JJMJS 11 (2024)

Issue 11 2024

J M JJ S Journal of the Jesus Movement

in its Jewish Setting

From the First to the Seventh Century

TABLE OF CONTENTS Translating New Testament Texts “within Judaism”: Theory and Practice MARK D NANOS Jew or Self-Styled Jew in Romans 2:17? A Re-Assessment KARL OLAV SANDNES The Salvific Significance of Torah and Jesus’s Death as a Ransom for Many in Mark’s Narrative World JOHN VAN MAAREN Between Apologetics, Identity, and Identification: On the Study of Christianity

by Jewish Scholars in Israel SHRAGA BICK Gregory R Lanier’s Corpus Christologicum: A Review Article RUBEN A BÜHNER Torleif Elgvin’s Warrior, King, Servant, Savior: A Review Article JESPER HØGENHAVEN

JOURNAL OF THE JESUS MOVEMENT IN ITS JEWISH SETTING: FROM THE FIRST TO THE SEVENTH CENTURY

JOURNAL OF THE JESUS MOVEMENT IN ITS JEWISH SETTING: FROM THE FIRST TO THE SEVENTH CENTURY

Translating New Testament Texts “within Judaism”: Theory and Practice Mark D. Nanos Lund University | mark@marknanos.com JJMJS No. 11 (2024): 1–34

Abstract The familiar translations of the New Testament naturally reflect the familiar interpretations of these texts from a “within Christianity” perspective, and just as importantly, usually from a negative, even hostile perspective on Judaism as the essential rival. Any research seeking to explore alternative interpretations, such as the recent efforts to read Paul and other NT texts from various “within Judaism” approaches, will require the development of translation alternatives capable of facilitating this research and communicating the conclusions reached. This essay surveys some of the initial, often complicated theoretical and practical challenges that must be navigated, including some examples of alternative translations that have been explored to date.

Keywords Bible Translation, Defamiliarization, Familiarity-Bias, Gloss-Bias, Luther’s Bible, KJV, NRSV

In a translation lives interpretation. 1 With respect to translating New Testament texts no less than any other text, a translator makes language choices that reflect her interpretation of the language of the source text. For those who only access the source text through her target text translation, it follows that they will suppose the NT text means what her interpretive choices communicate—for her

E.g., Theo Hermans, “Hermeneutics,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2020), 31

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(227–232); although this point is relatively banal, observed regularly in studies of the topic, the evidence to be discussed demonstrates the need for highlighting the continued impact of this dynamic.

2 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) readers, the translation functions as the source text. Any attempt to read and interpret, even annotate, the NT from the various “within Judaism” perspectives—or any other interpretations that challenge the traditional interpretive paradigms—must reckon with the fact that the familiar translations influence what one expects the source texts to mean.

Although able to re-write the source text into her language, the translator is not entirely immune to the dynamic impact of this “familiaritybias.” She almost certainly became acquainted with NT source texts in target text translations before learning Koine Greek; she thus began reading the source texts with a set of interpretive assumptions based upon the translation choices— and thus interpretations—with which she was already familiar. 2 The circularity is compounded by the fact that when she learned Greek, her lexicons (e.g., BDAG), 3 commentaries, textbooks, and instructors taught her glosses to employ when translating the NT texts. This “gloss-bias” embodies lexical choices based on the familiar interpretations of the language encountered in the source text that have long established histories, providing a sense of certainty of a word’s or phrase’s supposed historical usage without the need to undertake what one might assume would be unnecessary, tedious investigation, especially if the usage has been repeated as self-evident in the familiar commentary and lexical discussions no less than the legacy translations.

To date, NT translations proceed from premises quite different than those guiding within Judaism research; indeed, more often than not they reflect the traditional working assumption(s) of Christian translators that the NT texts developed apart from and largely in conflict with, when not expressly against, the practice of Judaism (of Jewish identification and ways of life, not least the continued role of Torah observance for followers of Christ). 4 These viewpoints are traditional, they represent normative (often supersessionistic) theological certainties, even dogmas, albeit no longer without some recent challenges, not least from within Judaism based scholarship. It follows that, for within Judaism Cf. Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987; repr., Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998). Applied to Pauline studies, see Mark D. Nanos, Reading Paul within Judaism: The Collected Essays of Mark D. Nanos, Vol. 1 (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017), ix–xiii.

3 See Jesús Peláez and Juan Mateos, New Testament Lexicography: Introduction - Theory - Method, ed. David S. du Toit, trans. Andrew Bowden (FSBP 6; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018).

4 I use Judaism here, shorthand for Second Temple Judaism, to refer to “Jewish ways of life,” communal as well as individual, in all their cultural variety.

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Nanos, Translating New Testament Texts 3 oriented research to flourish, not only the familiar interpretations need to be interrogated, but also the familiar translations must be investigated anew, and, when warranted, new translations offered: interpretations and translations go hand in hand, or perhaps better, hand in glove.

The promise and prospects for within Judaism based research, and for its reception, have been and will be impacted no less profoundly by the dynamics of translation theory and practice, by what is in a translation, than have been and will be any other interpretive approach to the source and target language texts. Translation is about language, to be sure, but translation is all the more about “the expression (and repository) of a culture”; language represents “one element in the cultural transfer known as translation.” 5 Put differently, “translators do not just translate words; they also translate a universe of discourse, a poetics, and an ideology.” 6 Umberto Eco clarifies the dynamic this way: “translation does not only concern words and language in general but also the world, or at least the possible world described by a given text.” 7 The translator’s (or more than likely in the case of biblical texts: the translating committee’s) task is to seek to make the language of the source text accessible in the language of her target readers. She proceeds based on what she decides that the target readers ought to understand the source text to have meant—and, in the case of most if not all NT translators and their ideal audiences to date, which usually involve confessional allegiances, what it ought to mean for themselves today. Whether intentional, recognized, or neither, the translator makes choices based upon her expectations of the text’s communication aims coupled with her assumptions about the interpretive expectations of and for the contemporary audience(s) for which she “rewrites” these texts. Translation involves the subjective exercise of negotiation; the translator must decide how best to acculturate the source text so that it will communicate to her target text’s readers how she—and, most likely, how the institutions and affiliations that her translations seek to represent—interpret the meaning of these texts, so that they can understand it in just those interpretive terms. 8 André Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (New York: Routledge, 2016), 57.

6 André Lefevere, Translating Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literary Context (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1992), 94.

7 Umberto Eco, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation (London: Phoenix, 2004), 16.

8 Lefevere, Translating Literature, 11–12, passim. Eco, Mouse or Rat?, 56: “translators have to make an interpretative hypothesis about the effect programmed by the original 5

4 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) Most biblical translations, other than avowedly paraphrastic ones (e.g., “modern language” versions), strive to achieve faithfulness to the meaning attributed to the source text’s communication aims; that is, they aim to make available the semantic content of the original rather than to function as a literary text. 9 The effort to re-write the words and word order (syntax) of the phrases and sentences in the original source (as well as metaphorical and other literary devices) as literally equivalent as possible (word to word; e.g., represented by an interlinear text), must be balanced with the need to communicate the source text language in ways that make sense for the target readers in their own language (source to source). Each translated Bible negotiates differently how best to remain close to the source text in the translated text; at one extreme, some, like Wycliffe’s, parrot the original so closely that they do not read well in the target language. The KJV and those modeled closely upon it, attempt to balance these two elements. Robert Alter’s effort “to make the Bible available for English readers in language that might at least intimate something of the power, the subtlety, and the beauty of the Hebrew” provides an instructive challenge for those involved in translating the dynamics of the Greek NT, especially for the narrative and prophetic texts. For example, he discusses the need to capture word plays and ironic twists, such as those that Paul employed but which are, as Alter brought out in his translation of Isaiah’s communication aims, often overlooked in the familiar translations. 10 The more literal oriented the target text translation, the more likely it will be understood to represent the “correct” meaning of the source text, which might imply that any others are “wrong,” 11 although actually claiming such would defy the logical limitation of the translation process, since interpretation involves human agency, thereby introducing culturally conditioned decisions

text, or, to use a concept I like, to remain faithful to the intention of the text. Many hypotheses can be made about the intention of a text, so that the decision about what a translation should reproduce becomes negotiable” (emphasis his).

9 Lefevere, Translating Literature, 90–91.

10 Robert Alter, The Art of Bible Translation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), “Autobiographical Prelude,” Kindle Edition, xiv of 129; cf. Mark D. Nanos, The Irony of Galatians: Paul’s Letter in First-Century Context (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002).

11 Lefevere, Translating Literature, 6.

Nanos, Translating New Testament Texts 5 that are, by definition, subjective. 12 The assumption that the translation rightly represents the source text is also often associated with the first translation; and loyalty to any given translation grows more unassailable the longer it remains the primary source for its readers; this applies all the more when, over the centuries, the target text functions as the culturally conditioned liturgical and theological basis for its faithful readers’ world views. 13 And yet for the readers of a later period a translation does not function in precisely the same way that it did originally; language is contextual, it changes with time: “Translations are not made in a vacuum. Translators function in a given culture at a given time. The way they understand themselves and their culture is one of the factors that may influence the way in which they translate.” 14 Many NT scholars are familiar with the concept of “dynamic equivalence” advocated by Eugene Nida, which focuses on how to best express the meaning for the target text in ways faithful to the source text. 15 The impact that the translator (e.g., Nida) attributes to the reader of the source text naturally depends upon the translator’s (in Nida’s case, Protestant evangelical) interpretation of the source text and its context, as well as on assumptions about what this will mean (perhaps, more than likely: should mean) to the targeted reader, or any readers, for that matter, in their contexts. Over the last several decades literary translation theory and practice specialists from biblical as well as non-biblical fields have analyzed Nida’s approach to various conclusions, from how to best define “dynamic” to what degree other approaches to “equivalence” offer better ways to re-write source texts “faithfully,” a topic that Cf. Robert Barnes, “Translating the Sacred,” in The Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies, ed. Kirsten Malmkjær and Kevin Windle (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

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2012), 6 of 12, Ebook: DOI:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199239306.013.0002.

13 Lefevere, Translating Literature, 118–121; Eugene A. Nida, “Bible Translation,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 25 (22–28).

14 André Lefevere, “Introduction,” in Translation/History/Culture: A Sourcebook, ed. and trans. André Lefevere (London: Routledge, 1992; Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003), 1–13.

15 Nida, “Bible Translation.” In contrast to “formal equivalence” (word for word), in which the target text follows as closely as possible the surface structure of the source text, e.g., keeping the source text word order as close as the target language allows, “dynamic equivalence” aims to create for its reader an “equivalent effect,” i.e., it aims to capture the (supposed) impact of the source text on the original reader for the reader of the target text (source to source, as if the source text was written in the target language and cultural terms).

6 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) is itself subject to different interpretations. 16 Although some biblical translations attempt to maintain elements of the source text’s “foreignness” in order to raise awareness that the source text belongs to another culture, place, and time, most strive to make the translation as “invisible” as possible.

In the latter case, Lawrence Venuti helpfully explains several advantages and disadvantages worth careful consideration: [T]he absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes it [i.e., the target translation] seem transparent, giving the appearance that it reflects the foreign writer’s personality or intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text—the appearance, in other words, that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the ‘original.’ The illusion of transparency is an effect of fluent discourse, of the translator’s effort to ensure easy readability by adhering to current usage, maintaining continuous syntax, fixing a precise meaning. What is so remarkable here is that this illusory effect conceals the numerous conditions under which the translation is made, starting with the translator’s crucial intervention in the foreign text. The more fluent the translation, the more invisible the translator, and, presumably, the more visible the writer or meaning of the foreign text. 17 Dorothy Kenny, “Equivalence,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed.

Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1998), 77–80; Lefevere, Translating Literature, 7–10; Barnes, “Translating the Sacred”; Anthony Pym, “On the Historical Epistemologies of Bible Translating,” in A History of Bible Translation, ed.

Philip A. Noss (Rome: Edizioni Di Storia E Letteratura, 2007), 212–215 (195–215); Stephen Pattemore, “Framing Nida: The Relevance of Translation Theory in the United Bible Societies,” in A History of Bible Translation, 217–263.

17 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995), 1–2, passim. See also the methodological discussion, especially the dynamics of colonizing the past and the way that existing terminological “edifices” shape our thinking and discourse, in Anders Runesson, “The Question of Terminology: The Architecture of Contemporary Discussions on Paul,” in Paul within Judaism: Restoring the First-Century Context to the Apostle, ed. Mark D. Nanos and Magnus Zetterholm (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 53–77; Adam Nicolson, God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (San Francisco: HarperCollins e-books, 2009), 9, discusses evidence for both of these strategies in the KJV: “The divines of the first decade of seventeenthcentury England were alert to the glamour of antiquity, in many ways consciously archaic 16

Nanos, Translating New Testament Texts 7 The KJV’s success at blending the source and target languages contributed much to the shape of modern English, naturalizing many features of the original source text (and the Latin of the Vulgate translation), 18 a model case of the translators’ invisibility. In fact, the KJV accomplished this feat well enough to lead some readers to suppose that the Bible was originally written in English, although this was not the translation committee’s stated aim. 19 The dynamic of invisibility plays to the traditional universalizing of biblical guidance, in some ways posing a significant obstacle for within Judaism oriented research, which focuses on understanding what the source text most likely was designed to mean for the specifically targeted reader; for example, in the case of Paul’s letters usually, if not always, Christ-following non-Jews.

Attending to such dynamics can highlight that his views on topics are often much more nuanced than traditionally deduced, that he likely would not argue that what he advises non-Jews to constitute faithfulness (e.g., not to become circumcised) applies without distinction to what he upholds as faithfulness for Jews (e.g., the obligation to have one’s infant sons circumcised).

In addition to the habit of interpreting the guidance in these texts as if written to all followers of Christ without ethnic distinction, or even to all humans, the familiar approaches can give the impression that the source text was actually written to instruct the later reader of the translated text in their own context, and logically, that what is written applies similarly to all Christians everywhere and for all time (albeit qualified according to the confessional in phraseology and grammar, meticulous in their scholarship and always looking to the primitive and the essential as the guarantee of truth. Their translation was driven by that idea of a constant present, the feeling that the riches, beauties, failings and sufferings of Jacobean England were part of the same world as the one in which Job, David or the Evangelists walked. Just as Rembrandt, a few years later, without any sense of absurdity or presumption, could portray himself as the Apostle Paul, the turban wrapped tightly around his greying curls, the eyes intense and inquiring, the King James Translators could write their English words as if the passage of 1,600 or 3,000 years made no difference. Their subject was neither ancient nor modern, but both or either. It was the universal text.” Cf. Alter, The Art of Bible Translation, 21–23 of 129, passim.

18 Alister E. McGrath, In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 249–276.

19 McGrath, In the Beginning, 277–310, discusses how this became the case despite the translators’ aim to convey the meaning of a text from another time, and the diverse, including very negative (largely political, i.e., Puritan), initial reactions to the KJV, before it came to achieve this level of popular regard; cf., also, Alter, The Art of Bible Translation, 10–11 of 129.

8 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) allegiance of the translator and her ideal reader). 20 This naturally raises the question whether the outcome produced for the target readers is “faithful” to the source text, since the text they read appears to address them directly rather than those of another time and place, and thus to seem applicable without requiring cross cultural engagement or critique (hermeneutical reasoning). 21 Worth considering is whether there is a more faithful way to approach both what the source text was originally written to communicate and what someone later could or should begin to reason from it when seeking to understand what it might mean for themselves (including whether it might not apply to themselves or in their own contexts). 22 The decisive role that interpretation plays in the translated NT texts tends to be downplayed, especially when the translation is confessional or government funded, or both; instead, the translator’s cultural assumptions can be so deeply held that they seem self-evidently representative of the source text’s cultural assumptions. An example from Nida is instructive. When explaining the dynamic of source-to-source translation, that “[e]ffective translations are rarely word-for-word, because literal renderings are often seriously misleading,” Nida then clarifies the point with this example: “even traditional terms may lose their religious significance. For English speakers, grace may refer to the ten days that a person can wait before paying a bill, a person by the name of Grace, an aesthetically pleasing form and/or movement, and possibly a short prayer or appropriate saying before eating. These meanings are a far cry from the meaning

Pym, “On the Historical Epistemologies,” 213, observes that “Nida’s general preference for dynamic equivalence is coherent with Modernist evangelistic ideology, where message is to be made present to all people at all times. It very much requires the fiction of equal languages, and indeed of equal cultures. We might also see something of Augustine’s divine spirit, causing translations to suit the people they address.” Cf. Matthew V. Novenson, “Anti-Judaism and Philo-Judaism in Pauline Studies, Then and Now,” in Protestant Bible Scholarship: Antisemitism, Philosemitism and Anti-Judaism, ed. Arjen F. Bakker, et al. (JSJSup 200; Leiden: Brill, 2022), 108 (106–124).

21 Runesson, “The Question of Terminology,” 55–58.

22 E.g., attention to diatribe and other shifts in pronouns from first to second or third person can highlight movement from what is being signaled to apply to the writer or intended reader/hearer, and thus from what is being argued to apply to Jews versus to non-Jews or Christ-followers versus those who are not, and combinations thereof. Alter, The Art of Bible Translation, 12 of 129, observes that, in addition to recovering the meanings of biblical words by establishing lexical values, attention must be given to nuance, connotation, and level of diction.

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Nanos, Translating New Testament Texts 9 of unmerited goodness and kindness in the Greek charis.” 23 A review of usage traced in LSJ makes plain, however, that despite this common Protestant refrain introducing the dynamic of merit, this is not a lexical element of χάρις in Paul’s time, even if the word might be used in a context having to do with merit/nonmerit. Thus “grace” may not be the best dynamic equivalent to choose in our time for a very different reason than the ones Nida notes, that is, because it introduces a later gloss-bias designed to privilege a particular Christian theological position in contrast to alternative Christian positions (which are conflated with the supposed merit rather than grace based character of Judaism) in a way that arguably does not map faithfully on to the way this language was used in the mid-first century. 24 Ideological criticism is always necessary; no one can escape the need thereof, because ideology is, by definition, that which one assumes to represent the established, thus self-evident “facts” from which to interpret and translate the source texts. 25 Nida, “Bible Translation,” 24 (emphasis added).

This is a good example of the kinds of translation issues that must be approached with suspicion of the gloss-biases with which scholars today are familiarized when learning the source languages, which need to be investigated anew both in terms of the source and the target texts’ communication aims. Cf. James Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (Glasgow: Oxford University Press, 1961), who had already thoroughly critiqued these kinds of lexical claims, although charis was not featured (only briefly noted, 264 n. 1). A review of LSJ, 9th ed., 1940, on “χάρις,” demonstrates that “unmerited” is not lexically warranted, and that χάρις is regularly used for gift-exchange/reciprocity, among other uses that may involve notions of merit or expressions of thanksgiving and the recognition of obligation to the giver. A gift given out of love need not be qualified as unmerited even if it is unmerited, because the contextual dynamics may not register in terms of merit.

For another example, see Matthew Thiessen, “A Worthy Cornelius and Divine Grace: Complicating John Barclay’s Paul and the Gift,” CBQ 84 (2022): 462–479.

25 Bercovitch describes ideology as “the ground and texture of consensus ... the system of interlinked ideas, symbols, and beliefs by which a culture—any culture—seeks to justify and perpetuate itself; the web of rhetoric, ritual, and assumption through which society coerces, persuades, and coheres” (Emily Miller Budick, “The Holocaust and the Construction of Modern American Literary Criticism: The Case of Lionel Trilling,” in The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser [Irvine Studies in the Humanities; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996], 131 [127–46], citing Sacvan Bercovitch, “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History,” Critical Inquiry 12 [1986]: 635). Lefevere, Translating Literature, 118: “Whether an audience is reading the Bible or other works of literature, it often wants to see its own ideology and its own universe of discourse mirrored in the translation. It likes to re-create the world in its own image, sometimes with startling 23 24

10 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) The primary biblical translations also enjoy a special status that underscores the assumption of faithfulness to the source text. Translators and readers traditionally not only viewed the original text as divinely inspired but extended the same respect to the rewritten text, which provided their only direct access to the source text. 26 In this vein, the Catholic Church pronounced Jerome’s Latin Vulgate the only sanctioned translation (until some recent redescriptions), 27 and the King James Version became the “Authorized” Bible for its subjects, which some Christians continue to revere as if it represented an original source text. 28 A number of reformers stressed the divinity of Scripture and regarded the humans involved in its transmission, including its translation, as “passive instruments,” but even many who recognized the “immanent” human element in the production of these texts and translations in various ways continued, then and into the modern period, to appeal to a “transcendent” divine factor that is not similarly attributed to non-biblical source texts and their transmission. 29 In other words, vernacular bible translators, even when striving

results”; 120: “The attitude that uses one’s own culture as the yardstick by which to measure all other cultures is known as ethnocentricity. Cultures that do not flaunt it would if they could, but since they cannot they pretend to be free of it. An ethnocentric attitude allows members of a culture to remake the world in their image, without first having to realize how different the reality of that world is. It produces translations that are tailored to the target culture exclusively and that screen out whatever does not fit in with it.”

26 Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Afterlives of the Bible; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 208.

27 See Ellie Gebarowski-Shafer, “The Bible in Roman Catholic Theology, 1450–1750,” in The New Cambridge History of the Bible, Vol. 3, From 1450 to 1750, ed. Euan Cameron (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 489–517.

28 James R. White, The King James Only Controversy: Can You Trust Modern Translations? (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1995); Pym, “On the Historical Epistemologies,” 208–212. See McGrath, In the Beginning, for an accessible and interesting account of the historical developments involved in the KJV translation.

29 Travis DeCook, The Origins of the Bible and Early Modern Political Thought: Revelation and the Boundaries of Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 4–35, 78–79, passim; Pym, “On the Historical Epistemologies,” 203, discusses several examples as well as the general theme, including not only that “in the Preface to most contemporary versions of the Bible there is a passage saying that the translators were ‘united in their faith,’” but also that Luther stated, “a false Christian or a rabblerouser cannot faithfully translate the Scriptures.” See Alan H. Cadwallader, The Politics of the Revised Version: A Tale of Two Testament Revision Companies (London: T&T

Nanos, Translating New Testament Texts 11 for probability in historical contextual terms, have been accorded divine inspiration implicitly, when not explicitly. 30 The Protestant ideology that Scripture interprets Scripture implies that the biblical texts, the translated texts as well as the source texts, are authoritative apart from institutional traditions or other modes of interpretation, but the fact that they exist in the forms that they do--which includes the extant source texts’ postdating of the originals by hundreds of years and in many variations due to scribal practices no less than the fact that the target text’s translations have been made according to interpretive premises, Luther’s translation serving as a prime example--bear witness to human involvement; that is, Scripture does not interpret Scripture, people do. 31 In spite of the traditional Protestant railing against (Catholic) tradition, and the assertion that Scripture interprets itself, every new translation effort must reckon with resistance that appeals to traditional Protestant (no less than Catholic or other) interpretative and translation legacies. As Travis DeCook demonstrates, the development of more critical approaches to the biblical texts did not eliminate the continued presence of metaphysical and theological assumptions, such as the conviction that the divine is working through the humans involved, albeit conceptualized in new ways, sometimes radical ones.

These assumptions emerge in the arguments of Luther and the Reformers, Spinoza and other early modern interpreters, Karl Barth, 32 and, I would add, among most if not all biblical interpreters to this day. This dynamic hardly invites the exploration of translation alternatives; 33 instead, new proposals are Clark, 2019), for a detailed investigation of the divisive relationships among committee members and other interested parties in the case of the Revised Version.

30 DeCook, The Origins of the Bible, examines the continued influence of theological and metaphysical assumptions in the work of those who developed critical historical method in the sixteenth century and since, reflecting their contextual frameworks, although this factor is often overlooked in prevailing approaches to this dynamic in binary terms. Pym, “On the Historical Epistemologies,” discusses this dynamic, with examples, in terms of non-representative epistemologies (spirit given understanding and ability to re-express, akin to spirit-channeling) and representative ones (exact imitation of the source text in the translation).

31 DeCook, The Origins of the Bible.

32 DeCook, The Origins of the Bible, 26–29, passim.

33 Note, e.g., that Augustine objected to Jerome’s move to translate from the Hebrew text (instead of from the Septuagint, which also presented itself as a divinely guided translation) because it was disturbing to Christians to introduce alternative readings of the familiar divine text of the existing, Old Latin translation, which was based on the

12 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) often accused of biased interests if not also of posing harmful threats to the faithful, and those who have ventured in this direction have often experienced loss of standing and livelihood, and for some, perhaps most famously, Tyndale, loss of life. 34 Whether funded by confessional bodies, which has been most often the case, or not, the familiar translations of the NT reflect certain confessional (and often, political, gendered, sexualized, racialized, colonialized, capitalist, individualistic, among other cultural, often discriminatory) orientations that advance particular theological, political, and social meaning-making.

Translation decisions can communicate opposition to the theological or political views of rival “Christians” of the translator’s own times, including as expressed in rival translations (see below). Few if any have aimed for historical accuracy without concomitant concern to make choices that will facilitate the reader’s salvation and edification, in which interest the Old Testament’s role has been to pave the way for the New. 35 Translators no less than their ideal readers have regarded the NT as the object of their faith, a conviction that extends to the translations they make and read no less than to the source texts. “The scriptures,” according to William Tyndale, a founding figure for the English language tradition, “spring out of God and flow unto Christ, and were given to

Septuagint (André Lefevere, “The Role of Ideology in the Shaping of a Translation,” in Translation/History/Culture, 16 [14–18], discussing Augustine’s objections in his “Letter to Saint Jerome”). Similarly, Nida, “Bible Translation,” 25, shares this anecdote: “After completing the translation of the Bible in one of the major trade languages of West Africa, the translator returned home on leave of absence and decided to take some courses in linguistics. He soon realized how many mistakes he had made in his early work, and upon returning to the field he asked the responsible committee to let him revise his translation.

But he was told that he had no right to ‘change the word of the Lord’!”

34 Lefevere, “The Role of Ideology,” 14, observes: “Translations can be potentially threatening precisely because they confront the receiving culture with another, different way of looking at life and society, a way that can be seen as potentially subversive, and must therefore be kept out.” Cf., also, Lefevere, Translating Literature, 118–121; Harry Freedman, The Murderous History of Bible Translations: Power, Conflict and the Quest for Meaning (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

35 John Barton, “Jewish and Christian Approaches to Biblical Theology,” in Protestant Bible Scholarship, 200–216; Harry M. Orlinsky, “A Jewish Scholar Looks at the Revised Standard Version and its New Edition,” Religious Education 85 (1990): 211–221, discusses his role as the first Jewish scholar to work on a Christian Bible translation committee, and even so, this invitation was specifically related to “Old Testament” texts.

Nanos, Translating New Testament Texts 13 lead us to Christ.” 36 At the extreme, translations have been developed explicitly for people who did not possess a written language in order to “convert” these people away from alternative, often indigenous cultural and religious alternatives, but similar aims are regularly attested for European language translations as well. 37 On can hardly overstate the implications that follow from the fact that translation decisions have historically reflected the translator’s particular faith orientation, and, even when downplayed or denied, done so as if representing the self-evident meaning of the source text for their readers. Jennifer Eyl concludes, in a challenge to this state of affairs, that “New Testament translators introduce another field” to the “several basic branches of the Humanities [that] form the basis of Translation Studies,” namely, “Theology”; therefore, unlike other branches, “Biblical translation is best classified as a type of religious practice.” 38 Although the circularity between interpretive frame and translation result that is normative need not be indulged by the historical critic, this religious practice represents a reality that must be confronted by anyone who undertakes biblical translation. 39 This subjective dynamic, and thus the need for DeCook, The Origins of the Bible, 56, citing Tyndale’s The Obedience of a Christian Man, ed. David Daniell (London: Penguin, 2000), 169. Seidman, Faithful Renderings, 36

128, observes, “Douglas Robinson makes the point that the assumptions behind a range of questions about the ‘effectiveness’ of a translation—and not merely Bible translation— rely on an implicit Christian model of translation as conversion.”

37 The evangelistic aims of Wycliffe Bible Translators are well known, but this aim is normal if not to the same level of singular focus; see Freedman, The Murderous History, ch. 12, “Reworking the Bible”; Seidman, Faithful Renderings, 128. For example, facilitating conversion of the German people was also Charlemagne’s aim for ordering the translation of parts of Scripture into German centuries before Luther, and Luther rearranged the order of the NT books according to the degree to which “they expressed the core of the ‘gospel’ as the good news about salvation from evil by Christ alone”; hence, the placement of Romans to start the Pauline literature; Eric W. Gritsch, “Luther as Bible Translator,” in The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther, ed. Donald K. McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 62–65 (62–72).

38 Jennifer Eyl, “Semantic Voids, New Testament Translation, and Anachronism: The Case of Paul’s Use of Ekklēsia,” MTSR 26 (2014): 320 (315–339) (emphasis added).

39 In the “Forward” to Werner Schwarz’s Principles and Problems of Biblical Translation: Some Reformation Controversies and Their Background (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), C. H. Dodd notes a special problem for those translating scriptural texts regarded to be sacred: “Should the translator, then, be guided, or even overruled, by the theologian? Or is this an opportunity of confronting the theologian

14 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) circumspection if hoping to achieve the best historiographical results, can unconsciously guide a translator or reader who does not share the usual convictions, which extends also to anyone who might oppose them. In the case of translation of biblical texts that have shaped our cultural world, the practice of translation is difficult to disentangle from personal and communal meaningmaking, regardless of whether we are for or against any given theological or philosophical viewpoint. 40 Research conducted today remains constrained by translations that embody premodern concepts and discursive patterns in spite of the fact that contemporary historiographical practices differ significantly from those in vogue when the foundational translations were fashioned. Euan Cameron helpfully summarizes this dynamic: The sixteenth to eighteenth centuries had their own perspectives and their own views of the world. They were still pre-modern in their attitude to the divine presence in the cosmos, in their assumptions that the history of the world was the history of the cosmos, and the story of the universe was ultimately the story of God’s relationship with the human species. Nevertheless, within that pre-modern framework, the biblical scholars of the age laid the foundations for the way that the modern age edits, studies and reads Scripture. 41 afresh with the plain sense of Holy Scripture which, as he himself admits, is the permanent standard of reference for all Christian doctrine?” (vii [vii–viii]). See also Runesson, “The Question of Terminology”; cf. Matthew V. Novenson, Paul, Then and Now (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022), 1–12.

40 The essays and annotations in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), sometimes exemplify the way that traditional Christian translations (in this case, based on the NRSV) no less than interpretations can continue to shape what non-Christians (in this case, Jewish scholars, some of whose research does not focus on NT texts) may assume the original text aimed to communicate.

41 Euan Cameron, “Introduction,” in The New Cambridge History of the Bible, Vol. 3, 14 (1–14). Leading up to this conclusion, Cameron noted, “Biblical translations after the Reformation—and this applies even to those produced in Roman Catholicism—were written and issued with the laity in mind. Moreover, their editors worked with the controversies of the age very much in view. Some made their theological positions extremely clear, either through the programmatic use of certain vernacular words rather than others (as in Tyndale), the expressing of preferences for some biblical books over

Nanos, Translating New Testament Texts 15 In addition, we must take account of the fact that the translations we use today were not undertaken to offer new translations but rather to make modifications to the traditional ones, and thus perpetuate legacy theological assumptions. 42 In other words, they choose new words and ways to communicate in the target language, but these choices perpetuate the same basic understanding of the meaning of the source texts rather than interrogating them. Bruce Metzger’s explanation for the NRSV many of us use today in universities confirms Cameron’s generalization: [T]he New Revised Standard Version of the Bible is an authorized revision of the Revised Standard Version, published in 1952, which was a revision of the American Standard Version, published in 1901, which, in turn, embodied earlier revisions of the King James Version, published in 1611. 43 Alan Cadwallader develops this point further, highlighting an important dynamic with which any effort to offer a new translation will have to reckon: The English Bible known as the King James Bible, aka ‘the Authorized version,’ was neither a translation nor others (as with the early Luther) or through expository annotations in the margins (as in the Geneva Bible)” (13). In this volume, see also Cameron, “The Bible and the Early Modern Sense of History,” 657–685.

42 E.g., Cadwallader, The Politics of the Revised Version, 17: “The King James revisers themselves were keen to accent that their work was simply an improvement. One of their number (Miles Smith), doubtless aware of the muskets levelled at the work, wrote a long explanatory preface (often dropped in later printings of the text) in which full flights of forensic rhetoric defended the efforts: ‘Truly (good Christian Reader) we never thought from the beginning that we should need to make a new translation ... but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one, not justly to be excepted against.’”

43 Bruce Metzger, “To the Reader,” in The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testament: New Revised Standard Version (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), xi (xi–xv) (emphasis added). The very contextualized period, place, and patronage concerns that guided the translations of the KJV have been regularly discussed from different historical and ideological perspectives, as have the contextual factors for previous and subsequent translations; e.g., White, King James Only; Freedman, The Murderous History; Seidman, Faithful Renderings.

16 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) authorized.... [T]he homogenization of language...the ‘steamroller’ effect—was due to the fact that the work of translators that became the 1611 publication was both the result of the evaluating scrutiny of committee supervision, and the heavy borrowing (enforced by the commissioning edict of King James in 1604) from previous translation—the Geneva Bible, the Bishop’s Bible, the Coverdale, Matthew, Whitchurch and Tyndale translations. 44 The process goes back even further, of course, because Tyndale began from a combination of the Vulgate, Erasmus’s Latin translation from the Greek, and Luther’s German version. 45 To a large degree, the English translations have built upon each other with the primary aim of updating language and orientation, whether convictional or national, such as the various American revisions.

Today’s widely used translation revisions were largely developed to address the controversies of their own times, such as those that animated the preaching of Augustine and Jerome, the Reformers and their Catholic rivals, and Protestant competitors within each vernacular. Those who developed the Geneva Bible with Calvinist sensibilities communicated their interpretations in prefaces to each book and through copious annotations, which the Scottish Presbyterians and Puritans championed. Those who developed the KJV sought to counter these developments, under the direction of the King himself, and thus, for example, eschewed annotations to avoid any resistance to the authority of the Crown and the Anglican Church that the marginal comments in the Geneva version could foment. 46 In this direction, a brief consideration of the historically conditioned context of Luther’s Bible’s impact is warranted. That Luther translated the target text in idiomatic German in ways that humanized and Germanized biblical figures, and that his effort profoundly shaped the evolution of what became

Cadwallader, The Politics of the Revised Version, 17.

Harry M. Orlinsky and Robert G. Bratcher, A History of Bible Translation and the North American Contribution (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), 32–34.

46 Cf. Nicolson, God’s Secretaries, 110–111, 300, passim; ch. 4 discusses each of the rules for translation developed to meet the king’s aims; on 110, Nicolson summarily notes: “This was the king’s commission and James hovers in the background of every instruction. It was ‘his Highness’ who was busy drawing up the rules for the Translators to follow. It was ‘his Majesties pleasure’ that the most learned men should be drawn in.”

44 45

Nanos, Translating New Testament Texts 17 common literary German, are well known. 47 Luther’s translation (like Wycliffe’s), just like his interpretations, were at the time anything but normative; rather these were not only highly contingent and driven by “antipapist” polemical aims, they were also “perceived as undermining both ecclesiastical authority and the institutions of the State.” 48 Especially interesting for our purpose is Euan Cameron’s observation about the precariousness of the success of Luther’s interpretation and translation: “It is by no means easy to see how and why this interpretation gained so much traction in sixteenth-century Europe.” 49 Cameron offers several explanations for how Luther, “tormented by his sense of unworthiness” as a monk, nevertheless managed to appeal to the general population; for example, his assertions “resonated with philosophical doubts about the church’s claims to purvey its material ‘stuff’ for the good of souls” that were already in the air, but the appeal of Luther’s assertions probably derives largely from the way that indulgences were being “advertised as available to assist the souls of the departed from purgatory to heaven.... Those who marketed them engaged in a fairly transparent effort to raise money for various ecclesiastical causes.” 50 In this specific context, Luther’s translation in terms of “faith alone” based on “God’s grace,” defined as “unmerited favor” versus “works,” defined as “human effort to gain salvation by observing law,” which meant Jewish as well as “any” other law performed to merit God’s favor or appease God’s wrath, 51 made some sense to a wide audience of his time. But this declaration was highly contingent: that salvation was by Christ alone was polemical, aimed at the papal leadership, albeit by way of conflating their errors with those he attributed to the Jews in his interpretation of the biblical texts. Luther argued that the addition of allein was warranted by the specific dynamics of German language usage, although, not without significance, he recognized that it was not similarly appropriate to retain the addition when translating his Bible from German into Latin. 52 Gritch, “Luther as Bible Translator,” 70–71; Seidman, Faithful Renderings, 115–119.

Seidman, Faithful Renderings, 119.

49 Cameron, “Introduction,” 9.

50 Cameron, “Introduction,” 9.

51 Gritch, “Luther as Bible Translator,” 68.

52 Martin Luther, “On Translating: An Open Letter [1530],” in Luther’s Works, vol. 35, American ed. (St. Louis and Philadelphia: Concordia and Fortress, 1958–1986), 177–202; Gritch, “Luther as Bible Translator,” 66–67; Mickey L. Mattox, “Luther,” in The Blackwell Companion to Paul, ed. Stephen Westerholm (Chichester, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2011), 380 (375–390).

47 48

18 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) Luther’s interpretation of the meaning of the source text according to his specific contextual concerns remains, some six-hundred years later, the prevailing framework for understanding Paul’s, and thus Christian, especially Protestant, theological reasoning on these and related dynamics. However, when Luther and other Reformers developed the meaning of “faith” in opposition to “works” and “law,” these formulations were highly contextualized in ways that do not map onto the cultural concerns of our times; when invoked as if timeless truths, they can (and likely do) create not only new cultures, but also do so in (gloss-biased) ways that may misrepresent the messages of the source texts even though they use language that appears to be dynamically if not also formally equivalent (e.g., translating πίστις as “faith,” ἔργα as “works,” νόμος as “law”).

Defamiliarizing options should be explored to translate even the most familiar words, which may arguably be more faithful to the source text. For example, many NT scholars today argue that πίστις refers to “faithfulness/loyalty/trust” rather than just faith as in believing in a propositional claim. Moreover, although in Paul’s time νόμος could signify a custom that had become law, most often νόμος signified a custom/principle.

Therefore, the translator should not assume that Paul refers to formal laws or to “Torah” whenever he uses this terminology—or that he sought to draw a contrast between Torah/Law and Faith/Trust; rather, he could argue about what constituted faithfulness to Torah, God’s guidance for Israel. In this direction, I have proposed that ἔργα in the phrase ἔργα νόμου signifies “rites” for completing the religio-ethnic passage into proselyte standing completed by the “custom [νόμος]” of circumcision for males, not unrelated ritual (e.g., Sabbaths, diet) or the moral behavior enjoined in Torah (i.e., Torah-observance per se). 53 Paul’s argument is that the completion of these transformation rites (culminating in the rite of circumcision) by non-Jew Christ-followers would not represent faithfulness in their case (even if it had become customary practice in some Jewish communities to make this rite of passage available to non-Jews seeking full membership standing among Jews). Seldom noticed is the fact that Paul proceeds from the premise that the development of the custom of proselyte conversion rites violates written Torah, creating a curse rather than a blessing (Gal 3:10). In other words, Paul can appeal to Torah to make his case against the

Mark D. Nanos, “Re-Framing Paul’s Opposition to Erga Nomou as ‘Rites of a Custom’ for Proselyte Conversion Completed by the Synecdoche ‘Circumcision,’” JJMJS 8 (2021): 75–115.

53

Nanos, Translating New Testament Texts 19 particular practice of ἔργα νόμου for non-Jews on offer in Galatia, although this point has gone unrecognized in Pauline interpretive traditions. He argues from the fact that Torah enjoins Jewish parents to faithfully complete the rite of circumcision for their eight-day old sons, yet nowhere does Torah enjoin or describe circumcision as a religio-ethnic transformation rite by which non-Jew (non-Israelite) adult males can become Jews (Israelites), so-called proselytes.

Translation practices such as this can help facilitate the option of reading Paul—like other Torah-oriented Jews—to have viewed Torah as a gift given by God to guide Israelites to think and behave according to a particular way to be faithful to God and neighbor. But the situation Paul addressed was complicated by the fact that Torah was not given to the other peoples/nations who, because of their trust in the gospel message, were assembling in Christfollowing Jewish subgroups alongside of Jews, and thereby (in many cases, at least) also with Jews and non-Jews who did not share their convictions about the gospel claims for them. Paul’s innovative gospel-based interpretations of the standing of non-Jews convinced about Jesus as Messiah naturally created confusing conundrums in the Jewish sub-group communal gatherings that his letters sought to address, and among outsiders to their subgroups, for these nonJews were beholden to live righteously, which was exemplified in normative Jewish cultural practices derived from the interpretation(s) of Torah (and, obviously, variously construed within and between Jewish communities of the time, not least with respect to the role of circumcision for non-Jews). Although these non-Jews were not technically under Torah because not members of Israel/Jews, and although Paul prohibited them from completing the transformation rites (ἔργα νόμου) that some other Jews advocated in such cases, which disrupted certain prevailing customs, Paul was at the same time enculturating them into a Jewish way of life, into Judaism, into Jewishness— creating a very messy, easily misunderstood social reality. I provide this example to demonstrate how revisiting translation choices to test a different set of preChristianity, first-century assumptions about Paul, his audiences, and related matters, can introduce new opportunities to consider and debate the most probable meaning of his texts, whereas simply repeating the received translations reinscribes the received interpretations without provoking further examination of their faithfulness to the original texts.

New interpretive proposals from within Judaism or any other perspective can expect to encounter defensive a priori arguments from and on behalf of those who have internalized the familiar as true, having likely trusted such premises to guide their lives to date. Moreover, new proposals will likely

20 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) create challenges also for those who welcome them—they too may find some aspects difficult to grasp or retain or even to trust fully, because neither the premises nor interpretations are easy to square with that which is assumed to accurately mirror the source text in the translations with which they are familiar.

In other words, what they find printed in “the Bible” and encounter in all the commentaries, monographs, and so on available to them may undermine confidence, making the new interpretations and accompanying discussions, and, all the more, new translations, seem deviant, even dangerous, and perhaps prudent to avoid. 54 Christian translations of the NT frequently appear to proceed from the premise that Jewish identification and religious ideals and practices represent the negative binary contrastive “other,” the cultural “them” who, variously constructed for different contextual purposes, serve as the “foil” by which to communicate the superior ideals of Christianity. In such cases, the Christian culture of the translating “us” runs the risk of communicating that Christians transcend and replace the identity and culture of the Jewish “them.” Prevailing translations tend to depict Jewish people and groups and the Jewish ideas and practices (e.g., Torah observance, especially ritual practices) that arise in these texts in ways that map onto the translator’s religious rivals. These rivals are seldom actually Jews or even Christians practicing Judaism, but rather alternative “Christian” groups with different ideas and practices with whom the Jews and their ideas and practices are conflated. Negative assessments of Jewish translation practices are part of this historical legacy, regularly (mis)represented as “literal” in the sense of “fleshly” to provide a foil that demonstrates not only the superior “spiritual” aims of Christian translators, but also their unique capability of performing this “sacred” task properly. 55 To the many challenges must be added reconsideration of the text critical decisions, which are also influenced by interpretive assumptions and paradigms.

55 Seidman, Faithful Renderings, offers many important insights, explicitly stating, “In reframing translation history as theological polemic rather than methodological inquiry or linguistic theory, I also hope to clear space for the expression of Jewish alternatives to the consensus that has shaped translation in the West” (78). Among the relevant observations we cannot discuss here, Seidman’s comments about Luther’s translation agenda sharpen the point; e.g., “while Basel and other Protestant centers of Christian Hebraica continued to rely on medieval Jewish exegetical resources ... Luther worked hard to assemble in Wittenberg a center of Christian Hebraica absolutely untainted by Jewish influence”; and, regarding the OT, “For all Luther’s dependence on Jewish sources ... Luther measured the distinctiveness of his own translation by its distance both from 54

Nanos, Translating New Testament Texts 21 For within Judaism interpreters, these and related translation dynamics are profoundly relevant. These new approaches interpret source texts for contemporary audiences. Even if to date most of the research published has not offered new translation alternatives (some examples are listed or discussed below), they are (or should be) committed to best historiographical practices— which include nurturing awareness/suspicion of the translator/interpreter’s own cultural biases and preferred outcomes. This research and the communication thereof are also conducted in the culturally conditioned context of contemporary NT studies and its audiences, which naturally impacts the research processes undertaken no less than the ways considered to communicate the results. In addition to researchers coming to the task aware of and in conversation with the familiar interpretations and translations, part of the research process involves becoming familiar with the alternatives offered over the centuries, furthering the process of “familiarity-bias.” Regardless of how the major interpretive topics and trajectories repeated from commentary to commentary are valued, for example, they represent the status quo.

This familiarization process can inductively limit consideration of wholly different hypotheses and the methodologies used to explore them, as well as limit how to assess whether new ideas, especially if not adumbrated in scholarship to date, are worth advancing. In other words, whether interpreters pursuing new approaches suspect the familiar translations to be correct, mistaken, or misleading, they will likely remain to some degree constrained by what they are able to imagine possible, the methods they have learned to employ, the sensibilities they will trust, and the kinds of conclusions they will be comfortable drawing. Limitations of these kinds cannot be avoided entirely, but perhaps by raising awareness of the ineluctable influence of these cultural influences on the translation process for everyone who undertakes the task, future research can be undertaken by means less bound to the familiar premises’ ends. 56 In summary, for within Judaism oriented research to reach its potential, in addition to qualifying and redefining the meaning of the language characteristic of the discipline, such as special terms one encounters in the Hebrew style of the Bible and the Jewish exegetical tradition by which the Bible had been read. Luther frequently expressed his conviction that neither Hebrew grammar nor Jewish exegesis could be the ultimate guide for a Christian translation” (120).

56 Cf. the recent compatible reflections, mutatis mutandis, of the German Lutheran NT scholar Jörg Frey, in “Anti-Judaism, Philosemitism, and Protestant New Testament Studies: Perspectives and Questions,” in Protestant Bible Scholarship, 149–181.

22 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) translations and commentaries, the research undertaken should explore the development of translation alternatives that better communicate the interpretive alternatives advanced. The translations that interpreters and their audiences know and use today not only do not support within Judaism research premises, they often undermine the conclusions reached and thus blunt the impact, leading to convoluted arguments and the retention of premises and conclusions that limit the probability of advancing paradigm changing research. 57 Annotations and explanations are helpful, of course, but they can seem like, and be assailed as, special pleading. Repeating the familiar translations, even when arguing for different interpretive outcomes, implicitly corroborates the interpretive legacies those translations embody instead of raising suspicion thereof. In contrast, introducing defamiliarizing new translations, when warranted, might bring awareness to other premises that live on in the familiar translations, including gloss-biases, and likely reveal just how much the initial probes from within Judaism premises have remained constrained by the paradigmatic assumptions and interests of previous generations of interpreters. Moreover, exploring new translations will likely provoke awareness of interpretive possibilities to date unforeseen.

Reading the NT within Judaism is in its early stages. Like several other contemporary research agendas seeking to interpret these texts in new ways that are arguably more historically viable as well as more respectful of the minority other, 58 this effort is logically constrained by the translations from which within Judaism interpreters presently work. Thus they must regularly argue that a particular text does not mean what it ostensibly appears to mean in the translation language of interpreters and other contemporary readers, because interpretation lives in translation.

Recent Translations that Facilitate “within Judaism” Interpretations Within Judaism oriented research is a relatively recent development. Although most of the within Judaism scholarship over the last three decades has focused on Pauline texts, especially where Paul’s rhetoric addresses Jewish, often Torah Cf. DeCook, The Origins of the Bible, investigates the way that pre-modern theological assumptions remain present in more historically oriented interpretive efforts, e.g., from Spinoza on.

58 E.g., “historical” Paul and Jesus quests, and post-colonial, feminist, African-American, post-Holocaust, among other approaches that are beginning to challenge the ideological premises as well as conclusions that animate the dominant interpretive paradigms.

57

Nanos, Translating New Testament Texts 23 related, topics, 59 in the last few years research from within Judaism premises has extended to examination of other, if not every NT text, and into reception history as well. 60 The jury is hardly in on whether or to what degree other NT texts, including the Deutero-Pauline texts, or those of subsequent generations, are best approached from within Judaism, but there is good reason to suspect that looking at each of them from the angles this perspective brings to the research will lead to some new insights, regardless of whether in some cases the conclusion may be that a text does not represent Judaism, that is, would not be best classified “within” Jewish ways of thinking and living, and perhaps even be better understood as “without” or “against” Jews and Judaism. 61 Within Judaism research has, for the most part, sought to demonstrate interpretive alternatives from within lines of the familiar translations; however, several translation alternatives have been advanced in this process. Herein I can only name a few.

Mark D. Nanos and Magnus Zetterholm, eds., Paul within Judaism; earlier, see Mark D. Nanos, “Paul and Judaism: Why Not Paul’s Judaism?” in Paul Unbound: Other Perspectives on the Apostle, ed. Mark Douglas Given (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2010), 117–160; revised in idem, Reading Paul within Judaism, 3–59; see also, e.g., Gabriele Boccaccini and Carlos A. Segovia, eds., Paul the Jew: Rereading the Apostle as a Figure of Second Temple Judaism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016); František Ábel, ed., The Message of Paul the Apostle within Second Temple Judaism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2020); Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); idem, “What Does It Mean to See Paul ‘within Judaism’?” JBL 141 (2022): 359–380.

60 E.g., Anders Runesson and Daniel M. Gurtner, eds., Matthew within Judaism: Israel and the Nations in the First Gospel (ECL 27; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2020); John R. Van Maaren, “The Gospel of Mark within Judaism: Reading the Second Gospel in Its Ethnic Landscape” (PhD diss., McMaster University, 2019); Isaac W. Oliver, Luke’s Jewish Eschatology: The National Restoration of Israel in Luke-Acts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021); Wally V. Cirafesi, John within Judaism: Religion, Ethnicity, and the Shaping of Jesus-Oriented Jewishness in the Fourth Gospel (Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity 112; Leiden: Brill, 2021); for additional recent research from within Judaism perspectives on these and other texts in the NT and thereafter, see Karin Hedner Zetterholm and Anders Runesson, eds., Within Judaism? Interpretive Trajectories in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam from the First to the Twenty-First Century (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2023).

61 Cf. Cirafesi, John within Judaism; alternatively, Adele Reinhartz, Cast Out of the Covenant: Jews and Anti-Judaism in the Gospel of John (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2018).

59

24 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) In addition to offering methodological insights related to translation theory and practice, Anders Runesson draws on his extensive research of synagogue developments to explain the historical warrants for translating ἐκκλησία as “assembly” rather than “church,” and how this usage was compatible with the use of συναγωγή, which is now supported and advanced in various ways, perhaps most notably by “association” studies. 62 These investigations also demonstrate why it is not only anachronistic but unhelpful to use “Christian” and “Christianity” to discuss the matters related in NT texts, a view now widely held and practiced. Paula Fredriksen translates ἔθνη as “pagans” and Christfollowing ἔθνη as “ex-pagan pagans” to reinforce the linkage between ancestral custom, cult, and ethnicity. 63 She also explains how Rom 1:4, translated literally, refers to Jesus “appointed son of God ... by resurrection of the dead (ἐξ ἀναστάσεως νεκρῶν),” that is, at the general resurrection of the dead yet to come, and not, as the RSV translates the phrase, “by his resurrection from the dead,” which masks the apocalyptic eschatology and can instead (not surprisingly) (mis)represent the resurrection of Jesus as initiating a new “religion.” 64 William S. Campbell translates διαστολή in Rom 10:12 as “discrimination” rather than the Runesson, “The Question of Terminology.” See also Ralph Korner, “Ekklēsia as a Jewish Synagogue Term: Some Implications for Paul’s Socio-Religious Location,” JJMJS 2 (2015): 53–78; idem, The Origin and Meaning of Ekklēsia in the Early Jesus Movement (AJEC 98; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017); Eyl, “Semantic Voids.” The bibliography for association research, although also a relatively recent development, is extensive, offering many new insights for constructing the historical settings of these texts, and thus what they probably meant in their own times; see, e.g., Philip A. Harland, Dynamics of Identity 62

in the World of the Early Christians: Associations, Judeans, and Cultural Minorities (New York: T&T Clark, 2009); John S. Kloppenborg, Christ’s Associations: Connecting and Belonging in the Ancient City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019); Richard S. Ascough, Early Christ Groups and Greco-Roman Associations: Organizational Models and Social Practices (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2022).

63 Fredriksen, Paul, 74–77; I similarly avoid “gentiles” by using “non-Jews/non-

Israel(ites),” to avoid the familiar (anachronistic) assumption that Christian (and Christianness) and gentile (and gentileness) are not only synonymous but stand in contrast to Jewish (and Jewishness). Cf. Paula Fredriksen, “Mandatory Retirement: Ideas in the Study of Christian Origins Whose Time Has Come to Go,” in Israel’s God and

Rebecca’s Children: Christology and Community in Early Judaism and Christianity: Essays in Honor of Larry W. Hurtado and Alan F. Segal, ed. David B. Capes, et al. (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007), 25–38, explains problems with “conversion,” “nationalism,” “religio licita,” and “monotheism.”

64 Fredriksen, Paul, 141–145.

Nanos, Translating New Testament Texts 25 familiar “distinction” or “difference,” in order to highlight that Paul is not collapsing ethnic difference but rather emphasizing corresponding equality of standing for those in Christ, Jew and non-Jew, even though still ethnically distinguishable in the ἐκκλησία. 65 Rafael Rodriguez and Matthew Thiessen edited a collection of essays challenging the traditional interpretations and some elements of the translations of Rom 2; I offered several as well. 66 Heidi Wendt challenges the familiar translation of διώκω as “persecute” when discussing Paul’s usage (which problematically can connote anything from violence to discipline to a vague sense of disapproval), on the lexical grounds that this usually refers to “pursuing”—in rhetorical terms to “pursuing an/in argument,” in judicial terms to “prosecuting” or “accusing,” options that describe Paul’s activities in more salient, informative ways, and bring into question whether Paul was involved in the violence toward the nascent movement in the manner usually portrayed. 67 Hans Förster argues for a number alternatives that challenge antiJewish biases for translating the Gospel of John, offers a new reading of the language in 1 Thess 2:14–16, explains and offers more probable alternatives for the questionable translation choices around which turns the quintessential traditional case for reading Paul converting from Judaism in Gal 1:16–19, provides several studies of anti-Jewish biases manifest in the word studies of the TDNT, and examines the problematic influence of Latin on the Greek lexicons we consult. 68 William S. Campbell, The Nations in the Divine Economy: Paul’s Covenantal Hermeneutics and Participation in Christ (Lanham, MD: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2018), 129–135; see also several translation alternatives offered in, idem, Romans: A Social Identity Commentary (T&T Clark Social Identity Commentaries on the New 65

Testament; London: T&T Clark, 2023).

Rafael Rodriguez and Matthew Thiessen, eds., The So-Called Jew in Paul’s Letter to the Romans (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016); Mark D. Nanos, “Paul’s Non-Jews Do Not Become ‘Jews,’ But Do They Become ‘Jewish’?: Reading Romans 2:25–29 within Judaism, Alongside Josephus,” JJMJS 1 (2014): 26–53, updated in idem, Reading Paul within Judaism, 127–154.

67 Heidi Wendt, At the Temple Gates: The Religion of Freelance Experts in the Roman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 158 n. 43; idem, “A Violent Life in Ioudaismos?: Reconsidering Paul as ‘Persecutor’ in Galatians 1.13–14,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Biblical Exegesis, ed. Stanley Porter and David Fuller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

68 Hans Förster, “From Inner-Jewish Debate to Anti-Jewish Polemic? The Transformation of the Gospel of John within Its Textual Transmission,” in Liturgy and 66

the Living Text of the New Testament: Papers from the Tenth Birmingham Colloquium

26 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) Earlier in this essay I explained the warrant to re-translate and interpret Paul’s usage of ἔργα νόμου (usually “works of [the] law”) in very specific terms of undertaking the “rites of a custom/customary rites” involved in religio-ethnic transformation related to non-Jews becoming Jews, completed by circumcision for males, in contrast to the traditional habit of conflating the initiation rites signified by circumcision with the observance of Torah for those who have been initiated (as infant boys, by parental observance of Torah, or as proselyte males, by choice). I argue that this phrase did not signal opposition to behavior (“works”) per se, whether Jewish Torah or tradition based (contra New Perspective on Paul descriptions that conflate circumcision, which is a part of one time rites of passage, with observing days and diets, which pertain instead to Torah observance for those who have completed said rites of passage; cf. Gal 5:3), or more general behavior, such as when Paul’s opposition is understood to refer to human effort to observe any kind of law, ceremonial or moral. 69 This research also supports the growing chorus of NT scholars who contend that πίστις should be translated “faithfulness,” “loyalty,” and “trust,” rather than with the familiar glosses “faith” and “belief.”

In a series of exegetical studies of the language in Rom 11 (and ch. 9), published over the last fifteen years, I advance a number of translation alternatives, many now collected together with a translation of 11:11–33. 70 These on Textual Criticism of the New Testament, ed. Hugh A. G. Houghton (Piscataway:

Gorgias, 2018), 245–267; idem, “Der lange Schatten eines ‘Nazi-Professors’: Überlegungen zum ThWNT und zu seinem Einfluss auf Übersetzungen,” Kirche und Israel 36 (2021): 45–58; idem, “Ein philologischer Vorschlag zu 1 Thess 2,14–16,” SNTSU 46 (2021): 19–40; idem, “Translational Choices and Interpretation in Galatians 1:13–16: An Appraisal,” ThTo 80 (2023): 74–87 (cf. Nanos, Reading Paul within Judaism, 29–40); Hans Förster, “Translating from Greek as Source Language? The Lasting Influence of Latin on New Testament Translation,” JSNT 43 (2020): 85–107. Cf. John A. L. Lee, A History of New Testament Lexicography (Studies in Biblical Greek 8; New York: Peter Lang, 2003); idem, “The Present State of Lexicography of Ancient Greek,” in Biblical Greek Language and Lexicography: Essays in Honor of Frederick W. Danker, ed. B. A. Taylor, et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 66–74; Eyl, “Semantic Voids, 331–334.

69 Mark D. Nanos, “The Question of Conceptualization: Qualifying Paul’s Position on Circumcision in Dialogue with Josephus’s Advisors to King Izates,” in Paul within Judaism, 105–152; idem, “Re-Framing Paul’s Opposition.’”

70 Mark D. Nanos, Reading Romans within Judaism: The Collected Essays of Mark D. Nanos, Vol. 2 (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2018), which includes an essay on the translation of 9:6 that argues Paul’s point is to affirm the identity of all Israelites as Israel, several essays on ch. 11, and an essay considering the dynamics of translation committee choices

Nanos, Translating New Testament Texts 27 studies—from which I will now draw several examples—substantiate new ways to read Paul’s arguments, not only within Judaism but also in directions that challenge central elements of various supersessionistic translations and interpretations that prevail to this day.

For example, in spite of the statements in Nostra Aetate 4 (based primarily on appeal to Rom 11:28b–29), which precipitated similar statements from other Christian institutions, that call for an end to the tradition of interpreting Paul to have regarded his fellow Jews, if not followers of Jesus, as cut out of covenantal standing and replaced by Christians, no translations (known to me) of Rom 11 available for liturgical readings, sermons, study, or reflection, support such pronouncements. In other words, as welcome and wellmeaning as these statements are, they rely upon a passage or two in Rom 11 but otherwise do not align with the translation choices presented in the rest of the chapter—including even in v. 28a, where the NRSV presents the members of Israel as “enemies of God,” although “of God” is not attested in any manuscripts, and one might expect ἐχθροί to read estranged, grammatically mirroring the adjectival translation of ἀγαπητοί as beloved. Moreover, translation decisions throughout chs. 9 (esp. v. 6) and 10, which are part of the argument that extends from 9–11, also appear to contradict these generous pronouncements. As a result, tradition altering statements, such as those in NA 4, not only remain vulnerable to (translation) text-based criticism from detractors, but also they do not provide the kind of comprehensive text-based way forward that those who welcome these calls for change might need to confidently embrace them as authentic representations of Paul’s overall viewpoint or to be enabled to mount challenges to the supersessionistic and replacement based legacies they likely still encounter regularly. Simply put, the dramatically more positive dispositions toward Jews and Judaism that NA 4—and many other Christian bodies since— have enjoined, often by appeal to specific statements in Rom 11:26 and 28–29, do not appear to be supported by the translations of the arguments in which they are embedded, or, to make matters worse, by the commentary discussions of these passages. 71 This need not remain the case. since the Shoah with regard to these chapters; see also, published subsequently, Mark D. Nanos, “‘All Israel Will Be Saved’ or ‘Kept Safe’? (Rom 11:26): Israel’s Conversion or Irrevocable Calling to Gospel the Nations?” in Israel and the Nations: Paul’s Gospel in the Context of Jewish Expectation, ed. František Ábel (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2021), 243–269.

71 The fact that the language in vv. 28–29, to which these new pronouncements appeal, was there to shape Christian translations and interpretations all along, but was largely

28 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) Turning to the details of Paul’s olive tree allegory in 11:17–24, and the passages on either side of it (vv. 11–16 and 25–33), there are many translation alternatives worth exploring; here I can only offer a brief survey of a few examples. To begin with, since Rom 9–11 trades in many metaphors, some echoing when not citing scriptural texts that also trade in metaphors, and the olive tree is an allegory (extended metaphor) toward which Paul builds in the preceding verses and from which he continues to draw in the rest of ch. 11, attention to stylistic dynamics is warranted. 72 Preceding the olive tree imagery itself, in 11:11–15, there are several translation alternatives that would maintain the metaphorical register in Paul’s graphic description of some fellow Israelites “stumbling” presently yet at the same time emphatically insisting they have not “fallen”; that is, this development is temporary, things are not as they might seem to be. To communicate this message in metaphorical register, one might expect choices such as “misstep” rather than “transgression” for παράπτωμα, “lagging behind” or “discomfort” rather than “failure” or “defeat” for ἥττημα, and “delay” or “falling back” or “missing out” rather than “rejection” for ἀποβολή. After this metaphor, and making a similar point around the parts sanctifying the whole (starter for the entire loaf, roots for all the branches) in v.

16, one would expect him to make a logically congruous case when he turns to developing the olive tree allegory in vv. 17–24; namely, that although some branches have been “broken” as in “bent” they have certainly not been “broken off” the tree—but that is not at all what one encounters in the translations.

neglected, is also telling; this history is traced by Joseph Sievers, “‘God’s Gifts and Call Are Irrevocable’: The Reception of Romans 11:29 through the Centuries and ChristianJewish Relations,” in Reading Israel in Romans: Legitimacy and Plausibility of Divergent Interpretations, ed. Cristina Grenholm and Daniel Patte (Romans through History and Culture Series; Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000), 127–173; and from a different angle, see Mark D. Nanos, “Neue Früchte von einem vertrauten Ölbaum?

Probleme und Perspektiven neuer Einsichten aus Röm 11 nach der Shoah,” trans. Carla Weitensteiner and Hermut Löhr, in “Nicht Du trägst die Wurzel, sondern die Wurzel

trägt Dich.” Gegenwärtige Perspektiven zum Rheinischen Synodalbeschluss “Zur Erneuerung des Verhältnisses von Christen und Juden” von 1980, ed. Wolfgang

Hüllstrung and Hermut Löhr (Leipzig: Evangelischen Verlagsanstalt, 2023), 101–129 (English base version available at: www.marknanos.com/wpcontent/uploads/2021/06/New-Fruit-for-Website-revised-6-29-21b.pdf).

72 See Jean Boase-Beier, “Stylistics and Translation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies, ed. Kirsten Malmkjær and Kevin Windle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1–8, Ebook: DOI:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199239306.013.0002.

Nanos, Translating New Testament Texts 29 Instead, the translations of 11:17 depict Paul describing Israelites who are not persuaded of the gospel (more likely, I think, not persuaded that this gospel should be proclaimed to non-Jews), 73 unlike himself, as branches from an olive tree that have been “broken/cut off.” In some translations, such as the NRSV, their omission from the tree is magnified in replacement theology terms by describing the insertion of the wild shoot “in their place [ἐν αὐτοῖς]” (we will return to this matter below). The original branches are not only portrayed as judged and cast out, but their former place is now filled with the new branches (the Greek only indicates one wild shoot inserted, which ought to make one wonder how one shoot takes the place of the “some” branches supposedly removed). Sure, metaphors can be messy and inconsistent; nevertheless, something is awry—either in Paul’s argumentative strategy within and between these metaphors, or in the legacy translations.

Although the Greek word Paul employs in v. 17, a cognate of κλάω, is translated “broken off,” it can denote something that is broken as in “cracked” or “bent,” in which case it remains in the tree, from which it, like the newly inserted wild shoot, draws its sap. 74 If bent but still in the tree, this translation would align with elements in Paul’s argument and the overall point of coAn insight noted first, to my knowledge, by Lloyd Gaston, Paul and the Torah (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987), 116–134, 135–150.

74 For details, see Mark D. Nanos, “‘Broken Branches’: A Pauline Metaphor Gone Awry?

(Romans 11:11–36),” in Reading Romans within Judaism, 112–152; orig. 2010. In contrast, in vv. 21–22, after Paul turns from describing the state of some branches bent to warning the (single) wild shoot poked into the tree that it must not arrogantly disregard the suffering of the natural branches, he instead uses cognates of ἐκκόπτω to describe what they will suffer, which does instead denote the different fate of being “cut off” as in pruned from the tree. The familiar translations not only conflate these terms, they also make other choices that do not bring out the tension between the branches natural to the tree Paul is defending and the solo wild shoot that he is sharply reproving.

Note, e.g., in v. 22 the familiar translation of the last phrase, ἐπεὶ καὶ σὺ ἐκκοπήσῃ, is “otherwise you also will be cut off” (NRSV), which expresses similarity of fate; instead, the contrast would be conveyed by translating this, “otherwise, you will be cut off even.”

In v. 20, the familiar translation of μὴ ὑψηλὰ φρόνει ἀλλὰ φοβοῦ is, “So do not become proud, but stand in awe” (NRSV), which is far less threatening than the context and the use of the imperative warrants: “Do not be proud minded, on the contrary, be afraid”; or, to bring out the metaphorical register, in this case of this newly introduced (singular) twig arrogantly looking down on the suffering of some of the branches natural to the tree: “Do not be high-minded [i.e., toward these bent branches], instead, be afraid [i.e., of being cut off entirely; eventually stated plainly in v. 22, as just discussed].”

73

30 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) existence and inter-dependence much better than the legacy translations, which instead conflict with those elements and that message enough to be characterized as contradictory. In addition, the image of bent branches still on the tree rather than broken off would establish continuity with the metaphorically laden point he made before this allegory in vv. 11–16, as just discussed, as well as after it. In vv. 28–29, he argues that these same Israelites are God’s beloved [ἀγαπητοί] even if some are presently estranged [ἐχθροί], because “the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable”—a conclusion that stands in sharp contrast to the replacement oriented message encountered in the familiar translations. Moreover, throughout the allegory and the chapter, Paul strains to explain that the success of the non-Jews addressed (the “you”) is interdependent upon the success of the Jews being discussed (the “them”), which is what would be communicated if both kinds of branches (a newly introduced wild one among natural ones, some bent to make room for it) now live together in the same tree drawing from the same sap (i.e., God’s favor).

Notwithstanding the NRSV decision to translate ἐν αὐτοῖς as “in their place,” most translations more faithfully reflect the Greek, “in/among them” (v.17). But none of the translations—or commentary discussions—to date (to my knowledge) reflect that the Greek for “them,” being masculine plural, refers to being placed among the branches (κλάδων, masculine plural) described as “broken [ἐκκλάω].” If those branches are understood to be broken off, removed from the tree, then the wild shoot is not being inserted into the tree but into branches no longer on it. Clearly that is not Paul’s aim; instead, the wild branch is being reminded that it now draws its life from the sap of the tree just like the natural branches do, including the ones presently suffering a “break” of some kind (suffering temporarily, that is, for Paul argues before and after this [albeit in zero sum terms] that this development is to the benefit of the wild shoot placed “among them”).

To list a few of the other significant translation alternatives in ch. 11, in vv. 23–24, where the familiar translations indicate that the natural branches can be “grafted in” again because it is assumed that they have been removed from the tree (“broken off”), Paul’s use of ἐγκεντρίζω can instead indicate that these branches are being “poked,” “prodded,” or “spurred on” again. Translated in this direction, Paul would be referring to the reinvigoration of branches that remained on the tree in an injured state (broken as in bent or cracked) without suggesting that they have ever been detached from the tree (broken off).

Moreover, in the last clause of v. 24 Paul attributes this invigorating activity, undertaken on behalf of the natural branches, to the effort “by/for their own

Nanos, Translating New Testament Texts 31 olive tree [τῇ ἰδίᾳ ἐλαίᾳ].” Reading this (metaphorically) to indicate the invigoration, once again, of the natural branches, would also play off the way that the wild shoot was introduced into the tree: even though, unlike the cultivated branches it was not native to the tree’s growth, it was poked into it.

This imagery comports with oleoculture practice: a shoot can be poked in so as to invigorate the host tree. Paul may mean to communicate that although the first prodding (i.e., the poking in of the wild shoot) did not bring the rest of the Israelites to the intended fruitful outcome (of all Israel heralding the gospel to the nations), a secondary prodding of its branches can still do so, and that would still be “all the more” natural for the tree to do (or receive) than was the initial introduction of a shoot that it had not grown. Translated in this direction, Paul’s overall argumentative effort remains salient: he seeks to put the non-Jews in Christ represented by the singular wild shoot in their subordinate and precarious rather than superior and smugly secure place by highlighting that the gifts and calling of Israel(ites) (i.e., the natural branches in the tree of Abrahamic descent whom they now find themselves alongside, whether Christ-followers or not) remains irrevocable.

The usual translation of v. 25 portrays “part of Israel” or “Israel partially” in a “hardened” state. But the Greek word Paul uses here is πώρωσις, which usually refers to a “callus” formed to protect a limb, whether on a human body, or, drawing on the allegory Paul has just developed, on a tree’s damaged limbs. 75 Moreover, the “callus” is described as useful for Israel “for a while” or “temporarily,” “until the fullness of the nations begins.” 76 Translating πώρωσις as “callus” highlights a positive valence that fits the aims of the chapter much better than does the arguably gloss-biased “hardened,” which trades on the negative valence from the description of Pharaoh’s heart as hardened; but when referring to Pharoah, Paul uses a different Greek term, σκληρύνω (in 9:18; as does Exodus), even though the usage of two different Greek words are not distinguished in the familiar translations. In other words, the tree is protecting itself, hardening in the positive sense of developing a callus until healed so that the nourishment Mark D. Nanos, “‘Callused,’ Not ‘Hardened’: Paul’s Revelation of Temporary Protection until All Israel Can Be Healed,” in Reading Paul in Context: Explorations in Identity Formation: Essays in Honour of William S. Campbell, ed. Kathy Ehrensperger and J. Brian Tucker (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 52–73, updated in Reading Romans within Judaism, 153–178.

76 Paul uses ἀπὸ μέρους, an adverbial phrase about how long the callus is intended to do its job (“until”), rather than the language one might suppose from the familiar translations “part of” or “partially,” as if adjectival, defining Israel.

75

32 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) can continue to flow to the limbs to again produce fruit, in the meantime avoiding vulnerability to disease at the point of damage, which would instead put the entire tree—including the newly introduced wild shoot—at risk.

Paul’s reference to “all Israel will be saved” in v. 26, as positive as this gloss may appear to be, depends upon the premise that the Israelites Paul is discussing (“them”) have at this point “lost” their covenant standing and thus are now in need of salvation “just like gentiles,” to use the familiar phrasing. But if “they” are not understood by Paul or his addressees to have lost their covenant standing—in metaphorical terms, if some are bent “for a while” but “protected”—then σῴζω can be translated according to its normal usage, as “protected/kept safe.” 77 This would illustrate Paul’s overall argument that these Israelites remain in covenant standing even though suffering temporarily.

Regardless of present appearances, “all Israel will be protected/kept safe” during this process. Paul thereby emphasizes that the non-Israelites addressed need to understand their role in this mysterious, God-designed scheme, calls for humility and concern for the Jewish other rather than arrogance and disregard, and maintains that successful completion of this plan depends on a shared need for God’s mercy.

Skipping to vv. 30–32, where this interdependency is featured in more straightforward rather than metaphorical terms, the familiar translations attribute the current estranged state of these Israelites to their “disobedience,” but the cognates of the Greek word Paul uses (ἀπειθέω) signify a state of “nonpersuadedness.” 78 If translated to represent not being persuaded yet (or: doubtful) instead of glossed in the legacy direction of willful disobedience, as if rejecting what they know to be true, this would highlight the shared disposition that Paul is trying to emphasize. The Israelites he is discussing may be unpersuaded about the gospel’s claims now, but this applies equally to his readers, because formerly, they, as non-Israelites, likewise were not persuaded of the claims for Israel’s God. He seeks to elicit empathy for the Israelites he is discussing, who have not been persuaded yet that these non-Israelites have now, because of their trust in the claims made in the gospel message, already become full fellow members of the people of God (i.e., by the gospel claim to facilitate the restoration of all the other peoples to the One Creator God) apart from

Nanos, “‘All Israel Will Be Saved’ or ‘Kept Safe’? (Rom 11:26).”

See also Matthew D. Jensen, “Some Unpersuasive Glosses: The Meaning of Ἀπειθεία, Ἀπειθέω, and Ἀπειθής in the New Testament,” JBL 128 (2019): 391–412.

77 78

Nanos, Translating New Testament Texts 33 becoming members of (the people) Israel. 79 Paul’s message remains consistent on this reading (even if shaped by zero sum reasoning): they are all codependent upon the mercy of God and thus ought to be generous toward the needs of the other rather than arrogant and dismissive. That message contrasts sharply with the judgment -of-the-Jewish-other’s intentions as the rejection of what “Jews” know to be true that is embodied in the glosses one encounters in every version of which I am aware. 80 Although the translation choices I propose still portray Paul expressing judgment of some of his fellow Jews—that they, like bent branches, suffer this negative condition for not (yet) joining him to herald the gospel to the nations (represented by the single wild shoot, also, arguably involving a negative valence)—the message of the allegory, and chapter, communicate a much more respectful message about the state and fate of his fellow Jews than do the familiar translations. These changes allow Paul’s text to express rivalries developing within Judaism, which he attributed to God’s design, rivalries that revolve around different responses to the gospel’s claims at the moment in time Paul was addressing, which he believed could and would result in a very different, positive outcome than present appearances might lead the non-Jew addressees to conclude. These translation alternatives demonstrate that Paul’s argument can be read without the usual supersessionistic assumptions and conclusions, even if they do not change the fact that Paul thought his understanding of what all should believe and do was the correct one, or that what he argued did not take place in his lifetime (or since) in the ways that he described.

Conclusion The familiar legacy translations and interpretations have been incorporated into the prevailing cultural ways of thinking and living and talking about these texts for so long that many likely consider them to be self-evident. However, “NT within Judaism” research is exploring new ways to interpret the source text that

Mark D. Nanos, “Paul and the Jewish Tradition: The Ideology of the Shema,” in Celebrating Paul. Festschrift in Honor of Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, O.P., and Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., ed. Peter Spitaler (CBQMS 48; Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 2012), 62–80; updated in idem, Reading Paul within Judaism, 79

108–126.

On this theological legacy, see Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

80

34 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) challenge long-held views. For some, these new interpretations will likely provoke an immediately defensive reaction; after all, they can challenge deeply held theological convictions that live in the familiar NT translations, translations that embody the interpretations around which their confessional commitments turn. These convictions have shaped identification, affiliations, ways of life, discursive patterns, and so on, and are expected to continue to do so. At the same time, many who welcome the new interpretive alternatives offered may also struggle to fully comprehend and communicate these alternatives, especially if they rely solely upon the familiar translations to access what is written in the source texts, which, as discussed, often embody interpretations that can a priori appear to disqualify the new alternatives proposed.

If scholarship conducted from within Judaism premises is to achieve its potential, almost certainly it will require the development of translation alternatives capable of facilitating the research involved as well as of communicating the conclusions reached. Discovering translation alternatives that defamiliarize as well as communicate the changes proposed may also help clarify the interpretive developments and differences. Continued use of familiar language as well as theological terminology will continue to make it difficult to escape the self-evidentiary force of dynamics such as those I have referred to throughout as familiarity-bias and gloss-bias.

To be clear, the challenge is not only to find new ways to restate the legacy interpretations of the source texts by way of translation revisions, which has been the aim of widely used legacy translations (e.g., explicitly noted in cases of the KJV and RSV, discussed above), but to thoroughly interrogate what the source texts were probably designed to mean by the first-century authors for their readers, and to translate accordingly, despite the complications involved in re-writing for today’s reader, some of which this essay has surveyed. This challenge will involve reevaluation of the textual variants and the rubrics employed for making difficult choices. In short, within Judaism research should offer translations in which newly developed and developing interpretations of the historical source texts’ more probable communication aims can live.

Jew or Self-Styled Jew in Romans 2:17?

A Re-Assessment Karl Olav Sandnes MF Norwegian School of Theology | Karl.O.Sandnes@mf.no JJMJS No. 11 (2024): 35–52

Abstract Matthew Novenson has added new arguments to the view that the interlocutor in Rom 2:17 is a gentile calling himself a Jew. The critique found in Rom 1–2 is of a very different kind than the one about Jews and the gospel in chapters 9– 11. Hence, the “Jew” in 2:17 is not the same as the Jews in chapters 9–11. This article looks critically into these arguments, claiming that 3:9 is a reference, not to Scripture, but to what Paul has stated earlier in Romans, which then included Jews already in chapter 2. Chapters 1–2 and 9–11 cannot be separated in the way done by Novenson. A web of connecting links between these different parts of the letter is worked out to demonstrate a fundamental connection. Finally, it is argued that the introduction of a gentile interlocutor in 2:17 creates new problems for understanding 1:18–3:20 within Romans.

Keywords Scripture, Sin, Jews, Diatribe

1. Introduction Matthew V. Novenson has recently released a collection of previously published articles, indeed a readable and highly commended volume. 1 One of the most important, and I would say innovative contributions, is his discussion on Rom 2:17, entitled “The Self-Styled Jew of Romans 2 and the actual Jews of Romans

1

Matthew V. Novenson, Paul, Then and Now (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022).

36 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) 9–11.” 2 Novenson’s comparison between these two passages in Romans advances the discussion and deserves further attention. What Paul in Rom 2:17 and the following verses holds against “you who call yourself a Jew” finds, according to Novenson, no corroboration in the failure of Paul’s fellow Jews in chapters 9–11. The transgressions of the law in the first case are replaced by failure to receive the gospel in the latter: The self-styled Jew, like, or perhaps as, the presumptuous person introduced in Rom 2:1, is guilty of gross infractions of the law despite his evident busyness exhorting other people to obey it. The Jews of Rom 9–11 (and Rom 3:3) come in for criticism, but not at all in the same way…. There is nothing at all about transgression in Rom 9–11. 3 Hence, there are in Romans “Jews” and Jews, “and the former are not the latter.” 4 Such discrepancy has been noted by other scholars previous to Novenson, but no one has to my mind observed this so pointedly. 5 He considers the self-styled Jew a gentile, not a Jew, which has been, and still is the more commonly accepted reading, albeit not as evident as before.

Novenson’s reading of Romans deserves to be scrutinized, particularly the way he relates 2:17 in context and chapters 9–11, or rather how he disconnects the two. To this belongs also how Rom 3:9 and the following verses pertain to his understanding of who the self-styled “Jew” in 2:17 is. The scholarly arguments in favor of a gentile interlocutor found its full expression in the 2016 volume The So-Called Jew in Paul’s Letter to the Romans. 6 My question is simply this: Is the hypothesis of a Gentile interlocutor persuasive in the context of the letter as a whole? My argument will focus on the relationship between Rom 3:9 and the following catena of scriptural passages.

Furthermore, Novenson’s view that Rom 9–11 voices criticisms categorically Novenson, Paul, 91–117; previously published in The So-Called Jew in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, ed. Rafael Rodriguez and Matthew Thiessen (Minneapolis: Fortress 2016), 133–161.

3 Novenson, Paul, 116–117.

4 Novenson, Paul, 117.

5 See Charles K. Barrett, The Epistle to the Romans, 2nd ed. (BNTC; London: Black, 1991), 53; Stanley Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 156.

6 See note 2 above.

2

Sandnes, Jew or Self-Styled Jew? 37 different from chapter 2 will be nuanced by working out links, both in vocabulary and ideas, between these two parts of Romans. 7 Finally, I will comment on the role of the second-person plural “you” in 2:24, an issue not addressed by Novenson.

The Islandic scholar Runar M. Thorsteinsson’s 2003 monograph paved the way for new ways to understand Romans, and also opened up promising possibilities for how to portray Paul’s theology. 8 In his exegesis of Rom 2, Novenson stands on the shoulders Thorsteinsson, adding, in fact, to his argument. Thorsteinsson argues that the rhetorical interlocutor throughout Romans 2 is not an actual Jew, but a gentile Judaizer. Thorsteinsson’s exegesis

Lionel J. Windsor, “The Named Jew and the Name of God: The Argument of Romans 2:17–29,” NovT 63 (2021): 229–248. He argues that Paul charges a fictive Jewish teacher of the kind Josephus tells about in Ant. 18.81–84, a scandalous teacher. Windsor argues that ἐπονομάζῃ is not reflexive, but passive, and should be rendered “you are [customarily] called,” which is a reference to public reputation. Paul deliberately evokes the ideal of a Jewish teacher whose instruction is Torah-based, and who purports to be able to address and put right the human sinfulness laid out previously in Romans. Bad reputation and public recognition, going back to the incident found in Josephus, is not conducive to bring gentiles to praise God’s name. This interesting suggestion suffers in my view from excessive use of sources external to Romans. Windsor is, therefore, led to argue that Rom 2:17–29 is not about the eschatological status of the interlocutor, but about lack of public recognition and the ineffectiveness of the Jewish teacher. Thus, Rom 3:1 is not about salvific advantage for Jews, as in Rom 9–11, but about how this fictive interlocutor may after all bring about praise for God’s name among gentiles. My question is this: if Paul’s point in 2:17–29 is to prove the ineffectiveness of Jewish teachers in dealing with human sinfulness, as claimed by Windsor, what sense does it then make to raise the question in 3:1 at all? That question moves in another direction. According to Windsor, this teacher stands in contrast to Paul who through his gospel is the only option for dealing with the problem of human sin uncovered in the previous parts of Romans. Viewed from how this Romans passage ends, speaking about all humans being accountable to God, Windsor’s exegesis appears, if not impossible, still too sophisticated to be convincing. The accountability of any exegete of Romans is primarily to this text. All fascinating and enlightening suggestions inspired by external sources, find here their true test.

8 Runar M. Thorsteinsson, Paul’s Interlocutor in Romans 2: Function and Identity in the Context of Ancient Epistolography (ConBNT 40; Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 2003), 196–234. For a critique, see, e.g., Karl Olav Sandnes, Paul Perceived: An Interactionist Perspective on Paul and the Law (WUNT 412; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 28–30, 100–104.

7

38 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) has become a building-block in what is nowadays labelled Paul within Judaism. 9 His reading has served to substantiate the claim that Romans is not addressed to Jews at all. Novenson has aptly presented this view: Paul within Judaism rejects the idea that Paul’s polemics were aimed at his ancestral religion in any aspect…. For these interpreters, Paul stands entirely within Judaism and not in any respect against Judaism.

By their lights, the ‘justification from works of law’ that Paul rejects is only a possible course of action for gentiles. On Judaism itself, Paul has nothing to say. 10 Thorsteinsson’s and Novenson’s understanding of Rom 2:17 has come to buttress the view that what Paul says pertains to gentiles only. 11 2. The Relationship Between Romans 3:9 and the Scriptural Catena Novenson as well as Thorsteinsson find in Rom 3:9 supportive evidence for excluding actual Jews from 2:17. The traditional translation goes like this: “…

No, not at all, for we have already charged (προῃτιασάμεθα) that all, both Jews and Greeks are under the power of sin” (NRSVue). 12 This rendering interprets “we” as referring to Paul himself, in analogy with Rom 1:5 where his apostolic ministry is spoken of in the first-person plural (ἐλάβομεν). The temporal aspect in προῃτιασάμεθα then refers to what Paul has already written in the epistle, which See, e.g., William S. Campbell, Paul and the Creation of Christian Identity (LNTS 322; London: T&T Clark, 2006), 105–109; Matthew Thiessen, “Paul’s Argument against Gentile Circumcision in Rom 2:17–29,” NovT 56 (2014): 373–391; Rafael Rodriguez, If You Call Yourself a Jew: Reappraising Paul’s Letter to the Romans (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014). Anders Runesson, Judaism for Gentiles: Reading Paul Beyond the Parting of the Ways Paradigm (WUNT 494; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2022), 33–40, where Thorsteinsson’s work is seen as “a seminal study contributing to this interpretive trajectory.” Runesson rightly points out that Thorsteinsson’s study does not explicitly label his work as Paul within Judaism.

10 Novenson, Paul, 87; see also Matthew Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 54–59.

11 Magnus Zetterholm, “The Non-Jewish Interlocutor in Romans 2:17 and the Salvation of the Nations: Contextualizing Romans 1:18–32,” in The So-Called Jew, 39–58, especially pp. 41–43, 52–53, 58.

12 For critical questions regarding this translation, see Nils Alstrup Dahl, “Romans 3:9: Text and Meaning,” in Paul and Paulinism: Essays in Honour of C. K. Barrett, ed. M. D. Hooker and S. G. Wilson (London: SPCK, 1982), 184–204.

9

Sandnes, Jew or Self-Styled Jew? 39 includes the immediately preceding argument indicting Jews, probably from 2:1 on, but most clearly so in 2:17. In contrast to this, Novenson’s reading of 2:17 follows Thorsteinsson closely, but adds a significant new perspective by bringing a comparison with the actual Jews in Romans 9–11 into the picture (see below).

Pace the traditional reading rendered above, Novenson says: On my reading, however, Paul has not in fact indicted the Jews in Rom 2. How, then, can he say προῃτιασάμεθα? The answer lies in what follows, to wit: a litany of scripture citations presenting a kaleidoscope of impiety: ‘There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who comprehends, no one who seeks after God, and so on’ (Rom 3:10–18). … In other words, it is the sacred books of old, not Paul himself in the preceding paragraph, that ‘previously charged’ the Jews with being under sin. 13 Galatians 3:22 (ἀλλὰ συνέκλεισεν ἡ γραφὴ τὰ πάντα ὑπὸ ἁμαρτίαν) is seen as warranting this view. The temporal aspect in προῃτιασάμεθα refers to what Scripture has previously stated, which is then laid out in the verses following from v. 10 on, not to what Paul has already claimed in the letter. Thus, Novenson subscribes to Thorsteinsson’s conclusion regarding this passage: “In fact, it is first with these citations that the charge of ‘universal sinfulness’ is explicitly announced.” 14 Thorsteinsson’s treatment of 3:9 is, in light of the importance attributed to it, surprisingly short, hardly paying attention to possible objections. Novenson gives additional support, but the relationship between προῃτιασάμεθα and καθὼς γέγραπται in v. 10 is not sufficiently accounted for.

Novenson assumes that the two are nearly identical. The temporal aspect as well as the plural “we” in προῃτιασάμεθα is hardly accounted for. To say, as Novenson does, that 3:9 cannot militate against a certain reading of 2:17 is a circular argument, as precisely that verse is the disputed issue here.

The first issue to be addressed is the role usually given to καθὼς γέγραπται in Romans. In Novenson’s argument the citations from Scripture starting in 3:10 introduce something not yet addressed by Paul. Thus, προῃτιασάμεθα refers not to the preceding, but to the citations which follow, implying that Scripture has

13 14

Novenson, Paul, 108.

Thorsteinsson, Interlocutor, 235.

40 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) stated this already. 15 According to James D. G. Dunn, καθὼς γέγραπται “is used as a formula to introduce quotations from the OT—not least in Romans, and consistently as an appeal to Scripture to document or prove an assertion just made.” 16 Hence, with καθὼς γέγραπται Paul turns to Scripture to further substantiate with divine approval what he has already stated in this epistle. The relevant key texts are the following: Rom 1:17; 2:24; 3:4; 4:17; 8:36; 9:13, 22; 10:15; 11:8, 26; 15:3, 9, 21. This means that Paul turns to Scripture, reinforcing what has already been put forward in his own words, albeit his words may be shaped in accordance with the scriptural texts added to his argument. It may therefore sometimes be difficult to distinguish between Paul’s own words and the scriptural sayings he draws on. This may be illustrated by Rom 1:16–17. Paul begins in 1:16 by giving a short summary of the gospel, focusing on its salvific power for both Jew and Greek. Already in 1:16 the keyword “faith” is introduced, and in 1:17a, Paul makes a connection between faith and righteousness, which will later prove crucial for the argument of Romans.

Having already established his basic case in 1:16–17a, and also key terms and concepts upon which that case rests, Paul turns to Scripture. The dictum found in Hab 2:4 confirms the role of faith (πίστις) urged by Paul in v. 17a: “For in it [the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith.” Two keywords (δίκαιος and πίστις) from Hab 2:4 figure prominently in Paul’s own words, thus summarizing the statement Paul made in the previous verse.

The affirming role of καθὼς γέγραπται is there throughout these texts.

Two examples suffice to make my point, Rom 11:26 and 15:9. The first case, regardless of how καὶ οὕτως is interpreted, 17 is Paul’s hope about Israel being saved (πᾶς Ἰσραὴλ σωθήσεται), which finds support in Isa 59:20–21 and 27:9, introduced with καθὼς γέγραπται. It is, of course, possible to say here that Paul’s hope is culled from the Scriptures, but our concern here is not how this hope originated, but on how καθὼς γέγραπται works in his epistolary presentation.

Worthy of notice is that Israel’s need for salvation is here described in a way strongly reminiscent of Rom 1:18–3:20: ἀποστρέψει ἀσεβείας ἀπὸ Ἰακώβ and ἀφέλωμαι τὰς ἁμαρτίας αὐτῶν. This observation is not to be overlooked and will be Joshua D. Garroway, “Paul’s Gentile Interlocutor in Romans 3:1–20,” in The So-Called Jew, 85–100, argues that Paul refers to something he has spoken on a previous occasion.

For a critique, see Sandnes, Paul, 103–104. Garroway’s interpretation is interesting as it 15

indicates that the plural “we” involved in the verb is a problem here; see later.

16 James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1–8 (WBC 38A; Dallas: Word, 1988), 44, cf. 115.

17 Michael Wolter, Der Brief an die Römer (Teiland 2: Röm 9–16) (EKK VI/2; Ostfildern and Göttingen: Patmos and Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019), 207–210.

Sandnes, Jew or Self-Styled Jew? 41 elaborated below. In the second case, 15:9, Christ is said to have become a servant for the Jews, to confirm the promises given to the fathers. But gentiles will also join in praising the God of Israel. To prove this last point, καθὼς γέγραπται introduces Ps 17:49 LXX (= 2 Sam 22:50): “Therefore I will confess you among the gentiles and sing praises to your name.” Then follows a catena of biblical passages where ἔθνη and words for praise are found. The texts convey together Paul’s main point here, namely, that the gentiles will join in giving praise to Israel’s God. The plural ἐν ἔθνεσιν in the quotation, and also in all quotations making up the catena, is identical with Paul’s τὰ ἔθνη in v. 9a, thus emphasizing how Paul’s own words find reinforcement in Scripture.

This questions the view that προῃτιασάμεθα points to Scripture itself, as it leaves this verb practically redundant in Paul’s text. What does this bring to the relationship between Rom 3:9 and the catena then? According to Thorsteinsson and Novenson, there is no previous assertion in 3:9 to be confirmed, since 3:9 is already a paraphrase of the catena of passages about sinfulness. Thus, the role of καθὼς γέγραπται as confirming what has already been stated, is blurred.

What does all this bring to our understanding of Rom 3:9–10 then?

These observations on how καθὼς γέγραπται is used in Romans are not conclusive evidence against Novenson’s interpretation. Nonetheless, it implies that his interpretation of 3:9–10, where this phrase introduces something which is new to the epistolary context, is irregular in Romans. The phrase καθὼς γέγραπται usually points backward to what has just been said, confirming, supporting, or backing an assertion already made. The confirmatory role of καθὼς γέγραπται is blurred in Thorsteinsson’s and Novenson’s interpretation. One might possibly say that Rom 3:9 constitutes Paul’s own words, shaped by Scripture, which then in 3:10–18 find scriptural corroboration, but there are no terminological links established between vv. 9 and 10, although πάντας ὑφʼ ἁμαρτίαν εἶναι (see also πάντες γὰρ ἥμαρτον in 3:23) leads naturally to οὐκ ἔστιν/οὐδὲ εἷς. The emphasis on Jews and Greeks in 3:9 definitely points backward to 1:14, 16 and 2:9–12 where the two are mentioned. The scriptural catena which follows gives no terminological substantiation for including “Jews and Greeks” in 3:9. This is found only in the preceding. Thus, 3:9 picks up on what Paul has already established in his argument, which includes indictments on Jews, and then 3:10– 18 affirms this by a catena of biblical texts.

My hesitation regarding Novenson on this point finds further affirmation in the first-person plural “we” in προῃτιασάμεθα. According to

42 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) Novenson, “we” refers to and introduces scriptural evidence. 18 Regardless of how the authorial “we” is interpreted, it is unusual for Paul to introduce Scripture in this way. A possible analogy may be found in Rom 4:9: “Is this blessing, then, pronounced only on the circumcised or also on the uncircumcised? We say (λέγομεν γάρ) ‘Faith was reckoned to Abraham as righteousness.’” Romans 4:9 introduces a new step in the argument, picking up on the first-person plural in v. 1: “What are we to say (ἐροῦμεν)?” Whether Abraham was circumcised or not at the time God addressed him in Gen 15:6 allows for certain implications to be gleaned from that text. It is not Scripture as such, but clearly Paul’s interpretation of it which is at stake here. Thus, λέγομεν refers not to the Scriptural text itself, but to its relevance for the question v. 1 has already raised in “we” form. 19 Romans 15:4 may help illustrate the distinction between “we” and Scripture. Paul says that what Scripture has previously stated (προεγράφη) (Ps 68:10 LXX) “was written for our instruction.” Paul thus distinguishes between Scripture and “we,” as he does also in 1 Cor 10. There is a past in the Scripture which is distinguished from present “we”: “These things happened to them to serve as an example, and they were written down (ἐγράφη) to instruct us, on whom the ends of the ages have come” (1 Cor 10:11). Novenson’s reading of 3:9 confuses this by having a first-person plural introducing Scripture. If “we” here refers to Scripture, it is the only example of this in Paul.

3. A Web of Connecting Links Novenson argues that the actual Jews in Rom 9–11 come in for criticism, but of a very different kind than the one we find in chapter 2: “But the disobedience with which Paul charges Israel is of a very particular sort. It is neither gross moral turpitude, as in Rom 1–2, nor a perverse use of the law for either egoistic or jingoistic ends.” 20 They are charged with unbelief, as they turned their back to Paul’s gospel. The differences are, according to Novenson, “striking.” 21 Novenson is right in pointing out that disbelief in their Messiah is at the center Likewise, Thorsteinsson, Paul’s Interlocutor, 236: “Thus, the words ‘for we have previously charged’ in 3:9 concern not Paul’s previous discussion in his letter but charges already made by scripture, examples of which are the given by Paul in the following verses.”

19 Thus, also Samuel Byrskog, Romarbrevet 1–8 (KNT; Stockholm: EFS forlaget, 2006), 86.

20 Novenson, Paul, 115.

21 Novenson, Paul, 116.

18

Sandnes, Jew or Self-Styled Jew? 43 of Rom 9–11, but there is more to be said. The Jews in Rom 9–11 are not exempt from Paul’s theology of sin, as presented in 1:18–3:20. The arguments for this depend on observations suggesting that 1:18–3:20 and chapters 9–11 are entangled in a web of terms that connect the two precisely when it comes to the criticism being voiced in both passages. This is relevant since Novenson argues that the two are to be seen separately.

Judged from how Rom 1:18–3:20 is summarized, this section aims at including both Gentiles and Jews under the power of sin. 22 The section renders a theological view on fallen humanity. Already in the opening statement of 1:18– 3:20 ἂνθρωπος is a key figure. Two observations suggest a reference to all humanity. In Rom 2:9 this noun is defined explicitly as including both Jews and gentiles, and this section of Romans ends up saying that every mouth (πᾶν στόμα) will be silenced, and the whole world (πᾶς ὁ κόσμος) will be held accountable to God; in short, πᾶσα σάρξ (3:19–20) is included, or as stated in 3:22b–23: “there is no distinction, since all have sinned.” The aim of this part of Romans is intended precisely to prepare for that conclusion, which also anticipates 5:12–21 where Adam and sin are joined. 23 The difference Novenson urges between Rom 1–2 and 3:10–18 is unconvincing to me, as he says that only the latter part is relevant for the Jews.

If 3:10–18 is about real Jews, and not just self-styled Jews, it follows that Jews are also subject to the kind of criticism that Paul develops within 1:18–3:20. They are not just guilty of disbelief or lack of understanding. It is thus difficult to claim that Paul limits his criticism of his fellow Jews to cognitive failures. If Rom 3:10–20 also includes Jews, as stated by Novenson, the same striking difference vis-à-vis chapters 9–11, as claimed for chapters 1–2, comes into view. In other words, regardless of how the interlocutor in 2:17 is understood, the discrepancy vis-à-vis Rom 9–11 is still there by way of 3:10–18. This problem is in my view not accounted for in Novenson’s contribution.

There are several links between Rom 3:10–18 and the preceding part of this section in Romans. The following will work out terminological links and common motifs that tie in not only 3:10–18 with 1:18–3:20 but chapters 9–11 as See Friedrich Wilhelm Horn, “Götzendiener, Tempelraüber und Betrüger: Polemik gegen Heiden, Juden und Judenchristen im Römerbrief,” in Polemik in der fruhchristlichen Literatur: Texte und Kontexte, ed. O. Wischmeier and L. Scornaienchi (BZNW 170; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 209–232.

23 See Beverly Roberts Gaventa, “The Revelation of Human Captivity: An Exegesis of Romans 1,18–32,” in God’s Power for Salvation: Romans 1,1–5,11, ed. Cilliers Breytenbach (Colloquium Oecumenicum Paulinum 23; Leuven: Peeters, 2017), 43–59.

22

44 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) well. 24 The web of connections to be uncovered questions Novenson’s claim that chapters 9–11 are set apart from this previous text in Romans. This web also questions separating 3:10–18 from 1:18–3:20, as though Jews are not included before 3:9.

Romans 1:18–3:20 is introduced with key words ἀσέβεια and ἀδικία, where the latter is seen as suppressing truth (ἀλήθεια; see also 2:8, 20). The noun ἀδικία (see also 1:29; 2:8) finds a correspondence in 3:10 (οὐκ ἔστιν δίκαιος), and although ἀλήθεια and cognates do not appear in the catena given in chapter 3, the motif of defeating truth is precisely what is conveyed by the biblical texts collected in 3:10–18. We noticed already that ἀσέβεια figures in the citation Paul leans on when he talks about all Israel being saved (11:26). Thus, already from the opening of 1:18–3:20 a web reaching even into chapters 9–11 is indicated.

The issue of knowledge and understanding is prominent in this section (1:19, 21, 28, 32–32, 34; 2:4, 18, 20) and it is picked up in 3:11 (οὐκ ἔστιν ὁ συνίων) and 3:17 (οὐκ ἔγνωσαν). Romans 1:18–3:20 is closed by a statement about knowledge of sin (ἐπίγνωσις ἁμαρτίας; 3:20). This knowledge comes through the law, according to Paul, thus implying that his fellow Jews, who have the Torah, were supposed to know.

As for the catalogue of vices in Rom 1:29–30, it is worth noticing that δόλος figures as a verb in 3:13 as well (ἐδολιοῦσαν). Furthermore κατάλαλος, slanderous, finds its equivalent in the role given to words, tongue, and mouth in 3:13–14: “they use their tongues to deceive. The venom of vipers is under their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.” In the catalogue, figures also ἀπείθεια: γονεῦσιν ἀπειθεῖς, a hint at the decalogue (cf. 2:21–22), and a term found also in 2:8. The cognates of this adjective are crucial when Paul in 10:21 quotes Isa 65:2 LXX about “disobedient” Israel (πρὸς λαὸν ἀπειθοῦντα). This motif is found also in 10:3 (οὐχ ὑπετάγησαν) and 11:20 and 23 (ἀπιστία). The citation in 10:21 shapes the language with which Paul brings his treatise on Israel in Romans to an end: “Just as you were once disobedient to God (ἠπειθήσατε τῷ θεῷ) but have now received mercy because of their disobedience (τῇ τούτων ἀπειθείᾳ), so also they have now been disobedient (ἠπείθησαν) in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they also may now receive mercy. For God has imprisoned all in disobedience (συνέκλεισεν γὰρ ὁ θεὸς τοὺς πάντας 25 εἰς ἀπείθειαν) so that he may be

Gaventa, “Human Captivity,” 44, says that three motifs from 1:18–32 prove important in the remainder of the letter, i.e., the extent of sin, worship, and epistemology (knowledge).

25 Some mss, probably including P46, have neuter (τὰ πάντα) here.

24

Sandnes, Jew or Self-Styled Jew? 45 merciful to all” (11:30–32). Worth observing here is, of course, that ἀπείθεια is defined universally, being applied to both gentiles and Jews. Here is a mutual dependence, based on a disobedience which characterizes both gentiles and Jews. The motif of hardening which is important in 11:7–10, picking up on 9:17– 23, is anticipated in 2:5 (“But by your hard and impenitent heart…; κατὰ δὲ τὴν σκληρότητά σου καὶ ἀμετανόητον καρδίαν”).

A common accusation against gentiles from a Jewish perspective is of idolatry (Wis 11–15; 1 Thess 1:9–10; 1 Cor 12:1–2), which also figures prominently in 1:18–3:20, especially in 1:19–25, but even in 2:22: “You who abhor idols, do you rob temples?” 26 This is, of course, one of the reasons that might suggest a gentile, and not a Jewish, interlocutor in 2:17. As I have stated above, I think this misses out on the surprising and exaggerated nature of the rhetoric in 1:18–3:20. 27 Seen in light of Paul’s use of the Golden Calf tradition in 1 Cor 10:7 this move is not surprising from a scriptural point of view either. 28 Furthermore, the idolatry-blame is found also in 11:2–4, taken from 1 Kgs 19.

This is a pivotal story in biblical tradition about Israel and Baal. 29 Although Paul’s primary aim in citing from 1 Kgs 19 is to argue for his concept of a According to Jens Schröter, “Juden und Heiden in Römer 2: Röm 2,1–29 innerhalb der Argumentation von 1,18–3,20,” in God’s Power, 87–88, Paul “bewegt sich hier also innerhalb allgemeinlicher ethischer Begrifflichkeit zur Kennzeichnung schändlicher Verhaltens.”

27 See Sandnes, Paul, 101–102, for the intended chocking effect of this rhetoric. Views usually resonating in texts about pagans come into wider use due to the universalizing perspective of this passage. Jonathan A. Linebaugh, God, Grace, and Righteousness in Wisdom of Solomon and Paul’s Letter to the Romans: Texts in Conversation (NovTSup 152; Leiden: Brill, 2013), 93–96, says that “[functionally], then, the indictment of Romans 1.18–32 becomes, at last retroactively, an indictment of the Jew as much as the Gentile” (p. 95). The rhetorical move is to “eliminate the self-imposed distance between the judge and the other,” thereby subjecting all to the same condemnation. Linebaugh’s argument is that while the polemic in Wis 13–15 serves to reinforce the distinction between Jew and gentiles, Paul’s rhetoric reworks this, to portray humankind as united in being sinners; see also Jonathan A. Linebaugh, The Word of the Cross: Reading Paul (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022), 97–122.

28 Karl Olav Sandnes, Belly and Body in the Pauline Epistles (SNTSMS 120; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 199–210; see also Gaventa, “Human Captivity,” 50, who points to Ps 105:20 LXX and says that “a subtle irony emerges, then, as the ‘gentile problem’ of idolatry is cast in language that also implicates Israel, laying the groundwork for 2:1–3:9.”

29 John M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 462–463, 545.

26

46 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) remnant among the people (λεῖμμα), he does remind his readers of Israel’s past involvement with a sin which is elsewhere especially connected with gentiles.

Novenson points out rightly that Paul in Rom 9–11 blames the Jews for failing to recognize the Messiah and the gospel. But this failure is part of the issue of right worship and knowledge which permeates chapters 1–2 in this letter. In his 1989 article, “Cognitio Dei im Römerbrief,” Ernst Baasland works out in detail how the theme and terms for knowledge and insight permeate Romans. 30 He argues that Rom 1:18–3:20 is to be seen against the backdrop of how the prophets of Israel charged the people for lacking in knowledge: Um Röm 1,18–3,20 als Ganzes erklären zu können, hätten wir fast die gesamte Gerichtsverkündigung der Propheten heranziehen müssen. Wir begrenzen uns auf diejenigen Propheten-Texte, in denen die Erkenntnis-Thematik in der Verkündigung auftaucht, besonders: Hos 4,1–3. 6–9; 6,5–7; Jer 2,5–12. 29–36a; 4,19–26; 8,4–13; 9,2–9; Jes 1,2–4; 40,12–31; 43,8. 13; Mi 6,1–9; vgl. auch Dtn 32; Ps 50 wie auch die Mahnungen/Trost-Aussagen: Jer 4,4f; 9,23ff. 31 Baasland argues that this is picked up again in chapters 9–11, and that Paul in doing so follows in the wake of prophetic traditions in the Jewish Scriptures.

Prophetic critique of Israel is indeed a “within Judaism” phenomenon, not restricted to the Hebrew Bible, but also present in other relevant Jewish literature such as Josephus and Qumran.

“Not Seeking God” (οὐκ ἔστιν ὁ ἐκζητῶν τὸν θεόν; Rom 3:11) is a motif also in 11:7 (ἐπιζητεῖ Ἰσραήλ; cf. 9:31). The difference is that Israel seeks God but without proper understanding. Lack of appropriate knowledge is important in Paul’s presentation of the actual Jews in chapters 9–11, stated explicitly in 10:2– 3: “For I can testify that they have a zeal for God, but it is not based on knowledge (οὐ κατʼ ἐπίγνωσιν). Not knowing (ἀγνοοῦντες) the righteousness of God and seeking to establish their own, they have not submitted to God’s righteousness.” To this belongs also 10:19: “Again I ask, did Israel not understand (οὐκ ἔγνω)?” A negative answer may here be expected, in line with

30 31

Ernst Baasland, “Cognitio Dei in Römerbrief,” SNTSU Serie A 14 (1989): 185–218.

Baasland, “Cognitio,” 199.

Sandnes, Jew or Self-Styled Jew? 47 the logic of 10:2–3 above. 32 However, the grammar (BDF §427.2) is in favor of an affirmative answer, which then adds a perspective to 10:2–3. It is possibly a flashback to Rom 3:2 (ἐπιστεύθησαν τὰ λόγια τοῦ θεοῦ). There is a notion here of the Jews’ advantage in having been entrusted Scripture, which then exacerbates the fact that Paul’s own people know neither what nor whom the Scripture was really about. 33 I have already stated that Rom 11:26 with emphasis on ἀσέβεια and ἁμαρτία resonates well with 1:18–3:20, and in such a way that the differences between the criticism voiced in these passages are not as striking as claimed by Novenson. This observation takes us to the role of Abraham in Romans, an issue far beyond what we can unfold here. Abraham is in Rom 4:5 and 5:6 presented as ἀσεβής, and the immediate context of 4:5 defines this further as requiring forgiveness: “Blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven (ἀφέθησαν αἱ ἀνομίαι) and whose sins are covered (ἐπεκαλύφθησαν αἱ ἁμαρτίαι). Blessed is the one against whom the Lord will not reckon sin (οὐ μὴ λογίσηται κύριος ἁμαρτίαν)” (4:7–8). This suggests that the tradition of Abraham’s pagan past as an idolater (Jub. 12; Apoc.

Ab. 1–8) is here developed and altered in light of 1:18–3:20. 34 What matters here is that Abraham, in being described thusly, is linked to 1:18–3:20.

This detailed and tedious list of verses is the only way to lay out the web in which Rom 3:10–18 is connected to 1:18–3:8, and also that chapters 9–11 are embedded in this web. Both 3:10–18 and chapters 9–11 represent to Paul a development of the question of sinfulness. This conclusion finds corroboration in the fact that Israel will find salvation from their sins (ὅταν ἀφέλωμαι τὰς ἁμαρτίας αὐτῶν; 11:27). Finally, Novenson makes a distinction between sin as “empirically demonstrable,” applied to gentiles and found in Rom 1:18–32 and 2:1–29, and sin “as known from the testimony of the law, that is to say, from scripture rather than experience.” 35 I find this too schematic and simple to catch the rhetoric of Paul’s discourse on sin in Romans. Somehow, sin is empirical to all, be they gentiles or Jews, as death reigns (Rom 5:12–21), a fundamental fact in Paul’s reasoning about the power of sin. Furthermore, Rom 9–11 is not untouched by Paul’s own mission and the experiences of opposition he faced from Jews as well See the arguments by Otfried Hofius, Paulusstudien (Tübingen: Mohr Siebck, 1989), 176; Baasland, “Cognitio,” 211.

33 Predrag Dragutinović, “The Advantage of Having the Scriptures: An Exegesis of Romans 3,1–20,2” in God’s Power, 97–115, at 113–115.

34 Karl Olav Sandnes, “Reading Romans 4 Backwards: Abraham Mirrored in His σπέρμα, Isaac,” ZNW 115 (2024): 69–89.

35 Novenson, Paul, 109.

32

48 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) (2 Cor 11:24), and the view on sin in chapters 1–2 is not only empirically demonstrable, but intended to give a theological perspective as well.

4. Romans 3:1, the Advantage of the Jew, vis-à-vis a Gentile Interlocutor in 2:17–29 Novenson connects the Jew in Rom 3:1–3 with the actual Jews in chapters 9–11, which is hardly a contested position. The argument in chap. 3 breaks off and is picked up in chapter 9. However, in Novenson’s argument more is at stake. The Jews implied in 3:1–3 are separated from the preceding paragraph in 2:17, as 3:1–9 is about Jews, not “Jews” as in 2:17. A relevant question to present is the following: what prompts a question about the prerogatives of Jews in precisely this context? As Paul uses the diatribe-style elsewhere, τί οὖν hardly introduces a new section cut loose from the preceding. Central to the diatribe-style are questions that are objections to positions made. With that in view, τί οὖν has most likely a reference to the preceding. This may be exemplified by Rom 6:1 which follows from the dictum in 5:20–21 about abundant grace depending on increase of sin. Likewise, in Rom 7:7 the diatribe question (“What then are we to say? That the law is sin?”) picks up on the previous verse about being released from the law. In other words, the diatribe style presents or echoes a possible objection or inference arising from the preceding argument. According to Stanley K. Stowers, the questions of the diatribe involve objections and false conclusions that are reactions “to the elements of argumentation and persuasion which precede them in a great variety of ways.” 36 Given what 2:17–29 has stated, what is then the prerogative, if any, for the Jews? Thusly, 3:1–9 is introduced.

Novenson would probably not disagree on this formal point.

However, if Rom 2:17–29 is not about Jews, but a gentile who claims to be a Jew, and the issue at stake in 2:25–29 concerns circumcision, there is a need to think this through. It would still make sense to ask about the advantage of circumcision, as does 3:1b. Leaning on Matthew Thiessen, 37 Novenson argues that Paul here refers to legislation on circumcision, which applies strictly to Jews, about a rite to occur on the eighth day. Hence, the interlocutor “becomes

Stanley Kent Stowers, The Diatribe and Paul’s Letter to the Romans (SBLDS 57; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981), 143; see pp. 119–154 on objections and false conclusions in the diatribe. See also Thomas Tobin, Paul’s Rhetoric in its Contexts: The Argument of Romans (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004), 88–98, 118–123; Sandnes, Paul Perceived, 97–99.

37 Thiessen, “Paul’s Argument.”

36

Sandnes, Jew or Self-Styled Jew? 49 a transgressor of the law precisely through, not in spite of his circumcision. By undergoing circumcision, he violates the circumcision commandment.” 38 Perhaps, Paul was, says Novenson, a Jew who held this position found in, e.g., Jubilees. Thus, the aim of 2:25–29 is to keep gentiles like the interlocutor away from circumcision. It seems to me that the verbs πράσσειν and φυλάσσειν used here link up with ἐργάζεσθαι in 2:10 and the distinction between “hearers” and “doers” of the law in 2:13 (see below), thus indicating another issue than a “Galatianlike situation” of gentile circumcision. Be this as it may; my point is that if 2:25– 29 embarks on a debate on circumcision legislation, this leaves the question in 3:1a about the advantage of the Jews hanging in the air. Paul asks in 3:1 about Jews and circumcision. That needs to be pinpointed. The question of the advantage for the Jews makes less sense if the implied addressee is a gentile and the issue is about circumcision for gentiles. Against a backdrop where the text is about a gentile and circumcision, the question of advantage for Jews makes less sense.

5. Two Additional Observations I finally, turn to two observations which are not in themselves decisive with regard to how 2:17 is to be interpreted, but which, nonetheless, make a smoother reading if the interlocutor is a Jew. 5.1. Romans 2:24: “The name of God is blasphemed among the gentiles because of you” This citation from Isa 52:5 (cf. Ezek 36:17–23) is not in any way conclusive regarding the identity of the interlocutor in Rom 2:17, but it is still worthy of notice. 39 Paul depends on LXX, as the Hebrew text does not have “among the nations (ἐν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν).” In its context, in both Hebrew and LXX, this is not an indictment against Jews, but refers to Israel being oppressed by the nations, in captivity. This makes God appear powerless, thus paving the way for God’s name being blasphemed, a topic which is prominent in, e.g., 4 Ezra: “we pass from the world like locusts. And our life is like a mist, and we are not worthy to obtain mercy. But what will he do for his name, by which we are called? It is about these things that I have asked?” (4:24–25; cf. 5:28–30). It is the unfortunate situation of the Jews which caused the blasphemy. The Romans application, Novenson, Paul, 105.

See Christopher Stanley, The Rhetoric of Quotations in the Letters of Paul (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 145–150.

38 39

50 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) however, blames the transgressions of the interlocutor for God’s name being blasphemed, summarizing the indictment found in the passage. According to Thorsteinsson, these changes to the original context are due to Paul who does not indict Jews at all, but a gentile interlocutor. 40 This is to me an odd solution, as it implies that gentiles who claim to be Jews are accused for gentiles blaspheming God’s name, thus making διʼ ὑμᾶς a reference to gentiles causing other gentiles to blaspheme God’s name. This is not impossible, but a less likely solution.

The Ezekiel-text involved has the motif of Israel causing God’s name to be blasphemed. In a context where their idolatry and uncleanliness prevail, “their way (ἐν τῇ ὁδῷ αὐτῶν)” is mentioned thrice. To Paul, this was an obvious reference to lifestyle or conduct measured by the standards of the law. 41 Furthermore, “according to their way” (κατὰ τὴν ὁδὸν αὐτῶν) appears in tandem with κατὰ τὴν ἁμαρτίαν αὐτῶν (Ezek 36:19). Thus, this passage fits how Isa 52 is used in Paul’s context. Conflated with Ezek 36, which voices a well-known prophetic tradition of Israel causing pagan blasphemy (T. Naph. 8:1; cf. Matt 5:16), it fits nicely the context, albeit it is not evidently decisive for the question who “the Jew” is in 2:17. However, in a context where Paul argues that both Jews and gentiles are under the power of sin (Rom 2:9–11; 3:9), it would be odd for Paul to blame a gentile interlocutor for how gentiles viewed God’s name. The fact that there is sufficient historical grounds for imagining a gentile interlocutor, 42 does not do away with the oddity of such an interpretation.

Worthy of notice is also that the second-person singular from 2:17 is kept rhetorically throughout to v. 23, while in v. 24 there is a plural (διʼ ὑμᾶς). This change is due, not only to the quotation from LXX, but also to the fact that Paul has a group of people in mind. This fits more naturally with Jews than with gentile sympathizers.

The self-claimed presentation of the interlocutor has one phrase in which reverberates biblical language: φῶς τῶν ἐν σκότει (Rom 2:19). This language is derived from Isa 42:6–7 and 49:6, and is about Israel’s role vis-à-vis the nations. Hence, this vocabulary is at home in conversion contexts (Jos. Asen.

Thorsteinsson, Interlocutor, 218–221. Novenson does not comment on the role of this citation.

41 See Karin Finsterbusch, Die Thora als Lebensweisung für Heidenchristen: Studien zur Bedeutung der Thora für die paulinische Ethik (SUNT 20; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 108–119; cf. halak which in Hebrew tradition may be used with reference to ethical conduct.

42 As demonstrated by Novenson, Paul, 99–102.

40

Sandnes, Jew or Self-Styled Jew? 51 6:2; 8:9; 15:12; Philo, Spec. 1.54; Virt. 179; Acts 26:18). 43 This is not conclusive for the question of who the interlocutor is since the motif is also at home in Matthew’s portrayal of Pharisees (Matt 15:14; cf. 23:16, 24). Nonetheless, this phraseology makes perfect sense if Paul has in mind a Jewish interlocutor.

5.2. Jew or “Jew” in Romans 2:25–29 This passage is held in the second-person singular (“you”) as is Rom 2:17–23, but not v. 24 (see above). This rhetorical second-person singular ties 2:17–29 together into a unit. It is therefore to be expected that Ἰουδαῖος keeps the same meaning throughout this section. Worth noticing therefore is that “you” in 2:27 is contrasted with the uncircumcised. It is, of course, possible, to argue that this refers to circumcised and uncircumcised gentiles (see above). 44 However, if both ἀκροβυστία and περιτομή here refer to gentiles, this is certainly changed in 4:10– 12, 17–18 where such a reading makes no sense. Furthermore, 2:27 is formulated in a way which picks up on 2:12–14 about ἔθνη τὰ μὴ νόμον ἔχοντα φύσει τὰ τοῦ νόμου ποιῶσιν. Both passages speak from the idea of “knowing God’s will or law and doing it.” The idea of “knowing God’s will and also doing it” runs the gamut of the entire passage of 1:18–3:20 (1:19–21, 32; 2:1–3, 13–14, 18–23) and is explicitly voiced in 2:25–27. The noun φύσις appears in both 2:12–14 and 2:27.

The logic is also related: those who from nature are without law or without circumcision observe what is commanded in law or the rite which is a symbol of obedience to it. 45 Romans 2:14 makes explicit what is not explicit in 2:27, namely that a contrast between Jews and gentiles is implied. This is further corroborated in 2:14 which grows out of 2:9–11 where Jews and gentiles are mentioned together, motivated by God showing no partiality. Hence, another synonymous distinction follows in 2:12: ὅσοι γὰρ ἀνόμως versus ὅσοι ἐν νόμῳ (cf.

3:19: οἱ ἐν τῷ νόμῳ). This finds an analogy in the attitude portrayed rhetorically in 2:18–23, culminating in ὃς ἐν νόμῳ καυχᾶσαι. These observations are suggestive Reinhard Deichgräber, Gotteshymnus und Christushymnus in der frühen Christenheit: Untersuchungen zu Form, Sprache und Stil der frühchristlichen Hymnen (SUNT 5; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967), 78–87; Wolter, Römer, 194–195.

44 So Thorsteinsson, Interlocutor, 221–231, and Novenson, Paul, follows this. The 43

interlocutor is a gentile throughout 2:17–29. This is not unlike the view that Paul in 1 Cor 7:17–19 addresses an exclusive intra-gentile issue; see Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 107–108; cf. Mark Nanos, Reading Paul within Judaism: Collected Essays of Mark D. Nanos Vol. 1 (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017), 79–80.

45 Jens Schröter, “Juden und Heiden in Römer 2,” 83–94.

52 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) in pointing to a Jewish interlocutor, even if the identity of the interlocutor rests on observations pointed out elsewhere in my presentation.

Regardless of how Rom 2:28–29 is interpreted, Paul most likely draws on biblical traditions on circumcision of the heart (Lev 26:41; Deut 10:16; 30:6; Jer 4:4), thus negotiating what a true circumcision is. Against that backdrop it makes perfect sense to speak critically about people “calling” themselves Jews as does 2:17 in my opinion, even if they so are. Thus, the distinction urged in 2:28– 29 paves the way for the distinction implied in the “calling oneself” in 2:17.

6. Summary The question of the identity of the interlocutor in Rom 2:17 is important since it concerns the reading of Romans more generally, and also because it pertains to larger theological questions of Paul’s theology. Novenson’s recent book Paul Then and Now (2022) is an opportunity to address this again. He follows in the footsteps of Runar M. Thorsteinsson who in 2003 initiated this debate, by claiming that 2:17 referred to an imagined gentile interlocutor. The present article considers this critically: is this convincing in the context of the letter as a whole? Issues affecting 2:17 are addressed here, such as the reference of προῃτιασάμεθα in 3:9 as well as the scriptural catena. The two are not the same, as it seems to Novenson (and Thorsteinsson); rather, 3:8–10 reinforces what Paul has already stated in his own words previously in the letter. Hence, 3:9 assumes a reference to Jews prior to 3:10–18. A Jewish interlocutor makes also the diatribe question in 3:1 about the advantage of a Jew more natural. The reference to uncircumcision and circumcision in 2:25–29 links up with passages earlier in the letter about Jews and gentiles. Romans 9–11 is rightly by Novenson given a special role in the letter, as Israel’s advantage is worked out there. But he overlooks how Paul’s argument even in these chapters is intertwined in themes and terms running throughout 1:18–3:20 as well, one of them being knowledge and insight. It is not true to say, as does Novenson, that the actual Jews in chapters 9–11 are criticized only for turning their back to the gospel. To both Thorsteinsson and Novenson, Jews are exempt from Paul’s presentation of the power of sin in chapters 1–2. This paves the way for a gentile interlocutor in 2:17. Once their view on chapters 1–2 is questioned, the formerly traditional reading of a Jewish interlocutor is worth considering again.

The Salvific Significance of Torah and Jesus’s Death as a Ransom for Many in Mark’s Narrative World John Van Maaren Ruprecht-Karls-Universität | john.r.vanmaaren@gmail.com JJMJS No. 11 (2024): 53–75

Abstract This article considers the interrelation between law, faith, and the death of Jesus for kingdom entrance in Mark’s narrative world. It first argues for a consistently positive portrayal of Torah throughout a Markan narrative that depicts righteous persons as law observant (15:42–43; 16:1), where law-breaking occasions rebuke (6:18; 7:8–9), in which the appropriate response to Jesus’s miracles includes doing “what Moses commanded” (1:44), and where law observance is the standard for kingdom entrance (10:17–22; 12:28–34). It then draws on insights from the role of Torah in the Gospel of Matthew (especially, Runesson 2016; Eubank 2013) and Luke (Giambrone 2017), to consider the relationship between law observance as a kingdom membership criterion and the death of Jesus “as a ransom for many” (10:45) in Mark. It concludes that Mark’s echoes of the new exodus theme suggest Jesus’s death serves to pay the ransom for the ancestral sins that scattered Israel among the nations, and so prepare the way for the gathering of his elect from the four winds (13:27) into the imminent kingdom of God.

Keywords Soteriology, Torah, Faith, Intertextuality, Within Judaism

54 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) 1. Introduction 1 While Paul is commonly read to contrast salvation by faith with salvation through works of the law (Gal 2:16; Rom 3:28), the gospels evince no such dichotomy. In contrast, the gospel writers often depict Jesus assuming the necessity of Torah observance for kingdom entrance (e.g., “you know the commandments,” Mark 10:19 // Matt 19:17 // Luke 18:20) while also extoling the virtues of “great faith” (e.g., “Woman, how great is your faith!” Matt 15:28). 2 Yet, Paul’s purported faith/works dichotomy is too easily projected onto the gospel writers, leading many interpreters to assume that salvation by works generally, or obedience to the Mosaic Torah more specifically, must be antithetical to faith in Christ’s sacrificial death for the writers and therefore inconsequential for kingdom entrance. 3 This a priori theological framework causes interpreters to either overlook, and sometimes intentionally downplay, the positive portrayal and salvific significance of human actions in many gospel texts. Surprisingly, while human actions are often associated with kingdom membership in the gospels (e.g., the parable of the sheep and the goats, Matt 25:31–46), faith primarily relates to healing in the immediate present (e.g., “daughter, your faith has made you well,” Matt 9:22 // Mark 5:34 // Luke 8:48). 4 Several recent studies of Matthew and Luke have highlighted the importance of human actions for membership in the kingdom of God—usually 1

An expanded and slightly reworked version of this article also appears as the sixth chapter of John Van Maaren, The Gospel of Mark’s Judaism and the Death of Christ as Ransom for Many (WUNT I; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2025).

2 This observation is noted in the most recent Markan commentary. Thomas Söding, Das Evangelium nach Markus (THZNT 2; Leipzig: Evangelisch Verlagsanstalt, 2022), 208– 209.

3 For example, with explicit appeal to Paul, Mar Pérez i Díaz writes, “If we take into account the different texts of Paul presented to show the interest shared by the apostle and the evangelist, we see that the keystone that unites them is to deliver man from the law.” Mark, a Pauline Theologian (WUNT 2/521; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020), 119.

Cf. Robert H. Gundry, Mark: A Commentary on His Apology for the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 555. More moderate positions are reflected in the influential commentaries of Adela Yarbro-Collins and Joel Marcus, who both appeal to Paul in their discussion of law in Mark as unnecessary for, but not necessarily antithetical to, salvation.

Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 356; Joel Marcus, Mark 1–8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 27; New York: Doubleday, 2000), 74.

4 English translations of texts now in the Bible, unless noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version.

Van Maaren, The Salvific Significance of Torah 55 designated “salvation,” or “eternal life.” Anthony Giambrone’s examination of the charity theme in Luke notes that “Luke simply accepts the idea that, as sin contracts a debt, so credit accrues for performing good works—even to the point of meriting the resurrection.” 5 Similarly, Nathan Eubank’s study of Matthew’s economic imagery concludes that “almsgiving is the quintessential—but far from only—act that earns heavenly treasure. One’s ‘account’ with God … determines whether one enters the kingdom.” 6 Anders Runesson, while examining the reasons persons incur divine wrath in Matthew, finds that “in Matthew’s gospel, the law of Moses is the foundational criterion that decides various forms of punishments and rewards.” 7 While Giambrone, Eubank, and Runesson configure the relationship between human action and the death of Jesus differently (discussed below), no study has considered the salvific significance of Torah observance in Mark. The scholarly hesitancy to introduce Mark into this discussion is quite likely due to the widely-held assumption that Mark writes for a primarily non-Jewish audience (e.g., 7:3–4) and portrays Jesus setting aside the Levitical dietary and possibly ritual purity laws (7:1–23). However, the writer’s explanation of the customs of πάντες οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι (“all the Jews/Judeans,” 7:3–4) admits of other explanations 8 and a few recent studies have developed and refined a reading of Sacramental Charity, Creditor Christology, and the Economy of Salvation in Luke’s Gospel (WUNT 2/439; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 304.

6 Wages of Cross-Bearing and Debt of Sin: The Economy of Heaven in Matthew’s Gospel 5

(BZNW 196; Boston: de Gruyter, 2013), 105.

7

Divine Wrath and Salvation in Matthew: The Narrative World of the First Gospel

(Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016), 170.

8 At the narrative level, it appears to explain Judean customs (“all the Judeans”) for a scene taking place in Galilee and could therefore explain local-specific variation for a Judea/Galilee motif. So Daniel Haase, Jesu Weg zu den Heiden: das geographische Konzept des Markusevangeliums (Arbeiten zur Bibel und ihrer Geschichte 63; Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2019), 85; Johannes Majoros-Danowski, Elija im Markusevangelium: ein Buch im Kontext des Judentums (BWANT 180; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2008), 19; Richard A. Horsley, Hearing the Whole Story: The Politics of Plot in Mark’s Gospel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 105; Gudrun Guttenberger, Die Gottesvorstellung im Markusevangelium (BZNW 123; de Gruyter, 2004), 141. It may also explain Jewish customs for “diaspora Jews far removed from the everyday workings of Palestinian Judaism and with more knowledge of the local Gentile world than the Palestinian Jewish world”: Stephen P. Ahearne-Kroll, The Psalms of Lament in Mark’s Passion: Jesus’ Davidic Suffering (SNTSMS 142; Cambridge:

56 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) Mark 7 in which Jesus argues in favor of a Levitical understanding of ritual purity while simply assuming the importance of kashrut. 9 This reading has the advantage of not making Jesus reject Torah in the very scene where he rebukes his interlocutors’ for doing just that (“you reject the commandment [ἐντολήν] of God,” 7:8–9). It also raises the possibility that Mark, like Matthew and Luke, assumes that Torah observance matters and that it impacts kingdom membership.

This study seeks to integrate the importance of Torah observance into the understanding of the Markan Jesus’s call to repentance as preparation for the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God (Mark 1:15). After a brief survey of Markan indicators of a positive portrayal of the law, and its link with kingdom membership, this study outlines the contributions of Giambrone, Eubanks, and Runesson for the understanding of the salvific mechanisms in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew. It then uses insights from these related studies to outline how Mark likely conceived of the relationship between Torah observance and Jesus’s death “as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). While the Gospel of Mark does not have Luke’s sustained interest in almsgiving (Giambrone), Matthew’s extensive economic imagery (Eubank), or a “structured and coherent approach to divine judgment” (Runesson), 10 it does include multiple stories that link eternal life/kingdom entrance with Torah observance (especially, Mark 10:17– 22; 12:28–34).

2. The Validity and Salvific Significance of Torah in the Markan Narrative The law of Moses and specific legislation in the Mosaic law are common topics in the Markan narrative. Most often, elements of the law are the basis for disputes between Jesus and his interlocutors who are often scribes and

Cambridge University Press, 2007), 28. Others have noted the uncharacteristic nature of the comment to suggest that it is a later interpolation. E.g., Marie Sabin, Reopening the Word: Reading Mark as Theology in the Context of Early Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 7–8.

9 Logan Williams, “The Stomach Purifies All Foods’: Jesus’ Anatomical Argument in Mark 7.18–19,” NTS 70 (2024): 371–391; John Van Maaren, “Does Mark’s Jesus Abrogate Torah? Jesus’ Purity Logion and Its Illustration in Mark 7:15–23,” JJMJS 4 (2017): 21–41; Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New York: New Press, 2012); Yair Furstenberg, “Defilement Penetrating the Body: A New Understanding of Contamination in Mark 7.15,” NTS 54 (2008): 176–200.

10 Divine Wrath and Salvation, 5.

Van Maaren, The Salvific Significance of Torah 57 Pharisees. 11 For the sake of brevity, this study makes just two preliminary points: (1) numerous passages in Mark’s gospel assume, or state explicitly, the importance and validity of the Mosaic law, and (2) the law is explicitly linked with kingdom membership in at least two passages. 12 First, throughout the narrative of Mark, law observance is an assumed part of righteousness. This is stated most overtly in Jesus’s rebuke of the Pharisees: “you abandon the commandment (τὴν ἐντολήν) of God and hold to human tradition” (7:8; cf. 7:9). This distinction between the command of God and human tradition provides a lens for understanding what Mark assumes for other disputes and discussions of specific laws—that is, Mark presents Jesus as defending the commandments of God against human innovation. The crucial importance of the law that is noted explicitly in Mark 7 coheres with other glimpses into the writer’s assumptions about the law. For example, the writer emphasizes that the timing of Joseph of Arimathea’s burial of Jesus’s body (15:42–43) and that of the three visitors to the tomb (Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome; 16:1) is dictated by the need to observe the Sabbath. Elsewhere Jesus commands the healed lepros to go to the priest and “offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded” 13 and John the Baptist rebukes Herod for marrying his brother’s wife and thereby violating Lev 18:16 (Mark 6:18). In each of these examples, the writer of Mark assumes that law obedience matters.

Specific topics related to the law that are addressed in the Markan narrative include the Sabbath (2:23–3:6; cf. 1:21–39; 15:42–43; 16:1–2), ritual impurity (7:1–23; cf. 1:40–45; 5:21–45), moral impurity (e.g., 6:18; 7:19–23; 10:11–12, 19; 12:5–8), marriage (6:17–20; 10:2–12; 12:18–27), oaths and vows (7:11), temple offerings (1:40–45; 12:28–34), and the decalogue (10:17–20). References or allusions to individual commands of the decalogue occur as follows: First commandment (Exod 20:2): 10:18; 2:29, 32. Sabbath (Exod 20:8– 11): 1:21–39; 2:23–28; 3:1–6; 15:42–43. Honor parents (Exod 20:12): 7:10; 10:19. Murder (Exod 20:13): 10:19; cf. 3:4, 6; 6:19; 8:31; 9:31; 10:34; 11:18; 12:5, 7, 8; 13:12; 14:1, 55; 15:7.

Adultery (Exod 20:14): 7:21–22; 10:11–12, 19. Stealing (Exod 20:15): 7:21; 10:19. False witness (Exod 20:16): 10:19; 14:55–59. Coveting (Exod 20:17): 4:19; 7:22.

12 The word νόμος (“law”) does not occur in Mark, but related terms do; cf. Heikki Sariola, Markus und Das Gesetz: Eine redaktionskritische Untersuchung (AASF 56; Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1990), 18. Related words include ἐντολή (“commandment”): 7:8, 9; 10:5, 19; 12:28, 31; ἔξεστιν (“it is permitted”): 2:24, 26; 3:4; 6:18; 10:2; 12:14; and Μωϋσῆς (“Moses”): 1:44; 7:10; 9:4, 5; 10:3, 4; 12:19, 26.

13 Mark 1:44. Joel Marcus, Mark 1–8, 210, writes, “By this instruction Jesus seems to acknowledge the authority of the priestly establishment.”

11

58 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) Second, correct understanding and correct practice of the law are both closely tied with membership in the kingdom of God. Arseny Ermakov pointed this out in a short essay and here I rely on his discussion. 14 One the one hand, the law must be understood correctly in order to enter the kingdom of God. This is most clear when a scribe questions Jesus about the greatest commandment (ἐντολὴ πρώτη) in the law (12:28–34). After the scribe agrees with Jesus’s dual answers of the love of God (Deut 6:4–9; 11:13–21; Num 15:37–41) and love of neighbour (Lev 19:18) and proceeds to favorably compare these to “all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices” (12:28–33), Jesus responds “you are not far from the kingdom of God” (12:34). Right understanding of the law is, according to this story, an important part of entrance into the kingdom. While some commentators read the scribe’s answer to imply the abrogation of sacrifice, 15 the comparative language (i.e., “greatest commandment,” “more important”) and the allusions to 1 Kgdms 15:22 and Hos 6:6 which both assume the continued importance of sacrifice, suggest that the writer of the Markan narrative also assumes the continued validity of sacrifice. 16 On the other hand, the law must be obeyed to enter the kingdom of God. This is most clear in Jesus’s answer to the man’s question about what he must do to gain eternal life (10:17–22), a context that is explicitly concerned with kingdom entrance. Jesus’s response to the man’s inquiry is to remind him of the commandments he already knows: “you know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother” (10:19). The implication is that eternal life—identical with entrance into the kingdom of God (10:17, 24, 25)—is attained by observing the commandments.

After the man states that he keeps these, Jesus replies “you lack one thing” “The Salvific Significance of the Torah in Mark 10.17–22 and 12.28–34,” in The Torah in the New Testament: Papers Delivered at the Manchester-Lausanne Seminary of June 2008, ed. Michael Tait and Peter Oakes (LNTS 401; London: T&T Clark, 2009), 21–31.

15 Morna Hooker, Mark, 289, concludes the phrase would have been understood as a 14

condemnation of temple worship, but only because of an assumed context where the writer and readers did not offer sacrifice. Cf., Günther Bornkamm, “Das Doppelgebot der Liebe,” in Neutestamentliche Studien für Rudolf Bultmann zu seinem 70. Geburtstag, ed. Walther Eltester, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Töpelmann, 1957), 85–93, esp., 85, 89–90; Cuvillier, Marc, 254.

16 Adela Collins, Mark, 576, writes, “That does not mean that cultic sacrifices do not need to be made, or still less that they ought to be abolished.” Similarly, Markus, Mark 8–16, 842.

Van Maaren, The Salvific Significance of Torah 59 (10:21) and directs him to give his wealth to the poor in exchange for eternal life. When Paul’s faith/works dichotomy is read into Mark, this is commonly seen as an addition to law observance and indicative of a different standard of righteousness. 17 Yet Jesus’s directive is comprehensible as pointing out one commandment that the man has not kept: “love your neighbor as yourself.” 18 Later in the Markan narrative Jesus identifies the love of neighbor as one of the two most important commands in the law (12:31) and this man’s accumulation of “many possessions” (10:22) and apparent disregard for the poor (10:21) is a clear transgression of Lev 19:18. 19 If this background is correct, Jesus’s instruction to the man to sell his possessions is aimed at bringing the man back into obedience with Lev 19:18. There is abundant evidence that Jews in antiquity often associated giving to the poor (almsgiving) with eternal rewards. 20 The logic throughout the passage is that living according to God’s law given to Moses is the standard of righteousness and necessary for entrance into the kingdom of God/eternal life.

In contrast to the law of Moses, faith is never presented as a criterion for kingdom entrance in Mark’s gospel. When faith “saves” (σῴζειν) in Mark’s For example, Robert H. Gundry, Mark, 555, writes, “Jesus upsets the notion that keeping the commandments brings eternal life.”

18 Leviticus 19:18. For a similar conclusion regarding Matthew’s version, see Runesson, Divine Wrath and Salvation, 124–126.

19 Michael Peppard makes a related argument that the one command the man failed to keep was “do not defraud” (Mark 10:19). He points out that this is the only commandment listed by Jesus that is not part of the decalogue (it occurs twice in Torah: Deut 24:14–15; Lev 19:13); “Torah for the Man Who Has Everything: ‘Do Not Defraud’ in Mark 10:19,” JBL 134 (2015): 595–604, esp. 599–600. Peppard argues that an analysis of the ways a person could become wealthy in the first century suggest that the command “do not defraud” is meant as a critique of the man’s wealth. In a zero-sum economy with land as the scarcest resource, it was primarily landowners who, through exploiting workers, could gain wealth. Richard A. Horsley, Covenant Economics: A Biblical Vision of Justice for All (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009), esp., 89; Ekkehard W. Stegemann and Wolfgang Stegemann, The Jesus Movement: A Social History of Its First Century, trans. O.C. Dean Jr. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 15–20. If this background is correct, Jesus’s instruction to the man to sell his possessions is aimed at bringing the man back into obedience with Deut 24:15/Lev 19:13 so that he in fact does not incur guilt (Deut 24:15). Peppard’s conclusion, like that suggested here, would make law observance the criterion of righteousness that Jesus demands of the man.

20 E.g., Prov 10:2; Hos 6:6; Dan 4:24; Tob 4:5–11; Sir 21:9–13. Gary A. Anderson, Sin: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 144–146.

17

60 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) gospel (5:29; 34; 10:52), it saves from sickness, not from the destruction that awaits those outside the kingdom of God (e.g., 9:42–48). In these contexts, faith saves a person from their physical ailment in the sense that Hippocrates can speak of persons being saved (σῴζειν), for example, from a fever or extreme fatigue (Coan Prenotions, 135, 136). In fact, the πίστις, πιστεύω, πιστικός lexeme most often represents the human posture that enables healing, exorcism, and other miraculous acts in the immediate present. Faith is explicitly noted as the key human prerequisite for healing in relation to the four persons carrying the paralytic (2:5), the woman with a flow of blood (5:34), the synagogue ruler and his daughter (5:36), the father of an epileptic son (9:23–24), and the blind Bartimaeus (10:52). Similarly, faith, or lack of faith, in Jesus’s miraculous power is associated with the calming of the sea (4:40) as well as the withering of the fig tree and the associated teaching on petitionary prayer (11:22–24). Elsewhere the faith lexeme generally designates confidence that what someone says is true: the chief priests, scribes, and elders should have believed John the Baptist (11:31) and the disciples are not to believe every announcement that the Messiah is here (13:21). This sense of believing what someone says is true also seems to be the meaning in the introductory summary of Jesus’s proclamation: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe (πιστεύετε) in the good news” (1:15)—that is, accept the truth of Jesus’s proclamation that the kingdom of God is near. In Mark’s logic, acceptance of Jesus’s message is not the end goal, but should prompt repentance (μετανοεῖετε; 1:15) from sin (2:17) which for Mark, as argued above, consists of disobeying the commandments of God (e.g., 7:8–9). By association, confidence in the truth of someone’s teaching also seems to be the sense of references to faith in Jesus, whether children who believe (πιστευόντων; 9:42), or chief priests and scribes who mockingly offer to believe if Jesus will come down from the cross (πιστεῦσωμεν; 15:32). If faith in Jesus designates confidence in Jesus, lack of faith (ἀπιστιᾳ; 9:24) results in fear (4:40; 5:36).

In this sense, then, for Mark’s narrative world, kingdom entrance is based on righteousness, understood as obedience to God’s law given to Moses.

Faith’s closest relation to kingdom entrance is that it prompts repentance from sin, bringing persons back into line with the law of God. It is in this sense, then, that we should understand Jesus’s initial proclamation, “the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (1:15), and target audience: “I have come to call not the righteous but sinners” (2:17).

Van Maaren, The Salvific Significance of Torah 61 3. Linking Human Action and Jesus’s Self-Sacrificial Death in Matthew and Luke If the standard of righteousness and criterion for kingdom entrance in the Gospel of Mark is obedience to Torah, why must Mark’s Jesus “give his life as a ransom for many” (10:45)? Three studies that consider the relationship between human actions and Jesus’s death in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke provide useful comparisons for our study of Mark. I provide brief summaries here before considering the Gospel of Mark.

First, Nathan Eubank’s study of the economics of salvation in Matthew considers how Jesus “saves his people from their sins” (Matt 1:21) within Matthew’s particular understanding of sin and righteousness. 21 He builds on Gary Anderson’s observation that economic imagery pervades Early Jewish and Christian conceptions of sin and righteousness, and finds that Matthew likewise conceives of sin as debt, and righteous deeds as wages earned (25:29; 6:12, 19– 24). 22 Eubank addresses human action—never delineated specifically as those actions commanded in Torah, and yet his observation that charity is “the quintessential—but far from only—act that earns heavenly treasure” corresponds closely to law observance as kingdom membership criterion and so can be usefully engaged for comparative purposes.

Eubank finds that, in Matthew’s narrative, a person’s economic account determines kingdom membership (e.g., parable of the talents, 25:14–30; cf.

24:45–51; 25:31–46) and the coming judgment represents a settling of accounts (“he will repay everyone for what has been done,” 16:27). Yet, Matthew presumes the possibility of post-mortem repayment of debts (e.g., parable of the unforgiving servant, 18:23–35; cf. 5:25–26), that one’s heavenly wages may be deposited to others’ accounts (e.g., “whoever welcomes a prophet … will receive a prophet’s reward,” 10:41–42), and that God cancels debts when asked (“forgive us our debts,” 6:12; parable of the unforgiving servant, 18:26–27) and repays righteous deeds in excess (20:13–14). 23 The “heart” of Eubank’s study is an investigation of how Jesus’s role as one who saves from sin (1:21) and gives his life “as a ransom for many” (20:28) functions in light of the above economics of sin as debt and righteousness as good works. He finds a two-fold significance of Jesus’s sacrificial death which both (1) provides an example for followers to imitate as they likewise deny Eubank, Wages of Cross-Bearing, 15.

Anderson, Sin; Eubank, Wages of Cross-Bearing, 3, 25–26, 104–105.

23 Eubank, Wages of Cross-Bearing, 105.

21 22

62 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) themselves (16:24; 19:29; 20:26), thereby earning heavenly wages (16:25; 19:29), and (2) accrues an excess of credit by which Jesus is able to pay the debt-bondage and save the many (20:28), thereby fulfilling all righteousness (3:15).

Accordingly, for Eubank, Jesus both provides a road map for persons to follow in order to earn heavenly wages, and, if they are unable to balance their accounts, Jesus’s excess credit may be deposited into the account of any who ask (6:12).

The second study, by Anthony Giambrone, examines the theme of charity in Luke’s gospel within the framework of the salvific significance of good works. He, like Eubank, never delineates works as those works commanded by Torah, yet, by rooting his study in Luke’s Jewish context, noting that this is done with constant reference to “the law and the prophets,” and finding the idea of meriting the resurrection “in continuity with a deeply written Jewish worldview,” his category of “works” nicely maps onto Torah observance and may be constructively engaged for our comparative purposes. 24 Giambrone, like Eubank, builds on the work of Gary Anderson, but emphasizes Anderson’s later work, noting that, in early Jewish and Christian thought, charity is (1) pervasive, (2) positive, and, most significantly, (3) sacramental (i.e., a cultic act with redemptive power). 25 He undertakes three “exegetical probes” into Luke’s parables—(1) the two debtors (7:36–50), (2) the good Samaritan (10:25–27), and (3) the unjust steward, and Lazarus and the rich man (16:1–31)—to show that Luke accepts the Second Temple idea of sin as debt (7:36–50), that the debt of sin may be repaid by charity (10:25–37; 16:1–8), and that in Luke the two models of salvation (1) by divine intervention (remission) and (2) by a gesture of repentance in the giving of alms (repayment) cohere (16:19–31). At the conclusion of his study, he considers the Lukan relation between the divine and human roles in salvation: God forgives, and people repent through works of charity. 26 Giambrone concludes that Luke replaces the Jewish link between charity and cult by linking charity with Christ’s sacrificial death in the Lord’s supper (22:19), but he refrains from suggesting how Christ’s sacrifice may perfect charity or how charity allows participation in Christ’s sacrifice. 27 Third, Anders Runesson investigates the Matthean theme of divine judgment which, as a key boundary marking strategy for dividing “us” from “them” through criteria for correct behavior, represents an essential element in Giambrone, Sacramental Charity, 2, 284, 304.

Giambrone, Sacramental Charity, 49–51; Gary A. Anderson, Charity: The Place of the Poor in the Biblical Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

26 Giambrone, Sacramental Charity, 126, 309.

27 Giambrone, Sacramental Charity, 313.

24 25

Van Maaren, The Salvific Significance of Torah 63 understanding “core aspects of the identity and social practices of a religious group.” 28 Runesson’s examination of Matthew’s narrative world finds that faith is primarily associated with healing in this world (Roman centurion, 8:10; paralytic, 9:2; woman with a flow of blood, 9:22; two blind men, 9:29; Canaanite woman, 15:28; disciples’ lack of faith, 17:20) but never with judgment and entrance into the world to come. 29 Similarly, loyalty to the person of Jesus is not the fundamental criterion for judgment, since persons who do not follow Jesus are promised substantial rewards (10:40–42; 25:31–46) and deemed “righteous” (1:19; 13:17; 23:29, 35) and passages linking Jesus with reward and punishment concern the response to Jesus’s teaching of repentance in light of the expected kingdom. 30 In contrast, the law of Moses is explicitly presented as the criterion of judgment (5:17–20; 7:21–27) and assumed to be relevant and consequential in both its entirety (23:23), and specificity. 31 Accordingly, while faith describes the correct attitude, and Jesus provides its authoritative interpretation, “the law of Moses is the foundational criterion that decides various forms of punishments and rewards” in Matthew’s narrative world. 32 Runesson integrates Jesus’s need to “save his people from their sins” (1:21) and die a sacrificial death (26:28) with Matthew’s stated validity of Torah observance as the basis for punishment and reward through the eight-step logic of Ed Sanders’s “covenantal nomism.” 33 Runesson provides specific examples from Matthew to establish that the writer shares this basic pattern of thought: [1] God has chosen Israel (1:1, 21; 10:5–6; 15:24, 31) and [2] given the law (5:17–18; 7:12; 19:17; 22:34–39). The law implies both [3] God’s promise to maintain the election (1:21, 23; 2:6; 3:9; 9:12–13; 24:31) and [4] the requirement to obey (3:8–9; 5:20, 48; 7:21–25; 12:50; 13:23; 23:23–28). [5] God rewards obedience and punishes transgression (5:6, 19, 20; 6:1, 18, 33; 12:36–37; 13:41–42; 15:3–9, 13–14; 19:17, 29; 23:33, 35–36; Runesson concludes that the thought-world and social setting reflect a ‘dialect’ of Second Temple Judaism. Runesson, Divine Wrath and Salvation, 2, 443.

29 Runesson, Divine Wrath and Salvation, 136.

30 Runesson, Divine Wrath and Salvation, 142–163.

31 Adultery (5:27–30), divorce (5:31–32; 19:3–9), bloodshed (5:21–22), retribution (5:38– 42), honoring father and mother (15:4; 19:19), and greed (19:21–24).

32 Divine Wrath and Salvation, 163.

33 Ed P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (London: SCM, 1977), 422.

28

64 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) 24:12–13). [6] The law provides for the means of atonement (5:23–24; cf. 23:17–21; 26:28), and atonement results in [7] maintenance or re-establishment of the covenantal relationship (26:28). [8] All those who are maintained in the covenant by obedience, atonement, and God’s mercy belong to the group which will be saved (13:43, 49; 19:7, 26, 29; 24:12– 13, 22, 31; 25:21). 34 According to Runneson, in Matthew’s narrative world, the mechanism for atonement provided in the law [#6] is not working, because the temple cult has become defiled through the accumulation of grave sins and has reached a breaking point through the sins of leading Pharisees who are also held responsible for ancestral sins (23:29–39). Because of the accumulation of moral impurity, Jesus foresees the temple’s destruction (24:2) and the end of its atoning function in removing the impurity that threatens the land and people, presenting a barrier to kingdom membership. In this context, Jesus’s death takes up the role of atoning for sin that the defiled temple is unable to play, thereby maintaining and re-establishing the covenantal relationship. 35 In this logic, Jesus’s death is necessary to maintain the covenantal context within which law observance matters—that is, Jesus had to die because the temple was condemned (rather than vice-versa—that the temple was destroyed as a consequence of Jesus’s death). Runesson notes that, while condemnation and exclusion from the kingdom is based on Torah disobedience, Matthew (unlike Mark 10:29–30 and Luke 18:29–30) never portrays kingdom membership as a reward for Torah observance. 36 Rather, for Matthew, persons “inherit” the kingdom (19:29; 25:31–46). In this way, kingdom membership is the default destiny of covenant members (i.e., Israel) unless the covenant is broken.

In summary, Nathan Eubank, Anthony Giambrone, and Anders Runesson configure the mechanism of salvation that includes both human actions and Christ’s self-sacrificial death differently. These differences are partly attributable to the focus on different gospels, but also partly because of different approaches. Eubank’s focus on the economy of salvation integrates Christ’s “ransom for many” into the heavenly ledger as the most righteous of deeds that fulfills all righteousness. Giambrone’s starting point is the sacramental/cultic

Runesson, Divine Wrath and Salvation, 199–200.

Runesson, Divine Wrath and Salvation, 91, 163.

36 Runesson, Divine Wrath and Salvation, 45.

34 35

Van Maaren, The Salvific Significance of Torah 65 significance of one specific type of human action—charity/almsgiving—as the work of repentance necessary to receive Christ’s forgiveness. Runesson emphasizes the sacrificial element to integrate Christ’s death into a probable first-century Jewish thought world that already had an existing cultic mechanism for dealing with sin.

The above studies provide useful starting points for considering how Mark relates the death of Jesus to Torah observance. It is noteworthy that both Eubank and Giambrone examine motifs that are in some way unique to Matthew and Luke respectively. That is, the texts that Eubank relies upon for Matthew’s understanding of sin as debt and righteousness as wages earned are absent from Mark, with one exception (Matt 10:41–42 // Mark 9:41) 37 and each of Giambrone’s “exegetical probes” into Luke’s parables 38 are also absent from Mark. Still, hints in Mark’s narrative suggest that Mark, like Matthew, may conceive of sin as debt (Mark 9:41) and at least the Markan Jesus’s directive to the rich man to “sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven” (Mark 10:20) may, like Luke’s narrative, link almsgiving with kingdom entrance. Yet the absence of either a Markan emphasis on sin as debt or an almsgiving motif prevents us from directly examining whether either solution works for Mark’s gospel. Runesson’s study that links Jesus’s death with temple provides a more plausible connection for thinking about Mark, for Mark has a strong temple critique motif.

As we turn to Mark, it is important first to consider the few hints at the significance of Jesus’s death in Mark’s narrative world. Mark provides no extended treatment of the significance of Jesus’s death, and so our treatment does not take the form of a study of a Markan motif, but rather inquires into possible ways that the writer of Mark related the significance of Jesus’s death to the stated significance of Torah observance for kingdom entrance in Mark’s gospel.

These are “you will not get out until you have paid the last penny (Matt 5:25–26); “forgive us our debts” (Matt 6:12); “he will repay everyone for what he has done” (Matt 16:27); parable of the unforgiving servant (Matt 18:23–35); parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matt 20:1–16); faithful and wicked servants (Matt 24:45–51); parable of the talents (Matt 25:14–30); parable of the sheep and the goats (Matt 25:31–46).

38 These are (1) the two debtors (Luke 7:36–50), (2) the good Samaritan (10:25–27), and (3) the unjust steward, and Lazarus and the rich man (16:1–31).

37

66 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) 4. Jesus’s Death “as a Ransom for Many” in Mark 4.1 Setting the Stage: Markan Indicators of the Significance of Jesus’s Death If we are correct that, for Mark, righteousness (2:17)—understood as Torah observance (12:28–34; 10:17–22)—is the primary criterion for kingdom membership, how does Mark understand the significance of Jesus’s death?

While Jesus’s death is often predicted (8:31; 9:12, 31; 10:33; cf. 3:6; 8:34), Mark provides only rare hints at what he sees as its significance. On the one hand, Jesus’s death is said to be exemplary: “If any want to follow behind me, let them … take up their cross and follow me” (8:34). More interestingly, as Jesus approaches Jericho on his way to Jerusalem, he tells of his impending death to illustrate kingdom servant leadership practices for the disciples, noting that he gives his life as “a ransom (λύτρον) for many” (10:45). Similarly, at the last supper, Jesus describes the cup as “my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many” (14:24). The issues, then, that will inform the rest of our investigation are (1) the meaning of “ransom” in Mark 10:45, (2) the relationship between Jesus’s death and “covenant” in Mark 14:24, and (3) the identity of the “many” in both texts. As we will see, the answers to each of these questions coalesce around the new exodus motif, understood as the regathering of the descendants of Jacob from the places they have been scattered.

4.2 Jesus’s Death as a Ransom in Mark 10:45 There is widespread agreement that Deutero-Isaiah’s suffering servant is an important background for the Markan Jesus’s statement that “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom (λύτρον) for many” (10:45): both figures are said to (1) serve others and (2) die (3) for the sake of many (Isa 53:11–12 LXX; Mark 10:43–45). 39 Yet the absence of explicit ransom language in Isaiah’s suffering servant song has caused scholars to look for additional, or sometimes alternative, contexts both elsewhere in Israel’s ancestral writings, and in the broader Greco-Roman world. For example, Matthew Thiessen emphasizes the royal connotations of both the narrative foreground (“You know that among the nations [τῶν ἐθνῶν], those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them … but it is not so among you,” Mark 10:43–44) and the “Son of Man” title—derived from Dan 7:14–15—to root the ransom language in the context of Greco-Roman ideals of the self-sacrificial ruler and imperial arguments for the reverse—that many should die for the one Joel Marcus, Mark 8–16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 27B; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 753; Yarbro Collins, Mark, 500.

39

Van Maaren, The Salvific Significance of Torah 67 ruler. Thiessen notes the strong verbal parallels—including ransom language— between Seneca’s argument that it is right that many should die as a ransom on behalf of the emperor Nero (the many for the one) and the Markan Jesus’s statement that he will die as a ransom for many (the one for the many). Thiessen concludes that “[i]n Mark 10:42–45, then, we see an early rulership discourse of the Jesus movement that challenges and rejects the type of rulership advocated

by Seneca in De Clementia.” 40 Brant Pitre looks to the use of ransom language in the Hebrew Bible/LXX to find intertextual allusions in Mark 10:45. After surveying the variety of uses of λυτρόω; λύτρον in the LXX, he makes the important and often overlooked point that “this terminology is … most prominently used to describe a very particular type of deliverance: deliverance or release from exile.” 41 In particular, ransom language clusters around descriptions of two related events: “Israel’s past deliverance from exile in Egypt in the exodus, and its future deliverance from exile in the new exodus.” 42 For example, God’s initial announcement of deliverance to the enslaved Hebrews, given through Moses, promises that “I will ransom (λυτρώσομαι) you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment” (Exod 6:6). Pitre lists twenty additional uses of ransom language in relation to the Israelite exodus from Egypt. 43 More importantly, given Mark’s new exodus motif, ransom language also pervades texts looking forward to a new exodus. 44 For example, in Isaiah we read, “But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have ransomed (ἐλυτρωσάμην) you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you” (Isa 43:1–2; cf.

43:18–19). Even more strikingly, Zech 10:8–11 states,

40

“The Many for One or One for the Many’? Reading Mark 10:45 in the Roman Empire,”

HTR 109 (2016): 447–466, esp., 466, cf. 456–463. Cf. David Seeley, “Rulership and Service in Mark 10:41–45,” NovT 35 (1993): 234–250.

“The ‘Ransom for Many,’ the New Exodus, and the End of the Exile: Redemption as the Restoration of All Israel (Mark 10:35–45),” Letter and Spirit: A Journal of Catholic Biblical Theology 1 (2005): 41–68, 55.

42 Pitre, “The ‘Ransom for Many,’” 56.

43 Exod 15:13, 16; Deut 7:8; 9:26; 13:5; 15:15; 24:18; 2 Sam 7:23; 1 Chron 17:21; Neh 1:10; Esth 4:17 (LXX only); 1 Macc 4:11; Pss 74:2; 77:15; 78:42; 106:10; 136:24; Isa 51:10–11; 63:9; Mic 6:4; “The ‘Ransom for Many,’” 56–57.

44 For the foundational study on Isaiah’s New Exodus in Mark, see Rikki E. Watts, Isaiah’s New Exodus and Mark (WUNT 2/88; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997).

41

68 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) I will signal for them and gather them in, for I have ransomed (‫ ;פדיתים‬LXX: λύτρώσομαι) them, and they shall be as numerous as they were before. Though I scattered them among the nations, yet in far countries they shall remember me, and they shall rear their children and return. I will bring them home from the land of Egypt, and gather them from Assyria; I will bring them to the land of Gilead and to Lebanon, until there is no room for them. They shall pass through the sea of distress, and the waves of the sea shall be struck down, and all the depths of the Nile dried up. The pride of Assyria shall be laid low, and the scepter of Egypt shall depart.

Here, as elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, ransom language is connected with the return of the diaspora, portrayed as a new exodus through allusion to the exodus from Egypt. 45 A strong case can be made, therefore, that the Markan Jesus’s ransom language in Mark 10:45 is part of the new exodus motif in Mark’s gospel.

This case will be strengthened by considering the relation between Jesus’s death and covenant in Mark 14:24 and the identity of the “many” in Mark 10:45 and 14:24.

4.3 Jesus’s Death as Covenant Renewal in Mark 14:24 The other hint at the significance of Jesus’s death for the writer of Mark comes during the last supper when Jesus, lifting the cup, states that “this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many” (14:24). This statement, like 10:45, addresses the importance of Jesus’s impending death for “the many” (discussed next) but, rather than describing it as a ransom, refers to Jesus’s “blood of the covenant.” Commentators agree that this language alludes to the covenant ceremony in Exod 24:3–11 where Moses sprinkles the “blood of the covenant” on the people (Exod 24:8). 46 This event, as the second of three “covenant ceremonies” that follow the exodus from Egypt (Exod 19:1–20:20; 24:1–11; 34:1–35:29), also links Jesus’s statement to the exodus from exile in Egypt. Mark’s understanding of this new covenant or, perhaps more accurately,

Cf. Isa 52:2–3; Jer 31:10–12; Mic 4:1–2, 8, 10.

Jeffrey Stackert, “‘This Is My Blood of the Covenant’: The Markan Last Supper and the Elohistic Horeb Narrative,” BR 62 (2017): 48–60; Amy L. B. Peeler, “Desiring God: The Blood of the Covenant in Exodus 24,” BBR 23 (2013): 187–205.

45 46

Van Maaren, The Salvific Significance of Torah 69 covenant renewal, 47 depicts Jesus inaugurating a new exodus. 48 This new exodus connection is further strengthened by the Markan portrayal of the last supper as a Passover meal and echo of the covenant language of Jer 31:31 (“I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel”). 49 The narrative foreground of the new/renewed covenant in Jer 31 is a regathering of the diaspora, depicted as a ransom of Jacob’s descendants from the nations—that is, as a new exodus from exile among the nations: Hear the word of the LORD, O nations, and declare it in the coastlands far away; say, “He who scattered Israel will gather him, and will keep him as a shepherd a flock.” For the LORD has ransomed (‫[ ;פדה‬LXX: ἐλυτρώσατο; Jer 38:11]) Jacob, and has redeemed him from hands too strong for him.” (Jer 31:10– 11) Accordingly, the language of both covenant and ransom allude most immediately to the prophetic expectation of a new exodus, understood as the regathering of the scattered diaspora.

4.4 The Identity of the “Many” in Mark 10:45 and 14:24 If the ransom language in Mark 10:45 echoes the prophetic new exodus motif and the covenant language in Mark 14:24 depicts Jesus renewing the covenant God made with the people immediately following the first exodus, there is a corresponding answer to the identity to the “many” (πολλῶν) in both Mark 10:45 and 14:24: the descendants of Jacob who have been scattered among the nations and who are consistently depicted as those ransomed from the nations and regathered as part of the new/renewed covenant. Again, Brant Pitre helpfully catalogues references to the many/multitude in the Hebrew Bible that look forward to the regathering of the scattered descendants of Jacob through the language of the Exodus. 50 Perhaps most illustrative, Zech 10:8 reads “for I have ransomed (λυτρώσομαι) them, and they shall be as many (πολλοί) as they were

Adela Yarbro Collins, “Mark’s Interpretation of the Death of Jesus,” JBL 128 (2009): 545–554, esp., 550.

48 Watts, Isaiah’s New Exodus and Mark, 381.

49 Mark 14:12–16; Craig A. Evans, Mark 8:27–16:20 (WB 34B; Nashville: Nelson, 2001), 370.

50 “The ‘Ransom for Many,’” 60–64.

47

70 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) before. Though I scattered them among the nations, yet in far countries they shall remember me, and they shall rear their children and return.” The reference to the many “as they were before” refers to when the Israelites became too “many” (πλῆθος; Exod 1:9) for the Egyptians and eventually left as a “multitude” (πολύς; Exod 12:38–39). This is just one example of the extensive use of “many” in the Hebrew Bible and other Second Temple Jewish literature to refer to the returnees from exile in the new exodus. 51 Jason Staples summarizes his comprehensive survey of Jewish literature through the end of the first century, stating: “Jews in this period did not anticipate merely a Jewish restoration but a full restoration of all Israel.” 52 Pitre summarizes the significance for Mark: “the upshot of all this is simple: Jesus’ words about a ‘ransom’ for ‘many’ in Mark 10:45 are directly evocative of the exodus, the exile, and the restoration of the twelve tribes of Israel.” 53 Scholars regularly note these echoes of regathered Israel but argue that the writer of Mark uses them with a twist. 54 For example, Rikki Watt’s influential study of the new exodus motif in Mark acknowledges the echoes of the regathering of scattered Israel. 55 However, he avoids considering whether the “many” in Mark 10:45 and 14:24 may be regathered Israel by identifying Jesus as representative of “true Israel,” while acknowledging that this is never directly stated in the Gospel of Mark. This allows him to conclude that 14:24 “indicates that being a member of true Israel is predicated, not on one’s nationality or filial ties, but on one’s response to Jesus. This implies a redefinition of what it means to be Israel.” 56 This redefinition of Israel is never explicit in the Markan narrative but is necessary to support the identity of the “many” in 10:45 and 14:24 as all followers of Jesus rather than the scattered tribes. The reading that I propose enables the writer of Mark to be reading with, rather than against, the grain of Cf. Jer 31:8, 11; Hos 1:10–11; Isa 52:14; 53:11, 12; Dan 9:27; 12:1–3; 1 En. 57:1; 1QS 8:12–14; 9:18–20 ; 4 Ezra 13:39–40; Jos., Ant. 11.133.

51

52 The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism: A New Theory of People, Exile, and Israelite Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 341.

“The ‘Ransom for Many,’” 64.

Joel Marcus, Mark 1–8, 35, writes, “But in Mark the Deutero-Isaian picture of the Lord’s triumphal way has suffered a strange reversal from its intersection with the theology of the cross.” Richard Hays concludes, “Thus, for Mark, Jesus’ death both hermeneutically redefines and reconfirms God’s covenant with Israel,” Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 36.

55 Watts, Isaiah’s New Exodus, 284–287.

56 Watts, Isaiah’s New Exodus, 353.

53 54

Van Maaren, The Salvific Significance of Torah 71 the source text, and does not need to appeal to an implicit equation of Jesus as the new Israel in order to explain the writer’s repurposing of the ancestral writings. It also opens new possibility for understanding the relationship of Torah observance and Jesus’s death in Mark’s narrative world, as discussed next.

In summary, the sparse hints of the significance of Jesus’s death in the Gospel of Mark coalesce around the new exodus motif found especially in Isaiah, but also throughout the Hebrew prophets: The Markan Jesus’s statement that he will “give his life as a ransom” (10:45) alludes to repeated promises that God will ransom his people from exile scattered among the nations, just as he ransomed them from exile in Egypt. The Markan Jesus’s reference to his “blood of the covenant” (14:24) and its setting at a Passover meal alludes to the covenant ceremonies immediately following the exodus from Egypt, and positions Jesus as the inaugurator of a new or renewed covenant (Jer 31:31) as part of the new exodus. In the context of Mark’s new exodus motif, the identity of the “many,” as the primary beneficiaries of Jesus’s death, is best understood as the many descendants of Jacob scattered among the nations whom the Hebrew prophets foresee being gathered to the land. Pitre summarizes, “any prophetic speaking of the Son of Man giving his life as ‘a ransom for many’ would call to mind one thing: the still unfulfilled promise of the Lord to ‘atone for iniquity’ and to ransom the lost ten tribes from among the nations, bringing them home to the promised land in a new exodus.” 57 Finally, insofar as the new exodus motif involves a regathering of the diaspora from the nations, this understanding of the significance of Jesus’s death is able to integrate the insights of those who read Jesus’s ransom saying (10:45) in the context of empire and Greco-Roman ruler discourse, for this regathering is “against empire” insofar as the diaspora are taken out from the nations. 58 5. Linking the Salvific Significance of Torah Observance and the Significance of Jesus’s Death in Mark’s Gospel How then are we to relate the salvific significance of Torah observance (12:28– 34; 10:17–22) with the role of Jesus’s death as a ransom for the many

“The ‘Ransom for Many,’” 64.

Especially, Thiessen, “The Many for One or One for the Many?,” 447–466; Sharyn Dowd and Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, “The Significance of Jesus’ Death in Mark: Narrative Context and Authorial Audience,” JBL 125 (2006): 271–297; Seeley, “Rulership and Service in Mark 10:41–45,” 234–250; Adela Yarbro Collins, “The Signification of Mark 10:45 among Gentile Christians,” HTR 90 (1997): 371–382.

57 58

72 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) descendants of Jacob scattered among the nations? Just as Mark provides only hints of the significance of Jesus’s death, he never explicitly addresses the relationship between law observance and Jesus’s death. 59 Accordingly, this section simply suggests a perhaps most probable way that the writer of Mark might have held the two ideas together in their mind. The answer, I tentatively suggest here, is that Jesus’s death, insofar as it involves forgiveness of sins in Mark, 60 atones for a specific subset of sins—namely, those ancestral sins that have led Israel into exile and which are ostensibly not yet forgiven because in the narrative setting of Mark Israel remains scattered among the nations. 61 If so, then the economic force of ransom (λύτρον) suggests that Mark, like Eubank argues for Matthew and Giambrone argues for Luke, sees moral sins as debt and Jesus’s death as a payment of that debt. 62 This understanding that Jesus’s death atones for a specific subset of ancestral sins finds support in the Markan narrative where forgiveness happens apart from Jesus’s death. This is most clear during the healing of the paralytic (2:1–12) when Jesus first tells the man “your sins are forgiven” (2:5). Mark’s Pharisees object, claiming that only God can forgive sins (2:7), but are foiled when Jesus then heals the man, illustrating, for Mark, that “the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” (2:10). Mark’s point in the narrative is that Jesus has divinely given authority, while simply assuming that forgiveness of sins is something that God does—in the narrative present, as in the past, without reference to Jesus’s death. Accordingly, in the thought-world of the Markan narrative, Jesus’s death does not appear to be a new solution to deal with all sin, but a specific act that deals with one persisting problem—the continued exile among the nations—in a conceptual universe that already includes a mechanism for dealing with sin and a God who forgives.

If this understanding of the Markan significance of Jesus’s death is correct, then Jesus’s death, and Israel’s responsibility to keep God’s law, in the Markan narrative, serve two different purposes. Jesus’s death “clears the slate” of ancestral and communal sins (cf. Dan 9:24–26), and yet individuals continue to be judged and rewarded based on their obedience to God’s law—including Similarly, in relation to Matthew, Eubank, Wages of Cross-Bearing, 13.

Yarbro Collins, “The Significance of Jesus’s Death in Mark,” 550.

61 Runesson, Divine Wrath and Salvation, 91, 163, argues similarly for Matthew’s gospel, insofar as it is the accumulation of moral impurity, due to grave sins that threaten expulsion from the land.

62 For a succinct summary of the economic force of ransom language in the LXX, see Yabro Collins, Mark, 500–504.

59 60

Van Maaren, The Salvific Significance of Torah 73 entrance into the immanently arriving (9:1; 13:30; 14:25) kingdom of God. In addition, there is no indication in the narrative that within the expected and, from the compositional setting, soon-to-be-established kingdom, an alternative standard of righteousness is in place. According to the logic suggested here, obedience to the law of Moses presumably remained the expected standard of righteousness inside the kingdom of God. On this reading, Jesus’s death is not only a ransom of scattered Israel.

It also serves as an example of self-sacrificial behavior that the disciples and others are called to imitate (“take up their cross and follow me,” 8:34) and even those not scattered among the nations benefit as they can anticipate being reunited with those returning if they also persist until the arrival of the kingdom of God. 63 It is this regathered, reunited community that Jesus and the disciples, then, drink to in anticipation of when Jesus, hopefully with his closest followers, will “drink it again in the kingdom of God” (14:25) and so both those ransomed and the others who “repent and believe in the good news” (1:15) can hope to collectively experience a union with Jesus in the approaching kingdom (9:1; 13:30).

6. Implications and Avenues for Further Investigation The solution that this study suggests differs from the solutions of Nathan Eubank and Anders Runesson in relation to Matthew, and Anthony Giambrone in relation to Luke insofar as each of their studies considers Jesus’s death as addressing the problem of sin in general, rather than as a solution to one contemporary result of sin—that is, the scattering of the descendants of Jacob among the nations. Yet, elements of their conclusions may also be compatible with my argument regarding Mark’s gospel. For example, it is possible that Mark also understands sin as debt and righteousness as wages earned (as argued by 63 The time between the narrative and compositional setting of Mark and the arrival of the kingdom of God is a time to “repent” (1:15; 2:17), but “only those who endure until the end will be saved” (13:30). In this way, no one has kingdom membership in the present, but some have been given its secrets (4:11–12). These secrets consist of explanations of parables (4:11–20, 33–34), debriefings after debates (7:19–23; 10:10–12), knowledge of Jesus’s messianic identity and impending death (8:27–33), and a preview of the kingdom (9:2–10). This secret knowledge is not for those already in possession of kingdom membership, but rather functions as a “cheat-sheet” for successfully “enduring until the end” (13:30). Therefore, following Jesus is not equated with kingdom membership in Mark, but entails a sort of advantage through special knowledge.

74 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) Eubanks in relation to Matthew), though Mark provides little tangible evidence for this (e.g., Mark 9:41). If so, Jesus’s “excess of righteous deeds” might function in Mark to pay the outstanding debts of those long gone that have nonetheless resulted in exile among the nations. Similarly, Mark might assume, like many other first-century Jews, that almsgiving is a cultic act, though just one passage in Mark may suggest such an understanding (10:21). Runesson concludes that Matthew perceives of Jesus’s death as taking the role of the temple cult in atoning for sin (whether temporarily or permanently) due to the defiled state of the temple. Our conclusion, in contrast, has no direct logical implication for the existing temple cult, and while Mark’s narrative includes significant critique of the current temple leaders and predicts the temple’s destruction, it never directly relates the ancestral sins to the present leaders and the destruction of the temple as Matthew’s does (especially, Matt 23:29–39).

While the logic of our argument does not imply the cessation of cult, there is one piece of data in Mark that we have not yet considered that does link Jesus’s death with the temple: the torn veil that immediately follows the death of Jesus (Mark 15:37–38). In light of the above suggested Israel-centric narrative perspective, what new possibilities emerge for understanding the unstated significance of the torn temple veil? That is, how does Jesus’s death precipitate the tearing of the temple veil? What does it signify for Mark and his intended readers? Are the torn temple veil and predicted temple destruction (13:2) likely understood as referring to a recent event for the writer and readers, assumed to be permanent? Mark provides no direct answers to these questions.

Our argument, if correct, has implications for other areas of inquiry into Mark’s gospel. For one, if Jesus’s death functions primarily to bring the diaspora back from exile among the nations, what does this imply for the understanding of the kingdom of God in Mark’s gospel? In particular, does Mark understand the future, imminent arrival of the kingdom of God (9:1; 14:25; 13:30) to be a restored earthly Israel? The few spatial indicators of the coming kingdom may support this (e.g., gathering “from the four winds,” 13:27; the son of man “coming on the clouds of heaven,” 9:1; 13:26; 14:62) as do other allusions to the regathering of the diaspora (e.g., “fishers of men,” Mark 1:17; Jer 16:16).

In addition, what does the combined assumption that Torah observance matters and Jesus’s death as ransom of the diaspora suggest about the social location of the writer and implied readers of Mark? While the New Exodus motif sometimes envisions gentiles as among the new Israel (e.g., Mic 4:2), most often Israel is removed from the nations (e.g., Jer 31:10–12),

Van Maaren, The Salvific Significance of Torah 75 suggesting an Israel-centric assumption on the part of the writer and, perhaps, intended audience.

Between Apologetics, Identity, and Identification: On the Study of Christianity by Jewish Scholars in Israel* Shraga Bick Yale University | shraga.bick@yale.edu JJMJS No. 11 (2024): 76–107

The educated reader interested in rabbinic Aggadot will surely wonder why the author should compare these legends to the writings of the Church Fathers…. Has he tended his own vineyard so well that he feels free to roam the fields of others? 1

1. Pre-Text I was traveling with a colleague on the new fast train back from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. While describing to her my study of Christianity as part of my research, we noticed that an elderly ultra-orthodox person, sitting across from us, was listening attentively to our conversation. At a certain moment, the person asked to join our conversation, and with an astounded look on her face inquired whether I was Christian—although my appearance clearly exposed my affiliation with Orthodox Judaism. My simple answer that I am Jewish was not satisfactory, and so she kept inquiring if I had converted from or was in the process of converting to Christianity, or perhaps if I was half-Jew-half-Christian.

And the more I tried to argue that I was merely a Jewish scholar of Christianity for purely intellectual reasons, just as a mathematician’s engagement with mathematics does not have a prerequisite of conversion, she seemed only more confused. In her eyes, it was inconceivable that a Jew, by his own choice, would

I wish to express my gratitude to Dr. Yonatan Moss, Dr. Karma Ben Johanan, and Dr. Ma’ayan Raveh, as well as to the members of the Forum for the Study of Christianity at the Hebrew University and the Judaism and Human Rights Program at the Israel Democracy Institute, for their valuable feedback and insights throughout various stages of writing this article.

1 Menachem Hirschman, The Bible and its Midrash: Between Rabbinic Literature and the Church Fathers (Ra’anana: HaKibbutz HaMeuchad, 1996), 7. *

Bick, Apologetics, Identity, and Identification 77 be interested in Christianity without somehow identifying with or being attracted to it. As in other encounters between the seemingly trivial and the scandalous, this brief encounter did not give me rest. On the one hand, her surprised, and very sincere, response was unusual in my everyday academic surrounding, where questions of emotional attachment are rare, but also in wider Israeli liberal circles, where Christianity, I felt, lost not only its menacing aura, but even its very essence as a rival “religious option.” My interlocutor was not only amazed by a Jew studying Christianity, but also by the presumption that one might study any religion without it being motivated by some sort of underlying attachment or affection, and while denying it having any impact on his perceptions and life.

Yet presenting my interest here as stemming merely from this one-time troublesome encounter would be inaccurate, and perhaps it only unleashed denied and repressed thoughts that have been lying beneath the surface since the beginning of my academic study of Christianity. I felt a need to confess, but I did not know exactly about what, nor to whom. And since I am still a disciple, albeit a university one, yet a disciple nonetheless, I wish to go back and examine my teachers’ beginnings, and where their own interest originated.

2. Prologue In this essay I shall address the subject of introductions, prefaces, forewords, and so on, to scholarly works on Christianity written by Jewish scholars in Israel, beginning in the early twentieth century. Although I will occasionally venture into the body of the texts themselves, in general this study deliberately limits itself to the introductions appearing at the beginning of the discussed works— the part that ostensibly precedes the work, even if written, most often, after the work was concluded. This is a liminal space that appears in the scholar’s book but is also clearly distinguished from it. In the research context this distinction carries multiple meanings that I will discuss in detail below, but which can easily be illustrated via one small example: in contrast, for instance, with the body of the text, its preface usually lacks footnotes, is often written after the study is peer-reviewed, and does not undergo the classical process of academic scientific appraisal. In this sense the preface is a kind of “implant,” an external organ added onto the book’s main structure—even more so than in the case of other paratexts, such as the book’s title.

The question of the function and significance of introductions/prefaces with respect to the “main text” has received little scholarly attention. One of the first attempts to examine this phenomenon was undertaken by French literary

78 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) critic Gerard Genette in his book Paratexts. 2 Genette defines the paratext as all details that accompany the main text—such as titles, dedications, prefaces, notes by the publisher, etc. All these function as a kind of “vestibule”—an entrance to, or a threshold between the work and the audience, text that is both external and internal—and as such serve as a kind of gate through which the reader must pass in order to reach the work itself. Such a “gate,” of course, is not essential: in the Middle Ages texts could “wander” among readers in a state that, in our eyes, would seem to be almost raw, for example, lacking a title or author’s name. 3 This is thus first and foremost a phenomenon that characterizes the modern era.

The preface supplies the reader with answers to several important questions that are not necessarily indicated in the work itself: where and when it was written (in this sense, not only where and when—information that can be found in the book’s bibliographical details—but also in conjunction with which event or important date on the calendar, and in which circumstances); its imagined audience; its authors and how they present themselves, and more. In this sense, it serves not only as a gate, but also as a kind of map, or dictionary, which the reader must carry with him and occasionally revisit in order to rearrange his spatial and temporal orientation in the text.

These assertions become even more pertinent with regard to academic texts. By definition, the academic text seeks to don a mantle of objectivity, so that the questions mentioned above—the identity of the author, the reason for the work’s composition, and so on—may be considered inappropriate. Research literature, by its very nature, attempts to present itself as lacking a particular identity, as if the author serves simply as a vessel, lacking history or ideology. It is precisely this trait that lends the academic text its validity and scientific character. If each introduction is a kind of “membrane connecting inside and outside … allowing the outside in, making the inside out,” 4 then the academic introduction is the arena wherein, according to the rules of the discourse, the Subject is allowed to be made present, just before plunging into the realm of objectivity. 5 Thus, the introduction is also a dangerous junction, since it can Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

3 Genette, Paratexts, 3.

4 Genette, Paratexts, 1, n. 2. Genette quotes from J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host,” in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom, et al. (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 219.

5 This is, of course, a generalization; there are disciplines, particularly in the social sciences, in which—especially after the so-called “crisis of representation”—the identity 2

Bick, Apologetics, Identity, and Identification 79 potentially undermine the entire supposedly objective edifice that immediately follows; it can expose the individual, the subject hiding behind the scientific study, with their dreams, aspirations, historical background, and attachment to particular people and places. The latter, by their very presence in the preface, attest not only to an existence “outside” the study but also to their significance for the academic work, the scientific study itself, though they may be excluded from it, inscribed only on its margins. Conversely, the absence of a preface can indeed obliterate the subject, who is swept up in the objective scientific research.

In fact, some of the prefaces discussed below are no less than an outcry on the part of the author, who wishes to make manifest, if even for a moment, the profoundly subjective nature of his research.

This does not mean—as is repeatedly stressed in these texts—that the study does not present its findings as they truly are from the author’s standpoint; it only indicates that the author is an “interested party,” for whom the contents are of personal relevance—related to a specific place and time and addressing a specific implied reader. It is, in fact, the author’s implicit hope that his work may not only benefit his imagined readers but also anger, excite, offend, and above all move them in some way. Paradoxically, then, the preface presents the subject’s final words—yet we, the readers, usually skip these paratexts at the beginning of the work, hurrying on to the study itself.

However, in a small number of fields, the question of the scholarly subject cannot, it seems, be entirely obscured. One of these is the study of “Christianity through Jewish eyes,” or Jewish-Christian polemics, in which major personal, national, and religious questions hover persistently above the objective research; most significantly, these questions are marked by a long and bloody history. Here I will focus on prefaces written by Jewish scholars in Israel.

In addition, I will only focus on academic scholarship—not on literary or artistic works, which have already been amply studied. Nevertheless, I will employ some of the insights gained from these studies. For example, various works have discussed the renewed interest in Jesus in the context of the Jewish national struggle: as a means of reverting to a pre-rabbinic stage of Judaism so as to shape a non-Halachic “native-Eretz-Israeli” Jewish identity; and even as an attempt to transcend the dominant Israeli discourse on secularization, yet without

of the scholarly subject and the need for reflection on the work process are issues that are strongly foregrounded.

80 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) returning to the hearth of “exilic,” that is, traditional Judaism. 6 Note, though, the profound difference between these fields of activity: whereas literature and art essentially seek to take familiar (historical or cultural) symbols and put them to new use, thereby changing the object by lending it a new, subjective meaning, scientific scholarship, at least in principle, seeks to remove the object’s literary, artistic, and cultural interpretations and additions and to revisit the original, presenting it “as it truly is.”

3. Introduction: Samuel Krauss and the Early Jewish Scholarship on Christianity In 1902, Samuel Krauss published his important study on Toledot Yeshu. 7 Krauss was, in Joseph Klausner’s words, “one of the few Jewish scholars who did not recoil from the study of Christianity—a field that many feared to approach, for obvious reasons.” 8 However, just as Krauss symbolizes one of Jewish scholarship’s “breakthrough moments,” he also represents the limitations of writing, in the early twentieth century, an objective study that is not “tainted” by religious identity. Yonatan Moss has placed Krauss’s work within his time, particularly in light of Jewish attempts to participate in an academic discourse that was ostensibly objective, yet which continued to function in a framework unquestionably dominated by Protestant Christian scholarship. In Moss’s words: Unlike the intrinsically partisan realms of apologetics and polemics, philology was conceived as the “objective science” of the age. In the realm of philology, Jews and Christians, despite their competing belief systems and presumed divergent See Ruth Kartun-Blum, “The Burden of Secularity: The Dialogue with the New Testament in Israeli Literature,” Dimuy 27 (2006): 32–37; Neta Stahl and Tzelem Yehudi, The Representations of Jesus in 20th-Century Hebrew Literature (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2007); Tafat Hacohen-Bick, ‘I Want a River / No Small Temple’: Theology and Poetics in the Poetry of Pinchas Sadeh, Yona Wallach, and Zelda Schneerson (PhD diss., Ben Gurion University, 2019).

7 Samuel Krauss, Das Leben Jesu nach jüdischen Quellen (Berlin: S. Calvary & Co., 1902).

8 Joseph Klausner, “Professor Samuel Krauss and His Life’s Work,” in Professor Samuel Krauss Jubilee Volume (Jerusalem: Rubin Mass, 1936), xx. There were, of course, Jewish thinkers who wrote about Christianity before Krauss. Particularly worthy of mention is Abraham Geiger. See Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

6

Bick, Apologetics, Identity, and Identification 81 allegiances, could meet on a common ground of scholarship.

Nevertheless, as we saw, the ground was not common and the scholarship was not objective. 9 Already at the beginning of his book Krauss stresses that he is not writing an apologetical work but rather a critical historical-philological study. It is, however, difficult not to see in the work—like those written by other Jews of that period—an apologetical attempt undertaken in a Christian environment in which Jewish emancipation was partial at best, if not entirely superficial. Yet in light of Krauss’s declarations that he is not an apologist—and, in particular, the fact that the publication of Toledoth Yeshu was indeed against “Jewish interests”—Moss refuses to define Krauss simply as an apologist. Instead, he prefers to approach Krauss’s writing in terms of a “double consciousness,” 10 seeing him as a scholar who simultaneously seeks to act as an objective author working in a purely scientific academic space, and as a Jewish writer who cannot but be aware of the possible consequences of his work, and of the possibilities— or lack thereof—facing him and the reception of his scholarship by a wider audience. 11 However, according to Moss, the real issue is the essential duality of language itself, or rather, the (im)possibility of translating a Jewish language into a Christian one. The problem is not the “technical” complexity of translating Hebrew concepts into modern Latin languages, but rather a more inherent and

Yonatan Moss, “‘I am not Writing an Apology’: Samuel Krauss’ Das Leben Jesu in Context,” in The Jewish Life of Jesus (Toledoth Yeshu) in Context, ed. Daniel Barbu and Yaacov Deutsch (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020), 339. I am very grateful to Dr. Yonatan Moss for allowing me to read his paper prior to publication and for the illuminating conversations we held on this subject.

10 Although developed by W. E. B. Du-Bois in relation to the experience of African Americans, I follow Moss’s borrowing of this term in relation to the experiences of Jews at the turn of the century. Furthermore, it is possible that there is not only an analogous but also an historical connection between the idea of Jewish and Black double consciousness, as recently argued by Thomas, who pointed to the ways in which DuBois’s personal experience of German antisemitism helped shape his theorizing of Black double consciousness (James M. Thomas, “Du Bois, Double Consciousness, and the ‘Jewish Question,’” Ethnic and Racial Studies 43 [2020]: 1333–1356).

11 For a discussion of a fascinating figure in this context, see Matthew Silver, “A Jew’s View of Jesus: Stephen Wise, Joseph Klausner, and Discourse about the Jewish Jesus in the Interwar Period,” Zion 70 (2005): 31–62.

9

82 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) fundamental difficulty involving the inability to translate Jewish ideas into a Christian context, which is saturated with the classical replacement theology and a long tradition of Jewish-Christian hostility, in a manner wherein Judaism and the Jews supposedly will “come out well.” I would like to connect Moss’s argument to Gershom Scholem’s letter to Franz Rosenzweig on the dangers inherent in the secularization of Hebrew language. Scholem warns of the moment when the theological and historical contents of the secularized language will break through, precisely because of the attempt to repress and deny them. This is an inevitable process, in which Scholem sees himself as belonging to an intermediary generation between Hebrew as a sacred or a secular language. This is a unique moment wherein one can still distinguish the process of the “repression” or “neutralization” that attempts to transform a religious language encumbered by tradition and messianic ideas into one that is new and secularized. Finding himself on the brink of an abyss, Scholem feels obliged to warn others: Language is names. The power of the language is contained in the name; in it is sealed its abyssal substance. Having invoked the ancient names daily it is no longer in our power to distance their potency. These will appear, aroused, for surely, we have invoked them powerfully. Certainly we speak in rudiments,

certainly we speak a ghostly language: the names pass through our sentences; in writings and newspapers one or another plays with them, and lies to himself or to God that it doesn’t have to mean anything, and often the power of the Holy One speaks from out of the ghostly shame of our language. For the names have their own life, and if they did not, woe to our children who would be abandoned to the void without hope. 12

I would like to propose a similar argument regarding the possibility of translating Jewish-Christian polemics into an objective, scientific-secular language. As opposed to Scholem, this refers not only to language but to the secularization of discourse. One consciousness—that of the objective scholar— seeks to secularize the Jewish-Christian discourse, while, at same time, a

Gershom Scholem, “A Confession regarding Our Language,” translated in William Cutter, “Ghostly Hebrew, Ghastly Speech: Scholem to Rosenzweig, 1926,” Proof 10 (1990): 431 (emphasis added).

12

Bick, Apologetics, Identity, and Identification 83 different consciousness remains aware of the impossibility of this process of translation; feeling threatened, it attempts to obscure and disrupt the act of translation itself. Scholem was convinced that “God will not remain mute in a language in which he has been invoked and summoned into our existence in countless ways.” 13 Does this assertion also hold for the one who, to a large extent, was seen by both Christians and Jews as the “curse of God”—to Jesus?

While Krauss does not fit into many of the criteria of my case studies discussed below, he is nonetheless valuable for illuminating some key themes, especially that of double consciousness and apologetic scholarship.

Furthermore, Krauss believed that there was a profound difference between his research and earlier Jewish intellectual engagement with Christianity. Similarly, later Jewish scholars, living in Israel in a completely different cultural and political climate, at a time when the Jewish scholarly position dovetailed with the emergence of Zionism and the establishment of a new Jewish national identity, also considered their own work as fundamentally different than previous research conducted under Christian dominance and influence.

Nevertheless, I will attempt to show that even in an entirely different reality, the same “double consciousness,” and the tension it entails between an objective and an apologetic position, continues to exist.

I will first discuss three prominent case studies, focused on three prominent Israeli scholars writing on Christianity—Joseph Klausner, David Flusser, and Israel Yuval. As I will show, despite the differences in the contents of their studies, these scholars found it necessary to preface their works with an introduction that, among other things, refers to their point of departure as Jewish scholars and to the question of the Jewish scholar’s ability to undertake an objective study of Christianity. Although they should not be seen as representing all Israeli scholarship on these issues, each of them expresses dominant and central voices of their generation, which had a great impact even beyond the narrow walls of academia. In the second part, I will argue that since the beginning of the twenty-first century such prefaces have completely disappeared, replaced mostly by “classic” academic prefaces—with no signs of identity-based conflict or ideological investment in the object of study. I will attempt to characterize these changes by reading them as part of a deep process of the “secularization of Christianity”—yet, interestingly, by Jews.

13

Scholem, “A Confession,” 432.

84 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) 4. Part 1: Israeli Scholarship on Christianity—From Klausner to Yuval The Jewish stomach cannot digest a half-Jew-half-Christian, or rather, a Jew from the waist down. 14 The first Hebrew study on Jesus was begun, according to its author, approximately at the time of the publication of Krauss’s work—around the turn of the century. The work in question is Joseph Klausner’s Jesus of Nazareth (1922). 15 At the time of publication, Klausner had already gained a reputation as an important and well-known figure in the Zionist movement. In this sense, Jesus of Nazareth is the first study of Jesus to have been written from a wholly Zionist perspective, in Hebrew, and in a geographical, cultural, and social environment completely different from that of European Jewry. 16 Klausner wrote an introduction and four different prefaces to his book, one for each new edition. In the first preface from 1927, Klausner emphasizes that this is the first study addressing the subject from an entirely objective and scientific point of view and with a scholarly intention (“as if I were writing on Socrates, Plato, Muhammad, or Buddha”). 17 In addition, Klausner notes that his main objective is not to improve the understanding of Christianity or Jesus’s Jewish roots, but rather to demonstrate the differences between Judaism and Christianity. Furthermore, he admits, though somewhat vaguely, that he hopes Ephraim Deinard, A Sword for the Lord and for Israel (New Orleans: Moinster Printing Company 1923), 152.

15 For a short review of Klausner’s position regarding Christianity, see David Fox Sandmel, “Joseph Klausner, Israel, and Jesus,” Currents in Theology and Mission 31 (2004): 456–464; Tsvi Sadan, Flesh of our Flesh: Jesus of Nazareth in Zionist Thought (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2008), 127–162.

16 In this the study departs significantly from Claude Montefiore’s work, The Synoptic Gospels (London: Macmillan, 1909). Montefiore’s introduction contains many of the characteristics that I will discuss in this paper. From the beginning, Montefiore “marks” his study as one written by a Jew on Christianity. He does this in order to underline the uniqueness of his point of view, as well as to excuse his limited knowledge of Christian scholarship on the New Testament. To some degree the introduction attempts to emphasize that his study offers a kind of “Jewish knowledge” on Jesus that can compensate for the lack of “scientific knowledge.” Nevertheless, Montefiore emphatically asserts that despite the anguish of past Jewish-Christian relations, and despite his own Jewishness, in his study he seeks to present the facts as they truly are. Montefiore’s position encountered fierce criticism among Zionist circles, in particular Ahad Ha’Am, who later published his essay “Al Shnei HaSeifim” (HaShiloach 23 [1910]: 97–111).

17 Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times, and Teaching, 6th ed. (Jerusalem: Stiebel, 1922; repr., Ramat Gan: Massada, 1969), 13 (Hebrew).

14

Bick, Apologetics, Identity, and Identification 85 his book will be beneficial in the national sense—though he insists this was not his goal: The God in my heart knows that in my work I strove for nothing but the scientific truth. It fills me with joy that this truth aligns—this is my inner belief—with the best interests of our nation and all of its spiritual properties. For it is not only the scent of the soil, the soil of Eretz Israel, that the reader can sense in this work in each step taken by Jesus and in each word spoken by him, but also the difference between Christianity and Jesus’s doctrine, and the degree to which historical Judaism is essentially different and separate from both. 18 This excerpt conveys the paradox in which Klausner finds himself: on the one hand he writes of the return to Jesus as a figure whose every step and every word emanate the “scent of the soil of Eretz Israel”; on the other hand, he seeks to underline the great difference between Judaism and Christianity. These two contradictory impulses appear at a time when the real possibility of establishing a new Jewish national identity vied with continued Jewish assimilation in Christian European society. As noted by Tsvi Sadan, though Klausner believed in Jesus’s Jewishness, he consistently opposed the views of other Jews who held that Jesus’s doctrine did not differ from the Judaism of his period; this assertion, according to Klausner, both obliterated Jesus’s uniqueness and, at the same time, justified all of his positions—even those that clearly contrasted with Judaism.

This paradoxical approach is also apparent later in the preface, in which Klausner explains that he did not intend to demonstrate the superiority of one religion to the other, but rather to show only

the differences that set Judaism apart from Christianity and vice versa. This, and only this, is the goal of my book, which I strove to write as objectively as I could and as scientifically as I

could, and in which I distanced myself from subjective religious and national trends that are incompatible with science…. For it is not my wish to defend Judaism and indict

18

Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth, 15.

86 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) Christianity, but to elucidate and explain the great contrast between them. 19 Klausner was fully aware of the novelty of his approach—“the first attempt to write about Jesus from an exclusively historical perspective.” Indeed, the book was distributed widely and quickly translated into numerous languages. Yet it was also the subject of attacks by both Jewish and Christian critics. Klausner’s preface to the third edition reflects the intensity of emotion the book aroused; and whereas he expected the critiques of Christian writers, he was surprised and hurt by the Jewish critics: But for Jews, who know of my work in the course of forty years for the benefit of the entire Jewish people … —that Jews should rise and accuse me of “undermining the foundations of Judaism” in “hymns of glory for Jesus,” and even of preaching Christianity and receiving money from missionaries … —this I could never imagine. 20 Klausner’s book was indeed harshly criticized. Thus, in 1923 Ephraim Deinard published a work titled A Sword of the Lord and of Israel (Herev le’Adonai ve’LeIsrael), dedicated to “Dr. Klausner / Come near, that I may feel you, my son, to know whether you are really my son Esau or not.” 21 Klausner is described as having donned “a priest’s garments, with a pen as his sword and a cross held aloft in his hand, as if to say: Here, I have brought you God, kiss the Son of God. Here is your God!” 22 According to Deinard, the scholarly-objective outward appearance of Klausner’s work is a deception intended to lure the youth of Israel “so that they fail to recognize that death is in it.” Deinard, it should be noted, composed many polemical works on various subjects, and was at times sharptongued to the point of baseless exaggeration; his book should not be seen as an expression of scholarly criticism, 23 but on the contrary—as an example of the strong emotional and subjective response that Klausner’s supposedly objective Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth, 18 (emphasis added).

Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth, 12.

21 Deinard, A Sword, 1.

22 Deinard, A Sword, 3.

23 Most of Deinard’s assertions are completely unfounded and it is unlikely he believed in them himself—for example, the charge that Klausner wrote his book in order to obtain a bishop’s position in London (A Sword, 15).

19 20

Bick, Apologetics, Identity, and Identification 87 study stirred in his readers. Deinard’s criticism was aimed not only at Klausner’s objective arguments but also at his very ambition for objectivity: [S]uch a man—his first duty is to proclaim openly that he is not a Jew, and not, as he cunningly wrote in his preface, that he is objective, as if standing at a distance and looking on impartially. Unbiased, God forbid, in Judaism’s favor. And even if he were to keep this promise, in that case as well it would be as if he ceased being Jewish, at least for the entire duration of writing his book. And that duration, according to him, is twenty-five years. 24 Later he continues in the same vein: Can a Jew born, raised, and educated in the Torah, whose livelihood depends upon the Jewish people, be objective (without tending towards one side or the other) in speaking about Christianity and Judaism?… Can it be that a Jewish author … who has seen the beloved little ones dashed against the rock, merciful mothers slaughtered like sheep … all these deeds perpetrated by the faithful of the “doctrine of love,” can it be that a Jewish author should boast of writing about Christianity in a moderate spirit and a mild heart, without tending to one side or the other? It beggars belief! Supposing even that his heart is of stone, can it be? 25 Another figure to sharply criticize Klausner’s book upon its publication was Aharon Kaminka, a prominent figure in the period’s cultural and intellectual life. Like Deinard, Kaminka begins by asking whether a historical study can ever be objective; he seems to imply that Klausner’s positive attitude toward Jesus may indicate that Klausner himself has crossed the lines of his own nationalreligious identity. 26 Indeed, a similar assertion underpins Kaminka’s historical argument regarding Jesus: he claims that, as Jesus takes a hostile position toward Deinard, A Sword, 6.

Deinard, A Sword, 14.

26 Aharon Kaminka, “The Learning of the Sages of Israel and the Christian Legend,” in Critical Historical Writings: Selected Essays (New York: Sefarim, 1944), 175 (Hebrew).

24 25

88 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) Israel and their sages, he clearly could not truly be a Jew. And although Kaminka is, to a very limited degree, prepared to accept a historical study of Jesus written by a Jewish scholar, he can hardly accept the “unnatural auto-suggestion … on the part of Jewish scholars who beg for charity from those whose entire moral assets are taken from us.” 27 In his preface to a later book, From Jesus to Paul (1931), Klausner writes in a slightly different tone. There, Klausner draws a connection between past and present events, namely, the 1929 Palestine Riots, and, in particular, the “persecutions, murders, and incitement in Germany and Italy.” All of these distressing events should be understood, writes Klausner, in light of the fact that “the Jews did not listen to Paul, and did not abandon their unique doctrine along with their unique nationality.” The answer to the question of “why the Jews did not become non-Jews” in Paul’s day is still relevant, and Klausner’s historical study is meant, among other things, to strengthen the understanding that the Jews were justified in adhering to their faith and national identity both in Paul’s days and in the present. Thus, although the book “addresses a purely scientific problem,” it is nevertheless “not a drawback if, at the same time, it answers a question of crucial life-or-death importance.” 28 In his last preface from 1956 to Jesus of Nazareth, Klausner’s tone is milder. He no longer mentions the harsh criticism which the book met on all sides or the “torment and pain the book caused” (as he wrote earlier).

Furthermore, though he concludes this preface as well by noting the importance of difference, his tone is more conciliatory—and Messianic: “May this book serve to increase understanding between Judaism and Christianity, and thereby realize the words of the prophet: ‘For all the peoples walk each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever’ (Mic 4:5).” 29 The most prominent figure after Klausner, and undoubtedly the most famous and influential in the Israeli context, is David Flusser. 30 Flusser, born in Kaminka, “The Learning of the Sages,” 191. For more on Kaminka, see Sadan, Flesh of Our Flesh, 154–156.

28 Klausner, From Jesus to Paul, vii.

29 Klausner, From Jesus to Paul, 7.

30 Indeed, between Klausner and Flusser there were other important scholars in Israel who wrote on Christianity—most notably Yitzhak Baer and Ephraim E. Urbach.

However, their interest in Christianity is secondary to their main interest in Judaism.

Nonetheless, As Oded Irshai has demonstrated, one can notice also within their work their (very different) subjective beliefs regarding the role of Christianity within Jewish 27

Bick, Apologetics, Identity, and Identification 89 Prague in 1917, immigrated to Palestine in 1939, and in 1969 was appointed professor of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University. In 1968, Flusser’s book, Jesus, was published in Germany, and in the following years it was translated to many other languages—however not to Hebrew. In 1997 a new English translation was published, containing many additions and changes. It was only in 2009, 9 years after Flusser’s death, that the book was published in Hebrew.

In his preface to the 1997 English edition, which also appears in the Hebrew translation, Flusser writes about his motives for studying Christianity and about the historical circumstances that shaped his conception of Jesus. Like Klausner, he does not attempt to obscure his Jewish identity, being perfectly aware of the possibility that his Jewishness might arouse opposition to his scholarly arguments on the part of a subset of readers (“some excessively conservative Christian circles”). On the contrary, Flusser believes that his Jewishness affords him a more accurate historical perspective, based on his deep acquaintance with late Second Temple period Judaism. Nevertheless, he emphasizes that his Jewish identity, whose work is based, among other things, on “Jewish knowledge,” does not render his book a “Jewish study”—that is, a study that should be attributed to Jews, seen as speaking in their name, or considered subordinate to any collective or Jewish identity: I have not written this book to describe Jesus from the “Jewish standpoint.” The truth of the matter is that I am motivated by scholarly interest to learn as much as I can about Jesus, but at the same time being a practicing Jew and not a Christian, I am independent of any church. I readily admit, however, that I personally identify myself with Jesus’ Jewish Weltanschauung, both moral and political, and I believe that the content of his teachings and the approach he embraced have always had the history and theology (Oded Irshai, “Ephraim E. Urbach and the Study of Judeo-Christian Dialogue in Late Antiquity: Some Preliminary Observations,” in How Should Rabbinic Literature Be Read in the Modern World? ed. Matthew Kraus [Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006], 167–197). According to Irshai, when Urbach turned to discuss Christian sources, it was mainly to reject “allegations concerning the impact Christianity might have had on the rabbinic world” (Irshai, “Ephraim E. Urbach,” 179). Therefore, their apologetic stance regarding the history of Jewish ideas is more relevant for understanding the historiography of Jewish Studies, as opposed to the study of Christianity—although there are obvious, and important, connections between these two fields.

90 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) potential to change our world and prevent the greatest part of evil and suffering. 31 Flusser attempts to have it both ways: he does not hide his connection with the object of his study and the modern-day interest he finds in Jesus’s (Jewish) views, yet insists that his main motive for writing the book is scholarly interest, with his Jewishness presented as an advantage in his objective research rather than as a drawback. In his concluding statements, he indicates the goal of his many years of scholarship in one clear and pointed assertion: “My ambition is simply to serve as a mouthpiece for Jesus’ message today.” His use of the word “mouthpiece” can be understood as an image of his intention to explicate Jesus’s message, yet it is hard to ignore the hidden Messianic context (see Exod 4:16).

The Hebrew edition was accompanied by a translation of a foreword from 2001, written by Steven Notley. In his foreword, Notley describes Flusser’s special attitude toward Jesus. When reading Jesus’s words, writes Notley, Flusser “does not work as a detached historian. He works as a man of faith who sees his scholarship as having relevance to the complex challenges of the present age.” 32 Flusser’s work was not simply theoretical; concerning current events, he would often wonder—“what would Jesus say.” In this context, Notley cites two examples. Notably, while the first touches on a classic moral issue, the second is deeply intertwined with the foundations of Jewish national identity and Middle Eastern and global politics. According to Notley, one day, while visiting Flusser during the tense period preceding the first Gulf War, when “the streets of Jerusalem were virtually empty in anticipation of the outbreak of war … [u]pon opening the door, he pondered aloud, ‘Interesting days we are living in. What would Jesus say? Let’s go and find out’.” 33 As Notley mentiones, Flusser’s assumption was “that the study of the words of Jesus should make a difference in how we conduct our lives.” Following Flusser’s own words, Notley concludes his introduction with the hope that his contribution to the book will strengthen “Flusser’s desire that this biography ‘serve as a mouthpiece for Jesus’ message today.’”

A special “Introduction to the Hebrew Edition” follows, written by two Israeli scholars, Serge Ruzer and Aryeh Kofsky. Their text supplies important information regarding Flusser’s scholarly approach, placing him within the

David Flusser, Jesus (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2001), 15.

Flusser, Jesus, 11.

33 Flusser, Jesus, 12.

31 32

Bick, Apologetics, Identity, and Identification 91 wider research on early Christianity. However, here there is no mention or discussion of Flusser’s personal standpoint. One could presume that the introduction’s authors were unaware of this omission; yet their text’s concluding sentence functions as a clear intertext with regard to Flusser’s own direct and provocative statement. Following the lengthy discussion of Flusser’s scholarly method, Ruzer and Kofsky write: “In conclusion, we hope to have presented to the readers a smooth and lucid translation that will serve as a fine mouthpiece sounding David Flusser’s words.” 34 This sentence should be read as a kind of midrash on Flusser’s (and Notley’s) hope/assertion. This time, however, in an introduction meant for Hebrew-speaking readers, the messianic allusion is entirely obscured, and the mouthpiece is nothing but a mouthpiece, with the sound it emits being not Jesus’s voice but the fine scholarly voice of Flusser.

Flusser wrote a much more detailed Hebrew introduction to his book Judaism and the Origins of Christianity (1979). This quite long (15 pages) “prologue” is titled “Christianity as Seen by the Jew.” It is difficult to determine to whom the word “Jew” is referring: Does Flusser mean “Jew” as a general, nonspecific noun? An ideal Jew? The Jew as a historical archetype? Or, perhaps, a very concrete Jew, namely, David Flusser? In other words, is the text in question a historical-theological essay or a personal, autobiographical confession?

Flusser dedicates the first pages of the prologue to a lengthy discussion of the difference “between the concept of faith in Judaism and in Christianity.”

In Judaism, he argues, faith is never a cause of salvation, which functions only as part of a broader system of precepts and duties. By contrast, Paul, and not Jesus—whom “such a position would probably fill with repulsion”—introduced into Christianity the conception that faith is a necessity and is the essential condition for salvation. Pauline Christianity created a fearful concept of faith, which, instead of helping man, “has become a threatening whip, a traumatic experience that is difficult to escape.” 35 Flusser does not hesitate to describe the Christian faith in pointed psychological terms: “I dare say that this kind of faith carries the risk of psychosis; and it is precisely the traumatic element of such a faith that provides the faithful with ‘security,’ which, for us, seems deceptive and

Flusser, Jesus, 27 (emphasis added).

David Flusser, Judaism and the Origins of Christianity (Tel Aviv: Sifriy’at Po’alim, 1979), 15.

34 35

92 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) psychologically unhealthy.” 36 Later he describes the Pauline assumptions as befitting the psychology of young children. 37 Flusser also draws a connection between the opposing views of Judaism and Christianity regarding the concept of faith and the perception of history.

While “the Jew” takes an interest in history and its moral and spiritual meaning, the Christian is focused on faith, thereby removing the historical event from its concrete context and turning it into myth and dogma. It is not Jesus the man— like many other Jews—who died on the cross and thereby atoned for his own sins; rather it is Jesus the son of God, who died and atoned for the sins of all humanity. In this sense, Christianity takes historical events that occurred in the life of a specific Jew, as well as specific Jewish motifs, and rearranges them as a story, a myth, and as ideas in which the faithful must believe. This rearrangement contrasts with the “historical Jesus’s” conduct, as well as with the fundamental structure of “the Jew,” and therefore “no wonder that the JewishChristians did not accept the story, but rather took an interest in Jesus as a Jewish wise man, perhaps a prophet.” 38 It is difficult to avoid seeing the first-century Jewish-Christians of which Flusser speaks as a reflection of Flusser himself, while he, as discussed above, may be seen as a reflection or representative of the archetypal “Jew.” This archetype is more interested in “Jesus as a Jewish wise man, perhaps a prophet,” and not in the “story”—the pagan-Christian principles of faith that Flusser the scholar (but also “the Jew”) will prove in his book did not exist at all.

Near the end of the prologue, Flusser attempts to explain the need for his work in a more focused manner. Alongside the aforementioned interest of the “Israeli reader in a greater understanding” of Christianity, Flusser finds it necessary to warn his readers of two types of Christians: not only those “who righteously argue” that Christianity’s attitude toward Judaism was a “regrettable mistake” but are unwilling to acknowledge that this negative attitude is an integral part of Christianity; but mostly of those within “certain Christian circles” who “assail Jews and Judaism in Israel and, apparently, abroad, yet not necessarily in order to attack Judaism but rather to attract Jews to Christianity.” 39 In particular, Flusser notes the “little-known fact” of Jews who converted to Christianity while insisting on retaining their Jewish identity.

Flusser, Judaism, 17.

Flusser, Judaism, 23.

38 Flusser, Judaism, 23.

39 Flusser, Judaism, 25.

36 37

Bick, Apologetics, Identity, and Identification 93 Flusser himself is ambivalent as to how they should be called (“Jews who converted to Christianity”; “Jews”; “Jews of the Christian faith”; “Christian Jews”; “Messianic Jews”—all in one paragraph!), as well as how they should be viewed. Firstly, he is concerned that this phenomenon is nourished, albeit inadvertently, by the trend of “searching for Christianity’s Jewish roots”—of which, of course, he is a prominent representative; yet, even more so, he is concerned that secular Jews “who are utterly ignorant in Jewish matters” may perceive the Messianic Jews, particularly when the latter identify with Israel and Zionism, as no different from other Jews, so that consequently, the danger they pose is greater.

Wherein, however, lies the difference between these modern “Christian-Jews,” whom Flusser unequivocally condemns, and the “JewishChristians … more interested in Jesus as a Jewish wise man, perhaps a prophet,” with whom he identifies? Flusser himself offers an answer to this question, informed by the prologue’s distinction regarding the nature of the Jewish versus the Christian faith. Regarding modern “Christian Jews,” he writes: Do the various “Messianic” Jews not believe, at least in part, in the “story” discussed above? Is the psychological experience of believing in Jesus as the son of God who died and atoned for humanity’s sins …—is it not this experience that caused them to join the movement? Did they become “Messianic” simply on account of Jesus’s (Jewish) belief, or do they adhere to the belief-in-Jesus—a belief that Jesus himself opposed? … It appears that they do believe in him—adhering to a “faith” that we have found to be a distortion, both of Judaism and of Jesus’s own faith. 40 It seems as if the Messianic Jews are Flusser’s personal rivals: like him, they seek to uncover Christianity’s Jewish roots, and to some degree, they even reject replacement theology and some of Paul’s stern teachings regarding Jewish precepts. And, like him, they seek to present “Jesus’s Jewish faith”—and it is precisely for this reason, admits Flusser, that they may exert a dangerous power of attraction.

Flusser concludes the prologue on a seemingly more conciliatory note: “Christianity should be understood. But the meaning of the Torah should also 40

Flusser, Judaism, 26.

94 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) be studied. All agree—even the Christians themselves—that both carry important meanings, a profound message, and that both are endowed with great power.” However, he immediately resumes his assertions regarding the source of (Pauline) Christianity “in the submerged layers of the human psyche, which are even more primeval than classical idolatry.” The Torah, says Flusser, which “rests on a harmony of human psychological powers,” is prepared to accept the existence of “elementary forces and impulses in the psyche,” yet requires that people “break free of the chains of easily attainable beliefs and the concepts of idolatry” and should strive toward “morality, wisdom, and action.” I contend that Flusser sees himself as an apostle of the “Torah of Israel,” and that the true goal of his scholarship is to free Christianity of the “chains of easily attainable beliefs,” that is—of the very concept of Christian faith, bringing it back to its Jewish origin. This accords, says Flusser, with the beliefs, thoughts, and actions of the historical Jesus. Thus, Flusser’s scholarly path is fully interwoven with his spiritual-religious one, and with his self-perception: the Christian story should be cleansed and Christianity should revert to its sublime Jewish roots.

John Gager, in an essay dedicated to Flusser’s perception of Jesus and Paul, argues that while the distinction between Christianity and Jesus as a “legitimate” Jewish figure appears in the works of many authors beginning in the nineteenth century, Flusser’s is the most loving and inclusive description of Jesus written by a Jew. Consequently, writes Gager, Flusser presents Paul as Jesus’s negative—the epitome of Christianity’s anti-Jewishness. 41 This position, says Gager, is essential in light of the clear Jewish Orthodox framework in which Flusser operated. Yitzhak Laor, by contrast, emphasizes the national-Zionist motivation in Flusser’s thoroughgoing adoption of Jesus: Flusser claims there is no figure from the late Second Temple period about whom we have as much historical data as we do about Jesus. This is the key to the Israeli longing for Jesus. It is not a longing for gilt Byzantine icons, or medieval painting, or the Divine Comedy, or Bach’s Matthaus Passion (though the average educated Israeli has a deep longing to feel at home in Western culture). Our national longing for Jesus is the longing for the Jews of the Second Temple period, for the existence that

John G. Gager, “Scholarship as Moral Vision: David Flusser on Jesus, Paul, and the Birth of Christianity,” JQR 95 (2005): 67.

41

Bick, Apologetics, Identity, and Identification 95 is a “well-known fact.” We were here. That is a well-known fact. 42 Laor’s description complements Gager’s to a significant degree, and in particular reveals, from a different perspective, the extent to which Flusser’s scholarly endeavor was tied to his self-perception and the beliefs with which he identified and sought to promote. As Gager argues, Flusser’s scholarly project assumes that scholarship cannot and should not be objective in the sense that the scholar is uninterested or uninvolved in the object of his study. Flusser’s Jesus, then, is to a very great degree the Jesus of Flusser; the sense of kinship between the author and his topic is made abundantly clear. Gager himself, as a scholar of Judaism and Christianity younger than Flusser by a generation, openly chooses to adhere to Flusser’s approach—not necessarily toward the object of his research, but rather in acknowledging the scholar’s obligation to take a moral stand and morally identify with his work.

Flusser and Klausner are perhaps the most prominent examples, but similar expressions can be found in many works written throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Thus, Jacob Katz’s Between Jews and Gentiles (1961) 43 contains a very short preface, one paragraph long, in which the author asserts/confesses that a book with such a title “necessarily declares a connection with the present.… The roots of present-day problems reach far back into the past, and Jewish-Gentile relations in our times cannot be understood without knowledge of their early stages. The historian may assume that by removing the reader from the present he is not detaching him, but rather preparing an observation point from which the reader’s gaze may more easily encompass the place in which we stand.” And beneath the paragraph, as in other works, a date appears that soars above objective time: “Jerusalem, the Hebrew University, Yom Kippur, 1961.” 44 Yitzhak Laor, “He’s One of Us, He Belongs Here,” Haaretz Literary Supplement, 28 August 2009, https://www.haaretz.co.il/literature/1.1277983.

43 Jacob Katz, Between Jews and Gentiles: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1961).

44 Ordinarily, such temporal coordinates are passed over or seen as supplying merely technical information. This phenomenon is not unique to books on these topics (for example, each of E. E. Orbach’s five prefaces to his classical work The Sages is mentioned as being composed on the day of the new moon). I believe it is plausible to assume that Jacob Katz was not really seated at his desk on the eve of the holy day, working diligently, at that very moment, on the conclusion of his book—and neither were the other scholars 42

96 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) The last case study I would like to discuss is that of Israel Yuval, who unlike Klausner and Flusser was born in Israel, and after its establishment as an independent Jewish state. 45 Yuval explicitly places his scholarship in a contemporary context: according to him, he wrote his book following an almost incidental family excursion to Trier while staying in Germany for his research.

Standing with his family beneath the city’s Roman basilica, he read the description of the occurrences during the Crusades, when parents threw their children from the tower to prevent their conversion to Christianity. As Yuval attests, This was a rare case when my profession as a historian coincided with my role as a father. The question I posed, as a historian, to myself as a father was incisive: what could lead a person in his right mind to hurl his children to such a cruel death? I was certainly not the first to raise this question, but I may have been the first Jewish Israeli historian to read to his children the chronicle of 1096 beneath the Trier basilica. The direct encounter with the actual site of a historical event in the company of those who could have been its victims stirred deep emotions within me which the texts themselves could not. 46 In this paragraph Yuval draws a connection between the present moment, standing with his children at the foot of the basilica, and the horror of children falling from their parents’ hands 900 years earlier. The contrast between the two periods is stark—the terror of the Crusades, Christian hostility toward the Jews, compared with a pleasant walk through a modern, peaceful city. Suddenly, though, Yuval’s visceral insight and the symbolism of his presence there as a contemporary Jewish-Israeli historian overpower the scene, even before historically much closer horrors—those of the Holocaust—enter the narrative.

True, Yuval’s formulation is rather vague—was this visit planned? Was it just a coincidence that the Chronicle was in his backpack, ready for perusal?

In his description the actual past darkens not only his awareness as a parent; it who completed the prefaces to their books on the eve of Passover, Rosh Hashanah, or Hanukkah. The main significance of such temporal descriptions in the framework of the liturgical calendar transcends practical-scholarly time, sending the reader to a different temporal dimension, dense with historical-religious-national meaning.

45 Israel Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb (Tel Aviv: Alma, 2000).

46 Yuval, Two Nations, 11.

Bick, Apologetics, Identity, and Identification 97 also breaches the boundaries of academic historical scholarship, challenging Yuval’s assumption—characteristic of the new generation of scholars born and raised in the State of Israel—that the past can be examined in an objective manner free of historical memories. This breach becomes even more evident later in the preface, when Yuval describes the shocked reception of his work a year after this visit, in 1993: As the son of a generation born after the end of the ChristianJewish polemic … I thought, naively, that there was nothing offensive in this comparison since history often suggests a sequence of optical illusions and conjured images…. That which was meant at first to be just another esoteric scholarly essay, to be read only by the initiated, quickly turned into a fierce battleground joined by many.… It seemed I had hit, unwittingly, an exposed and painful nerve. 47 Again, the intrusion of emotions into an “esoteric scholarly” historical discussion is considered surprising, particularly “after the end of the ChristianJewish polemic.” In this sense, Yuval’s work and outlook constitute a transitional stage between the early period, represented by Klausner and Flusser, and later, twenty-first-century scholarship. Yuval, like his peers and the scholars of the following generation, feels he is living “after the end of the ChristianJewish polemic,” in a period when one can write a historical study on child murder that is almost “esoteric.” But this consciousness, which supposedly “transcends apologetics,” is suddenly invaded by deep currents of historical sensitivity. To some degree, Yuval’s experience at the basilica was the “preview”—a kind of portent—of the drama that was to unfold with the publication of his study the following year. 48 Here as well, we cannot ignore additional paratexts accompanying the preface. Thus, it concludes with a dedication to the memory of the author’s close relatives who were murdered by the Nazis on their way from Vienna to Palestine. Yuval writes: “Their portraits and fate stood before me for the entire duration of the book’s writing.” Reading the preface as an integral part of the entire work and as a key to it—that is, taking Yuval’s words in this sentence

Yuval, Two Nations, 12.

See for example the articles in Zion 59:2–3 (1994) and especially Ezra Fleischer’s passionate response.

47 48

98 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) seriously—we cannot but recall his incidental walk through the streets of Trier, or the claim that his generation was born “after the end of the Christian-Jewish polemic.”

Although there are, of course, other examples, I believe those discussed above suffice to distinguish several patterns, which, despite their differences, are shared by all the Israeli authors addressed above. 49 In all three cases, I have tried to show the authors’ evident attempts to present such scholarship as objective— though this insistence itself, and the very need to put forth such an argument, are not trivial, and, as I will now show, both eventually disappear. Furthermore, in all these texts I have sought to demonstrate how the authors’ proclaimed objectivity repeatedly comes up against the subject and their history—whether close or ancient, personal or national—which is the bloody historical relations between Judaism and Christianity.

5. Part 2: Unidentified Research Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, a dramatic change can be seen in the tone and contents of prefaces to works on Christian subjects. It is naturally more difficult to present a lack clearly, yet I argue that in two decades the confessional element, so characteristic of the previous generations, has disappeared, with prefaces becoming identical to the accepted academic model. 50 They offer an objective presentation of the study, avoiding questions such as the author’s subjective position, the emotional history accompanying For other examples see Haim Cohn, The Trial and Death of Jesus (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 2012 [1968]); Hirschman, The Bible and its Midrash, 7; Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Jerusalem: Shazar, 2002), first published in English in 1999.

50 Although this change is particularly noticeable in publications from the last twenty years (see note 54 below), its first expressions can be found already in Guy G. Stroumsa’s first book from 1984, Another Seed: Studies in Gnostic Mythology (NHS 24; Leiden: Brill, 1984). However, in this book, Stroumsa is interested in examining Gnostics, that is, groups labeled as heretics and as “others” by the Church Fathers, and therefore might not serve as an adequate example for the purposes of this article, since it is not the Jewish “other” (i.e., the Christian) that is at question but rather the “others’” “other” (the Gnostic). Thus, the problem of the Jewish identity of the scholar is less relevant, and does not incite the same emotional involvement, by the author and by the readers, alike.

Stroumsa’s later books, which address more specifically what (anachronistically) can be termed “orthodox Christianity,” were published already closer to the turn of the century, as well as David Satran’s Biblical Prophets in Byzantine Palestine: Reassessing the Lives of the Prophets (SVTP 11; Leiden: Brill, 1994).

49

Bick, Apologetics, Identity, and Identification 99 the research, or the expectations or reactions of the book’s audience—whether Jewish or Christian.

Itzhak Benyamini, for example, dedicated an extensive study to an examination of Paul’s attitude toward the Law from a psychoanalytic viewpoint.

In this work, which is certainly extraordinary in its methodology within the scholarly tradition of New Testament studies, Benyamini discusses the theological and political significance of Paul’s ideas in the context of modern and postmodern psychoanalytic typologies, such as “psychoanalytical Judaism” or “Levinasian-Derridarian Judaism.” However, in light of the author’s explicitly post-structuralist perspective and aversion to positivist and objectivist research, the lack of almost any reference to the context and the actual history of JewishChristian relations is particularly prominent. Benyamini’s introduction to the work lacks any apologetical element addressing the audience or any reference to the question of his personal position and connection with the subject of his research as a Jew—this despite the fact, that his book discusses the very question of the identity between the Jewishness of an author (i.e., Paul, Levinas, Derrida) and the content of that author’s work. 51 Another interesting example is David Malkiel’s The Jewish-Christian Debate on the Eve of Modernity, 52 which focuses on the work Asham Talui by Yehoshua Segre of Scandiano. In the introduction, Malkiel writes that the text that is the subject of his research is like an alien being: “just as an alien lands on our world out of context, and can be judged only by its characteristics … so this book ‘landed’ on our world entirely out of its cultural context. Yet in this it is not unique: there are dozens of works by Italian Jews of Segre’s period … in whose works the modern reader cannot find a cultural point of reference.” 53 However, Malkiel’s metaphor of the “alien” can also be applied to his own book—which is presented outside of any cultural context, and its paratext reveals only the fact of its composition within an academic context but without historical-social coordinates.

The same can be said of Adiel Schremer’s work. In his preface, Schremer contrasts his study with what he sees as a scholarly tendency to read rabbinic literature against the background of Christian writings, which, he argues, “Christianizes” the former and reads it from a colonialist viewpoint—a Itzhak Benyamini, Paul and the Birth of the Sons’ Community: An Investigation into the Foundation of Christianity with Freud and Lacan (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2007).

51

52 53

Jerusalem: Dinur Center, 2004.

Malkiel, Jewish-Christian, 10.

100 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) rather harsh critique that is heavily charged ideologically (or “contraideologically”). Yet besides positioning the text academically and acknowledging the assistance of institutions and relatives, Schremer reveals no personal-biographical or ideological motivation, apparently finding it unnecessary to justify his engagement with the subject, besides the wish to present a more accurate history of rabbinic literature. 54 As mentioned above, this phenomenon is apparent in almost all of the (many) works written on these topics in the past twenty years. 55 Reviewing the Hebrew translation of Pau Figueras’s The Spirit and the Bride, 56 Yitzhak Laor writes, “I suppose that the demand for this book, which is already being published in a renewed edition, reflects a trend—Israelis are attracted to Christianity.” 57 Yet is the Israeli interest in Christianity in the twenty-first Adiel Schremer, Brothers Estranged: Heresy, Christianity, and Jewish Identity in Late Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), x.

55 E.g., David Rokach, Justin Martyr: A Dialogue with Trypho the Jew (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2004); Aviad Kleinberg, Brother Genfrey’s Pig’s Foot: Stories of the Saints that Changed the World (Tel Aviv: Zmura Beitan, 2000); Yair Zakovitch and Serge Ruzer, In the Beginning was the Word: Eight Talks about the Fourth Gospel (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2014); Yehudit Weiss, A Christian-Kabbalistic Messiah in the Renaissance: Guillaume Postel and the Zohar (Tel Aviv: Hakkibutz Hameuchad, 2016); David Barzis, The Rabbis and the Implicit Discourse with Christianity (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2018); Aryeh Kofsky and Serge Ruzer, The Early Christian Faith: Challenges, Changes, Debates (Tel Aviv: Idra, 2018); Guy G. Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations of Late Antiquity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009); David Satran, In the Image of Origen: Eros, Virtue, and Constraint in the Early Christian Academy (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018); Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred: The Debate on Christian Pilgrimage in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Yonatan Moss, Incorruptible Bodies: Christology, Society, and Authority in Late Antiquity (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016); Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Yifat Monnickendam, Jewish Law and Early Christian Identity: Betrothal, Marriage, and Infidelity in the Writings of Ephrem the Syrian (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Karma Ben-Johanan, Reconciliation and Its Discontents: Unresolved Tensions in Jewish-Christian Relations 54

(Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 2020 [Hebrew]).

56 Pau Figueras, The Spirit and the Bride: Six Chapters on Early Christianity (Jerusalem: Academon, 2014).

57 Yitzhak Laor, “The Illusionary Boundaries of Eretz Israel,” Haaretz Literary Supplement, 31 January 2014, https://www.haaretz.co.il/literature/study/.premium1.2228139.

Bick, Apologetics, Identity, and Identification 101 century similar to the interest of Klausner, Flusser, and others in the course of the twentieth century?

In the excerpt quoted above from his review of Flusser’s Jesus, Laor distinguishes between the Israeli public’s longing for Christian-European culture and its longing for the Jews and Judaism of the Second Temple period, expressed through the figure of Jesus. Much tension exists between these two kinds of desires: In the latter the desire and search are for the ancient (lost) Jewish self, where Christianity offers a route back to pre-Exilic, native Judaism; a route employed to establish and consolidate the new Jewish national consciousness. The former, on the contrary, leads to the pre-Zionist, exilicChristian cultural sphere—not to the cliffs of the Judean Desert, but to the great cathedrals of Europe. Although these two routes of desire could, theoretically, exist simultaneously, it seems that each enjoys dominance at a specific period in time. I propose that at present—that is, during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, and as part of broader post-national processes developing in Israeli society—the yearning for Christianity is rather an expression of a desire for “Europe” and the “West” than for the Second Temple period.

Yet perhaps there is no need to present contemporary scholarship in terms of a desire that goes beyond the simple quest for knowledge for its own sake, entirely unconnected with questions of identity and nationality. In other words, the issues of nationality or post-nationality—issues that focus on the question of the author’s identity—are possibly irrelevant. Rather, these studies orient themselves toward a kind of scholarship that presents itself, and seeks to be seen, from a neutral viewpoint free of any contemporary political context.

This, of course, is the implied self-presentation of these authors, but it is, at the same time, their expectation regarding the readership, which, like them, is seemingly no longer interested in the “Jewish story.” Consequently, the engagement with Christianity is no longer accompanied by an amplification of the issue of Christianity’s Jewish roots or the degree to which Jewish scholarship on Christianity is legitimate; on the contrary, this scholarship suggests an attempt to obscure the author’s Jewish identity and the historical-nationalreligious conflict that is the backdrop for writing, presenting the figure of a scholar whose approach is universal, unaffiliated with any group, emerging from an objective position based on purely scientific interest. Now there is no longer any need to emphasize this objectivity, which is not even mentioned, as there seems to be no “problem” which must be addressed.

Furthermore, I wish to propose another explanation for the disappearance of the “problem”—one that involves the secularization of

102 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) Christianity in the scholarship written in Israel. We tend to think of secularization as pertaining to the religion that is secularized, in other words— that Jews “secularize” Judaism, Christians “secularize” Christianity, and so on.

Yet it is perhaps possible to secularize a religion that is not one’s own and never has been. In some cases the lack of belief in a religion co-exists with the understanding of its existence as a threat, as idol-worship (Avodah zarah), as a religious alternative; it is seen as a rival that puts forward arguments that have threatening implications from which the faithful must protect themselves— arguments that exist on a religious plane, that is, as part of an inter-religious dialogue or debate. In the case of Christianity, the threat has always been multidimensional: both theological (the fear that Jews may adopt the belief in Jesus) and social (the fear of social and cultural assimilation or conversion).

For the new Israeli identity, however, Christianity is no longer a threat.

For the first time in the history of the two religions, it constitutes a neutral subject of research that can be studied using ordinary academic tools. 58 Thus, the double consciousness of the Jewish scholarly discourse in Israel regarding Christianity, so dominant in the course of a century of scholarship, is vanishing, with the words—the language of the research—denoting exactly what they wish to express, concealing no hidden and dangerous theological depths.

Let us now revisit Scholem’s words regarding the secularization of language: like Klausner and Flusser, in biographical terms, Scholem saw himself as belonging to the “transitional” generation between traditional and new Judaism, and, regarding the Jewish scholars of Christianity, between the traditional Jewish-Christian polemic and the modern study of Christianity. In this intermediary stage, the dangerous duality of the secular-scholarly language is still prominent and frightening. In the next generation, however—which “has no other language” besides the secularized and objective scholarly idiom—will the language itself, as predicted by Scholem, rise against its speakers? Or is a full secularization of the discourse possible, allowing the Jewish engagement with Jesus and Christianity to be objective and free of the chains of the past?

I have no intention of passing judgment on any of these trends. The secularization of the Jewish language of research on Christianity is not a negative development. In fact, this was precisely the hope of all Jewish scholars of There are, of course, broader trends that undoubtedly contribute to this change, such as the growing pressure in the Israeli academy to publish in English, the globalization of knowledge and of the academic discourse, and more. However, these processes are relevant to all the humanities and social sciences and cannot explain the unique characteristics of the changes I wish to discuss here.

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Bick, Apologetics, Identity, and Identification 103 Christianity, ever since the days of Wissenschaft des Judentums. All these scholars aimed for objectivity. Nevertheless, the success of this process must also have a price. It carries profound social and theological meanings, worthy of attention.

This disappearance of subjective involvement from Israeli scholarship seems even more outstanding when one considers how over the same period questions of identity, within the research materials and of the scholars themselves, have become one of the most charged topics in the humanities.

Indeed, this movement toward scholarly and personal questions of identity is apparent in the works of prominent North American Jewish scholars of Christianity. The case of Daniel Boyarin’s Border Lines can serve as a good example: 59 as opposed to the “unidentified” tendency in Israel, Boyarin’s preface (quite exceptionally quickly translated into Hebrew as a separate essay, without the whole book, as soon as 2005) 60 presents the Jewish engagement with Christianity in the context of queer theory concepts, in a manner that highlights the author’s hybrid identity. In other words, Boyarin declares his personal involvement in Christianity while also confessing to the efforts he has made to conceal this emotional involvement under the guise of pure objectivity.

The title of his book’s preface—“Interrogate My Love”—introduces the reader to a conceptual world of investigation and confession: “As long as I can remember I have been in love with some manifestations of Christianity.” This is a personal infatuation, yet also part of a more general malaise affecting others as well: “Some Jews, it seems, are destined by fate, psychology, or personal history to be drawn to Christianity.” 61 However, this love of Christianity is by no means simple—since the Christianity that Boyarin loves is not necessarily the same one beloved by his Christian friends; and, mostly, it is the same Christianity that, throughout history, has conducted a fraught relationship with Judaism, to which, confesses Boyarin, he has an even stronger libidinal attachment.

Later Boyarin acknowledges the complex situation in which he finds himself, between his love for one (Judaism) and his passion for another

Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Admittedly, Boyarin is not an Israeli scholar, yet, in accordance with his scholarly approach discussed below, he might be placed on the margins of Israeli and American scholarship.

60 Daniel Boyarin, "Interrogate my Love," Mita’am 3 (2005): 77–84 (Hebrew).

61 Boyarin, Border Lines, ix.

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104 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) (Christianity), and his need to “come out.” Unlike in his other books, he says, the writing of this book—which specifically focuses on the construction of Jewish and Christian identity—simply refused to end. Lacking identification by the author (both as a subject and with the object of his research), the academic work on identity could not be written.

As Boyarin explains in the preface, in late antiquity, Judaism and Christianity were in the process of establishing clear identities and boundaries— a process that, unsurprisingly, included a struggle against liminal and unidentified ideas and groups, which were presented in a negative, even monstrous light. In this context he confesses: I speak here, then, for the monsters. But why? What right do I have to do so? I am not, after all, a heretic from either the orthodox Christian or orthodox Jewish point of view, neither a Judaizing Christian nor a Christian Jew (a min), for all my attraction to Christianity and Christians. I do not choose, in any way, to be a Messianic Jew, a Jew for Jesus, or anything of that sort, but actually, to be just a Jew, according to the flesh and according to the spirit…. I need to figure out in what way the position of monster, of heretic, calls me in order to discover the meaning of my work to me. I think I read the record, in

some sense, from the point of view of the hybrids, the heretics, not because I wish, then, to revive their particular religious modality, whether we call it Jewish Christian or find some other name for it, but because there is some other sense in which the position of those “monsters” is close enough to my own to call me to it, to identify with it, as my place.

Boyarin’s minut (heresy), his place at the margins of Orthodoxy, stems first of all, according to his description, from his political position regarding Israeli policy, which, he argues, caused him to become unwanted even in his own community. But Boyarin’s ‘heresy’ is also apparent in his academic position. In a later work, he confesses his lack of belonging to any clear academic discipline (History? Literature? Talmudic Studies?), and his being “like a bumblebee, I just keep on flying, bumbling, and buzzing around the disciplines.” 62 Daniel Boyarin, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), xii.

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Bick, Apologetics, Identity, and Identification 105 Boyarin’s confession, like Flusser’s and Klausner’s admission of personal interest, should undoubtedly be seen as an expression of much broader cultural trends of identity formation. Thus, in an essay published seven years before his book appeared, Susannah Heschel proposed that in the context of Jewish-Christian scholarship, Jesus functions as the ultimate cross-dresser, essentially subverting the possibility of establishing a distinct Jewish or Christian identity. Like a drag queen, Jesus appears once as a Jew and once as the ultimate Christian, while, at the same time, the opposite identity can be glimpsed beneath his apparent self, conveying the idea that he can put on and take off his “disguise” at will and transgress contrasting identities. According to Heschel, The cross-dresser is at once both a signifier and that which signifies the undecidability of signification. It points toward itself—or, rather, toward the place where it is not. Jesus, too, destabilizes the self-definitions of both Judaism and Christianity…. As a Jew and the first Christian, yet neither a Jew nor a Christian, Jesus is the ultimate theological transvestite. 63 If Jesus, then, is the paradigmatic signifier of the hybrid identity, then it is only natural that he should become an object of desire for scholars—and readers— occupying precisely this liminal space. Previously, Zionist scholarship searched for alternative messianic Jewish figures, such as Jesus or Sabbatai Zevi, seeking to create an alternative history and model of Judaism to replace traditional Orthodox Judaism. Now, however, the new hero is the heretic—not the King of the Jews but rather a marginalized figure, existing in-between, challenging and obscuring boundaries—and for that very reason is misunderstood and banished.

It is important to note that this confessional or “coming out” rhetoric, insisting on revealing that which the rules of the discourse (whether Jewish or academic) forbid, is not unique to Boyarin alone. 64 Adele Reinhartz, for Susannah Heschel, “Jesus as a Theological Transvestite,” in Judaism Since Gender, ed.

Miriam Peskowitz and Laura Levitt (New York: Routledge, 1997), 194.

64 A comprehensive discussion regarding North American scholarship goes beyond the scope of this paper. On this see, among others, Shaul Magid, “The New Jewish Reclamation of Jesus in Late Twentieth-Century America: Re-Aligning and ReThinking Jesus the Jew,” in The Jewish Jesus: Revelation, Reflection, Reclamation, ed.

Zev Garber (Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2011), 358–382.

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106 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) example, sensitively describes in her book’s preface how, in the name of scientific objectivity—the very same benevolent factor that allowed her to be active as a scholar in a Christian field—she was also obliged to both obscure her Jewish identity, and deny the emotions stirred in her by Christian texts. Her non-identified research in fact required a deeper denial of identity. Her preface thus consciously functions as an escape route from this objectivity-based selfdenial, formulated in confessional language and as “coming out,” in order to foreground the scholar’s Jewish subjectivity. 65 Thus, within the North American context, where sensitivities regarding identity formation, post-colonialism, and gender had a great impact on the fields of Jewish and religious studies, it might be harder to set aside questions of identity, and the discourse, in accordance with postmodern notions on identity and queer theory, is deeply engaged with questions of identity and its (de)construction. This pattern, however, only emphasizes to a larger degree the way in which questions of identity completely disappeared from the Israeli scholarship on Christianity.

6. Conclusion In this essay, I sought to examine how Jewish scholars of Christianity in Israel present their research, and themselves, in their academic prefaces. The review and analysis of these writings raised many important questions. Can Jews conduct objective research on Christianity? Furthermore—is the aspiration for objectivity a worthy one, even if possible? Must the Jewish scholar be, in Deinard’s harsh terms, “non-Jewish” while researching Jewish-Christian topics?

Throughout this essay, I had no pretension of answering these questions; rather I sought to bring them to the surface and indicate their discursive developments.

My main objective was to thereby raise awareness of the place of the “Jewish subject” in the “objective” study of Christianity. As discussed above, the wish to transcend apologetics to the point of not even considering it necessary to claim objectivity was, to some degree, the aspiration of those scholars who, in their apologetic statements, demonstrated their own Jewish identity; in this sense, the E.g., “It was clearly time to ‘come out’ as a Jew” (Adele Reinhartz, Befriending the Beloved Disciple: A Jewish Reading of the Gospel of John [New York: Continuum, 2005],

65

13). Similarly, in Amy-Jill Levine’s book, which beautifully describes her biography as a Jew, existing between the Jewish and the Christian spheres, the introduction functions as a declaration of intent to manifest the scholarly subject. See Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2006), 5.

Bick, Apologetics, Identity, and Identification 107 disappearance of this kind of apologetics is a kind of success. Paradoxically, however, the removal of the “Jewish perspective” also signifies the “death” or secularization of the object of research. As already noted by Augustine, the existence of Christianity depends upon the existence of a “Jewish gaze,” whose preservation is therefore essential. 66 Indeed, as Jeremy Cohen writes in the introduction to his book on the symbolic Jew, it is somewhat unsettling that Jewish scholars in postmodern times still feel they must take the role of the “Jewish scholar” when they are among a group of Christian scholars. 67 This is patently true, particularly considering the gruesome historical associations of the concept of the symbolic Jew. Yet there is something no less troubling about the removal of this tension, its repression, and the attempt to present a “transparent” (“non-Jewish,” in Deinard’s terms) scholar, not least in light of the historical, centuries-old suppression of the Jewish voice.

Recalling Scholem’s warning regarding the secularization of the Hebrew language, I would like to conclude with a question: Can the Jewish discourse on Christianity be “secularized” at all? Is such secularization worthwhile? Which repressed voices might emerge? And how is it possible to manifest the voice of a (Jewish) scholarly subject without rendering the study biased or ideological, but rather one that stirs interest and identification? As opposed to Scholem, I do believe that words and traditions can be detached from their “abyssal substance.” However, as recent years have taught us, secularization is a much more complicated process than previously thought, as “the religious” seems to be returning to the forefront of the public sphere throughout the globe, including in Israel, making the imagined “end of religious polemics,” as expressed by Yuval, seem more and more to be only a short episode in modern history, and in the long history of Jewish-Christian relations.

On the importance of preserving the Jew as a witness in Augustine’s works, see, among others, Cohen, Living Letters, 23–65.

67 Cohen, Living Letters, 1.

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Gregory R. Lanier’s Corpus Christologicum: A Review Article Ruben A. Bühner University of Zurich | ruben.buehner@uzh.ch JJMJS No. 11 (2024): 108–116

1. Introduction In recent decades, a lot of work has been done on the origin and development of New Testament Christology. Such work usually investigates how some New Testament depictions of Jesus relate to other Second Temple sources with regard to messianic or eschatological figures. Although such investigations oen rely heavily on textual comparisons and exegetical details, many of those Second Temple or later sources are difficult to access for both researchers and readers, or are available only in rather dated translations. is is where Gregory R. Lanier’s monumental work 1 comes in and offers a comprehensive and accessible sourcebook for the study of early Christology with reference to Second Temple and Rabbinic texts and traditions. Undoubtedly, this book will serve as a helpful starting point for future research in the field.

2. Presentation of the Book e Corpus Christologicum is unique in its aim and its broad range of material.

It offers almost three hundred ancient texts from seven different languages.

Lanier presents these texts in their original or ancient languages on one column and offers a new English translation on the facing column. e texts come from the Hebrew Bible and its ancient versions, from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Philo and Josephus, as well as from other, mainly Rabbinic, traditions. In each case, a very short introduction helps the reader contextualize each source. Key words are underlined and major textual variants are included in notes. Additionally, the volume offers bibliographical references for primary and secondary sources, which include the most important English, German, and (more rarely) French publications.

Gregory R. Lanier, Corpus Christologicum: Texts and Translations for the Study of Jewish Messianism and Early Christology (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2021).

1

Bühner, Corpus Christologicum: A Review Article 109 Taken as a whole, the focus of the book is the presentation of primary texts and translations of those texts. e at times wooden nature of the translations is helpful for precise comparison. Whereas the volume does offer helpful indexes of sources, epithets, hypostasis, figures, metaphors, and attributes, it gives no actual interpretation of the texts and does not argue in favor of any particular scholarly tradition of how to read New Testament Christology in its Jewish context.

With respect to other and related works, it differs precisely in its focus on presenting the primary texts as well as in its inclusion of an astonishingly wide range of material. Previous works have either discussed a wide range of relevant ancient material without presenting the primary sources, 2 or they have limited themselves to the interpretation of a specific set of material, for example, messianic texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls. 3 us, I am confident that this superb reference work will be used widely in future research and will help further promote the study of early Christology in its Jewish setting. Nevertheless, some aspects are in need of further discussion.

3. Selection of Sources For such a refence work, the selection and presentation of the sources is no doubt crucial. In this respect, Lanier makes a good decision not to argue fiercely about the dating or the provenance of a specific text, or whether it is chronologically relevant. Rather, the book aims at including all those texts that are regularly discussed in the secondary literature on early Jewish messianism and early

Such as Gerbern S. Oegema, Der Gesalbte und sein Volk: Untersuchungen zum Konzeptualisierungsprozess der messianischen Erwartungen von den Makkabäern bis Bar Koziba (Schrien des Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum 2; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994); John J. Collins, e Scepter and the Star: e Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature, 2nd ed. (New York: Doubleday, 2010); Stefan Schreiber, Gesalbter und König: Titel und Konzeptionen der königlichen Gesalbtenerwartung in frühjüdischen und urchristlichen Schrien (BZNW 105; Berlin: 2

Walter de Gruyter, 2000).

3 Such as Johannes Zimmermann, Messianische Texte aus Qumran: Königliche, priesterliche und prophetische Messiasvorstellungen in den Schrifunden von Qumran, (WUNT II 104; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998); Géza G. Xeravits, King, Priest, Prophet: Positive Eschatological Protagonists of the Qumran Library (STDJ 47; Leiden: Brill, 2003); and Albert L. A. Hogeterp, Expectations of the End: A Comparative Tradition-

Historical Study of Eschatological, Apocalyptic, and Messianic Ideas in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament (STDJ 83; Leiden: Brill, 2009).

110 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) Christology. at is, irrespective of the scholarly debates on the precise dating of such complex texts as the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs or the Parables of Enoch, Lanier includes them in his collection without further discussion. e same is true for texts such as Lam 4:20, where it is uncertain whether the messianic reading of the Septuagint (χριστὸς κυρίος) reflects a later interpretatio Christianae from the supposedly original χριστὸς κυρίου. 4 is broad approach seems reasonable and helpful for this kind of reference book.

More questionable, however, is the selection of sources with respect to the relevance of their contents. Although Lanier includes a variety of sources, his inclusion or exclusion of specific ancient sources seems arbitrary at some points. 5 To be sure, the book includes all major relevant texts, but at the margins some decisions seem unfounded. Overall, the subtitle of the book, Texts and Translations for the Study of Jewish Messianism and Early Christology, is a bit misleading since Lanier’s selection of sources focuses more on the study of early Christology than on ancient messianism. For instance, on the one hand, the volume includes texts such as Prov 8 which were interpreted christologically within the New Testament and later, even though we have no evidence they were interpreted messianically before the Jesus movement. On the other hand, however, texts from the Hebrew Bible that were read as messianic texts by some Second Temple Jewish groups are not included at times if they were not also read christologically/messianically within the New Testament. For example, Lanier does not include Isa 52:7, “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace,” even though it was understood as a messianic text in some early Jewish groups. is is attested clearly in 11QMelch (11Q13) II 16–18, which first cites the text and then adds the comment: “the messenger is the anointed of the spirit.” 6 e same exclusion is true for a number of texts from the Hebrew Bible that are relevant for the study of ancient messianism, though not as relevant to New Testament Christology (e.g., Lev 25; Num 6:45–26; Deut 15; Ps 7; 82; 146; Dan 3). 7 On this see Ruben A. Bühner, Hohe Messianologie. Übermenschliche Aspekte eschatologischer Heilsgestalten im Frühjudentum (WUNT II 523; Tübingen: Mohr

4

Siebeck, 2020), 98.

5 Lanier does not offer an explanation of his criteria for selecting ancient sources.

6 On the interpretation of biblical texts in 11QMelchizedek, see James A. Sanders, “e Old Testament in 11Q Melchizedek,” JANESCU 5 (1973): 373–382.

7 Surprisingly absent is also Isa 7:13–14. Of course, no messianic text prior to Matt 1:22– 23 unambiguously cites or alludes to Isa 7. Nonetheless, scholars have pointed to some

Bühner, Corpus Christologicum: A Review Article 111 e focus on Christology is also reflected by the absence of some messianic texts outside the Hebrew Bible. us, for instance, texts such as CD II 12 or 1QM XI 7 talk about ‫משיחו‬/‫ משיחי‬and are, therefore, discussed in other works on Second Temple messianism, 8 but are absent in the Corpus Christologicum. Admittedly, for the study of early Christology these texts seem rather marginal, but this may not be true for research that focuses on other parts of Second Temple messianism outside the New Testament.

7F

4. Presentation of Primary Sources Related to Lanier’s selection of primary sources is his presentation of those sources. In offering the primary sources in their original languages and their various ancient versions, this volume will be an unparalleled resource for any researcher in the field. In this respect, for instance, it is of great help that Lanier presents the Aramaic version of Dan 7:9–27 not only next to its Greek translation which prevailed in the early church, but also next to the older Greek translation which presents the “one like a son of man” (Dan 7:13) in quite different terms.

In other instances, however, Lanier’s presentation of the sources seems quite mechanical and, thus, a bit confusing for the uninformed reader. For some texts which have been preserved in different ancient versions, it is quite clear that only one of those versions was ever interpreted messianically. Since the other ancient versions were not interpreted in this manner, including them in a collection like this is both unnecessary and confusing. For example, as is true for most texts from the Hebrew Bible within the Corpus Christologicum, Lanier includes the Masoretic Text, Greek translation, and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan for Amos 4:12– 13. Of these versions, only the Greek text reads “his Messiah” (τὸν χριστὸν αὐτοῦ) which is very likely due to a misreading of the Hebrew ‫“( מה שחו‬what his

intertextual links within the book of Isaiah that make it at least likely that the messianic rereading of Isa 7:14–16 was indeed carried out by some Jewish groups outside the Jesus movement; see, for instance, Randall Heskett, Messianism Within the Scriptural Scroll of Isaiah (LHB 456; New York: T&T Clark, 2007), 38–132; Richard M. Davidson, “e Messianic Hope in Isaiah 7:14 and the Volume of Immanuel (Isaiah 7–12),” in “For You

Have Strengthened Me”: Biblical and eological Studies in Honor of Gerhard Pfandl in Celebration of His Sixty-Fih Birthday, ed. Martin Pröbstle, trans. Gerhard Pfandl (St. Peter am Hart: Seminar Schloss Bogenhofen, 2007), 85–96; cf. also Ruben A. Bühner, Messianic High Christology: New Testament Variants of Second Temple Judaism (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2021), 108–109.

8 Cf. Zimmermann, Messianische Texte, 316–319; Xeravits, King.

112 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) thought”) as ‫“( משיחו‬his Messiah”). 9 Whereas it is absolutely clear that the Greek version can be classified as a messianic text, this is not true of the Hebrew text nor of Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, and we have no evidence that anyone in antiquity ever interpreted them messianically. In special cases like this, it might have been helpful to use a more flexible and individualized manner of presenting the selected sources.

Additionally, Lanier provides helpful, though scant, comments about the primary sources, their content, and their relevance, especially to early Christology. Although the book rightly focuses on the presentation of the ancient sources themselves, these introductory comments are at times misleading or omit crucial information. For example, the messianic character of 4Q246 is heavily debated in the scholarly literature, with some scholars arguing that the text portrays a negative rather than a messianic figure. 10 Yet, the introduction in Corpus Christologicum speaks without any hesitation or further reference of a “messianic” text (p. 205). Similarly, the introduction to CD XII and XIV tells the reader that the texts would attest to a “singular ‘Messiah of Aaron and Israel’.” Although such an interpretation is possible, Lanier does not alert the reader to the scholarly debate on this issue, which is divided between a singular and plural understanding. 11 Of course, for a sourcebook like this it is 8F

See Edward W. Glenny, Finding Meaning in the Text: Translation Technique and eology in the Septuagint of Amos (VTSup 126; Leiden: Brill, 2009), 238; Bühner, Hohe Messianologie, 91.

9

For a negative figure, see for instance, David Flusser, “e Hubris of the Antichrist in a Fragment from Qumran,” Imm 10 (1980): 31–37; Michael Segal, “Who Is the ‘Son of God’ in 4Q246? An Overlooked Example of Early Biblical Interpretation,” DSD 21 (2014): 289– 312; Józef T. Milik, “Les modèles araméens du livre d’Esther dans la Grotte 4 de Qumrân,” RevQ 15 (1992): 321–406, here 383. In contrast, others argue in favor of a positive and messianic figure; cf. Adela Y. Collins and John J. Collins, King and Messiah as Son of 10

God: Divine, Human, and Angelic Messianic Figures in Biblical and Related Literature

(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 65–74; Florentino García Martínez, “Messianische Erwartungen in den Qumranschriften,” Jahrbuch für biblische Theologie 8 (1993): 171– 208; Tucker S. Ferda, “Naming the Messiah: A Contribution to the 4Q246 ‘Son of God’ Debate,” DSD 21 (2014): 150–175, here 175; Zimmermann, Messianische Texte, 169– 170; Andrew Chester, Messiah and Exaltation: Jewish Messianic and Visionary Traditions and New Testament Christology (WUNT 207; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 232; Schreiber, Gesalbter, 498–508.

11 On this, cf. Zimmermann, Messianische Texte, 40–43.

Bühner, Corpus Christologicum: A Review Article 113 not necessary to give an interpretation of the selected sources, but the few introductory sentences should reflect the scholarly debates.

5. Indexes e various indexes Lanier provides will certainly be of great help for future research on the topic. Despite their broad coverage, however, they lack accuracy at times and omit some important texts. For example, the entry on “throne” omits Ps 110, and the entry on “Torah/Revelation” does not include 4 Ezra 14:21–50. Whereas these instances are rather marginal oversights, others are due to interpretative decisions which are not laid out. For example, the entry on the attribute “Sonship/Firstborn” does not mention 4 Ezra. Some scholars would agree with this decision since there are good reasons to assume that the Latin (filius) and Syriac (‫ )ܒܪܝ‬in 4 Ezra 7:28, 29; 13:32, 37, 52 go back to a Greek παῖς (rather than υἱός). Other scholars, however, have argued differently. For example, John J. Collins writes, “But even if the Greek did read παῖς, the word can also mean child or son—compare Wis 2:13, 16, where the righteous man claims to be παῖς of God and boasts that God is his father. In 4 Ezra 13, in any case, the context strongly suggests an allusion to Ps 2, so the meaning is ‘son’ rather than ‘servant.’” 12 In such debated cases, it would have been helpful to use the same broad principle in the indexes as Lanier uses for the inclusion of sources despite their debated dating and provenance.

1F

6. Relation of Christology and Messianism One could argue that the above-mentioned criticism regarding the selection and presentation of sources is rather marginal and irrelevant for a sourcebook like this which must limit its scope. is is a fair response. More objectionable than Lanier’s selection of sources themselves, however, is the theological/historical position the selection reflects. By focusing on the most important Second Temple texts for New Testament Christologies rather than presenting texts that attest to a diversity within Second Temple messianism, this sourcebook stands within a scholarly tradition that tends to differentiate between early Jewish messianism and New Testament Christology, arguing that although the latter is based on the former it is no longer a part of it. In the introduction to a volume of collected essays, Magnus Zetterholm has made a similar comment about Jewish and Christian messianism: “A concept of a Messiah exists both within Judaism, where it originated, and in Christianity, where perhaps it underwent its 12

Collins and Collins, King, 96.

114 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) most profound transformations.… ‘e Messiah’ has been the most important concept that distinguishes Christianity from Judaism.” 13 However, against this older line of research, scholars such as Matthew Novenson have demonstrated convincingly that early Christology itself is part of the messianic discourse of its time and cannot be separated from other messianic texts and traditions. 14 “In short, the o-cited stereotypes of the Jewish messiah and his Christian counterpart are as inaccurate as they are o-cited.” 15 Rather, historically, we should read New Testament Christology as nothing other than a possible variant of a diverse field of Second Temple messianism. 16 Including additional messianic texts and including texts from the Hebrew Bible which were interpreted as messianic texts outside the New Testament would have ensured an understanding that no longer sees Christology Magnus Zetterholm, “Introduction,” in e Messiah in Early Judaism and Christianity, ed. Magnus Zetterholm (Philadelphia: Fortress, 2007), xxiv. Cf. further, e.g., Martin Karrer, Der Gesalbte: Die Grundlagen des Christustitels (FRLANT 151; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), 408: “In allem Facettenreichtum der Stellungnahme beansprucht es [sc. the early Jesus movement, or, in Karrer’s words, ‘Urchristentum’] Gottes Herrsein, nicht Davids Herrschertum als entscheidenden Maßstab christlichen Gesalbtenverständnisses…. Christi, des Gesalbten, Hoheit und rettende Kraft drängt so in der Linie des Neuen Testaments unter Überbietung und Korrektur alles IrdischHerrscherlichen, ja überhaupt aller menschlichen Gesalbtenhoffnungen nach einer Explikation aus Gottesaussagen.” Similarly, Schreiber, Gesalbter, 491, concludes: “Ein wesentlicher Grund für die christliche Modifikation der königlichen Gesalbtenkonzeption liegt sicher darin, daß zentrale Züge dieser Tradition wie nationale Präferenz, königliche Herrschaftsausübung, politische Umgestaltung und übernatürliche (quasi-militärische) Macht im Auftreten Jesu keinen Anhalt finden. Dafür stellt der Titel die Möglichkeit zur Verfügung, Jesu einmalige Nähe zu Gott und den Heilscharakter seiner Existenz prägnant zu artikulieren.”

14 Cf. Matthew V. Novenson, e Grammar of Messianism: An Ancient Jewish Political Idiom and Its Users (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); idem, Christ Among the Messiahs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Benjamin Reynolds and Gabriele Boccaccini, eds., Reading the Gospel of John’s Christology as Jewish Messianism (AGJU; Boston: Brill, 2018); William Horbury, Jewish Messianism and the Cult of Christ (London: SCM Press, 1998); Collins and Collins, King; Bühner, Messianic High Christology. For a more detailed review of the common scholarly distinction between Christology and messianism, see Novenson, Grammar, 187–216.

15 Novenson, Grammar, 192–193.

16 Novenson, Grammar, 196, calls “Christian messianism … just an extraordinarily welldocumented example” of Jewish messianism.

13

Bühner, Corpus Christologicum: A Review Article 115 as a transformation or as the historical climax of all forms of early Jewish messianism. e same is true of some of the introductory lines Lanier provides before each primary source. ey tend to suggest a reading that understands Second Temple messianic texts as a preparatory context for New Testament Christology. Yet, with respect to the examples discussed above, 4Q246 for instance could also be read as a form of “counter-messianism” to what we find in the New Testament, 17 and if CD XII and XIV are understood as attesting a form of dual messianism, this would once again have a rather different relation to New Testament Christology.

Furthermore, the various indexes attest the book’s focus on New Testament Christology rather than on messianism. On the one hand, the indexes include several entries which are especially relevant for the study of the New Testament, such as the entry on “wisdom” or “worship.” On the other hand, potential entries that are primarily important for Second Temple messianism independent of the New Testament are overlooked at times. For instance, the indexes lack entries on the different “tools” or “weapons” of the messiah, his opponents, or texts which attest to a dual or triple messianism. Although messianic elements such as these may be only minimally relevant to the study of New Testament Christology, they are highly relevant to the study of messianism outside the early Jesus movement.

At all these points a more careful and less christological approach would reveal the close relationship between what we misleadingly label “Christology” and “messianism,” not because they share the same ideas, but because they take part in the same ancient discourse. at is, they argue with similar words, pretexts, and motifs but sometimes come to very different conclusions. e way we present ancient sources in sourcebooks like this not only recognizes possible differences within ancient texts, but also creates them. 18 at is, messianism is not only about fixed ideas and concepts for the end of times. It is also a political idiom, which is used in different times and places to make sense of differing circumstances and is used to define one’s identity. 19 is is also true for the history of Jewish-Christian relations in antiquity and, likewise, for the See Ruben A. Bühner, “e Contested Character of Divine Messianism: From an InnerJewish Debate to an Identity Marker,” Early Christianity 13 (2022): 433–454, here 438– 444.

18 Cf. Novenson, Grammar, 216.

19 On this, cf. also A. Y. Reed, “Messianism Between Judaism and Christianity,” in Rethinking the Messianic Idea in Judaism, ed. L. M. Morgan and S. Weitzman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 23–62; Bühner, “Contested Character.”

17

116 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) way modern scholars conceptualize the difference between messianism and Christology. Such categorical distinctions are not only questionable in a historical perspective and represent anti-Jewish clichés in theological perspective, but they once again reveal that messiah language—then and now— is also a political idiom that is used to define one’s own identity and to secure one’s own claims against the claims of others. As recent studies have revealed, early Christology is not only rooted within Jewish ideas but should be seen as a possible variant of Second Temple messianism.

7. Conclusion Lanier’s sourcebook certainly does not intend to reaffirm the older notion of a categorical difference between messianism and Christology. On the contrary, this unique and monumental reference work not only has the potential to become the standard sourcebook for future research, but also has the potential to help readers overcome long established clichés. Nevertheless, in some places it reveals how subconsciously and deeply rooted these scholarly traditions can be.

Torleif Elgvin’s Warrior, King, Servant, Savior: A Review Article Jesper Høgenhaven University of Copenhagen | jh@teol.ku.dk JJMJS No. 11 (2024): 117–124

Torleif Elgvin has written an ambitious book 1 on a complex, intensely disputed, and deeply fascinating topic, the rise and development of Israelite and early Jewish royal ideology and messianic expectations. The book covers the entire span of time from before the emergence of biblical literature into the rabbinic period, in accordance with Elgvin’s firm recognition that messianism in the Hebrew Bible must be understood in a continuum with the textual evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other examples of the wider phenomenon of Jewish literature from the Second Temple period. The development of messianic ideas has been treated in the past in a number of influential works—names like Sigmund Mowinckel and John J. Collins immediately come to mind. 2 Definitions of “messiah” and what constitutes a messianic notion have been the subject of much scholarly debate, often intertwined with different positions on the history of Israelite and Jewish religion, the growth of biblical literature, and the relations between ancient Judaism and early Christianity. Attempting a comprehensive take on this huge and variegated material requires not only courage, but a solid command of several fields.

Torleif Elgvin, Warrior, King, Servant, Savior: Messianism in the Hebrew Bible and Early Jewish Texts (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022).

2 Sigmund Mowinckel, Han som kommer. Messiasforventningen i det gamle testament og på Jesu tid (København: G.E.C. Gad, 1951); English edition: He That Cometh: The Messiah Concept in the Old Testament and Later Judaism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956); John J. Collins, The Scepter and the Star: Messianism in the Light of the Dead Scrolls (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010). Several Scandinavian scholars have contributed to the discussion of messianism; see Aage Bentzen, Messias. Moses redivivus.

Menschensohn. Skizzen zum Thema Weissagung und Erfüllung (ATANT 17; Zürich: Zwingli-Verlag, 1948); Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, King and Messiah: The Civil and Sacral Legitimation of the Israelite Kings (ConBOT 8; Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1976). See also, more recently, Matthew V. Novenson, The Grammar of Messianism: An Ancient Jewish Political Idiom and Its Users (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

1

118 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) Elgvin’s primary interest is not in discussing definitions. His perspective is fundamentally empirical and historical, as he regards the gradual—and sometimes abrupt—emergence and evolution of different notions of kingship and future kings as savior figures as a continuum, unfolding in tandem with the development of ancient Israelite and Jewish written traditions.

He begins in Chapter 1 (“Son of David,” 1–54) by sketching the historical and archeological evidence for the existence of an early Israelite monarchy associated with the royal figures of David and Solomon. The notion of a political unity in the Iron Age, corresponding to the biblical traditions of Saul, David, and Solomon, is contested, given the scarcity of extra-biblical sources available.

Elgvin, however, points to the archaeological remains that can be interpreted as reflecting a monarchic state in the tenth century, and he cites the references to the “house of David” in the Tel Dan inscription and, arguably, in the text of the Mesha stele (duly noting the challenges to the authenticity of the former). 3 These sources lend additional credibility to the historicity of David, and establish the existence of a “house of David” as a plausible designation for the Judean Kingdom. Regardless of the implications and relevance one assigns to the (possible) historical beginnings of the Israelite and Judaean monarchies for the development of royal ideology, Elgvin provides a highly useful and concise treatment of the evidence.

Moreover, Elgvin deals briefly but comprehensively with royal ideologies in Mesopotamian and Egyptian sources, and then turns to the Hebrew Bible texts. He dates “the source behind 2 Sam 7” (Nathan’s promise to David of an eternal house) to the tenth century, the cores of Psalms 2, 110, and 21 to the late tenth or ninth century, and Psalm 72 to the late eighth or seventh century. In these texts, Elgvin traces elements of royal ideology, such as the king’s divine sonship, that in his view were taken over and adapted to Yahwism by early Israelite scribes.

Elgvin then turns to the Northern Kingdom in Chapter 2 (“Royal Ideology in the Northern Kingdom,” 55–75), arguing that the royal passage of the Balaam oracle (Num 24:15–19) preserves a Northern Israelite version of royal ideology that likely goes back to the era of the ninth century Omride dynasty. He notes how the prediction of a “star rising from Jacob” ( ‫דרך כוכב‬ ‫מיעקב‬, Num 24:17) in a much later time became foundational for the Bar Kokhba Regarding the mention of a “house of David” restored in the Mesha Inscription, see André Lemaire, “‘House of David’ Restored in Moabite Inscription,” BAR 20.3 (1994): 30–37.

3

Høgenhaven, Warrior, King, Servant, Savior:|A Review Article 119 revolt, as documented in rabbinic texts. A reflection of this Northern tradition is also visible in Jacob’s blessing of Joseph in Gen 49. However, after the fall of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BCE, these traditions were transferred to Judah, and incorporated into larger tradition complexes, where the main emphasis was on the Davidic Kingdom. Elgvin briefly explains the historical framework as an influx of Israelite refugees into Judean territory following the Assyrian conquest of Samaria, resulting in a considerable expansion of Jerusalem, as archaeological findings have demonstrated. 4 The tumultuous final decades of the Northern Kingdom and the subsequent fall of its last remains sparked hopes for a future restoration of a united kingdom, as echoed in Ps 80 and the Book of Hosea.

In Chapter 3 (“From Isaiah to Josiah,” 76–103), Elgvin goes on to show how the last century of the Judean Kingdom saw first a rise, and then a shattering of expectations surrounding the Davidic dynasty. This, according to Elgvin, can be seen in the famous, and intensely debated, “royal” passages in the Book of Isaiah, Isa 7:14–17 and 8:23b–9:6. Elgvin regards Isa 7:14–17 as an eighth century oracle, proclaiming the birth of a new Davidic king, who would replace King Ahaz. At the same time, the oracle predicts war and destruction for both Israel and Judah. No distant messianic future is envisaged here. Isaiah 8:23b–9:6 is discussed in some detail, and alternative suggestions for the date of the passage, wholly or partly, to either the time of Isaiah, or the time of King Josiah in the late seventh century, are considered. Ultimately, Elgvin opts for the latter possibility. The triumphant celebration of a new future for the Northern provinces under a Davidic ruler seems to fit the immediate aftermath of the collapse of Assyrian power in the region under Josiah better than an eighth century scenario. Furthermore, Isa 8:23b–9:6 represents a reworking of the Davidic promise theme. The reign of Josiah is likely to have sparked hopes of a Davidic restoration, including a reunification of Judah and Israel. However, his premature death meant that this attempted restoration failed. Echoes of these hopes can be found in biblical texts, particularly, in Jeremiah, while later texts develop the theme of Josiah as a righteous king favored by Yahweh, who fell by the sword (Zech 12:10–13:9). Micah 5:1–8 is an exilic relecture of the Isaianic oracles, postponing the birth and reign of a Davidide into the future.

Chapter 4 (“The End of the Kingdom,” 104–142) deals with the fall of the Judean Kingdom and the deportation of the Judean elite to Mesopotamia.

These catastrophic events challenged prevailing notions of kingdom, and led to Cf., in particular, Magen Broshi, “The Expansion of Jerusalem in the Reigns of Hezekiah and Manasseh,” IEJ 24 (1974): 21–26.

4

120 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) significant and variegated transformations of royal ideology. Elgvin points to the Davidic covenant theology introduced in Psalm 89 as a new element, inspired by Deuteronomistic theology. Following the experience of exile, evolutions of royal ideology went in different directions: Hopes for a restoration of the Davidic Kingdom can be traced in the continuous reworking and expansion of prophetic literature. Here, Elgvin points to texts like Jer 23:5–6 LXX; 37:18–21 LXX; Amos 9:11–15, and, notably, Isa 11:1–5 as evidence of this trend. Moreover, he suggests that the garden of Eden narrative in Gen 2–3 could also be read as a reflection on the trauma of the exile. The story symbolically captures the disobedience that led Judah and Israel into exile, but also points to the continued care of God. On the other hand, a very different perspective on the expected, future restoration of God’s people is evidenced in the earliest stratum of the Book of Ezekiel. The prophet Ezekiel had no place for a future Davidic king, but in subsequent redactions of the book scribes chose to insert the Davidic motif. Something similar can be said of Deutero-Isaiah with respect to various redactions and stages of literary growth: in the earliest layers of Isa 40–55, which in Elgvin’s view derive from an anonymous prophet from the time of the rise of Cyrus, before the fall of Babylon, the Persian king is the anointed instrument of Yahweh, and Davidic motifs are transferred to him as the liberator of Yahweh’s people and the agent of justice on earth. Elgvin provides a concise but incisive discussion of the “servant songs” (Isa 42:1–7; 49:1–9a; 50:4–11; 52:13–53:12), highlighting the potential for different readings of the servant figure, individual or collective, and explores the various ways the suffering servant has likely been understood in subsequent contextualizations, where the servant was seen as a reflection of figures such as Jehoiachin, Zerubbabel, Jeremiah, and Moses. These texts resonate with royal, prophetic, and cultic images, and lend themselves to collective as well as individual interpretations.

He places special weight on the interpretation evidenced by the Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran (1QIsaa, ca. 100 BCE), which reflects a messianic reading of Isa 52:13–53:12, reading ‫“( משחתי‬I anointed”) in 52:13 (rather than MT: ‫משחת‬, “marred”).

The period immediately following the return of a small group of Judeans from Babylonia was crucial for the postponement of hopes for a new Davidic king into a distant future. The development of this period is treated in Chapter 5 (“The Return to Judah and Messianic Hopes,” 143–180). Again, Elgvin provides a sketch of the historical background: Judah seems to have been sparsely populated during the centuries following the exile, and Jerusalem was at this time no more than a small “temple village.” Only a small contingent of

Høgenhaven, Warrior, King, Servant, Savior: A Review Article 121 exiled Judeans chose to return to the land. An important testimony from this period is Zech 4, which inaugurated the notion of two anointed leader figures, a king and a priest, working side by side, termed the “two sons of oil” (‫שני בני‬, ‫ היצהר‬Zech 4:14). The passage may have consciously avoided the term “anointed one” for political reasons. This dual image—a “landmark in the development of messianism,” according to Elgvin—would prove highly influential over the subsequent centuries, with some scribes emphasizing the expectation of an anointed priest, others that of an anointed king. There were also messianic concepts reiterating the dual messianism, like those of the Qumran community.

While the expectations voiced in Zech 4 originated in a situation where the Davidide Zerubbabel briefly held the office of governor in Persian Yehud, alongside Joshua the priest, Zerubbabel was probably removed from office by the Persians exactly because of the potentially “dangerous” restoration hopes associated with his royal ancestry.

Expectations of a future restoration on a greater and more glorious scale than the realities of Persian period and early Hellenistic period Judah were developed in different directions. Some texts describe the role of a future Davidic king in rather vague terms (Jer 33:17–22), while others are reminiscent of the suffering servant figure of Isaiah 53 (Zech 9). Elgvin demonstrates how the redactional growth of the Psalms collection reflects an ongoing elaboration of the image of King David as a warrior, a songster, and a founder of the cult, a development documented in the Septuagint as well as the Qumran Psalms Scroll (11QPsa).

The second century BCE is a new turning-point in the development of messianic expectations. In Chapter 6 (“The Upheavals of the Second Century BCE,” 181–227), Elgvin traces these new trends against the background of the incorporation of Judaea into the Seleucid empire, and, subsequently, the revolt and the rise of a new independent Hasmonean state. Again, tendencies run in different directions: There are strains within Judaism that envisage a future glorious restoration of the temple and the priesthood without any place for a Davidic king. This is the perspective of Ben Sira and the Aramaic Levi texts. On the other hand, the second century also witnessed the emergence of eschatological expectations involving a messianic figure with close ties to the heavenly realm. In Elgvin’s understanding of Dan 7, the “son of man” (‫בר אנש‬, Dan 7:13) is such a messianic figure, “an end-time, earthly Davidic king being ‘online’ with heaven while he still rules on earth.” Elgvin defends this interpretation in a discussion with Collins’s view of the “son of man” as a

122 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) heavenly being, 5 pointing to the messianic understanding as supported by early interpretations of the passage found in the Enochic Similitudes (1 En. 37–71) and in the Qumran composition 4QMessianic Apocalypse (4Q521).

Chapter 7 (“The Messiahs of the Scrolls,” 228–262) gives an overview of messianic ideas in the manuscripts from Qumran. Elgvin dates the origins of the Qumran community (the Yahad) to the mid-second century BCE, and regards the Hasmonean Simon as the most plausible candidate for the role of the “Wicked Priest” in the Yahad compositions. As Elgvin states, no homogeneity should be expected in the Qumran scrolls with regard to eschatology or messianic expectations. In some of the core texts of the Yahad, The Community Rule (1QS), The Rule of the Congregation (1QSa), and 4QTestimonia (4Q175), the end time scenario includes a priestly and a royal messiah, the messiahs of Aaron and of Israel, as well as an eschatological prophet. However, in other sectarian texts—notably some of the pesher commentaries—a royal messiah, a “shoot of David,” is the expected figure leading Israel at the end of times. Several of these passages make an effort to associate the Davidic messiah with observance of the Torah and deference to the priesthood. The collection of manuscripts also contains texts that envisage a priestly end time figure, painted in the colors of the suffering servant of Isaiah 53, with no reference to a royal messiah. This is the case in the Aramaic composition 4Q541 (4QApocryphon of Levib?), which describes a Levitical priest making atonement for all of his generation through his sufferings, and similar ideas can be detected in the Self-Glorification Hymns and other hymns included in the Hodayot, which may have been read in association with the Teacher of Righteousness. A “collective messianism,” where God’s people are the primary agent on God’s behalf in the end time scenario, seems to be evidenced in the Qumran War Scroll (1QM).

In Chapter 8 (“Jewish Messianisms after the Turn of the Era,” 263– 315), Elgvin traces the continued developments of, and reflections on, messianism in Jewish literature from the late first to the seventh centuries CE. The decisive historical event of this period was the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–136 CE). The evidence from literary sources as well as coinage clearly suggests that Simon Bar Kokhba was regarded by his adherents as a messianic figure, inaugurating the “freedom of Israel.” These messianic pretentions are reflected in rabbinic texts, as is the brutal suppression of the revolt by the Romans.

John J. Collins, Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel (Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1993), 304–310.

5

Høgenhaven, Warrior, King, Servant, Savior: A Review Article 123 Through a sampling of passages, Elgvin shows how messianic expectations and motifs continued to be voiced in Talmudic texts of the following centuries, often associated with mysterious or ambiguous notions, sometimes in critical or polemical dialogue with early Christian ideas. At some point during the first five centuries CE the notion of two messiahs emerged, a messiah, son of Joseph, as the forerunner of the Messiah, son of David. The notion of a suffering messiah, painted in the colors of Isa 53, in the late collection Pesiqta Rabbati is an exception.

The strength of Elgvin’s book lies in its comprehensive nature. Having this wide range of sources treated in one place is extremely useful, and Elgvin should be credited for stating his arguments in a concise manner, without engaging in lengthy polemics or discussions. It goes almost without saying that there are areas not covered in the book—the most obvious case being the New Testament and early Christian literature, which is only touched upon briefly, in particular in Chapter 8. This field has of course been covered extensively in numerous other contributions. Without a particular set of definitions, decisions about what is relevant will sometimes be somewhat arbitrary. For instance, the ambivalent attitude of the Deuteronomistic History towards kingship (witnessed in the narratives of the origins of Israelite kingship in 1 Sam 8–10 and in the law of kings in Deut 17:14–20) is not assessed in relation to Nathan’s promise to David in 2 Sam 7. This is not, however, a criticism of Elgvin’s selection of a rich variety of important passages. The structure of the book is, as the chapter headings show, basically chronological. Elgvin’s emphasis on the centrality of the earliest available material witnesses to the Hebrew Bible literature, namely, the Qumran scrolls, is in itself an important and encouraging sign of a growing recognition, within the field of biblical studies, of the significance of these sources.

Inevitably, some will disagree with particular suggested dates and interpretations. In some cases, Elgvin exhibits a greater confidence in the possibility of discerning the redactional history of biblical passages, and assigning plausible dates to their various strata, than some interpreters, including the present writer, would embrace. To mention but one example, when he follows William Schniedewind in regarding 1 Kgs 8:12–13 as the oldest stratum of the temple dedication account, 6 I wonder if there is an underlying assumption at play dictating that the more “materially” oriented idea of Yahweh William Schniedewind, Society and the Promise to David: The Reception History of 2 Sam 7:1–17 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 40–46.

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124 JJMJS No. 11 (2024) dwelling in the darkness of the temple must be older or more original than the more “spiritual” assertions that Yahweh’s name dwells in the temple while Yahweh himself is in the heavens. This raises questions, for example, concerning the age of the Priestly texts with their perception of the glory (kābôd) of Yahweh residing in the sanctuary vis-à-vis the Deuteronomistic notion of Yahweh’s name.

Because of the chronological framework, biblical texts are treated in their (possible) order of composition and redaction rather than any canonical sequence. The index of passages, however, makes it easy for the reader to locate any given source in the book. Elgvin writes in a concise and clear style and with an attractive flow. He notes in the preface that the book was written during the Covid-19 pandemic when access to scholarly literature in libraries was limited.

This may in the end have been to the advantage of the book, which strikes a good balance between providing the necessary references and information, and overburdening the reader with research history. While messianism has probably been both over- and under-estimated by scholars past and present, struggling to reconstruct the complex phenomena of ancient Judaism and early Christianity, Elgvin’s book is an important contribution to ongoing discussions, and provides immediate access, for scholars and students alike, to the central sources.

Issue 10 2023

JJM JS Journal of the Jesus Movement in its Jewish Setting

ISSN 2374-7870

Issue 10 2023

J M JJ S Journal of the Jesus Movement

in its Jewish Setting

From the First to the Seventh Century