Mark Chancey in the United Methodist Reporter
Questions and Answers on the Jewishness of
Jesus
The following interview is reprinted from the
UM
Portal.
Q&A: The Jewishness of Jesus
Mary Jacobs, Mar 13, 2008
Q&A: The Jewishness of Jesus
Mary Jacobs, Mar 13, 2008
|
Mark Chancey
|
By Mary
Jacobs
Staff Writer
Dr. Mark Chancey has made an auspicious start as the new chair of SMU’s religious studies department. Always passionate about promoting interfaith understanding, he was the featured lecturer at a Jewish synagogue recently on “The New Testament: First Century Jews, First Century Christians.”
A member of Northaven United Methodist Church in Dallas, Dr. Chancey’s scholarly work has focused on the New Testament, early Christianity and early Judaism and the archaeology of Palestine. He spoke recently with staff writer Mary Jacobs.
When you talk about the “Jewishness” of Jesus and the New Testament, what do you mean?
I think we often forget that Jesus and Paul were Jews, and they were operating within a Jewish worldview. And so Jesus’ notions of the kingdom of God and the coming age and the nature of God are all deeply influenced by his own Jewish tradition, as are Paul’s theological ideas. So we’re starting off with Jewish beliefs, concepts and symbols—temple, Torah, Messiah. Christian understanding of these ideas changes, but the roots are Jewish.
Why is it important that we, as Methodists, understand the “Jewishness” of Jesus?
Some of the importance is due to understanding the continuity of Christianity with Judaism and the continuity of the New Testament with what Christians call the Old Testament. If we’re going to understand our own faith, then we need to understand our historical origins in Judaism.
The other answer has to do with the often-sad history of how Christians have mistreated the Jews. Over the centuries, Christians have misunderstood Judaism, and Jews have often been the victims of Christian persecution because of Christian stereotypes of Judaism as a dry or legalistic or ritualistic religion, or the famous charge that the Jews killed Jesus. I think there’s still a lot of room to go in Christian understanding of Judaism, and also in Jewish understanding of Christianity.
What is it that fascinates you personally about this period when Christianity “spun off” from Judaism?
Growing up Christian, I never fully realized just how much the New Testament reflects early Judaism. We Christians are used to reading the Gospels and the other letters in the New Testament, but that may be the only ancient literature that we read. When you read the New Testament side-by-side with rabbinic writers or the Dead Sea Scrolls or writers like Josephus or Philo, then we begin to see the extraordinary dialogue going on in the first century about ideas like expectations for God’s deliverance, hopes for freedom from oppression and for the coming kingdom of God.
It also gives us a much more fair perspective on Judaism. If all we had were the Gospels, we’d think that the Pharisees were nothing but a bunch of legalistic hypocrites. But if we read other Jewish sources, particularly the rabbinic writings, we find that’s simply not the case. If all we had to understand Judaism was Paul, we would think that Torah was a broken system that was hard to live by, that it was burdensome or oppressive. But when we read other Jewish sources, we find that living by Torah was a joy and a privilege. And it helps us to see just how unusual and how distinctive Paul’s interpretation of Jewish law was. Paul reinterpreted Torah through the lens of his belief that Jesus was the Messiah. And so he has a very distinctive perspective on Torah.
In your recent lecture, you talked about passages in the New Testament—where Jesus argues with the Pharisees, for instance—that are misunderstood if readers don’t take Jesus’ Jewishness into account.
In those passages, Jesus, a Jew, was arguing with other Jews about how best to interpret the law. That’s about as Jewish an activity as you can get. It’s not Jesus criticizing the Jewish religion. It’s Jews arguing amongst themselves about how to best practice their religion. It’s an insider conversation among practitioners, rather than Jesus just condemning Judaism.
I thought it was interesting that many questions coming from the audience related to the Christian understanding of the “Old Testament.” What was behind that?
It’s an interesting issue because Jews and Christians both claim the Old Testament as Scripture, yet traditionally bring totally different interpretive lenses to it. So we have competing interpretations. At least classically in the Christian tradition, we see the Old Testament as prophetic of Jesus. And Jews do not see Jesus in the Old Testament. This is a very different way of looking at it. So that’s part of it, competing interpretations.
The other part of it [is] the Christian tradition has often seen itself as superseding Judaism—replacing Judaism, with the new covenant replacing the old covenant, and the new people of God, Christians, replacing the old people of God, Jews. And it has been catastrophic for Jewish history.
You mentioned that you frequently speak to Christian audiences, helping them better understand Judaism, but this time you were doing the opposite: explaining the New Testament to a primarily Jewish audience. What has that been like?
What has interested me has been the composition of the audience. A large number of Christians have turned up for it, including a number of very conservative Protestants. That intrigues me.
I wish more congregations were as intentional as Temple Emanu-El in creating this kind of dialogue, these types of exchanges. It’s fruitful and fascinating.
Staff Writer
Dr. Mark Chancey has made an auspicious start as the new chair of SMU’s religious studies department. Always passionate about promoting interfaith understanding, he was the featured lecturer at a Jewish synagogue recently on “The New Testament: First Century Jews, First Century Christians.”
A member of Northaven United Methodist Church in Dallas, Dr. Chancey’s scholarly work has focused on the New Testament, early Christianity and early Judaism and the archaeology of Palestine. He spoke recently with staff writer Mary Jacobs.
When you talk about the “Jewishness” of Jesus and the New Testament, what do you mean?
I think we often forget that Jesus and Paul were Jews, and they were operating within a Jewish worldview. And so Jesus’ notions of the kingdom of God and the coming age and the nature of God are all deeply influenced by his own Jewish tradition, as are Paul’s theological ideas. So we’re starting off with Jewish beliefs, concepts and symbols—temple, Torah, Messiah. Christian understanding of these ideas changes, but the roots are Jewish.
Why is it important that we, as Methodists, understand the “Jewishness” of Jesus?
Some of the importance is due to understanding the continuity of Christianity with Judaism and the continuity of the New Testament with what Christians call the Old Testament. If we’re going to understand our own faith, then we need to understand our historical origins in Judaism.
The other answer has to do with the often-sad history of how Christians have mistreated the Jews. Over the centuries, Christians have misunderstood Judaism, and Jews have often been the victims of Christian persecution because of Christian stereotypes of Judaism as a dry or legalistic or ritualistic religion, or the famous charge that the Jews killed Jesus. I think there’s still a lot of room to go in Christian understanding of Judaism, and also in Jewish understanding of Christianity.
What is it that fascinates you personally about this period when Christianity “spun off” from Judaism?
Growing up Christian, I never fully realized just how much the New Testament reflects early Judaism. We Christians are used to reading the Gospels and the other letters in the New Testament, but that may be the only ancient literature that we read. When you read the New Testament side-by-side with rabbinic writers or the Dead Sea Scrolls or writers like Josephus or Philo, then we begin to see the extraordinary dialogue going on in the first century about ideas like expectations for God’s deliverance, hopes for freedom from oppression and for the coming kingdom of God.
It also gives us a much more fair perspective on Judaism. If all we had were the Gospels, we’d think that the Pharisees were nothing but a bunch of legalistic hypocrites. But if we read other Jewish sources, particularly the rabbinic writings, we find that’s simply not the case. If all we had to understand Judaism was Paul, we would think that Torah was a broken system that was hard to live by, that it was burdensome or oppressive. But when we read other Jewish sources, we find that living by Torah was a joy and a privilege. And it helps us to see just how unusual and how distinctive Paul’s interpretation of Jewish law was. Paul reinterpreted Torah through the lens of his belief that Jesus was the Messiah. And so he has a very distinctive perspective on Torah.
In your recent lecture, you talked about passages in the New Testament—where Jesus argues with the Pharisees, for instance—that are misunderstood if readers don’t take Jesus’ Jewishness into account.
In those passages, Jesus, a Jew, was arguing with other Jews about how best to interpret the law. That’s about as Jewish an activity as you can get. It’s not Jesus criticizing the Jewish religion. It’s Jews arguing amongst themselves about how to best practice their religion. It’s an insider conversation among practitioners, rather than Jesus just condemning Judaism.
I thought it was interesting that many questions coming from the audience related to the Christian understanding of the “Old Testament.” What was behind that?
It’s an interesting issue because Jews and Christians both claim the Old Testament as Scripture, yet traditionally bring totally different interpretive lenses to it. So we have competing interpretations. At least classically in the Christian tradition, we see the Old Testament as prophetic of Jesus. And Jews do not see Jesus in the Old Testament. This is a very different way of looking at it. So that’s part of it, competing interpretations.
The other part of it [is] the Christian tradition has often seen itself as superseding Judaism—replacing Judaism, with the new covenant replacing the old covenant, and the new people of God, Christians, replacing the old people of God, Jews. And it has been catastrophic for Jewish history.
You mentioned that you frequently speak to Christian audiences, helping them better understand Judaism, but this time you were doing the opposite: explaining the New Testament to a primarily Jewish audience. What has that been like?
What has interested me has been the composition of the audience. A large number of Christians have turned up for it, including a number of very conservative Protestants. That intrigues me.
I wish more congregations were as intentional as Temple Emanu-El in creating this kind of dialogue, these types of exchanges. It’s fruitful and fascinating.
Posted: Wednesday - April 16, 2008 at 01:28 PM |
Quick Links
Statistics
Total entries in this blog:
Total entries in this category:
Published On: May 05, 2008 04:52 PM
Total entries in this category:
Published On: May 05, 2008 04:52 PM