Download 1 Contempt or Respect? Jews and Judaism in Christian Preaching

Contempt or Respect? Jews and Judaism in Christian Preaching.
Ann Conway-Jones
Joint Honorary Secretary
A rabbi standing in front of his or her congregation is able to expound Jewish belief and practice
without any need to mention Christianity. The reverse is not true for a Christian preacher. The
starting point for Christian sermons is usually the gospel reading, and most of the characters in
the gospels, including Jesus, are Jewish. Therefore Christian sermons often involve discussion
of Jewish traditions. As an Accredited Lay Worker of the Church of England, I regularly preach
in my parish church. I have also researched early Jewish–Christian relations, focussing on
differences in biblical interpretation. And I am actively involved in Jewish–Christian dialogue: I
am joint Honorary Secretary of the Council of Christians and Jews; I have good relationships
with my local synagogues. How do I bring my academic knowledge of Judaism, and my
experience of Jewish–Christian dialogue, to bear on my preaching? A sermon is not an occasion
for dialogue: it is a monologue proclaiming Christian beliefs to a Christian congregation. Yet it
often involves talking about Jews and Judaism. How does one do that with integrity? Most
Christian preachers are not experts in Second Temple Judaism, the context of Jesus’ ministry,
nor do they have much, or indeed any, contact with contemporary Jews. What helpful insights
might I offer? The more I delve into these questions, the more I realise how complex they are.
Whilst preparing this article, I would often write a sentence, and then find myself wanting to
contradict it, or at least add further nuances. And then I would think of exceptions to the
exceptions. There are no simple solutions. But an honest appraisal of the questions and
dilemmas is in itself a step forward. My comments will be divided into three sections: the first
on the Hebrew Bible, the second on Jesus the Jew, and the third on supersessionism.
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
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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
1
There is an excellent introduction to this process in Risa Levitt Kohn and Rebecca Moore, A Portable God: The
Origin of Judaism and Christianity (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).
See Gary S. Selby, Martin Luther King and the Rhetoric of Freedom: The Exodus Narrative in America’s Struggle
for Civil Rights (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008).
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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 selfquestioning 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:
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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
Malcolm Carroll, ‘Readings in Matthew 5–7’, in Nathan Eddy (ed.), Fresh from the Word: The Bible for a
Change: 2014 (Birmingham: IBRA, 2013), 43. My aim in giving these examples is not to criticise individual
authors; the comments are typical of the genre.
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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 קטן‬and ‘Jonathan’ (‫ )יונתן‬all 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
4
Roots: Adult and All Age (Resources for the Weekly Lectionary), 74 (November/December 2014), 7.
There is a description and criticism of this criterion in Morna D. Hooker, ‘Christology and Methodology’, New
Testament Studies, 17: 4 (1971), 480–7.
5
There is a list of anti-Jewish stereotypes commonly found in Christian preaching in Amy-Jill Levine, ‘Bearing
False Witness: Common Errors Made about Early Judaism’, in Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (eds), The
Jewish Annotated New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 501–4.
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Talmud Yevamot 16a.
Julian Bond, ‘God’s Hands and Ours’, in Nathan Eddy (ed.), Fresh from the Word: The Bible for a Change: 2014
(Birmingham: IBRA, 2013), 77.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/judaism/beliefs/eyes_1.shtml.
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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
10
A discussion of the complexities involved in defining the historical Pharisees can be found in Marilyn J. Salmon,
Preaching without Contempt: Overcoming Unintended Anti-Judaism (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), 75–107.
11
Jewish War 2.166. Translations of Josephus are taken from H. St. J. Thackeray, Ralph Marcus, and Louis H.
Feldman, Josephus, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1926–65).
12
Jewish Antiquities 18.12.
13
Jewish Antiquities 13.298.
14
The Pharisees: A CCJ study paper by Jonathan Gorsky, Rachel Montagu and Jane Clements.
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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
See Peter J. Tomson, ‘If this be from Heaven...’: Jesus and the New Testament Authors in their Relationship to
Judaism (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 327–8.
15
See Steve Mason, ‘Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History’, Journal
for the Study of Judaism, 38: 4 (2007), 457–512. Mason is concerned with all the literature of the period, arguing
that ‘the Ioudaioi were understood until late antiquity as an ethnic group comparable to other ethnic groups, with
their distinctive laws, traditions, customs, and God’ (p. 457). For vehement disagreement with Mason see
http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/vanishing-jews-antiquity-adele-reinhartz/;
http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/invented-revolution-jonathan-klawans/;
http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/ioudaios-religion-annette-yoshiko-reed/.
16
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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
17
Robert L. Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late 4th Century (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983), xvi.
For example, the caption ‘The father of the Jews is the devil’ was inserted under the picture of a Jew in a picturebook for children (Ein Bilderbuch für Gross und Klein) published in Nürenberg in 1936. See Gareth Lloyd Jones,
‘Teaching Contempt: The Jew through Christian eyes’, Journal of Beliefs & Values, 20: 1 (1999), 6–12, 18.
18
19
Nostra Aetate: Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions
(http://www.jcrelations.net/I_Nostra_Aetate__I___revised_translation.2944.0.html?id=720&L=3&searchText=Nost
ra+aetate&searchFilter=cat_13). See also The Churches and the Jewish People: Toward a New Understanding
(http://www.jcrelations.net/The_Churches_and_the_Jewish_People__Toward_a_New_Understanding.1512.0.html?i
d=720&L=3&searchText=sigtuna&searchFilter=cat_12); and Sharing One Hope? The Church of England and
Christian-Jewish Relations: A Contribution to a Continuing Debate (London: Church House, 2001), 20.
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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,
See, for example, Edward Kessler and Philip A. Cunningham, ‘A Public Dialogue: Contemporary Questions
about Covenant(s) and Conversion’, Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 4 (2009),
http://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/scjr/article/view/1544/1398.
20
Daniel Boyarin, ‘Rethinking Jewish Christianity: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (to which is
Appended a Correction of my Border Lines)’, Jewish Quarterly Review, 99: 1 (2009), 28. For Boyarin’s argument
that Christology, the story of Jesus as the divine–human Messiah, was part of Jewish diversity see The Jewish
Gospels:The Story of Jesus Christ (New York: The New Press, 2012).
21
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James Parkes, Prelude to Dialogue: Jewish-Christian Relationships (London: Vallentine Mitchell 1969), 153.
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,
23
Against the Jews 4.3.6; trans. Paul W. Harkins, Saint John Chrysostom: Discourses against Judaizing Christians,
Fathers of the Church 68 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1979), 78–9.
24
David T. Runia, Philo in Early Christian Literature: A Survey (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1993), 3.
Karl Rahner, ‘Anonymous Christians’, in Theological Investigations, volume 6: Concerning Vatican Council II
(London: DLT, 1974), 390–8.
25
Adam Gregerman, ‘A Jewish Response to Elizabeth Groppe, Philip A. Cunningham and Didier Pollefeyt, and
Gregor Maria Hoff’, in Philip A. Cunningham et al. (eds), Christ Jesus and the Jewish People Today: New
Explorations of Theological Interrelationships (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 224.
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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
See Dow Marmur, ‘Should Christians celebrate the Seder?’ (2000):
http://www.jcrelations.net/Should_Christians_celebrate_the_Seder.2338.0.html?id=720&L=3&searchText=seder&s
earchFilter=%2A&page=1.
27
28
Jules Isaac, The Christian Roots of Antisemitism (London: CCJ, 1965), 8–9.
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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.
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