family, disciples, or first Jewish followers. And while we might want Paul to have reconciled with James and the Judean ekklēsia on his last visit to Jerusalem, it is not readily apparent that he, in fact, was able to do so. Moreover, Paul’s hope for the eschatological redemption of ethnic Israel stands in stark contrast with how his interpreters began to understand their once shared story of salvation now seen as God’s rejection of the Jew(s).11

Notes 1 On Romans, see Nanos, The Mystery of Romans; “The Letter of Paul to the Romans,” 253–86; Stowers, A Rereading of Romans; Michael J. Cook, “Paul’s Argument in Romans 9–11,” Review & Expositor 103 no. 1 (2006), 91–111. 2 On reading Romans as a letter addressed predominantly to Judeans, see Mason, “Paul Without Judaism,” 22–3. Mason notes how Paul equivocates, “uncharacteristically fall-

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ing over himself to be polite with a group he did not establish” by offering an apparently conciliatory tone. Dennis C. Duling, “Ethnicity and Paul’s Letter to the Romans,” in Dietmar Neufeld and Richard DeMaris (eds.), Understanding the Social World of the New Testament (New York: Routledge, 2010), 68–89. Joshua Garroway, “The Ins and Outs of Paul’s Israelite Remnant,” in František Ábel (ed.), Israel and the Nations: Paul’s Gospel in the Context of Jewish Expectation (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2021), 187–98; Mark A. Elliott, The Survivors of Israel: A Reconsideration of the Theology of Pre-Christian Judaism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000). Mark D. Nanos, “‘Callused,’ Not ‘Hardened’: Paul’s Revelation of Temporary Protection Until All Israel can be Healed,” in Kathy Ehrensperger and J. Brian Tucker (eds.), Reading Paul in Context: Essays in Honour of William S. Campbell (LNTS 428. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2010), 52–73, argues that πώρωσις (Rom 11:25) can be translated as “callus(ed),” rather than “hardened,” with its negative connotation ala the Pharoah’s “hardened” heart (cf. Exod 9:12, 16). Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), contrasts Paul’s reading of the “mystery” of Israel’s rejection – in which Israel’s rejection of Jesus-as-Christ is strategic and temporary – with Augustine’s reading of Romans, in which God’s rejection of Israel is punitive and permanent. George W. Worgul, Jr., “Romans 9–11 and Ecclesiology,” BTB 7 no. 3 (1977), 99–109, 99. Worgul, “Romans 9–11 and Ecclesiology,” 104: “He continually plays on the theme of rejection, showing that in a mysterious fashion God uses the rejection to produce good.” Garroway, “The Ins and Outs of Paul’s Israelite Remnant,” 193: “Paul holds out hope that some Jews—not all Jews, but some Jews, as Paul says in Rom 11:14—might realize where they belong before it is too late and reattach themselves to Israel.” As Garroway points out, Rom 9:6b represents an “insurmountable challenge” to the view that “all Israel” does not refer to a select remnant of Jews: “Not all those descended from Israel are Israel” (194). See Heikki Räisänen, “Romans 9–11 and the ‘History of Early Christian Religion,” in Tord Fornberg and David Hellholm (eds.), Texts and Contexts: Biblical Texts in Their Textual and Situational Contexts (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1997), 751–2. E. Haenchen, “Judentum und Christentum in der Apostelgeschichte,” ZNW 54 (1963), 155–87, 185; J. Jervell, Luke and the People of God (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1972), 64: “the unbelieving portion of the people is rejected for all times.” Cf. W. Eltester, “Israel im lukanischen Werk und die Nazarethperikope,” in E. Grässer, et al (eds.), Jesus of Nazareth (Berlin, 1972), 76–147, 129; H. Räisänen, “The Redemption of Israel,” in P. Luomanen (ed.), Luke-Acts: Scandinavian Perspectives (Helsinki and Göttingen, 1991), 94–114, 106: “Jews who do not accept Jesus will be excluded from God’s people and damned.”

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In Paul’s letter to the Galatians, the Apostle to the Gentiles recalls that he made an agreement with James and Peter in Jerusalem to “remember the poor” (πτωχοί) (Gal. 2:10). First described as a λογεία, a “collection” of monetary funds in 1 Cor 16:1–14,1 and subsequently identified as a kind of gift (in 2 Cor), a διακονία (2 Cor 9), and/or a κοινωνία (2 Cor 8:4; 9:13; Rom 15:26), a “contribution” to the “saints” based on a common ideal of fellowship,2 this gathering of funds seems to have been a long-term effort on Paul’s part. The funds were gathered from Galatia (1 Cor 16:1), Corinth, Macedonia, and Achaia (2 Cor 9:1–15) and could be conceived as an “offering” to the Jerusalem ekklēsia (2 Cor 8:13–15, 9:11–12), an “offering” associated with Gentile acceptance of the Gospel (2 Cor 9:13–14), and/ or as an “offering” as economic “aid for the saints” (Rom 15:25–32).3 This collection could be understood as the fulfillment of prophecy,4 a charitable contribution to the economically deprived,5 and/or as an expression of spiritual “indebtedness” from Gentile to Jewish Christ-followers.6 In short, the collection symbolized the success and/or failure of Paul’s mission (Rom 15:14–33). It is apparent, however, that Paul was not sure if his collection would be accepted or rejected in Jerusalem (Rom 15:30–31). If it is perhaps going too far to call the collection “a polite bribe,”7 it is reasonable to think that there were relational strings attached to its social function insofar as the customs of reciprocity, honor-and-shame, and mutual obligation in gift-giving would have required some form of exchange from the Jerusalem leadership. Paul thus seems to have arrived in Jerusalem ca. 58 CE with the collection, accompanied by Gentile followers of Jesus, but anxious about his reception (Rom 15:31). The only historical source describing this final visit to Jerusalem is the book of Acts. The historicity of Acts, however, remains a vexing problem in New Testament studies.8 Since F. C. Baur and the Tübingen School’s seminal work on the topic,9 the book of Acts has often been regarded as an unreliable historical source.10 In 1838, Baur wrote that the book of Acts is “the apologetic attempt of a Paulinist to initiate and bring about the mutual rapprochement and union of two opposing parties” (“der apologetische Versuch eines Pauliners, die gegenseitige Annäherung und Vereinigung der beiden einander gegenüberstehenden Parteien dadurch einzuleiten und herbeizuführen”), namely, by making Paul sound like Peter and Peter sound like Paul. The impulse motivating this portrait was the DOI: 10.4324/b22959-12

The Rejection of the Collection 161 author’s desire to help Gentile Christians forget their hostility toward Judaism, to help Jewish Christians forget their hostility toward Gentiles, and for both to transfer “their common hatred toward the unbelieving Jews” (“dem gemeinsamen Hass beider gegen die ungläubigen Juden”).11 Similarly, in 1847, Albert Schwegler argued that the book of Acts is “a tendentious writing of such free composition and so little historical reliability” (“eine Tendenzschrift von so freier Composition und von so geringer geschichtlicher Verläßlichkeit”) that it must be left aside.12 In Acts, we have “neither the historical Paul nor the original historical apostles” (“weder den historischen Paulus, noch die historischen Urapostel”).13 In 1854, Eduard Zeller also published a study on Acts and found it unreliable as an historical source,14 arguing that it is “an attempt to achieve the recognition of Gentile Christianity in its independence and freedom from the Law by means of concessions to the Judaic party” (“sein Versuch, die Anerkennung des Heidenchristenthums in seiner Selbständigkeit und seiner Freiheit vom Gesetz durch Zugeständnisse an die judaistische Parthei zu erreichen”).15 Conservative critical reactions to the Tübingen School were predominantly rejectionist.16 Baur’s dependence on the Pseudo-Clementine literature, in particular, exposed his approach’s fundamental weakness. Baur’s identification of Judaism as a particularistic ethnic religion in contradistinction to Christianity’s alleged universalism also continues to represent a problematic legacy. Nonetheless, this School’s central insight – detecting a pro-Pauline apologetic tendency in the book of Acts that sought to de-escalate socio-ethnic conflicts within the early Jesus movement – has been sustained in the face of relentless criticism, rendering Luke-Acts a “storm center” in New Testament research.17 Scholarly interests soon shifted from the intractable problem of Acts’ historicity toward its source-critical, redactional, literary-rhetorical, and historiographical profile. Nonetheless, one of the virtually assured results of this critical tradition is that the author of Acts sought to portray a picture of apostolic unity by harmonizing social conflicts within the early ekklēsia, a portrait which shifted the tensions between Jewish and Gentile Christ-followers toward an opposition between non-believing Jews and emergent “Christians.” Since the decline of the Tübingen School, the book of Acts has variously been conceived as either a generally reliable historical source,18 a source reliable in its depiction of Roman politics, law, and administration,19 or, perhaps most reasonably, as an intermittently historically reliable source on a case-by-case basis.20 As a history written according to the literary-rhetorical conventions of ancient historiography,21 the work does display a significant degree of historical verisimilitude. The author knows a number of genuine details about Paul, including his persecution of the Jesus movement, his Pharisaic background, his visit to Syria, his affiliation with Barnabas, his persecution in Antioch, and his resistance to Gentile circumcision.22 On the other hand, there are significant discontinuities between the Paul of the Epistles and the Paul of Acts.23 The most well-known example of discontinuity between the two sources is the contradiction between what Paul says about his visit(s) to Jerusalem in Galatians 1–2 and what Acts says in chapters 9, 11, and 15. Apart from the different chronologies – Paul in Gal 1:15–24 says he

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did not visit Jerusalem until three years after his experience of the risen Christ whereas Paul frequently visits Jerusalem in Acts 9:28-29 (cf. 11:30; 12:25) – the nature and outcome of the Jerusalem Council (Gal 2:1–10; Acts 15:1–35) is a more problematic question. In Galatians, Paul claims that he received a “revelation” to go to Jerusalem to discuss the issue of Gentile circumcision. He claims that he met James, Peter, and John in a private meeting and that they gave him the “right hand of fellowship,” adding “nothing” to his ministry other than to “remember the poor.” Paul also reports that he openly criticized Peter as a hypocrite after witnessing his withdrawal from shared table fellowship in Antioch. According to Acts 15, however, Paul was “appointed” to go to Jerusalem, where he attended a public meeting with the entire ekklēsia in Jerusalem, received Peter’s support for the Gentile mission, and was instructed by James to require Gentiles to follow the Noachide laws. Significantly, Paul tells us that he agreed (only) to go to the “uncircumcised” while Peter and James’ “mission field” remained focused on the “circumcised.”24 What this means (and/or meant to Paul) is unclear as it would seem to suggest that Paul accepted two “missions,” an ongoing mission to Jews as well as a legitimate extension of that mission now to Gentiles. Paul remembers his visit to Jerusalem as a victory: he did not need to circumcise Titus (Gal 2:3). Luke, however, portrays Paul as facilitating the circumcision of “Timothy” (Acts 16:3). Luke, in other words, depicts Paul as faithful and obedient to the Law. It may be that Paul remembered events differently. It may be that “Timothy” and “Titus” represent two different Gentile individuals. It may be that Peter and Paul ultimately worked out their differences and reconciled. It may be that James issued a “decree” and Paul forgot to mention it. It may be that Acts elaborates what Paul omits. It may even be that Paul was indeed an observant Jew who made disparaging remarks about the Law. The purpose of Acts, however, is to provide an “orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us” (Luke 1:1). Its goal was to promote a unifying, harmonious picture of the growth of the ekklēsia from Jerusalem to Rome and from Jews to Gentiles.25 That is why the Paul of Acts first goes to the Jews only to be rejected and turn to the Gentiles whereas the Paul of the Epistles is primarily the “Apostle to the Gentiles.” That is why the Paul of Acts is a faithful and observant Jew whereas the Paul of the Epistles proclaims Christ as the “end of the Law.” That is why the book of “Acts tends to pass over fundamental controversies in silence.”26 In sum, Acts’ late, tendentious representations cannot be used uncritically to reconstruct Paul’s visit to Jerusalem, his view of the Torah, or the nature of his participation in the sacrificial cult. We may not be justified in “ignoring” the book of Acts,27 but Acts’ representation of Paul is not identical to or equivalent to Paul’s own self-representation vis-à-vis the Law.28 Given Luke’s interests in harmonizing the Jewish/Gentile ekklēsia, Acts portrays Paul as a faithful Jew who kept the Law and participated in the Temple cult.29 Paul’s letters, however, suggest otherwise.30 While Paul never refers to performing sacrifices in the Temple,31 Gentile followers of Jesus were already diverging from Judean practices. The author of Acts 21 may suggest that Paul would have participated in cultic ritual,

The Rejection of the Collection 163 but Paul never says that he is going to Jerusalem to offer animal sacrifices; on the contrary, his mission is to bring a monetary “offering” (προσφορὰ) on behalf of Gentiles.32 It is possible to infer that Luke does portray Paul as using part of the “collection” to sponsor a Nazirite-style vow (Num 6:1), especially since James does ask Paul to pay for Temple services, but Luke never actually refers to Paul coming to Jerusalem to offer a “collection.” Nazirite vows do appear to have been practiced in first-century Judaism.33 A nazir (‫)נזיר‬, according to Num 6:1–21, is “set aside” or “consecrated” to/for God. Numbers 6: 3–6 describes the process of voluntary renunciation, which includes not cutting one’s hair. After the period of the vow is completed, the Nazirite makes an “offering” (‫ )קרבן‬of a one-year-old male lamb as a “burnt offering” (‫)עולה‬, a one-year-old “ewe lamb” as a “sin offering” (‫)חטאת‬, and a ram as a “peace offering” (‫)שלמים‬, as well as “grain offerings” (‫ )מנחתם‬and “drink offerings” (‫)נסכיהם‬. The Nazirite then shaves his head (6:18). It is only after the time of consecration has been completed that a Nazirite makes their “offerings,” and it is only after the sacrifices have been made that Nazirites shave their heads. According to Acts 21:23–26, James tells Paul that “We have four men who are under a vow” (εὐχὴν) and instructs him to “go through the rite of purification with them, and pay (δαπάνησον) for the shaving of their heads.” Paul proceeds to “purify” himself and complete “the days of purification” when “the sacrifice (προσφορά) would be made for each of them.” Luke’s knowledge of the Nazirite vow seems confused,34 since the Lukan Paul does not actually complete the process of the Nazirite vow nor make any sacrificial offerings of his own. In any case, the entire process is interrupted by a Jewish mob, rendering the question of Paul’s sacrificial practices moot. The Lukan Paul is willing to participate in sacrificial ritual – a position reminiscent of Paul’s own statement that “to those under the Law I became as one under the Law” (1 Cor 9:20) – but is prevented from doing so by “Jews from Asia.” Luke never mentions the collection. Further uncertainty in establishing the events of Paul’s last visit to Jerusalem involves our inability to determine when or where Paul wrote his letter(s) to the Philippians.35 Paul was imprisoned a number of times (in Ephesus, Caesarea, and Rome), so the mere fact of his imprisonment does not allow us to date or place the letter. If Paul wrote Philippians early on in his ministry (that is, before Romans), then its omission of any reference to the collection is indeed curious, especially if he was still soliciting funds, although collecting money is probably not something he could manage very well while in prison. On the other hand, if Paul wrote Philippians in Roman custody (Phil 1:13–14) – that is, if Philippians was written after Romans – then the absence of any reference to the collection is equally curious. It could mean, for example, that the collection was accepted in Jerusalem, but it could also mean that the collection was rejected and that Paul chose not to mention that embarrassing datum in his letter. It would indeed be odd if Paul chose not to discuss his experience in Jerusalem, either to proudly announce the acceptance of his mission or to criticize those who opposed it. On that note, Philippians does contain some of Paul’s most hostile and polemical language against his Jewish colleagues in Christ: “Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of

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those who mutilate the flesh! For it is we who are the circumcision” (Phil 3:2–3). His defensive appeal to his own ethnic Jewish credentials (3:5–6) could thus be read as an attempt to restore his reputation after the rejection of his collection and mission in Jerusalem. Despite our inability to decisively or definitively determine the date of Philippians, the general consensus in Pauline Studies is to date it prior to the composition of Romans. In any case, the question of the collection’s acceptance or rejection in Jerusalem remains unclear. If it was accepted, it would have solidified a unified movement of mutual understanding and fellowship between Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus, confirmed the legitimacy of Paul’s mission and reputation in Judean circles, and demonstrated fundamental agreement between all parties.36 It is possible, moreover, that the collection’s acceptance was relatively inconsequential and quickly absorbed by the Jerusalem ekklēsia (ca. 60 CE) only to be historically and narratively overshadowed by more pressing events. On the other hand, it is difficult to see how the collection’s acceptance by the Judean/Jerusalem leadership would not have been an exercise in bad faith if they did not accept its intended purpose: to establish positive reciprocity between the Jewish and Gentile (Pauline) wings of the movement. The intended recipients of the collection were key representatives of the Jerusalem ekklēsia. Since we know that Paul had a strained relationship with Jewish Christ-followers (particularly the men from James and Peter), the failure of the collection to reconcile Jews and Gentiles – whether or not it was in fact technically “accepted” (or how it was spent) – would have been registered as a failure in its intended effect: the symbolic, spiritual, and material unification of Jew and Gentile in Christ. If the collection had been accepted, we would also expect that fact to have been triumphantly proclaimed as a crowning achievement by Luke. On the other hand, if it was rejected, then it would have been an embarrassing failure for the Pauline mission, a turning point in the breakdown of Jewish/Gentile relations, and an insurmountable offense better forgotten lest it further corrode Gentile claims of equality “in Christ.” The rejection of the collection would also have facilitated an independent Christian identity in contradistinction to “the Jew(s).” There are a number of arguments indicating that the collection was not accepted. First, the book of Acts is the only source describing Paul’s last visit to Jerusalem, a journey he declares to be important for the sole purpose of bringing the “collection” to the “saints.” Second, Paul openly declared that he was “not under the Law,” a position sure to antagonize fellow Jewish followers of Jesus. Third, Paul displays notable hostility toward the “so-called pillars” of the community in his undisputed epistles, again signaling a position that would have been difficult for the Jewish leadership to accept. Fourth, Luke fails to mention the “collection,” Paul’s sole reason for visiting Jerusalem in the first place. Fifth, the Lukan Paul agrees to pay for the completion of a Nazirite vow, thus rehabilitating Paul’s antinomian reputation, but never completes the process, rendering Paul free from ever actually participating in the sacrificial system. The possibility that the collection was in fact accepted by the Jerusalem ekklēsia cannot be categorically denied. After all, one might suggest that Paul

The Rejection of the Collection 165 was simply “delivering” funds collected from various communities, although visiting Jerusalem was hardly a simple detour en route to either Rome or Spain. Alternatively, one might suggest that Luke’s silence indicates the collection’s acceptance, although one wonders why Luke would fail to take rhetorical advantage of such an important datum in his narrative. Luke’s silence is more plausibly read, then, as an attempt to avoid any direct reference to the existence of a collection, let alone its rejection. It is one thing, therefore, to want the Jerusalem ekklēsia to have accepted the collection and, by extension, Paul’s Gentile mission; it is quite another to establish that they did so. The historical rejection of the collection is the hypothesis with greater explanatory power. If this argument is accepted, the rejection of the collection could well have led to a social crisis in the movement that became a suppressed “memory” in the textual culture of emergent Christian historiography, an intentional forgetting. If the Jerusalem leadership had accepted the collection, we would expect Luke to tell us about it. But he doesn’t. The rejection of the collection would have been perceived as the social rejection of Paul’s approach to the Gentile mission, leaving (Pauline) Gentile Christ-followers resentful toward those they perceived to be the offending party. Luke never refers to Paul’s concerted efforts in raising a “collection.” The argument from silence is telling. It could be argued, of course, that Luke is “silent” about many things, including portraying Paul as a prolific letter-writer. The question, however, is whether an argument can be sustained in terms of whether Luke knew about the collection and what happened to it, but had reasons not to disclose his knowledge. Luke’s knowledge of the collection is also different in kind from Luke’s knowledge of Paul’s literary habits. Luke had good reason to report the acceptance of the collection if it had happened, but he doesn’t even mention it, despite the fact that Paul’s letters clearly point to this sacrificial “offering” being the primary reason for his last visit to Jerusalem. The fact that Luke seems to omit this historical datum points to the conclusion that the leaders of the Jerusalem ekklēsia did not accept the collection.37 The reception of Paul in sociologically unstable ekklēsiai challenged Gentile Christ-followers to assert their own independence from the Jerusalem ekklēsia, and thus represents a major turning point in the construction of Christian identity. Paul’s reputation needed to be rehabilitated. The author of Acts portrays Paul as a faithful, observant Jew participating in Temple sacrifices in Jerusalem (Acts 21:20–26). The author is intent on denying the reports of Paul’s reputation of teaching “all the Jews living among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, and … not to circumcise their children, or observe the customs” (Acts 21:21). The reception of Paul’s letters further anchored and amplified his authority within Gentile (Christfollowing) social networks. The New Testament writings privileged the Pauline tradition, commemorating the “founder” of a trans-Jewish faith that broke away from the bonds of Jewish tradition and liberated the gospel, erasing any objections to this social memory by edited texts, pseudepigraphy, and commentary. The incorporation of non-Jews (who did not observe the Torah) into an eschatologically oriented Jewish movement had rapid consequences: the Jewish Law became a problematic identity-marker of difference and disunity. This was, at

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least at first, more a sociological reality than a theological conviction adjusting to new social conditions, but Paul’s mission to Gentiles needed to be authorized. As the power dynamics of social authority shifted from Jewish to Gentile dominance, Paul’s letters came to be useful as a scriptural resource. It was this legacy – not Paul’s idealized intentions or visions of a unified ekklēsia – that left its mark on Christian history. Jews and Jewish-Christians would remember Paul – not for his good intentions, nor for his creative exegesis and enthusiastic ministry – but rather for his social disruption of tradition, his rejection of the Law, and for legitimizing hostility toward the faith of his birth. The Pauline legacy – where we first encounter the identification of Jesus as the Isaianic Servant, the rejection of the Law, hostility toward Jews/Judaism, and the problematic outcome of the Jerusalem “collection” – undoubtedly informed the development of the early Jesus tradition in the post-Pauline period.

Notes 1 On this term, see A. Deissmann, Bible Studies (Winona Lake: Alpha, 1979), 142–3, 219–20); J. H. Moulton and G. Milligan, Vocabulary of the Greek Testament (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1930), 377; BDAG, s.v. λογεία. 2 Julien M. Ogereau, “The Jerusalem Collection as Koinonia: Paul’s Global Politics of Socio-Economic Equality and Solidarity,” NTS 58 no. 3 (2012), 360–78, 372. 3 On the collection, see Alex-Dietrich Koch, “The Collection for Jerusalem: AJoint Action of Paul and Pauline Communities in Greece and Asia 53–6 AD,” ETL 96 no. 4 (2020), 603–22; John S. Kloppenborg, “Fiscal Aspects of Paul’s Collection for Jerusalem,” EC 8 no. 2 (2017), 153–98; Larry W. Hurtado, “The Jerusalem Collection and the Book of Galatians,” JSNT 2 no. 5 (1979), 46–62; Hinton Floyd Folsom, “Paul’s Collection for the Jerusalem Christians,” Th.D. dissertation, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1948; Johannes Munck, Paulus und die Heilsgeschichte (Cophenhagen: Munksgaard, 1954); ET: Paul and the Salvation of Mankind (trans. Frank Clarke; Richmond: John Knox Press, 1959), 282–308; Keith F. Nickle, The Collection: A Study in Paul’s Strategy (SBT 48; London: SCM, 1966); Dieter Georgi, Die Geschichte der Kollekte des Paulus für Jerusalem (Theologische Forschungen 38; Hamburg: Herbert Reich, 1965); Klaus Berger, “Almosen für Israel: Zum historischen Kontext der Paulinischen Kollekte,” NTS 23 (1977), 180–204. 4 Munck, Paul and the Salvation of Mankind; Nickle, The Collection; Dieter Georgi, Remembering the Poor: The History of Paul’s Collection for Jerusalem (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992); S. Wan, “Collection for the Saints as an Anticolonial Act,” in R. A. Horsley (ed.), Paul and Politics (Harrisburg: Trinity International, 2000), 191– 215. 5 D. G. Horrell, “Paul’s Collection: Resources for a Materialist Theology,” EpR 22 no. 2 (1995), 74–83; P. Vassiliadis, “The Collection Revisited,” Deltion Biblikon Meleton 11 (1992), 42–8. 6 Karl Holl, “Der Kirchenbegriff des Paulus in seinem Verhältnis zu dem ger Urgemeinde,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze Zur Kirchengeschichte II. Der Osten (Tübingen: Der Osten, 1928); Berger, “Almosen fur Israel,” 180–204; S. Joubert, Paul as Benefactor (WUNT 2/124; Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000). 7 Robert Orlando, Apostle Paul: A Polite Bribe (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014). 8 C. K. Barrett, “The Historicity of Acts,” JTS 50 no. 2 (1999), 515–34; Luke the Historian in Recent Study (London: Epworth Press, 1961); F. F. Bruce, “The Acts of the Apostles: Historical Record or Theological Reconstruction?,” ANRW 11/25, 2569–603.

The Rejection of the Collection 167 9 Baur, “Die Christuspartie in der korinthischen Gemeide,” 61–206; idem, “Über Zweck und Veranlassung des Römerbriefs und die damit zusammenhangenden Verhältnisse der römischen Gemeinde,” TZTh 9 (1836), 3; Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi, sein Leben und Wirken, seine Briefe und seine Lehre (Stuttgart: Becker & Müller, 1845); ET: Paul, the Apostle of Jesus Christ: His Life and Work, His Epistles and His Doctrine, second ed., (trans. Eduard Zeller; London: Williams and Norgate, 1876); Kritische Untersuchungen über die kanonischen Evangelien, ihr Verhältniss zu einander, ihren Charakter und Ursprung (Tübingen: L. F. Fues, 1847); K. Schrader, Der Apostel Paulus (Leipzig: Christian Ernst Kollmann, 1830–5); cf. Matthias Schneckenburger, Über den Zweck der Apostelgeschichte (Bern: C. Fischer, 1841). 10 Martin Dibelius, Studies in the Acts of the Apostles (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1956 [1923]), 1–25; 138–85; Hans Conzelmann, Die Mitte der Zeit (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1953); ET: The Theology of St. Luke (trans. Geoffrey Buswell; London: Faber and Faber, 1961); Hans Conzelmann and Andreas Lindemann, Interpreting the New Testament: An Introduction to the Principles and Methods of New Testament Exegesis (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1988 [1985]); Ernst Haenchen, “The Book of Acts as Source Material for the History of Earliest Christianity,” in L. Keck and J. Martyn (eds.), Studies in Luke-Acts (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980 [1966]), 258–78; The Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary, 14th ed. (trans. Hugh Anderson; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971), 112–6; Samuel Sandmel, The Genius of Paul: A Study in History (New York: Schocken, [1958] 1970), 149–57; Gerd Lüdemann, Early Christianity According to the Traditions in Acts: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), 1–17; James D. G. Dunn, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament (2d edn.; London: SCM, 1990), 270; Richard I. Pervo, Profit With Delight: The Literary Genre of the Acts of the Apostles (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987); The Mystery of Acts: Unraveling Its Story (Santa Rosa: Polebridge, 2008). 11 F.C. Baur, “Über der Ursprung des Episcopats in der christlichen Kirche. Prüfung der neuesten von Hrn. Dr. Rothe hierüber aufgestellten Ansicht,” TZTh 11 (1838), 3. 12 Albert Schwegler, Das nachapostolische Zeitalter in den Hauptmomenten seiner Entwicklung (2 vols.; Tübingen: L. F. Fues, 1846), I:90. 13 Schwegler, Das nachapostolische Zeitalter, II, 112. 14 Eduard Zeller, Die Apostelgeschichte nach ihrem Inhalt und Ursprung kritisch Untersucht (Stuttgart: C. Mäcken, 1854), 248. 15 Zeller, Die Apostelgeschichte, 357. Bruno Bauer, Die Apostelgeschichte. Eine Ausgleichung des Paulinismus und des Judenthums innerhalb der christlichen Kirche (Berlin: Gustav Hempel, 1850), 121, went even further: “Als die Apostelgeschichte gescrieben wurde, war die Spannung der Patheien zusammengefallen, war der Gegensatz schon verschleiert, die Differenz verwischt, hatte sich der Friede schon gemacht – die Apostelgeschichte ist nicht ein Friedenvorschlag, sondern der Ausdruck und Abschluss des Friedens und der Erschlaffung.” 16 Albrecht Ritschl, Die Enstehung der altkatholischen Kirche (Bonn: Marcus, 1857 [1850]). 17 W.C. van Unnik, “Luke-Acts, a Storm Center in Contemporary Scholarship,” in Keck and Martyn, Studies in Luke-Acts, 15–32. 18 Kirsopp Lake and H. J. Cadbury, The Beginnings of Christianity: The Acts of the Apostles (New York: Macmillan, 1933); Bruce, “The Acts of the Apostles: Historical Record or Theological Reconstruction?,” 2569–603; idem, Commentary on the Book of Acts (NIC/NLC; Grand Rapids and London, 1952); Colin J. Hemer, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1989); M. Harding, “On the Historicity of Acts: Comparing Acts 9.23–25 with 2 Corinthians 11.32–3,” NTS 39 no. 4 (1993), 518–38; I. Howard Marshall, Luke: Historian and Theologian (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1970); Ward Gasque, A History of the Criticism of the Acts of the Apostles (BGBE 17; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1975); Craig S. Keener, Acts: An Exegetical Commentary, 4 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012–2015).

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19 Adrian N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963); Harry W. Tajra, The Trial of St. Paul: A Juridicial Exegesis of the Second Half of the Acts of the Apostles, WUNT 35 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1989); Martin Hengel, Acts and the History of Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980); W. Ward Gasque, “The Book of Acts and History,” in R. Guelich (ed.), Unity and Diversity in New Testament Theology: Essays in Honor of George E. Ladd (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), 54–72. 20 Heidi J. Hornik and Mikeal C. Parsons, The Acts of the Apostles through the Centuries (John Wiley & Sons, 2017). 21 Hemer, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History; Daniel Marguerat, The First Christian Historian: Writing the ‘Acts of the Apostles’ (SNTS MS 121; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Gregory E. Sterling, Historiography and SelfDefinition: Josephus, Luke-Acts and Apologetic Historiography (Leiden: Brill, 1992). 22 Gerhard Krodel, Acts, Proclamation Commentaries (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981). 23 Philipp Vielhauer, “On the ‘Paulinism’ of Acts,” in Keck and Martyn (eds.), Studies, 33–50. Cf. Charles H. Talbert, “Again: Paul’s Visits to Jerusalem,” NovT (1967), 26–40. 24 Zetterholm, The Formation of Christianity in Antioch, 164, 231–2, argues that James would have seen Jesus-believing Gentiles as “god-fearers” outside the Jewish covenant whereas Paul insisted that they were fully equal members within the covenant and objected to Gentile following Jewish dietary or ritual laws. 25 See, for example, David P. Moessner (ed.), Jesus and the Heritage of Israel: Vol. 1, Luke’s Narrative Claim upon Israel’s Legacy (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999). 26 Bruce, “Historical Record,” 2582. Daniel Marguerat, “The Enigma of the Silent Closing of Acts (28: 16–31),” in David P. Moessner (ed.), Jesus and the Heritage of Israel: Luke’s Narrative Claim Upon Israel’s Legacy (Harrisburg, Pa: Trinity Press International, 1999), 284–304, 288–93, argues that a Greco-Roman “rhetoric of silence” informs Luke’s decision. 27 James H. Charlesworth, “Why Should Experts Ignore Acts in Pauline Research?,” in The Early Reception of Paul the Second Temple Jew: Text, Narrative and Reception History, ed. Isaac W. Oliver, Gabriele Boccaccini, with Joshua Scott, LSTS 92 (London: T & T Clark, 2019), 151–66, here 163. 28 Charlesworth, “Why Should Experts Ignore Acts in Pauline Research?,” 153: “Acts shows little knowledge of Paul’s anti-Law rhetoric. It contains virtually nothing about Paul’s ‘gospel’ of being free from the Law. Yet, in Paul’s letters, especially Romans, Paul claims that the Law is no longer efficacious.” 29 On Acts’ representation of Paul as a law-abiding Jew, see Acts 16:1–3; 21:18–28; 23:5; 24:14––15, 17–18; 25:8, 10; 25:4–8, 22. 30 See, for example, 1 Cor 9:20. 31 Eyal Regev, The Temple in Early Christianity: Experiencing the Sacred (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 4. 32 Rom 15:16. 33 1 Macc 3:47–51; Ant. 19.16.1 § 293–4; War 2.15.1 § 313; Acts 18:18; 21:23–4; m. Nazir 3:6; 5:4, 11: p. Ber. 7.2 (11b); cf. Fraade, “The Nazirite in Ancient Judaism,” 213–23. 34 Matti Myllykoski, “James the Just in History and Tradition: Perspectives of Past and Present Scholarship (Part II),” CBR 6 (2007), 11–98, here 19. Cf. 16–7: “the information Luke provides about the purification rites undergone by Paul has been found more or less problematic. According to Mosaic Law (Num. 6.1–21), there is no Nazirite purification that lasts only seven days … the minimum period is thirty days.” 35 Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (seventh edn; New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, 397: “Paul sent the letter from prison (Phil 1:7). We do not know where he was imprisoned or why.”

The Rejection of the Collection 169 36 Gasque, A History of the Criticism of the Acts of the Apostles, 271: “there is no evidence in the epistles of Paul or in the book of Acts that there was ever any fundamental disagreement between Paul and the Urapostel on matters of basic Christian belief. The only difference between the two was in spheres of ministry – as Paul himself emphasizes in Galatians 2.9. There was no difference concerning the Gospel or even over the question of preaching the Gospel to the Gentiles.” 37 V. George Shillington, James and Paul: The Politics of Identity at the Turn of the Ages (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 312. Cf. Haenchen, The Acts of the Apostles, 614; J. Jervell, Die Apostelgeschichte (KEK 3; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 529–30.

10 The Jewish Rejection of Jesus

In recent years, there has been a noticeable tendency to identify the New Testament writings as “Jewish.”1 Given the history of anti-Judaism, the impetus underlying this redescription is understandable. It is also problematic: there is simply no consensus on the ethnicity of the authors of the Gospels.2 Indeed, the very question of whether we can identify the ethnic identities of ancient authors is fraught with complications, not least of which is that these authors do not tell us who they are. True, Paul self-identified as a Jew. The author of the Double Tradition (Q) was also likely Jewish.3 It is also likely that the author of Matthew was a Jew.4 The disputed letters of Paul, however, are unlikely to have been written by Jews. The author of Mark was probably not a Jew.5 The author of Luke may or may not have been Jewish.6 To identify the New Testament as a whole as “Jewish,” therefore, is to argue beyond the evidence. The New Testament itself is a late fourthcentury non-Jewish canonical collection. Whether or not the authors of the New Testament writings were ethnically Jewish, they were writing to either an ethnically and religiously mixed community of Jews and Gentiles or to predominantly Gentile Christ-following communities for whom the “Jewish” way of life needed cultural unpacking and translation. The New Testament writings are documents chronicling the emergence of a new self-conscious non-Jewish social identity. Non-Jews joining the Jesus movement had no interest in observing the Torah, but they had very real interests in portraying the origins of their movement as based on central and authoritative expressions and extensions of Judaism. Since Gentile followers of Jesus were both attracted to Torah observance (“Judaizing”) and fully capable of representing the early Jesus movement as both Torah observant (Luke-Acts) and/or non-Torah observant (Mark), we must pay close attention to the rhetorical purpose(s) particular authors deploy in their descriptions of “Jewish” tradition. In Luke’s case, it is a story about a movement that began as Torah observant only to be “rejected” by Jews and made available to non-Torah observant Gentiles. It is this subtle transfer – from Jew to Gentile (“Christian”), from Jerusalem to Rome – that we must recognize as an apologetic project defending Paul from his antinomian reputation, not a historical report on his pious Torah observance.7 If Luke-Acts was written by a Jew, it was a Jew capable of blaming the Jews for Jesus’s crucifixion, identifying Jews as arch-nemeses, and portraying Jews as rejecting the message DOI: 10.4324/b22959-13

The Jewish Rejection of Jesus 171 of the Gospel of salvation.8 Since Paul and Matthew were also both capable of such sentiments, there is no a priori impediment to identifying Luke as Jewish. On the other hand, Paul’s hostile remarks about the Law – remarks made decades before the composition of Luke-Acts – required clarification. Luke frames Torah observance in the past as authorizing the pedigree of the “Christian” movement as a proper religio. As the first to introduce the term “Christian,” he also re-frames the trajectory of this movement away from “the Jew(s),” betraying what can be described as a non-Jewish agenda: the Way may have originated in Judaism and represented the essence of (true) Judaism, but it is no longer constituted by “(the) Jews.” Consider the Cornelius narrative. Here we have Luke’s account of the beginning of the Gentile mission. In Acts 10, Peter has a vision in which he sees “all kinds of four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air.” He then hears a voice saying “Get up, Peter; kill and eat” (φάγε) (10:12–13). Since these were “unclean” animals, Peter hesitates, but the divine voice is emphatic: “What God has made clean, you must not call profane” (10:15). Peter goes on to announce that because of this vision he now understands, like Paul, that “God shows no partiality” (Acts 10:34; cf. Rom 2:11) and then explains to the Jerusalem assembly that this “yoke” (of the Law) was a burden that “neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear” (Acts 15:10).9 It is difficult not to come to the conclusion that the very beginning of the Gentile mission – at least according to the author of Acts – divinely abrogates the food laws for Peter, that is, for Jews.10 It is true that Peter never actually eats any of the animals in this vision, but that may simply be because Peter is still too “blind” to understand the divine truth of the vision even while he represents the eschatological precognition of that vision. It may be that the author intended to imply that Jewish followers of Jesus would continue to observe the Torah, and/or that Jews would opt to continue to observe the Sabbath and the laws of kashrut, but Luke is not Mark: he never explicitly states that “all foods are clean” (7:19c) or that Torah observance belongs to a past era. Nonetheless, it is difficult not to interpret Peter’s vision to “kill and eat” unclean or impure animals as suggesting the abrogation of the food laws, again rehabilitating Paul’s reputation as one who had said that “nothing is unclean in itself” (Rom 14:14) and that Christ is “the end of the Law” (Rom 10:4). The New Testament is not a “Jewish” book. Many New Testament passages contain vitriolic denunciations of Jews. Many are deeply engaged in the process of creating a religious system separate from and other than Judaism in a hostile, polemical relationship with Jews. These writings should not simply be “re-Judaized” as “Jewish.”11 Yes, a Pauline ekklēsia may have included (some) Jews, but these assemblies were predominantly Gentile. First-century Gentiles did not confuse themselves with Jews. Nor would first-century Jews/Judeans have thought of themselves as Gentiles or non-Jews. We are justified, therefore, in maintaining this distinction instead of conflating both ethnicities under the harmonizing rubric of the term “Christian” (or “Jewish”). As Gentile members began to predominate, their social interests also came to predominate, reflected in the

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composition of authoritative texts that contained “memories” of Jesus’s ministry as well as social tensions inherited from the Jewish/Gentile schism. The Pauline corpus alone provides us with sufficient data to construct a socialpsychological profile of Gentile Christian identity formation, including the following generative components: first, Gentile fear of socio-ethnic illegitimacy in the face of Jewish critique; second, Gentile resentment toward Jewish followers for reminding them of their secondary status in the chronological sequence of salvation history and for their claims of prior ethnic privilege; third, Gentile distrust of Jewish motives for requiring circumcision and for the Jewish leadership’s authoritative claims on Gentile behavior and practice; fourth, Gentile anger directed at the Jewish leadership of the Jesus movement; fifth, Gentile guilt for erasing its Jewish past in conjunction with fear of its exposure; and sixth, Gentile defensive mechanisms designed to dispel doubt about the legitimacy of these critiques; leading to seventh, the Gentile desire to separate from Jewish fellowship due to an inability to resolve these socio-ethnic problems. The Gospels are composed in light of and in response to the Jewish war and the destruction of the Temple. By 70 CE, the revolt had come to its climax in the Roman occupation of Jerusalem. Vespasian’s imposition of the fiscus Judaicus, the “Jewish tax,” created a new ethnic, social, economic, and political context within which non-Jewish Christ followers co-existed in relationship with Jewish members of the movement. Now that tax revenues were being directed to the Temple of Jupiter in Rome – and not to the Jewish Temple – non-Jewish Christ followers were more inclined to distinguish themselves from “Jews,” underscoring what the apostle Paul had proclaimed all along, namely, that Gentile Christ-followers were equal to Jews without converting to Judaism.12 Domitian’s decision (81–96 CE) to impose the tax on those who “lived like Jews” further undermined any Jewish or Gentile attempts to “Judaize” Gentile Christ-followers, facilitating a politicoeconomic boundary marker between two once-related groups of Christ-followers, consolidated by the Roman emperor Nerva’s recognition of Judaism as a religio (96 CE).13 Jews were exempt from sacrificing to the emperor; “Christians” were not. Early “Christian” literature developed within an increasingly hostile political and rhetorical discourse toward the “rebellious” Jews of the Roman empire. It is within this dynamic social milieu that Pauline concepts were first adopted and adapted by the author of the Gospel of Mark.14 The nature and extent of Mark’s knowledge of the Pauline “gospel” continues to be debated, but if Paul declared that “nothing is unclean in itself” and that “all things are clean” (Rom 14:14, 20), then it is remarkable that the Markan Jesus also declares “all foods clean” (καθαρίζω πάντα τὰ βρώματα) (7:19c) in what is almost universally regarded as a parenthetical, editorial aside. Since there is no good reason to think that the historical Jesus sought to abolish the laws of kashrut, it seems apparent that the author of Mark was familiar with Pauline ideas, including the identification of Jesus as the “Christ,” the Jewish messiah, the Son of God empowered by the Holy Spirit who had authority over demons and the ability to heal, prophesy, and perform miracles.15 Similarly, the Markan Jesus, like the Pauline Christ, is rejected by his own people.

The Jewish Rejection of Jesus 173 The Gospel of Mark is characterized by the theme of rejection. Mark’s narrative is designed to culminate in Jesus’s crucifixion, but is punctuated by a series of dramatic events that foreshadow his arrival in Jerusalem. An early moment in this sequential rejection is the rejection of Jesus in his “hometown” of Nazareth (Mark 6:1–6).16 And they took offense at him. Then Jesus said to them, ‘Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.’17 Mark’s re-presentation of Jesus’s negative reception proved useful to Matthew and Luke.18 Jesus’s rejection by his own family set the stage for Jesus’s rejection by Jewish religious authorities and led to his death, narratively correlated to the destruction of the Temple.19 Although Jesus predicts the destruction of the Temple before his death, it is Mark’s narrative correlation of Jesus’s death and the destruction of the Temple that read as God’s judgment on the Jews for the rejection of Jesus. The cursing of the fig tree and the Temple incident both represent symbolic narrativization of this theme.20 Jesus’s “cleansing” of the Temple and prophecy of its destruction are inscribed in light of Mark’s knowledge of the Temple’s actual destruction,21 illustrating not Jesus’s powers of prediction, but Mark’s creative storytelling. Mark’s “myth of origins” focuses on “the figure of Jesus as the founder of the new movement” and “the reasons for rejection.”22 The latter explained Jesus’s rejection by appealing to the tradition of Israel’s “rejection of the prophets.” Jesus’s death was thus a “sign” that his message and followers would be rejected. This motif explained “the failure of the reform movements in terms of the ‘hardness of heart’ of those who refused the message, rather than calling into question the message or the messengers.”23 The rejection of Israel is also a central compositional motif in the Double Tradition.24 Q represents an ethnically Judean text and tradition.25 Despite a broad consensus among specialists that Q is a “Jewish” text, however, Q’s “Jewishness” still represents a discursive novum that needs to be emphasized. Q is nonetheless a classic example of Jewish sectarian social identity formation.26 The author redefines who belongs to Israel,27 criticizes other Jews,28 rejects the villages that have rejected Jesus’s message,29 condemns “this generation,”30 and pronounces judgment on Israel.31 The author stereotypes opponents, labels Pharisees “empty tombs,” and draws symbolic boundaries around its in-group. The “last will be first and the first last.” Some will enter the Kingdom and others will be excluded. The Jews of “this generation” have rejected the message of John and Jesus. The Jewish towns of Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum have rejected Jesus.32 The city of Jerusalem and its leaders have rejected Jesus. John and Jesus are the “children of Wisdom” rejected by “this generation” condemned for killing and persecuting the prophets.33 Even the disciples – sent out like “sheep among wolves” – are to anticipate rejection for their efforts.34 This generation’s rejection of Jesus cannot be forgiven: a judgment is coming, a judgment without warning.35 The rejection and failure of Jesus’s mission

174 The Jewish Rejection of Jesus to Israel has provoked divine judgment.36 Q is thus characterized by the themes of rejection and judgment, beginning with John the Baptist’s warning of “the impending wrath” and the arrival of one who will separate the “wheat” from the “chaff” and burn the latter in an everlasting fire (3:16b–17).37 The Temple is now “forsaken.” Israel is under judgment. Despite the violent rhetoric directed against “this generation,” Q’s polemic seems to be directed toward the non-responsive part of Israel,38 not Israel as a whole.39 Q’s conflict with “this generation” is a Jewish conflict within Judaism. The rejection is mutual.40 Jesus and his followers met sustained resistance from Jews that they experienced as rejection. Yet literary-rhetorical appeals to perceived persecution do not necessarily represent actual experiences of persecution. Q’s claim to experienced violence does not make it so. Such appeals were commonly used to construct a Christian “myth of persecution.”41 Nonetheless, rejection and/or persecution could have been perceived as experientially real whether or not actual rejection or persecution ever took place. These appeals to rejection and persecution served purposes other than the mere reporting of the historical facts. Rhetorical pronouncements of apocalyptic violence allowed authors to condemn others without resorting to physical violence. Rhetorical appeals to suffering and persecution also served the purpose of associating Q’s conflicts with the ancestral theme, motif, and tradition of “the rejected prophet(s),” imagining Jesus and his followers as subject to unjust suffering and the eschatological reversal of divine vindication. The incorporation of Q into the Gospels of Matthew and Luke transferred the polemical rhetoric directed at “this generation” into a wider socio-ethnic context where it could increasingly be read as setting the stage for a conflict between “Jews” and “Christians.” It may still be possible, therefore, to understand Matthew’s “slander” against the Pharisees as “intra-Jewish” polemic, not a Christian condemnation of Jews or Judaism,42 but Matthew was not written in an exclusively intra-Jewish context. Matthew’s knowledge of Jews and Judaism is put to Christian purposes in the Great Commission. Moreover, if Luke knew and used Matthew – as advocates of the Farrer Hypothesis propose – then the New Testament’s suppression of its Jewish origins becomes even more pronounced. Luke’s literary creativity would be pressed into service as an apologetic reaction to Matthew, an attempt to re-write “the most Jewish Gospel” from the perspective of a Pauline Gentile. Luke’s use of Matthew would therefore implicate the third evangelist in an artful subversion of the Jewish roots of the Jesus movement. So whereas the author of Matthew could be read as reacting to perceived antinomianism (“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law”), Luke’s own reaction to Matthew would subtly reinforce that very antinomianism, not openly or explicitly, but as the inevitable outcome of the Gentile mission. Luke’s appeal to the theme of the “rejected prophets” is an extension of the Pauline, Markan, and Double Tradition’s trajectories in which the Jewish rejection of Jesus results in “the Gentile turn” as part of the divine plan.43 Like Mark, Luke portrays Jesus as a prophet rejected in his hometown.44 Like Paul, Luke envisions the redemption of Israel in two stages: the first, characterized by rejection, resulting in the salvation of Gentiles, and the second representing the co-participation

The Jewish Rejection of Jesus 175 of Jews and Gentiles in the unified ekklēsia of Christ. Luke’s use of rejection as an explanatory motif is linked to Jesus’s death, the destruction of the Temple, and the relatively low rate of Jews joining the movement. The eschatological inclusion of Gentiles is thus the central pivot around which the gospel message of revelation shifts from rejection to reception. In sum, then, the Gospels represent the transference of salvation from “the Jew(s)” to the Gentiles in symbolic narrative form: the Jewish leaders reject Jesus, but a Roman centurion stands at the cross, a true believer (Mark 15:39). It is the “good Samaritan” who serves as exemplar (Luke 10:33; 17:16). It is the Jewish cities of Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum that reject Jesus while the Gentile cities of Tyre and Sidon represent genuine faith (Luke 10:13–15). It is “this generation” that rejects God’s prophets, but it is the Gentile citizens of Nineveh who repented at the preaching of Jonah (Luke 11:30). Indeed, even the Gentile city of Sodom will be spared compared to the unbelieving Jewish cities at the judgment.45 The “Jewish rejection of Jesus” inscribed in the Gospels was a narrative oversimplification. It may have been historically inaccurate, but it told a good story. True, some Jews rejected Jesus, but all of Jesus’s first followers were Jews. True, most Jews in Jesus’s day probably did not embrace his claims, authority, or movement, but Jesus was also perceived as rejecting other Jews’ claims, authority, and movements. True, there are indications that Jesus’s own family “rejected” him (at least at first), but Jesus’s family were also the main leaders of the Jerusalem ekklēsia for decades. The thematic dominance of rejection in the Jesus tradition is best explained, therefore, not by re-inscribing, reifying, and/or historicizing literary-theological appeals to the Jews as rejected by God, “hard-hearted,” or obstinate in their refusal to accept the gospel, but by appealing to social-psychological dynamics of social rejection.46 Christianity originated as a Jewish movement that transformed (and transferred) an intra-Jewish conflict into a Jewish/ Christian schism. The historical record itself betrays the historical inaccuracy of “the Jewish rejection of Jesus,” but this motif yielded so much generative power that it could defy the evidentiary record. The construction of Christian identity required the identification of an Other and that role was played, unwittingly, by “the Jew(s).”47 By rejecting Jesus, “the Jews” had rejected their own salvation. By rejecting Jesus, “the Jews” were now also rejected by God. The “Jew” came to be identified as the inferior Other,48 Judaism constructed as an inferior religion,49 and “Jewish-Christians” an illegitimate mixing.50 The reception of the Christian rejection of Judaism took many forms throughout Late Antiquity from Paul to Marcion,51 Trypho, Augustine,52 and the contra Iudaeos tradition. Separating the Christian revelation from its Jewish past, for example, Marcion rejected the Jewish God of Israel and the Jewish scriptures, holding that neither could be reconciled with the God of Jesus. It is no wonder Marcion was perceived as a threat.53 The “proto-Orthodox” compromise was to identify the God of Jesus as the God of the Jewish Scriptures. An “anxiety of influence,”54 a perpetual Othering of “the Jew(s),” and exclusive election informed an emergent Christian justification that the Jews were (to be) rejected for rejecting Jesus. The Christian tradition could not forget – it could only misremember – the

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Jewishness of Jesus. The construction of Christian identity required the elimination of what was foreign to its perceived essence. Drawing boundaries by denying Jewish influences from corrupting that essence, Christian traditions came to suppress, marginalize, erase, appropriate, redefine, and reject significant aspects of the “Christian” past. Jesus’s Jewish birth, childhood, youth, maturity, teachings, ethics, family, and social networks could not actually be erased, but they could be erased from the historical record. His new family would be those he “adopted.” His descendants, heretics. His social networks, condemned to silence. His religious authority received directly from revelation, as if he had been born divine. Ultimately, the charge of deicide – the identification of The-Jew-as-ChristKiller – confirmed what “Jesus” had said all along – that the Jews were from their father, the Devil (John 8:44). Christianity developed in opposition to Judaism. For centuries, Christians nursed a special hatred and resentment toward Jews for being both the mediating source and the ethnic origin of their salvation. Christian anti-Judaism, therefore, is not simply hatred of Jews/Judaism based on sibling rivalry and soteriological exclusivity; at a deeper level, Christian anti-Judaism is self-hatred, an unconscious resentment (re)-directed toward (and away from) its own ancestral legacy. Unable to extricate its essence (the Christian self) from its Jewish origins (the Other) and repulsed by this constituent element of its (im)pure essence and improper mixing, Christians turned “the Jew(s)” into the symbol of an unresolvable ambiguity and conflict within the Christian psyche.55 It is no small irony that this Western tradition of anti-Judaism also facilitated the constructive, preservative, and generative power of Jewish self-definition.56 Israel’s rejection (by the nations) only confirmed Israel’s election. Israel’s divine election, which had long served as a point of ethnic pride inspiring jealousy in Gentiles was now reversed in the Christian imagination: Israel’s rejection of Jesus and the Gentiles’ acceptance of Jesus was all part of God’s plan to make Israel “jealous.” Nonetheless, it was the Gentiles’ hatred of “the Jew(s)” – a social identity conflict now exacerbated by the construction of contradistinctive religious identities – that ultimately helped preserve Jews, giving them a strong sense of social solidarity as a distinctive, coherent community.57

Notes 1 Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels. Cf. Gabriele Boccaccini, Middle Judaism: Jewish Thought, 300 BCE to 200 CE (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 215: “No NT writing is ‘more’ or ‘less’ Jewish for the simple reason that they are all Jewish.” See also Johnson, “Anti-Judaism and the New Testament,” 1637–8, who argues that it would be anachronistic to describe any New Testament text as “anti-Jewish.” Julie Galambush, The Reluctant Parting: How the New Testament’s Jewish Writers Created a Christian Book (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2005), xix, reads the New Testament as “a Jewish book” written by Jewish authors (“Its goal is to represent the New Testament authors as credible Jews,” xvii). See also Adele Reinhartz, “The ‘Parting of the Ways’ and the Criterion of Plausibility,” in Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (ed. Ronald Charles; LNTS 628; London and New York: T & T Clark, 2021), 147–56, here 149: “As is now well-recognized, the

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NT is a Jewish source in the sense that most of its authors were Jewish in an ethnic or genealogical sense.” Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, 26–7, equivocates regarding the identity of the author of John: “This gospel … is written by someone who consciously placed himself outside, if not against, Judaism. This fact does not necessarily mean the author was not Jewish.” Cromhout, Jesus and Identity; James M. Robinson, “LOGION SOPHON: On the Gattung of Q. In Trajectories through Early Christianity,” (eds. J. M. Robinson and H. Koester; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971), pp. 71–113; H. E. Tödt, The Son of Man in the Synoptic Tradition (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1965); Odil Hannes Steck, Israel und das gewaltsame Geschick der Propheten: Untersuchungen zur Überlieferung des deuteronomistichen Geschichtsbildes im Alten Testament, Spätjudentum und Urchristentum. WMANT 23. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1967); Lührmann, Die Redaktion der Logienquelle; Schulz, Q: Spruchquelle der Evangelisten; Paul Hoffmann, Studien zur Theologie der Logienquelle (3rd edn; NTAb, NF 8; Münster: Aschendorff, 1972); 332–3; “QR und der Menschensohn,” in The Four Gospels 1992 Festschrift (ed. F. Neirynck; BEThL 100; Leuven: Peeters, 1992), 421–56; John S. Kloppenborg, “Literary Convention, Self-Evidence, and the Social History of the Q People,” Semeia 55 (1991): 77-102; Kloppenborg Verbin, Excavating Q, 256. J. Andrew Overman, Matthew’s Gospel and Formative Judaism: The Social World of the Matthean Community (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990); Saldarini, Matthew’s Christian-Jewish Community; David C. Sim, The Gospel of Matthew and Christian Judaism: The History and Social Setting of the Matthean Community (Studies in the New Testament and Its World; Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998). On the possibility that a final redactor of Matthew was a Gentile, see Kenneth W. Clark, “The Gentile Bias in Matthew,” JBL 66 (1947), 165–72. Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, 177: “Mark was a Gentile.” On Luke’s Gentile identity, see Donaldson, Gentile Christian Identity from Cornelius to Constantine, 382: “despite his Jewish sympathies and thoroughgoing familiarity with Jewish Scripture, the author of Luke-Acts is probably to be seen as a gentile.” The author’s hostile comments about “the Jews” (13:45, 50; 17:5; 18:5–6, 12, 14; 20:3) and the final scene, where Paul transfers “salvation” to Gentiles (28:25–28) considers the mixed community of Jews and Gentiles a thing of the past. See also Bart J. Koet, Five Studies on Interpretation of Scripture in Luke-Acts, SNTA 14; Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1989), 22; Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, ABRL (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 235–9; Levine and Brettler, The New Annotated New Testament, 97. On Luke as a Jew, see Jervell, Luke and the People of God; idem, The Theology of the Acts of the Apostles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 4–5; Gregory E. Sterling, “‘Opening the Scriptures’: The Legitimation of the Jewish Diaspora and the Early Christian Mission,” in Jesus and the Heritage of Israel, 199– 217, 201: “there is an opinion communis that the author of Acts was either a Hellenistic Jew or a God-fearer who had been attached to a Jewish synagogue.” Sterling opines that he was “probably a Diaspora Jew” (217). On Luke as “Jewish,” and even Torah observant, see Isaac W. Oliver, Torah Praxis after 70 CE: Reading Matthew and LukeActs as Jewish Texts, WUNT 2.355 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 31–2, 448. Lawrence M. Wills, “The Depiction of the Jews in Acts,” JBL 110 no. 4 (1991), 631– 54, 645: “in the author’s mind the Christians at the time of writing either are, or should become, a group separated from the recognized body of Jews as met in the Roman world.” Wills, “The Depiction of the Jews in Acts,” 643: “the repeated message of the narrative … is that Jews or Jewish Christians oppose the Way … The opposition of the Jews is what inaugurates the successes of the worldwide Gentile mission.” Cf. Jack Sanders, The Jews in Luke-Acts (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 81. On the unreliable and non-

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historical representation of “the Jews” in Acts, see also Dixon Slingerland, “‘The Jews’ in the Pauline Portion of Acts,” JAAR 54 no. 2 (1986), 305–21. Oliver, Torah Praxis after 70 CE, 325, argues that the heavenly voice does not abrogate the laws of kashrut because the vision is not about food, but about “the purification and sanctification of Gentile believers” (353), explaining that Peter realizes that this vision means that he “should not call anyone profane or unclean” (10:28). Oliver notes how Peter never actually eats the non-physical (!) animals and interprets this as Peter’s refusal to violate the laws of kashrut. Oliver’s reading, while ingenious, eludes the obvious meaning of this Lukan passage. Joseph B. Tyson, “Acts 6:1–7 and Dietary Regulations in Early Christianity,” PRSt 10 (1983), 146, noting how “effectively marks the end of dietary regulations for Christians.” Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, 289: “Who wrote the Gospels, Jews or Gentiles? No one knows.” See esp. Marius Heemstra, The Fiscus Judaicus and the Parting of the Ways, WUNT 2.277 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010). Martin Goodman, “Nerva, the Fiscus Judaicus and Jewish Identity,” Journal of Roman Studies 79 (1989), 40–4, 44, referring to Nerva’s “definition of a Jew” as dependent on their “public declaration of Judaism and acceptance of the burden of the consequent tax. Jews from now on were defined as such by their religion alone rather than their birth.” Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature, 132. Cf. Mack, A Myth of Innocence. Schröter, “Memory, Theories of History, and the Reception of Jesus,” 104, asserts that “there is no relationship between the Pauline formulation” in Rom 14:14 and “the Jesus sayings in Mark and Matthew that could prove a connection in the transmission history of a certain formulation,” but neglects to mention that the question is not whether Paul is quoting “a saying of the earthly Jesus,” but rather whether Mark repurposed a Pauline saying. On this saying, see William John Lyons, “A Prophet is Rejected in His Hometown (Mark 6.4 and Parallels),” JSHJ 6 (2008), 59–84. Ferda, “Galilean Crisis,” 360–1. See Luke 4: 16–30; Michael Knowles, Jeremiah in Matthew’s Gospel: The Rejected Prophet Motif in Matthean Redaction (JSNTS Sup 68; Sheffield: JSOT, 1993); Jocelyn McWhirter, Rejected Prophets: Jesus and His Witnesses in Luke-Acts (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013). Joseph, Jesus and the Temple. See also John S. Kloppenborg, “Evocatio deorum and the Date of Mark,” JBL 124 (2005), 419–50, 449. Mark 11:12–14, 20–21; 11:15–19. So William E. Arnal, “Mark, War, and Creative Imagination,” in Barry S. Crawford and Merrill P. Miller (eds.), Redescribing the Gospel of Mark (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2017), 409–13; David Seeley, “Jesus’ Temple Act,” CBQ 55 (1993), 265–71; Zeitlin, Jesus and the Judaism of His Time, 150; Mack, A Myth of Innocence, 291–2; Robert J. Miller, “Historical Method and the Deeds of Jesus: The Test Case of the Temple Demonstration,” Forum 8 no. 1 (1992), 5–30; “The (A)Historicity of Jesus’ Temple Demonstration: A Test Case in Methodology,” Society of Biblical Literature 1991 Seminar Papers, ed. Eugene H. Lovering Jr., SBLSP 30 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), 235–52. Arnal, “Mark, War, and Creative Imagination,” 432 n. 87: “the precedent is Mark’s use of the actual destruction of the temple, more or less in his own time, as part of his basis for the ‘temple tantrum’ episode.” Mack, A Myth of Innocence, 319–20. Mack, A Myth of Innocence, 320. John S. Kloppenborg, “The Formation of Q Revisited: A Response to Richard Horsley,” in David Lull (ed.), SBL Seminar Papers (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), 207, regards

The Jewish Rejection of Jesus 179

25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48

“this generation” as “co-extensive with Israel” because it invokes and accompanies criticism of Jerusalem, woes against Pharisees and Galilean towns and threats of exclusion. This, however, doesn’t make the Q people non-Jewish or any less Jewish than the Qumran community. Dieter Lührmann, Die Redaktion der Logienquelle (WMANT 33; Neukirchener-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1969, 24–48, 30, 93; Siegfried Schulz, Q: Spruchquelle der Evangelisten (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1972), 340; Kloppenborg, Formation, 148, 167, see “This generation” as a term for all Israel: the Q people have given up on Israel and may be embracing a Gentile mission. Kloppenborg Verbin, Excavating Q, 256; William E. Arnal, “The Q Document,” in Jewish Christianity Reconsidered: Rethinking Ancient Groups and Texts (ed. Matt Jackson-McCabe; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 129; Cromhout, Jesus and Identity, 260; Christopher M. Tuckett, “Q and the ‘Church’: The Role of the Christian Community within Judaism according to Q,” in From the Sayings to the Gospels (WUNT 328; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 219–31. Joseph, “A Social Identity Approach,” 28–49. See also Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, 126–27; Baumgarten, Flourishing, 7. Q 3:8, 13:29, 28, 13:30, 14:11, 14:16–23. Q 11:42, 39b, 43–44, 46b, 52, 47–48. Q 10:10–12, 13–15. Q 7:31, 11:16, 29–30, 11:49–51. Q 13:34–35. Q 7:1–10, 10:13–15. Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes, 162. Q 7:31–35; Q 11;49–51. Q 10:3, 10:10–12. Q 12:39–40, 12:42–46, 13:29, 28. Burton L. Mack, The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q & Christian Origins (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993), 45. Q 3:16b–17. Christopher M. Tuckett, Q and the History of Early Christianity: Studies on Q (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1996), 199, 201. Richard Horskey with Jonathan A. Draper, Whoever Hears You Hears Me: Prophets, Performance, and Tradition in Q (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999), 299. George W. E. Nickelsburg, “Revealed Wisdom as a Criterion for Inclusion and Exclusion: From Jewish Sectarianism to Early Christianity,” in “To See Ourselves As Others See us”: Christians, Jews, “Others” in Late Antiquity (eds. J. Neusner and E. S. Frerichs; SH; Chico: Scholars, 1985), 73–91, 90: “this attitude of superiority and exclusivism was derived, in part, from ideas and attitudes already present in the parent body.” Moss, The Myth of Persecution. Johnson, “The New Testament’s Anti-Jewish Slander,” 441, argues that the intra-Jewish nature of this polemic is “remarkably mild” compared to other writings of the period. McWhirter, Rejected Prophets, 7, notes how “Luke’s statements about Jewish rejection leading to the destruction of the temple make us uncomfortable – and rightly so.” Mark 6:4. Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, 84. Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, 64–116, surveys this theme in Chapter 2, “The Growing Estrangement: The Rejection of the Jews in the New Testament.” Cf. Justin, Dialogue with Trypho; Boyarin, Border Lines, 18; “Semantic Differences; or, ‘Judaism’/‘Christianity,’ in The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (eds. A. H. Becker and A. Y. Reed; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 73. Cynthia M. Baker, Jew (Key Words in Jewish Studies 7; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017), 4.

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49 Daniel Boyarin, Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion (Key Words in Jewish Studies; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018). 50 Reed, Jewish Christianity and the History of Judaism. 51 On heresy, see Todd Berzon, Classifying Christians: Ethnography, Heresiology, and the Limits of Knowledge in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016). 52 Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews. 53 See Justin, 1 Apol. 26.5–8; 58.1; Dial. 38.6; Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 1.1.2–4, 3, 23, 30.9; 3.3.4, 4.3, 11.2; 4.8–13, 29–34; Tertullian, Adv. Marc. See also Contra Iudaeos: Ancient and Medieval Polemics between Christians and Jews (eds. Ora Limor and Guy G. Stroumsa; TSMEMJ 10; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996). 54 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. 55 Cf. Martin Luther, On the Jews and Their Lies (Luther’s Works, vol. 47; trans. Martin H. Bertram; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971). 56 Myers, Jewish History: A Short Introduction, xxiv: “throughout much of their history, Jews were disliked in ways that reinforced their sense of being a distinct people.” 57 Cf. Baruch de Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Amsterdam: Jan Rieuwertsz, 1670) (ed., Jonathan Israel; trans. Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel; Cambridge University Press, 2007), cited in Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell, 166; Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction, xxiv.

Conclusion

In the beginning, there were two missions: one to the “circumcised,” and another to the “uncircumcised” (Gal 2:7–10), two social groups with different customs, habits, practices, and ethnic constituencies. The two “ways” were intimately related.1 Both wings self-identified as “the family of Jesus,” but the two were unable to integrate their communities, beset by the political conflicts of the Revolt (66–73 CE) and the deaths of the first generation of leaders (James, Peter, and Paul) (62–64 CE). Gentile communities adopted the language of fictive kinship in which all men are “brothers” in Christ, but what began as a matter of reprioritizing one’s family relationships based on common allegiance to God, became a new people (ethnos) that displaced Jesus’s original family, first in their leadership roles in the ekklēsia, then finally from Church history altogether. The success of the Christian wing and the progressive disappearance of the Jewish wing was mirrored in the shift from a Jewish concept of salvation shared with Gentiles to a Gentile concept of “Christian” salvation defined as non-Jewish. Paul’s occasional letters were collected and canonized within Gentile ekklēsiai, influencing both the dissemination of Jesus tradition(s) as creedal formulae as well as narrative myth. The story of the suffering-and-dying messiah whose death atoned for sin – revealed as “the mystery that was kept secret for long ages” (Rom 16:25) – was re-told as Jesus predicting his suffering and death. Oral traditions and literary representations intersected and overlapped well into the second century, but once the literary trajectory of the Gospel tradition developed its own authoritative status, it was the Gospels themselves – and not the putative historical events that they purportedly pointed to and narrated – that became authoritative guarantors of Christian tradition. This media transition (from fluid oral to oral/literary to authoritative literary) paralleled the sociological transition from its Jewish matrix toward a new social formation identifiable as Christian. Consequently, the Jewish Jesus who was once rejected by Jews would now come to symbolize and authorize the Christian rejection of “the Jew(s).” The Gospels inscribe the idea that “the Jews” rejected Jesus, in part, because he did not fulfill their military-messianic aspirations. The idea that the Jews rejected

182 Conclusion Jesus – and specifically his message of peace – is inscribed in the Gospels (Luke’s Jerusalem Lament, Mark’s figure of Barabbas) and reflects the violent revolutionary period of the Jewish Revolt (66–73 CE). For those Jews who hoped for the arrival of a David-like warrior-king, Jesus must surely have been a disappointment. The parousia-tradition qualified that disappointment by postponing Jesus’s Davidic functions to a future time, ascribing to Jesus imperial functions and fantasies of vengeance and divine judgment, although the continuing “delay of the parousia” (already attested in 1 Thessalonians) only exacerbated the problem. Jesus, however, could now be re-imagined as an agent of divine violence, making it possible to both remember and reject his rejection of violence. Jesus’s radical, counter-cultural “way” of self-renunciation – his way of sacrifice – was re-configured as a doctrine of sacrificial atonement, transferring the theological responsibility of Jesus’s death from Jesus to God (transforming Jesus’s self-offering into a blood sacrifice), and then from God to “the Jews,” identifying “the Jews” as causal agents in a historical narrative. Jesus’s first followers may have been Jews who did not reject Jesus, but they became inscribed in the tradition as honorary “Christians.” The concept of a distinctive “Christian” identity, like the term “Christian” itself, emerges as a result (but not the essential cause) of irreconcilable social, ethnic, and cultural conflicts within a Jewish/Gentile binary framework. Today the Jesus tradition is commonly recognized as both continuous and discontinuous with Jesus, Judaism, and the Law. That is, Christianity both received and rejected its Jewish origins by casting “the Jew(s)” as Other. Christianity’s “anxiety of influence” over its Jewish matrix is compounded, therefore, by its fascination with origins, an attempt to recover the original purity of the “Church,” whether imagined as a return to sola scriptura or the Enlightenment’s promise to recover the historical Jesus, liberated from centuries of Catholic dogma. A Jesus discontinuous with “orthodox” Christianity is not one desired by “the Church.”2 Haunted by the specter of rejected origins and nostalgically longing for its restoration, early Christian traditions came to see “the Jew(s)” as an archetypal foil. Christian tradition commemorated its Jewish origins, but the Jewish rejection of Jesus justified the divine election of Christianity as the new covenant. The Christian rejection of Judaism – the mirror reflection of the Jewish rejection of Jesus – created an intractable problem: Christians could no more erase their origins in Judaism than deny their own identity “in Christ.” The Christian rejection of the Jewish(ness) of Jesus was uncovered during the Enlightenment and the socalled “Jewish Jesus” is now a truism in Jesus Research, but there (was and) will always be something discontinuous about “the Jewish(ness of) Jesus” in relation to Christianity. That is, there will always be a rejected Jesus insofar as Jesus’s Jewishness is reconfigured within a Christian narrative. This critical recognition of Christianity’s continuity and discontinuity with(in) Judaism is crucial to recognizing the reception and rejection of the Jewish cultural matrix of Christianity. History tells us a different story: a Jewish Jesus, misremembered, but not forgotten, a man embraced by some Jews, and two missions, once intimately related, not yet parting ways.

Conclusion

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Notes 1 The allusion is to Michael Goulder, A Tale of Two Missions (London: SCM, 1994). 2 Bowman Jr. and Komoszewski, “The Historical Jesus and the Biblical Church,” 42: “The church’s only interest is in following and believing in the historical Jesus—the real Jesus, the real man from Nazareth … who rose from the dead. There is no other Jesus.”

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Index

Acts, book of 7, 44, 160–62, 164, 171 Ahimsa 59 Alexandria 11 anti-Judaism 11, 27–30, 33, 95, 101, 170, 176 anti-Semitism 27–28, 33 apocalypse (genre) 51 apocalypticism 42, 51–54 Apollonius of Tyana 47 Arnal, William 29 asceticism 42, 47 Aslan, Reza 56 Assmann, Jan 102–3 atonement 121 Augustine 175 Avalos, Hector 58 Baur, Ferdinand Christian 4, 160–61 Berger, Peter 87 Bermejo Rubio, Fernando 56 Bhagavad Gita 59 Boteach, Shmuley 32 Brandon, S. G. F. 56 Brown, Dan 48 Bultmann, Rudolf 94–95, 118 Butler, Judith 59–60 categories 42 “Christian” 9, 182 Christian identity 6–7, 11, 29, 86, 88, 144, 172, 175–76, 182 Christianity 9 Christian memory 43, 104 Christian origins, study of 1 Christos 2 circumcision 11, 142 cognitive dissonance 50, 57 Common Judaism 42–43 community, fallacy 4

continuity: of Jesus tradition 60, 96, 107, 124, 138; of memory 4, 103–4 contra Iudaeos 175 Cook, Michael J. 32 criteria of authenticity 28, 94–95 crucifixion (of Jesus) 97 cult (cultus) 12 Dabru Emet 32 Dead Sea Scrolls 31, 44, 124; as Essene texts 31 Desposynoi 8 Diaspora 43, 106, 116, 138 Dibelius, Martin 94 Didache 120 dietary restrictions 11, 45, 138–39, 142, 144, 170–71 discontinuity: of Jesus tradition 2–3, 29, 60, 62, 96, 107, 121, 161, 182; of memory 101–4 dissimilarity, criterion of 95–96 Domitian 8, 172 Double Tradition (Q) 61, 170, 173–74 Durkheim, Emile 48, 102, 116–17 Dying-and-rising gods 117–18 Eisler, Robert 56 ekklesia(i) 4, 9, 10, 12, 47, 55, 84, 88, 94, 107, 118–20, 141–43, 145–46, 156, 158, 160, 162, 164–66, 175, 181 election 27, 84, 176 Elephantine Temple 11 emotion(s), study of 12 Essenes 43 ethnicity 3, 6–7, 86, 137, 143; of evangelists 170–71; as fixed and fluid 7, 142 “ethnic reasoning” 6 Eucharist 84, 119–21

Index Eusebius 8 “eye-witnesses” 4 Farrer Hypothesis 174 fictive kinship 6, 181 Final Solution, the 28 fiscus Judaicus 172 Form Criticism 94, 101, 104–6 Frazer, J. G. 116–17 Freud, Sigmund 116–17 Garber, Zev 32 Geiger, Abraham 30 genos 6–7 Gentile(s) 9, 12, 107–8, 145, 165–66, 172 “Godfearers” 10, 145 Gospel of John 49, 106, 119, 124 Gospel of Luke 43, 58, 170–71, 174 Gospel of Mark 4, 10, 43, 45–47, 49, 84, 124, 172–73 Gospel of Matthew 43, 46, 58, 174 Graetz, Heinrich 30–31 Grundmann, Walter 28 Hagner, Donald 33 halakhah 44, 139 Halbwachs, Maurice 102 Hasidim 28 Hellenism 11, 84, 105 heresy 10, 30 historical Jesus 27, 43 History of Religions School 27, 118 identity 3, 86 Ignatius of Antioch 5 indigenous, as category 3 Jerusalem community 2 Jesus: as apocalyptic 51–55; as ascetic 48; as carpenter 43; and celibacy 48–49; and education 43; as Essene 31; family of 8, 48–49; and gist memory 61; and hatred 49; as icon 29, 30; Jesus Research 29, 94, 101; Jewishness 3, 5, 27–30, 43, 95–96, 181–82; as a marginal figure 5; as married 48; messianic conceptions 2; and the Mosaic Law/Torah 27, 29, 44; myth theory 2; of Nazareth 43–44; as nonviolent 55–58; as other 27; as Pharisee 32; as prophet 49–50; and purity laws 44–45; as sacrifice 115, 119, 121, 124–25, 182; and the Temple 45–46, 58–59, 120–21; as violent 56–60, 182; as zealot 32

241

The Jesus Seminar 2, 28 Jewish/Christian relations 11 Jewish/Christian schism 11, 83 “Jewish-Christian(ity)” 4, 5, 10, 106, 175 The Jewish Problem 33 The Jewish Question 28 Jewish Reclamation of Jesus 33 The Jewish Rejection of Jesus 3, 12, 31, 83, 86, 95, 171, 173, 175, 181–82 John the Baptist 52–53, 59, 62, 174 Josephus 52–53, 56, 59 Judaism, Rabbinic 11; as religio 172; Second Temple 12, 27, 84–85 Judaization 28 Judaizing 5, 29, 145, 170 “Judeophobia” 11 Käsemann, Ernst 51, 95 kerygma 84, 141 kingdom (of God) 53, 55, 61, 86 Kittel, Gerhard 28 Klinghoffer, David 32 Kohler, Kaufman 30–31 Krauskopf, Joseph 31 Levine, Amy-Jill 32 Maccabean Revolt 28 Maccoby, Hyam 56 Marcion 175 Martin, Dale 56 martyrdom 48, 116, 121 Mary Magdalene 48 Meier, John P. 5, 96 memory 102 memory distortion 3 Mendelssohn, Moses 30 Messianism 8; Davidic 7–8, 55, 182; and the Suffering Servant concept 33, 122–24, 181 Moses 103 mystery cults 118–19 mystery language 119 myth 2; of Christian uniqueness 2; of a Gentile Galilee 2; in New Testament studies 2; of persecution 2 Nazirite vows 163 Nerva 172 Neville, David 58 New Religious Movements (NRMs) 12, 143 New Testament, as Jewish 170–71 nonviolence 42

242

Index

oral tradition 101–2, 105, 181 Parables of Enoch 53 Parousia 54, 61, 182 Parting of the Ways 11 Passion Play (Oberammergau) 31 Paul 106, 118–21, 124, 136–43; as addressing Gentiles 136, 139; and the Antioch incident 138–39, 156, 162; as an apocalyptic Jew 141, 145; and the collection 160, 163–66; in conflict with Peter 138–39, 143, 162; within Judaism 136–37, 141–43; mission to the Gentiles 137–38, 157–58, 162; and the New Perspective 136; as rejected by Jewish Christ-followers 137; and the rejection of Israel 156–58; and Torah observance 136, 138–46 Pharisees 43 Philo 59 Pliny the Younger 9 pogroms 28 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) 84 Protocols of the Elders of Zion 28 Pseudo-Clementine literature 4, 161 Quest for the Historical Jesus 1, 101 Qumran (sectarianism) 85 race 6 reception history 106 Redescribing Christian Origins 2 Reimarus, Hermann Samuel 1–2 rejection, criterion of 96–97 rejection (theme) 85–86, 106, 174 Religion, study of 1, 27, 116 restoration eschatology 54–55 Resurrection (of Jesus) 62, 115, 120 Revolt (Jewish) 172, 181–82 Robinson, James M. 95 Sabbath 11, 102, 144 sacrifice 48, 115–16, 119 Sadducees 43 Salvador, Joseph 31 Sanders, E. P. 42 Scapegoat (ritual) 117 Schmidt, Karl Ludwig 94

Schröter, Jens 104 Schwegler, Albert 161 Schweitzer, Albert 1, 51 Shoah 28, 31, 33, 84 Sitz im Leben 94, 105 Smith, William Robertson 116 Social boundaries 87 Social conflict 3, 7, 86–88, 107 Social history 4 Social identity theory 86–88 Social memory theory 3, 88, 101–6 social rejection 3, 12, 83–84, 106, 165 Son of Man 53, 119, 121, 125 Strauss, David Friedrich 2 Suffering Servant (Isaiah 53) 31, 121–25, 166 supersessionism (Christian) 146 Talmud 30 tekton 43 Theissen, Gerd 96 theology 57 Third Reich 28 Toledot Yeshu 30 Torah 42 Totemism 116–17 Trajan 8–9 trauma (theory) 84 Trypho 175 Tübingen School 4, 160–61 Tylor, E. B. 116 Uppsala Congress on Apocalypticism 51 Urzeit-Endzeit 54 Vermes, Geza 28 Vespasian 172 violence 56, 62–63 Weiss, Johannes 51 Winter, Dagmar 96 Wissenschaft des Judentums 30 Yahad 44 Yahweh 84 Yeshu(a) 30 Zeller, Eduard 161