Seeing the Word (Studies in Theological Interpretation): Refocusing New Testament Study by Bockmuehl Markus

Author:Bockmuehl, Markus [Bockmuehl, Markus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL006100, REL067000, REL006400
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2006-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

Jesus’s Jewish Identity? A Historic Oxymoron

As the ancients concluded, to assert the Jewishness of Jesus is a dangerous nonsense; it substitutes semantic games for a truthful account of either Judaism or Christianity. Though Jewish and possibly even observant in appearance, Jesus had in fact put an end to Jewish life based on the Torah by revealing the new dispensation that would henceforth displace it. Thus the first Gentile bishop of Antioch, born less than a generation after Jesus’s death, bluntly affirms that “it is monstrous to talk of Jesus Christ and to practice Judaism” (Ignatius, To the Magnesians 10.3; cf. 8.1–2).[4] One could argue that opposition to gnostic and Marcionite views partly attenuated this position in later second-century writers like Justin, Irenaeus, or Tertullian, although their polemics never quite extended to a positive appreciation of Jesus qua Jew. Nevertheless, Eusebius of Caesarea articulately confirms what was by his time a familiar view—Jesus had come quite simply to replace Judaism with Christianity:

Christ spent his life, and the teaching of the new covenant was carried to all nations. Then immediately the Romans laid siege to the city of Jerusalem and destroyed it along with the temple there. At once the whole ordinance of Moses was abolished along with everything relating to the old covenant. The curse was transferred to those who continued to keep the Mosaic law after its time had passed, and thereby became lawbreakers.[5] Now at this same time the perfect law of the new Teaching was introduced in its place. (Demonstration of the Gospel 1.6.39, my translation) ὁ Χριστὸς ἐπεδήμει τῷ βίῳ καὶ τῆς καινῆς διαθήκης προεβάλλετο πᾶσι τοῖς ἔθνεσι διδασκαλία, παραχρῆμά τε ῾Ρωμαῖοι τὴν πόλιν ἑλόντες πολιορκίᾳ καθεῖλον [τὰ ῾Ιεροσόλυμα] καὶ τὸν αὐτόθι νεών· λέλυτό τε αὐτίκα πᾶσα ἡ Μωσέως διάταξις, καὶ τὰ τῆς παλαιᾶς περιῄρητο διαθήκης, τά τε τῆς ἀρᾶς μετῄει τοὺς παρὰ καιρὸν τὰ Μωσέως πράττειν, παρανομοῦντας εἰς αὐτά, βιαζομένους· ἀντεισήγετο δὲ ὁμοῦ καὶ κατὰ τὸ αὐτὸ τῆς νέας καὶ ἐντελοῦς διδασκαλίας τὰ νόμιμα.

In the same vein, Eusebius and others found it suitable that architecturally the Christian Jerusalem of Constantine, centered on the Holy Sepulcher of Jesus, was now replacing the ruins of Judaism once and for all.[6]

Ever since antiquity, theologians have tended to privilege universalizing abstractions about Jesus’s person and teaching over the Jewish particularities of his dress, his diet, and his disputes with fellow Jews. One could debate why this has been so, or indeed whether it may be a necessary consequence of the New Testament’s own universalizing witness. That it occurred is an uncontroversial matter of historical record—as is the fact that the wedge driven between Jesus and Judaism by Jews and Christians alike has, from antiquity to the period of living memory, wrought consequences of incalculable horror.

All this leaves us in an awkward position when trying to address the Jewishness of the person and aims of Jesus. From antiquity until the twentieth century, the notion of Jesus’s Jewish identity was almost universally acknowledged by both Jews and Christians to be an oxymoron—somewhat

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