RBL 10/2018

Matthias Henze

Mind the Gap: How the Jewish Writings between the

Old and New Testament Help Us Understand Jesus

Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017. Pp. vi + 235. Paper. $39.00.

ISBN 9781506406428.

Cynthia R. Chapman
Oberlin College

In Mind the Gap: How the Jewish Writings between the Old and New Testament Help Us
Understand Jesus, Matthias Henze brings years of scholarly expertise on the literature of
Second Temple Judaism into dynamic conversation with the writings of the New
Testament. Each chapter situates key New Testament ideas and beliefs squarely within
ongoing debates among Jews of the first century CE, showing that Jesus did not break
away from his Jewishness but rather, like many other Jews of his time, presented a
particular form of Judaism. The primary intended audience for this book is students and
laypeople who come to New Testament studies from a Christian background, which
explains Henze’s use of the Christian canonical terms Old and New Testament. Still,
anyone who would like to come to a fuller understanding of the thoroughly Jewish nature
of Jesus’s and Paul’s teachings would benefit from reading this book.

Henze sets the stage for his study with a brief sketch of the entire history of ancient Israel
leading up to the first century CE, emphasizing that, with the exception of the book of
Daniel, nearly half a millennium separates the books of the Old Testament from the
writings of the New Testament. He then notes how this historical gap is obscured in the
first book of the New Testament. The Gospel of Matthew, through its repeated references
to Old Testament prophecy, creates the impression that “Jesus emerged directly from

This review was published by RBL ã2018 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a
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among Israel’s prophets, whose tradition he continues” (30). Henze’s goal is to illuminate
the noncanonical Jewish writings that date from the fourth century BCE to the first
century CE and to show how they are essential to understanding the Jewish world of
Jesus.

In the second chapter, “Ancient Judaism and its Literatures,” Henze lists a set of topics
that were centrally important to the first-century Judaism of Jesus and shows how none of
them is found in any sort of developed form in the Old Testament. These topics become
the headings of the chapters that follow: the expectation of a messiah; interest in
cosmology, demons, and unclean spirits; a focus on the torah as the rulebook that defines
Jewish practice and identity; and a hope for the resurrection of the dead and the afterlife
(33). Since Jesus was not an adherent of the religion of ancient Israel but rather of first-
century Judaism, Henze helps students understand that reading the literatures of ancient
Judaism provides the religious and literary context for understanding Jesus and his
teachings.

In “Jesus, the Messiah of Israel,” Henze marks the distinction between the Old Testament
messiahs who were anointed kings, priests, and prophets and the “messianism” that
characterizes first-century Judaism. Defining messianism as “the belief in a divine agent
whom God will send at the end of time to reign over a restored kingdom of Israel” (54),
Henze introduces a series of Jewish messianic texts that provide a frame of reference for
understanding several of the claims that New Testament writers make concerning Jesus.
Especially useful in this chapter is Henze’s translation of the Messianic Apocalypse from
Qumran (4Q521), in which a messianic figure is described as one who would free the
prisoners, give sight to the blind, straighten the twisted, heal the badly wounded, resurrect
the dead, proclaim good news to the poor, and feed the hungry (70).

In the chapter on demons and unclean spirits, Henze notes that the New Testament
places Jesus in opposition to “a well-organized kingdom of demons and unclean spirits”
“ruled by Beelzebub,” “whom Jesus calls Satan” (89). Noting that the Old Testament does
not know these demons, Henze begins to trace their development from the nephilim of
the Old Testament to the fallen angels described in 1 Enoch and Jubilees. This chapter
would be an ideal supplement to a New Testament course’s coverage of the Gospel of
Mark because it allows students to see Jesus’s frequent encounters with demons as a battle
with what was in his time a well-known demonic world.

The fifth chapter asks the question, “Did Jesus abolish the law of Moses?” and argues
through a series of texts that neither Jesus nor Paul abolished the law of Moses. Henze
shows how the concept of law or torah is adapted and reshaped in several Jewish writings,
including Ben Sira and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Using Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount,

This review was published by RBL ã2018 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a
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Henze argues that Jesus upholds the torah while at the same time insisting “like Hillel and
others that not all laws are equal” (139–40). The discussion of Paul’s view of the law
focuses on the letter to the Romans, showing that “Paul rejects neither Israel nor the
Torah” (141).

The final chapter deals with the resurrection of the dead and the belief in an afterlife.
Henze notes that, while the concept of resurrection is used metaphorically by several
prophets to signify that Israel as a nation will live again after exile, the concept of the
resurrection of individual souls and/or bodies to an active afterlife is not found in the Old
Testament. Examining 2 Maccabees, Psalms of Solomon, and 4 Ezra, Henze shows how
an expectation that God would raise up the faithful at the end of time gradually developed
within Second Temple Judaism. The Christ followers who wrote the New Testament
writings inherited and developed this Jewish belief.

In the epilogue Henze makes his goals in writing this book very clear. He wants Christian
students to understand that Jesus “adhered to and practiced a specific form of Judaism”
(182). He wants them to understand what supersessionism is and why a belief that Jesus
“was better than Jews of his time” is not only inaccurate historically but dangerous in a
post-Holocaust world (193). He emphasizes those Pauline texts that show how “all Israel
will be saved” whether they accept the gospel or not (146). If there is anything to criticize
about this book, it would be that Henze is perhaps too sanguine regarding the
harmonious overlap between Judaism and what ultimately becomes Christianity. In his
words, the differences between Jews and Christians “are not as stark as they are often
made out to be” (183). While these are admirable goals, and this book goes a long way
toward helping students understand the Jewishness of Jesus and Paul, overcoming the
anti-Semitism of present-day Christian readings of the New Testament will necessarily
involve a full reckoning with the harder and the uglier texts, the ones that have proven
fertile ground for exclusion and hate. Moreover, students of the New Testament need to
understand that sectarian Judaism of the first century was inherently exclusive in its truth
claims and often violent in its language about those outside of a given sect’s religious
community. Roman imperial religion likewise demanded exclusive loyalty to its
particular set of truth claims. Pluralism was not a value in the first-century Mediterranean
world where Jesus lived and taught.

Henze’s goal of bringing Christians and Jews to a point of greater mutual understanding
will necessarily involve serious engagement with New Testament texts that have been
used for violent and even lethal results. To provide just one example, Henze concludes his
book with a hope-filled reference to Paul’s allegory of the olive tree in which Jews are the
natural branches and gentiles the wild olive shoots (Rom 11:19–21). He calls on Christians
to refrain from boasting and stand in awe of the natural branches that are Judaism. This

This review was published by RBL ã2018 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a
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allegory, however, calls to mind several other New Testament texts where trees or plants
function metaphorically. In Matt 3:7–10, John the Baptist calls Pharisees and Sadducees a
“brood of vipers” and challenges their ancestral claim to Abraham as presumptive. He
then turns to the tree metaphor, indicating that if these Pharisees and Sadducees do not
“bear good fruit,” they will be “cut down and thrown into the fire.” The Johannine Jesus
challenges his fellow Jews’ claims to be children of Abraham, arguing instead that those
who do not love or follow him are children of “your father the devil” who “was a
murderer from the beginning” (John 8:39–47). Several chapters later, Jesus speaks of
himself as the “true vine” and likens his followers, both Jew and gentile, to “branches”
who must abide in him so that they might “bear fruit.” Those branches that choose not to
abide in Jesus will be “gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned” (John 15:1–11).
Critically engaging the multiple versions of the tree metaphor would guide students
through an encounter with the sometimes violent and exclusive truth claims and the
identity-establishing rhetoric of first-century Jewish literature, including the New
Testament.

This book offers professors who teach courses in New Testament and early Jewish
sectarianism an outstanding pedagogical resource that is richly nuanced, deeply informed
by the author’s facility with the primary sources of Second Temple Judaism, while, at the
same time, remaining highly accessible to undergraduates.

This review was published by RBL ã2018 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a
subscription to RBL, please visit http://www.bookreviews.org/subscribe.asp.