To Serve the Son of Man

Back to Daniel Boyarin's The Jewish Gospels.  His second main claim is that Jesus kept kosher, "which is to say that he saw himself not as abrogating the Torah but as defending it.  There was controversy with some other Jewish leaders as to how best to observe the Law, but none, I will argue, about whether to observe it" (103).  The core of his argument is a passage in the gospel of Mark, where Jesus enters into a dispute with some Pharisees over ritual handwashing before meals.  (I say "ritual" because the cleansing wasn't a hygienic practice.)  I think Boyarin makes a strong case that Jesus' declaration in Mark 7 wasn't meant to overturn the dietary commandments of the Torah, and that the passage has widely been misinterpreted.

The only reason this matters is that the early churches disagreed sharply about believers' obligations under the Law of Moses. The scholarly quest for the historical Jesus consistently runs up against the barrier of Jesus' death and his followers' claim that he was raised from the dead.  Even according to the gospels, his followers didn't understand who he was or what he was teaching them until after his death and resurrection, and his ministry had to be reinterpreted in light of it; some of the resurrection stories make this explicit by having the risen Jesus explain how the Bible had required that everything happen as it did.  Some of his more inconvenient teachings have been explained away by saying that he they only applied to the days of his ministry and weren't meant to carry over to the new dispensation; but if so, it's hard to understand why the gospels preserve them in the first place.  But more often it appears that it's the other way around, and the earthly Jesus was talking past his audiences to believers a generation later, when the gospels were written.  (Why the gospels came to be written at all is a knotty problem in New Testament studies.)

The earliest surviving Christian writings are the letters of the apostle Paul, who was often at odds with Jesus' original disciples, as can be seen especially in his letter to the Galatians.  The gospels and the book of Acts also conflict with Paul in important ways: which is a problem because Paul is a character in Acts, and the narrator presents himself as Paul's follower, yet its portrait of Paul doesn't fit well with what we can learn about Paul from his own letters.  Acts presents Paul as a devout Jew even after he was called; indeed, Boyarin's definition of Kosher Jesus fits the Paul of Acts just as well: not abrogating the Law but defending it.  Since we know from Paul's letters that this doesn't describe his teaching or practice, it becomes legitimate to wonder if the gospels and Acts may have cleaned up Jesus' act as well.

Boyarin doesn't seem to recognize the problem.  He writes breezily of the diversity of early Christian belief:

... some [Christians] kept much of the Jewish law (or all of it), some kept some rules but dropped others (e.g., the apostolic rule of Acts), and still others believed that the entire also needed to be overturned and discarded by Christians (even those born Jews) [11].

This is a fair summary, but what did Jesus do?  Boyarin seems to think that the gospel of Mark represents Jesus' teaching fairly transparently, which isn't likely.  On the dietary commandments, Paul's letter to the Galatians makes it clear that Paul exempted not only Gentile Christians from Torah observance, but Jewish Christians too.  Paul claims:

¹¹ But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. ¹² For prior to the coming of certain men from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles; but when they came, he began to withdraw and hold himself aloof, fearing the party of the circumcision. ¹³ The rest of the Jews joined him in hypocrisy, with the result that even Barnabas was carried away by their hypocrisy. ¹⁴ But when I saw that they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas in the presence of all, “If you, being a Jew, live like the Gentiles and not like the Jews, how is it that you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?"

"Cephas" -- from the Aramaic for "rock" -- is Simon Peter.  James is the brother of Jesus, not the gospels' son of Zebedee; at some point James not only joined his late brother's sect but became a major player in its leadership.  According to Acts 10, Peter had a vision which gave him permission to ignore kosher and eat with Gentiles, so that he could baptize a Roman centurion named Cornelius.  According to Paul's (polemical) account, though, Peter backed down in Antioch, intimidated by representatives of James' faction.  Paul taught that all baptized believers were free of the Torah, because baptism united them with Jesus, whose death had freed him from the obligation to keep kosher.  Even if this was only Paul's doctrine, it's worth pointing out that Peter went along with it until it led to conflict with Jerusalem.  (Boyarin hardly mentions Paul in The Jewish Gospels, but he has written a book about Paul, which I had better read soon.)  No one knows where Paul got his doctrines; he claimed he got them directly from Jesus when he was called to be an apostle (Galatians 1).  Christian scholars have pooh-poohed this, reasonably enough, and claimed that he got them from Peter and James during a two-week stay in Jerusalem three years after his call (Galatians 1:18-19).  Even if that's true, it would mean that Paul got the doctrine of Christian freedom from the Mosaic Law from Peter and James, only a few years after Jesus' death.  Where did they get it from?

Boyarin also discusses gospel stories about observance of the Sabbath, and here again his discussion undermines his case.  He cites various rabbis who ruled that the Sabbath can be broken to save a life, agreeing with Jesus' reported dictum (Mark 2:27) that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.  But Boyarin has to make this fit with Jesus' reported claim (Mark 2:28) that as the Son of Man and therefore the Messiah, he was lord of the Sabbath.  According to the Jewish background Boyarin adduces, there was no need to invoke the Messiah to override the Sabbath for humanitarian reasons -- that was already widely accepted within Judaism.

Finally, Boyarin devotes a chapter to arguing that belief in a suffering Messiah was already widespread in Judaism before Jesus came along.  His argument is based on passages like the Servant passages in Isaiah, which he claims were interpreted within pre-Christian Judaism to refer to the Messiah.  If this is so, however, we can reasonably wonder why Jesus' own disciples reportedly reacted so negatively when Jesus taught them that the Son of Man must suffer (Mark 8:31ff).  Maybe the Messiah could suffer, but not the Son of Man?  (This is dubious because Daniel's "one like a son of man" is persecuted by the beasts in Daniel's visions.)

"I submit," Boyarin writes,

that it is possible to understand the Gospel only if both Jesus and the Jews around him held to a high Christology whereby the claim to Messiahship was also a claim to being a divine man.  Were it not the case, we would be very hard-pressed to understand the extremely hostile reaction to Jesus on the part of Jewish leaders who did not accept his claim.  Controversy among Jews was hardly a new thing; for a controversy to lead to a crucifixion, it must have been a doozy.  A Jew claiming that he was God, that he was the divine Son of Man whom the Jews had been expecting and, moreover, not being laughed out of the village for this claim, would have been such a doozy [55-6].

If the Jews were expecting a divine Messiah, how could claiming to be the Messiah lead to this kind of hostility, or even to being laughed out of the village?  How could conforming to standard expectations be a "doozy"?  This question has been asked many times before, and Boyarin's answer is the standard Christian answer, the same answer his book is dedicated to rejecting: because he claimed to be God.  (It's related to another standard Christian answer: the Jews were expecting a conquering military Messiah, so of course they violently rejected Jesus for claiming to be a meek, loving, nonviolent Messiah.  This one belongs to the history of Christian anti-Judaism, of course.)

It's also hard to see how a controversy among Jews could "lead to a crucifixion."  Crucifixion was not a Jewish punishment but a Roman one, and there's not really any doubt that Jesus was executed by the Romans.  Why would the Romans intervene in such a controversy?  The gospels' accounts are not plausible for a number of reasons, and many scholars have tried to make sense of them with little success.  The usual Christian answer is that the Romans mistook Jesus for a nationalistic military Messiah when in fact he was totally peaceful, and tragically let themselves be pushed by the Jews into killing him.  (The real Christian answer would be that Jesus had to die, because it was foretold in the scriptures, and the Romans and the Jewish leadership were just pawns in Yahweh's game of eleven-dimensional chess with Satan.  But while this answer often underlies the usual Christian answers, it usually isn't acknowledged explicitly.)

While The Jewish Gospels is a good reminder for many people, Jewish and Christian, of the Jewishness of Jesus, of the New Testament, and of Christianity itself, it doesn't add much to what was known already.  As I wrote in my previous post, it fits into a familiar genre that has been with us for a long time, and is more about showing interfaith goodwill (a valid project, to be sure) than about getting at historical truth.  That Daniel Boyarin's arguments lead to the kinds of contradictions I've pointed out here indicates that The Jewish Gospels is more a work of apologetics than of scholarship.

Some might wonder why I'm bothering to read such a book or to write about it, being an atheist and all.  First, I find the history of Christian origins fascinating for its own sake, because the beginnings of a cultural force that's so all-pervading, even today, is relevant today.  Second, you might be surprised at how often ordinary laypeople talk about stuff like this, and I like to be better-informed than they are.  And not just Christian laypeople: the relationship between Jesus' teaching and Paul's teaching is often brought up by atheists.  Even a lot of infidels want to see Jesus as the good guy and Paul as the bad guy.  Finally, what to do about the "Old Testament" comes up often in disputes about homosexuality and religion: a number of gay and pro-gay Christians have stressed the doctrine that the Torah isn't binding on Christians, for example, while others have stressed the difference between Jesus and Paul while ignoring the fact that on sexual matters, Jesus was not very liberal.

For all these reasons, then, The Jewish Gospels seemed like something I ought to read.  That a smart, knowledgeable guy like Daniel Boyarin got tangled up in his own argument is worth knowing too, don't you think?

You're Not Going To Have The Son Of Man To Kick Around Anymore

I just finished reading Daniel Boyarin's The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New Press, 2012), which I picked up at the library after reading about it on Amazon.  The book description referred to the discovery, in 2008, "of an ancient Hebrew tablet, dating from before the birth of Jesus, which predicted a Messiah who would rise from the dead after three days."  Apparently Boyarin contributed a soundbyte to a front-page New York Times story, but The Jewish Gospels didn't mention this find except in a noncommittal endnote on the very last page of the book.  (And with good reason: it seems to be dubious.)

Boyarin is a very distinguished Talmudic scholar, whose Unheroic Conduct (California, 1997) I found very interesting.  But I found The Jewish Gospels frustratingly uneven.  His general thesis is that Jesus was Jewish (and kept kosher), that Christianity didn't separate definitively from Judaism for several centuries, and that the New Testament (especially the gospels) is a "thoroughly Jewish text [with] cultural origins among the Jewish communities of Palestine in the first century" (157).  He's right to stress this, though the letters of Paul, at least, are products of the Jewish diaspora outside of Palestine.  About the origins of the gospels we know nothing, so scholars are constantly trying to read backward through the texts, which leads to doubtful results.

Although Boyarin clearly did his homework, he tends to overstate the novelty of his thesis.  The Jewishness of Jesus and the New Testament is a theme that comes and goes, like the tide, and those who advance it have an agenda no less than those who reject it.  When I was doing my own research on Christian origins in the 1980s I read a number of works which tried to situate Jesus in Palestinian Judaism, often though not always by Christian scholars, among them Geza Vermes' Jesus the Jew (Macmillan, 1973), Ellis Rivkin's A Hidden Revolution (Abingdon, 1978) and What Crucified Jesus? (Abingdon, 1984), Pinchas Lapide's Israelis, Jews and Jesus (Doubleday, 1979) and The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective (Augsburg, 1983), and William E. Phipps's Was Jesus Married? (Harper, 1970).  (Phipps argued that Jesus was a good observant Jew, so of course he was married.)

There were also efforts to situate the Jesus / gospel tradition within Jewish tradition, notably Birger Gerhardsson's Memory and Manuscript (1961) and Tradition and Transmission in Early Christianity (1964), which were recently reissued.  But the same period saw attempts to establish a sharper dividing line between first-century Judaism and neighboring cultures, for example Thorleif Boman's influential Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (SCM Press, 1960).  Even the language Jesus spoke has been a bone of contention: Hebrew?  Aramaic?  Greek?

Especially in the wake of Vatican II, many books appeared condemning Christian anti-Judaism, stressing Jesus' Jewishness and the Jewish roots of Christianity.  From the early 20th century many Christian scholars began to study the Judaism of Jesus' time more seriously than before, and a few Jewish scholars began to study the New Testament. This (along with archaeological work and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls) led to a more complex picture of Judaism, as well as of early Christianity.  But the trend had been there since the rise of historical Jesus studies in the late 1800s, though it was ambivalent: Christian scholars still wanted to see Judaism as the forerunner of Christianity, and they tended to sentimentalize or idealize the rabbis.  So most scholars of early Christianity pay lip service to the Jewishness of Jesus and of early Christianity; the disagreement is on specific issues.

Boyarin begins with Jesus as Son of God and/or Son of Man.  Reversing what he says is the usual reading, he argues that "'Son of God' referred to the king of Israel, the earthly king of David's seat, while 'Son of Man' referred to a heavenly figure and not a human being at all" (26).  He claims too that "the term 'Son of God' is not often used to refer to Jesus in the New Testament ... In the Gospels, Jesus is more likely to be referred to (or actually to refer to himself) by the title 'Son of Man'" (25). Like most scholars, Boyarin traces "Son of Man" to the apocalyptic book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible.  In this book, Daniel is a young Israelite exiled in Babylon from his homeland.  He has many adventures (the lion's den, the fiery furnace, and so on) and is granted visions of the future.  In one of these visions, after a series of several monstrous creatures, thrones are set up, and one is taken by an "Ancient of Days" (a really old man, that is) attended by millions.  One of the beasts is slain, and the others are deprived of their "dominion," though they are allowed to live on for a time.  And then:

¹³ “I kept looking in the night visions,
And behold, with the clouds of heaven
One like a Son of Man was coming,
And He came up to the Ancient of Days
And was presented before Him.
¹⁴ “And to Him was given dominion,
Glory and a kingdom,
That all the peoples, nations and men of every language
Might serve Him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
Which will not pass away;
And His kingdom is one
Which will not be destroyed.

Baffled, Daniel asks "one of those standing by" the meaning of what he has seen.  The bystander explains:

¹⁷ ‘These great beasts, which are four in number, are four kings who will arise from the earth. ¹⁸ But the saints of the Highest One will receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever, for all ages to come.

Evidently, then, "the one like a Son of Man" in Daniel symbolizes the holy ones of the Most High, usually understood to be the faithful and obedient Israelites who endured persecution by the beasts/kings.  This makes sense, because no one assumes that the kings in the vision appeared in real life as chimerical beasts which resembled lions with the wings of eagles, let alone as horns on the head of another beast.  The visions of Daniel are believed by most scholars to refer to various kings who kept Israel down after the end of the Babylonian Exile, culminating in Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who ruled from 175 to 164 BCE.  Antiochus was ambitious and eccentric, even unstable.  He tried to outlaw Jewish religious observances and to put a statue of himself as Zeus in the Temple at Jerusalem, replacing the worship of Yahweh.  This led to what is known as the Maccabean revolt, aided by an outside attack from Parthia, which was resolved when Antiochus died of disease in 164 BCE.  Because of his attempt to profane the Temple with his image, he is widely regarded as the "little horn" referred to in Daniel 8:9 who set up the "abomination of desolation" in the Temple, which is referred to in numerous biblical and extra-biblical books, including the gospels of Mark (13:14) and Matthew (24:15).  Jesus not only refers to himself frequently as the Son of Man, he speaks at times of the Son of Man coming on clouds, just like in the Book of Daniel.  This is the basis for the connection between the gospels' "son of man" and the book of Daniel.

Boyarin claims that the Son of Man was widely regarded as the Messiah, and not just as a symbol for the faithful remnant in Israel.  He shows that in other writings from around the time of Jesus, the Son of Man was treated not as a symbol but as an individual, and a godlike one at that -- though still subordinate to the Most High Yahweh.  He argues that when Jesus refers to himself as the Son of Man in the gospels, his fellow Jews see him as claiming divine prerogatives, like the authority to forgive sins, and therefore as claiming to be the Messiah.  I don't find this argument fully convincing.  First, Jesus uses the term differently at different times, and sometimes he doesn't seem to be making any exalted claims for himself, as in Matthew 8:20, "The foxes have holes, and the birds of the sky have nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head."  The scholar Geza Vermes showed that Aramaic speakers like Jesus might refer to themselves in the third person as "that man" or "that son of man," and argued that when Jesus referred to himself as the Son of man, he was not claiming a title but simply referring obliquely to himself.  This view never caught on among scholars, and Boyarin doesn't address it.  I think it's a possibility, though, for reasons that are relevant to Boyarin's argument.

The gospels show Jesus being asked about his claims and status, or Jesus asking others who they think he is.  No one ever asks him if he's the Son of Man, or accuses him of claiming to be.  At his trial before the Sanhedrin, for example, the High Priest asks Jesus point blank, "Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed?" (Mark 14.61).  According to Mark, Jesus replied, "I am, and you shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven."  This forthright declaration was softened in Matthew 26:64 and Luke 22:71: Jesus answers "You say it" (that is, "You said it, I didn't"); Matthew keeps the part about the Son of Man, Luke omits it completely.  (John's version of Jesus' questioning by the Jewish leadership is completely different.)  When Jesus asks his disciples who they think he is, Peter replies, "You are the Messiah" in Mark (8:29), "God's Messiah" in Luke (9:20), and "You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God" in Matthew (16:16).  No one ever tells Jesus that he is the Son of Man, or asks him if he is.

What follows Peter's declaration is also significant: Jesus tells his disciples not to tell anyone about him.  (Jesus also silenced demons who addressed him as "the Holy One of God," and told several people he'd healed to tell no one about it.  Such secrecy is a recurring theme in the gospels, and scholars are still debating what it means.)  Yet according to all four gospels, Jesus went around referring to himself as the Son of Man, in disputes with his Jewish critics and in public preaching, as in private teaching with his disciples.  According to Boyarin, this was tantamount to a public declaration that he was the Messiah, but no one seems to take it as such.  Boyarin is correct that no one asks what Jesus means by the Son of Man (except a couple of times in the gospel of John, 9:35ff and 12:34ff), but I think he's wrong as to why.

As Boyarin says, Paul occasionally refers to Jesus as the Messiah / Christ and the Son of God, but more often as "Lord."  But Paul never refers to Jesus as the Son of Man, nor do other New Testament writers.  (In Acts 7 and Revelation 1 and 14, there are allusions to Daniel's Son of Man, but the phrase is never used as a title for Jesus comparable to Christ. The New Testament writers are explicitly concerned to prove that Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God, not that he is the Son of Man.  This is a problem for Boyarin's case: if Jesus was so open and consistent about calling himself the Son of Man, why didn't the early churches follow his lead?

I still have to go over the rest of Boyarin's argument; I'll return to it soon.