As the Jewish scholar Moshe Goshen-Gottstein put it, where Christians see the Bible as a story about God, humanity and salvation, Jews read it as being about God, people and land. The story of Adam and Eve is a minor theme. There is no grand narrative in the Hebrew Bible, certainly not one that would culminate in the coming of Jesus, but more a collection of individual stories, sayings and teachings that together constitute a tissue of instructions on how to live a good life as a Jew.
The prophetic books do not come last so as to lead into the New Testament, but follow the Torah the books of Moses as commentary on it. The Bible is so variegated that it can support both these and, probably, many other ways of reading it, while mandating none.
The Christian and the Jewish readings of the Hebrew Bible are both driven by forces external to the actual text. For Christians, the writings of Paul, part of the New Testament, are one such major influence.
He initiated the reading of the Hebrew Bible in terms of a universal human disaster, followed by a rescue mission focused in Jesus.
This interpretation then became standard in the Church throughout the early centuries, and has remained so to this day. For Jews, after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE—an event that forced a reorientation of the way the religion was observed—the rabbinic tradition increasingly saw the Bible as a closed corpus that could be used as a guide for living in the present, rather than as orientated to the future of the world.
As far as scholars can tell, most Jews never experienced the law in the way the Apostle Paul sometimes describes it: in terms of guilt or enslavement to sin. Jews all over the Mediterranean world impressed and intrigued Greeks and Romans with their devout devotion to an aniconic God, their dietary regulations, their Sabbaths, and their circumcisions. Through these rituals, Jews celebrated ongoing interaction with God. If ritual was a mode of paying attention, the ancient Jews had figured out myriad ways of paying attention to God.
Paul argues so adamantly about his position precisely because these rituals — and the communities they engendered — must have been appealing to the recipients of his letters. To understand Judaism, Jewish practices, and Jewish beliefs in terms of a binary with Christianity and Christian beliefs is fundamentally wrong.
Through the centuries and in America today, it has proven dangerous as well. Medieval imaginings of the blood-thirsty, wretched Jews, guilty of the murder of Jesus, provoked countless expulsions, pogroms, blood-libels , and genocides. It was only after the Holocaust that scholars acknowledged that supersessionist thinking permeated the study of Judaism and had violent real-world implications.
After World War II, religion departments in America began reframing the relationship of Judaism and Christianity as sibling religions that parted ways in the first century CE. This has proven to be a fragile term, poorly papering over differences that were never fully confronted. That hyphenated link is now fraying as a certain segment of Americans define themselves against an imagined Other, the Jew, once again.
Jews are once again serving as a useful foil and are being demonized once more in this polarized and poisoned political climate. Hetfield meant, we must to turn to the biblical sources. Today, many Jews — including me — understand refugees to be strangers, much as the ancient Israelites were strangers in the land of Egypt, driven there by famine and dependent on the kindness of others. We might compare this with a conversation a gentile had with one of the leading interpreters of the Torah in the first century CE.
More recently in religious studies, scholars have reframed the relationship of Judaism and Christianity again. Instead, these Jewish and Christian communities continued to overlap and share much in common, only slowly establishing their boundaries, and defining themselves through each other for centuries.
This is a process that continues today. The fact that Bar Kohkbah did not successfully defeat Rome ultimately meant he did not turn out to be a Messiah — but he certainly took on the job of a Jewish Messiah. There are multiple forms of Jewish messianism , but none of them believe that a messianic figure — if such a person exists — will be divine.
This is in large part because the traditional job of a Messiah — the restoration of the Jewish state — has already been accomplished. Some Jews do believe that a Messiah will come, but the signs that would foretell have not appeared yet. Jews do not share the Christian belief that Jesus was divine. This difference in belief is grounded in the Jewish assertion that there is only one God, who can never be human, even though God may reveal himself in multiple ways.
Historically, this created an insurmountable theological barrier between Jews and Christians. Although Jewish Christians have technically been around since the death of Jesus, the more modern form of the movement has its roots in late 19th-century Europe, when anti-Semitic persecution was on the rise in Russia and large numbers of Jews immigrated to the United States. The sole focus of some missions based in England and the U. Rosemary Radford Ruether's provocative equation of Christology and anti-Semitism see Faith and Fratricide has for recent authors acquired the status of an unquestionable premise.
To borrow James Carroll's image, Christianity must atone for its past by throwing itself on the same sword it wielded against Jews. Only the suicide of Christian truth claims is sacrifice sufficient to answer the Holocaust. But showy self-immolation is no solution. Ironically, such public self-negation simply continues the pattern of Christian grandiosity.
Moreover, this reflex among Christians shows how devastating the long history of supersessionism was. It led to the persecution and murder of Jews. It fundamentally distorted Christian identity as well. Nothing so reveals the powerful hold of supersessionism on the Christian consciousness as the fact that many of those who rightly abjure it find that they have no Christianity left.
With respect to supersessionism's first consequence, the persecution and murder of Jews, Christians need to do more than make symbolic gestures or eloquent apologies. They need to pray for the mercy of God and ask for the prayers of those Jews who have survived their savage stupidity. Most of all, they need to repent. The word means change. And that brings us to the second consequence, the distortion of Christian consciousness.
With respect to this, Christians need to change in fundamental ways. But they need to change as Christians. Simple reminders. A healthier conversation might begin by Christians recognizing that what makes supersessionism wrong is not its current political incorrectness but its lack of theological imagination.
If, in fact, two parties should make contradictory truth claims on precisely the same point, then it would be necessary that one claim cancel the other.
If you say that you alone inherit this property but I say that I alone inherit it - and we are the only available heirs - then one of us being right means the other must be wrong.
But putting the matter that way in the case of Jews and Christians is to put it wrongly, for two reasons. The first reason is that, if we truly believe that there is but one God for all humans see Rom , then Jews and Christians are not either together or separately the exclusive recipients of God's gifts.
All humans are God's children. A sibling rivalry between two children in complete disregard of the larger family is both self-centered and silly. For either Jews or Christians to understand "election" in terms of an exclusive claim on God's revelation or care is to diminish God as well as the religious impulses of all the world's peoples. It is imperative that Christians and Jews move into modernity at least in this respect, that they recognize that the biblical story is not world history and that the self-disclosure of God in Scripture does not exhaust God's capacity for self-disclosure.
The "Gentiles" of the present day also should figure into Jewish and Christian thinking about God. The second reason is that the internal claims of Jews and Christians are markedly different and do not cancel each other. In Jewish terms, for example, Jesus must be considered a failed Messiah even if he is not regarded as a false Messiah.
He did not, after all, make things better for Jews, and that is the minimum requirement for a Jewish Messiah. Judaism is fundamentally misconstrued, however, when it is reduced to messianism.
Defining Judaism in terms of messianic expectation is defining it from a Christian rather than a Jewish perspective. Not even in the first two centuries of the Common Era, when messianism was rampant in Palestine, do we find a trace of it in the Diaspora, where most Jews lived. From Bar Kochba to Sabbatai Sevi, and from Sabbatai Sevi to Zionism, Judaism has flourished religiously apart from any significant messianic impulses but centered in community patterns of observance, study, and worship, based on the commandments of God.
On the other side, the Christian claim that Jesus is Messiah is not connected in any manner to empirical leadership over the Jews, but to Jesus' exaltation to God's right hand as the resurrected Lord. For Christians, Jesus is not a new Moses who displaces the old law with a new one, but the New Adam - whose "life-giving spirit" 1 Cor inaugurates a "new creation" 2 Cor ; Gal Christians understand the "promise to Abraham' not in terms of the flourishing of the people on the land, but as the eschatological gift of the Holy Spirit poured out on all flesh and capable of transforming human freedom itself Acts ; 2 Cor 3: Christians understand righteousness as measured not by the observance of the commandments but by the obedient faith of Jesus Rom The texts shared by Christians and Jews, in short, are read in fundamentally different ways, not simply because Christians read Tanakh the Hebrew Scriptures in light of the New Testament, but because the New Testament itself is based on distinctive religious experiences and convictions not recognized as their own by Jews past and present.
Christians and Jews are not and should never have been in the present situation of Jews and Muslims in Israel today, wrangling over specific geography because of religious associations. The saddest theological aspect of the Crusades was not the violence they fostered toward Jews as well as Muslims but the way they distorted the point of Christian faith, for which "the Jerusalem above" ought to be the only Jerusalem that matters see Gal ; Heb Given the fact that Jesus is clearly not a Jewish Messiah in any manner that makes sense to Judaism, and given the fact that Judaism honors God by its profound and enduring witness to God's holiness through its own understanding of Torah and its demands, there is every reason for Jews to continue within and celebrate their own tradition with no particular concern for what Christians might think.
That so many Christians over the centuries have assumed that they had the right to define Judaism simply shows how far they were confused about Christianity's distinctive experience and conviction. Toward a truer conversation. Christians can begin to leave supersessionism behind by cultivating three unaccustomed attitudes, and turning each attitude into a consistent practice. The first is an appropriate theological modesty.
0コメント