The Jewish Gospel

One small hesitant step after another Jewish attitudes towards Jesus are changing. First there came the unavoidable acknowledgement that the historical person called Jesus was born and died a Jew. It was even admitted that he lived a traditional Jewish lifestyle. There soon followed the admission, however noncommittal, that Jesus was popular in his day as a Jewish teacher and might even be considered a prophet by some.

In the May 7, 1979 edition of Time Magazine, it was reported that an Orthodox rabbi claimed that the resurrection of Jesus was a true historical event. Pinchas Lapide did not become a follower of Jesus, but he had to admit that the evidence for the resurrection was overwhelming. The magazine went on to conclude that the Jewish reclamation of Jesus is one of the ten most important ideas changing the modern world.

The potential for a whole new encounter with the rejected Messiah may have moved forward with the publication of The Jewish Gospel: The Story of the Jewish Christ by renowned Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin.

“While by now almost everyone, Christian and non-Christian, is happy enough to refer to Jesus, the human, as a Jew, I want to go a step beyond that. I wish us to see that Christ too — the divine Messiah — is a Jew. Christology, or the early ideas about Christ, is also a Jewish discourse… Thus, the basic underlying thoughts from which both the Trinity and the incarnation grew are there in the very world into which Jesus was born and in which he was first written about in the Gospels of Mark and John.” (The Jewish Gospel, pp. 5-6)

In July 2008, a front-page story in The New York Times reported on the discovery of an ancient Hebrew tablet, dating from before the birth of Jesus, which predicted a Messiah who would rise from the dead after three days. Commenting on this startling discovery at the time, Boyarin argued that “some Christians will find it shocking—a challenge to the uniqueness of their theology.” In other words, Christianity is Jewish.

Boyarin, a Talmudic scholar of the highest caliber, is Professor of Talmudic Culture at the University of California, Berkeley since 1990, and is widely read within Jewish circles. Even that most revered institution in American Jewish life since 1897 The Jewish Daily Forward piped in on Boyarin’s conclusions that a divine, suffering Messiah is an essentially Jewish idea:

“Boyarin, in ‘The Jewish Gospels,’ argues — backed up by impeccable research and readings of biblical and apocryphal literature — that Jewish texts before Jesus had notions of an incarnated Divine figure in human form (the ‘Son of Man’), and even a trifurcated or bifurcated Deity. The notion of a suffering and even dying messiah drew from both Isaiah and Daniel, Boyarin says. And by the way, Jesus kept kosher. Ultimately, Boyarin says, ‘the theology of the Gospels, far from being a radical innovation within Israelite religious tradition, is a highly conservative return to the very most ancient moments within that tradition.’”

Boyarin doesn’t stop there. He insists that the concept of the Suffering Messiah in the controversial passage of Isaiah 53 is a totally Jewish idea. Boyarin argues unashamedly that the idea of a Suffering Messiah is deeply rooted in Jewish traditions and scripture, both before and after Jesus, and is not a later Christian interpretation of the text trying to “validate” the suffering of Jesus on the cross.

”The fascinating (and to some, no doubt, uncomfortable) fact is that this tradition was well documented by modern Messianic Jews, who are concerned to demonstrate that their belief in Jesus does not make them non-Jewish. Whether or not one accepts their theology, it remains the case that they have a very strong textual base for the view that the Suffering Messiah is based in deeply rooted Jewish texts early and late.” (The Jewish Gospel, pp. 132-133)

Praise for Messianic Jewish theology? Even The London Jewish Chronicle, the world’s oldest and most influential Jewish newspaper, had to admit that:

”If Boyarin is right, then Messianic Jews whose belief in Jesus as messiah puts them currently beyond the Jewish pale might have more claim to be an off-shoot of Judaism than we think.”

While The Jewish Gospel has stirred buzz in Jewish circles, no one can predict just where it might lead. Paula Fredriksen, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, made an interesting observation on Boyarin’s book in her recent article cheekily entitled “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” published in the Jewish Review of Books:

”Serious critical scholarly work on the Jewishness of Christianity, and of Jesus in particular, has been vigorously ongoing for some two centuries. Until very recently, it has been a largely Christian project, but over the past fifty years, in ever-larger numbers, Jewish scholars too have joined in. These three works—The Jewish Annotated New Testament, Boyarin’s Jewish Gospels, and Kosher Jesus—testify variously to this fact. That this work now increasingly finds a popular audience is an interesting fact of our cultural moment.

”Will enhanced popular knowledge and understanding lead to better relations between communities? That hope, at least, in part motivates these efforts. It’s not such a bad thing to want.”