April 1, 2018
FROM THE ARCHIVES: WHY PERSECUTETH THEY PAUL?:
Why The Jews Did or Did Not Reject Jesus (Richard John Neuhaus, February 2005, First Things)
In his new book, [Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History], [David] Klinghoffer is admiring of Christianity's civilizational achievements, although not of its theology. He rebuts the claim that it is anti-Semitic to say that the Jews were responsible for killing Jesus, citing Maimonides and other Jewish authorities who say the Jews were right to eliminate a false messiah. He debunks the notion that Nazism and the Holocaust were a product of Christianity, and he underscores Nazi hatred of Christianity and the Judaism from which it came. He treats sympathetically Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ, and is witheringly critical of the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish organizations that thrive by exploiting irrational fears of anti-Semitism in America. In sum, Klinghoffer is in many respects Christian-friendly.Except for the fact that Christianity itself is premised upon the fatal falsehood that Jesus is the Messiah. Much of the book is given to a detailed point-by-point rebuttal of the claim that Jesus fulfilled the messianic promises of the Hebrew Scriptures that Christians call the Old Testament. These arguments will be of interest mainly to those who describe themselves as Hebrew Christians or Messianic Christians, and who believe they are fulfilled as Jews by becoming disciples of Jesus. The arch- villain in Klinghoffer's story is the apostle Paul who, he says, radically rejected Judaism and invented a new religion dressed up in "biblical trappings." Although Klinghoffer excoriates the liberal theological reductionisms of the nineteenth century, both Jewish and Christian, at this point his argument is oddly similar to a long liberal tradition of blaming Paul for distorting the more attractive religion of Jesus. Along with many Christians, he fails to appreciate the implications of the fact that Paul's epistles were written well before the gospel accounts of Jesus. In part because of their prior placement in the New Testament, it is a common error to think that the seemingly more straightforward gospel accounts were later and complicatedly "theologized" by Paul, whereas, in fact, Paul's writings reflect what was generally believed about Jesus in the community that later produced the gospel accounts.
This tendency to get things backwards is at the crux of Klinghoffer's argument. He writes, "We arrive here at the very heart of the difference between Judaism and the religion that Paul originated. The difference is still observable in the faith of Christians, as compared with that of Jews, down to our own time. Followers of Paul read and understand the Hebrew Bible through a certain philosophical lens--they bring to it the premise that Jesus is the savior, that salvation is from him. They read the Old Testament from the perspective of the New. They prioritize the New over the Old."
Well, yes, of course. Only some Messianic Christians and Jews such as Klinghoffer think that the truth of Christianity stands or falls on whether, without knowing about Jesus in advance, one can begin with Genesis 1 and read through all the prophecies of Hebrew Scripture and then match them up with Jesus to determine whether he is or is not the Messiah. As with Saul on the road to Damascus, Christians begin, and Christianity begins, with the encounter with Christ. As with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, the first Christians, who were Jews, experienced in that encounter the opening of the Hebrew Scriptures, revealing, retrospectively, how they testify to Jesus as the Christ. Klinghoffer writes, "The resurrection works as a proof that Jesus was 'the Christ' only if you have already accepted his authority to render interpretations of Scripture contrary to the obvious meaning of the words. That is, it works only if you are already a Christian." The more one takes seriously Old Testament prophecy, writes Klinghoffer, "the more convinced he becomes that it is awfully hard to make Christian doctrine sit naturally on its presumed foundation, the Hebrew Bible. Yet even the arguments based on prophecies obviously aren't perfectly invulnerable to refutation. Otherwise there would be no Christians, or at least no thoughtful Christians. They would all be Jews."
This is, I'm afraid, gravely muddled. The argument, in effect, is that Jews reject Jesus because they are already Jews, and the mark of being a Jew is that one rejects Jesus. This is quite unconvincing in its circularity. Christian thinkers, including Paul, viewed Christ and the Church as the fulfillment of the promise to Israel not because they were engaged in tit-for-tat exegetical disputes with Jews over what Klinghoffer recognizes are often ambiguous and enigmatic Old Testament prophecies. Christians early on, and very importantly in engagement with Greek philosophy, developed a christology that entailed an understanding that all of reality, including the history of Israel, finds its center in Christ who is the Word of God (the Logos), the image of the invisible God in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell (Colossians 1), and, finally, the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. These philosophical and theological developments, almost totally ignored by Klinghoffer, form the matrix within which the Church--mainly Jewish in its beginnings--understood Israel and its Scriptures. For the early Christians, as for Christians today, the person of Jesus Christ was revelatory also of the history and sacred writings of Israel, of which he is the fulfillment.
You have to figure Paul takes the brunt of these criticisms because folks are afraid to attack Christ and Christianity directly.
[Originally posted: February 19, 2005]
Posted by oj at April 1, 2018 12:59 AM
OJ:
Slightly off topic, but I ran across something in a blog, "http://benjaminscole.blogspot.com/2005_02_01_benjaminscole_archive.html#110848391989518771"
which I will quote from (2/13/05 entry" s9ince it does not have a permalink"
"In case you are not already among the burgeoning conservative intelligensia that reads First Things magazine, then my advice: run, don't walk, to the nearest bookstore and purchase a copy. Readers of First Things (ROFTERS) have become the subcultural soul of illuminated young minds in our generation. First Things groups are popping up around the nation like fever blisters after a high school prom. In fact, Baylor University has just begun a ROFTERS group, organized, in a small part, by your dear friend(s) here at Pen and the Sword."
I have been reading First Things off and on (mostly on) for years, but in the last few years, (2, no more than 3) it has been generating an increasing level of buzz among a sub-group of my clients, evangelicals associated in some way or other with private (religous) colleges. Years ago, the few times it came up was in connection with the "Evangelicals and Catholics Together" statements printed there, and the comments were mostly from Calvinist types who were afraid the statements went too far. I'm not sure why this change has happened, but I have seen it.
Dan:
Yes, it's certainly the best conservative magazine going.
Posted by: oj at February 19, 2005 3:34 PMJews, at least those that care about their theology, have a bit of a problem, viz.:
"Thou shalt have no other gods before Me" (Exodus XX:3; Deuteronomy V:7).
One might ask what does "before Me" really mean? Is it "instead of Me?" "in addition to Me"? "together with Me"?
This, of course, is not new ground.
Now, there may be some very creative ways to mitigate this particular injunction. Or it may even be possible to claim the Old Testament to be obsolete, or superceded (at least in this particular case).
One may want to claim, in a most general sense, that Christianity (and in its own way, Islam) helps the non-Jew recognize the divinity of the true God. And it may be a true claim, all things---or at least, most things---considered.
But can, or should, one understand the corollary of such a claim to be that Jews, already cognizant (let's assume) of the divinity of the true God, need not recognize Jesus as God?
If so, then to what may be attributed the problem with the Jews' non-recognition of Jesus? Since the Jews' non-recognition does seem to be problem (and not only historically).
Are Jews really exempt, therefore, from the acknowledgement of Jesus as God? Is the answer, yes, and if yes, can one really on Orrin's word for it? Or Neuhaus's? Or any Christian theologian, for that matter (that is, if I have represented them correctly)?
That is, does any Christian have the authority to say, "No, the Jews do not need to believe that Jesus is God"? Can Christians live with this? Is there a monolithic answer to this question? An answer with no qualifications?
Is the issue even still pertinent?
Posted by: Barry Meislin at February 20, 2005 4:38 AMBarry:
The question is very pertinent, because the chief sin of man is idolatry (violation of the 1st commandment, as you quoted). Is it idolatry for a Jew to worship Jesus?
And don't forget Deut. 6:4 ("Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one!").
Certainly Jesus was opposed for being a (plain-spoken) prophet, but other prophets had been opposed and killed before. However, none of them claimed divinity. Jesus not only claimed it, but performed miracles to validate his testimony. Annas and Caiaphas never did miracles.
Throughout the gospels, does it seem that the attitide of the authorities towards Jesus is one of punishment because he was seemingly breaking the commandment, or one of jealousy and anger because he was someone they could not accept?
Remember, at the time of Jesus, the Saducees were the majority party - they did not believe any Scripture outside the Pentateuch. The Saducees denied the resurrection. The Pharisees had their own little holiness society, quite apart from the people. And the Zealots were following in the 'tradition' of the Maccabees by hating the Romans and opposing them. Jesus upset a lot of applecarts.
And yet there were some (Nicodemus, Joseph, etc.) who recognized something in Jesus. Were they idolators? Was Paul?
Posted by: jim hamlen at February 20, 2005 10:03 AMBarry:
It seems entirely understandable that Jews and Christians would have taken some time to become reconciled, what with Christians claiming the Messiah had come and Jews denying it. but we seem to have achieved a modus vivendi for now.
Meanwhile, C. S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, has a nice bit about Christ's claim to Godhood:
'I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of thing Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic�on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg�or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.'
Posted by: oj at February 20, 2005 10:15 AMPoor Paul, getting it from both sides. The Nazis posited an Aryan Christ, a heroic rebel against Judaism, and Paul, the scheming Jew, hijacking Christianity back into Yahwehism. The main authority for this is Alfred Rosenberg, following H.S. Chamberlain. The Nazi take on all this was that Pauline Christiamity, as promulgatesd bny the Catholic Church, was a Jewish plot to re-inthrall mankind to a God Who restains man from realizing his real potential.
Posted by: Lou Gots at February 20, 2005 10:56 PM"Scholars generally agree that in the first century there were approximately six million Jews in the Roman Empire. . . That was about one tenth of the entire population. . . At one point Klinghoffer acknowledges that, during the life of Jesus, only a minuscule minority of Jews either accepted or rejected Jesus, for the simple reason that most Jews had not heard of him. Some scholars have noted that, by the fourth or fifth century, there were only a few hundred thousand, at most a million, people who identified themselves as Jews. What happened to the millions of others? The most likely answer, it is suggested, is that they became Christians."
Actually, the entire population of the Empire collapsed in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries as a result of barbarian invasion, civil war and plague. Many Jews fled the persecution of the now officially Christian state by moving to Persian controlled territory in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) or Persia.
OJ: Your quote would be more interesting if it pointed to an affirmation or proof rather than a non-denial.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at February 21, 2005 4:02 AMRobert:
Earlier in the book, Lewis had already discussed what he said was a greatly overlooked part of what Jesus said and did - to forgive sin. Not just sins against himself, but all the sins of the people he encountered. He did not ask permission of the offended; he just did it.
From Psalm 51, we see that David wrote about sin ultimately being against God, so in that sense, we can understand why Jesus could offer such forgiveness.
When he healed the crippled man on the mat (Mark 2), he astonished the religious leaders by first offering forgiveness to him ("who can forgive sins but God alone?"). Of course, Jesus then tells them, just watch - I can forgive and heal. Which is greater? Then the man stood up. At that point, they should have known what/who they were dealing with.
Posted by: jim hamlen at February 21, 2005 8:50 AMWell, not EVERYBODY
Posted by: Harry Eagar at February 21, 2005 6:05 PM
Some of the recent evangelical scholarship on these matters sees the New Testament and particularly the ministry of Jesus as the fulfillment of the the Old Testament promises of the future establishment of God's kingdom on earth. Gordon Fee, an authority on the life and writings of Paul, and N T Wright, a British Anglican bishop and authority on the gospels and the life of Jesus, have written extensively on the cohesion of the Old and New Testaments. Jesus' announcement of the arrival of the kingdom of God was the focal point and foundation of His message. The proclamation that all who were willing were welcome in God's kingdom was a welcome surprise to the Gentile and a stumbling block to the Jew.
Posted by: Pilgrim at February 19, 2005 11:23 AM