Christian Ends and Origins
What Christian Origins Mean for Christian Faith in the Modern World
In the last three posts of this interruptive mini-series I’ve made a connected series of arguments. First, I argued that one cannot separate Earliest Christianity from the classical world of Greece and Rome: Christianity is Judaism insofar as it is Hellenism and Hellenism insofar as it is Judaism. It is a phenomenon of Judaism’s nested existence in the Greco-Roman world. Second, Christianity flourished as a kind of “Judaism for gentiles”: Paul’s explicit architectural purpose in forming communities of gentiles whom he asked to embrace some but not all Jewish ethnic distinctives was, first, the creation of a kind of liminal space between Judaism and Hellenism and then, later, the basis for the conceptualization of Christianismos or Christianitas as a tertium genus between Ioudaismos and Hellenismos, Judaism and Hellenism. And third, Paul’s ecclesiology was only successful because it is the one that survived: together with the Johannine school, Pauline Christianity thrived in the Greco-Roman world of Late Antiquity while the “Jewish Christianity” or “Christian Judaism”—really, the Jesus Movement as it existed among and was propagated by Jews, in Jerusalem, Judea, Galilee, and Syria—declined, first with the loss of James and his community in the 60s and 70s CE, in the midst of the First Jewish-Roman War, then as a consequence of the Roman ethnic cleansing of Palestine and potential backlash against Jesus-following Jews under the militant leadership of Simon Bar Kokhba in the Second Jewish-Roman War, and finally, as a consequence of the forming identities of Early Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism throughout late antiquity. Gentile communities valued Pauline and Johannine schools of thinking, read in their new sociocultural contexts and historical circumstances, far more than the witness of James and Peter, whom they reappropriated for their emerging sense of “Christian” identity.
The loss of these alternative streams skews our reading of Paul. Crucially, Paul’s apostolic colleagues—no less than James the brother of Jesus and Peter, Jesus’s chief disciple and apostle—disagreed with him on the most radical question of his ecclesiology, namely, the appropriate method for gentile inclusion. We might phrase this as a disagreement between the three not over whether Paul’s mission was legitimate or whether it accomplished something, but over exactly what it achieved. James and Peter, the evidence seems to suggest, approved of Paul’s mission to gentiles as divinely graced, and contrary to popular opinion, Paul himself did not encourage Jews to abandon Torah-observance: he merely forbade gentiles from adopting Torah-observance. Gentiles in Paul’s missionary circle who had abandoned their ancestral gods for Israel’s God alone and submitted to Jesus as Israel’s Messiah were well regarded by James and Peter as sympathizers who could be saved at the eschaton; Paul felt that they had already been included in Israel. But this is exactly where James and Peter dissented from him. The surviving evidence attributes to them a clear belief that Paul’s “ex-pagan pagans” or “eschatological gentiles” were indeed a people of God, called out from the nations and assembled around Jesus the Davidic messiah, but they were not members of the covenant of Israel and therefore not to be welcomed as full members, as Paul seemed to desire and insist. For that, they would need to convert to Judaism. And, indeed, James’s own words in the edict of the Jerusalem Council as reported in Acts 15:13-21, assuming that they in any way reflect something historical that might go back to that meeting (whatever it really was: the sources disagree) or to James himself, seem to assume that temporary admission of gentiles on the basis of faith, baptism, and observance of the laws for the foreigner (abstinence from idolatry, fornication, strangled meat, and blood) is sufficient for now in view of the fact that they will presumably be going to synagogue to hear Moses and the Prophets read, and will therefore be encouraged to eventually convert: for men, by circumcision and full embrace of the Torah. Paul resisted this as inconsistent with his own understanding of his gospel, and opposed this Judaizing activity in communities that he founded and tried to defend himself to communities that he did not found by clarifying the character of his halakhic reasoning, as he does in the Epistle to the Romans. Paul does not seem to have ever received official censure from either Peter or James as far as we can tell, even if the picture painted by Luke in the Book of Acts of James, Peter, and Paul as being fully conciliated and mutually satisfied is certainly interpretive spin meant to smooth over kinks in the earliest Movement.
So, to recap what this means: Paul’s novel solution to the so-called “gentile problem,” while unique and ingenious, and while it accorded with broader attitudes in Ancient Judaism which did not require gentile conversion, was not the standard first-century attitude of the Jesus Movement, per se. The leaders of Jesus’s Movement were happy to see gentiles abandon idolatry and immorality, embrace Israel’s God, and become obedient to Jesus as Israel’s Messiah, and happy to let such individuals endure as satellites of the people of Israel—the second chamber of Mark Kinzer’s so-called “bicameral ecclesiology”—but they did not regard Paul’s gentile converts as equal members of Israel and would have preferred that such people fully convert to Judaism if they were going to enjoy full rights of fellowship, including table fellowship at the eucharistic banquet, the proleptic experience of the messianic feast at the end-time as it was already being practiced in the common meal of Jesus’s followers; a parallel practice seems to have existed at Qumran, which also considered itself the “new covenant” of God and Israel, which was similarly forbidden to any Jew who was not an Essene and certainly to any gentile. It is difficult to resist the conclusion: for James and Peter, the “new covenant” was strictly for Jews; gentiles could be beneficiaries of God’s eschatological mercy to Israel through Jesus and could fare well in the judgment by turning to God in the present in view of the future, but they could only enjoy membership in the covenant by circumcision. Paul’s position, by contrast, was that his gentile converts, too, were members of the new covenant. And Paul’s position won out in Christian history because it was the last option left standing, not because it was obviously or clearly the “true” or “right” answer, in some kind of abstract manner.
The question of who was “right” in the first century generally is impossible to adjudicate without reading in an alternative concept into our historical data ahead of time: arguments from providence are notoriously susceptible to our species’ habit of reading and re-reading facts in our own favor, to portray ourselves and our values in the best possible light. But neither James, Peter, Paul, nor John could have predicted the outcome of the later shape of Christianity. (Neither, for that matter, could Origen, Arius, Athanasius, Nestorius, or Cyril, but that’s a different post.) Nor was the movement coordinated enough as a philosophical schola or an administered collegium in the first century to admit of some kind of uniform doctrine across or within its various wings when these people were all still alive. Paula Fredriksen has written, for example, in a couple of her publications that it is unclear what exactly James the brother of Jesus would have made of Paul’s claims that, among other things, Jesus was a preexistent divine being who descended into the world and then was exalted by theonymy to the status of cosmic Lord as Davidic Messiah and Son of God. If the Epistle of James goes back to James, then James does call Jesus both Lord and Messiah, and does look forward to his parousia; but what do these terms mean to James as opposed to what they mean to Paul, and would James have recognized his brother in Paul’s Jesus? It’s not impossible: if ancient, medieval, and modern people can believe extraordinary things about themselves, so can people in their retinue and even in their own families, and in fact they often do. So it’s also not impossible after all that James was the sort of Jew interested in the messianic and angelic figures of Jewish apocalypses and that he came to believe his brother had been one of those in human form. But we should seriously entertain at least by way of exercise that James may not have known of Paul’s Christology or, if aware of it, that he may have tolerated without subscribing to it fully.
We are accustomed, for example, to thinking of the identity and nature of Jesus as a point of agreement in the earliest Jesus Movement, but beyond the belief in Jesus’s resurrection and the attribution of various titles, honorifics, and eschatological roles to Jesus among different Jews in the Jesus Movement and the ascription of various Greco-Roman categories normally applied to heroes, demigods, and other deified humans, nothing like a common Christology emerges in either the New Testament or the Early Christian literature. It’s actually more likely that the loose features of a common eschatology were more common, at least insofar as the one point of continuity across the Jesus Movement was the expectation of the arrival of the Kingdom of God and the restoration of Israel by a returning Jesus, whether on earth (Jesus, Peter? James?) or in heaven (Paul). Certainly, the later Christology of Early Christianity owes its originating ideas to the world of Second Temple apocalypticism and messianism, in which Jesus assumes the role of the apocalyptic Son of Man from Daniel and Enoch, the Davidic Messiah, the eschatological prophet, the celestial high priest, the chief angel, the Logos/Wisdom of God, etc., but the centrality of thinking about who and what Jesus is could not have been for the generations of the first century what it was for those of the fourth. The Jesus Movement also existed in a wider matrix of Jewish society that was tolerant of its unique beliefs and, if aware of its founder (who was a marginal figure in his own lifetime), then often appreciative even if not believing, and at least admired its patriarch, James. The Gospels themselves witness to the diverse reception of Jesus in this wider society, with Jewish exorcists invoking Jesus and his power against demons even though they did not belong to the Movement itself, without censure from Jesus (Mk 9:38-40; Lk 9:49).
The earliest leaders of the Movement certainly wanted their fellow Jews to accept Jesus as the Messiah and to explicitly join their Movement, but just as they tolerated an array of responses from the gentile world to Jesus, it is possible that they were also basically comfortable with a variety of positive responses as well, trusting that Jesus’s eschatological parousia would be sufficient proof of his messianic identity and the final judgment according to works would be enough to ensure their admission to the Kingdom. Hardliners like John the Elder, who made a highly apocalyptic and philosophical Christology a sine qua non for salvation, appear as outliers next to the moderate roles of James and Peter. It is unclear on which side to place Paul. Paul is on the one hand fairly clear that judgment is according to works (Rom 2:1-10); he on the other hand says that belief in Jesus’s resurrection and confession of his Lordship is necessary for salvation (10:9-13), but it is unclear if he is talking specifically about his gentile audience (who do not already share covenant and sonship and promise as the Israelites do; 9:4-5) or about Jews and gentiles in general (the clarification that “there is no distinction between Jew and Greek” can be read as an explanatory comment for the requirement of faith and confession, or it can be read as an inclusive comment about the possibility of salvation for gentiles).
Doctrinaire Christianity is not completely unmoored, then, from the first-century Jewish and Greco-Roman world of Christian Origins, but it did evolve in communities shaped exclusively by the more “theological” interests of Paul and John, in a Greco-Roman context accustomed to grouping new religious and philosophical movements into “schools” and thinking of them as teaching a specific dogma and ethics as a path to transcendence. Christian theology is, as I said in one of the earlier posts, nothing but the application of Greco-Roman philosophy and rhetoric to the traditional Christian kerygma as it was received in, especially, Asia Minor, Alexandria, and Rome, which is why it is not incidental that the major theological competition of Christian antiquity erupted between the Catechetical Schools of Alexandria and Antioch. In Alexandria, Greek-speaking Christian philosophers, heirs to Stoics, Middle Platonists, and Jewish thinkers like Aristobulus and Philo, formulated Christianity as a philosophical school on par with the best erudite eclecticism, and especially of Plato: this is what Clement and Origen devoted their writings to, and the Arian controversy is seen in that light arguably a crisis generated within the Alexandrian school and by the diversity of Alexandrian thinkers, that only subsequently had profound consequence for everyone else. All of that—all of that which we deem so essential today to what Christianity now is—is so distant from the world of James and Peter, but also from the world of Paul and John, too, though it is heavily contingent on the (Pyrrhic?) victory of Paul and John over James and Peter in history.
All of this is hard enough to catalogue in a historical-critical mode of inquiry. But what should any of this mean for faith, for theology, if anything? I wrote some time ago that the greatest challenge to my own Christian faith is the delay of the parousia. There are days where I find I have a surplus of faith in Jesus’s messianic identity, in the profound destiny of the Wayfaring movement that has descended from him in the form of the various Christian Churches, and in the crucial significance of Christianity for the future. There are days where I find that Christian theology offers me a luminous vision of reality that holds my psyche intact and grants my mind relief from its mundane pathologies. And there are also days where I find that every and any answer that Christians have and continue to produce for why Jesus has not come back, no matter how intricate or strong, is in some way less powerful than the simpler explanation that Jesus simply has not come back because he was wrong and the people who knew him were wrong about him, and that Christianity is perhaps not what I think it is or want it to be. As I have also contended before, it is important to be intellectually honest about the contrafactuals of one’s faith, to examine the foundations of one’s worldview with an open enough mind to dialectically progress down every conceivable possibility for how one might be wrong, if one is going to have a faith that is critically resilient. And here, perhaps, there’s an appropriate caveat emptor: doing so will, certainly, leave one far less certain than one may have otherwise been. Critically examining one’s religion, one’s philosophy, one’s politics, and so forth will always leave one with more questions than answers when done correctly; and specifically in the realm of faith and theology, critical examination is likely to leave one with a significant degree of dubium, if not in God’s existence and goodness, then at least in the meaning and character of providence, the reliability of individual lines of bhaktic and didactic transmission, and the like. Christianity is particularly vulnerable insofar as it constitutes a series of historical claims about things that are not merely transcendently and eternally true but also about things that Christians believe historically happened and have past, present, and future import for the world; while I think one can hold to it honestly in a post-critical way, just as I believe one can hold to traditional theism in a post-critical way, doing so with intellectual honesty means holding open the real possibility that Christianity is either wrong about the originating events of its apocalypse or at least about its inferential logic proceeding from those events to its traditional conclusions.
To be clear, for me, none of this is tantamount to denial of Jesus’s resurrection. When I wrote about the historical Jesus, I identified four facts about Jesus that I felt fairly reliable in the primary and secondary literature: Jesus existed; Jesus was a Jew; Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet; and Jesus was crucified by the Romans on the pretension of sedition or insurrection, as “King of the Jews,” which in the indigenous idiomatic repertoire of Judaism is represented by “messiah.” To these I also appended a fifth: Jesus’s followers believed that they encountered him raised from the dead, vindicated, and glorified. I remain convinced that the most plausible explanation for this experience of his followers, if one accepts a classically theistic, idealistic, and panpsychic world in which extraordinary things are possible, things that traverse the miraculous and the magical, the preternatural and the paranormal, and given the historical data around messianic claimants in Jewish history and what happens to the movements around them when they are killed, is that they really did have an experience of Jesus as alive again after his death, from which they inferred that he had been raised from the dead (an idea for which they had no singular, common science or set of associations, which I’ll address in some other post) and that this meant God had justified his messianic identity as the apocalyptic Son of Man and the Davidic Son of God, who would soon return as judge and king.
But that’s the thing, the resurrection itself does not Jesus a messiah make: the interpretation of Jesus as messiah is an inference from the idea that his resurrection was an act of divine vindication, a retrospective look back at the kinds of things Jesus said and did in his life and the kinds of things people believed about him in view of what God had done for him. But, especially when one considers that there was in antiquity no singular concept of messianism or mechanism of resurrection among Ancient Jews and Christians, and our New Testament and Early Christian literature do not agree with one another on a single common idea of what happened to Jesus other than that he is no longer dead (but how? and what does that mean? etc.), the inference that Jesus is a or the messiah from the fact of his resurrection proves to be at least unstable. True: Jesus was crucified “King of the Jews” and hailed as messiah by many during his lifetime; Jesus probably believed he was the Messiah Son of Man, the figure from Daniel 7 and Parables of Enoch, which was certainly understood by many, perhaps him too, as a Davidic messiah. But does God’s resurrection of Jesus necessarily constitute God’s approval of his messianic status? Can God have vindicated Jesus’s justice, his righteousness (tzedakah), without necessarily demonstrating the veracity of claims made about Jesus or beliefs privately held about him? It’s not a sin in Judaism to think that someone is or might be the messiah; it’s also not a sin to be wrong about it. Rabbi Akiva is famously thought to have believed that Bar Kokhva was the messiah (and to have given him the name); Akiva loses no status in rabbinic Judaism for having been wrong about that. Indeed, at least if we take them at their literal word, all of the prophets of Ancient Judaism, both the canonized ones and the non-canonized ones, are wrong about a good deal of what they predict, which fails to come to pass in the time period they predict it in; that doesn’t minimize their authority for Jews, and it didn’t preclude the idea among Ancient Jews that they had been glorified at or after death or instead of death. Fallibility is an essentially human thing: it is a product of our finitude, not our sinfulness, and the Bible contains both strict and more realistic standards around how to recognize a genuine prophet, the latter of which include human fallibility in the equation. So, certainly, Jesus’s followers believed that he was the messiah, and they inferred that his resurrection proved it so, but it is not the necessary or only conclusion one could draw form Jesus’s resurrection. It is equally possible that God vindicated Jesus’s piety towards the Torah, mission of social justice, and prophetic obedience, his humility to death, over against his execution as a messianic pretender, without necessarily affirming the appellation itself. And even if one does take the inference that Jesus is the messiah to be the correct, appropriate response to the event of the resurrection, one then has to grapple with the fact that this is an inherently proleptic vindication: in the New Testament, Jesus is declared messiah in view of the future where he will exercise messianic roles; the bases of the claim are only moved backwards once one has already re-read the events of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection backwards into Jewish scripture and rendered the paschal mystery a messianic desideratum rather than the strange, apocalyptic novum that it was considered by the earliest followers of Jesus. Jews did not in general believe in a dying and rising messiah; Jesus’s earliest followers could sustain the potential disqualification of his death on the grounds of his resurrection and future return to preside at judgment and rule in the Kingdom of God. It is only when this failed to appear that the exegesis became more self-referential.
So, as I’ve said, that’s a major challenge for me to the sustainability of my own Christian faith. I acknowledge that there are ways to deal with it that can help make sense of the issue, and some days I find those answers compelling, and other days less so. But the other great challenge to my Christian faith, if I’m being honest, is the way that Christians have treated Jews and Judaism over the long history, and how this telegraphs out the loss of James and Peter to the benefit of the Pauline and Johannine schools. It’s one thing that Jesus has not, in 2,000 years, come back to restore Israel as he expected to do and as his followers expected to do, such that now the majority of Jews on the planet no longer believe in messiahs generally and would be very disinterested in a monarchical Jewish state (though the number of those that are is growing in Israel, at least, and for deeply troubling reasons). But it’s another thing that the movement Jesus left in his wake was so quickly, in terms of its overall history, co-opted not as a community bound by aspirations of Jewish revivalism and restorationism, but as an explicitly gentile, non-Jewish, post-Jewish, anti-Jewish phenomenon that has caused so much pain to the Jewish community. I respect Paul, and don’t buy the later polemical image of him as an anti-apostle that we get in some Jewish Christian literature from late antiquity. But I am troubled—deeply troubled—that Jesus’s own adelphos, Jacob or James, is so marginal a figure to later Christianity’s structure, such that the very inclusion of his Epistle in the New Testament canon required its own slow ecclesiastical hand-wringing to accomplish; that it has been canon law for Catholics and Orthodox for more than a thousand years to force Jews to abandon the observance of Torah if they desire to become Christians (now relaxed among Catholics, but by way of laxity rather than by way of reform), when the original question was how the Jesus Movement could possibly accommodate gentiles; that Christianity has done so much ludicrous evil to Jews and Judaism in the name of Jesus, Messiah of Israel.
Christians often like to brush this aside, for the same reasons we all like to brush aside uncomfortable truths about ourselves held up to close inspection, but there’s no sidestepping it forever: Christianity has been a misfortune of history for the Jews that have lived within its orbit in the Roman Empire and Western Europe. Things are somewhat better outside of this sphere: Babylonian Jews and Syriac Christians lived side-by-side under Zoroastrian rule in the Sassanian Empire, and so while the two polemicized against one another with gusto, this did not come with the actual force of imperial might to be able to accomplish any kind of real harm to Jews or Jewish communities (as far as I know, at least). And so, to Jewish ears, the idea that Jesus was the messiah is implausible not just because Jews don’t generally believe in messiahs anymore, and not just because Jesus didn’t fulfill an arbitrary list of prophecies connected to messianism (Jewish scholars as much as Christian ones are aware that there is no singular, abstract “messianic idea”), but because the Movement that Jesus gave rise to has been, no matter how Jewish it was in its earliest days and in its fledgling peripheries and in some of its essential concepts, overwhelmingly the face of non-Jewish persecution of Jews for most of its history. Mark Kinzer recently suggested that Luke-Acts presents Jesus as the paradigmatic prophet of Israel whose crucifixion and resurrection are meant to enact by sign the death and resurrection of Israel as a nation; and while that could be true, there’s no way to read that into subsequent Jewish history that doesn’t give the role of the Roman imperials to the Christian Church, carrying out the sentence with mocking glee. Paradoxically, it is reflection on this very mystery of Jewish pathos and Christian persecution that has helped to generate in the modern period the Jewish reappropriation of Jesus as a Jewish martyr and patriot, and, at least for Pinchas Lapide, the belief in Jesus’s resurrection as capable of inclusion in a fundamentally Jewish worldview, while denying Christian inferences about Jesus (unless or until proven true, in Lapide’s case—he was happy to welcome Jesus as messiah if he ever got around to doing the messiah stuff).
All this, not because he intended it so, but because Paul’s solution for gentile inclusion, when stretched out across a delayed parousia and well beyond the loss of a Jewish core to the Jesus Movement, ended up creating the necessary circumstances within which Christian anti-Judaism became possible. All this in the name of Jesus who lived for Torah and died “King of the Jews.” All this for Paul of Tarsus, a Jewish apostle who was trying to maintain a pluralistic, multicultural network of Jesus followers without demanding absolute ethnic conformity from non-Jews.
How can someone stomach that without minimizing it? There’s a feedback loop here: to love Jesus is to love what Jesus loved, which is Jews and Judaism; to love Jesus brings us directly into confrontation with the actions, then, of those who have historically claimed to love Jesus (and I mean not just ordinary laypeople but even saints) and acted to mercilessly destroy that which Jesus lived and died for. How does one know all this, feel all this, for example, and then gladly hail John, Archbishop of Antioch, as Chrysostomos, “Golden-Mouthed,” “saint,” or even “our father among the saints,” knowing that the same mouth uttered eight homilies Against the Jews, declaring openly his hatred for Jews and Judaism? No matter how much rhetorical context is erected around this and how much effort is made to try and make it intelligible in John’s own life, I find myself continually unable to square the curse that Greek Christianity’s premier homilist calls down on Christians who dare to observe any Jewish custom with my own experience in life, much less his description of Jews with the people in the Jewish community I’ve known, loved, befriended, and taught. I use this example by way of pointing out that anti-Judaism’s not a negligible aspect of Christian Tradition: Chrysostom, to stick with the example, is the saint that every Orthodox Christian invokes every Sunday and at many other times during the year, whose icon is painted on the wall behind the altar in many churches. I have heard his words weaponized against Jews and Judaism in homiletical and didactic contexts. Anti-Judaism is, as Robert Louis Wilken acknowledged squarely, an unavoidable ingredient in Christianity, though I would offer the reframing that Christianity itself is a reformation of the earliest Jesus Movement, not the Way itself. And yet even with this caveat I have to wonder: in what sense can the thread be maintained, if the only people interested in obedience to Jesus are those so disconnected from that which he most valued, then and now?
In my own case, there’s not really a resolution to this religious, even existential angst that is on offer anywhere. I can’t say I’ve made my peace with it, but I accept that saying all of this wins me all of zero friends. Catholicism has made some progress towards rethinking its gentile masses as a people of God, not the people of God, acknowledging Israel’s irrevocable covenantal status as God’s people, but mature thinking about this issue is still far away, and Catholic leaders are sometimes a bit too quick to triumph in post-conciliar relations between Catholics and Jews at the expense of really analyzing the new relationship from the Jewish angle. Some (but not all!) Protestantisms have trended the Catholic direction on this. Eastern Orthodoxy, by contrast—the Christian Tradition to which I’ve belonged and simultaneously with which I have the deepest sympathies as a Christianity—is seemingly allergic to abandoning supersessionism in most ways that matter. Judaism, for as much as Jewish scholars and thinkers have willingly re-received Jesus as one of their own, does not have a precedent of or protocol for receiving Christian converts who take nuanced positions on Jesus. It would not be possible, I am assured (I have asked) to become a Jew and accept Lapide’s position on Jesus as my formula of reconciliation for my previous religious life. Nor are the majority of Jews terribly interested in making more space than has already been generated for the reclamation of Jesus by Jews. Most Jews can comfortably ignore Jesus their entire lives and be none the wiser about it; most official halakhic organizations have what might best be described as a policy of distance from Jesus and Christianity in the places that matter, in on-the-ground Jewish living, and a policy of distance, even a culture of distaste, for Jesus and Christianity remains normative even in progressive Jewish spaces.
I cannot begrudge Modern Jews this distaste, even as it pains me to see it and know that it is beyond my help to fix. Take, for example, The Observant Life: The Wisdom of Conservative Judaism for Contemporary Jews, a simply massive compendium of halakhic reasoning about everything one can imagine, from daily prayer to lifecycle events to money matters to politics to family. Jesus’s name appears in the volume fourteen times, on eleven different pages; in six different places, Jesus’s name is mentioned in the context of clarifying the appropriate relationship of Conservative Jews to Messianic Jews (namely, in saying that the latter are not real Jews). In one section, Christianity’s official halakhic status in Jewish eyes as an ethical monotheism for gentiles with is clarified, but boundaries around how Jews may speak about Jesus or interact with Christians are also clearly laid out.
Let me be unequivocal: that kind of protected, vigilant attitude towards Christians, Christianity, and para-Christian activity like Messianic Judaism (I’ll talk about this in a second) is 100% Christianity’s fault. Christian appeals to the fact that most of Christianity’s major ideas that have proved so alienating for the majority of Jews, including ideas like the Trinity and the Incarnation, are in fact rooted in Second Temple Jewish texts, traditions, and precedents are beside the point. However Jewish the major components of Christian believing and behaving are in their roots, Christianity has historically so predicated itself as anti-Judaism, as replacing Judaism, that Jewish Tradition has come to see these things as clear threats to Jewishness, and one can hardly blame that protective instinct given what any degree of flirtation with Christianity has actually meant for Jews throughout their history. So, for example, while I find The Observant Life’s insistences that, among other things, Christianity’s association of Jesus with the divine, the belief in Jesus’s divine nature, and the prospect of the Trinity are all fundamentally incoherent to Judaism a bit simplistic if one means to talk about Judaism as a transhistorical phenomenon that once included the nascent Jesus Movement, I cannot argue with the logic that sees Judaism and Christianity as now hermetically sealed against one another, chiefly for the safety and flourishing of Judaism as an ethnoreligious civilization.
What of Messianic Judaism? It’s a big, diverse tent, and generally far more complicated than either Christians or Jews (like the authors and editors of the halakhic compilation cited above) like to admit. Its historical origins I mentioned in passing in a previous article; its current state is a challenged one given the values of the movement’s architects, with not all or even most Messianic Jews yet requiring Torah observance even for Jewish members, and with not a few congregations mostly consisting of gentiles with evangelical Protestant proclivities. Which is to say, Messianic Judaism has the potential to prove to be a place where the Church and Judaism can restore relations more fully, but it has yet to manifest that potential openly, or to reach maturity in reflecting modern Jewish pluralism in its movement the same way that the ancient Jesus Movement reflected ancient Jewish pluralism. (Where are the Conservative, Reform, and Orthodox Messianics? Where are the Messianics that embrace the same kind of cosmopolitan ideals that most Modern Jews do? etc.)
Indeed, Messianic Jewish theology is only just, seemingly, coming into its own, and has had to renegotiate the majority of both its Jewish and Christian inheritances in a context where Messianics themselves are not acknowledged as Jews (or only as apostates) by virtually all contemporary Judaisms (which is a remarkable thing given how many disagreements there are between Jews of distinct persuasions: one thing everyone can agree on, it seems, is that Jews don’t believe in Jesus, and so those who do believe in Jesus are not Jews. Let Christian readers sit with that for a minute, minding the magnitude of their ancestors’ sins in shaping Jewish-Christian relations). As Dan Cohn-Sherbok once suggested, a way in which Messianic Judaism might begin to repair that attitude among other Jews would be by matching mainstream Jewish beliefs about Judaism’s relation to the nations of the world by offering the possibility of conversion: while Jews do not in general believe that non-Jews have to be Jews to be judged favorably by God, conversion does express at the highest point the idea that the covenant God gave to Israel is really for everyone, and that all the nations can become children of Abraham by accepting not only Abraham’s faith but also the covenant given to him, Isaac, Jacob, and through Moses to their descendants. But on this one point, Messianic Judaism most resembles Christianity in following the Pauline halakha over the Jacobean and the Petrine: forbidding gentile conversion to Judaism.
If the reconstruction of Peter and James I’ve mentioned previously holds water, this is a bit ironic, given that conversion was definitely their ultimate offer (expectation?) for solving the gentile problem: their voices are still audible in though drowned out by the literature of Paul and Luke. For modern Messianic Jews, this deepens the perception among traditional Jews that they are, at best, apostates and, at worst, not really Jews at all: certainly, this is such a minority attitude within Judaism that one basically only finds it in ancient pseudepigraphal texts, and some of Judaism’s most luminous sages are either converts or children of converts. Moreover, the Messianic habit of reading scripture seems suspiciously to other Jews like simply a set of Christian hermeneutical assumptions. The opportunity of Messianic Judaism is in its ability to embrace both the apostolic heritage and the rabbinic heritage, and to engage in the kind of dialectical reasoning that characterizes both anthologies. So it strikes me as methodologically odd for Messianics to regard Paul’s answer to the gentile problem as final when the New Testament preserves distinct attitudes towards the question, and when we can historically reconstruct those attitudes in ways that give us ample reason to mitigate the stature of Paul’s perspective, outsized by the survival of his letters at the expense of the mainstream community. Just as the Mishnah and the Talmudim preserve the attitudes of multiple rabbis, and Jewish readers are to hear all sides of an issue and join their own voices, experiences, and perspectives to interpreting texts and ruling on matters of life experience, it seems to me that modern Messianic Jews could also regard Paul as indeed divinely commissioned to gentiles without necessarily buying Paul’s understanding of Jew-gentile relations as final. After all, that’s what James and Peter did.
I offer no final resolution on this dilemma, of whether it is really possible to fulfill the Jesus Movement’s original intentions, or even desirable to. There are many Christian readers who will thank God that Paul “won,” historically speaking; there are many Jewish readers who may feel similarly pleased that Christianity and Judaism are now quite separate things. The question is a heady one: of whether providence was behind the evolution of gentile Christianity by way of vindication above the Jacobean and Petrine streams of the movement’s Jewish core (a thing I do not believe), or behind the continuation of Christianity among gentiles in view of a future restoration of Jewish followers of Jesus (a thing I can find plausible, some days), or if providence simply doesn’t favor Christianity in any specific way, but tolerates it in view of a future where something else will take priority (Judaism? Islam? A kind of nondual syncretic religion that does not yet exist?). Indeed, even from within a Christian read of history, Christians are supposed to understand themselves provisionally in this way: Christianity is not the messianic Kingdom of God, though it can be thought of as a sacrament of that Kingdom, a sign that makes it partially present (but also partially obscured). “It doth not yet appear what we shall be” (1 Jn 3:2). We are, like Jesus and the apostles, “innocent of the future,” as Paula Fredriksen puts it: even if we are prophets and seers, we see only “in a glass darkly” (1 Cor 13:12), and there comes a day far off where prophecies are swallowed up in love. But it’s also a personal question, one that individual Christians have to face when critically examining the foundations of their faith: how attached am I to the form of my religion? Would I ever be willing to change for something I felt was truer, or more authentic in some way? Do I need to? Does God care about my religious identity more than about my ethical actions? I think honest answers can fall on either side of those questions.
I realize it is a bit scandalous for Christians to face the juncture as I describe it: that any providential argument for Christianity’s development is counterpointed by the contingencies of history in a way that complicate all our inferences, that undermine our ability to have certainty about what exactly this thing is or is for. I do not doubt that Christianity is a real path to knowing God, both in the abstract (Christian philosophy at its best describes God in ways comparable and compatible with the ways that Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism all do) and in the “personal” (at a minimum, because God is “everywhere present, filling all things”). I do not doubt that Jesus is really, for Christians (and I am one), the human face of God and the divine face of humanity, and that in some sense if it was providentially necessary that Jewish-style ethical monotheism become normative among the nations a human face for God was going to be required (it’s simply too integral to how most people have historically envisioned the divine, as one of us, and understood human potential, as susceptible to divinity). I do not doubt that billions of people have experienced God’s Spirit (however defined and described) and the gift of divine grace in Jesus’s Name. Unpacking Christian Origins in a critical matter is not quite the same as undermining the meaningful character of one’s real experiences of their religion. Those are something inalienable, no matter what Christianity ultimately is.
What I struggle with, as a scholar and a person of faith, is the Christian interpretation of those truths as vindication of Christianity’s truth claims in toto, when so many other inferential possibilities offer themselves, some of them near to Christian claims, some of them far from them. Maybe Christianity as it evolved is sincerely the new covenant, as the Pauline and Johannine schools felt; but it seems more likely, from a neutral point of view, that Christianity is the survival of the original Jesus Movement in its furthest peripheries, and in fact the true new covenant was the community of James and Peter, if it is to be associated with the Jesus Movement at all. Perhaps contemporary Messianic Jews succeed that ancient community, but if so, there is clearly a great deal of work to be done to make Messianic Judaism both a mature, functional Judaism, recognizable to other Judaisms as such (if such is possible), as well as more deeply rooted in what we can know about the various streams of the Jesus Movement in antiquity. Perhaps, though, the more straightforward reading is Maimonides’s, that Christianity is tolerated by God because it spreads ethical monotheism and messianism among the nations, as does Islam; if this is so, hopefully Pinchas Lapide’s more generous take on this idea, acknowledging Jesus’s pious Judaism and at least open to the idea that God vindicated him by raising him from the dead, can win more approval in Jewish spaces, so that Christians might gradually find themselves drawn to fuller truth and embrace of Judaism without so big an ask as to reject the entirety of their previous religious experience as illegitimate. Or perhaps Islam’s understanding of Christianity as a proleptic covenant on the way to the final prophetic authority of Muhammad, now outmoded, will prove true eventually; or perhaps Christianity is destined to disappear together with all these faiths in the name of some other thing too horizontally distant to now perceive. My point is really just that we cannot know. And here I find myself relying on the principles by which the authors of The Observant Life structure their volume, long ago iterated by the Prophet Micah: “to love mercy, to do justice, and to walk humbly with your God” (Mic 6:8), hoping that whatever is right or wrong in matters of theology, whatever sins or suffering stain one’s tradition or community, whatever is unresolved in this life will be vindicated by God hereafter.
I so appreciate your honesty and your candor on what you find to be the "the greatest challenge to [your] own Christian faith." You are not the only person I know for whom the delay of the parousia is an enormous issue; my own brother took a degree in religious studies (under Richard Horsley, as it happens), discovered the intensity with which early followers of the Way anticipated the *parousia*, noticed that it had not occurred these last two millenia, and promptly left the Christian faith forever.
My stumbling blocks are very different (or perhaps not so different ultimately). It's the problem of evil that is, for me, the hardest of all matters. In my darkest moments, it is the suffering of the world that tempts me to go the way of my brother. And like you, I've sought out and heard lots of counterarguments and opposing views.
I just wanted to say, though, that the resurrection as *vindication* of the message and of the status of Jesus as messiah (and whatever else it may validate) has never been very important or compelling to me. For me, the resurrection is precisely the moment at which our gravest misunderstandings are revealed. The resurrection doesn't validate the message (or the messianism, or the apocalypticism), so much as recast all of our intuitive notions about these matters into something entirely contrary to anyone's expectations then or now -- a reconfiguration that really did and does require *metanoia* in the most literal sense. To me, the revelation of (and the revelation that is) Jesus could not be more like the theophanies and divine interventions of his ancestors, who again and again find that their expectations of what God should be and do is entirely wrong.
I suppose such an idea commits me to the possibility that the New Testament at various moments gets the Gospel wrong, which sounds like a perilous hermeneutical position. But well, here I am.
On your second point, I can only say that few of us are as troubled and embarrassed by this as we should be (myself included), and it is bracing to see it stated so eloquently.
I am taking a class this semester on Jewish mysticism (basically Kabbalah) and I was intrigued by what my professor said that some Kabbalists (possibly of the Lurianic stripe; he didn't mention which stream specifically) tried to articulate a system that would be compatible with Christianity with the possible purpose of building bridges between the two religions. This would certainly make sense of the fact that the Kabbalists held ideas that were very similar to Christian ones like the shattering of the vessels, an idea analogous to the Fall (of course, this could just have been taken from Neoplatonism).
You mention that Messianic Judaism might be a possible path in which Christianity and Judaism could begin to restore relations between each other. However, as you point out, it is apparent that that avenue is already fraught with suspicion and a unique hostility among the Jewish people. Perhaps it could be worthwhile to continue the bridge building project that some of the Kabbalists began, especially if it was a project that was initiated by Jewish thinkers. Speaking for myself, I have been so far amazed with Kabbalah's teachings and potential. The fact that it is compatible with a very old universe, teaches rebirth (which can help to inculcate a sense of commonality between human, animal, plant and inanimate matter) and has an emphasis on uniting opposites would be a boon for Christian theology. I think this would be a more fruitful way to connect traditions and hopefully begin to restore relations between Christians and Jews.