Good (Scholarly) News for Christians: Daniel Boyarin

In the Gospels Jesus several times tells his disciples that once they reach Jerusalem he is destined to be arrested and die at the hands of the priests and scribes. For decades, scholars working on the "historical Jesus" have sought to convince Christians that these instances of Jesus predicting his own passion most likely never occurred. Clearly, so the argument goes, they were formulated to address the scandal of Jesus' crucifixion after the fact; they were words put in Jesus' mouth by the Gospel writers to make it seem that arrest and death were part of Jesus' plan all along--when, as we all know, such couldn't have been the case.

On this and other issues, Daniel Boyarin's The Jewish Gospels is good scholarly news for Christians. Boyarin, one of the world's leading scholars of Talmud, makes it clear on historical grounds that Jesus' assertions that the Christ is destined to suffer are by no means unthinkable in the context of Second Temple Judaism. Further, Jesus' description of himself as the awaited "Son of Man," implying he is both Messiah and a divine incarnation, should not be seen as a fictional element added to the story by later Gentile Christians. As Boyarin shows, the designation "Son of Man" can best be clarified through careful reading of Jewish scripture, in particular the book of Daniel. It is Boyarin's view that the Gospels, especially Mark, may very well be offering an historically reliable portrait of what Jesus said about himself. He shows that Jesus' words and self-understanding as we find them in Mark make perfect sense in the context of certain contemporary strands of Jewish reading of scripture. They are not a foreign invention foisted upon Jesus' life and teachings after the fact.

Many Christians will think this is insignificant because they already accept the Gospels as "gospel truth." I would say Boyarin's book is good news for Christians because here we have one of the very best scholars in this field, a man who identifies himself as an orthodox Jew no less, coming out boldly and saying that the "historical Jesus" and the Jesus we find in the New Testament, in certain fundamentals, might very well be the same man. If Boyarin is right in this argument (or perhaps I should say: if he convinces some in the scholarly community) the upshot is nothing less than a great leap forward for the historical reliability of the Gospels. Gone will be the days when it is argued that the Jesus we find in the New Testament could not have been the actual Jesus. That the Jesus Christians worship is a fictional character created by Paul and Platonizing Greeks. Boyarin places Jesus' mission in a solid historical context; wielding Occam's razor, he cuts through entrenched misreadings of key passages in Mark, offering a clearer, more sensible sense.

Which brings me, rather late, to something else Boyarin accomplishes. He shows us the steps by which Christianity and Judaism each willfully alienated itself from its other, each disavowing, step by step, the beliefs they shared, so that finally, with the passing of centuries, it became almost impossible to imagine that there was a time when most Christians considered themselves also Jews, and many Jews believed in the Messiah Jesus. The Jewish Gospels is strong medicine for each side of the religious divide, and it may eventually have repercussions for how the two religions understand their differences. Boyarin is to be commended for laying out what his scholarly labors have revealed. Certainly others before him have noted some of the elements of his hard-hitting argument, but their voices were not so well placed to be heard, or the time was not suited to listen. Hopefully there will be a wider engagement with this brilliant little book: a wrestling not just engaged by scholars, but by believing Jews and Christians as well.

I will close with a couple sentences from Boyarin's Epilogue in order to suggest some of the range of this book (issues I haven't touched on in this brief review):

If the interpretations offered here hold water, then the New Testament is much more deeply embedded within Second Temple Jewish life and thought than many have imagined, even--and this I emphasize again--in the very moments that we take to be most characteristically Christian as opposed to Jewish: the notion of a Redeemer who himself will be both God and man, and the notion that this Redeemer would suffer and die as part of the salvational process. At least some of these ideas, the Father/Son godhead and the suffering savior, have deep roots in the Hebrew Bible as well and may be among some of the most ancient ideas about God and the world that the Israelite people ever held. (157-8)

Check Boyarin's The Jewish Gospels at Amazon.

Harold Bloom on Jesus and Yahweh

I cannot recall that the Hebrew Bible ever explicitly states that the Jewish people can render themselves holy through study, yet I am one of many thousands who were brougth up to believe in such incessant reading and meditation. --Jesus and Yahweh, p. 195

Take up any of Harold Bloom's books on our Western religious traditions and you will find, nearly every third page, sentences that seem overstated, even unhinged. To read Bloom is often a hair-raising experience: the critic, one frequently tells oneself, is ranting. But on second consideration--when one rethinks Bloom's assertions in the wider context of the centuries-long unfolding of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, with all their twists and heresies and inhumanity--he usually seems vindicated. Considered over the centuries, our collective religious experience really is as extreme and uncanny as he suggests. Looking at Western religion in the first decade of this new century, it would be hard to argue that believers are becoming more moderate.

Though even Bloom's wilder formulations are often well-founded, it's not always so, and there's definitely something of the crank to him, a crankishness that comes through not so much in his ideas as in his delight in hearing himself repeat these ideas. Bloom's writing is superb, magisterial; he employs terms with the keenest subtlety (a precision often misunderstood by those who would dismiss him, as when Bible scholars scoffed at his discussion of irony in the J writer: see The Book of J). Bloom's flaw, however, is a kind of thumping redundancy. The great critic's assertions, often in the superlative, return again and again, needlessly so. Fortunately, his books are otherwise such a pleasure to read, his own personality so learned and charismatic, that one will overlook this tic of repetition.

Bloom is in his usual fine fettle in Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine. Like his previously published works The Book of J, The American Religion, and Omens of Millennium, this new title seeks to contribute to what Bloom calls "religious criticism." His training and stature as a literary critic, not to mention his personal religious obsessions, make him particularly adept at formulating the major questions. The new work, definitely one of major questions, is divided into two sections, one for each of the "names divine" Jesus and Yahweh. The book does not make for two separate essays however; throughout the many chapters the critic illuminates his understanding of the one name by contrast with the other, his section on Jesus dealing also with Yahweh, and vice versa. Such mingling is inevitable, since Bloom's real subject here is the question of whether or not Jesus Christ, as understood by Christian tradition, is compatible with the uncanny God Yahweh as represented in the Hebrew Bible. Bloom concludes that they are not compatible, then deepens his discussion by (more or less) multiplying the number of names divine he would consider. Jesus and Yahweh? But which Jesus? For Bloom there is Jesus Christ on the one hand, a "theological god" developed by the theologians of the first centuries, and Yeshua of Nazareth on the other, a charismatic Jewish teacher about whom we can know precious little:

Doubtless the real Jesus existed, but he never will be found, nor need he be. [This book] intends no quest. My sole purpose is to suggest that Jesus, Jesus Christ, and Yahweh are three totally incompatible personages, and to explain just how and why this is so. (8)

Regardless of Bloom's skepticism as to the possibility of knowing the historical Jesus, he gives us, somewhat contradictorily, his own assessment of Jesus in the third chapter. For a writer mostly bitterly critical of the Christian tradition and its anti-Semitic distortions and crimes, this is quite high praise:

Father John P. Meier, the author of three magisterial volumes under the somewhat misleading title A Marginal Jew (with a much-needed fourth volume to come), accurately terms Jesus "a Jewish genius." One can go further: Jesus was the greatest of Jewish geniuses. It is as though the Yahwist or J Writer somehow was fused with King David, with the Prophets from Amos through Malachi, with the Wisdom authors of Job and Koheleth (Ecclesiastes), with the sages from Hillel through Akiba, and with the long sequence that goes from Maimonides through Spinoza on to Freud and Kafka. Jesus is the Jewish Socrates, and surpasses Plato's mentor as the supreme master of dark wisdom. (26-7)

One wants to know: if the historical Jesus, as Bloom insists, is lost to the sands of time, how can he also be "the greatest of Jewish geniuses"? Or rather: how could we know this? On the basis of what sources could we know it if not the gospels Bloom elsewhere characterizes as unreliable?

Presumably Bloom, like many educated Christians, suspects that in the gospels (in Mark, Matthew and Luke, though perhaps not at all in John) there is a basic collection of teachings and acts that really is authentic to Yeshua himself: i.e., that although we will never be sure exactly which words in the gospels are his, we can nonetheless get a somewhat reliable portrait of his teachings from these texts. Bloom insists that his preferred gospels are Mark and Thomas; he says that as a Jew he is hated by the writer of John and that he "returns the favor"; he claims that the Epistle of James, written perhaps by one of the followers of Jesus' brother James the Just, offers us the most trustworthy echo we will ever get of Yeshua's authentic voice. I agree with him to a degree in his preferences: certainly I'm convinced Matthew and Mark are the most reliable of the gospels; the Gospel of Thomas too may contain authentic sayings, and thus cannot be ignored; and certainly I find the Epistle of James a more likely historical echo of Jesus than the letters of Paul (which, however, I've recently been led to reassess thanks to the scholarly movement known as "the new perspective on Paul": Garry Wills gives a striking presentation).

Bloom's praise for Mark is grounded in the gospel writer's extraordinary narrative strengths and in the fact that Mark gives us a Jesus similar in many ways to Yahweh. Somewhat oddly, Bloom hints that at least Mark's Jesus actually could be the (literary?) "son of God":

But why did Jesus frequently speak in riddles? His parables follow and perfect Hebrew tradition; Yahweh himself, throughout the J Writer's text, delights in riddling puns, unanswerably rhetorical questions, and fiercely playful outbursts that edge upon a frightening fury. "Like father, like son," a believer aptly could reply. Whoever wrote Mark, the first Gospel to be composed, was such a believer, and went back to Yahweh at the God's uncanniest in order to suggest something of the secret of Jesus. (31)

Bloom's preference for Thomas, not explained in this work, is no doubt partly based on that newly discovered gospel's focus on Jesus' life and sayings rather than on the crucifixion. Such a focus, in any case, suggests that whoever compiled the sayings in Thomas had little use for the doctrine of atonement, a teaching Bloom also doubtless would rank among the creedal misrepresentations of Jesus' life. The critic also has frequently called himself a Gnostic, and, although the jury is still out as to the degree Thomas should be linked to Gnosticism, there are certainly sayings in Thomas that fit well with Gnostic teaching.

On Jesus and the Epistle of James, we read:

. . . Jesus outdoes the Pharisees (his closest rivals) in honoring the Law. His genius fused love for his father, Yahweh as abba [Aramaic: father], with love for the Law, oral and written, and love for his people. He remains the Jew-of-Jews, the Jew proper, triumphant over victimage while longing for the Father, and for the Kingdom where love and righteousness will be harmonized. Paul turned to the Gentiles. Jesus, as even the Synoptic Gospels make clear, certainly did not. James the Just, brother of Jesus, was his authentic disciple. Scholars oddly do not see that the spirit of Jesus stands forth most clearly in the Epistle of James, composed by one of the Ebionites, or Jewish Christians, who survived the judicial murder of James and the subsequent sack of Jerusalem. . . . [In the Epistle of James] we hear the voice of the Prophets in the wilderness, of Elijah and John the Baptist, and the voice of Jesus himself, for once abandoning his formidable irony. (13-4)

And:

. . . [The] stance and aura of Jewish Christianity has never been better exemplified than in this eloquent sermon. . . . Since there is an overt polemic against Paul, I am not impressed when scholars argue that James and Paul subtly can be reconciled. Martin Luther's anti-Semitic diatribe against James counts far more: he reacted with fury to the Epistle's "a man is justified by works and not by faith alone" (2:24), a manifest repudiation of Paul's "a man is justified by faith and not by works" (Romans 3:28) (38)

In general Bloom is not impressed by scholars who try subtly to reconcile. One of the critic's major gripes in Jesus and Yahweh is the extent to which Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) was "strongly misread" by the writers of what became the New Testament. In his long career as literary-religious critic, he has never tired of reminding readers that the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament are different books: both organized differently and read with radically different presuppositions. Bloom, theoretician of "the anxiety of influence," considers the New Testament to be in large measure driven by its writers' desire to bend the meaning of Jewish tradition to their own Hellenizing ends. The Christian Bible is, Bloom says, the most successful example of misreading in history. In a strong metaphor of his own, one evoking the Arch of Titus in Rome, he writes of the Hebrew Bible being taken captive by the New Testament:

If the New Testament triumphed in the Roman mode, and it did under Constantine, then the captive led in procession was the Tanakh, reduced to slavery as the Old Testament. All subsequent Jewish history, until the founding more than half a century ago of the State of Israel, testifies to the human consequences of that textual slavery. (50-1)

Bloom takes up the New Testament's struggle with Tanakh mainly in his consideration of the rhetorical strategies of the Gospel of John. The fourth gospel, as most readers have noticed, goes further in the direction of anti-Semitism than the previously written synoptic gospels, and contains some of the Bible's most unfortunate formulations:

A Jewish reader with even the slightest sense of Jewish history feels threatened when reading John 18:28-19:16. . . . There is a peculiar wrongness about John's Jesus saying, "If my kingship were of this world, my servants would fight, that I might not be handed over to the Jews" (18:36); it implies that Jesus is no longer a Jew, but something else.

Bloom attributes John's anti-Jewishness to the time and place of its writing; those behind its composition were undergoing "an anxiety of frustrated expectations, perhaps even of recent expulsion from the Jewish world." (78-9) It is this crisis of faith or identity that drove the gospel's nastiness toward the Pharisees (many scholars now believe it very unlikely Jesus' relations with the Pharisees were as bitter as the gospels make them out to be) as well as its struggle toward Moses. Bloom analyzes the passage containing John 8:58--Jesus' statement that "Before Abraham was, I am"--to bring out the subtlety and power of the writer's rhetoric, what the critic calls his "revisionary warfare." Impressed by John's subtlety, Bloom cannot finally bring himself to praise it:

I don't see how any authentic literary critic could judge John as anything better than a very flawed revisionist of the Yahwist. . . . In the aesthetic warfare between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, there is just no contest, and if you think otherwise, then bless you. (86)

Ultimately, as Bloom himself implies, one's assessment of John will depend on whether or not one believes Jesus to be the Messiah and whether or not one accepts orthodox Christian ideas as to what the Messiah is. For myself, I see John 8:58--"Before Abraham was, I am"--quite differently than Bloom. If the words are merely Johannine, they give us a rhetorically brilliant meditation on how the Messiah relates to the Patriarchs and Prophets: i.e., the Messiah is of greater stature than Abraham or Moses. If the words are authentically from Jesus, however, they offer an instance of Jesus' voice speaking directly from the ground of the Logos itself: Jesus affirming what he knows about himself against those who would accuse him of raving or blaspheming. A Christian reader like myself may well be put off by the anti-Semitic gestures in John, but can still brush them aside as aberrant, focusing instead on the more substantive theological aspects of the text. Regarding the passages where Jesus and the apostles are represented as a group somehow distinct from "the Jews," I agree with Bloom entirely: they are a product of anxiety and identity crisis; they offer a misrepresentation, a perverse example of anti-Semitism in a text that should, on the contrary, have found its root in Jewish tradition. As for John's christology, however, that is a different matter.

Bloom will doubtless say that one cannot have one's cake and eat it too, that the logocentrism of the Gospel of John is Hellenic and not Jewish, and that the true Messiah could not have spoken in this way. But how can Bloom or anyone know how the true Messiah would speak? Is Yahweh to be limited by our expectations of him? Could not his development, to follow Bloom's own biographical approach to Yahweh, follow unpredictable paths? The critic would have to agree that it is so.

Bloom's approach to Yahweh in this new work is somewhat different from that in the earlier Book of J. If in that work Bloom analyzed Yahweh's uncanny presence in the J writer's work, this meditation seems more concerned with Yahweh's career before and after the events narrated in the Bible. Where was Yahweh before creation, and what was his motive for creation? How explain his slow transcendence or distancing from men as narrated over the course of the Hebrew Bible, and how explain, further, his apparent self-exile from much of Jewish history since?

In Jesus and Yahweh Bloom keeps up a dialogue of sorts with Jack Miles, whose works God: A Biography and Christ he evidently, with some reservations, admires. Like Miles, and somewhat like the Kabbalists, Bloom has chosen to treat of Yahweh biographically. This choice is a conceit of course, one that makes it easier for the critic to make certain kinds of points. One of Bloom's major points is the disconcerting humanity of Yahweh: an irascibility and physical presence that make him hard to identify with the more transcendent Christian concept of God the Father.

Early on in the Yahweh chapters, Bloom makes a characteristic observation regarding the relationship between Yahweh as represented in the J writer's work and all that succeeds him--i.e., all subsequent Western religious thought: "Yahweh's Shakespeare, the J Writer, manifested an irreverence [toward Yahweh] that sparked the defensive rise of theology, which is always an effort to explain away the human aspects of God (or of Jesus)." (137-8) For Bloom the literary critic, Yahweh represents an intellectual challenge akin to that posed by Shakespeare's strongest characters, Hamlet and King Lear. The God Yahweh, Bloom insists, "is a man," and yet he is somehow an infinite man with a mind "intricately labyrinthine." This assertion that God is a man is of course something of the reverse of the Christian assertion that Jesus the man is also God. In terms of his own tradition, Bloom makes his assertion on good authority: in Kabbalah, in the Rabbi Akiba and in Scripture itself similar assertions can be found. Bloom writes:

Despite Philo of Alexandria, prince of Jewish Platonic allegorists, a true name for God, in the tradition of Rabbi Akiba, is Ish (man). Exodus 15:3 magnificently intones, 'Yahweh is a Man of War, the Lord is his name.'. . . The great Akiba, who truly founded the Judaism we still recognize . . . held strong to the literalism of Yahweh as Ish, God as Man, despite Rabbi Ishmael and his school. Yahweh walks about in Exodus 13:21, however unhappy sucah perambulation was to make the Prophets. I find a crazy comedy in the early exegetes who follow a strolling Yahweh around, while chirping, "He's not walking!" After all, the hardworking and energetic Yahweh really rests on the seventh day . . . . A swordsman, Yahweh needs downtime, like all men of war. And Yahweh is joyous, or angry, and frequently hungry. Akiba sensibly found all this quite acceptable, but it roused his friend and opponent Ishmael to indignant denials. . . . (196)

Why this God so engaged in the life of his Chosen People should slowly drift into transcendence after the Book of Job is a question Bloom sets himself in this work. Yahweh's apparent abandonment of his Covenant has long been a major problem for Judaism; the horrors of the twentieth century have pushed the issue to a limit point. Bloom points out that the Jews are to have trust in the Covenant, but understandably wonders how this can be possible anymore. He contrasts the types of spiritual comportment stressed by the three Western faiths: "Judaism emphasizes trust in the Covenant, Christianity professes faith that Jesus himself was the New Covenant, Islam is submission to the will of Allah." (143) Trust, faith and submission are the three distinct grounds of our three Western monotheisms. I believe Bloom would acknowledge that trust, as a spiritual mode, has vulnerabilities that faith or submission do not. Or at least that the horrors of Jewish history have been such as to undermine precisely that virtue: trust. Yahweh promised Abraham descendants as numerous as the grains of sand on the seashore, and yet, as Bloom points out, Christians and Muslims now outnumber Jews more than a thousand to one. The Roman massacres of Jews and destruction of the Temple themselves dealt massive blows to Jewish trust. The Holocaust of the last century, Bloom insists, should be evidence enough: Yahweh has defaulted on his Covenant. But even the history contained in the Hebrew Bible, when Yahweh was presumably at his most engaged, does not offer a very encouraging picture. "We can be maddened by Yahweh's bewildering turns at revealing and concealing himself . . . his furies can seem so sudden and capricious. Yahweh commands a recalcitrant Moses to descend into Egypt, and then attempts to murder his prophet at a night encampment in the Negev, on the way down." (132; see Exodus 5:24ff) As with Moses himself, so with the whole people. Even in the Tanakh, the blessings offered prove few and far between.

Since his Book of J Bloom has stressed Yahweh's impishness and unpredictability. But how account for it? In Jesus and Yahweh the critic turns to the speculations of Kabbalah in order to explain what seems to be the wayward and pained psychology of the Jewish God. There is a sketchy summary of the thought of Isaac Luria, seen partially through the lens of Gershom Scholem and Freud, and, interestingly, several reverent pages on Nahman of Bratslav. To simplify matters greatly, the Kabbalah on which Bloom focuses was an attempt to think the negative side of creation via the question of how the creation was possible and what its results were. In order to create the universe, it is claimed, Yahweh had to withdraw himself from part of himself, if only in order to make a void in which this universe could be. This withdrawing from self or division in self is already a beginning of crisis. Along with the concentration implied in creation, there was also, Bloom says, a necessary contraction, for without it "there could be no reality except God's, and no evil either." "There has to be an abyss in the will of Yahweh, since without a negative moment in the act of creation, God and the cosmos would fuse as one." (211-2) This abyss or self-exile in the creator (the term in Kabbalah is zimzum) is followed by a disaster in the created world. Isaac Luria conceived the fable of the Breaking of the Vessels to explain the imperfections of the world we know. In the creation Yahweh formed vessels to receive the outpouring of his power, but this power proved too much for the vessels to contain; they broke. Yahweh's irascibility as evident in the tradition, the suffering of the Chosen People in this imperfect world--both are a result of the cosmic disaster that was creation. The universe is a self-injured God presiding over a broken creation.

One may speculate that Yahweh's initial self-exile in zimzum was followed by a movement of withdrawal from the creation itself. This is the understanding Bloom portrays in the great 18th century Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav. In fact this withdrawal is not simply a matter of going elsewhere, a retreat, but is a dwindling in being or power.

God [for Nahman] is not merely an absence dwindled down from a presence. After one zimzum too many, Yahweh shrunk into Elohim cannot be distinguished from the cosmic void he wanders. . . . [Yahweh, who was once] Being itself, has vaporized into the void of Jewish dispersion and suffering. (224)

A self-divided Yahweh who rages over a broken creation, eventually to dwindle down into a slight presence, incapable of upholding the Covenant he once made with his people. This, according to Bloom, is the vision of the idiosyncratic Hasidic master Nahman; it is one Bloom seems to share, for frequently in Jesus and Yahweh the critic insists that Shakespeare's King Lear is an apt portrayal of the Hebrew God.

Throughout Bloom's meditations one frequently encounters expressions of the critic's bitterness, both a cosmic or existential bitterness and a historical grudge based on the unjust suffering of his people: suffering at the hands first of pagans, then of Christians, who are, Bloom suggests, really polytheistic pagans in disguise. Though the religious critical arguments are certainly substantial, one senses that Bloom's assertion of Jesus and Yahweh's incompatibility is grounded ultimately as much in bitterness as it is in learned argument. If Yahweh can shrink into something like the background noise of the universe--as represented in Rabbi Nahman, whom Bloom considers a literary genius--then Yahweh can also feasibly become the Father to whom Jesus refers. The reduced vigor, the ineffectuality and transcendence of which Bloom accuses the First Person of the Christian Trinity is not, after all, on a par with the weakness and ineffectuality of God in Nahman's bleak conception. And Jesus, partially obscured beneath centuries of philosophical speculation (i.e., theology), can still be heard in the gospels as the greatest master of dark wisdom: the wisdom of a kingdom whose laws represent an attempt to bridge the incommensurable: the divine and the human.

In the middle of his new book Bloom makes a comment about the Christian theologian Hans Frei: "The late Hans Frei used to puzzle me by his gentle prophecy that the spiritual future of Christianity had to involve a return to its Judaic origins." (146) I myself am not an orthodox Christian, I am a seeker rather, and as such I may be more willing than most to think through the meaning or possibility of such a return. In fact I've long felt the need for such a recognition on the part of Christianity: a recognition that the Messiah is the Jewish Messiah first, and the world's Messiah second. But what did Bloom finally make of Frei's prophecy? In Bloom's thought, what would a modern Jewish Christianity entail? Would it necessarily be an attempt to bring back the Ebionite faith? How would such a faith relate to the Covenant? Could Bloom imagine such a religion--i.e., the religion that Hans Frei was imagining? These are just a few of the questions one might pose to the great critic.

Check Jesus and Yahweh at Amazon.com

Garry Wills: What Paul Meant

[A more updated version of this article is at the site where it was originally posted: Garry Wills on Paul.]

There is no more Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, man nor woman, but you are all one in Christ Jesus. Merely by belonging to Christ, you are Abraham's seed, the heirs he was promised. --Paul, Galatians 3:38-9

A number of years ago I undertook a project to compile a composite Gospel, a text or anthology of texts that would present in as few pages as possible the bare essentials of the Bible as I understood it (see The Durationist Gospel). Amazingly to many readers, I included nothing of Paul. After putting my anthology online, my In-box was hit with a handful of incomprehending letters: How could I not have included at least a few key Pauline passages?

Leaving out Paul entirely was rather outrageous, granted. But the Apostle to the Gentiles was important mainly to the historic movement of the faith, I argued; my efforts were to present the life and teachings of Jesus to non-Christian readers, not the life and teachings of Paul. This was a bit disingenuous. In fact I had other reasons for neglecting Paul, which I explained in a letter to one correspondent. I'll quote most of it here:

Though I take the authentic letters of Paul as authoritative, I don't believe they should be accorded the importance given the Gospels. Paul may have been the earliest writer of the New Testament, but the Gospels offer our most complete picture of Jesus the Christ.

Of course Paul's story and his role are crucial in the history of the revelation. It is Paul who taught us that we too, we Gentiles, are invited through Christ to become sons and daughters of Abraham. Nonetheless, Paul's giant role in the history of revelation should not make us forget one thing: Paul is small next to the Christ.

The nature of Paul's writing--his concern to address the problems of the churches, his exposition of theology--has had an unfortunate effect. It has somehow made Paul more quotable, more the model of Christian discourse and action, than Jesus himself. This pre-eminent importance given Paul's particular stresses, this constant quoting of Pauline formulas in instances when one should be thinking of Jesus, is a great error.

My problem with Paul was a matter of Pauline rhetoric and gesture more than anything. It was a matter of the central position these had come to occupy in Christian discourse, particularly in Protestantism. To be brief: I didn't appreciate the extent to which the spirit of Paul lorded it over a Church in which he was neither Spirit nor Lord.

The question remains, however: Can one tell the story of Jesus as Messiah without also telling the story of Paul? Probably one cannot. Those with a grudge against Paul--and there are many--once they begin to explain Jesus' importance, will most likely find themselves repeating one aspect or other of Paul's theology. Perhaps only Gnostic Christians could offer a doctrine of Christ that in large measure ignored the writer of Romans. And this may be one of the reasons many modern Christians find Gnosticism so compelling: it allows them, finally, to jettison Paul.

But would it really be Paul they are jettisoning? Might it not be the case that the Paul they want to separate from Jesus is not the real Paul?

Garry Wills' little book What Paul Meant offers a brilliant defense of the widely maligned apostle, arguing that our understanding of Paul is skewed by historical and doctrinal accretions. Wills addresses many of the common accusations against Paul--that he was sexist, that he was anti-Semitic--and convincingly makes the case that they are grounded either a) on texts not actually written by Paul, or b) on misinterpretations of what Paul was getting at. Wills doesn't need to resort to special pleading or rhetorical sleights either: one has the sense in this book of an eminently reasonable mind, and a very gifted writer, who has long struggled with Paul's meaning and is now, as concisely as possible, presenting his conclusions. Depending on the best current scholarship, Wills directs his readers through a more nuanced consideration of the communities Paul lived with and wrote to; it is on this basis that he brings Paul's thought to light.

Wills begins by recounting the reasons one may suppose Paul not to be a reliable source as regards Jesus' teachings. Truth to tell, these reasons are pretty formidable. Not only did Paul never meet Jesus during his lifetime, he never, in his formative period, spent much time in Judaea:

[D]uring the earthly career of Jesus, Paul was never in the same country with him. Jesus came from Judaea and never moved outside it. Paul came from Cilicia . . . and became a follower of Jesus in Syria . . . . Paul did not even go to Judaea for three years after he professed allegiance to Jesus, and he remained there for only two weeks. After this first visit, he stayed away for another fourteen years (Gal 2:1).

Aside from not spending time in the places where Jesus lived and where, presumably, Jesus' closest acquaintances and followers could be found, Paul even dared criticize those who had known Jesus: "Paul dared to disagree with and criticize the original Twelve; and Peter, their leader; and James the brother of the Lord, who presided over the gathering in Jerusalem." (2-4) It is hard to credit Paul here. Against the firsthand knowledge of Jesus' original Judaean followers, Paul's familiarity with Jesus and his teachings would seem suspect. How could he be expected to know what Jesus really taught? Who was he to take such a prominent role in spreading Jesus' message? And further: Who was he to interpret that message in ways that irked Peter and James? There are three reasons Wills can argue for Paul's reliability, two of them valid on historical grounds, one acceptable only on the grounds of faith.

Anyone who has done even a modicum of historical study of the New Testament knows that Paul's letters were written before the Gospels. This fact has led some, Wills among them, to argue that we find the most reliable portrait of the early Jesus movement in Paul. Wills is quite persuasive here, pointing out that the common idea of Paul as a new convert going forth alone to spread the good news to places that had never heard of Jesus is false. In fact, as his letters show, Paul typically worked and traveled in teams with other believers and, what's more, was usually visiting places that already had gatherings of believers before he got there. Wills draws out the implications of this: Paul's ideas of Jesus' teaching could not have come entirely from himself; he was not a lone instigator of faith, but part of a community of faith that was there before him. The various city gatherings that made up that wider community, because they accepted Paul, must have agreed with him on essentials. In fact, having spent so much time among them, he'd probably gotten many of his ideas from them. Paul is thus our earliest witness not simply to his own understanding of Jesus, but to the emergent Jesus movement as such. His letters to the gatherings are the only texts to survive the first decades of Christianity.

Aside from these two grounds for accepting Paul--on the one hand, his chronological priority; on the other, the fact of his being part of an already vibrant Christian movement--Wills, a Catholic, presents a third, one that will only be credited by the faithful: Paul was given his message directly by the risen Jesus himself. We have two sources in the New Testament that tell us of Paul's experience of the risen Jesus, the first being his own letters, the second being Luke's accounts of Paul's life in Acts. Wills argues that in cases of conflict between what is narrated in Acts and what Paul himself writes in his letters, we should normally accept Paul's own testimony first. That seems reasonable enough. In fact attentive readers will find hardly a single point on which there is not conflict.

Regarding Paul's experience of the risen Christ, Luke narrates the story three times in the course of Acts. The three versions do not agree among themselves, and none agrees with what we find in Paul. Specifically, as regards Luke's famous first account, in which Paul, on the road to Damascus, is struck blind by a bright light and hears the voice of the Lord--in fact if we read Paul's letters we note there is nothing in them to confirm any part of this story. To go from Paul's own version, there is no bright light, no blindness, and it wasn't a matter simply of hearing a voice: no, Paul writes of seeing the risen Lord and speaking with him. What's more, going from Paul's accounts, we may assume that he didn't only see the risen Jesus once, but many times.

Throughout Wills book and in much current scholarship, Luke is shown to be almost uniformly unreliable as a historical source. Scrutinize them from any of a number of angles, and his accounts fall apart. Luke, it is clear, was more concerned with the ideological effects of his writing than with any question of historical accuracy. Placed just before Paul's letters in the New Testament, Luke's Acts casts a heavy shadow over how most readers understand Paul, one from which Wills and the scholars he relies on have tried to extricate him.

Luke's presentation bears some of the responsibility for the fact that Paul has been considered anti-Jewish. Paul, as Wills explains, did not consider himself part of a new religion separate from Judaism; rather his faith in Jesus as Messiah was inseparable from his Jewish identity:

Paul never thinks of himself as a convert to some new religion. He preaches the Jewish God, Yahweh, and the Jewish Messiah. He preaches in synagogues. When he brings others to believe in Jesus, he teaches them only from the Jewish holy writings, which were the only 'Bible' of the day--his letters would not be joined together with later documents to create a separate 'New Testament' till long after his death. Though relations between Jews who believed in Jesus and those who did not were becoming strained and combative in Paul's time, he says there can be no permanent break. History is moving fast toward its conclusion, and the only conclusion he recognizes is the one God has arranged for his covenanted people. 'Has God rejected his own people? Far from it' (Rom 11:1).

. . .

Other peoples are to be included in God's final plan, but the original people cannot be excluded. How this was to happen was mysterious, but Paul and his fellow believers in the Diaspora were hurriedly trying to work the matter out. (12-3)

And later:

For Paul there was no such thing as 'the Old Testament.' If he had known that his writings would be incorporated into something called the New Testament, he would have repudiated that if it was meant in any way to repudiate, or subordinate, the only scripture he knew, the only word of God he recognized, his Bible. (127-8)

Paul held that God had opened the blessing to the Gentiles in order to shame his chosen people, the Jews. "He is using the Gentiles, as he used Pharoah, to correct the Jews. For they will be corrected. Their defection is only temporary." (133) Wills quotes the Lutheran bishop Krister Stendahl on this aspect of Paul's thought: "The Jews have been put 'on hold,' to bring the Gentiles up to speed." As Stendahl has it: "The Jews in God's plan had to step aside for a little while so that the Gentiles had time to come in." Paul writes in his letter to the Romans:

All Israel will be rescued, as scripture says: 'Out of Zion comes the Rescuer, to rip away iniquities from Jacob, so my covenant abides with them, to remedy their sinfulness.' (11.26-27)

Wills:

Paul speaks of the Brothers [i.e., believing Gentiles] as joined to the Jewish promise, history, and fate, not vice versa. As Krister Stendahl says, Paul always thought of Gentiles as 'honorary Jews.' (137)

Given the sustained effort we see in Paul to bring Gentile Brothers into the covenant while maintaining proper respect for his own people (those with whom God initially made the covenant), how did it come about that, first, relations between Jewish and Christian communities became so bitter, and, second, Paul himself was accused of being anti-Jewish? Historians of the period have recently come to a better understanding of this world-historical falling out. The main cause is to be found in the way the emergent Jesus movement destabilized relations between Diaspora Jewish communities and pagan Rome. Under constant threat of sanction by their Roman rulers, Jewish communities felt threatened by this charismatic new movement. But why?

One needs to understand how the Jews outside Israel managed to get along under Roman rule. There were Jewish communities in many cities across the empire and a large community in the capital itself. Unwilling to take part in pagan festivals and refusing as well to engage in worship of the emperor, the Jews were always potential targets for reprisal. Their strict food laws exacerbated things by placing yet another barrier between them and their pagan neighbors. Still, there was an important minority of pagans who admired Jewish belief and even attended synagogue and became supporters of the Jews. The number of these pagan enthusiasts, called God Fearers, or Theosebeis, has recently been found to be larger than previously believed. They formed an important bridge of goodwill between the Jews and the wider pagan culture that surrounded them. Not Jews themselves, they necessarily took part in Jewish belief as outsiders. Wills describes the situation of the God Fearers as follows:

[They were] inquiring and sympathetic non-Jews welcomed in synagogues, where they could study, pray, and contribute money or advice, without being (yet) circumcised. They might go on to full membership in the faith, or they might just help create goodwill for the Jews in their dealings with the 'pagan' world. The Romans of the first century were out on quest for spiritual knowledge, and they welcomed many Eastern sects or cults--principally that of Mithras. But among the exotic beliefs being entertained, the Jews had, for some, a special appeal, based on their monotheism (in a polytheistic world), their purity of life, and their ancient learning. (64-5)

Some scholars now believe that the ire that sprang up between Jewish communities and Christians was due in large part to the fact that many of the God Fearers were joining the Jesus movement. Once "in Messiah," as Paul put it, these previous pagan admirers from the outside of Judaism could consider themselves finally part of the Jewish religion without having to undergo circumcision or accept other ritual demands. What's more, they might even begin to criticize Jews who didn't accept Jesus, as such might, in their eyes, be considered out of step with the fulfillment of their own covenant. Given the always precarious position of Jewish communities under Roman power, the falling away of the God Fearers must have been felt as boding nothing good. Conflicts between Jewish believers in Jesus and non-believing Jews would likely become bitter; the same might happen between pagan believers in Jesus and non-believing Jews. Disputes would lead to small scale conflicts, which might attract the attention of the Roman authorities, which could only make matters worse. The Roman historian Suetonius records that the emperor Claudius "expelled from Rome the Jews because of continual disturbances provoked by Chrestus." It is now assumed that this name "Chrestus" is a misunderstanding on the part of the historian, and that the name in question was actually Christus. Probably, then, it was disputes over the Jesus movement that led to trouble in Rome's Jewish community, which, in turn, led the emperor to expel the whole lot from the city. The Jews were eventually allowed back in after Claudius' death, but the situation of Christians vis a vis the Imperium only became worse. The reign of the succeeding emperor, Nero, would see the persecutions in which, it is believed, both Paul and Peter died.

While Paul's work spreading the good news was successful, then, his effort to maintain harmony between God's chosen people, the Jews, and God's newly welcomed people, the Gentiles, failed dismally. This failure is echoed in many passages in the New Testament, where the bitter conflict between traditional Jews and those who believe in Jesus is projected back onto the story of Jesus' life, as we find it in the Gospels. To take but one of the most famous examples, we might recall the dialogue between Pilate and the crowd over the question of Jesus' execution:

They all said, 'Let him be crucified!' 'Why?' [Pilate] asked. 'What harm has he done?' But they shouted all the louder, 'Let him be crucified!' Then Pilate saw that he was making no impression, that in fact a riot was imminent. So he took some water, washed his hands in front of the crowd and said, 'I am innocent of this man's blood. It is your concern.' And the people, to a man, shouted back, 'His blood be on us and on our children!' (Matthew 27:22-5)

Did this exchange ever occur? Only Biblical literalists believe it likely.

As argued above in relation to Luke, the polemical concerns of later New Testament writers cast a shadow over Paul that obscures our vision. But this is not the only shadow. Working in line with the scholarly movement known as the "new perspective on Paul," Wills sketches out how our understanding of Paul's theology was distorted yet again in the Reformation. Once more the insight of Krister Stendahl is crucial, as it was Stendahl, the Lutheran scholar, who put into question the stark Lutheran stress on "faith versus works." In a famous 1961 talk entitled "The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West," Stendahl suggested that Luther had misinterpreted what was at issue in Paul's letter to the Romans. Paul was not, as Luther interpreted it, insisting on our utter helplessness given the fact of sin, but only making the point that neither pagans nor Jews could avoid sin: neither side could accuse the other of being depraved.

Luther's misinterpretation of Paul came about through the fact that the German reformer did not appreciate the degree to which Paul's writing was taken up with the problem of relations between Gentiles and the Jewish Law. Without rejecting Mosaic Law as entirely as many Christians believed he did, Paul asserted that the Law was not binding on Gentile believers, and that in any case, as Wills puts it, "the claims of the prophets had to be fulfilled, making a religion of the heart replace that of external observances." Paul and Jesus agreed on the essential core of the Law. As Paul wrote, echoing Jesus: "The entire Law is fulfilled in this one saying, Love your neighbor as yourself." (Gal 5.14) Luther took the Pauline struggle with the problem of how Gentile believers related to Jewish Law and reinterpreted it as a contrast, in the life of every Christian, between "faith and works." Wills:

Luther was thinking in terms of the internal struggle of the individual sinner, not of the rescue of whole peoples, as Paul did . . . . Paul saw God's plan as dealing 'wholesale,' not retail. He was in a race with history, on his way to Spain, recruiting Romans in his effort to cover the whole Gentile world while he went back to bring the Jewish Brothers 'on board' this mission. He was counting on the Jewish Brothers to bring their countrymen to a realization that Jesus is the one they had been promised and were still hoping for. His message was always of and for his--and Jesus'--blood kin. (139)

Paul's message was metaphysically less radical than the Protestant interpretation of that message. For Paul, sin was not the utterly annihilating force it was in the mind of the late medieval monk Luther. The doctrine of original sin, we must remember, would not be formulated until the fourth century. Rather than focus on the individual soul--the soul so corrupted by the curse of Adam that no works could gain it any credit with a wrathful God--Paul addressed peoples who had strayed from the law: the Jews who had not kept Mosaic Law, and the Gentiles who had not kept the natural law God inscribed in their hearts. Straying humanity, according to Paul, is reunited with God on the bridge of the Messiah: the Jewish covenant is fulfilled through Christ, and the pagans are, through Christ, welcome to become God's children alongside the chosen people. According to Wills and other scholars of the "new perspective" movement, Paul's theology had a fullness and optimism one wouldn't expect looking back at it through the dark glass of intervening centuries: that first century when relations between Christians and Jews would sour; the fourth century when Augustine would write of original sin; and finally the fifteenth century when Luther would recast Paul's thinking on the Law as treating of the value of good works as such.

Wills has a lengthy central chapter on "Paul and Women," in which he discusses Junia, Prisca, Phoebe and other important women in Paul's circle. To go from the authentic letters, Paul obviously had great respect for these and other women in the movement, whom he calls "fellow workers in Messiah." One of them, Junia, Paul even refers to as a fellow "apostle," a fact which confused the medieval Church, which added an "s" to her name to make it masculine. Wills: "Only the most Soviet-style rewriting of history could declare Junia a nonperson" by dubbing her "Junias." "Paul believed in women's basic equality with men. . . . There is no more 'man and woman' as originally divided, since they are now united in Messiah--a concept Paul would expound when he said that the reborn Brother and Sister are 'a new order of being' (ktisis, 2 Cor 5.17)." (92; 89-90)

When quoting Paul, Wills uses his own translations, and they are some of the most finely balanced translations of New Testament passages I know of. An appendix gives his principles on this, telling us that "modern translations, even those that seem most 'objective,' distort what Paul was saying":

It is hard to avoid anachronism when we try to reenter Paul's world--to avoid terms that did not exist for Paul, terms like Christian, church, priests, sacraments, conversion. All such terms subtly, or not so subtly, pervert what was being said in its original situation.

Wills insists that we must "scrub away linguistic accretions on Paul's text" in order to "travel back into the Spirit-haunted, God-driven world of Paul in the heady first charismatic days of Jesus' revelation." (177) I couldn't agree more; anyone who reads Wills' translations along with his exposition will see firsthand the importance of this work of linguistic scrubbing. There have been other attempts to do with New Testament texts what Wills does here (Guy Davenport and Benjamin Urrutia had similar goals in their version of Jesus' sayings; Reynolds Price's Three Gospels is also worth consulting), but none seems to me as successful as Wills. There is a hewing to the primal sense of the ancient text, combined with a respect for English, that one rarely finds. Robert Alter does this with the Pentateuch, but I know of nobody who has done it successfully with the New Testament. I can only hope Wills will come out with a complete edition of the Pauline letters, perhaps reprinting What Paul Meant as a lengthy introduction. Could one hope to see this brilliant translator take up one of the Gospels? For this reader, still, the Gospels are where the most pressing voice is to be found.

Though the issue will probably never be decided and though there remain strong arguments to the contrary, Wills has argued persuasively for the closeness of Paul to Jesus, whether that closeness be grounded in Paul's experience of the risen Christ or Paul's place in an authentic, and very early, Christian movement. How did the movement Paul was part of relate to the Jerusalem gathering headed by James? It is, as Wills points out, encouraging that Paul and Peter, regardless of early conflicts, ended as fellow workers in Rome.

Is it perhaps true that Jesus, as the Gospels tell us, went to Jerusalem intending to be crucified, that he conceived of his body as the new Temple, and that he, as Paul insists, knew himself to be a new bridge between God and men--first the Jews, as children of the promise, and second the Gentiles, as newly chosen?

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Jewish Christianity Reconsidered

Ebionites and Nazarenes
Scholars believe the early Jewish Christian group known as the Ebionites took their name from the Hebrew word for "poor," the name thus meaning "the poor ones." There is evidence they themselves claimed the name derived from the fact of their having given all their possessions to the apostles. According to Irenaeus, the Ebionites rejected the virgin birth, believed that the Christ entered Jesus at his baptism, used Matthew's gospel only (or a version thereof), opposed Paul, followed Jewish law, had a great reverence for Jerusalem, and celebrated the Eucharist with water rather than wine. Of course, given that the Ebionites may represent one of the earliest Christian movements, rooted in the Jerusalem church, it is possible their beliefs are more authentically Christian (by which I mean: going back to Jesus himself) than the orthodoxy that soon began developing around the Mediterranean.

The later heresiologist Epiphanius (4th century) presents a slightly different and markedly less congenial picture of the Ebionites. But evidence suggests that this group, encountered by Epiphanius on Cyprus, might be an offshoot of Samaritan converts to Christianity. In any case, they are vegetarians, reject the prophets, and have adopted the apocalyptic Book of Elchasai.

The issue of vegetarianism in early Christianity is an interesting one, linked by Epiphanius to temple sacrifice, which the group he describes considered a perversion of God's true law. Writing in the early 4th century, Eusebius, often called the father of Church history, stated that both the apostles and James the Just were vegetarians. But the New Testament texts themselves don't anywhere imply vegetarianism, which to me seems to trump Eusebius' statements.

(NB: As for the other group often mentioned in conjunction with the Ebionites, namely the Nazarenes or Nazoreans, I am convinced by Petri Luomanen's recent arguments that no such group existed as an independent sect. The term Nazarene was, quite simply, the common term for Christian in the Semitic languages, thus early Catholic Christians would also have been called "Nazarenes." Luomanen's careful discussion, in any case, should show us how little we can know about either Ebionites or Nazarenes. See his article "Ebionites and Nazarenes" in Jewish Christianity Reconsidered.)

* * *

Jewish Christianity, Christian Judaism,
or neither of the above?

Review of: Jewish Christianity Reconsidered: Rethinking Ancient Groups and Texts. Ed. Matt Jackson-McCabe, Fortress Press, 389 pp.

In addition to Petri Luomanen's article on the Ebionites and Nazarenes, the volume Jewish Christianity Reconsidered contains a number of excellent scholarly contributions to the question: How Jewish was early Christianity? Not surprisingly, one of the points made by most of the scholars is that this question itself, formulated in this way, is anachronistic and misleading. "Judaism" in the first century was not what it became later and, certainly, "Christianity" wasn't either. But what was Judaism, and, more importantly for this volume, what was first-century Christianity as found in these Jewish communities?

The range of topics of the articles is well-suited to wrestling with this question. There is an article on the Jerusalem Church, one on Paul and his opponents, one (mentioned above) on the Ebionites; there are articles on many of the relevant New Testament books (Matthew, John, the Epistle of James, Revelation) and some of the apocrypha (the Didache, the Pseudo-Clementines). The volume gathers papers by contributors both secular and religious, and there are a variety of methodological approaches represented. Some of the stronger articles make judicious use of the recent work of anthropologists and social scientists, particularly as regards religious identities and how borders between sects are established and defined. In the following I'll present several of the articles.

First, however, it may be useful to clarify a bit what the roughest distinction might be between "Jewish Christianity" and "Christian Judaism." The issue, put in simplest terms, is one of where the stress is. A "Jewish Christian" would be an ethnically Jewish person who followed Jesus as Lord and who believed that Jesus' coming as Messiah inaugurated a new covenant: henceforth Torah could be set aside as the "old covenant." Paul was of course the major figure behind such an understanding, and this is the common understanding of most Christian churches. A "Christian Jew," on the other hand, would accept Jesus as Messiah but would not accept that this meant the obsolescence of Torah. Rather, according to this understanding, Jesus was the fulfillment of Israel's history as Messiah and the fulfillment of Torah as its greatest interpreter: that he was Torah's greatest interprete didn't at all imply that he came to replace Torah with a "new religion."

In his article on the Didache, Jonathan A. Draper, after explaining why the terms "Jew" and "Christian" are misleading, nonetheless admits that it is hard to avoid using them and goes on to characterize the Didache as an example of "Christian Judaism." His remarks make clear what this would mean in terms of the community at issue:

I would describe the Didache as "Christian Judaism." "Judaism" because its community considered itself a faithful group within "all Israel" and indeed stood in a tradition of Torah interpretation close to the Pharisaic-rabbinic party. . . . "Christian" because its community believed that Jesus was the Davidic messiah inaugurating the coming of God's eschatological kingdom, which could be "made known" to Gentiles as well as to Israelites, and which defined itself with regard to Jesus as "Christian" (12:4). "Jewish Christian" [on the other hand,] implies that there is an entity called "Christianity" in existence, separate from Israel, that provides the primary reference point of identity, and that ethnic Jews might belong to it like other ethnic groups . . . . The reality in the Didache community is the reverse: its primary reference point is Israel and the Torah, as these are affirmed and fulfilled in Jesus, and Gentiles may belong to this community only if they are prepared to respect the cultural world of Israel. (258-9)

These are the kinds of differences that inform many of the articles in the volume. I will present a few of them.

Warren Carter writes on the Gospel of Matthew and the question of whether it should be classified as a work of "Christian Judaism" or "Jewish Christianity." Like Draper, Carter finds such constructs inadequate. He presents the issues by comparing the views of A.J. Saldarini (who argues that Matthew should not be seen as representative of a new religion) and D.A. Hagner (who insists on just such newness). He assesses the strengths and weaknesses of both positions in relation to sociological theories of religious identity, questions of Matthew's christology, and the role of Torah in the text. Though finding problems in both positions, Carter concludes that Saldarini's understanding of Matthew is more persuasive than Hagner's: Matthew's Jesus doesn't annul either Torah or the pre-eminent place of Israel as God's chosen people; rather he is understood as "the definitive interpreter of the Law and Prophets." (178)

Raimo Hakola writes on the Gospel of John and how it may or may not be considered a Jewish Christian work. The article is of particular interest in that it shows the serious flaws in a position taken by much recent scholarship: namely that John reflects a Jewish Christian community reacting to persecution at the hands of an authoritative Judaism. Hakola argues that neither element in this current model of the origins of the fourth gospel holds up under scrutiny. I agree with him, and still suspect that John is most likely the product of a largely Gentile community--one however containing prominent Jewish members--seeking to establish its ground on the borders between Torah-observant Judaism and the wider Gentile world.

Patrick Hartin's excellent article on the Epistle of James is in large measure persuasive in its argument that the epistle represents a community that both considers itself fully Jewish and fully Christian. Hartin argues, however, against using these terms "Jewish" and "Christian" to characterize the community, as, once again, they are somewhat anachronistic. In Hartin's terminology, the writer of James is both a member of "the house of Israel" and a "devoted follower of Jesus." James refers to Jesus as Lord--a term previously used for God alone--but is more interested in Jesus' message than his person. Hartin convincingly shows that "the law" referred to throughout the text is to be understood quite simply as Torah, while Jesus is to be understood as Torah's most authoritative interpreter. He is also convinced that Jesus' mission as portrayed in Matthew is the same one we see in James; in both texts, we are dealing with the same understanding of Jesus: he has come to correct, instruct and perfect the house of Israel. If Hartin is right, such corroborative testimony to a single vision, coming from one of earliest gospels and the epistle associated with James and the Jerusalem Church, offers perhaps our strongest portrait of the historical Jesus.

These are a few articles in Matt Jackson-McCabe's well-conceived new book. With contributions from a dozen scholars, Jewish Christianity Reconsidered offers a multi-faceted introduction to recent debates on the beliefs of some of Jesus' first followers.

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