The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ

The Jewish Gospels

Also by Daniel Boyarin

Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash

Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture

A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity

Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man

Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism

Queer Theory and the Jewish Question

Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity

Socrates and the Fat Rabbis

The Jewish Gospels

The Story of the Jewish Christ

Daniel Boyarin

© 2012 by Daniel Boyarin

Foreword © 2012 by Jack Miles

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 38 Greene Street, New York, NY 10013.

Published in the United States by

The New Press, New York, 2012

Distributed by Perseus Distribution

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Boyarin, Daniel.

The Jewish Gospels : the story of the Jewish Christ / Daniel Boyarin.

p.   cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-59558-711-4

1. Jesus Christ—Jewish interpretations.   2. Bible. N.T.—Criticism, interpretation, etc., Jewish. I. Title.

BM620.B69   2011

The New Press was established in 1990 as a not-for-profit alternative to the large, commercial publishing houses currently dominating the book publishing industry.

The New Press operates in the public interest rather than for private gain, and is committed to publishing, in innovative ways, works of educational, cultural, and community value that are often deemed insufficiently profitable.

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Composition by dix!

This book was set in Berling Lt Std

2   4   6   8   10   9   7   5   3   1

For Aharon Shemesh, ,

in whom I have fulfilled both directives of our Sages:

to find a friend and acquire a teacher

Contents

Foreword by Jack Miles

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. From Son of God to Son of Man

2. The Son of Man in First Enoch and Fourth Ezra: Other Jewish Messiahs of the First Century

3. Jesus Kept Kosher

4. The Suffering Christ as a Midrash on Daniel

Epilogue: The Jewish Gospel

Notes

Index

Foreword

Jack Miles

DANIEL BOYARIN, A PROMINENT CONSERVATIVE rabbi confided to me not long ago, is one of the two or three greatest rabbinic scholars in the world, and—dropping his voice a notch—possibly even the greatest. The observation was given in confidence because, quite clearly, it troubled the rabbi to think that someone with Boyarin’s views might have truly learned Talmudic grounds for them. As a Christian, let me confide that his views can be equally troubling for Christians who appreciate the equally grounded originality of his reading of our New Testament.

Boyarin’s is a troubling brilliance because it blurs and complicates a pair of reciprocally settled identities. His achievement is to have taken conceptual control of this reciprocity and then deployed it in a bold rereading of the rabbis and the evangelists alike, the results of which are so startling that once you—you, Jew, or you, Christian—get what he is up to, you suddenly read even the most familiar passages of your home scripture in a new light.

I can best illustrate this point, I think, with a recent, quite personal example, but let me first set the scene with a little parable exploring what I mean by reciprocally settled identities. There is in our neighborhood a family with twin sons, Benjamin and Joshua. Because they are fraternal twins, not identical, they don’t look alike, and they are different in other ways as well. Ben is an athlete, a scrappy competitor who makes up in hustle whatever he may lack in raw ability. Josh is a singer-songwriter with bedroom eyes whose second love, after his current girlfriend, is his guitar. Their mother, who comes from a family of athletes, says fondly of Ben, He’s all boy, that one. Their father, from a family of musicians and romantics, dotes on Josh.

Being twins, sharing a bedroom since they were toddlers, Ben and Josh know one another quite well. Ben knows—as no one else does—that Josh can beat him in one-on-one basketball. Josh knows that Ben can sing two-part harmony in a sweet tenor voice never heard outside their bedroom. But what they know about themselves has mattered less and less as time has passed and as a received version of who they are has taken hold in their extended family. Ben is the athlete and fighter, everyone in the family agrees; Josh is the singer and lover, and that’s that. By degrees, the brothers themselves have succumbed to the family definition. Ben has virtually forgotten that he, too, can sing. Josh has stopped working out and this year did not even go to the homecoming game. Reciprocally, but with family assistance, they have accepted simplified versions of themselves as their settled identities.

As it happens, though, the twins have a favorite teacher, Mr. Boyarin, who knows them both from school and once accepted an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner at their house. After dinner, as sometimes happens on such occasions, the family album was brought out for the visitor’s edification. Mr. Boyarin, who likes both boys, noticed a fifth-grade photo of Josh—Josh, not Ben—in football equipment and asked about it. Later, he noticed a photo of Ben—Ben, not Josh—singing the national anthem at the school convocation, chosen for the honor because Mrs. Pignatelli, the music teacher, knew a great boy soprano when she heard one. The family chuckled at these completely out-of-character moments, but Mr. Boyarin took quiet note and resolved, as the opportunity may present itself, to allow what he sees as the neglected if not entirely suppressed side of each boy a little room to operate in.

Daniel Boyarin sees Judaism and Christianity as being like Josh and Ben, not that either sports or music is at issue. At issue, rather, is the question—always consequential but perhaps never more so than after the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 C.E.—of how Jews should relate to their God and to the Gentile majority of the human race. Before the destruction of the Temple, there were various contending schools of thought about this core question. After the catastrophic destruction, the two schools that survived were the Rabbinical and the Christian. Theologically, they had their differences, but they were both Jewish as surely as Josh and Ben are both brothers in the same family. Their differences were, as we say, all in the family, and they remained all in the family not just for a few decades but, Boyarin boldly asserts, for the first few centuries of the common era. It took that long for gradually escalating mutual polemics to overcome an underlying sense of fraternity on either side and to create two reciprocally settled identities where before there had been just one identity, albeit unsettled. What Boyarin regrets is that these two identities were polemically simplified and coarsened as each side learned to repudiate, as if on deepest principle, practices and beliefs that, at an earlier stage, either side would have admitted as unproblematically its own. It is as if Ben’s great-grandchildren should be taught to believe as a matter of core identity that "we never touch the guitar, they play the guitar, that’s what they’re like, while Josh’s offspring, by the same token, should be taught to stake their lives on the self-evident truth that we never touch a football, they play football, that’s what they’re like."

Did Jesus keep kosher? Would that have been un-Christian of him? In chapter 3 of the book you are about to read, titled Jesus Kept Kosher, Boyarin writes:

Most (if not all) of the ideas and practices of the Jesus movement of the first century and the beginning of the second century—and even later—can be safely understood as part of the ideas and practices that we understand to be Judaism.. . . The ideas of Trinity and incarnation, or certainly the germs of those ideas, were already present among Jewish believers well before Jesus came on the scene to incarnate in himself, as it were, those theological notions and take up his messianic calling.

However, the Jewish background of the ideas of the Jesus movement are only one piece of the new picture I’m sketching here. Much of the most compelling evidence for the Jewishness of the early Jesus communities comes from the Gospels themselves. . . . Counter to most views of the matter, according to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus kept kosher, which is to say that he saw himself not as abrogating the Torah but as defending it. There was controversy with some other Jewish leaders as to how best to observe the Law, but none, I will argue, about whether to observe it. According to Mark (and Matthew even more so), far from abandoning the laws and practices of the Torah, Jesus was a staunch defender of the Torah against what he perceived to be threats to it from the Pharisees.

The Pharisees were a kind of reform movement within the Jewish people that was centered on Jerusalem and Judaea. The Pharisees sought to convert other Jews to their way of thinking about God and Torah, a way of thinking that incorporated seeming changes in the written Torah’s practices that were mandated by what the Pharisees called the tradition of the Elders.. . . It is quite plausible, therefore, that other Jews, such as the Galilean Jesus, would reject angrily such ideas as an affront to the Torah and as sacrilege.

Boyarin’s reading of Mark 7, in which he turns what Christianity has traditionally interpreted as an attack on Jewish dietary and purity laws into a distinct kind of defense of them, is one of many stunningly persuasive but utterly surprising readings of what in his hands does indeed become compelling evidence for the Jewishness of the early Jesus communities . . . from the Gospels themselves. There is no denying, and Boyarin does not deny, that Jesus attacks the Pharisees, the forerunners if not the founders of Rabbinical Judaism, but few Christian commentators have recognized how clear a distinction Jesus draws between them and Moses and how much he is at pains to defend Moses and therewith to defend the Torah. It is by stressing that distinction that Boyarin brings the quarrel back into the Jewish family.

Now to the personal example. On October 30, 2011, I heard the following Gospel passage read in my church (Church of the Messiah, Santa Ana, California):

Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, "The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi. But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father—the one in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted. (Matthew 23:1–12; New Revised Standard Version)

Jesus was surely one of the greatest polemicists of all time. It is thanks to him that the very word Pharisee has as its second definition in Webster’s College Dictionary a sanctimonious, self-righteous, or hypocritical person. And it’s clear, isn’t it, in this passage from the Gospel of Matthew that the sanctimonious, self-righteous, hypocritical persons whom Jesus has in his crosshairs do call one another rabbi. But all texts, including scripture, are read through the filter of what one already knows. Episcopalians who call their priests Father and Roman Catholics who call the pope Holy Father slide easily enough past call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father—the one in heaven because everyone knows that the term father is innocently used in these Christian contexts. More to the point, most Christian interpreters slide with equal ease past Jesus’ injunction: "The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’s seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it." I myself have read and heard this passage for years but only on October 30, 2011, thinking about my draft of this foreword, did I really lock on to do whatever they teach you and follow it. Post-Boyarin, I can only read this passage as a defense of un-sanctimonious, un-self-righteousness, un-hypocritical adherence to the Law of Moses against sanctimonious, self-righteous, hypocritical exploitation of it.

So, then, I repeat the question: did Jesus keep kosher? If he had nothing against the Law, why couldn’t he keep kosher? And come to think of it, is it not a rather absurd notion that the Jewish Messiah should disdain to eat like a Jew? But if you happen to be a Jewish reader of this foreword, please double back now and reread the quoted first paragraph of Boyarin’s chapter 3, especially its ending: The ideas of Trinity and incarnation, or certainly the germs of those ideas, were already present among Jewish believers well before Jesus came on the scene to incarnate in himself, as it were, those theological notions and take up his messianic calling. The Trinity a Jewish idea? The incarnation a Jewish idea? Yes, indeed! And if such thoughts as these seem unthinkable, I can only urge: read on. They may seem more thinkable after you read Boyarin’s deeply informed analysis of the Jewish background to Jesus’ application to himself of the strange title Son of Man, a designation that ought to mean simply human being but clearly, and paradoxically, bespeaks divinity far more than does the more modest, merely royal or messianic designation Son of God.

The challenge that Daniel Boyarin delivers to Christians is, first, to surrender some of their claim to religious originality and, second, to think with him past a supposed Christian belief in the obliteration of nationality within the noble universality of the church. In an earlier book, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity, Boyarin urged Christians to remember that the same Paul who wrote

There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise. (Galatians 3:28–29; New Revised Standard Version)

also wrote

I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew (Romans 11:1–2; New Revised Standard Version).

Daniel Boyarin belongs to a generation of Jewish-American scholars who have addressed the Christian scriptures with an unprecedented and pathbreaking frankness and freedom. They see Paul, who boasted that as a pupil of Gamaliel [a famous early rabbi] he was thoroughly trained in every point of our ancestral law (Acts 22:3), as far more rabbinically Jewish than Jesus, contrary to an earlier view that saw him as sanitizing Jesus for Gentile consumption.

For Christians, true, the distinction between male and female is ultimately ephemeral because men and women are ultimately one in Christ Jesus, but penultimately—which is to say, until the end of time—men and women do usually remain male and female, and Paul usually treated them as such. He was not the enemy of all difference. So also, then, for the difference between Jew and Gentile. Titus, born Greek, could become a Christian Greek without undergoing circumcision, Paul stoutly insisted. Timothy, born Jewish but uncircumcised, had to be circumcised, Paul insisted by essentially the same token, so as to make a point for the benefit of Jews and Greeks alike. Timothy was to be a Christian, yes, but even as such he was to remain a Jew, a Christian Jew. In other words, the Jewish party was far from over when the Christian party began. On the contrary—and here is surely Boyarin’s most mind-stretching correction—the Jews were the hosts, not the guests, at that Christian party, and what they were in practice at the start, he suggests, they can become again, at least in thought and in theory, even now.

Boyarin’s challenge to Jews, then, is simply to recognize themselves or at least to imagine themselves in some semblance of this historic role, despite millennia of Christian