Dunn on Christian Anti-Semitism

J D G Dunn

Continuing my readings on Christian Anti-Semitism here are some thoughts from James Dunn:

One of the most astonishing features of the quest of the historical Jesus has been the seeming determination of generation after generation of questers to discount or to strip away anything characteristically Jewish from the Jesus tradition. We can explain the underlying logic, even if we can never sympathize with it—the logic of traditional Christian anti-Semitism. As is well known, from the second century onward, perhaps we should say from the Epistle to the Hebrews onward, a consistent strand of Christian supersessionism has dominated Christian perception of the Jews. This is the view that Christianity had superseded Israel, had drained from its Jewish heritage all that was of value, and had left Judaism as an empty husk. On this view Christianity was antithetical to Judaism; indeed, the first time the word “Christianity” appears, in Ignatius of Antioch, early in the second century, it is coined as an antithesis to “Judaism.” Christianity, in other words, was early on perceived as not-Judaism, and Judaism as not-Christianity. The Jews, after all, had set themselves against the gospel and had rejected Christ; Judaism had thus set itself in opposition to Christianity. Worse still, the Jews had been responsible for Jesus’ death. The people themselves had accepted this bloodguilt: “His blood be on us and on our children” (Matt. 27:25); they were deicides, murderers of God. What Jesus said of Judas was true of them all: “It would have been better for that man not to have been born” (Mark 14:21, author’s translation). This was the underlying rationale behind the later persecutions and pogroms against the Jews in Christian Europe.

From this background emerged the governing instinct or assumption that Jesus himself cannot have been a Jew like that; he must have been different. And so we find as one of the most striking features of the quest repeated attempts to distance Jesus from his Jewish milieu. Susannah Heschel provides a penetrating analysis of this unsavory trend during the nineteenth century: “As Jewishness, Judaism represented a set of qualities associated with everything Christian theologians wished to reject and repudiate: false religiosity, immorality, legalism, hypocrisy, physicality, seductiveness, dishonesty, to name just a few.” She observes that liberal theologians painted “as negative a picture as possible of first-century Judaism” in order “to elevate Jesus as a unique religious figure who stood in sharp opposition to his Jewish surroundings.” A unique religious consciousness, unaffected by historical circumstances, in effect cut Jesus off from Judaism. Ernest Renan, for example, could write: “Fundamentally there was nothing Jewish about Jesus”; after visiting Jerusalem, Jesus “appears no more as a Jewish reformer, but as a destroyer of Judaism.… Jesus was no longer a Jew.” And for Albrecht Ritschl, the chief theological spokesman for liberal Protestantism, Jesus’ “renunciation of Judaism and its law … became a sharp dividing line between his teachings and those of the Jews.”6 Almost equally as striking is the fact that the great account of the liberal quest by Albert Schweitzer simply failed to take account of the substantial debate between Jewish and Christian scholarship on the theme of Jesus the Jew. On this point the irony of liberalism is that it not only sought to “liberate” Jesus from the distorting layers of subsequent dogma, but it also sought to present Jesus as the one who “liberated” the quintessential spirit of religion from the “outmoded garb” of Jewish cult and myth.

At the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, Wilhelm Bousset, in his little book on Jesus, well illustrates the twin aspects of the liberal quest—the idealization of the Christian’s Jesus set starkly over against the vilification of his opponents and of the religion they represented.

The bitterest enemies of Jesus, and the true antipodes to all that he stood for, were the Scribes. However closely he resembled them in the outward forms of his activity, in the spirit of it he and they were at opposite poles. On the one hand was the artificiality of a hairsplitting and barren erudition, on the other the fresh directness of the layman and the son of the people; here was the product of long generations of misrepresentation and distortion, there was simplicity, plainness, and freedom; here a clinging to the petty and the insignificant, a burrowing in the dust, there a constant dwelling upon the essential and a great inward sense of reality; here the refinement of casuistry, formula- and phrase-mongering, there the straightforwardness, severity, and pitilessness of the preacher of repentance; here a language which was scarcely to be understood, there the inborn power of the mighty orator; here the letter of the law and there the living God. It was like the meeting of water and fire.

Rudolf Bultmann’s reaction to his liberal teachers included his own recognition that so far as NT theology was concerned, the proclamation of Jesus did indeed belong under the heading of “Judaism.” But his insistence was even stronger that faith had nothing to do with history, that therefore we need know nothing of this Jesus, and that the only thing that matters is an existential encounter with the kerygmatic Christ. Consequently, the outcome was not so very different: faith in the kerygmatic Christ was a quantum leap away from anything that might be shown to be true of the Jewish Jesus. And although the generation following Bultmann began to move away from his existentialism, they continued to regard the Judaism of Jesus’ day with a jaundiced eye. Nothing shows this more clearly in German theology than the commonplace description of Second Temple Judaism as Spätjudentum (late Judaism)—even though they well knew, of course, that Judaism continued to thrive and still flourishes to the present day. The logic again is clear, the assumption still that of Christian supersessionism: that Judaism’s only function and purpose was to prepare for the coming of Christ and of Christianity; when Christ came, that marked the end of Judaism; the generation of Jesus’ time was “late Judaism,” the last Judaism. So too, with an astonishing insensitivity in the post-Holocaust period, it was not uncommon, even among prominent German theologians, to speak of Jesus doing away with Judaism or bringing Judaism to an end.

In the renewed quest of the post-Bultmann era, most of the debate centered on the question of criteria, criteria that would enable the quester to determine whether any particular saying derived from Jesus himself. We will return to this subject in the next section. Here we simply need to note that the principal criterion, dissimilarity, tried to make a virtue out of what second questers perceived as a necessity, by reconstructing their picture of Jesus out of what distinguished Jesus from his historical context and set him over against his Jewish milieu. And the neoliberal quest of Dominic Crossan and Burton Mack differs from the old liberal quest at this point only by its argument that the influence of hellenization, which in Harnack’s view marked out the difference of the early church from Jesus, is already found in Jesus’ own teaching; despite the acknowledgment of Jesus’ Jewishness, the tendency is to play up the similarities between Jesus’ teaching with Hellenistic culture and the differences from his native Jewish culture. In other words, the Jewishness of Jesus still remains an embarrassment to far too many attempting to take part in the quest.
In view of this embarrassment, it is a refreshing feature of the other main strand of current inquiry into the life and teaching of Jesus that it takes its start from the very point of embarrassment—Jesus the Jew. Indeed, my own preference is to limit the title “the third quest of the historical Jesus” to the quest for Jesus the Jew. The prospects for such a (third) quest have also been considerably improved by the fresh insights into the character of Second Temple Judaism that have been granted to scholarship during the past fifty years.

Here the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has pride of place. More than anything else the scrolls have broken open the idea of a monolithic, monochrome Judaism, particularly as set over against the distinctiveness of newly emerging Christianity. It has now become possible to envisage Jesus, as also “the sect of the Nazarenes,” within the diversity of late Second Temple Judaism in a way that was hardly thinkable before. This breakthrough has been accompanied and reinforced by other important developments—particularly the breakdown of the previously quite sharp distinction between Judaism and Hellenism, the recognition that the portrayals of rabbinic Judaism in Mishnah and Talmud may not simply be projected backward into the first century, the renewed interest in the rich range of apocryphal and pseudepigraphical Jewish literature as further testimony to the diversity of Second Temple Judaism, and the increasing sophistication in evaluating the steadily mounting archaeological data from the Israel (particularly Galilee) of Jesus’ time. In short, it is no exaggeration to say that scholarship is in a stronger position than ever before to sketch a clearer and sharper picture of Judaism in the land of Israel at the time of Jesus and as the context of Jesus’ ministry. And, as Nils Dahl observed forty years ago: “Everything that enlarges our knowledge of this environment of Jesus (Palestinian Judaism) indirectly extends our knowledge of the historical Jesus himself.”

This third quest allows us to shift the goal of our search from the distinctive and different Jesus to the characteristic Jesus. The quest for a Jesus who is different from Judaism has led us down some dubious roads and into some very unsavory places. To look for a Jesus who was brought up in Galilee and carried through most of his mission there, and yet who distanced himself fundamentally from the practice and beliefs of his fellow Galilean Jews, was always bound to end up with a rather odd Jesus. But a Jesus who was brought up in Galilee and who could evidently empathize with typical Galilean Jews suggests rather that the Jewishness of Jesus is a valid and viable starting point for the quest, rather than something to be stripped away or shied away from. We should, of course, not go to the opposite extreme of assuming that Jesus would be characteristically Jewish through and through. Those who have pioneered this new way of looking at Jesus, particularly Geza Vermes and Ed Sanders, are open to criticism at this precise point—that they have minimized the tensions between Jesus and the Pharisees in particular. Jesus appears to be such a good Jew that his denunciation by the high priestly party and execution become something of a puzzle. In closing the gap between Jesus and Judaism, such scholars open up the other gap, the one between Jesus and the Christianity which followed.

Nevertheless, looking at Jesus within the context of the Judaism of his time remains a more plausible line of search than starting with the intent of wrenching him out from that context. By noting what the characteristics are of Jewish practice and belief, we can infer, unless we have indications to the contrary, that Jesus shared these characteristics. A basic list would include the fact that he was circumcised, that he was brought up to say the Shema, to respect the Torah, to attend the synagogue, to observe the Sabbath. In addition, Sanders has offered a list of what he describes as “almost indisputable facts” about Jesus: that his mission mainly operated round the towns and villages of Galilee; that the main emphasis of his preaching was the kingdom of God; that he characteristically taught in aphorisms and parables; and so on. Here again, what emerges is a picture of the characteristic Jesus.

Dunn, J. D. G. (2005). A new perspective on Jesus: What the quest for the historical Jesus missed (58–65). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic.

James D. G. "Jimmy" Dunn (born 1939) is a leading British New Testament scholar who was for many years the Lightfoot Professor of Divinity in the Department of Theology at the University of Durham, now Emeritus Lightfoot Professor. He has worked broadly within the Protestant tradition.

Dunn has an MA and BD from the University of Glasgow and a PhD and DD from the University of Cambridge. For 2002, Dunn was the President of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas, the leading international body for New Testament study. Only three other British scholars had been made President in the preceding 25 years. In 2006 he became a Fellow of the British Academy.