Christianity and Judaism - Two Essays

 I never understood the Christian attitude towards Jews as Christ killers. It always seemed like cover for something far less noble - like theft. One thing that brought me closer to Orthodox Christianity is it differentiates between the leaders of the Jews during the trial of Jesus and the Jews themselves. After all, Jesus and Peter and Paul were Jews.

Reading the Signs of Jewish Time: The Eschatological Elusiveness of the Apostle Paul (Marginalia) is an eye-opener.

Novenson then addresses “justification from works of the law,” an idea Paul references in Galatians 2:16 and Romans 3:20, 28 especially. What does this phrase mean and was it actually a common idea among Jews of Paul’s time, that one could be “justified” through works of the law? Mountains of theological energy have been devoted by Christians like Wrede to prove Paul is attacking the apparently Jewish idea that we can be justified by works of the law. But, alas, there is exactly zero textual evidence in any ancient Jewish source for this apparently very Jewish idea. The concept is nowhere to be found in the Bible (for example in the particular cluster of phrases dikaiosune, erga, nomos in the LXX). It’s not in Philo or Josephus. Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai doesn’t use it; nor do Rabbi Akiba or Judah the Patriarch. It’s not in the Mishnah, the Tosefta, Talmud Yerushalmi, Talmud Bavli or any classical midrashim or targumim.

So where do we actually find this phrase? In the letters of Paul. The phrase is a polemical invention of Paul to designate those gentile believers in Christ who encourage other gentiles to voluntarily observe certain acts of Torah, especially male adult circumcision, which Paul likely viewed as a violation of Torah because it did not take place on the eighth day after birth, the only permissible kind of circumcision (Genesis 17:10-12). It was a derogatory term Paul invented to refer to his gentile Christ-believing opponents who were misunderstanding, in Paul’s view, the eschatological positioning of gentiles viz-a-viz Christ and Israel.

***

As Novenson’s careful work shows, achieving an accurate sense of Paul’s writings is a difficult task. It is tragically far simpler to create a convenient enemy rather than face the complexity of history, in which Paul, like Jesus, is a Jewish teacher, thoroughly embedded in his broader Jewish context. Christianity and Judaism, as separate religions, are not to be found in this context.

There is also in The Epistle of James the admonition against faith without works. James also a Jew.

Uglier in its implications is Christianity’s Shadow Founder: Marcion, Anti-Judaism, and the Birth of Liberal Protestantism

Imagine a Christianity without Judaism: A bible with no Israel, no Torah, no law and prophets, and finally a Jesus without a history, revealing a god separate from and unknown to the world prior to Jesus’ appearance in history. In such an imagined act, one comes close to imagining the under-studied truth of modern Christian theology: that such a form of Christianity, a Christianity without Judaism, lies at the foundation of Protestant liberalism. This form of Christianity is not new to the modern world, but is associated with the “arch-heretic” of early Christianity, Marcion of Sinope.

In the second century CE, Marcion taught that Jesus was the revelation of an unknown god, a totally hidden divinity that had nothing to do with creation, which was the work of the god of the Jewish people, who were still awaiting their Messiah. The Jewish god was a god of justice and wrath, while the god of Jesus was a god of pure grace, who had come to deliver humanity – though not the Jewish leaders – from the world. Christianity thus had nothing to do with Judaism, and, as a result, Marcion eliminated the Jewish scriptures from the Christian Bible, and excluded all parts of what would become the New Testament that seemed too Jewish. In the standard narratives of church history, Marcion thereby inaugurated the formalization of the orthodox canon of Scriptures, making him one of the most important “heretics” in Christian history.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Marcion enjoyed a great revival and his thought became associated with the leading thinkers in German theology. By the early twentieth century Marcionism was so important in German theology that Franz Rosenzweig claimed that the form of Christianity to which he had been so attracted was that of Marcionism. When Karl Barth, the most influential figure of twentieth-century theology, published his groundbreaking commentary on Romans, Der Römerbrief (1919/1922), a canny early reader, Adolf Jülicher, compared his theology to that of Marcion, and Barth himself later acknowledged the similarities. Moreover, every major liberal historical theologian, from Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860) and Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889), to Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930), had a deep interest in Marcion. And during the Third Reich, the Marcionist view of Scripture – a totally de-Judaized canon – became the center of a movement to eliminate Jewish influence on the German church and insist that Jesus was not Jewish, but Aryan. 

As I understand Orthodox Christian teaching, the Church is the new Israel and the Jews are a privileged people. All the same antisemitism has reared its head in Orthodoxy, too.

More importantly, I understand more the Nicene Creed, with its insistence that the Holy Spirit spoke through the prophets. 

I thought about the God of Love not being the God of the Old Testament during yesterday's liturgy. It struck me that God loved Abraham, he loved David, and he loved us enough to give us free will. Yes, He is a bit rough, but He is not without love for us.

I am still left thinking antisemitism exists to give cover for evil under the cover of godliness. Strange, to speak of a God of Love while killing a people, driving them from one land to another, appropriating their work.

sch 5/12