Jews and Anti-Judaism 1

I have a book review to write on Terence Donaldson's, Jews and Anti-Judaism in the New Testament: Decision Points and Divergent Interpretations.  I read the first chapter yesterday and found it a delight.  What a great presentation of the lay of the scholarly land!  I'm also writing on related issues in Hebrews this week so the convergence is a great serendipity for me.

Chapter 1 is the Introduction, which gives the back discussion on the question of antisemitism and the New Testament.  The issue became very pertinent after WW1, especially with Jules Isaac's book Jesus and Israel.  Isaac had written much of the material on the run from Nazis.  His wife and daughter died in concentration camps.

Isaac was not attacking Christian faith per se, but could legitimately point out that the Nazi perspective on the Jews grew easily from a centuries old tradition that was a Christian tradition.  It included a scholarly and popular climate that painted Judaism as degenerate at the time of Christ, assigned collective guilt to the Jewish people for Christ's death, and considered the dispersion of the Jews a divine punishment for their crime.

The chapter cites other scholars who pursued the issue and some of the helpful distinctions that followed the later discussion.  These included Gregory Baum, who initially put early Christian polemic in the category of denunciations of Israel carried out by the prophets... thus not anti-Semitic.  Rosemary Ruether by contrast argued that there was no way to rid Christianity of anti-Judaism because its view of Christ demands a polemical interpretation of the Jewish Scriptures.  James Parkes argued that it was not until after the war with Rome in AD66 that there ensued a "parting of the ways" (10).

The rest of the chapter is its brilliance.  Donaldson carefully and insightfully divides the issue into its parts.  He does not at this point so much give answers as present the discussion and its options.

Is the New Testament anti-semitic?
Because Christianity became overwhelmingly Gentile, we have to at least address this issue in the use of New Testament texts, but many have argued that it doesn't make much sense to say that documents themselves, since they were written by Jews, were anti-Jew.  Edward Flannery, for example, sees anti-Judaism as different from anti-semitism, as theological.  "It rejects Judaism as a way of salvation but not the Jews as a people" (14).

Is the New Testament anti-Judaic?
Or does it fall more in the category of the prophets or a sect like at Qumran?  Douglas Hare identifies three types of anti-Judaism (what follows are my words): 1) prophetic, 2) sectarian, and 3) outsider.  The prophets were clearly not anti-semitic or anti-Israel.  They were trying to correct it.  The Qumran sect was anti-the rest of Judaism, but were still Jews arguing for the right form of Judaism.  In the second century then, with the outsider comments of Gentile Christians like Ignatius and Justin Martyr, we probably have hit a form of anti-Judaism proper.

Thus Donaldson concludes that the term anti-Judaism would fit the last type but not the first type (into which category Hare put Jesus and John the Baptist).  Whether the second type fits the term Donaldson considers a matter of a spectrum.

Is the New Testament supercessionist?
That is, does the NT see the Christian church replacing and superseding ethnic Israel.  For Donaldson, approaching the issue in this way misses out some pieces.  For example, it formulates the issue negatively--what is the discontinuity--more than positively--what was the continuity.  It also does not include individuals like Marcion or the Gnostics, who did not even believe the OT was legitimate in the first place.

Kendall Soulen has distinguished types of supercessionism, each of which has a different tone.  "Punitive" supercessionism sees the replacement as a matter of punishment for Israel.  "Economic" supercessionism has to do with God's plan for different periods of history.  There is also a mixed view that only sees the Gentiles replacing the part of Israel that did not believe, while the part that did remains unsuperseded.

Does the NT reflect a painful parting of the ways?
A lively discussion has emerged in recent decades, with Ways That Never Parted arguing that Jewish and Christian social groups interpenetrated off and on even to the time of Constantine.  Daniel Boyarin has argued that "partitioning" would be a better word than "parting," and James Dunn has argued for "partings" plural rather than singular.  A key here is that since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we are far more aware of the diversity of first century Judaism (sometimes even put in the plural, Judaisms) than we were before.

Set up for the book
Early in the chapter, Donaldson gives three aspects of any document that need to be taken into account when assessing this issue.  First is the identity of those who are expressing statements (the "subject").  Second is the identify of those to whom they are speaking (the "object").  Lastly there is the tone or the intention behind their expression.  He will use this three fold rubric in the rest of the book, as he looks at the gospels and Paul.

Great start to the book!

Disciple versus Christian

I'm a little sorry these posts have been coming almost one a day these last few days... I just seem to have had a lot of thoughts.

Our pastor always has thought provoking sermons. One of the distinctions he played with a little bit Sunday was the distinction between being a disciple of Jesus and being a Christian. This distinction is of course putty in the hands of the Barna crowd I suspect, but I don't think Steve was barking up that tree.

One of his comments was that the disciples were disciples a long time before Acts calls them Christians. He posed the question whether we tend to have the order the wrong way around. We talk about becoming a Christian and then only later about discipleship.

I also note that, in addition to the Barna follower of Jesus who doesn't buy into religion is the person who is a Yoder follower of Jesus. This is the pacifist, turn the other cheek follower. Such a person isn't necessarily unorthodox, but clearly places a certain primacy on the earthly ethics of Jesus and may not consider Paul or the other parts of the NT quite as significant.

Well, a whole bunch of thoughts are swirling around my head. I'll just stream them down here and anyone is welcome to pick any one up:

1. To what extent should we think of Jesus' earthly mission as a very specific mission to upper Galilee?

I think Marshall overdoes this in Beyond the Bible but I think there is a valid point in it too. The earthly Jesus tells us he was not omniscient on earth. He clearly targets Jews not Gentiles and "lost sheep," Galilean Jews at that. He mostly functions within the paradigms of ancient Israel rather than proclaiming an "all time" universal message. What this means is that we should not assume that the message of the earthly Jesus was meant to be "transcultural" (I don't like that word) or timeless in every respect. An aweful lot of his earthly teaching was likely addressed at a specific time and place in Galilee.

2. There is an important distinction to be made between the particulars of what Jesus preached in Galilee and the presentation of Jesus in the gospels. I am not arguing for a strong discontinuity between the two. But, in my strong opinion, the gospels were not written primarily to record for posterity the earthly life and ministry of Jesus. The gospels were written to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to their own audiences decades later than Jesus. In that sense I would argue that the gospels have the same authority as Paul's writings, not more or less. They are the inspired work of New Testament theologians just like Paul's writings.

3. Something very significant takes place at Pentecost that could not have taken place until after the resurrection. Because the Holy Spirit would not come until after Jesus' ascension, we are comparing apples and oranges to some extent when we place before and after Pentecost on some sort of timeline we would compare to the timelines of our lives.

This is one of the hermeneutical problems with the earlier generation of Wesleyans who saw in the disciples' pilgrimage a model for the ordo salutis of our lives today through entire sanctification. The coming of the Spirit at Pentecost was a unique event in salvation history, the transition from one age to another. We are all born after Pentecost and we all become Christians (or disciples) after Pentecost in the age of the new covenant. Technically, there could not have been any true "Christians" before Pentecost, for you cannot be a Christian without the Spirit (Rom. 8:9) and the Spirit had not yet come.

But none of this is really what Pastor Steve was talking about--I'm just doing a stream of consciousness with some thoughts he inspired. Steve was posing a legitimate question: do we need to follow Jesus for more than 10 seconds before we can realistically expect to find him, to encounter him? That's what he will be exploring for the next few weeks.