The Bible With and Without Jesus by Amy-Jill Levine

Author:Amy-Jill Levine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperOne
Published: 2020-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

From Prediction to Polemic

ALTHOUGH IN the New Testament only Matthew’s Gospel cites Isaiah 7:14, later authors deployed the verse in their arguments against non-Messianic Jews as well as other Jesus-followers whose Christology they found deficient. The next extant textual citation of Isaiah 7:14 in relation to Jesus appears in Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho (ca. 160). Justin, who lived circa 100–165, was born in Samaria to pagan parents. He was one of Christianity’s foremost apologists, who sought to show the Roman Empire that Christianity was not a subversive or depraved sect but a philosophically logical and ethically moral movement. He gained the title “martyr” when he and his disciples refused to renounce their faith.

In the Dialogue, Justin and Trypho discuss what have remained major issues in Jewish-Christian conversation: the ongoing value of the covenant with Moses, supersessionism, the messianic identity of Jesus in relation to Israel’s scriptures, the relation of Trinitarian thought to Jewish monotheism, the role of the Logos, and the distinctive wordings of the Hebrew scriptures versus their Greek translations. While speculation that the Dialogue’s Trypho is based on Rabbi Tarfon, an early second-century companion of the famous Rabbi Akiva, cannot be confirmed, James E. Kiefer aptly observes that the dialogue was “probably a real conversation with a real rabbi (although it may be suspected that Justin in editing it later gave himself a few good lines that he wished he had thought of at the time), whom he met while promenading at Ephesus shortly after the sack of Jerusalem in 135.”12 Given that the emperor Hadrian, by destroying the city, ended hopes that the Temple destroyed by Roman troops in 70 CE would be rebuilt, the followers of Jesus became increasingly convinced that God’s covenant had passed from the Jews to them.

In Dialogue 67, Trypho and Justin turn to the question of Jesus’s conception. Trypho, as expected, states that Isaiah describes not a “virgin” but a “young woman” and adds, “But the whole prophecy refers to Hezekiah and it is proved that it was fulfilled in him, according to the terms of this prophecy.”13 As we have seen, his dating for the birth of Hezekiah is off. Trypho nevertheless quotes the Hebrew correctly.

Trypho goes on to cite some miraculous-birth stories from what we today would call “Greek mythology”: “It is written that Perseus was begotten of Danae, who was a virgin; he who was called among them Zeus having descended on her in the form of a golden shower. And you ought to feel ashamed when you make assertions similar to theirs. . . . But do not venture to tell monstrous phenomena, lest you be convicted of talking foolishly like the Greeks.” Justin had to guard the front on the pagan side, a front that saw Jesus as just another god, like Hercules or Mithra, Dionysius or Pythagoras. Placing the mythological examples on Trypho’s lips, Justin is able to deny the charge that Christians were copying pagan stories. He goes on to insist rather that all the competing accounts of miraculous births were the work of Satan.

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