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Jews or Christians? The Followers of Jesus in Search of Their Own Identity, by Giorgio Jossa, translated from the Italian by Molly Rogers. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 202. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006. 175 pp. €69.00.
Giorgio Jossa addresses the question of when Christianity became a distinct religion, completely separate from Judaism.
The old view was that Christianity developed against a Jewish background dominated by “the Pharisees.” The Pharisees were the heart and soul of “normative Judaism,” out of which was born Rabbinic Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple. Christianity officially separated from Judaism when the birkat ha-minim was added to the Amidah prayer about ten years later. But recent studies have revealed just how rich were the varied facets of Judaism in Jesus’ time that make such a truism questionable.
This book is organized in three chapters that address: 1) The Jews from 4 BCE to 100 CE, 2) The Christians from 30 CE to 100 CE, and 3) Jews and Christian as seen by the Romans.
In the first chapter the author argues that the old liberal Christian view of Schürer and Harnack, that Palestinian and Diaspora Judaism were quite distinct, is incorrect. He agrees with Martin Hengel’s view that Judea before the destruction of the Temple was very Hellenized. Within the Jewish homeland, Jossa writes, so great was the variety within Judaism that “every group in fact deviated from something that others believed essential” (p. 28).
How does this phenomenon bear on the incompatibility of emerging Christianity with Judaism in the milieu of all this diversity? Though all forms of messianism shared a Davidic hope, Jewish messianism was, at least in the first century, reluctant to identify the messiah with a historical person. The messianism of Christianity was distinct from the varieties of Jewish messianism in viewing its Messiah as divine.
Chapter two offers a tantalizing rebuttal of most current discussion of how early the new ideas Jesus introduced were recognized as distinct from Judaism. Contrary to the view that Jesus taught and did his work entirely as a participant in the manifold Judaisms of his time, the author argues that there was early on a distinct difference in Jesus’ teaching and perception of his identity. This uniqueness did not consist in a complete rejection of the biblical laws, and in particular of the pertinence of the Sabbath, as Neusner and others have proposed. Instead, albeit in an “allusive and enigmatic” way (p. 56), Jesus very early projected his messianic identity. “The explicit identification of Jesus with the Messiah took place only after the resurrection,” but this new identity was clearly implicit earlier in Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and in the term “Son of David” applied to him early on.
Jossa argues, admittedly as a hypothesis, that the use of Psalm 110, “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, till I put thy enemies under thy feet’. . . ,” goes back to Jesus himself. He writes, “I believe that he made this statement not to support, against the scribes, a simple ‘academic’ opinion regarding the nature of the Messiah, but precisely in order to suggest that his messianic claim was in the direction of a different, and higher figure, than the traditional one of the Son of David. His listeners were invited to reflect on the nature of the Messiah and to ask themselves in what way Jesus could be related to it” (p. 57).
Jesus was different from other messianic pretenders before and after in more than one way. For example,he did not gather to himself the elite from the heartland of Judaism’s strength, but humble fellows from the am-ha-aretz. Jossa proposes that Jesus’ vision of the fulfillment of God’s plan intentionally used humble means, “in tension with his future appearance in glory” (p. 59). This idea was not the creation of the early Church, but was present in Jesus and was part of the historical preaching of Jesus.
Regarding the issue of determining what Jesus actually said and words later put into his mouth by the early Church, we may observe that there was a tradition widely practiced in early Judaism of quoting earlier authorities by name. For example, in Mishna Eduyoth 2: 6, we read “Of three things did R. Ishmael speak and R. Akiba did not agree with him . . . it was yet the eve of Sabbath, R. Ishmael says . . . But R. Akibah says . . .” (Danby’s translation). Presumably the Amoraim who remembered the differences of view between R. Ishmael and R. Akiba were not making it all up. Similarly, when the Gospel writers cite words of Jesus as actually his own, and spoken well before his passion, this evidence suggests that Jesus’ distinction from other forms of Judaism of his time was evident quite early, as early as the start of his ministry when he began to teach and act in ways that caught the notice of fellow Jews so that they opposed him.
The third section of Jossa’s book bears upon a later period than the first two parts, which have to do with Jesus’ identity within early Judaism. It addresses the question of when the Romans recognized that Judaism and Christianity were distinct, beginning with the time of Tiberius (14–37 CE). It was in the decade after 40 CE that followers of Jesus are called Christians at Antioch (Acts 11:26), but this does not prove that the Romans were aware of the distinction between Christians and Jews. It may have been essentially a Christian self-designation. In 49 CE there was agitation in Rome that Suetonius attributes to Chrestus, a name many think referred to Christ; but this may well not have been the case. Jossa questions the idea that Suetonius’ reference to Chrestus means that Emperor Claudius knew the difference between Christians and Jews.
In 62 CE, however, as reported by Josephus, the killing of James, brother of Jesus, in Jerusalem probably marked a terminus ad quem after which Rome recognized the conflict at least between Sadducees and Christians. That this was so was confirmed by Nero’s persecution of Christians in Rome by name in 64 CE. When the Jewish War began three years later, various Christian writers state that the Christians fled from Jerusalem to Pella, south of the Sea of Galilee. Whether or not this is fiction, it proposes that they took no part in the Jewish revolt against Rome. When the fiscus Judaicus was imposed, this annual tax was placed on observant Jews and proselytes, a number that Jossa proposes did not include Christians (p. 140).
Jossa’s Jews and Christians, a relatively short book, is rich in content. Chapter Two makes a significant argument that Jesus understood very early his uniqueness, and that he did not misunderstand the nature of his role, so that he died in defeat. His followers, though they continued to frequent synagogues and the Temple after Jesus’ Passion, must have known that they were part of something new well before this.
I sometimes had the feeling that the Italian original of this book might have been easier to follow. I found quite a number of typographical mistakes. But these are a minor flaw in a valuable contribution to the discussion of when Christians and Jews began to be separate religions.
Stuart D. Robertson
Foreign Languages and Literatures
Purdue University |
