The Jewish Jesus

The Jewish Jesus by Peter Schafer

Peter Schafer specializes in the study of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity during the early Christian/early Rabbinical Jewish period. Schafer's general thesis is that the separation of Christianity from Judaism took far longer than commonly thought and that the two sister faiths helped to shape each other during this long period of interaction. Schafer views rabbinical Judaism and Christianity as sister religions:

“One final remark: we are talking here about the very early relationship between “Judaism” and “Christianity”—long before they became two distinct communities, let alone religions. Instead of following the old paradigm of the “daughter religion” (Christianity) being born from the “mother religion” (Judaism), I prefer to use the term “sister religion” for Christianity, since, ultimately, I am arguing that once the idea of the Christian Messiah was put forth—with all its ramifications—Judaism could not remain the same.”

Schafer's principal source of information involves a reading of the rabbinical Mishnah and Talmud. In particular, Shafer examines the rabbinical responses to arguments made by unspecified heretics (minim), which echo Christian arguments or positions.
An example of this interconnectedness involves Paul justification of the custom of women covering their heads on the grounds that a hierarchy exists, which in descending order ranks Christ/God—man—woman. In this hierarchy man is the “image” and “glory” of God, whereas woman is the “glory” of man.(1 Cor 11:2-16.) This concept seems to come from Genesis 1:27: “And God created man in his image, in the image of God he created him.” (This text is used by the Latter Day Saints to justify their doctrine that God has a corporeal body.) This text was used by Rabbi Simlai to refute the “heresy of two powers” – which maintained that there were two divine powers in heaven, also called “binitarianism.” R. Simlai rebutted a minim argument that used the creation of man in “our image” by teaching: “In the past Adam was created from dust, and Eve was created from Adam, but henceforth: ‘in our image, after our likeness' (Gen. 1:26). Neither man without woman nor woman without man, and neither of them without the Shekhinah.” Some have argued that the rabbinic midrash is dependent on Paul, but Schafer believes that the more likely explanation is that Paul and Simlair are dependent on a common a common Jewish source.
Other minim challenges involve the different names given to God in the Torah. A key point is that the minim's challenge always involve three names, which suggests that the minim are Christian. Schafer suggests that this identification may not be entirely apposite in that Christian interest in the Holy Spirit was not a strong element of Christian thinking prior to the fourth century. He also suggests that changes in the imperial structure wrought by Diocletian's collegial imperial system may have fostered thinking in terms of a limited divine rulership.
Schafer maintains that Jewish rabbis were aware of Christological debates. Christian concepts originated in Judaism:

“It was Christology that most occupied the Fathers of the Church during the first centuries C.E. (up until the mid-fourth century)—and thus worried their rabbinic colleagues. R. Simlai and the majority of the rabbis not only knew these debates but referred to and grappled with them.82 And this is hardly surprising, for reflections about the form and essence of its God were certainly not alien to prerabbinic and rabbinic Judaism. A classical example is the Wisdom theology as developed in the biblical book of Proverbs and in the noncanonical books Jesus Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) and Wisdom of Solomon. In Proverbs (third century B.C.E.?) we are told of Wisdom (hokhmah) that she was created before the creation of the world and was with God as his “confidante” or his “master worker” when “he assigned to the sea its limit” and “marked out the foundations of the earth.”

Philo of Alexandria developed a Logos and Wisdom theology:

“It would therefore not seem a difficult task to develop from such initial stages the idea of a second divine power next to and with God—as indeed Philo did with his comprehensive Wisdom and Logos theology. Judaism did not choose to go this route—at any rate not the variety of Judaism that would gain acceptance in the centuries to come. Jesus Sirach—written about 190 B.C.E. in Hebrew, translated ca. 132 B.C.E. into Greek, but never accepted as part of the official canon of the Hebrew Bible (although highly regarded by the rabbis)—applies Wisdom of Solomon's wisdom to the Torah...”

Christianity maintained the character of wisdom and logos, particularly in John 1. Judaism identified wisdom with the written Torah, but Judaism could have continued on with the ideas of Wisdom and Logos:
“Judaism, too, could have carried on with the ideas of Wisdom and Logos—it is precisely for this reason that the rabbis perceived the developments within Christianity as simultaneously tempting and threatening—it decided, however, under the impact of Christian theology (or rather, under the impact of what would ever more forcefully become the trademark of Christianity), against this option. It would take until the Middle Ages—until the emergence of the Kabbalah as the climax of Jewish mysticism toward the end of the twelfth century—for Wisdom as a person to find her way back into Judaism.”
The rabbinical Jews also formed the idea of a young and an old God. This developed from the presentation of God as a war hero at times (Ex. 13:18, 15:3) and as an old man (Exodus 24:10) at other times. (God as an old man needs a footstool.) The latter imagery projected concepts of mercy; the former of strength. This reaches a height in Daniel 7:9 in the “Ancient of Days” motif. These presentations raised the “two powers” heresy, which was battled by rabbinical midrashes affirming the unity of God. (Since the midrash contemplates complementary powers, Schafer rules out a gnostic system.)
Because Daniel 7:9 speaks of setting thrones – plural – in heaven, this also suggests the “two powers” heresy. This naturally led to speculation about who was to sit in the other throne. Rabbinical suggestions indicated that the second throne would be occupied by the Messiah-King David. This suggestion was slapped down by other rabbis who saw the Christian danger in it.
The Daniel trope led to non-canonical scriptures identifying the messiah-king as the son of God, which led to the canonical gospels identifying Jesus as an heir to David and the son of Man who took his seat on the throne reserved for Him at God's right hand. Schafer explains:

“It is highly probable that R. Aqiva in the Bavli knows of this Jewish chain of tradition and refers to it (yet of course without its Christian implications). And it is little wonder that R. Yose and, even more so, R. Eleazar b. Azariah, both aware of the Christian ramifications, try to immediately defuse any such implications in R. Aqiva's exegesis, seeing as how they threaten to evoke (in their view) that most dangerous and detested of all heresies—Christianity—and in its most provocative form. Both Jews and Christians shared a belief in the Davidic Messiah, and when Aqiva has his Messiah take his seat next to God in heaven, all rabbinic fences erected against this particular heresy are pulled down—with incalculable consequences for rabbinic Judaism. So I wish to argue that in our Bavli sugya we are indeed confronted with rabbinic polemics against Christianity, that is, Christianity in its very essence, with the Messiah Jesus competing with the Jewish Messiah.”

Rabbinical Judaism went in a different direction. One passage in Exodus created a conundrum:

“A certain heretic (mina) said to Rav Idith: “It is written: ‘And to Moses he [God] said: Come up to the Lord (YHWH)' (Ex. 24:1). But surely it should have said: ‘Come up to me!'”

Why is God inviting Moses to come up the mountain to see God as if there are two different “gods”? One explanation was that the being giving the invitation was Metatron:

“He [Rav Idith] said to him [the heretic]: “This was Metatron, whose name is like the name of his master, as it is written: ‘for my name is in him' (Ex. 23:21).” “But if so,” [the heretic retorted,] “we should worship him!”

Metatron's identity shifts. At some times, he is an angel. He is identified with the angel who accompanied the Jews on their journey through the desert and was given the incredible power of forgiving sins in Exodus 23:20:
“(23:20) I am going to send an angel (mal'akh) in front of you, to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared. (21) Be attentive to him and listen to his voice; do not rebel against him (al-tamer bo), for he will not pardon your transgression; for my name is in him (ki shemi be-qirbo).”

This led to heretical speculation that this was Metatron and that Metatron was interchangeable with God. In the Talmud, Metatron assumes the position of the highest angel because his name is like the name of God.
Further speculation equated Metatron with Enoch who “walked with God,” i.e., was taken up to heaven and became an angel. Metatron was also identified with Michael, who functioned as the celestial high priest in Heaven. This rabbinic speculation was rife with risks:

“On this level, therefore, our passage is still quite “innocent.” It is interested in Metatron's function in heaven, clearly as an angel, and not in his relationship with God. But one can see how it might give rise to other more dangerous speculations. Once Michael is identified with Metatron and the Metatron traditions sneak in, a Pandora's box is opened: one might then consider that the plural of “thrones” in Daniel 7:9f. might refer not just to God's throne but rather to one throne for the “Ancient of Days” and another for David/the Son of Man or Metatron;72 or consider the dangerous implications resulting from the insight that Metatron's name is like the name of his master.”

Another part of the Talmud had God spending time teaching Torah, which was also assigned to Metatron:

“The two Babylonian rabbis Aha (bar Ya‘aqov) and Nahman bar Yitzhaq (fourth-generation amoraim, first half of the fourth century C.E.) search for a biblical proof that God stopped laughing after the destruction of the Temple. Having rejected the verses Isaiah 22:12 and Psalms 137:5f., they settle on Isaiah 42:14—obviously undisturbed by the fact that God's crying is compared to that of a woman in labor. But since the Talmud does not want God to spend all day and night crying (the sugya continues with the question of what God does at night), it reserves the fourth quarter of the day for something more productive: the Torah instruction of schoolchildren (presumably the little children in heaven who have died a premature death). This leads to the further problem (typical of the Bavli's reasoning) of who instructed the poor children before God took over, that is, before the destruction of the Temple. Answer: You may wish to assign this task to Metatron—or you may conclude that God himself instructed the schoolchildren before the destruction of the Temple as well as after. Here Metatron enters the discussion almost casually. The answer clearly presupposes his presence as a very high angel in heaven, if not as a second divine power. Hence, the seemingly dispassionate or casual answer (whatever you prefer: Metatron or God) reveals that the Bavli editor doesn't really care and in fact makes Metatron and God interchangeable—as we know by now quite a dangerous attitude.”

Thus, Metatron's image created the risk of the emergence of a potential second divinity in heaven. Schafer notes:

“But even the critical approach can hardly conceal the fact that certain (Jewish) circles in Babylonia must have fancied the idea of a second divine power next to God. More precisely, it appears that with the figure of Metatron certain Jews in Babylonia in particular found a vehicle for entertaining—in a remarkably pronounced and undisguised way—ideas that seem to have been unparalleled in other (Palestinian) sources.142 Why were these ideas perceived as so dangerous that they needed to be attacked in the Bavli and even toned down in 3 Enoch? In what follows I will attempt to situate these ideas in the context of the intricate tangle of the two sister religions “Judaism” and “Christianity,” emerging in the first centuries C.E., interacting with and responding to each other, and gradually becoming ever more differentiated in the course of time. There can be little doubt that pre-Christian Judaism developed ideas that helped pave the way to a “binitarian” theology—cases in point are speculations about Logos and Wisdom, certain angelic figures, Adam as the original makro-anthropos, and other exalted human figures143—of which the early New Testament speculations about the Logos Jesus are but one particularly prominent example. The Metatron traditions, as part of the larger Messiah–Son of Man complex, clearly belong to this store of potentially powerful and dangerous ideas, as several scholars have observed.”

Schafer denies that the Metatron concept played a role in the development of Trinitarianism. Rather, the thinks that the Metatron concept was an answer to the “the New Testament's message of Jesus Christ.”
The role of response and counter-response is seen in the issue of whether the laws of Moses were given directly by God or were mediated by angels. The Christian position is explicitly the latter, but the Bible suggests the former. However, there was substantial development in the Second Temple period that proposed greater angelic mediation. The Christian claims caused rabbinic backtracking. Schafer notes:

“ Since Paul and the author of the Letter to the Hebrews are definitely arguing with Jews, we can take it for granted that the “law ordained or declared through angels” reflects a common Jewish standpoint. Hence, when the rabbis of rabbinic Judaism contest this standpoint and claim that God neither needed nor used the angels to carry out his revelation on Mount Sinai and the subsequent salvation history, they are obviously arguing against a (Jewish) view introduced during the Second Temple period and taken up in the New Testament.79 One could even go a step further and argue that they contested this standpoint and insisted on God's direct involvement because the New Testament used it to propagate the inferiority of the Law of Moses and its abolition by Jesus Christ. Confronted with such a claim, the rabbis could not but insist that the law was given by God himself and that God remains the master of history, including the ultimate salvation of his people—or to put it another way, that the old covenant was still valid and there was no need for a new one.”

Schafer also notes a Talmudic story about the death of a baby messiah and an indifferent mother of the messiah. Schafer sees this as a complete inversion of Christian's nativity story:

“On the contrary, in my view the Yerushalmi story is a complete and ironical inversion of the New Testament—the lowing cow versus the star; the Arab versus the angel of the Lord and/or the magi; the Jewish peddler versus the magi; diapers versus gold, frankincense, and myrrh; and the murderous mother versus the murderous king. Quite an impressive list, which, summarized in this way, sounds almost comical, like a parody of the New Testament infant story. And this, I propose, is precisely what our story wishes to do. It is a counternarrative, a parodistic inversion of the New Testament, of the Christian claim that this child Jesus, born in Bethlehem, the city of David, was indeed the Messiah. As such, it is of great theological significance. For it undermines the essence of the Christian message by arguing that no, this child Jesus is not the Messiah, at least not the Messiah who you Christians say lived among us on earth in order teach the new doctrine of the new covenant, and to be crucified and ultimately resurrected and lifted up to heaven. This Jesus cannot be the Messiah for the very simple reason that soon after his birth he was snatched away by whirlwinds and disappeared.”

This is a hard book to evaluate. I am not sure that Schafer has made the sale by showing the back and forth of Jewish and Christian thinking. There were certainly examples of polemics and counterpolemics, but a lot of the examples seemed deep in the weeds. The really intriguing aspect of the book to me was the Jewish Talmudic information. Raised on the notion that the Jewish source is the Tanakh, we do not appreciate the intellectual development that went on internally in Jewish thinking.