Download The Jewishness of Jesus – What it means to Christians and Jews

Rabbi Mark L Solomon, Sion Centre, 20 November 2013 (with Nicholas Sagovsky)
The Jewishness of Jesus – What it means to Christians and Jews
We need to straight away to acknowledge an asymmetry: the Jewishness of Jesus – indeed anything about
Jesus – will have much greater significance for Christians than for Jews. He is the central figure of faith for
Christians, marginal for Jews. Marginal doesn’t mean insignificant, though, and the way Jesus’ significance
has changed for Jews is revealing
In early rabbinic traditions he is often dismissed as an outsider, of tainted parentage, who departed from
proper rabbinical training and practised magic, tricking and misleading people into following him. These texts
were censored and ultimately dropped from Jewish tradition.
Fascinating example of ancient polemical response: “Rabbi Meir used to say: What is the meaning of the
scriptural verse ‘For a curse of God is he that is hung’? (Deut. 21:23) [It can be compared] to two twin
brothers who resembled one another. One was king of the entire world, the other took to robbery. After
some time the one who took to robbery was caught, and they crucified him on a cross. Everyone who passed
to and fro would say, ‘It seems as though the king is crucified!’ That is why it is said, ‘For a curse of God is he
that is hung’.” (Tosefta Sanhedrin 9:7; cf. Galatians 3:13f.)
Abraham Farissol (Polemicist, Italy, c. 1451–c. 1525, in Magen Avraham) “Let us assume that their Christ is a
Messiah for them, and we shall neither deny nor affirm that which befell their Messiah. For to my mind it is
distinctly feasible that they be justified in designating him as their rightful redeemer. For they have declared
– and it is in fact true – that since he came and imparted his doctrines, they have been redeemed and
cleansed of the pollution of idol worship.”
Rabbi Jacob Emden (leading rabbinic authority, d. 1776, Germany): “It is … a habitual saying of mine … that
the Nazarene brought about a double kindness in the world. On the one hand, he strengthened the Torah of
Moses majestically, as mentioned earlier, and not one of our Sages spoke out more emphatically concerning
the immutability of the Torah. And on the other hand, he did much good for the Gentiles … by doing away
with idolatry and removing the images from their midst. He obligated them with the Seven [Noachide]
Commandments so that they should not be as the beasts of the field. He also bestowed upon them ethical
ways, and in this respect he was much more stringent with them than the Torah of Moses, as is well-known.”
Modern Judaism has moved towards claiming Jesus positively as one of our own (often – perhaps unfairly –
by blaming Paul for introducing alien, Hellenistic elements into Jesus’ Jewish message).
Claude Montefiore (founder of Liberal Judaism and New Testament scholar, d. 1938): Jesus was a prophet,
“in the genuine succession to Amos and Isaiah”; “the prophet of inwardness”; “As Liberal Judaism derives so
greatly from the prophets, is it not wonderful that it should rightly find much to admire and use in the
prophet of Nazareth.” (Quotations from The Old Testament and After, London 1923, pp. 229-32) Montefiore
wanted to introduce selected readings from the Gospel teaching of Jesus into Liberal Jewish services, but his
fellow Liberal pioneers found this a step too far.
Leo Baeck, Judaism and Christianity, p. 101 (in reaction to German Protestant antisemitism): “In this old
tradition we behold a man who is Jewish in every feature and trait of his character, manifesting in every
particular what is pure and good in Judaism. This man could have developed as he came to be only on the
soil of Judaism; and only on this soil, too, could he find his disciples and followers as they were. Here alone,
in this Jewish sphere, in this Jewish atmosphere of trust and longing, could this man live his life and meet his
death – a Jew among Jews. Jewish history and Jewish reflection may not pass him by nor ignore him.”
Rabbi Mark L Solomon, Sion Centre, 20 November 2013 (with Nicholas Sagovsky)
Jesus as an exemplar of ethical spirituality, of an ideal relationship with God: Martin Buber, “From my youth
onwards I have found in Jesus my great brother. That Christianity has regarded and does regard him as God
and Saviour has always appeared to me a fact of the highest importance which … I must endeavour to
understand.” (Martin Buber, Two Types of Faith, trans. Norman P. Goldhawk, London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1951.)
Was Jesus a “marginal Jew” in his own time? Was he an insider or an outsider? Or an insider who made
himself into an outsider? So many of his sayings are close to the teachings we know from Rabbinic writings.
He upholds the law faithfully even while criticising some interpretations of it and rebuking hypocritical piety.
He challenges power structures and religious institutions.
Other significant 20th-century Jewish views: Jacob Klausner, Jesus as proto-Zionist; Haim Maccoby – Jesus as
Pharisaic teacher and messianic aspirant; Geza Vermes – Jesus as Chasid, charismatic holy man, wandering
healer and wonder-worker.
Byron Sherwin (American Jewish scholar): Jesus as a failed (but NOT false) messiah. Failure is an essential
part of the prophetic/messianic mission. Jesus can be seen as one of many instances of the mystical
“Messiah Son of Joseph” who suffers and dies as part of an ongoing redemptive process. This evokes for me
the Chagall’s powerful images of the suffering Jesus as symbol of the suffering Jew in the Russian pogroms
and the Shoah – the crucifixion becomes an image of Jewish suffering (see also Chaim Potok, My Name is
Asher Lev).
Daniel Matt (translator of the Zohar): “Jews can accept Jesus, not the Jesus of the Church or Jesus Christ the
Messiah, but the Jewish Jesus, a long-lost cousin who, for nearly two millennia, has been misunderstood and
perhaps lonely. By appreciating Jesus as a Jewish teacher, a Jew acknowledges that the wisdom of Torah
manifests itself in countless, unforeseen ways. … Jesus was a flower of Judaism cut down in full bloom. Seen
through Jewish eyes, he was not the one-and-only son of God. The myth of the son of God explodes into the
truth that every human being, every creature, every thing is an incarnation of God. Jesus should not be
idolized. From a Jewish perspective, to turn him into the only son of God is to betray him.”
I believe we Jews can also betray Jesus by trying to appropriate him too much, to domesticate him. Jesus
resists such limitation. He rises beyond his Jewish existence – symbolised by his rejection of Jewish family
values – while never completely abandoning it. By becoming the Torah incarnate, the embodied Word for
the Church, he is the Jew who got away and universalised the Jewish message more than any rabbi could
have done. He sharpens the dichotomy between particularism and universalism which is the crucial axis
along which Judaism moves, now one way, now the other. To choose to remain a Jewish Jew in the face of
Jesus is to choose particularism to some extent, to see the beauty in smallness, in the elitism of Torah study.
But that doesn’t mean one cannot look with admiration and even a bit of envy at the boldness of the
universal message that the Church finds in Jesus.
Since, like Matt, I cannot acknowledge Jesus as the one-and-only Son of God, but need to find a way of
comprehending the enduring redemptive power of Jesus in Christian lives, I see Jesus as a supreme mystic
who experienced, and radiated, such a profound sense of union with God that it has kept his spirit alive and
operating salvifically within the Church. Outside Judaism that would have meant either the obliteration of
personhood in a philosophical monad, or the deification of an emperor in a fascistic cult. Only from a Jewish
wellspring, in the first century, could such a union of human and divine retain both a human face and an
ethically transcendent sense of the otherness of God.