I had a Facebook friend recommend this book to me, and the title certainly caught my eye, so I read it. It is called The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ. The author is Daniel Boyarin, Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture and rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley and a self-described Orthodox Jew.1 Jack Miles, the Christian author of the famous God: A Biography, wrote the praising forward. The book was published by The New Press, a publisher dedicated to publishing "books that promote and enrich public discussion and understanding of the issues vital to our democracy and to a more equitable world."
As I read, I was shocked by what I was reading. Here was a Jew, not a Jew for Jesus, not a Messianic Jew, not a Christian in any way—an Orthodox Jewish talmudic scholar—claiming that Jesus legitimately fulfilled the messianic prophecies. Boyarin also argues that ideas such as the Trinity and the Incarnation, central to mainstream Christian theology, are essentially Jewish ideas, not only hinted at in the Tanakh itself, but also believed by Jews up until the first few centuries of the Common Era. Here is this Jewish scholar claiming that ideas that modern, mainstream Judaism rejects as heresy and idolatry are inherently Jewish ideas, not later Greek-influenced, Christian ideas.
These arguments, on Boyarin's part, are actually injurious to modern, mainstream Judaism. So why would a Jew be arguing such things? In reality, it seems, from reading his book, that he wished to take a stab at Christianity by arguing that Jesus and Christianity were not original, but simply took their pre-existing ideas from Judaism. So, in a way, he denigrates Christianity. At the epilogue at the end, Boyarin discredits Jesus. He says that even Jesus' extraordinary nature cannot explain the perceived 'newness' or uniqueness of Christianity: "Taking even the remarkable nature of Jesus—and I have no doubt that he wasa remarkable person—as the historical explanation for a world-shifting revision of beliefs and practices seems to me hardly plausible" (159). Rather, everything that Jesus had, Judaism had (this may be an exaggeration of the argument), and so Judaism had a pre-A.D. idea of a dying and rising messiah: he writes that "the notion that some kind of experience of the risen Christ preceded and gave rise to the idea that he would rise seems to me so unlikely as to be incredible" (159). Jesus' followers did not believe that he had risen because they saw him risen. Rather, they saw him risen, because they believed him risen. That is, they already had believed that the messiah would rise from the dead, so when their perceived messiah died, they saw him risen, even though he did not. "Perhaps his followers saw him arisen," Boyarin continues, "but surely this must be because they had a narrative that led them to expect such appearances, and not that the appearances gave rise to the narrative" (159). Boyarin, after demolishing the central tenet of Christianity, then gives a footnote trying to be kind, relegating belief in the resurrection to mere faith: "Let me make myself clear here: I am not denying the validity of the religious Christian view of matters. That is surely a matter of faith, not scholarship. I am denying it as a historical, scholarly, critical explanation" (159n). Postmodern revisions of Christianity aside, how is demolishing one's belief as ahistorical and then saying, "Oh, you can still believe it [even though it is not historically true]," supposed to make Christian believers feel any better? Also, such an argument completely ignores the Gospels' depictions of the post-resurrection witnesses as shocked and surprised, certainly not expectant and eager (NBC's New Testament-based TV show A.D.'s depiction of Mary Magdalene and John as eagerly awaiting his resurrection despite the boo-hooing of the rest of the disciples notwithstanding). Well, what should I have expected from academia?
Let us move on to the more uplifting parts of the book. The first move of Boyarin's book is to demonstrate that the Judaism of Jesus' day (called Second Temple Judaism, the history of Israel from the rebuilding of the Temple in the sixth century BCE until its destruction at the hands of General Titus in CE 70) was much more diverse and pluralistic than modern Judaism. This idea is a well-known scholarly fact by now—in fact, the Oxford Companion to the Bible, edited by Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan, titles its article on Judaism "Judaisms of the Second Temple Period." Judaisms—plural. To give you a sense of the Judaisms of Jesus' day, consider that there were apocalyptic communities such as the Essenes, innovators such as the Pharisees, secularists and assimilators such as the Sadducees and the Herodians, as well as messianic spectators and regional variations in outlook and language (e.g., Galileans versus Judeans). Thus, Judaism was far from being a monolithic entity.
But Boyarin takes this idea a step farther. He argues that through the first three centuries of the Common Era the relationship between Judaism and Christianity was fluid and undefined. In fact, according to him, it may even be anachronistic to even speak of them as two separate religions at that point in time. People belonged to groups with a common identity, but the idea of Jewish "religion" itself, in the modern sense of a set of beliefs, a priesthood, and scriptures did not exist. "Everybody then—both those who accepted Jesus and those who didn't—was Jewish (or Israelite, the actual ancient terminology)," Boyarin writes; continuing, "Actually, there was no Judaism at all, nor was there Christianity. In fact, the idea of 'a religion,' that is one of a number of religions to which one might or might not belong," did not exist at that time (2).
Here is how Daniel Boyarin paints the Jewish religious landscape of the first few centuries: "There were no Rabbis yet, and even the priests in Jerusalem and around the countryside were divided among themselves.…Some [Jews] believed that in order to be a kosher Jew you had to believe in a single divine figure and any other belief was simply idol worship. Others believe that God had a divine deputy or emissary or even son…" Basically, Boyarin's picture allows for a broad spectrum of Jewish belief.
For an article-length summary of Boyarin's argument, see his article in the Jewish journal Tikkun.
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