Contempt or Respect? Jews and Judaism in Christian Preaching

The Tanakh, the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible

The idea that Jews and Christians have common scriptures is deceptive. It is more revealing that they have different names for (approximately) the same collection of books and that they order those books differently. Judaism and Christianity are now separate religions, with different reference points. The framework within which Jews interpret the Tanakh is not the same as the framework within which Christians interpret the Old Testament. Put extremely simply, Jews read through the lens of the Talmud and rabbinic midrash; Christians through the lens of the New Testament. It is also not irrelevant that Christians have nearly always read the Old Testament in translation; the early church, for example, used the Greek Septuagint. Matters are further complicated by a third designation for the same collection: ‘Hebrew Bible’, the title used within academia, where it is read as an object of analytical study. After the destruction of the Jerusalem temple by the Romans in 70 c.e., two new religious movements gradually emerged from the variety of Second Temple Judaism: rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. They both took the Jewish scriptures with them, each finding ways of reinterpreting ancient Israelite religion for the new temple-less situation. ¹ They grew out of the same heritage, and therefore there is a sense in which both are equally entitled to make use of those scriptures. Complications arise because Christianity rapidly became a religion of Gentiles. For Jews, the Tanakh is the record of their people’s history. The Torah, in particular, embodies God’s revelation to their ancestors at Mount Sinai. As the BBC programme ‘Who do you think you are?’ testifies, we have a strong feeling of connection with our ancestors, even if they turn out to have been scoundrels. And there are a few scoundrels in the Tanakh, along with some heroes and heroines, and many complex rounded characters. For Gentile Christians, however, these are not our ancestors, and therein lies our problem. We have inherited these scriptures because the first Christians were Jews, whose lives were steeped in them, and for whom they held the key to Jesus’ identity. But we do not have the same sense of connection with the people represented in the Bible’s pages – they are our ancestors in the faith not the flesh, except, of course, that they didn’t actually share our faith. The church fathers resolved the problem by following the example of St Paul, and resorting to allegory and typology. Although the Old Testament might seem to be speaking about the religious experience of Israel, they detected a deeper or hidden meaning pointing to Christ. This Christian colonisation of the Old Testament has at times had great energy and vitality: it has resulted in masterpieces of European art, and fuelled the emotional power of black spirituals. The leaders of the American civil rights movement were convinced that they were re-enacting the exodus from Egypt. ² Sometimes Christians have responded to the Hebrew Bible’s insights into the human condition without needing to ‘baptise’ them. But works such as Handel’s Messiah testify to the way in which the Old Testament was appropriated for the proclamation of the Christian message. The first problem with this is the sheer effrontery of the Christian insistence that Christ is the key to the Old Testament, and that Jews cannot understand their own scriptures. (Note that there is a difference between saying that the Old Testament is key to understanding Christ, and saying that Christ is the key to understanding the Old Testament.) The second is to do with reading literature that we do not fully own. The Tanakh records a people’s relationship with their God with remarkable honesty. The behaviour of individuals, and of the people as a whole, is at times deplorable; the portrayal of God has a fierce intensity which does not conform to ‘niceness’. But it is one thing to admit one’s own failings, it is quite another to make capital out of the sins of others, which has been the Christian tendency. The self-questioning which is part and parcel of wrestling with tragedy has been turned into accusation. Since we expect the Bible to be an edifying read, rather than a family chronicle, warts and all, we identify with the narrative when it suits us, and distance ourselves when it doesn’t. There are many problematic biblical passages, with which Jews and Christians both have to struggle, but Christians tend to press the ‘opt out’ button—it’s not about us, it’s about ‘them’. And ‘their’ mistakes, as Paul writes, ‘are warnings for us, not to desire evil as they did’ (1 Cor 9:6).

Traditional allegorical readings of the Old Testament are still to be found in our liturgies. Blessings over the baptismal water, for example, refer to the children of Israel being led through water from slavery to freedom. That way of reading the Old Testament, however, was dealt a body blow by the emergence of historical criticism. This academic discipline returns the Hebrew Bible to its original context. It extracts from it the contours of Israelite religion, from the Bronze Age to Hellenism. Pointing out that the prophet Isaiah was articulating a message for his contemporaries, not predicting events centuries in the future, has been a necessary corrective. But Christian preachers must deliver a message for their congregations today, not give historical lectures on the beliefs of an ancient people. Jews seem (from my outsider’s point of view) to have weathered the storm of historical criticism better, in that they have continued to value their traditional sources of biblical interpretation. Even in progressive synagogues, where historical criticism is taken seriously, it is not unusual to hear a rabbi quoting rabbinic midrash, or Rashi’s commentary. A Christian preacher who quotes Augustine or Calvin is viewed as being unnecessarily abstruse. There is no doubt that traditional Christian biblical interpretation was wilfully arrogant in its treatment both of history and, perhaps more importantly, of Jews. The forced disputations of the Middle Ages, which Jews couldn’t afford to win, are one of the many low points in the history of antisemitism. But historical criticism has cut us off from the roots of our biblical interpretation. Studying the Bible with Jews has taught me that paying attention to the detail of the Hebrew word play yields fascinating results. But few Christians know Hebrew, and, more importantly, Jewish biblical interpretation takes place within a Jewish framework. To slot it into Christian preaching would be a violation of its integrity. So there is a question mark hanging over Christian preaching on the Old Testament: we are aware of the deficiencies of traditional allegory, yet receive little spiritual nourishment from historical criticism. In the wake of historical criticism, and as a reaction against it, new varieties of biblical criticism sprang up: feminist interpretation, literary criticism, liberation theology … Many of them found rich pickings in the Hebrew Bible, because it is full of wonderful stories and evocative, searching poetry. Some of these disciplines have enabled Jewish and Christian scholars to work together in an atmosphere of academic neutrality. They have also provided inspiration for preachers, Jewish and Christian alike. But there remains the intractable fact that the Hebrew scriptures are not Christian. Do we ‘baptise’ them, as the church fathers did? I would argue that we can indeed use Isaiah 52–3, for example, in our meditations on Christ. After all, the beauty of great poetry is that it keeps generating new meanings, and has a life beyond its original context. Jews too have developed anachronistic readings of biblical passages. It would be a shame to lose the reference to the crossing of the Red Sea in baptismal prayers. What we can’t do is insist that the meaning we find in any particular passage is the only one there, or expect it to speak to people outside our Christian framework. The Hebrew scriptures were composed over centuries, gathering together potent materials. They encourage us to ponder on the intricacies and ironies of human life, from the personal to the political (more so, it has to be said, than the New Testament, which has a much narrower field of vision). Sometimes we might have a specifically Christian insight to throw in, and sometimes not. What is pernicious is not the detecting of Christ when nothing had been further from the minds of the original authors—I love Rublev’s icon of the three angelic visitors to Abraham transformed into the Trinity—but the idea that the Old Testament is an inferior preliminary, trumped by the gospel.

Jesus the Jew

Many Christian preachers have yet to take seriously enough the fact that Jesus was Jewish, and therefore that his thought and behaviour were inspired and informed by Jewish tradition, not a protest against it. He was part and parcel of the variety within Second Temple Judaism. Everything he did was, by definition, Jewish. And his attitudes did not come from nowhere, they were nourished by his religious upbringing. But it is an instinctive, unthinking habit of Christian preachers to draw contrasts between Jesus and Judaism. Here are a couple of examples from recently published Bible notes:

Jewish blessings were mainly detached and formal; these (beatitudes) are direct and personal. Often blessings were accompanied by contrasting curses; here, by further blessing. Usually the blessing was future; with Jesus it is right now. Usually it was conditional; here it is for all who will hear. ³

The Pharisees understood the Law to be a means to holiness by providing separation from the rest of the world. Jesus offers a radically different approach. … The minutiae of the Law are not as important as its overriding characteristics: love, mercy and justice. ⁴

For a long time New Testament scholarship applied a ‘criterion of dissimilarity’, whereby a saying of Jesus was only judged authentic if it was dissimilar to anything in contemporary Judaism. ⁵ That has now been swept away, and there is a much better appreciation among scholars of Jesus’ Jewishness (as well as a much better appreciation of first century Judaism generally). But to what extent has that filtered down to the pulpit? ⁶ The gospels contain many stories of controversy. But discussion and debate, sometimes heated, have always been part of Judaism. The Talmud tells of Rabbi Dosa ben Harkinas disagreeing with his younger brother, Jonathan, over a legal issue, and calling him ‘the first-born of Satan’ (it is worth noting that ‘first-born of Satan’ (בכור שטן), ‘younger brother’ (אח קטן) and ‘Jonathan’ (יונתן) all rhyme in Hebrew, and have a similar rhythm). ⁷ Here is the way in which Christians tend to describe disputes between Jesus and his contemporaries:

Jesus is challenged: ‘Why aren’t your disciples following the letter of the Law?’ His followers walk innocently through fields on the Sabbath, plucking grains to eat. The religious ‘police’ come and lay down the law, telling Jesus his disciples’ actions are forbidden. They confront Jesus and complain: change is a problem. Jesus accepts the challenge and trumps them; they have no comeback. ⁸

Compare that with Clive Lawton’s description of reading the New Testament for the first time:

One weekend, going at the same pace as an orthodox Jew says his prayers or anyone might read a light novel on holiday, I whizzed through the Book. It was so Jewish! The arguments, the examples, the proofs, the preoccupations —I recognised them all as belonging more to my world than anything I had yet identified as Christian. … I recognised the pleasure in argument and verbal honing, the clever use of prooftexts, the camaraderie and generosity underlying disagreements, as the rabbis call them, for the sake of Heaven. … Passions ran high in those days. Religious details mattered. And they still do. When I read the account of Jesus being expelled from the synagogue for preaching something the crowd didn’t like, I didn’t even realise this was supposed to be controversial. I bet the Jewish Jesus—the one I recognise—would have been back the following week arguing the toss all over again. ⁹

Many of the controversy stories in the synoptic gospels concern Jesus and the Pharisees. It is very likely that after the destruction of the temple, as the fortunes and influence of other Jewish groups, such as the Sadducees or Essenes, declined, the main rivals to Jesus’ followers were the Pharisees. Too many Christian preachers take the gospels’ descriptions of Pharisees at face value, as objective fact; failing to realise that they are polemical attacks, reflecting the context in which the gospels were written rather more than Jesus’ own assumptions. The conflict comes through particularly sharply in Matthew’s gospel. A key tenet of interfaith dialogue is that people should be allowed to speak for themselves. Unfortunately, the Pharisees are not here to do so. They are in fact a rather shadowy group. There is no consensus among scholars as to exactly who they were. ¹⁰ Josephus, the first century Jewish historian, claims that the Pharisees ‘are affectionate with each other and cultivate harmonious relations with the community’. ¹¹ They also ‘simplify their standard of living, making no concession to luxury’. ¹² As a result, they ‘have the support of the masses’. ¹³ Josephus is not unbiased, he has his own axes to grind. But his testimony demonstrates that there is more than one way of viewing the same group. His evidence suggests that the Pharisees were popular because their interpretation of scripture (known as the Oral Torah) made Torah study and Torah observance accessible to ordinary people, and was flexible enough to cope with changing situations. Jews regard the Pharisees as ‘great spiritual figures, responsible for the development of the Jewish life and practise as it is today. They are seen as moderate, creative and humane religious leaders, and regarded as saintly exemplars of Jewish spiritual attainment’. ¹⁴ So when we read of Jesus arguing with a Pharisee, we should ask ourselves: Is there any need to carry on this dispute, and repeat the rhetorical insults, arguing with people who are not present to put their side of the story? Or can we talk of Pharisees respectfully, as people who took a different position, not necessarily to Jesus, but certainly to his followers, yet took it out of integrity? It is not so much a matter of knowledge about first century Judaism as of attitude and tone. Supplying more information does not necessarily help. All too often Christian explanations about behaviour in the gospels are heavy handed, flattening the characters further, rather than bringing them to life. A classic example is the parable of the good Samaritan. Jesus told a story which featured a priest and a levite. They were only ever characters in a story, never real people with motivations to be explained. But Christian preachers will insist on invoking the purity laws as the reason why they did not cross the road. It is a story in which authority figures do not behave as they should, and are shown up by an outsider. Jews and Christians agree that they behave badly, even if their explanations differ: Christians think purity laws don’t matter, whereas Jews (including Jesus and the first disciples) take purity laws seriously, but accord priority to saving a life. Even the high priest on Yom Kippur would be obligated by Jewish law to help the wounded man—his deputy would then fulfil the religious duty. However, since the priest is said to be going down from Jerusalem, not up towards it (Luke 10:31), he is not about to officiate in the temple, which is the only place where being in a state of ritual impurity matters. So purity laws are completely beside the point. Dramatisations of the parable in which the priest and Levite are replaced by a bishop and a vicar, or other such authority figures, are more faithful to the spirit of the original.

John’s gospel presents a whole new set of challenges. It obscures Jesus’ Jewishness, consistently labelling his opponents as ‘the Jews’. And in John’s scheme of cosmic dualisms— light/darkness, life/death, truth/lies—‘the Jews’ are on the dark side. The one exception, where Jesus does self-identify as Jewish—asserting that ‘salvation is from the Jews’ (4:22)—is in his dialogue with the Samaritan woman, which has been postulated as an early layer of Johannine tradition. ¹⁵ The low point of the gospel, from the point of view of Jewish–Christian relations, is when Jesus says to ‘the Jews’, ‘You are of your father the devil’ (8:44). It has been suggested that the Greek hoi Ioudaioi might be better translated ‘the Judeans’, rather than ‘the Jews’. ¹⁶ This doesn’t solve the problem, however, of the obliteration of Jesus’ identity. By the time of the final editing, the group behind John’s gospel clearly thought of themselves as in opposition to ‘the Jews’, indeed to ‘the world’ in general. There is some beautiful writing in John’s gospel, but its author(s) lived in a different context, and therefore we are not obliged to adopt its attitudes wholesale. In particular, our relationship to Judaism has changed. In the first and second centuries, Jews were an established, recognised minority in the Roman Empire. Their relationship with the imperial power may not always have been easy, but they were ‘a lively presence in the cities of the eastern Mediterranean’. ¹⁷ Jesus’ followers were trying to define themselves over against other Jews, yet were still dependent on them in so many ways, not least for the scriptures. Like rebellious teenagers, or the religious splinter groups we know from our own times, they tended to make dramatic statements. Let’s not forget Rabbi Dosa ben Harkinas’ slur on his brother: our fiercest arguments are with those we are closest to, and an understanding of the context is essential for evaluating how seriously to take abusive statements. Jews and Christians today occupy very different positions in relationship to each other, and we have the shame of knowing that John’s gospel, particularly that insult associating Jews with the devil, was exploited by the Nazis. ¹⁸ To use a domestic comparison, the gospel is best treated like a friend going through a messy divorce who is making outrageous complaints against their partner—the pain is real, but there are always two sides to the story, and it is best not to get too involved.

Can supersessionism be superseded?

Supersessionism is the doctrine that Jews have been replaced by Christians in God’s favour, and Christians have inherited God’s promises to Israel. Official statements by mainstream churches, starting with Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate, have repudiated supersessionism, often quoting St Paul: ‘For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable’ (Rom 11:29). ¹⁹ It is, however, not as easy to eradicate as one might expect. There is a deep Christian instinct to define ourselves over and against Jews. That was understandable in the early years. The New Testament is full of debate, spoken and unspoken, about the extent to which first the message of Jesus, and then the developing understanding of Christ, are in continuity with the traditions of Israel, and to what extent they are new and different. ‘How does Christ relate to Torah?’ was a burning question for the early church. It is not a burning question for us; but we still have to construct sermons based on New Testament passages which are agonising over it. The result is hackneyed contrasts between law and gospel, which ignore the richness of the concept of Torah, and miss the irony that Paul took his proof texts from the Torah. In today’s context, when Judaism and Christianity have separated, and each has travelled a great distance from their common roots, is it possible to define ourselves as Christians without attacking Judaism? Part of the problem, it seems to me, is our desire to find an overarching structure into which both Judaism and Christianity will fit. We want to figure out how God’s plan accommodates both. Paul was the first to wrestle with the question, believing, on the one hand, that God was faithful, and, on the other, that in Christ Jesus something new had occurred. How was he to make sense of the fact that most of his fellow Jews refused to recognise the new revelation? After tossing it backwards and forwards in Romans 9–11, he produces the image of the wild olive shoot being grafted in, and the idea that ‘a hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles come in, and so all Israel will be saved’ (Rom 11:25–6). In our own time, there has been much scholarly discussion about whether there is one covenant or two, rarely acknowledging that no covenant with God is an objective reality. ²⁰ ‘Covenant’ is a human metaphor, used to describe a relationship with that which is beyond comprehension. My own academic work is on early Jewish and Christian mysticism, a key tenet of which is that God is ultimately unknowable—no human words, concepts or symbols encapsulate the divine essence. I would suggest extending that mystic ‘unknowing’ to our relationships with other faiths—there is no scheme which will resolve the complexities and contradictions of religious diversity.

Judaism and Christianity spring from the same heritage, and during the first few centuries of the Common Era were thoroughly intertwined. Scholars are increasingly recognising how impossible it is to separate them out until at least the fourth century, when hierarchical religious authorities, who could erect boundaries and police them, came into being. Daniel Boyarin argues ‘that there is no nontheological or nonanachronistic way at all to distinguish Christianity from Judaism until institutions are in place that make and enforce this distinction, and even then, we know precious little about what the nonelite and nonchattering classes were thinking or doing’. ²¹ When John Chrysostom preached his sermons Against the Jews in the fourth century—sermons which James Parkes described as ‘the most horrible and violent denunciations of Judaism to be found in the writings of a Christian theologian’, ²² and which, like John’s gospel, were exploited by the Nazis—what most drew his ire were the Christians who had no qualms about going to synagogue on Saturday and church on Sunday, and who participated enthusiastically in Jewish festivals:

The difference between the Jews and us is not a small one, is it? Is the dispute between us over ordinary, everyday matters, so that you think the two religions are really one and the same? Why are you mixing what cannot be mixed? They crucified the Christ whom you adore as God. Do you see how great the difference is? How is it, then, that you keep running to those who slew Christ when you say that you worship him whom they crucified? ²³

Chrysostom, a priest in Antioch who would later become bishop of Constantinople, may have thought that this ‘mixing’ was despicable, but many ordinary Christians (especially women) did not. Who, therefore, should be our role model? As Jews and Christians drew apart, they divided up the ‘family silver’ between them: Jews took the hereditary line, the Hebrew language, and the halakhah (Jewish law); Christians the messianic theology, the Septuagint translation, and Philo, the philosophical Alexandrian Jew, who metamorphosed into Philo ‘the bishop’. ²⁴ And they developed different ways of looking at the world. A rabbi and I once asked small groups of Jews and Christians to study a Talmud passage together. Some of the Christians were outraged, because they couldn’t make head nor tail of it; they didn’t even know how to begin. The Talmud can’t simply be ‘read’; it needs puzzling over; and is written in a genre totally unfamiliar to Christians. Conversely, the concept of ‘salvation’ means little to Jews. As a child I was bilingual. When I spoke in English, I thought in English; when I spoke in French, I thought in French. I find it difficult to translate words, because there are few connections between the languages in my brain: I am either in one world or the other. Similarly, Judaism and Christianity occupy different thought worlds, and cannot simply be meshed together. But once Christians have affirmed that God has not rejected the Jews, they want to fit Judaism into their scheme of things. However, even when they produce a positive role for Judaism, complimentary and complementary, it is rarely one that Jewish people themselves would recognise. Who wants to be an ‘anonymous Christian’, for example? ²⁵ As a Jewish consultant at a recent Roman Catholic consultation on ‘Christ and the Jewish people’ observed, ‘Jews remain actors in a Catholic theological drama’. ²⁶ Christians often fail to recognise Judaism’s rich history since NT times, and are disconcerted by those aspects of Judaism which don’t fit into what they consider to be a ‘religion’, such as also being an ethnicity, making no attempt to attract converts, and identifying with a piece of land. I don’t recognise the Judaism I have been privileged to encounter—with its vibrancy and warmth, paradoxes and contradictions, poignant melodies and jokes—in Christian systematisations. The question should not be how to mesh Judaism and Christianity into a single paradigm, but how to make space for ‘the other’. How can we respond creatively to people whose world-view is not so much opposed to ours as on a different wavelength?

The Christian relationship to Judaism has often consisted of appropriating that which appeals, and dismissing the rest. It is reminiscent of those colonial explorers who brought back treasures such as the Elgin Marbles, or West African carvings, for British museums, all the while insisting that ‘the natives’ were backward and primitive. Recently, for example, Christians have discovered the joys of the Passover Seder, and have set about celebrating it for themselves. ²⁷ I’ve also noticed that Christian preachers have a penchant for stories about Hasidic rabbis. By contrast, little effort is made to develop a sympathetic understanding of Judaism’s complicated emotional ties with the land of Israel. How do we arrive at an ‘adult to adult’ relationship, in which it is recognised that each religion, and each individual practising it, has a hugely complex identity? How do we allow people to define themselves, rather than slotting them into our framework? That needn’t preclude exchanging ideas, or gaining inspiration from each other. Despite the best efforts of the Académie Française, words do migrate from one language to the other. But given the tragic history of Jewish–Christian relations, Christians need to be much more careful about respecting Jewish integrity, and not assuming an automatic right either to make pronouncements about Judaism, or cherry pick Jewish traditions we fancy.

Conclusions

Jules Isaac, the French historian and educationalist, coined the phrase ‘l’enseignement du mépris’—the ‘teaching of contempt’—for the interconnected themes of Christian anti-Judaism. Looking at his writings of the 1950’s, we can take heart that much has changed. Jews as a ‘deicide people’, the ‘Dispersion of Israel’ as divine punishment for the crucifixion, and ‘the Synagogue of Satan’ are no longer proclaimed from Christian pulpits. ²⁸ But that doesn’t mean we can be complacent. I have been wrestling with how to change Christian speech about Jews and Judaism from contempt to respect. As Christian preachers we have no choice but to base our sermons on the Bible—the Old Testament, which both is and isn’t the Jewish Tanakh, and the New Testament, which reflects the fraught first stages of Christianity’s separation from Judaism. Most preachers are not experts in Second Temple Judaism, and often miss nuances in the text. But a sermon is not a lecture, and shouldn’t be overburdened with historical explanations. So my plea is not primarily for more information, but for a change in attitude. A sermon is a time for proclaiming Christian beliefs, of which we needn’t be ashamed. There will be plenty we say with which Jews will either disagree, or view with incomprehension and indifference, the incarnation and the Trinity being obvious examples. And that’s fine: we are free to define ourselves and our beliefs. The problem comes when we start defining Jews and their beliefs, when we characterise Judaism in ways which no Jew would recognise, either today or in the first century. That is where the insights gained from dialogue are needed: we are to talk for ourselves, not for others. And we must remember that other people are as complex as we are —nobody is an object, a one-dimensional stereotype. We all have mixed motives, and other people’s positions have as much integrity as our own. It is not stupid, or heartless, to refuse to buy into Christianity, and see life in a different way. Even if we know that, we are apt to forget it when faced with New Testament polemics, especially if still reading commentaries written twenty or thirty years ago. So, my recommendations are: Don’t make contrasts between Jesus and Judaism—remember that Jesus was Jewish (as indeed was Paul). Any sweeping generalisations along the lines of ‘Jews think such and such’ are bound to be wrong (as the saying goes ‘two Jews, three opinions’!). Remember that Judaism has a culture of discussion and debate, one of the hottest topics being whether to be strict or lenient in the matter of halakhic observance. Talk of Jews with respect, conscious that there are two sides to every story. Even if you don’t understand why, for example, someone is disagreeing with Jesus, assume that their position has integrity.

Judaism and Christianity are now separate religions, with different reference points. But our relationship is complicated, because the first Christians were Jewish, we share common scriptures and there is a long and tragic history of Christians persecuting Jews. Therefore, it is all the more important, and all the more difficult, to establish a relationship in which we talk to and about Jewish people with respect. Even when they are not present.