Jews and Christians – Parting Ways in the First Two Centuries CE? by Jens Schröter Benjamin A. Edsall Joseph Verheyden

Jews and Christians – Parting Ways in the First Two Centuries CE? by Jens Schröter Benjamin A. Edsall Joseph Verheyden

Author:Jens Schröter, Benjamin A. Edsall, Joseph Verheyden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2021-08-23T10:34:20.588000+00:00


e) The Gospel’s Rhetoric

In her inspiring book Cast Out of the Covenant,58 Adele Reinhartz focuses on the rhetoric and the rhetorical effect of the Gospel. Her question is to what affiliation the Gospel’s rhetoric inspires or encourages its readers and, on the contrary, what disaffiliation it suggests.

Reinhartz’s contribution is most remarkable as she herself draws on a life-long career of “befriending the beloved disciple”59 and incorporating that Christian text into the literary heritage of her Jewish tradition, while always struggling with how to cope with John’s anti-Jewish rhetoric. In her recent book, she now draws the consequences from her earlier criticism of Martyn’s community hypothesis,60 abandoning the attempts of characterizing the community behind the Gospel but merely focusing on the text and its rhetoric. From here, she concludes that the Gospel is in effect anti-Jewish, rather than a part of an inner-Jewish dialogue/fight. It is not a reaction to expulsion, but instead promotes a “parting of the ways.”61 Her stimulating book has caused me to rethink and sharpen my own approach towards these issues, beyond the mere explanation of the development of John’s Christology from Jewish sources.

Reinhartz asks if the identity and affiliation of a model reader could be drawn from reading or hearing the Gospel.62 An important part of John’s rhetoric are the stories of character transformation in which a figure comes to be healed, gains insight, or believes and is therefore attached to a new community, the community of the disciples of Jesus in which a new identity as “children of God” who have new and eternal life is shaped. This “rhetoric of affiliation”63 is matched by a “rhetoric of disaffiliation”64 with regard to the Ἰουδαῖοι or to aspects of Jewish life. Not only is the Gospel silent on Jewish practices such as circumcision, dietary laws, or Sabbath observance, it also dissociates its readers from the main elements of Jewish tradition, Torah and Temple, claiming that they are all fulfilled in Jesus. Finally, it presents the Ἰουδαῖοι as a group hostile to Jesus and his followers, so that readers are also distanced from them and might even start to fear them. Thus, regardless of the historical relation between those Ἰουδαῖοι and ‘real Jews’ in the world of the readers, the Gospel’s narrative rhetoric leads its readers to disassociate themselves from the Ἰουδαῖοι or ‘disciples of Moses’ in their world and to associate themselves with Jesus and his disciples. Finally, as Reinhartz lucidly observes, “the Gospel’s Jewishness was itself mobilized to support the anti-Jewishness that is so deeply embedded in the Gospel’s rhetorical project.”65

We may question whether we should call the Gospel anti-Jewish or whether we should call it “anti-Ioudaioi,”66 thus avoiding anachronistic images of ‘Judaism.’ But such an artificial use of language is unlikely to be helpful in the discussion, and leaving a term untranslated may keep an awareness of the problems, but does not solve them. It might also be an overinterpretation when Reinhartz argues that the Jews are “cast out of the covenant” in John, as this



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.