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et us begin with a disclaimer: When one tries to reconstruct ancient history it is difficult to know when one has hit upon the correct theory, because there are no surviving eye witnesses and the documentary and archeological evidence is so often ambiguous if not contradictory. That is why the discipline rarely gets beyond the realm of probabilitya very humbling thought. There has to be an even greater degree of diffidence in approaching this particular undertaking. The human spirit cannot be held in the hand. If it is a tall order to reduce to words a single spiritual experience of one human being, how much more so a complex of ideas and convictions subscribed to by large hosts of people. And yet many of us, including those who chose the title A Jewish Perspective of Jesus for the original lecture that became the precursor of this paper (see the authors note, at the end of the article), evidently deem words not totally inadequate vehicles for communicating and sharing ideas and meaningful dialogue about them. Forums like this are quite momentous. We do well to remember how fortunate we are to be living in a time and place that allow scholarship to breathe. Once upon a time, encounters between faiths, and even between sects and denominations, were fraught with tension. If they occurred at all, they were occasions for subterfuge and one-upmanship and usually resulted in misunderstanding and resentment. Today, thanks in part to psychological insights, we recognize that there can be more than one valid expression for the human spirit, and that even unity and accord among peoples should not and need not be contingent upon conformity. It may also be that the excesses to which the old intolerances led have tardily alerted us to the destructiveness of narrow partisanship. Above all, those brave pioneers of intellectually honest scholarship have shown how enriching an endeavor it can be. They have paved the way for us, the more cautious, to bring up the rear in this forward march
towards a deeper appreciation of all spirituality. And so, in the promise of this openness, I shall try to submit: A Jewish Perspective of Jesus. The title does not demand a Jewish perspective of Christianity. Definitionally any Jewish perspective of Christianity is an outsiders. By living his/her life in the faith of Israel, the Jew makes clear his stance vis--vis other faiths. A perspective of Jesus is quite another matter. And, of course, there is more than one perspective. To some extent, everyone forms his or her own individual impression even of their contemporaries whom they can question directly. This holds at least as true for those that are no longer around to give interviews and can be glimpsed only second hand and through the mists of time. So when I the man, the Jew, the American was asked to present a perspective, I knew that on an essential level it would be my personal reading of the relevant texts. For that is all we have: textsand our best shot. Most of what we know about Jesus comes from the four
Rabbi Steven H. Golden, M.A. (The Jewish Theological Seminary of America), was among the first graduates to receive semikhah (rabbinical ordination) from The Institute of Traditional Judaism (Teaneck, NJ). Twice chosen to serve as a Student Chevra Intern at CLAL, the National Center for Learning and Leadership, he is the author of Jewish Service and the Jewish Tradition, published in CONTACTThe Journal of Jewish Life Network (summer 1999). Golden is an adjunct faculty member at the Skirball Center for Adult Jewish Learning at Temple Emanu-El in New York City and currently serves as Rabbi of the Jewish Community Center of Spring Valley, NY. He can be reached at Greenbriar at Whittingham, One Birmingham Lane, Monroe Township NJ 08831-2638, and his e-mail
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Gospels, which are also the oldest extant texts. There are also a number of apocryphal gospels, and the Roman historian Tacitus has a brief notice. Then there are the Jewish sources, namely the Talmud and Josephus, and some would add the Hebrew and Aramaic versions of the so-called Toldot Yeshu. These are a natural first stop. However, for anyone curious as to how Jews close to his time remembered Jesus, the Talmuds usefulness is minimal. That is because we do not find the rabbis to have preserved any independent memories of Jesus. Instead, what they provide are responses to the Christian reality. No doubt these responsespatently combative and propagandistwere intended to counter questions from both within and without. Or to quote John P . Meier (98) . . . when we do finally find such references [to Jesus] in later rabbinic literature, they are most probably reactions to Christian claims, oral or written. What applies to the rabbinic sources goes a fortiori for Toldot Yeshu. That is because the latter is extracted from that very same rabbinic materialalbeit reworked, and amply and scatologically embellished by the skillful redactor. If the Talmud takes liberties with the niceties of chronology and halakha in the polemical cause, Toldot plays fast and loose; e.g. Yehoshua ben Perahyah, Queen Helen (of Adiabene? Constantines mother?) and Jesus are made coeval! Embedded in the farrago, lodge no doubt vestiges of early anti-Christian propaganda useful for studying the agonistic age of the evangelists. But nothing reliable can be gleaned from this material regarding what his Jewish contemporarieswhether friend or foe, admirer or detractorthought of Jesus. For that one would need a source that is earlier and, preferably, less creative. Of course, the letters of Paul and at least some of the Gospels were authored by men Jewish by birth and upbringing. When they wrote, however, they had already joined the Christian movement. That means not only that their perspective must count as Christian and not Jewish but even when they describe Jewish reactions with very few exceptions it is hostility they describe. Yet all four Gospels make it clear that most if not all Jesus friends and supporters were Jews, which proves that Jewish opinion about Jesus was by no means monolithically hostile. But it must be borne in mind that these documents attained their present form at a time when Church and Synagogue were caught up in bitter rivalry, when only people who are against the writers church are called Jews. Jew especially in Johns Gospelhas become almost a synonym for adversary. So because these documents display at times a slant no less partisan than the Toldot, disentangling fact from legend from apologetics becomes rather tricky. However, unlike the much later Toldot genre, genuine traditions are recoverable from beneath the polemical overlay of Gospel and Epistle. And when those traditions relate to Jesus Jewish acquaintances and their stance towards him, they are indispensable to our quest, as we shall see by and by. Then there is Josephus Flavius, the
Jewish historian, who lived from 37 CE until the year 100 CE. The standard text (also called the vulgate) of the 18th book of Josephus ANTIQUITIES contains the following reference to Jesus:
About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. When Pilate, upon an accusation brought by the principal men (or men of the highest standing) among us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love [him] did not cease. On the third day he appeared to them restored to life. For the prophets of G-d had prophesied these and myriads of other marvelous [things] about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still up to now, not disappeared [ANTIQUITIES XVIII, 6364].
The question is: how much, if any, of this passage known as the Testimonium Flavianum (i.e. The Testimony of Josephus Flavius, TF) flowed from the pen of Josephus, and how much was a later Christian concoction? Ever since the Renaissance, critical readers have contended that only a Christianwhich Josephus was notcould have written the above passage replete as it is with Church dogma. In the wake of this realization, many scholars dismissed the entire TF as a forgery. Others argued for its authenticity, reasoning that had Josephus work not contained a testimonium, the Church would not have embraced the Jewish historian the way it did. A third group attempted to reconstruct a hypothetical TF that was more compatible with Judaism. Then in 1971, the meticulous Jewish scholar Shlomo Pines, shed new light on the whole issue. In an article he published that year, he brought to bear evidence from a previously ignored quotation of the TF in an Arabic text. That text, KITAB AL-UNWAN, a tenth century historical work by Agapius (also called Mahboub) bishop of Hierapolis, had been twice published earlier in the century, but its import had somehow been overlooked. Here is Agapius variant TF:
At this time there was a wise man who was called Jesus. His conduct was good, and [he] was known to be virtuous. And many people from among the Jews and the other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. But those who had become his disciples did not abandon his discipleship. They reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion, and that he was alive; accordingly he was perhaps the Messiah, concerning whom the prophets have recounted wonders [Pines: 16].
Pines recognized immediately that Agapius version tallied in at least one important detail with Origens version of the TF.
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Dr. Ernst Bammel of the Cambridge Divinity School is far readier to deprive the omission of material significance. He writes: The omission of Jewish participation may be attributed to Agapiuss customary abbreviation of his sources. He does not need to include this detail here since he has supplied this information in the two neighboring sections of his account (1974a: 146). So according to Bammel, Agapius might well have decided to skip the reference to the accusation brought by Jewish leaders even if he had found it in his Syriac Vorlage of TF. And this because he has supplied this information in the two neighboring sections of his account. Now, the two sections between which Agapius sandwiches his TF do indeed contain references to the crucifixion. What they impute to the Jews is, however, not the bringing of an accusation before Pilate but the crucifixion itselfwhich is surely a very different story. More germane, those references do not occur in Agapiuss own words but rather in texts which, like Josephus, he presents as quotationsthe first from a putative dossier drawn up by Pilate for Tiberius Caesar and the second in a letter of Abgar, king of Edessa. One cannot but wonder why Agapius would have arbitrarily dropped the reference to Jewish complicity just from his Josephus citation while retaining it even in the Abgar source that he quotes after Josephusunless he felt the lesser guilt ascribed to the Jews in Josephus diluted the effect of his two more robustly anti-Jewish sources. To sum up, though one would welcome the idea of a TF that said nothing of Jewish involvement in the arrest of Jesus, the argument that a Christian hand added the relatively mild clause about the Jewish accusation is weaker than the opposite case: viz., that Agapiusconsciously or subconsciouslyomitted that clause because it gave the Jews too small a role. So we have to reckon with the distinct possibility that Josephus did write the words upon an accusation brought by the principal men among us. But what was he thinking of? How do Jewish leaders come to denounce a son of their people to the hated Roman prefect? In the Gospelsand most explicitly in JohnJewish and Roman authorities cooperate in the arrest of Jesus. But Josephus configuration would be more shocking, insofar as it makes Jewish worthies the instigators, all but implying that without their initiative Jesus might not have come to Pilates baleful attention. For the rabbis the most dastardly thing an Israelite could do was to hand over a fellow Israelite to the iniquitous Roman government. Such a person is called a moser or masor (see Rosh Hashanah 17a et al.). There are stern prohibitions against so
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much as taking a civil case to a Roman court of law (Gittin 88b; Midrash Tanhuma, Mishpatim 3)let alone surrendering to its jurisdiction the life of a fellow Jew. Thus, one would have expected the Jewish community to protect its members from the intrusive and brutal arm of Roman tyranny. At this juncture it may be worthwhile to look more closely at the moser laws as formulated in the Tosephta. It is not easy to date the Tosephtas material. Committed to writing in the third century, it embodies much older orally transmitted tradition. Towards the end of the seventh chapter of Tractate Terumoth we read:
A band (si`a) of people to whom gentiles say give (tenu) us one of you so that we may kill him, otherwise we shall kill you all better that all die and not to hand over (lo yimseru) one Israelite life. However, if they specify a single personas Sheba the son of Bikhri was specifiedthey shall give him to them (yittenuhu lahem), and let not all of them be killed [Tosephta Terumoth 7:23; cf. Genesis Rabbah 94:9].
ings around the year 62 CE) before the Roman governor Albinuswhich is what they did according to Josephus.
Thereupon, the magistrates . . . brought him [Yeshua ben Hanan] before the Roman governor; there, although flayed to the bone with scourges, he neither sued for mercy nor shed a tear. . . . When Albinus, the governor, asked him who and whence he was and why he uttered such cries, he answered him never a word, but unceasingly reiterated his dirge over the city, until Albinus pronounced him a maniac and let him go [WARS 6:5, 3].
Assuming this halakha to have been in place at the time of Jesusand to have been accepted by all Sectsits ramifications would ostensibly have meant the following. If Jesus was specified by the Romans as one suspected of sedition, then a Jewish body that acceded to a Roman warrant for his arrest would not be in breach of Halakha; if Jesus was not specified by the Romans then to deliver him to them would have transgressed this same Halakha. Note the Tosephtas formulation as Sheba ben Bikhri was specified; why give this illustration? Some say that it is an example of someone who is requested by name. Others insist like Sheba implies not merely that the wanted person must be named, but unless there was a prima facie case cited against him as there was against biblical Sheba (2 Sam 20:21), then it would still be prohibited to turn him in. Hence the only way to reconcile the handing over of Jesus with this established halakha is to say that the Romans had already targeted him as an enemy or, at the very least, had set their sights upon him. Otherwise, the enormity of handing him over to their jurisdiction, rather than shielding him from their clutches, would be highly problematic. Now some writers question the antiquity of the rabbinic moser laws. They wonder whether Jewish solidarity in earlier times was not essentially tribal and instinctive and if so whether it was strong enough or pervasive enough to ensure that every Jew, however tiresome, would continue to enjoy the communitys protection. These are the writers who also wonder whether the moser laws of the Talmud might not have been called for precisely because Jew had been found informing on Jew to the Roman authorities instead of closing ranks against Rome. They cannot imagine how people bound by moser laws would reach decisions such as the one to bring the wistful visionary Yeshua ben Hanan (or Hananiahwho began to speak his forewarn-
Josephus implies that Albinus might readily have passed a death sentence on Yeshua had the latters insanity not saved him. The contention is, had the moser halakha been in place, it is inconceivable that it could have been so trampled underfoot. In response, we submit that even if the Tosephtas formulation is late, the basic prohibition to hand over a Jew to the Gentiles was no post-Temple rabbinic scruple. It is unambiguously codified in the Temple Scroll (col. 64, lines 69)a text at least three centuries older than the Tosephta. But nor should we hastily write off the antiquity of the Tosephtas distinctive moser law. As noted, it is a third century compilation that nevertheless preserves material of earlier vintage. To date any particular component of this type of corpus, one looks for independent corroboration. As it happens, for the antiquity of the Tosephtas moser law such corroboration might be provided by Johns evangelion. John 11:50 narrates that at a meeting of the Jewish council, the High Priest Joseph Caiaphas (Caiaphas is the Latinized form of [ben ha-]Qayyaf, which name is attested by the Mishnah (Parah 3:5) and Josephus and by the ossuary excavated in the early 1990s and exhibited in Washington DC in 1995), stood up and said, it is better that one man should die for the people than that the whole nation should be destroyed. These words of Caiaphas are of course nothing but the inverse of the Tosephtas law. If it was not Caiaphas who spoke these words, the evangelist who put them into his mouth must have been some awesome rabbi. For he was familiar not just with the moser halakha and its precise formulation but was also possessed of acute halakhic irony. The Tosephtas formulation runs, as we have seen: better that all die and not to hand over one Israelite life. Is it fortuitous that Caiaphas formula is the Tosephtas in reverse, or far more likely the result of Caiaphas (or else the author of John 11:50) having the halakha in mind and deciding to override it? John makes much of Caiaphas utterance, interpreting it as prophecy; he was prophesying in spite of himself. This notion of making predictions without being aware of it, is familiar from rabbinic literature: nithnaba welo noda` ma nithnaba (Aboth of Rabbi Nathan recension B, beginning of chapter 43; cf. Baba Bathra 119b). The preservation of Caiaphas words is
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the stake of the adulterous daughter of a priest (Mish. San. 7:2; Toseph. San. 9:3) etc. strongly suggest that the Sanhedrin continued to impose capital punishments. An aside of Josephus may also have some bearing. It occurs in his report of the Pharisees falling foul of the Hasmonean king John Hyrkanos over their leniency towards one Eleazar who had reproached the King: they [the Pharisees] replied that Eleazar deserved stripes and chains; for they did not think it right to sentence a man to death for calumny. At this point Josephus inserts a gloss whose verb is in the present tense and whose evident purpose is to confirm the Pharisees reputation for clemency based on his first hand knowledge: and anyway the Pharisees are naturally lenient in the matter of punishments (ANT. 13: 10, 6). If under Rome the final decision lay with the governor, there would be little or no leeway for the exercise of Pharisaic magnanimity. Lastly, in his report of James execution Josephus notes that the high priest had acted illegally by convening the Sanhedrin without the procurators permission, implying that as long as it was cleared with the procurator, the Sanhedrins convocation would have been legaland by extension any verdict it then rendered. To be fair, Blinzler realizes Pilates inconvenience to his theory (that not Roman but Jewish will and effort were decisive in Jesuss execution) and tries to do something about it. Reluctantly (the reluctance is palpable) he grants that Pilate passed the formal death-sentence. However, in doing so Blinzler opinesPilate acted against his own convictions and against his earlier innocent verdict, condemning Jesus only because he was afraid that if he acquitted him those who wanted Jesus dead would complain to Caesar (1959: 236). But were there grounds to fear that Tiberius Caesar would fault his representative for acquitting a defendant whom he had openly and unequivocally pronounced innocent under Roman law of any capital offense, just because that defendant had riled Jewish priests? For Pilate to let clerics walk all over him to the point that he reverses his findingsindeed makes a public fool of himself and his Roman justicethey would have needed to convince him that they had Caesar in their pocket. Blinzler cites instances of Tiberius, in response to Jewish gripes, rapping Pilate over the knuckles, such as when the latter put up plaques or shields honoring Caesar in his Jerusalem residence. Philo tells us that the Jews sent a petition to Caesar advising him that by installing the plaques Pilate had disregarded the practice of earlier Roman emperors who had insisted their officials respect the religion of the indigenous population. These petitioners understood full well that Caesar would ignore them unless they invoked Roman precedent. Witness how precedent is the operative word in his letter: [Tiberius] wrote to Pilate with a host of reproaches and rebukes for his audacious violation of precedent and bade him at once take down the shields. . . . (EMBASSY TO GAIUS, 299305).
Similarly when Pilate accedes to the Jews impassioned plea to remove the standards he had brought into Jerusalem by night, his position is weak, not because the petitioners have a hot-line to Caesar, but because Pilate knows that his action was a departure from Roman precedent. And Rome does not look kindly on change. It is evident that Blinzler has set himself the laudable goal to vindicate wherever possible the Gospel accounts, especially Johns, and John can be read as saying that Pilate switched his judgment from innocent to guilty only out of abject trepidation of Jesuss enemiesthe specter of whose clout at the imperial court jellyfished him. On this occasion, however, we feel Blinzler tries so hard that he forgets to explore an equally credible (or incredible) scenario. Enemies never lack enemies of their own. What if the enemies of Jesus enemies had reported to Caesar that a Jewish mob had bullied Pilate into killing a man after publicly declaring him innocent of all wrongdoing? We submit that Caesar would be livid to learn that his deputy cowered under pressure, disgracing the reputation of Roman justice and opening the floodgates for pressure groups to lead the Imperium Romanum a merry dance. Remember also Pilate was ultimately removed for coming down too hard on the native population not for showing leniency. Thus we must question Blinzlers ingenious casuistry to the effect that Pilate, though finding Jesus innocent under Roman law, sentences him all the same, trembling in his boots lest Jesus foes get their other little stooge, Tiberius Caesar, to come after him. Moreover, the procurator Albinus let neither Yeshua ben Hanans accusers, nor the high priest who convicted James the Just, have it all their own way. Although conjecture is the common lot of every reconstruction, some score better and some worse on the verisimilitude scale. The documentary and epigraphical evidence about Pilate is not of a pliant robot waiting to do the Sanhedrins dirty work (pace Blinzler [183], whose Pilate is indeed made to serve as their tool). The Inquisitors of the 15th to 18th centuries, who tried tens of thousands, killed nobody; those they found worthy to die they relegated for execution to the secular arm. Pilate was no secular arm; nor will he go away. Thus, we are left with the obvious alternative that Pilate sentenced Jesus because he found him guilty by his own terms of reference. According to the Gospels, Jesus friends did not rally round or present any defense of their teacher before Pilate, but on the contrary kept a low profile. What a pity Blinzler was not there to apprise them of Pilates sympathy and let them know that all he craved was a counter-protest by fellow sympathizers to support his lonely stand against Jesus accusers! We suspect that the discipleslike the rest of Jewryknew the real Pilate and the danger he posed to their own lives. For it was Pilates well attested policy to show zero tolerance for apocalyptic stirrings in any shape or form; and there is no good reason to doubt the Gospels intimations that the Jesus Movement was indeed
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Thus, Pilate, Tiberius and the Jerusalem leadership situated in the context of their power play seem to us to militate against Dr. Blinzlers reconstruction. So far we have been focusing rather heavily on the trial because the question of Jewish involvement in Jesus trial is key to a Jewish perspective of Jesus. For it is one thing to debate religion or ideology fiercely. Sadducees and Pharisees indulged in it and no milder was the acrimony between the Dead Sea Scroll sect and the Glib of Tongue party. Neither did Hillel and Shammai mince words. But wishing the opponent deadnot to mention taking concrete steps to that endhas no place in a Torah society where the only people who can lawfully be sentenced to death are felons found guilty of very specific capital crimes and then only by a court of Torah law. Therefore anybody persuaded by the reports either of a trial, sentence and execution of Jesus by the Sanhedrin (Talmud; see further) or of that bodys collusion with Roman authorities (Gospels; standard TF), must also be persuaded that Jesus was guilty of a crime considered capital by Torah or else that he had been
named as a wanted felon by the powers that be. The Gospels all describe the High Priest and other Jerusalem dignitaries engaging in proceedings, of one sort or another, against Jesus prior to arraigning him before Pilate. However, what each of the Gospels describesthough disagreeing quite radically on detailsis nothing that deserves the name legal proceedings but rather a travesty thereof. First of all, the authorities are presented as hell-bent on liquidating the defendant so that the trial is merely a show trial. After none of the allegations comes to anything, the presiding High Priest decides to convict on what he, on the spur of the moment, declares to constitute blasphemy uttered obligingly by the defendant just as the prosecution case collapses for want of testimony. Incidentally, rabbinic halakha disqualifies a judge who witnessed a crime from trying the case because witness and judge cannot be the same person in a capital case (see Rosh Hashanah 26a; Baba Qama 90b et al.). Bringing Pilate into the case is equally devoid of Torah coherence. Nothing is said of Pilate naming the defendant or spelling out his alleged crime (on the moser halakha see above). For these reasons the reader of the Gospels has only two options. One is to take the low roadand the Gospel reports at face value; concluding withal that Caiaphas and his minions were time-serving rascals and worse. That, of course, is the road traditionally trodden by sworn anti-Semites. If that is what the evangelists wished to convey then those who decry the germs of latter-day Jew-hate in the Christian canon would be sadly right. We happen to side with those scholars who recognize in the trenchancy of the Passion stories poeticor better, polemiclicense, a device met in the Toldot and comparable molten writing. As we have seen, it is possible also that Josephus assigns the leaders of his nation a prosecutorial role. Even the Aggadah and Jewish parodies such as the Toldot do not deny it. Quite the reverse; often ascribing the lions share of the prosecution to the Jewish authorities or, in the case of the Talmud, taking it out of Roman hands entirely and placing the trial and execution (by means of lapidation, not crucifixion) squarely under the Sanhedrins jurisdiction. But as already observed, these relatively late Jewish sourcesall written in Aramaic or Hebrew and intended for home-consumptionmake no pretense to history. Indeed their polemical strategies are not even opaque. Take the extreme example. The Talmud, as just noted, makes the Sanhedrin solely responsible for the trial and execution of Jesus as it does, incidentally, for the trial and execution of Bar Kokhba (Sanhedrin 93b). Why? Of all the conjectured motives, try the following for size: (1) The fatally wounded King Saul asks his arms-bearer to put an end to his life lest these uncircumcised ones come and torture me (1 Sam 31:4; 1 Chr 10:4). It is less painful to contemplate a Jesus, a Bar Kokhba or any other Jew punished under humane Israelite law than his abandonment to the cruel caprice of uncircumcised Rome. (2) In its anti-Christian
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polemic, the Jewish side will have boastfully exaggerated its factions past triumphs (especially over its opponents heroes but also over the Bar Kokhbas and sundry others) in order to compensate for its present defeats. But whatever their motives and whatever their historical value, the perception of these sources is one of active Jewish participation in the execution of Jesus. We may have devoted disproportionate space to this element. Notwithstanding, this emphasis seems justified due to the executions persistence in the records, and because of the very different ways Judaism and Christianity relate to Jesus crucifixion. Christianity predominantlythough not universallyhas associated Jesus crucifixion with an idea incomprehensible, and a word for that idea dismaying, to all known Judaisms: deicide. The Jewish student has to bear in mind that there are Christians for whom the crucifixion of Jesus entails this dimension which is quite outside his own Jewish conceptual horizons. I say has to bear in mind because to overlook it is never to understand its corollary adopted by some Church spokesmen who lived in the pre-Second Vatican Council age; namely, that contrary to all norms of justice from the crucifixion onwards (i.e., not retroactively) all Jews in perpetuity are responsible for it. On the other hand, even when stripped of metaphysical connotation, the crucifixion of Jesus as an historical event still leaves the Jewish student plenty of legal as well as religious questions to ponder.
we know and receive. But to get back to Blinzler, skepticism about his theory of cause and effect between religious disputation and crucifixion, in no way extends to the disputes themselves. In fact there is wide scholarly consensus as to the verisimilitude, and therefore credibility, of the Gospels recollections of vehement dissent. Put another way, the disputes recorded in the Gospels ring true enough; but neither individually nor yet cumulatively do they explain the enormity of the crucifixion. According to E. P . Sanders, The situation seems to be this: those who presumably know the most about Judaism, and about the Law in particularJewish scholarsdo not find any substantial points of disagreement between Jesus and his contemporaries, and certainly not any which would lead to death (1985: 55). Just so; Jesus recorded teachings regarding specific misvot are inadequate, as far as we know, to account for hostility greater than that which divided the various Jewish sects. In fact some of the issues are demonstrably sectarian, such as voluntary fasts (observed exclusively by the Pharisees and John the Baptists circle), washing of hands before meals (as distinct from scriptural purity), and doing things on the Sabbath that debatably constitute work, but are non-scriptural Sabbath prohibitions (e.g. miracle healing, exorcisms, and carrying within the walls of Jerusalem (John 5:2, 1012; cf. Erubin 6b, 22a, 101a). The dominance of these and similar recognizably sectarian themes has been explained rather persuasively by Alan Watson (2223). He maintains that when at the beginning of Jesus ministry, Jerusalem Pharisees arrive in Galilee to check him out, it is with the prospect of co-opting him. This might explain why they come forward chiefly when Jesus teaching diverges from theirs. Of course that leaves a sizeable residue of religious pronouncements attributed to Jesus in the Gospels that touch upon non-sectarian subject matter. But even when contentious, they do not appear to us to carry a lethal threat. To elucidate this last point let us examine some of the purportedly contentious teachings that are not Pharisee-oriented, such as those to do with the Temple, ritual purity, filial piety, divorce, Messiahship, prophecy, vicarious atonement. The Temple Some sayings of Jesus can be read to question the indispensability of the Temple. Among the prophets of Israel, Ezekiel and Haggai clearly envision temples as essential, but they are the minority. Moses provides blueprints only for a mobile tent-sanctuarythus implicitly ruling out a permanent temple. Elijah, the Talmud notes, though the Temple was standing in his day, went up Mount Carmel to worship (Sanhedrin 89b and Rashi, ad loc.). The other pre-exilic prophets are ambivalent when not outright repudiatory. Jeremiah foretells the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and draws upon himself
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Is it conceivable that with the saying nothing that goes into a man from outside can defile him (which saying is widely accepted as authentic) Jesus meant to debunk, not the prescriptions of Leviticus, but rather the sinister potency believed to rub off from defilement? Now it could be argued, if you trash the superstition that keeps tumah/taharah viable, you kill the system itselfwhich seems to be a common enough assumption. For instance, David Catchpole writes:
The attitude to Torah expressed in Mark 7:15 is very clearly crucial for the evaluation of Jesus. . . . Kesemann [1964: 39] was entirely right in his interpretation of this devastating saying: The man who denies that impurity from external sources can penetrate into mans essential being is striking at the presuppositions and the plain verbal sense of the Torah and at the authority of Moses himself [108the source for Kesemanns citation has been supplied by Steven Golden].
During the whole term of his vow he shall not go near a corpse, not even when his father or mother, brother or sister, dies; he shall not make himself ritually unclean for them, because the Nazarite vow to his G-d is on his head.
We submit that in light of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkais teaching it is an open question. That the Priestly Torah seems to take defilement to be hypostatic cannot be ruled out. Also, as already noted, the disproportionate attention of the Pharisees to ritual purity/defilement (as compared with other misvot), suggests a driving force that exceeded the desire to obey the bare letter of the law. Thus, one might argue that Rabbi Yohanan was less faithful to the spirit of the levitical system than were the Pharisees who did nothing to dispel defilements mythos. But when the chips are down, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai is not placed on death row for his demythologizing. This theory of ours has been criticized on the grounds that demons and exorcisms were very much alive in the Jesus Movement with no hint of unease about the associated beliefs. But compared with sickness that is always real and palpable, defilement not resulting from disease (e.g., ritually impure food), is fictional. Hence, downplaying the potency of ritual defilement is not necessarily inconsistent with an existential recognition of human suffering. Filial Piety
Likewise, according to Rabbi Yehudah, a haber (i.e. a person enrolled in a Pharisaic commensality) would be forbidden to bury the dead (Mishnah Demai 2:3). Thus, we have two halakhically sanctioned voluntary pledges that prevent the votaries from burying their closest relatives and necessitate delegating their duty to others. Where there is absolutely no one else to attend to the corpse, then according to halakha it becomes a meth misvah (a misvah corpse = an abandoned corpse), and whoever comes upon a meth misvaheven the High Priest or a Nazariteis obligated to attend to its burial. Jesus was careful to say that there were others to bury the dead; he did not say let the father bury himself. Because there are others to bury the father, a novice in committing himself to join a religious fellowship such as Jesus would be emulating the haber who, in turn, presumably sees himself as a quasi Nazarite. So, there is no undermining of the misvah of interring the dead, nor of the fifth commandment, to a degree unparalleled in biblical and post-biblical halakha. Divorce Deuteronomy 21:1014 legislates for the case of a captive woman whom an Israelite soldier has taken in battle. Later generations squirmed at legislation that evidently grated on their evolved sensibilities. Needless to say they did not repeal it but explained it away with the famous line dibra tora keneged yezer hara` (=the law was given in response to the evil inclination; cf. Kiddushin 21b)i.e., it was never intended as the ideal but as a concession to human frailty. Scholars have long suspected that, if Jesus reputed comment about divorce (Mark 10:46) could be translated back into Hebrew or Aramaic it would sound very much like dibra tora keneged yezer hara` (Kampen 1994). Messiahship
To another he said, Follow me, but the man replied, Let me go and bury my father first. Jesus said Leave the dead to bury their dead; you must go and announce the kingdom of G-d (Luke 9:5960; cf. Matt 8:2122). Some scholars find this saying to challenge the fifth commandment and therefore bound to offend. Let us review Jesus deterring the man from burying his father within its Jewish context. If a rabbi had said to his disciple, Become a Nazarite, and the disciple listened, then as a Nazarite, he would be forbidden by the Torah of Moses to bury his next of kin, as it says in Numbers 6:67:
It was not exceptional for a group of Jews to identify a particular person as a Messiah. Mosaic monotheism is based on the belief in one G-d; but Mashiahs could be any number. In the Torah, it is the High Priest who is kohen ha-mashiah (Lev 4:3, 5). David refers to Saul as meshiah of the L-rd (1Sam 26:11,16), and to himself as meshiah of the G-d of Jacob (2 Sam 22:51; 23:1). Admittedly, during the second commonwealth the Messianic idea undergoes transformation, and with the ascendancy of apocalypse, comes to be associated with the End of Days. Hence Messianic redemption was to be final and
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The quaint yarn Eusebius spins around the name ebyon (=poor) is, of course, pure midrash. As explained by HansJoachim Schoeps (11), Ebionites (in Hebrew ebionim) is a rehebraized ancient title of honor that was adopted by those Jewish Christians on the basis of Jesus beatitudes concerning the poor. The hatred and satire of opponents reduced Ebionite to a nickname and term of abuse (the poor in spirit, the poor in faith in Christ) so that the Jewish Christians themselves avoided it. Thus, in reality the appellation Ebionites was one its bearers carried with pride because it referred to their eschewal of luxury and worldliness. Two important points transpire, at any rate, from Eusebius. (1) As self-defining Jews the Ebionites were unable to accept the dogma of the Messiahs divinity; and conversely, their denial of the dogma enabled them to continue in their Jewish self-perception. (2) This resistance of the Ebionites strongly suggests that the divinity of the Messiah had not been an integral dogma of the Jesus Movement when Jewish Christianity was taking shape. Ongoing Prophecy E. E. Urbach has shown that in the late second temple period, the age of divine communication had not been declared a thing of the past (1978: 51417; also 1946). In fact the Talmud states quite categorically that even when prophecy ceased divine communication continued through the agency of ruah ha-qodesh (=the holy spirit) (cf. Erubin 64b; Sanhedrin 11a; Tosephta Pesahim 2:9) and when the holy spirit was withheld bat qol (=an echo of the [divine] voice; i.e., a muffled communication) still continued to be heard. Josephus also attests to contemporary prophets and prognosticators such as Yeshua ben Hanan, whom Josephus explicitly accredits with supernal foreknowledge (Gray). In Deuteronomy we read:
the prophet who presumes to utter in My Name what I have not commanded him . . . that same prophet shall die. If you ask yourselves how shall we recognize a word that the L-rd has not spokenthis is the answer: When the word spoken by the prophet in the name of the L-rd is not fulfilled and does not come true, it is not a word spoken by the L-rd. The prophet has spoken presumptuously [18:2022].
Some commentators hazily connect this Deuteronomic text to the fate of Jesus. They are quite right that this law would have been enough to convict any claimant to divine prophecy whose prognostication failed the test laid down in the text. In the Gospels there is one saying attributed to Jesus by witnesses that
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might have been amenable to such a test: viz., the prediction in Mark: I will pull down this temple made with human hands and in three days I will build another not made with hands (Mark 14:58). But to apply the test the temple would have had to come down and three full days to elapse. Mark also says that the report was false. So if Jesus never made the prediction, that adds a further impediment to the tests application. Moreover, in Matthews parallel there is no I will pull down but instead the witnesses allege to have heard Jesus say: I can pull down (26:61). This suggests that the point of the testimony was something other than to impugn Jesus prophetic status by drawing attention to an unfulfilled prediction. Neither are the controversies recorded in the Gospels explained by these Deuteronomic verses, nor are these verses invoked or so much as alluded to (Morrow). Jewish polemic frequently calls Jesus Meseet U-Maddeakh. Meseet is defined by Scripture (Deut 13 712) and Mishnah (San. 7:10) as a person who seduces another to worship or/and to sacrifice to an idol which he both names and whose efficacy he extols. Maddeakh (Deut 13:14; also 13:26 Mishnah loc. cit. and 10[11]:4) is also a touter for idolsjust more ambitious. The puzzling thing is the vagueness of these late polemical sources. Which idol or idols were touted? Were they Greek, Roman, Phoenecian or some new-fangled cult? Were Jews persuaded to worship the idols and/or to sacrifice to them? If any were persuaded, why were they not charged with the lesser charge of idolatry? How come the idols disappeared from Christian memory without a trace? The answer to all these questions is that the Meseet U-Maddeakh allegation dates from an age when Christianity had adopted dogmas that Jews considered idolatrous. At that time there was no need to designate the idols or the form of worship etc., because Gentile Christianity itself was the problematic religion that the Church was preaching with a view to convertor if you like, to lead astray. Nevertheless we cannot ignore those scholars who reckon the Meseet U-Maddeakh charge historical. They reason that in addition to the Talmud, the Gospels also allude to a popular perception of Jesus as one who leads astray (planos in Greek). We would grant that as a jibe planos is feasible (just as the serpent is dubbed meseet in the aggadah San.29a); and it is no doubt out of this and similar insinuations (e.g. Hebrew mekhashef = goes in Greek) that the Talmuds stories grew. But all this is irrelevant to our quest, which is the trial. In the Gospels meseet never comes up as a charge before the Sanhedrin; Meseet U-Maddeakh is nothing but a red herring. Vicarious Atonement King David laments his fallen son: O that I might have died in your stead, Absalom my son (2 Sam 19:1). The sentiment speaks for itself. Skipping a millennium or more, vicarious
atonement is entirely at home in the Talmud. For instance, when mentioning a parent who has died within the previous twelve months, the Talmud requires a child to refer to them thus: My father/mother for whose resting place may I be an expiation (cf. Kiddushin 31b). So we see that Jews are allowedif not encouragedto say to G-d, Let me suffer instead of so and so. In a world where this was believed, it would have a very powerful effect. On the other hand, Psalm 49 seems skeptical of vicarious atonement: the ransom of the soul is too great a cost and must be left forever (v 9). Likewise today, many Jews are uncomfortable with the idea, because it implies that no matter what, sin must exact a toll. In Exodus 34:7 Moses revealed to his people and to the world that G-d Himself bears (or carries away; Heb. nsa) the sin, guilt and iniquity of human beings. Now the primary meaning of nsa is to bear, to carry, to take away. When used of sin, some translations render it to forgive because eventually remissive nsa sheds its concrete sense and becomes coterminous with slh. While the outcome may be the same, the process envisaged by nsa was clearly removal and transference. The mere fact that later usage endowed nsa with an independent secondary meaning of to forgive, should not influence our reading of its early occurrences, such as here in Exodus 34 where it undoubtedly retains its original sense (Brown, Driver & Briggs: 671, 3c). As a rabbi, I know that there are people whose consciousness of sin and guilt can be overwhelming. Some people need an abstract idea to be reified for them to grasp it. Witness the solemn atonement rite of the priestly torah:
When Aaron has finished making expiation for the sanctuary, for the Tent of Meeting, and for the altar, he shall bring forward the live goat. He shall lay both his hands on its head and confess over it all the iniquities of the children of Israel and all their acts of rebellion, and all their sins; he shall lay them on the head of the goat and send it away into the wilderness in charge of a man who is waiting ready. The goat shall bear upon itself (nsa alav) all their iniquities into some barren waste and he shall let the goat go, there in the wilderness [Lev 16:2022].
The ritual of a scapegoat was given, no doubt, to satisfy the need of people to see the carrying away (nsa) of their iniquity acted out before their eyes. Interestingly, the Torah says nothing about killing the scapegoat; rather it prescribes that it be released in the wilderness. If in later times it was indeed toppled from a precipice as described in the Mishnah (Yoma 6:6) it may bespeak a belief that only through death would atonement be secured (Sassoon:16974). Nonetheless, the Christian doctrine of sin and atonement brought through Jesus death goes way beyond the symbolism of the scapegoat. Still, even if expressed
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Epilogue
During many dismal centuries of fear and superstition there was a complete breakdown of communication. This tragedy has a complex history that a vast library of books has tried to document and understand, and we cannot cover that story here. To reduce it to its barest outline, once the break between Judaism and Hellenistic Christianity was complete (Jewish Christians such as Ebionites, did not break with Judaism although the ties were sorely tested during the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132135 CE) then the two groups began to adopt the You and Us terminology. The Christianwhich had been at first the smaller and more vulnerable party and had been subject to harassment at the hands of Jewish busybodies employed all available defense tactics. And of course the best defense is a strong offense: So If you Jews invalidate us, then we can countercharge you with killing Jesus. Those who take literally the words found in the Gospel and in [standard] Josephus to the effect that Jewish leaders were instrumental in having Jesus tried by Pilate, must find a way to contend with a situation we have already seen to be at odds with halakha and
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Jewish Tradition. Jews were not to be tried by a legal system that is contrary to Torah law. Even if some of Jewrys leaderswho should know better than to put politics and expediency above Torahwent badly astray, still the blame should not and cannot devolve on their children, let alone on the entire Jewish people. For the Torah says: Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children for their fathers; a person shall be put to death [only] for his own sin (Deut 24:16). But for this Mosaic law the Church seems to have had limited use. It visited the sin of the fathers not only upon their biological children but also upon every single Jew, homeborn or proselyte. The distinctions between collective and perpetual guilt were ignored; both extraordinary, yet in other respects distinct. Even if it was collective in the sense that the Jerusalem adult citizenry at the time of the crucifixion could stand by and let it happen, how could unborn generations be held responsible forever? We know from the Gospels that large numbers of his countrymen respected Jesusas did Josephus half a century laterand would have had no part in the conspiracy against him. But the Gospels also inform us that the disciples fled in fear when Jesus was arrested, and influential friends such as Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathaea are not reported as appearing before Pilate at the critical moment. Unless the Gospels wished to erase the memory of any resistance to Roman authority on the part of the original Jesus fraternity, the way they tell the story leaves the impression that there was no concerted protest against the arrest. To repeat: if by Torah standards an injustice was perpetrated (as seems possible) and fear struck everybody dumb, then that silence cannot be condoned. The rabbis taught that the sin of silence in the face of injustice is as heinous as actively promoting it (Sotah 11a; Sanhedrin 106a). But heinous as it is, even the sin of silent witnessing to wrong is not hereditary. Notwithstanding, the ideas of collective and perpetual guilt conjoined to preclude all constructive dialogue or mutual understanding throughout a long dark night of persecution, Inquisition and pogrom inflicted on Jews almost from the moment Christianity attained political power. Vatican II was a trailblazer for those who were ready to embark upon a new path in human relations. More recently, the Lutheran Church has distanced itself from the virulent antiJewish rhetoric of Martin Luther. Perhaps, after the Shoah, we have begun to feel answerable for words emitted in the heat of crisis but which out of context solidify into hard cold weapons. Today, there is a growing resolve to go further and re-evaluate texts that use immoderate languagelanguage that in the wrong setting can still stir the baser passions. Such an examination of our respective literatures is imperative for both Synagogue and Church as a first step towards self-understanding and putting ones own house in order. Then the kinder and more wholesome dialogue that is now
sprouting can develop, based not on denial of the jarring, the angry, and the recriminatory in our respective traditions, but rather on acknowledgement of their existence and finding the guts to do what it takes. That should make for a calmer atmosphere in which the two sides can perhaps listen to one another, speak tonot atone another across the barrier. For the barrier is real, and rapprochement is not achieved through the blurring of differences or glossing over of ones convictions. We must also beware of the secularists devaluation and the cynics: a plague upon both your houses. The rapprochement is precarious. There are those who see much that is shared, and others who emphasize the dissimilar. Some would like to deny the common Judeo-Christian heritage. But as long as we hold fast to the two pivotal lifelines:
Onebelief in the word of G-d Twocoming before G-d in prayer
then we can unite in prayer for G-ds spirit to guide us and ultimately to prevail.
Works Cited
Bammel, Ernst. 1974a. A New Variant Form of the Testimonium Flavianum. THE EXPOSITORY TIMES 85: 14547. 1974b. Zum Testimonium Flavianum. Pp. 922 in JOSEPHUS STUDIEN, edited by Betz, Haacker, & Hengel. Gttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 1970. ex illa itaque die consilium fecerunt . . . Pp. 1140 in THE TRIAL OF JESUS: CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN HONOUR OF C. F. D. MOULE, edited by Ernst Bammel. London: SCM Press. Blinzler, Josef. 1959. THE TRIAL OF JESUS. Translated by Isabel & Florence McHugh. 2nd revised and enlarged edition. Westminster, MD: The Newman Press. Brown F., S. R. Driver, & C. Briggs. 1959. A HEBREW AND ENGLISH LEXICON OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. London, UK: Oxford University Press. Catchpole, David R. 1971. THE TRIAL OF JESUS: A STUDY IN THE GOSPELS AND JEWISH HISTORIOGRAPHY FROM 1770 TO THE PRESENT DAY. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Eusebius. ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY, Book II. Retrieved October 7, 2003, from http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/NPNF2-01/Npnf201-07.htm#P938_461218 Feldman, Prof. Louis H. Nov. 15, 2000 Fax Correspondence. Gray, Rebecca 1993. PROPHETIC FIGURES IN LATE SECOND TEMPLE JEWISH PALESTINE: THE EVIDENCE FROM JOSEPHUS. Oxford University Press. Greenblatt, Zvi. 1992. Burial Cave of the Caiaphas Family. BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY REVIEW 18/5, 2836, 76. Josephus, Flavius. 1968. THE JEWISH WAR, Books IVVII, translated by H. St. J. Thackeray. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
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University Press. Pp. 46267. 1965. JEWISH ANTIQUITIES, Books XVIIIXX, translated by Louis H. Feldman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pp. 4851. Kesemann, Ernst. 1964. ESSAYS ON NEW TESTAMENT THEMES. London, UK: SCM Press. Kampen, John 1994. The Matthean Divorce Texts Reexamined. Pp. 14967 in NEW QUMRAN TEXTS AND STUDIES, edited by George J. Brooke & F. G. Martinez. Leiden, The Netherlands: E.J. Brill. Meier, John P . 1991. A MARGINAL JEW. New York, NY: Doubleday. Morrow, William. 1995. Phone conversation. Queens Theological College, Kingston, ON. Neusner, Jacob 1993. A RABBI TALKS WITH JESUS: AN INTERMILLENNIAL, INTERFAITH EXCHANGE. New York, NY: Doubleday. NEW ENGLISH BIBLE. 1972. Oxford, UK: The Bible Societies in association with Oxford University Press. Philo. 1962. ON THE EMBASSY TO GAIUS, translated by F. H. Colson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pines, Shlomo. 1971. AN ARABIC VERSION OF THE TESTIMONIUM FLAVIANUM AND ITS IMPLICATIONS. Jerusalem, Israel: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. QURAN. ARABIC & ENGLISH. 20002003. Mulitlingual Quran
Project/ Al-Islam.org Ahlul Bayt Digital Islamic Library Project (Simultaneous-selectable Arabic, Abdullah Yusuf Ali (English), Marmaduke Mohammad Pickthall (English) & M.H. Shakir (English). Retrieved January 31, 2004, from http://www.alislam.org/quran/ Reich, Ronny. 1992. Caiaphas Name Inscribed on Bone Boxes. BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY REVIEW 18/5: 3844, 76. Sanders, E. P . 1993. THE HISTORICAL FIGURE OF JESUS. London, UK: Penguin Books. 1985. JESUS AND JUDAISM. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. Sassoon, Isaac S. D. 2001. DESTINATION TORAH. Hoboken, NJ: KTAV. Schoeps, Hans-Joachim. 1969. JEWISH CHRISTIANITY. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. Tacitus. 19942000. THE ANNALS XV, xliv 4. The Internet Classics Archive, by Daniel C. Stevenson. Retrieved October 7, 2003, from http://classics.mit.edu/Tacitus/ annals.11.xv.html Watson, Alan. 1995. THE TRIAL OF JESUS. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Winter, Paul. 1974. ON THE TRIAL OF JESUS. Rev. ed. Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter. Urbach, E. E. 1978. THE SAGES: THEIR CONCEPTS AND BELIEFS (Hebrew). Jerusalem, Israel: Magnes Press. 1946. When did Prophecy End? (Hebrew). TARBIZ 17: 111.
Authors Note
In 1995 I was invited by Rev. Dr. Hallett E. Llewellyn, then Dean of Queens Theological College (QTC) in Kingston, Ontario, to talk to his senior theological students about Jesus from a Jewish perspective. The following year Dr. Llewellyn asked me to give my paper again to his 1996 graduates. Recently, it has been deliveredwith additions and revisionsto a number of Jewish audiences. I here record my thanks: to Dr. Llewellyn and Rev. Dr. William Morrow of QTC for their friendship and assistance; to Professor Louis H. Feldman for his gracious help with our Josephus research; to my brother, Dr. Jonathan M. Golden of Drew University for his unstinting support. From my mentor, Hakam Isaac Sassoon, I received encouragement and help at all stages of this project.
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