Boyarin: The Gospels are Jewish

Today we are interviewing Daniel Boyarin, whose new book, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ, was published by New Press this April. In The Jewish Gospels, Daniel presents an astonishing argument that the concept of the Trinity was not original to Christianity at all but came out ideas that were commonplace in the Jewish tradition long before the birth of Jesus. Daniel is one of the world’s most renowned, original, and admired scholars of ancient Judaism. He is the Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the departments of Rhetoric and of Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley. Daniel is not shy of taking provocative and controversial positions. His work was recently alluded to in the Oscar-nominated Israeli film, Footnote, where it was the subject of an argument. He has described himself as a Trotskyist, anti-Zionist Orthodox Jew, a set of positions and commitments that has excited both exaggerated interest in his work as well as scurrilous public attacks (mostly by pro-Zionist Jewish professors). Let’s hope today’s interview will engender both.

Andy: Daniel, everybody knows that Jesus was a Jew. But in The Jewish Gospels you are saying something quite different and original, even revolutionary. Can you explain your argument?

Boyarin: When people say that Jesus was a Jew, they usually mean that he came out of a Jewish milieu. Some think he completely revolutionized that environment, while others think it was the Gospels that produced that overturn, making a Jewish teacher into a god. I am arguing that the portrait of Jesus we find in the Gospels (especially in Mark) is one that could completely fit into the context of Second-Temple Judaism in which a Messiah who would be divine and human at the same time is not a foreign notion. I argue, moreover, that there is nothing in Mark or Matthew (or probably in Luke as well –  but this is a harder argument to make) that suggests that Jesus was setting aside or abrogating the law of the Torah. So it’s not only Jesus who was a Jew but the Christ (and Christ is not Jesus’ last name but his title!)

Andy: So let me get this straight. In the early years of Christianity there was no real distinction between Jews and Christians. There just happened to be some Jews who thought that a particular guy, Jesus, was the messiah. And these Jesus Jews weren’t really all that distinctive within the world of Jews at the time. Is that correct?

Boyarin: Yes. Fairly frequently I’m asked by Christian folk why the Jews “rejected” Jesus. I answer this (as Jews stereotypically are wont to) with another question: Who do you think accepted Jesus, the Zulus; the Goths? Jews were expecting a Messiah—this is one of the central arguments of the book—and many of them, moreover, had come to expect him to be a divine being in human form or even embodied in a human. Some Jews who came to know Jesus were so impressed with him that they accepted the claim (if he made it) or made the claim themselves that this Jew from Nazareth was the one that they and all of the Jews were expecting. Not altogether surprisingly a fair number, probably most, of the Jews around at the time were more skeptical. Today we call the first group of Jews Christians, the second Jews, but then and for a long time, they were all Jews.

Andy: When I studied The New Testament, I was always taught that St. Paul was the person who really made Christianity distinct from Judaism. And that happened early on. Apparently you see it differently. When did Christianity have its irrevocable break with Judaism? And why?

Boyarin: In some ways it was Paul who effected the revolution with respect to the Torah that we don’t find in the Gospels. But it needs to be remembered that Paul was an embattled figure, marginalized and considered a heretic by most followers of Jesus for decades if not  longer. I would tentatively suggest that it was the entry of myriads of Gentiles into the Jesus movement, folks who had no interest in or attraction toward the traditional ways of the Jews that ultimately precipitated a gradual and finally total separation of the communities. One of the important arguments of the book is that the Gospels are misread as portraying Jesus as rejecting the Torah and Jewish religious practice; it was Paul who did that, and even with Paul, a plausible argument could be made that he intended this rejection only for the “believers” from the Nations (the so-called Gentiles) and not the Jewish followers of Christ. Jesus, I argue, defended the Torah against the reforms and traditions of the Pharisees whom he saw as substituting their own traditions for what was clearly written by Moses!

Andy: A lot of your book is a close look at the language of the Gospels, particularly The Gospel of Mark. I always thought that the Gospels tried to distinguish Jesus’ ideas from the Jewish thinkers of his time, particularly the Pharisees.

Boyarin: Yes, but precisely the argument is that the Pharisees were not “the Jewish thinkers of the time;” they were some Jewish thinkers of the time. Jesus, I argue, was much more conservative in his approach to Torah than the Pharisees who were descended from Jews who had returned from the Babylonian Exile with some quite new ideas about the way the Torah ought to be practiced, especially their notion of a “Tradition of the Fathers”—later on called Oral Torah—that dictated some practices that certainly seemed different from the literal meaning of the Torah itself. So Jesus was portrayed as being in conflict with those Pharisees but that hardly marked him off as in any way not Jewish in his religious thought, any more than the attacks on the Pharisees in the Dead Sea Scrolls make those texts not Jewish or less Jewish than the Talmud!

Andy: When you think about this, it seems pretty provocative. How do you think Jewish and Christian theologians are going to respond to it?

Pedagogue

In a recent discussion with a believer online, I found myself navigating his attempts to prove to me, not only that Torah had been done away with in the coming of Yeshua, but that it was actually wrong for me to believe otherwise. After I showed him how his idea was in direct contrast to Yeshua's own words in Matthew 5:17-19, he countered with the text of Galatians 3:23-26. His primary interest, though, was to hear my understanding of verse 25, specifically. He asked, "What do you think it says?" It confounded him to learn that I thought it said exactly what it actually says.

“But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian…” or pedagogue, as the Greek renders it. The role of the pedagogue, in the Greek culture of the time, was to protect and prepare the child until he was old enough to sit under the schoolmaster. Rav Shaul uses the concept of the pedagogue to illustrate that Torah was our guardian, our caretaker. It protected us until Messiah Yeshua appeared. It prepared us by showing us what to look for - what to expect. Now that we're old enough, so to speak, we've graduated to the next level. Now that faith in Yeshua has come, now that He has appeared, the laws of the Temple sacrifice, for example, finally make sense to us.

How many of you would expect to take a prep course for a college class, only to find that once the class started, the professor instructed you to forget everything from the prep course - or even taught you contrary to it? Should this ever happen to you, know that you're in the wrong class.

Messiah Yeshua expounded on Torah in hundreds of enlightening ways. What we had come to understand of Torah paved the way to receive His teaching - for He is the Living Torah, the very Word of G-d! We have now come to realize that the entire sacrificial system pointed (and points) to Him. Truly, because of His sacrifice, “It is finished.” Not the instruction of HaShem, but our sentence for breaking it. Our sin, as long as we believe, has been atoned for. Now that we have faith in Yeshua, we no longer need to bring sacrifices for our sin to the Temple. Not to mention, we don’t even have a Temple at the moment - and that may serve as some measure of proof. The sacrifices of the Temple, the regulations of the priesthood, the particulars of unblemished offerings, etc. are the laws that we, as believers, are no longer under. We’re no longer under the pedagogue, the guardian, in that respect, but have now progressed to higher learning. The guardian, in order to continue our education, has handed us over to the schoolmaster. He will take what we know and build upon it - not negate it. We, unlike the rest of humanity, need nothing more to point us toward Messiah. He’s right in front of us! We’re now to sit at His feet and learn from Him. The rest of the world, however, seems to have foregone education altogether, opting instead, to enter the world ignorant and try to figure things out on their own.

Many people, like the one to which I was speaking, would like to pretend that Torah has been erased. It's human nature, after all, to gravitate towards that which requires nothing of us - the path of least resistance. The problem with that is, now that we're in Messiah, we're supposed to be moving away from the things human nature causes us to gravitate towards (Romans 12:2).

The "lawless" view thriving today, both firmly rests upon, and has enabled the tragic history of antisemitism within the Church. With the influx of gentiles into Messianic Judaism over the first few centuries, it was quickly transformed into what became, under Rome, the Empire of  Roman Catholicism. The original Hebraic understanding, structure and framework would be exchanged for pagan ideas and, eventually, a Papal domination of belief and doctrine - even salvation - a true pia fraus. The Reformation that followed was successful in shedding many false ideas within Christianity, but it didn't accomplish near enough - and, as is clearly seen in history, only served to stoke the flames of hatred and ignorance toward Jews and Judaism. This prevailing and errant view in Christianity is less about what "Jesus" accomplished, and more about a legacy of distancing Christians from Yeshua, the Jewish Messiah. That may seem somewhat of a rabbit trail, but understanding our past relations is essential to making sense of the chasm we see today between Judaism and the countless Christian denominations borne of reformed Catholicism.

But, returning to our topic, if it were true that Torah no longer applied, there would be no more sin in the world, and no one would be sinful before G-d (Romans 3:20b). How many of you understand that to be the case? Further, and this is very important to understand, if Messiah Yeshua did away with Torah, with the instruction of HaShem, He is no longer Messiah - or never was to begin with. One couldn't possibly be the Word of G-d and nullify it.

6 Questions

How many believers, marginal or otherwise, will raise their children in the midst of some sort of quasi-religious environment, complete with all manner of traditional trappings and myth, only to have them later, as adults, either lose their faith entirely, or search endlessly for a way just to make sense of things? How many parents, who clearly only want the best for their children, will emphasize adherence to some semblance of moral ethic, and endeavor to instill a sense of right and wrong in the young minds of their progeny, but completely neglect kindling a fire within their young hearts for the holiness of HaShem, His Word, and a life lived on the narrow path of Messiah Yeshua?

How righteous would our nation be if those within Christianity would tenaciously fight against the overwhelmingly powerful force of nostalgia and tradition, dethroning the falsehood and atrocious error of Supersessionism once and for all, and, starting with how they raise their children, seek to move ever-so-gently towards researching and adopting the beliefs and practices of the first followers of Messiah Yeshua - and the L-RD Himself - the One that they consider their Master? How greatly would the the collective heart of the Jewish People be impacted by witnessing the "one nation under God" humbling itself, fervently returning to HaShem, and celebrating the immutable position of Israel in G-d's plan for the restoration of the entire earth?

Truly, that's all that the disparity in Christianity amounts to - nothing but spiritual blindness brought on by the elevation of tradition, nostalgia, and groupthink over the very Word of G-d - certainly nothing scriptural! What would happen if the Church embraced the entirety of scripture and calibrated itself accordingly - rather than calibrating scripture according to the various creeds, edicts and initiatives of the Church? World changing stuff, I imagine -- and wasn't that the goal all along?

Digging Discipleship

I can't think of anything better for you to read today than this excellent series from Darren Huckey on discipleship - Becoming a Disciple of Yeshua , Retaining the Message of Yeshua and Are We Misunderstanding the Message of Yeshua. In this series, Darren is unearthing so many essential principles that I'd have to consider it mandatory reading for all those who desire to progress from a believer in Yeshua to His disciple. While they're each essential reading, if you only have a minute, start with this one - awesome stuff, to be sure.

Darren, if you're reading this, thanks so much for putting the time into sharing your perspective and ideas on this with us all. Yasher koach, brother!