Dwight Pryor: Unity Not Uniformity

Finally, Supersessionism suffers from what I would call an unfortunate reductionism in the distinction between Jew and Gentile.  This is based mostly on a misapplication of a passage from Paul's letter to the Church in Galatia.

Paul states tha tin Messiah there is "neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, free or slave" (Galatians 3:28).  This statement was written in a polemical setting and a particular context, in which some were arguing that Gentiles who have faith in the Messiah are not in fact part of covenant Israel:  and to become part of the covenant people they must become proselytes to Judaism, i.e., be circumcised.  The Apostle Paul counters:  To the contrary, because of what God has accomplished in Messiah, in fact believing Gentiles are co-heirs, fellow sharers, and part of Isrel's commonwealth.  They are in full covenant standing.

When you take this text to say that Messiah has abolished all distinction between Jew and Gentile you are violating the witness of Scripture.  Paul continues to make this distinction in his letters -- because the distinction between Jews and Gentile was established by God Himself.

Moses states it poetically:  When God allotted the portions of the earth to the sons of Adam, He did so in rleationship to the sons of Israel, (Deuteronomy 32:8).  Through Abraham God intended a mutuality of blessing between Jew and Gentile.  For there to be a blessing, there must be distinction, an 'other' that is to be blessed.

The point is that from Paul's perspective the division between Jew and Gentile has been removed in Messiah -- the divisiveness -- but not the distinction.  That will continue not only in the Church, but even unto the final fulfillment of Scripture.  When we come to the consummation of all things, Revelation records that in the New Jerusalem the gates will be named after the Tribes of Israel,  and to Jerusalem will come the kings of the Gentiles, bearing their gifts, their glory (Revelations 21:12, 24).

God intended from the beginning for the nations to find their blessing through His covenant people Israel.   Of course Jesus fulfills that promise in large measure. But fulfilment is more than a discharge of duty; it is filling-full of a relationship. In such a 'filling-full' can occur again.  Even his Jesus fulfilled the commandment to love God and love your neighbour, so we too must the phone. Everytime engage in loving and kind it is one to another we are fulfilling the Torah.

When therefore we reduce or abolish the God-given distinction between Jew and Gentile, between Israel and the nations, we engage in a kind of forced uniformity, whereas the Bible speaks of unity.

There is a difference between unity and uniformity. In Galatia there were those (whomever they were) saying that the only way Gentiles could become part of the covenant people was to become Jews, i.e., be circumcised. Ironically the church went to the opposite extreme, claiming that the only way Jews could become part of the new covenant people (the Church) was to cease being a Jew and in effect becoming a Gentile. Jewishness no longer had a relevance; in fact it was an obstacle to true faith.

The problem we face is twofold: as Protestants, invariably our faith t and ends to be individualistically focused and other-worldly oriented. The Hebraic point of view by contrast tends to speak of corporate faithfulness, with a this-world orientation.

As I sat at the same time ago, questions are keenly interested in "going up" -- in getting people up and out of this world. People often ask me when the rapture is going to occur. My response was: "I don't know. But this I know: While you are so concerned about going up, God is passionate about coming down!"

Look at this from right to left from the beginning, in Genesis, to the end, in Revelation, God is coming down. And at the end, the New Jerusalem, is it going up? No, it is coming down. God is perenially in pursuit of a people.  According to the apostle Paul, we Gentiles have experienced the mercies of God in order that we could be joined to that people and and His covenant story in the earth.  And that story from beginning to end involves Israel.

When all things are said and done, in the final consummating act of God's creation, the chief player will not be the church, nor will it be the nations. It will be Israel.  Through Israel, God says, "I will show myself wholly to the nations" (Ezekiel 36:23). And together the nations shall stream up to Jerusalem -- for blessing, fellowship and the fullness of worship of God who will take up permanent habitation in Zion.

When the Son of Man comes, he returns not to London, impressive as it is, nor to New York. He returns to Jerusalem.  To there the nations will go up. There the fullness of God's intended mutuality of blessing Jew and Gentile will be consummated. For too long the Church has tried to expropriate the blessings to itself apart from Israel.

Sometimes Israel itself, as Abraham Heschel said, is a messenger who has forgotten the message. I'm not speaking today about the spiritual state of a particular Jew. Nor am I speaking about the merits of the current administration of the State of Israel. I'm talking about God -- the God who has a purpose for a covenant people, and who in His sovereign will and freedom of choice elected to identify His name forever with the Jewish people.

We who worship the living and true God, we who have been brought near to him through Messiah's sacrifice, surely we must never suggest that God has rejected the Jews, replaced Israel or revoked the Torah. As Paul insists, "God forbid!"

Source: Pryor, D (7 February 2007). A different God? An edited and amended transcript of a lecture given at Salters Hall London. Pages 14-17.

N T Wright on Replacement Theology

N T Wright

Romans 9–11 is, in fact, a massive retelling of the scriptural narrative, on a par in its way with the remarkable retelling in the second half of the Wisdom of Solomon and other similar second-Temple narratival passages. The point throughout 9:6–29 is that what has happened to Israel is what God always intended. As Paul thinks his way through the story of the patriarchs, the Exodus and the time of the prophets, it is clear that God never intended Israel to be affirmed as it stood. God had, it seems, called Abraham and his family to be the solution-bearing family knowing that, because they too were ‘in Adam’, they were themselves bound to become part of the problem, and that the shape of their own history was thus bound to bear witness to their own share in the problem whose solution they were none the less carrying. This line of thought reaches its height at the start of chapter 10, where, just as in 3:21, the Messiah himself reveals what God’s covenant plan had been all along. But as the argument of chapter 10 works through to the statement of Paul’s missionary policy in verses 14–18, it leaves him still with the puzzle: if God has, as he promised, made Israel jealous by bringing in Gentiles to share the covenant privileges, what is now to happen to ‘Israel according to the flesh’?

It is at this point, of course, that many have tried to mount an exegetical argument to say that, while Paul has indeed explained the renewal of the covenant, the rethinking of election, as I have expounded it above, he here offers a different argument, supremely in 11:25–26, for thinking that God is also providing a special way of salvation, still reserved for Jews and Jews only. Indeed, not to mount such an argument is to run the risk of being accused of that current heresy, ‘supersessionism’, the mere mention of which is enough to drive otherwise clear-headed exegetes into abject apology and hasty backtracking. Has Paul really so redefined election around Messiah and Spirit that there is no room for anyone who clings to the original election while rejecting those two redefining poles? Is not Paul’s whole argument in chapter 11 that, despite their unbelief, the Jewish people are still ‘beloved because of the patriarchs’ (v. 28)?

Yes, but this does not mean what the revisionist argument tries to make it mean. As I have argued in considerable detail elsewhere, the promise Paul holds out for at present unbelieving Jews is not that they are actually all right as they are, but that they are not debarred, in virtue of their ethnic origin, from coming back into the family, their own family, that has been renewed in the gospel, and from which they are currently separated because it is marked out solely by faith, and they are currently in ‘unbelief’. Romans 10:1–13 remains, in fact, a crucial driver of the argument right through chapter 11, as the various links between the two passages (not often enough noted) indicate; in particular, when Paul says ‘all Israel shall be saved’ in 11:26 he is consciously echoing ‘all who call on the name of the Lord shall be saved’ in 10:13, which is offered as the answer to the question of 10:1 about the salvation for presently unbelieving Jews. As he says in 11:23, they can be grafted in if they do not remain in unbelief. Had he held the views normally attributed to him, he could not have written that line.

Paul’s argument is not aimed at our modern western context, in which centuries of horrible European anti-Semitism have finally worked their way out in an orgy of violence, implicating many parts of the Christian church. His argument is aimed at the proto-Marcionism he suspects may exist in the Roman church, an attitude which really would deserve the name ‘supersessionism’, a belief according to which God has effected a simple transfer of promises and privileges from Jews to Gentiles, so that Jews are just as shut out now as Gentiles were before (a very convenient thing to believe in Rome in the middle or late 50s after those unpopular Jews were allowed back again upon Nero’s accession). This argument has nothing to do, either, with the idea, which neither Paul nor his contemporaries would have understood, since it belongs primarily with the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, that each religion is more or less as good as each other one, and that Judaism and Christianity are parallel ways of believing in the one God and should each learn to shrug their shoulders and go their separate ways. That, for Paul, would paradoxically have been the ultimate form of anti-Judaism—the idea that the Jews should be encouraged to ignore their own Messiah, to sidestep the renewal of their own covenant, and to remain in ignorance of the dikaiosynē theou, of what the creator God had righteously been doing in Israel’s own history.

Rather, Romans 9–11 as a whole, though it does not say very much about Messiah and Spirit, is in fact shaped according to the pattern which Paul elsewhere works out very explicitly in those terms. It is as though, soaked in the thought expressed in Galatians 2:11–21 and similar passages explored above, he were to set himself the task of thinking through what it means that, as he says in 9:5, the Messiah is Israel’s Messiah according to the flesh and also ‘God over all, blessed for ever’. What we see worked out in 9–11, in other words, is the Messiah-shaped pattern of Israel’s history, with the Spirit-driven pathway to covenant renewal blazed through the middle of it. As in 11:11–15, Israel itself is ‘cast away’ for the reconciliation of the world, and thus can and will be ‘received back again’ with a meaning of nothing short of ‘life from the dead’. Paul has so retold the story of Israel according to the Messianic pattern worked out earlier in the letter that, when we stand back and look at the picture as a whole, what strikes us is not the relative absence of Messiah and Spirit but the fact that the whole of Israel’s story is laid before us as the outworking in history of what it means that, as the fulfilment of God’s promises to Abraham, the Messiah was crucified and raised to new life.

Wright, N. T. (2005). Paul: Fresh Perspectives (125–128). London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

N T Wright is a leading New Testament scholar and retired Anglican bishop. In academia, he is published as N. T. Wright, but otherwise tends to be known as Tom Wright. Between 2003 and his retirement in 2010, he was the Bishop of Durham. He is now Research Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at St Mary's College in the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

Michael Brown on Replacement Theology or Supersessionism

Michael Brown

Michael Brown  in his book "Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, Vol 1" writes in a question and answer format.  His dialogue on supersessionism is an interesting read.

Q.  The real problem with the New Testament is the notion that God is finished with the Jewish people, that they are now the synagogue of Satan, having been replaced by Christians who are the true Jews and the New Israel.

A.  Although it is easy to see how you came up with this idea, it is incorrect and without foundation. This doctrine, known as replacement theology or supersessionism, has been taught at times by many church leaders, but it remains an unbiblical view.  Again, I’ll respond point by point for clarity’s sake.

Does the New Testament say that God is finished with Israel? Absolutely not! As we saw earlier, Paul, in the fullest treatment of this question in the New Testament, emphatically rejected this notion. Rather, he explained to his Gentile readers that his people Israel had only stumbled temporarily, explaining that they were partially hardened (see Romans 9–11; for the concept of God hardening his people in the Tanakh, see Deut. 29:4; Isa. 6:9–10). The hardening was partial in at least two ways: (1) It was only temporary, and in the end, Israel as a nation would turn back in faith; and (2) it did not apply to all the people. After all, virtually all of Yeshua’s first followers—amounting to many thousands—were Jews.

In keeping with this concept of Israel’s final restoration, Jesus prophesied to his disciples that “at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man [the Messiah] sits on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging [or leading, ruling] the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matt. 19:28). The tribes of Israel will be part of God’s endtime kingdom. It is because Yeshua’s disciples knew this that shortly before he ascended to heaven they asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6). Rather than rebuking them and calling them stupid for thinking for a moment that God would ever restore the kingdom to Israel, he said, “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority” (Acts 1:7). In other words, it’s none of your business to know when this will happen. Instead, he told them their job was to go into all the world and tell everyone that the Messiah had come (Acts 1:8).

It is true that Jesus taught that “many will come from the east and the west [meaning Gentiles], and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 8:11–12). But this was saying nothing more than that many Jews, who should have been the first to recognize the Messiah, will be rejected and left out because of their unbelief, while many believing Gentiles will enjoy Israel’s blessings in their stead. The entire context of Yeshua’s ministry makes this clear.

Q. “But didn’t Paul teach that the church was the new Israel?”

A.  Not at all. Rather, he taught that Gentile believers in the Messiah became fellow members of the household of God along with Jewish believers, but they remained Gentiles. Read through Romans 9–11, where Paul addresses Gentile believers as Gentiles, talking to them about his people Israel: “I am talking to you Gentiles. Inasmuch as I am the apostle to the Gentiles, I make much of my ministry in the hope that I may somehow arouse my own people [Israel] to envy and save some of them” (Rom. 11:13–14).
It is true Paul applied some of the spiritual descriptions of Israel to Gentile Christians, but he never said the church was Israel or, more importantly, that the church had replaced Israel. I have documented this in detail in my book Our Hands Are Stained with Blood.  As I noted there,

  Many people have feelings and impressions about what the Scriptures teach. But the facts are the facts: While the New Testament often describes Israel and the Church in similar terms—both are pictured as the children of God, the bride of God, the chosen people, etc.—on no definite occasion does the New Testament ever call the Church “Israel.” In fact, out of the 77 times that the words “Israel” and “Israelite” occur in the Greek New Testament, there are only two verses in which “Israel” could possibly refer to the Church as a whole: Galatians 6:16, where Paul speaks of the “Israel of God” and Revelation 7:4, where John speaks of the 144,000 sealed from the twelve tribes of Israel. This is saying something! Seventy-five “definites” and only two “maybes.” I wouldn’t want to side with the “maybes”!

  As for the verses open to dispute, in Galatians 6:16 the King James Version, the New King James Version and the New American Standard Bible [important, contemporary Christian translations] all imply the same thing: “The Israel of God” does not refer to the whole Church. It refers to believing Jews. The same can be said for the description of the 144,000 sealed in Revelation 7:4. It most probably describes the final harvest of Jews worldwide. Elsewhere in the Book of Revelation “Israel” means “Israel” (Rev. 2:14) and the “twelve tribes of Israel” mean “the twelve tribes of Israel,” as distinguished from the “twelve apostles” (Rev. 21:12–14).

The same point can be made even more emphatically with regard to the use of the term Jew in the Greek New Testament: It occurs more than 190 times, referring in general to ethnic, national Jews, or specifically to Judean Jews or to Jewish leaders in Jerusalem.

Q.  “What about Romans 2:28–29, where Paul says that those who are Jews outwardly (meaning in the flesh) are not Jews, whereas a true Jew is one who is a Jew inwardly (meaning spiritually)? According to Paul himself, if I don’t believe in Jesus, even though both my parents are Jewish, I’m not a Jew, whereas a Gentile Christian is a Jew.”

A.  Again, your interpretation is wrong. In context, Paul is addressing Jews living in Rome, and his question has to do with who is a real Jew in God’s eyes. Is it the Jew who is circumcised in body only, or the Jew who is circumcised in spirit as well? Thus the New International Version rightly translates these verses as follows: “A man is not a Jew if he is only one outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. No, a man is a Jew if he is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code. Such a man’s praise is not from men, but from God” (Rom. 2:28–29).

Do you see Paul’s point? It would be like me bringing three men before you, two from Africa and one from America. One of the Africans is a devout atheist, the other a devout Christian. The American is also a devout Christian. If I asked you, “Which of these men is the spiritual African?” you would reply, “The African Christian!” You wouldn’t think for a moment that the American Christian was the spiritual African, would you? In the same way, if I brought before you a Jewish atheist, a God-fearing Jew, and a God-fearing Gentile Christian and asked you, “Which of these is a spiritual Jew?” you would say, “The God-fearing Jew.”

That was Paul’s point. Between two Jews, one who is circumcised in his flesh but does not know and serve the Lord, and one who is circumcised in his flesh and knows and serves the Lord, who is the true Jew, the real Jew in God’s sight? Who is the spiritual Jew? You wouldn’t think for a second he was speaking of a spiritual Gentile.

Q.  “Okay, I’ll admit your interpretation makes sense, but what about those verses in which Jews who oppose Christians are referred to as the ‘synagogue of Satan’? If that’s not anti-Semitic, nothing is.”

A.  Once again, I have no doubt that the verses to which you refer have been used by anti-Semites, just as verses in the Tanakh that call our people a “sinful nation, a people loaded with guilt, a brood of evildoers, children given to corruption” (Isa. 1:4) have been used against us. Still, you might be surprised with the facts behind the “synagogue of Satan” accusation.

This description is found just twice in the New Testament, Revelation 2:9, where Jesus comforts believers in Smyrna who were experiencing intense persecution and even martyrdom (“I know the slander of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan”), and Revelation 3:9, where Jesus encourages suffering believers in the city of Philadelphia (in Asia Minor), assuring them, “I will make those who are of the synagogue of Satan, who claim to be Jews though they are not, but are liars—I will make them come and fall down at your feet and acknowledge that I have loved you” (Rev. 3:9).

On the one hand, there is the possibility that the people to whom Yeshua referred—and who were causing real hardship for these Christians in Smyrna and Philadelphia—were actually not Jews at all. This would be similar to a modern-day cult such as the Black Hebrews: They strongly oppose both Jews and Christians and claim to be the real Jews, the true Israel, when in fact they are not. As to being called a synagogue, it is important to remember that the Greek word used here could simply mean a meeting place, as in James (Jacob) 2:2—“Suppose a man comes into your meeting” (Greek, synagoges).

On the other hand, it could well be that Yeshua was speaking of his own kinsmen but using biting, prophetic hyperbole, just as when the Lord said through the prophet Hosea, “You are not my people, and I am not your God” (Hosea 1:9), and again, speaking of Israel as his wife, “Rebuke your mother, rebuke her, for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband” (Hosea 2:2). In both of these verses, God completely repudiates his people/wife Israel, only to immediately promise Israel’s restoration (see Hosea 1:10; 2:16). The lesson we learn is that sometimes, when our people continually disobeyed the Lord and broke his covenant, he spoke of them as if they were not his people at all. In the same way, when the Messiah’s own people actually tried to stop Gentiles from hearing about him (and this did happen; see, e.g., Acts 14:1–20), he could say of them, “You claim to be Jews but are not; you’re really a meeting place of Satan.”

“But that’s so harsh!” you say.

Yes, it does seem harsh, but no harsher than the accusation in the (Jewish) Dead Sea Scrolls that Jews who opposed their (Jewish) group were part of the “congregation of Belial.” (Belial was synonymous with Satan.) And it is certainly a lot less harsh than the Talmudic claim that Jesus is now in hell, burning in excrement (see b. Gittin 56b–57a).

In any case, this is where we get to the root of the problem. When the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, they were written primarily for their own believing community, consisting only of Jews. When the New Testament was written, it was written for a different believing community, consisting of Jews and Gentiles. Over the process of time, this community of believers (called the church) became increasingly Gentile and, hence, increasingly ignorant of its Jewish roots, the very thing Paul warned about (see Rom. 11:17–26 and the discussion above, 2.7). Ultimately, some of this church turned hostile to its Jewish roots, utilizing texts that at most provided evidence of a very selective anti-Judaism, and, more than eighteen hundred years later, were used to fuel the fires of racial anti-Semitism.

As a follower of Jesus, I grieve over this misuse of my sacred Scriptures, and I stand against any so-called Christian who would misuse them in this way today. I also believe there should be a greater sensitivity in modern translations of the New Testament, not altering a word that was written but translating with special clarity in light of the terrible history of misinterpretation that we have described in part.

But that is only part of the grief I experience. You see, as a Jew, I agonize over the fact that our people as a whole missed the Messiah when he came, instead turning against him. How awful it is! We broke the Sinai covenant over and over again, we rejected prophet after prophet, even killing some, and then we rejected the Messiah, delivering him up to be crucified. So both the church and the Jewish people have sinned!

There is only one way to make things right: Let everyone who claims to be a Christian demonstrate it by showing the love of the Messiah to his own Jewish people, utterly repudiating even the slightest hint of anti-Semitism, and let every Jewish person turn back to Yeshua—our one and only Messiah—in repentance and faith.

Let me close this rather lengthy answer with an observation. As I mentioned earlier, I can honestly say that in almost thirty years in the church, I have rarely, if ever, met a “Christian” anti-Semite,  and when I have told Christians about the horrors of anti-Semitism in church history, they were utterly shocked. Moreover, when I shared with them that many Jews actually believe the New Testament itself is anti-Semitic, they were dumbfounded. These people who carefully studied the New Testament for years never came to any anti-Semitic conclusions. The thought of such interpretations never even dawned on them.

This should give you pause for thought, and it should help explain to you why, at this critical juncture in Jewish history, Israel’s best friends are Bible-believing, New testament-reading Christians.  I know this is the opposite of what you have been taught, but it’s the truth. The gospel truth.

Brown, M. L. (2000). Answering Jewish objections to Jesus, Volume 1: General and historical objections. (170–175). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books.

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.