Everything (A Lot?) of What You Know About Christianity is Wrong

Signed, a Jew with Christian Education

AJ Levine, Daniel Boyarin, and Paula Fredriksen are the patron saints of Jewish experts in Christianity. This is the right description because Jews don’t have saints, and Christians have expelled the Jews. The fact that a handful of the foremost scholars on early Christianity are Jewish is the sort of intersectional research dynamics that I especially appreciate.

They help me feel less alone, where my complex family dynamics converge and influence my life, study, and daily living.

All of us are somewhat anomalous—me and the crew that I’ve named.

Yes, I’m counting myself in the “us,” but I’m nowhere near the scholar these others are. I would consider myself an expert in their work, but that is different from being an expert in the work. Know-what-I-mean?

I’m the Monday morning quarterback of New Testament and Jewish Studies.

My interest was piqued earlier this week when I saw the weekly My Jewish Learning newsletter included a link to the article “What Jews Can Learn from the New Testament.” I’d read just about any article that combines the terms ‘Jewish’ and ‘New Testament,’ but usually, these articles and books are directed toward Christians to better understand the historical people and circumstances that give rise to their religious tradition.

That this article was directed specifically toward Jewish people affirms the premise that I’ve been working from for several years: The New Testament is, in effect, Jewish literature, and should Jewish people read it in that context, the themes and theology would be familiar. At any rate, I may just do the same tired thing and direct this toward Christians, I hope it’s not that tired, though.

I found this excerpt from the article especially compelling:

Both Jews and Christians ought to understand that most of Jesus’ reported teachings are, from a rabbinic perspective, not particularly revolutionary or even new, and that the rift between Judaism and Christianity is a function of what was said about Jesus after his death.

Hear hear! That’s the whole point of my writing for the past several years. My oldest recently said to me after another book showed up in the mail, “Dad, is this another Jewish Jesus yada yada yada book?”

His adoption of yada, yada, yada is heartwarming. Another Jewish patron saint, Jerry Seinfeld, is smiling.

Each of the two parts of the quote is worth addressing. The first is that Jesus’ teachings, at least what we may infer about them from the NT text, are not novel from a Rabbinic perspective, and the second is that the rift between Judaism and Christianity occurred after Jesus’ death. I want to say something about the latter point first.

I began reading Boyarin’s 1999 release, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism, a few weeks ago. I had really only cracked the first chapter by the time I received a gift for the holidays: Fredriksen’s late 2024 release, Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years. Despite a publication date 25 years apart, the opening argument of each text included reference to the same historical writing in early “Christian” (Jewish and pagan Christ-following communities): The instruction to early Christians to follow the Jewish calendar for Passover to set the annual date for the Easter celebration. The phrasing is worth noting, referring to Jewish populations as “Your brothers in circumcision.”

Boyarin and Fredriksen each raise this particular instruction as clear evidence in support of the argument that multiple Judiasms and Christianities (plural) co-existed within the first century or two of the common era. Likely because I’ve read both of these authors for years, I’ve become generally persuaded by their views. Namely that there is no discernible dividing line to signal when Judaism “ends” and Christianity “begins.” I think this blurry distinction has both temporal and conceptual fuzziness: Temporally, the texts of the NT are certainly moving toward an eschatological messianism with Jesus at the center, and by the second century, this movement is departing from some of the competing Jewish sects of the period, but we couldn’t locate a particular text, religious leader, or event to signal a clear departure within the first two hundred years of the common era.

Conceptually, eschatological messianism and the resurrection of Jesus are undoubtedly cornerstone ideas of the NT; hence, seemingly, the artifice on which Christianity is built, but these ideas are as thoroughgoingly Jewish as anything. For example, the Pharisees and Sadducees debated resurrection. The Pharisees, whose interpretation of the law was not wholly dissimilar to Jesus’, or what we can recover about Jesus, hold to bodily resurrection; whereas the Sadducees who rejected the Oral Law of the Pharisees rejected the idea of resurrection because the so-called Law of Moses, or Pentateuch, or Torah, the first five books of what becomes the Hebrew Bible and Christian Old Testament do not include resurrection. NT proclamations of Jesus’ resurrection fit wihtin this debate. So again, as it is temporally that we cannot point to a single point of divergence between the traditions of Judaism and Christianity, neither can we point to deep conceptual differences that would point to a punctuated departure.

Some may object, arguing that Paul, whose early epistles pre-date the gospel accounts, certaintly wrote against Judaism. Wasn’t he “the first Christian,” after all? But this interpretation divorces Paul from his context as a Pharisee. The pro-resurrection guys! Paul’s speaking against the Jewish law arises from within Judaism itself! One interpretation, in fact, a dominant interpretation, of the coming end-times is that all people (all nations; ta ethne), will cease their worship of idols and turn toward the Gd of Israel in the messianic age. By the mid-first century, Paul saw the Jesus movement tilting toward gentiles. Because he took Jesus to be the messiah, this didn’t comport with his end-times view. Yes, all nations would turn toward the Gd of Isreael, but that included Jewish people, so for Paul, he’s not theologizing from whole cloth. He’s responding to the internal tension he felt: The Gd of Israel is a Gd for all nations, so why aren’t more of Paul’s Jewish siblings on board?

Paul’s answer is that Gd must be hardening the hearts of his Jewish siblings, a popular action for Gd to do with different people throughout the Torah, until more of the nations would turn toward the Gd of Israel through Jesus the Christ. Paul needed a way to accommodate gentiles into the Jewish program, and he didn’t think becoming Jewish by way of circumcision and following the law was the way to do that.

So to tie a bow around the distinction between Judaism and Christianity, it really is not until Rome adopts Christianity in the third and fourth centuries that Jews are explicitly written out of Christianity. The narrative we have about the origins of Christianity is really a reconstruction from the so-called “Church Fathers.” There really is not an orthodoxy or orthopraxis for early Christians until one is imposed onto the earlier narrative from the fourth century.

This brings us to the second point, the first part of the passage I quoted from the article: “Jesus’ reported teachings are, from a rabbinic perspective, not particularly revolutionary or even new.”

I want to say two things about this: First, I want to raise a worldview distinction between Judaism and Christianity. For Jews, the messiah has not yet come. This is a little anachronistic because there are figures throughout Jewish history who were given the title messiah, Jesus being one of them! But also figures like Bar Kokhba who led a revolution against Rome in 135 CE, some hundred years after Jesus’ death.

At any rate, one distinction is that the messiah figure in Jewish theology is broadly understood as a collective or corporate deliverance from circumstances that are so overwhelming, from which escape or freedom seem so out of reach by human means, for example, when you are an occupied people at the will of a large, militarized empire, the messiah is a divine appeal to deliver a people. Ideas of heaven and hell and personal salvation spread during the second Temple period, and these are spurred on in what became the Christian tradition by Paul, who synthesized a Pharisaic eschatology with Greek philosophy from the Hellenization of Israel/Palestine, but the take-home message is that the Jewish messiah was conceived as a figure of political transformation and not individual salvation.

The second and related point is that Jews have significant figures, teachers, rabbis, judges who are followed for their spiritual leadership and interpretation of the law, and even some contemporary Jewish movements hold to an eschatological messianism, but by and large, the people and practice of the Jewish community see Gd as the ultimate judge. Different movements or sects of Judaism will adopt the position of their teachers and this accounts for differences in practice and interpretation, but these differences are tolerated.

Christian ecumenicism is a toleration of difference. I guess what I mean to say is that the difference in Judaism is less about what an individual Jew believes to be the case and is more about how individually we are accountable to fulfilling the law, and our discourse is about how the law is best applied, and not whether the law itself matters.

Take kashrut, or kosher dietary laws. A Modern Orthodox Jew may adhere rigidly to a strict interpretation of kashrut, including different sets of utensils and serveware for milk and meat products, and a Reform Jew may interpret kashrut to be mindfulness about consumption and might suggest vegetarianism is the ethical code embedded in kashrut. Each movement would claim they are adhering to the law, but in my decades of study and discourse, but except in some movements, not the majority, the consequence of an afterlife of eternal conscious torment would not feature in Jewish projection onto other Jewish movements.

Minhag, or custom, informs a tremendous amount of Jewish practice. Sephardic Jews, Ashkenazim, and Mizrahi Jews, divided by ancestry and ethnicity, hold to different practices. This isn’t a bug in the sytem, it is a feature. Sephardi Jews eat beans during Passover, and Ashkenazim don’t, but in mainstream Judaism, no one is “right”. You simply follow your particular tradition within the broader law. So, to say that Jesus’ teachings are not novel may strike a Christian as undermining the uniqueness of Jesus or his teachings, but for Jews, the law operates by wrestling and debating with competing interpretations, few of which are “novel.”

The view is that Torah was given over to people from Gd, and so wrestling with different interpretations is a uniquely human act. Judaism lifts up our role in the partnership with Gd, and not, where I think some Christian communities land, in suppressing disagreement and promoting the “right” interpretation.

Okay, let’s take stock: So, on the point that Jesus’ teachings are not revolutionary from a rabbinic perspective, I hear that as an affirmation of tradition, not a heretical strike against the central figure of Christianity. To the second claim that divisions arose long after Jesus’ death, I affirm that diversity of belief and pluralism were signatures of second Temple period Judaism, in which Jesus was fully embedded.

Judaism and Christianity continue as distinct traditions. My effort here is not to bring the two into parallel. But I do think it’s important for Christians to understand that the Hebrew Bible does not serve as one big road sign pointing to Jesus. The road to Christianity passes through the second Temple, and only when the “religion” becomes wedded to empire is difference suppressed.

Power has a funny way of flattening dissent. That’s a pretty good message for today.