Dissident Dispatches

by Andrew Fraser

  What is Judaism?

  The problem with “Jewish Christianity” is not just the incoherence of the term; in a first century context, it also becomes a double-barrelled, multi-layered anachronism. Strange as it seems to the modern mind, “religion” did not yet exist in the first century AD. More specifically, nowhere in the Greco-Roman world could one find a free-standing belief system, a distinctive system of thought or practice, known as either “Judaism” or “Christianity”. Of course, New Testament scholars have spent decades happily discussing “Second Temple Judaism” and the various subsidiary “Judaisms” (e.g. Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes) supposedly found therein.721 Just recently, the linguistic foundations of that rewarding academic enterprise were badly shaken by the revelation that “no term equivalent to ‘Judaism’ (much less ‘Judaisms’)” in either Hebrew or Aramaic can be found in any document or text dating from the period between the second century BC and the second century AD. There were “Greek and Latin words that appear to correspond, namely Ιουδαїσμός and Iudaismus,” but they “have a different and peculiar history”. Steve Mason reports that “the Greek is used four times by one Jewish author in the unique situation of the 160s BCE” and only twice more in other closely related texts before the third century AD. Mason adds that “Greek and Latin authors mention the Ioudaioi and their laws or customs dozens of times, but it did not occur to them to invoke Ιουδαїσμός/Iudaismus”.722

  To understand both the historical and modern significance of the ancient Greek Ιουδαїσμός, it helps to understand the story behind 2 Maccabees where the word makes one of its few pre-Christian appearances. In the second century BC, the Maccabees secured the independence of Judea in a heroic struggle against their Greek rulers. They “were assisted by heavenly interventions while they bravely vied for honour, which they did for the sake of Ιουδαїσμός”. The word was employed in 2 Maccabees not as “a general term for ‘Judaism’ but rather” to denote “a certain kind of activity over against a pull in another, foreign direction”. The activity in question is best rendered in English as “Judaizing” and was undertaken by Judas Maccabeus as “a counter-movement” to the “Hellenizing” process promoted by his enemies. The Maccabean program of Ioudaismos was “not then ‘Judaism’ as a system of life, but a newly coined counter-measure against ‘Eλληνισμος [Hellenismos or Hellenization]”.723

  In the earliest, relatively infrequent Christian use of Ioudaismos it “comes to assume the harmful role of ‘Eλληνισμος in Maccabean literature”. Typically; the word was linked to calls for a “Christianizing” movement to counter “the dangerous pull” of ‘Judaizing’”. It was not until the period between 200 to 500 AD that Christian authors “did employ these terms liberally”.724 From the early third century, the terms Ιουδαїσμός/Iudaismus come to signify “the whole belief system and regimen of the Ioudaioi: a true ‘-ism,’ abstracted from concrete conditions in a living state and portrayed with hostility”. Tertullian (160–220 AD) played a pivotal role in this linguistic transformation. This Latin writer was the first to “use both Christianismus (4 times) and Iudaismus (about 24 times)”. Moreover, he used the former term only in juxtaposition with the latter. His usage stripped “away all that was different in Judaean culture — its position among ancient peoples, ancestral traditions, laws and customs, constitution, aristocracy, priesthood, philosophical schools — abstracting only an impoverished belief system”. In sum, Tertullian dismissed Iudaismus as “an ossified system flash-frozen with the arrival of Jesus”.725

  Some scholars claim that this linguistic innovation marked the emergence for the first time of both Judaism and Christianity as “religions”. Until then “there is no ‘native’ term that means ‘Judaism’ in any language used by Jews of themselves until modernity”. More importantly, “the term Ioudaioi is almost never, if ever, used by people to refer to themselves as ‘Jews’”.726 According to Daniel Boyarin, the “religion” of “Judaism” was “the product of Christianity in its attempts to establish a separate identity from something else that they call ‘Judaism’”. Tertullian used the negative image of Iudaismus as a foil against which Christians could define themselves. Their collective identity was secured by “the invention of Christianity as a religion, disembedded…from other cultural practices and identifying markers”.727

  Boyarin examines the linguistic origins of Christianity from the sceptical perspective of a “Talmudist and postmodern Jewish cultural critic”.728 He maintains that, in the absence of “a Platonic Idea of Christianity hovering somewhere in the ontosphere,” there can be no a priori reason to suppose that “worship of Jesus” should “constitute a different religion” when it began in first century Judaea. “The rabbis,” he writes, “introduced innovations no less dramatic vis-à-vis earlier Israelite, and even Jewish (by which I mean belonging to Yehud) religious practices but no one is tempted to call them a different ‘religion’”. Accordingly, he portrays the newly “[h]egemonic Christian discourse” as an effort to produce “Judaism and Paganism…as other religions precisely in order to cordon off Christianity in a purification and crystallization of its essence as a bounded entity”.729 Christian writers in late antiquity took a significantly different view.

  Was Judaism the Parent Religion of Christianity?

  The church fathers understood Christianity not just as one religion among many but as the unique spirit animating the people of God as they spread out from Jerusalem to the furthest reaches of Greco-Roman civilization. By appropriating the story of Israel from Genesis to Revelation, the church endowed the faithful with a collective identity. Christians became a new race distinct from other ethnic groups. In effect, the biblical narrative of Israel served as the mythomoteur powering the ethno-genesis of a Christian people.730 Newly-constituted as the Israel of God (Gal 6:16), Christians denied ownership of that mythic heritage to the Ioudaioi who were seen “not as members of the living culture of Judeaea, but as a homeless and humiliated people in a perpetual state of aporia who could cling to a few strange seeming practices”. In Tertullian’s mind, “Iudaismus ended in principle with the coming of Jesus and it survives only vestigially”.731 But even in their reduced circumstances, the Ioudaioi “of Graeco-Roman antiquity understood themselves, and were understood by outsiders, as an εθνος [ethnos], a people comparable to and contrastable with other εθνη [ethnie]”. For that reason, Mason contends that Ioudaioi should be translated, not as “Jews,” but as “Judaeans”.732

  According to Mason, Origen (182–254 AD) did not believe that the Ioudaioi of his time had shed “their geographical-ethnic character” as Judeans to constitute a “religion”. In fact, he held that, following the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70, the Judeans “now constitute an ethnos only, because they lack the cult (and so divine favour) that normally goes along with status as an ethnos”. He claimed that “God’s watchful care over the Judeans was transferred to those from the ethne [or gentiles] who trusted in him”. After the arrival of Jesus, the Judeans no longer possessed “those things they considered awe-inspiring from antiquity”. They had been “entirely left behind” and there was “not the merest hint of divinity among them”. No other “ethnos except the Judaeans alone has been banished from its mother-city and its own place along with the ancestral cult”.733

  In Origen’s day, Christians regarded it as self-evident that not only was there no “Jewish” religion that could substitute for the Judean Temple cult; neither were there any self-described “Jews” who professed such a “faith”. All those things awaited the emergence of rabbinic Judaism based on the Talmud. In that sense, Boyarin has good reason to argue that “Judaism…is not the parent religion to Christianity”. His suggestion that “in some respects, the opposite may be true” is less convincing.734

  Boyarin interprets the rise of Christianity as the invention of one increasingly hegemonic “religion” which in turn produced a counter-cultural resistance moveme
nt in the form of the Jewish religion.735 By contrast, he presents Judaism as an ethno-cultural phenomenon which incorporates much more than a religious “belief system”. For Boyarin, Judaism — now as in the first century AD — denotes not just “the religion but the entire complex of loyalties and practices that mark off” the Jewish people. He regards “today’s references to Judaism as a faith” as no less impoverished than Tertullian’s treatment of Iudaismus as an abstract belief system detached from its Judean cultural and historical context.736 How then can a leading Christian scholar such as NT Wright credibly contend that Pauline theology was an essentially Jewish system of beliefs? And what are we to make of the fact that Boyarin set out the essential ingredients of Wright’s argument twenty years ago in a book entitled A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity?

  Is NT Wright a Jewish Christian?

  If there was no first century word in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, or Latin for a religion called Judaism or a people who called themselves Jews, what justification can there be for attaching the label, “radical Jew” to the apostle Paul? Boyarin’s answer might be to suggest that the words “Jew” and “Judaean” function within linguistic codes as either signifiers or as the signified. Certainly, linguistic discontinuity has not disrupted the powerful sense of ethno-religious solidarity binding a twenty-first century Jew such as Boyarin to his first century Judean ancestors, either those living in Judea or those in the diaspora throughout the Greco-Roman world. The former Anglican Bishop of Durham, on the other hand, conspicuously avoids displays of loyalty to his own co-ethnics, past, present, or future. Both men agree, however, in their view that Paul was someone living “within a narrative,” a story about the exile and restoration of Israel. Wright concedes, as well, that modern Jews, as presumptive heirs and successors to ethnic, historical Israel, have a legitimate claim to co-ownership of this narrative.

  According to Wright, Saul of Tarsus, like other Pharisees, held “a worldview within which the primary legislation had been laid down but within which, in their own day, fresh work was needed” in “the interpretation and application of Torah”. In particular, “the Pharisees believed that they were required to work towards God’s kingdom”.737 Wright denies that Paul departed from the essential framework of that Pharisaical worldview. Rather, he reworked the biblical themes of monotheism, election, and eschatology to present the “kingdom of God” as “the whole world rescued at last from corruption and decay, and living under the sovereign rule of God, exercised through the Messiah’s people”.738 Boyarin attributes Paul’s eschatological universalism to the ubiquitous influence of Hellenistic culture among first century “Judeans”. In his theology “the dual nature of Jesus provided a hermeneutic key to the resolution of the enormous tension that he experienced between the universalism of the Torah’s content and the particular ethnicity of its form”. Paul’s unique character is established “in the sui generis way that the different elements — Pharisaism, Hellenism, and belief in Christ — are combined to produce something absolutely new”.739

  In his 1994 book, Boyarin invokes Wright several times in support for his thesis that Paul was influenced by the sharp distinction made in Hellenic culture between “spirit” and “flesh”. For example, he writes “that Paul held to the kind of dualism, which NT Wright calls ‘cosmological duality: the classic position of Plato,’ and identifies as a ‘mainline belief of the Greco-Roman (and modern Western) world’”.740 He would certainly agree with Wright’s latest argument that “what was central to Paul’s worldview was the fact of a new community which transcended the boundaries of class, ethnic, origin, location and (not least) gender”. Wright adds that in his mission to the Gentiles “[t]he markers of Paul’s ancestral Judaism fall away, as far as the ekklēsia is concerned, because God has done all the great things he has promised to the patriarchs, the things for which Moses, the Psalms and the prophets had longed and prayed”.741 Boyarin is obviously less impressed than Wright by the ethno-religious apostasy entailed by Paul’s theology. But, at least in principle, both scholars affirm not just the universalism of Paul’s theology but the ancestral kinship between ethnic Israel and the Israel of God.

  According to Wright, Paul believed that “[t]hrough the Messiah, Jesus, the purpose in calling Abraham, the purpose of ‘the Jew’, is fulfilled: God is rescuing the human race, and thereby the whole creation, through his faithfulness to the original promise” made to the seed of Abraham. He does concede that, alongside “Paul’s concern for the single family, in radical, Messiah-based continuity with the people of ancient Abraham,” there is also a “radical, crucified-Messiah-based discontinuity with the people formed by Torah”.742 Wright is, of course, well aware that mention of any such discontinuity conjures up the spectre of supersessionism, a charge he is repeatedly, if peevishly, at pains to avoid. To his credit, he does reject suggestions that Paul’s promise in Romans 11:26 that “all Israel will be saved” included “hardened” Jews, the discarded branches of Israel’s original olive tree.743 To eliminate any possibility of misunderstanding, however, he solemnly affirms that he harbours no hard feeling towards those cast away on account of their unbelief (Rom 11:19–21). He declares that “there can be no reason whatever to suggest that God has now finished with the Jewish people, that Jews are no longer welcome in the Messiah’s renewed family”.744 The door to Wright’s church is always open to Jews so long as they declare a belief in Jesus. What the consequences of continued unbelief might be is left to our imagination.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, even such a modest concession to traditional Christian teaching on the Jewish question rankles with Boyarin. He reads the passage in Romans “from the point of view of a member of that Jewish group that refuses to believe in Jesus and abandon our ancestral practices and commitments”. While acknowledging Paul’s “sincere passion for human (re)-unification and certainly a valid critique of ‘Jewish particularism’”, Boyarin charges that “since the unification of humankind is predicated on sameness through faith in Christ, those humans who choose difference end up effectively non-human”.745 In the nicest possible way, Boyarin underscores the determination of Jewish unbelievers to remain in rebellion against God. The timid response to such unyielding resistance coming from Wright and other philo-semitic New Testament scholars has not been edifying.

  In effect, New Testament scholars have established Jewish intellectual hegemony over the narrative theology of both Old Covenant Israel and its putative heirs and successors who now speak in the name of rabbinic Judaism. Accordingly, most established, well-connected, and ostensibly Christian scholars prefer not to dwell on the biblical and historical truth that God rejected historical, ethnic Israel, once and for all. We know that Jesus promised that God would wreak a divine vengeance upon the Ioudaioi if they stubbornly held to their “covenant with death” (Isa 28:15; cf. 2 Cor 3:7). One suspects that it is “for fear of the Jews” that scholars such as NT Wright turn a theologically blind eye to the apocalyptic moment when God actually entered into history in AD 70 to single out and pronounce a final judgement upon Israel “according to the flesh”.

  The likely effect of Wright’s work on Paul will be to Judaize even further Christian interpretations of history. Wright knows that it is both anachronistic and misleading to describe Paul as a Jewish Christian. Nevertheless, he persists in his description of the apostle to the Gentiles as a “stubbornly and intentionally…deeply Jewish thinker”.746 The fact is that Paul’s mission presupposed the transformation of the Ioudaioi, both as signifier and as signified, as a word and as a people. No longer was a man an Ioudaios because he was circumcised in the flesh. For Paul, the circumcision that mattered was “that of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter” (Rom 2:28–29). Accordingly, modern Jews “according to the flesh” no longer possess the special relationship to God which once characterized their putative ancestors in ancient Judaea. In an ancient historical setting, the term “Jewish Christian” is of little value; it is a moder
n invention which makes a much better fit with the philo-semitic project pursued by Wright and his charmed academic circle. Certainly, it well describes Wright’s latest gargantuan effort to smooth out the discontinuities and the ruptures entailed by the metamorphosis of historical Israel into the Israel of God. Not the least damaging consequence of his work has been to drive a wedge between the historical Paul and his Lord and master, the historical Jesus Christ.

  Were Paul and Jesus on the Same Page?

  The great strength of Wright’s book is that he demonstrates beyond doubt that Paul saw “scripture as the great controlling story through which Israel understood its own existence” and that he saw “it, indeed, as a story in search of an ending, an ending whose shape and content would not be in doubt (the fulfilment of the promises, the coming of the Messiah and so forth)”. The great weakness of the book is Wright’s failure to provide that story with a clear and convincing ending. He does, of course, contend that Paul was able “at last to read Israel’s scriptures with a sense of closure, a sense of an ending that made sense of the beginning (Abraham, and behind him Adam) and of everything in between as well”. According to Wright, “[t]he cross, for Paul, was not simply an isolated incident, the mechanism of a detached ‘atonement’. It was where the whole narrative was going all along”.747