Abstract
This paper presents some of the important issues pertaining to the role of the (Hebrew) Bible in Jewish–Christian dialogue, some of the problems arising around it, and suggests some solutions to how Jews and Christians can share this corpus without forcing Christian readers to give up their unique perspective on the text or justifying reading practices in which Jews lose a full claim on the text.
Introduction
Last year Ann Conway-Jones, herself an Anglican, published an excellent article in The Expository Times entitled ‘Contempt or Respect? Jews and Judaism in Christian Preaching’. 1 The succinct, honest, and constructive tone of her article was refreshing and still much-needed. In part as a response to this, I would like to add a few thoughts of my own, as a supplement rather than counterargument. They mainly concern the role of the Hebrew Bible in Jewish–Christian dialogue, and how it is used both within and between the religious traditions. 2 These are primarily addressed to Christian exegetes, teachers, and preachers, and here I would like to say something about myself and my aim.
Contrary to Conway-Jones, I am not writing from within the church, as I am Jewish myself. This means that when I point something out about Christian reading, I am offering critique, not self-critique, a rather different approach. I think it safe to say that many Jews and Christian engaged in dialogue have the feeling that Jews can criticize Christianity almost endlessly, whereas Christians can feel gagged when it comes to unsavoury aspects of Judaism. This is born out of a sense that the larger context of Christian anti-Jewish theology, liturgy, and practice, all too often predicated upon the denigration of Judaism, and some of the horrible consequences of this, does not give Christians a credible platform from which they can voice their critique. I am well aware of this ‘moral advantage’, in which Christians too often feel silenced by guilt. My intention is not to offer a critique with the aim of just showing how bad Christianity can be. Rather, I am offering it as a contribution of one actor in the larger friendship between Jews and Christians that the post-war era has led us to. I trust (and have ample evidence) that there are plenty of Christians who themselves want to improve upon this relationship and who want to rid their tradition of its anti-Jewish heritage and I thus trust that it can be offered as a tool for self-improvement from one friend to another. I can only think of “Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.” (Prov. 9:8) and hope that the day will come in which we all feel safe to give and receive such advice in the spirit of friendship and trust.
Considering the Judeo-Christian Venn Diagram
One of the first issues to deal with is just how we construe our relationship with each other, and the consequences that certain models might have. There is an unavoidable imbalance here, in which Jews have not felt much need at all to understand Christianity in theological terms; certain legal issues of food, purity, and idolatry aside, Jews have typically treated Christians as just another group of Gentiles, but one which happens to be reading Jewish scripture. 3 In a certain sense Jews, therefore, do not have a model for the Christian church or for talking about Christianity in Jewish terms.
Christianity as a religious system and as a community can never have such a non-specific relationship to Judaism. That Christians need to grapple with Judaism is thus understandable, but far too often this has ended up in some rather problematic models of how Christianity and Judaism can be related to each other. One is the theology of supersessionism, of Christianity replacing Judaism. While still more common among general clergy and churchgoers than most academic theologians seem to acknowledge, this can perhaps be seen as the resilient but steadily fading ghost of theologies past.
But other solutions can be equally problematic, not in actual content but in their very assumption that Christian theologians can speak for both Jews and Christians, and their relationship to the Hebrew Bible. Conway-Jones notes: “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.” 4 Even 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. 5
This observation, while not exactly new, still needs to be reiterated. While Christians need to relate to Judaism, it is important that Jews do not become objectified as pieces in a Christian theological model. Already in the seventies, Charlotte Klein in her excellent book Anti-Judaism in Christian Theology, wrote: “The Christian theologian continues to assume that he has the right to pass judgement on Judaism, its destiny, and its task in the world or even to be permitted to dictate this task.” 6
Not a sphere within a sphere
The reason for bringing this up in the context of Bible-reading is that it seems to stem from a sense that Christianity encapsulates and transcends Judaism, a sense which also comes into play in much Christian exegesis and preaching. The model here is that Christianity is everything that Judaism is, but more. A stark version of this can be found in the immeasurably important biblical theologian Walther Eichrodt, who wrote that only in Christ are the most noble strands of Hebrew biblical thought brought to their conclusion and “[t]he negative proof of this is the impression of a torso that Judaism gives when separated from Christianity”. 7 Even if one does not go so far, it is still not an uncommon assumption that Jews are little more than ‘Christians without Christ’, which, I suspect, is part of why many Christians, on reading up on Judaism, start feeling that it gets stranger by the page, since they have simply thought of it as something they know all about, and when they see the parts of Judaism not ‘already included’ in Christianity, these can strike them as exotic or even absurd.
This is something that frequently spills over into teaching and preaching. Even when Christians realize that Judaism is much more than they thought, that it has sides to it that grow far beyond Christianity, they sometimes still de facto end up treating Judaism as encompassed by Christianity, not by making a claim about so much as laying claim to Judaism. Sermons in which the Talmud or other Rabbinic texts are cited are not entirely uncommon on the liberal side of Christian preaching. I have myself heard a Protestant preacher, in one and the same sermon, both dismiss Pharisees and quote a Rabbinic Midrash! Even when contempt for Pharisaic and Rabbinic traditions is not lurking in the background this practice, while rooted in a genuine curiosity about Jewish texts, is quite problematic. Jewish texts should not be employed to teach a Christian lesson. 8 While both Jews and Christians have a legitimate claim to the Hebrew Bible, the same cannot be said about Jewish texts written hundreds of years after the two communities went their separate ways. Christians have no more claim to the Talmud than to the Qur’an, and should not feel as if everything Jewish also belongs to Christians. This, I think, stems from a model in which Christianity is the fully open flower of the bud that Judaism is (or even was). A case in point here is the deeply problematic practice of Christian Seders, a practice in which a central Jewish ritual is appropriated by another religion, even though the Passover Seder as we know it today was not around by the time of Jesus and is not part of a shared heritage. Judaism is not the same as the Hebrew Bible, and is not the same as the parent to Christianity. It is not a sphere encapsulated by a larger, more developed, sphere and if one imagines it that way Arnaldo Pomodoro’s sculptures of spheres within spheres should come to mind, in which the smaller sphere cracks open, and asserts itself against, the larger.
Equidistant from the text?
But if we stay clear of the Scylla of seeing everything in Judaism as the anticipative, primitive form of Christianity, we should also make sure not to steer right towards the Charybdis of completely relativizing their respective claims to the Hebrew past. John F. A. Sawyer, trying to remedy just the problem of seeing Judaism as preceding Christianity, writes: “Judaism is just about as far removed from the Hebrew Bible as Christianity is.” 9 His point is that you simply cannot open the Hebrew Bible and expect to learn much about modern Rabbinic Judaism, as if Judaism had been frozen in time. I agree with this, as should be apparent from the above, but would want to push back a little against this oft-repeated sentiment in Jewish–Christian dialogue. This idea of there being a sharp division between the Hebrew Bible and Rabbinic Judaism does not hold up historically. Christians are simply not as close to the religion of the Hebrew Bible as Jews are; they are not circumcised, do not usually speak Hebrew or Aramaic, have not in any way kept the Israelite bloodlines, do not observe even the most central dietary requirements, do not care about purity and do not celebrate any of the biblical festivals, 10 all central aspects of the Hebrew Bible. But Jews, for all the change that has taken place in their traditions from the closing of the Bible until today, do and are all of those things. Of course Christians also carry unique parts of the biblical heritage with them, parts that Jews do not, but in practice the social and ethnic shift in which Christianity became an amalgamation of Jewish and Gentile religious traditions has changed it considerably, and has broken much of its continuity with the Hebrew Bible. This is not to say that Jews are therefore better custodians of the Hebrew Bible, just that it is neither helpful nor factually correct to present this gap between Rabbinic Judaism and the Hebrew Bible as being as substantial as that between Christianity and the Hebrew Bible, and I would argue that it is part of a general trend that, historically, has been trying to displace or at the very least distance Jews from their strong roots in the Hebrew Bible. It does not help anyone to completely relativize our continuities and discontinuities, and, as will be seen below, Christians have other lines of continuity upon which they can also rely. To say that Jews stand in an ever-changing, but unbroken, chain of tradition that is more closely tied to the Hebrew Bible than a non-Israelite religion that itself frequently claims that text to be inapplicable to them should not be problematic as long as we do not relativize the claim that Christians have to the text.
Dissociative Textuality Disorder
I alluded above, in a simplified way, to one strand of the complex and multi-faceted history of how Christianity has tried to integrate the Hebrew Bible into its canon and life. This approach, which proclaims the Hebrew Bible to be inapplicable to or, in its strongest Pauline-Lutheran iteration, enslaving of, Christians is just one of many solutions that Christian theologians have come up with, but it is one of the most frequently heard. Jon D. Levenson has pointed out that the tendency to denigrate the Jewish side of the shared canon is still commonplace even among many biblical scholars and writes, in the discussion of Paul D. Hanson, himself a Lutheran, that not all of the Jewish Torah corresponds, even indirectly or germinally, to the will of God. Some of it is simply a deplorable human invention, except that Hanson…sees some redeeming value in the latter category in that it serves as a foil for the liberationist deity with whom he wishes to identify the God of Israel.
11
He further writes that “the law is retained in scripture only as a sort of dead letter that shows Christians what the delivering God has delivered them from”. 12 Naturally, it is in Protestant theologies that this finds it most extreme expression but it is not absent in other parts of the Christian church and, through the strong Protestant influence on academic biblical studies, it often works its way into research and teaching as well. One should not underestimate the psychologically, theologically, and systemically unsound consequences it can have to take parts of one’s own scripture, understand them to be divinely revealed, and yet see them as inferior or even, in some sense, evil.
Another way of creating an unsustainable division in value between the two components of the Christian canon is the remarkably stubborn tendency to sneak in some pseudo-historicist criterion to demonstrate the superiority of the New Testament corpus. This is rare on the conservative right but far too common as one progresses towards the religious left, where the historicity of all of the Bible is not a prioritised area to defend or may be seen as inherently problematic—that is, with one exception: the life, crucifixion and, most importantly, resurrection of Jesus Christ. While the Flood and the parting of the Red Sea can safely be seen as mythical or allegorical, the death and resurrection of Jesus cannot. There, a strangely positivist view of history tends to take over. One frequent and somewhat peculiar argument for this—that the parting of the sea is historically absurd but the resurrection of Jesus is historically credible—is an odd reliance on sources. One can even find this claim in the otherwise remarkably nuanced and intellectually honest Rowan Williams, who in his popular book Being Christian, after advising against “an obsession with historical accuracy”, goes on to say: At the same time, we need to recognize that we are on slightly different ground when it comes to the New Testament. For we are dealing there with texts written very soon after the events they describe. And we are clearly dealing with a complex of tradition that must involve a degree of personal reminiscence. We are not talking about someone in 500
This is just one example of many potential candidates, but the form is essentially the same: the Hebrew texts are not reliable in what they report of miracles, since they were written so long after the events described, whereas the Gospels can be seen as more reliable. This characterisation misses two important points.
The ‘problem’, in most people’s mind, is hardly the status of the sources which are, after all, highly doubtful in both cases, but rather whether seas can at all part or people return from the dead. To obfuscate this central concern feels disingenuous to most people. The concern is that the reader is bound by the text or by the tradition to believe what she otherwise would find absurd.
This ‘duty to believe the otherwise absurd’ curiously seems to stop as soon as one is outside one’s own canon; the reader does not seem to have any duty to believe Patristic miraculous accounts, even when reading texts which may have at some earlier point have been part of the biblical canon, such as The Shepherd of Hermas. If our problem is not at all the miraculous, why stop at the gospels? Why not believe the Quranic account (3:123–5) of the Battle of Badr, in which three thousand angels are sent from heaven in support of the early Muslim community? That account is conceivably even closer in time to the events described than the authors of the Gospels are to the life and death of Jesus. Still, I suspect not many of the readers accustomed to the argument described above would immediately accept the Islamic historiography.
I say this not only because Jews are the ones who get the short end of the stick (our Bible sometimes seems to verge on the historically meaningless), but also because Christians themselves suffer from this unbalanced ‘dissociative textuality disorder’ when it comes to their own scripture. It is also quite incompatible with much early Christian writing. If I may be so bold as to bring up a passage from the New Testament (2 Tim 3:16–17): “All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”
This denigration of the Hebrew Bible, when it comes to practical impact on one’s life, appreciation for its content, or oddly distributed trust in its historiography, is a detrimental attitude. It is a shame that it still persists when there is no shortage of Christian scholars of the Hebrew Bible who have shown the richness of this corpus, and it is my staunch belief that Christian teaching and preaching has been so much better for it. 14 There is still much to do in this area, however—and especially when it comes to the training of clergy—this could be applied to great effect. I myself have had the privilege of teaching the Bible in Christian (Lutheran) settings, and it has usually not taken more than a weekend to fundamentally alter some of the ways in which the students have approached the Hebrew Bible. That is only the beginning, but there are many initiatives like that; scriptural reasoning is one, other forms of shared Bible studies is another, and a simple conscious connection between the world of academia and religious teaching can make a difference here.
Reclaiming Christian Interpretation
Lastly, I wish to touch upon a subject where I think Jewish–Christian dialogue has been detrimental to Christian biblical reading, but for entirely other reasons, and I wish to offer a correction to a certain form of respect for Judaism in which the textual richness of Christianity gets diminished. The realisation that while the New Testament is deeply dependent upon the Hebrew Bible, the Hebrew Bible is not at all dependent on the New Testament (a discovery which it took scholars surprisingly long to make) has had many good consequences. It has led to Christians’ respecting the integrity of the Hebrew Bible, as well as trying to figure out what it might mean without immediately connecting it to a later reception (i.e., the New Testament corpus). It has led to the Hebrew Bible’s becoming a hospitable forum where Jews and Christians can meet. But it has also sometimes had the effect of putting a straightjacket on Christian interpretation. Whereas Jews feel free to use the full resources of their later traditions to interpret the Hebrew Bible in the most far-fetched ways, often to the delight of Christian interlocutors, Christians are often shut down by Jews, or shut themselves down, when they try to give a Christological reading to a passage of the shared canon. Christians, it sometimes seems, only have the historical-critical tools of the last two or three centuries at their disposal, whereas Jews are free to draw upon over two thousand years of interpretation (including the historical-critical methods) in their reading of scripture. The result is often that a uniquely Christian voice is lost in the dialogue. Now, this lessening of Christian interpretation is not just grounded in the interaction with Jewish dialogue partners; there are considerable differences in the ways in which Jews and Christians approach the text, a notable example being the fact that there are few Jewish sermons in which the preacher will not quote at least one Rabbinic Midrash or medieval commentator, whereas the equivalent seems to be a rare occurrence in most Christian settings. But the problem remains; if Jews are free to contribute Jewishly to the dialogue, Christians must also be allowed to read the Bible as Christians. Christians read the Hebrew Bible with Christ as their lens, maybe not so much a method as a guide to the questions they ask of it. Through this Christian reading tradition, the Hebrew Bible is indeed, for the Christian, deeply connected to the New Testament, and the interpretations there are often just as imaginative and interesting as any Midrash. In a sense, Christians might need to reclaim some of their uniquely Christian ways of reading the Hebrew Bible, to the extent that this is conducive to the dialogue. 15
Interpretatio Christiana
But if Christians are to reclaim their own reading traditions in a situation where they share the table with Jews, how is that to be done responsibly? We do not wish, after all, a return to a situation in which Christians try to prove that the Hebrew Bible, taken on its own, really proclaims Christ. The problem, of course, is one which Friedrich Baumgärtel has pointed out, namely, that “we cannot eliminate the fact derived from the history of religion, that the Old Testament is a witness out of a non-Christian religion”.
16
Another way of putting the problem might be: if in the section above I described the problem of Christians becoming estranged from, and so dismissive of, the Hebrew Bible, the opposite might be the problem of totally appropriating it. Again, Conway-Jones writes: They [Judaism and Christianity] 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. … 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.
17
While many Christian theologians have been wrestling with the issue of how to teach Christianity from the pages of the Hebrew Bible, it seems to be that the suggestion of yet another hermeneutical method might not be the best way forward. I would instead suggest something very simple: namely, to look at the older interpretative paradigm of interpretatio Christiana, in which older deities, places, rituals, and texts are given a Christian understanding. It is not that anyone claims that the Pantheon was built by Christians to serve a Christian purpose but to the people who later Christianized it, it could be made to make sense within a Christian framework (and could be used in practice). Something did not have to have been originally Christian to be able to contribute meaningfully to a Christian way of life—sometimes in central aspects. One might of course argue that there is no exact match here, as the very first ‘Christians’ grew out of the Hebrew Bible and did not take up something foreign and give it a Christianizing coating. While there is some merit to that argument, it is also worth pointing out that this was rarely a process of just appropriating someone else’s religious heritage. The Romans, who turned the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina into San Lorenzo in Miranda, did, in fact, stand in a tradition which they, in part, brought along with them into Christianity. Christianity grew out of not only, or even primarily, Jewish roots, and when Greeks, Celts, and Vikings adopted Christianity they came with their own lines of continuity leading from their religious heritage into Christianity, just as the first Jewish Christians had their Jewish lines of continuity. 18 I would therefore suggest that this might be a good model for understanding the relationship of Christianity to the Hebrew Bible, without denying that the Bible is much more systemically important to Christians than Homer ever was—although both have, at least historically, undergone this process of Christianizing interpretation. Acknowledging, even celebrating, the fact that Christianity did not just grow out of Judaism but also out of Greek, Roman, and many other religious traditions, which often contributed to important areas of Christian life, may enrich the paths a Christian reader can take to the Hebrew Bible. Much of Christian liturgical practice, for example, is not based on Judaism but on Roman religion, something which only in recent decades has been given more than a passing glance. 19 If the stole, for example, comes from the scarves of office worn by Imperial officials, as may well be the case, this does not in any sense invalidate its use and significance. It is yet another root to the tree that is Christianity. Another, obviously much more central root, is the Hebrew Bible. The argument I am making is not that the Hebrew Bible ‘doesn’t really belong to Christians’ so much as that it is only one of several backgrounds to Christianity. Just as pre-modern teachers of Christianity felt free to utilise many of those Gentile backgrounds and contextualise them within a Christian framework, so may it be worth thinking about approaching the Hebrew Bible in a similar way. Remembering that Christians have many other backgrounds to which they can relate may be one component in new theological and practical approaches that may free up Christian reading and ease some of the tensions in the relationship between Jews and Christians. Judaism has, in a sense, become a single parent to Christianity where, in fact, many progenitors were involved. Remembering them may be one step in the right direction, towards deepened friendship and trust between Jewish and Christian communities as they meet across the pages of their shared scripture.
Footnotes
1
Ann Conway-Jones, ‘Contempt or Respect? Jews and Judaism in Christian Preaching’, The Expository Times 127.2 (2015): 63–72.
2
The term ‘Hebrew Bible’ will be used in this article, not because it is an ideal designation of the corpus known as the Tanakh or the Old Testament, but simply because, in my view, it is a better candidate than the other two.
3
This is in stark contrast to Islam, which is often singled out for positive treatment in Jewish law. See the legal considerations of Maimonides, for example, in his Mishneh Torah, Akum 9:4, where he states outright that Christians are idol worshippers (“Edomites [Christians] are idolaters, and their day of idolatry is Sunday”), in contrast to Muslims (Ma’akhalot Assurot 11:7), concerning whom he writes: “The Ishmaelites are not idol worshippers at all, and it [idolatry] has ceased to exist in their mouths and hearts and they attribute proper oneness to G-d with no blemish.” (Responsa §448). It is my impression that serious theological thinking about the role of Christianity has only been undertaken since the Emancipation, and even then without much enthusiasm (with a few exceptions such as Franz Rosenzweig and, more recently, Michael Wyschogrod).
4
Conway-Jones, ‘Contempt or Respect?, 69.
5
Conway-Jones, ‘Contempt or Respect?’, 70.
6
Charlotte Klein, Anti-Judaism in Christian Theology (London: SPCK, 1978), 7.
7
Walter Eichrodt, Theologie des Alten Testamentes, 3 vols. (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1962), vol 1, 26: “Der negative Beweis dafür ist der Anblick des Torso, den das vom Christentum geschiedene Judentum darbietet.”
8
This is especially important when there is still lingering (and sometimes active) contempt for Judaism in Christian thought and practice. My partner, who grew up Catholic, has compared this to throwing your dog waste on the neighbour’s lawn and then asking to borrow their lawnmower.
9
John F. A. Sawyer, ‘The Bible in Future Jewish–Christian Relations’, in E. Kessler & J. Aitken (eds), Challenges in Jewish–Christian Relations (New York: Paulist Press, 2006). 39–50, on 41.
10
And even when there is a biblical background, such as for Easter and Pentecost, they are not generally understood as such.
11
Jon D. Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993), 72.
12
Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, 74.
13
Rowan Williams, Being Christian (London: SPCK, 2014), 33–4.
14
An interesting counterexample is The Jewish Annotated New Testament, published by Oxford University Press, in which Jewish scholars comment upon and engage with the New Testament.
15
I am not saying that Jews will necessarily care much about many of the Christological readings Christians have come up with throughout history, but then Christians often do not care much for the legal minutiae of some Jewish interpretation either. But Christian exegesis is not limited to just saying that whatever one is reading, is really about Christ. There is far more to Christian exegesis than that. What is relevant to the dialogue is, in part, a separate issue.
16
Friedrich Baumgärtel, Friedrich, ‘The Hermeneutical Problem of the Old Testament’, in Claus Westermann (ed.), Essays on Old Testament Hermeneutics, 2nd edn (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1963), 134–59, on 135. This can, of course, also be said of at least some of the texts of the New Testament!
17
Conway-Jones, ‘Contempt or Respect?’, 64.
18
A Christian theologian who has been suggesting this in the context of non-Western Christian traditions, is the Korean theologian Hyun Kyung, whose controversial speech on the topic at the 1991 World Council of Churches in Australia may be familiar to more than a few readers. See <
>. Accessed 20/06/2016.
19
See Paul Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy (London: SPCK, 2002).