The Jewish Gospels Page 14

  6.Jerome, Correspondence, ed. Isidorus Hilberg, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vienna: Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996), 55:381–82 (my translation).

  7.See also Reuven Kimelman, “Birkat Ha-Minim and the Lack of Evidence for an Anti-Christian Jewish Prayer in Late Antiquity,” in Aspects of Judaism in the Greco-Roman Period, vol. 2, Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, ed. E.P. Sanders, A.I. Baumgarten, and Alan Mendelson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981), 226–44, 391–403.

  8.Chana Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 28.

  9.Albert I. Baumgarten, “Literary Evidence for Jewish Christianity in the Galilee,” in The Galilee in Late Antiquity, ed. Lee I. Levine (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), 39–50.

  10.The era of the “Aryan Jesus” is over, thankfully. Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

  11.Craig C. Hill, “The Jerusalem Church,” in Jewish Christianity Reconsidered: Rethinking Ancient Groups and Texts, ed. Matt Jackson-McCabe (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 50.

  1. From Son of God to Son of Man

  1.Joseph Fitzmyer, The One Who Is to Come (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 9. I have drawn much on Fitzmyer’s exposition for this section.

  2.To be sure, the person of the king has a sacralized quality, and moreover, as we see in the case of Saul himself, even an ecstatic or prophetic measure. (Is Saul among the prophets?)

  3.For discussion, see A.Y. Collins and J.J. Collins, King and Messiah as Son of God: Divine, Human, and Angelic Messianic Figures in Biblical and Related Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2008), 16–19.

  4.Leo Baeck, Judaism and Christianity: Essays (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1958), 28–29.

  5.For a good survey, see Delbert Royce Burkett, The Son of Man Debate: A History and Evaluation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

  6.For the literature supporting this view, see John J. Collins, “The Son of Man and the Saints of the Most High in the Book of Daniel,” Journal of Biblical Literature 93, no. 1 (March 1974): 50n2. In his view, the one like a son of man is Michael. He represents Israel, as its heavenly “prince,” quite explicitly in chapters 10–12. Collins, accordingly, disagrees with me, thinking that the interpretation in Daniel 7 does not demote him at all. In both chapters 7 and 10–12, for Collins, reality is depicted on two levels. I would only remark that Collins’s interpretation is by no means impossible, but I nonetheless prefer the one I have offered in the text for reasons made most clear in my article in the Harvard Theological Review, as well as on grounds of relative simplicity.

  7.Louis Francis Hartman and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, trans. Louis Francis Hartman, The Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 101. They themselves list Exod 13:21; 19:16; 20:21; Deut 5:22; I Kings 8:10; and Sir 45:4.

  8.J.A. Emerton, “The Origin of the Son of Man Imagery,” Journal of Theological Studies 9 (1958): 231–32.

  9.Matthew Black, “The Throne-Theophany, Prophetic Commission, and the ‘Son of Man,’” in Jews, Greeks, and Christians: Religious Cultures in Late Antiquity: Essays in Honor of William David Davies, ed. Robert G. Hamerton-Kelley and Robin Scroggs (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1976), 61.

  10.For a study of the ubiquity of this pattern, see Moshe Idel, Ben: Sonship and Jewish Mysticism, Kogod Library of Judaic Studies (London: Continuum, 2007).

  11.Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 43.

  12.Readers of modern Hebrew will surely find Yisra’el Knohl, Me-Ayin Banu: Ha-Tsofen Ha-Geneti Shel Ha-Tanakh [The Genetic Code of the Bible] (Or Yehudah: Devir, 2008), 102–13, of interest here. Especially riveting is Knohl’s idea that YHVH was represented by a golden calf insofar as he was understood as the son of El, who was a bull.

  13.After the rabbis, I have found only Sigmund Olaf Plytt Mowinckel, He That Cometh: The Messiah Concept in the Old Testament and Later Judaism, trans. G.W. Anderson (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1956), 352, emphasizing this point sufficiently, but, of course, since the literature is massive, I may (almost certainly have) missed others.

  14.Following the argument made originally by Emerton, “Origin.”

  15.John J. Collins, Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 291.

  16.I have modified Collins’s original list of such patterns in two ways. I have dropped the comparison with the sea, since I believe that the sea vision and the Son of Man vision were once two separate elements, and I have emphasized the differential ages of the two divine figures, which seems to me crucial for understanding the pattern of relationships here.

  17.Carsten Colpe, “Ho Huios Tou Anthrōpou,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 8 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1972), 8:400–477.

  18.Ronald Hendel, “The Exodus in Biblical Memory,” in Remembering Abraham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 57–75.

  19.Cross, Canaanite, 58. See also David Biale, “The God with Breasts: El Shaddai in the Bible,” History of Religions 21, no. 3 (February 1982): 240–56, and Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel, 2nd ed. with a foreword by Patrick D. Miller, Biblical Resources Series (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2002), 184.

  20.This explanation of Baʿal and YHVH as rivals for the young God spot might be taken to explain better the extreme rivalry between them manifested in the Bible.

  21.Smith, Early History of God, 32–33. Cross, in contrast, had argued that YHVH was originally a cultic name for ʾEl used in the south; YHVH eventually splits off from and then ousts ʾEl (Cross, Canaanite, 71). This seems to me to leave somewhat unclear the Baʿal-like characteristic of YHVH as these have been described by Cross himself in the passage cited immediately above. Cross’s comments (Cross, Canaanite, 75) on two strands in “Israel’s primitive religion” don’t quite answer this question. In a later chapter of his book, Cross treats the close affinities between Baʿal and YHVH, so close, indeed, that as my teacher H.L. Ginsberg realized already in the 1930s, an entire Baʿal hymn has been lifted intact and adapted for YHVH in Psalm 29. As Cross himself emphasizes, this could hardly have been done if the imagery were not appropriate already for YHVH (Cross, Canaanite, 156). Cross therefore writes: “The language of theophany in early Israel was primarily language drawn from the theophany of Baʿl” (Cross, Canaanite, 157), a formulation that I would slightly modify: the language of theophany of YHVH in ancient Israel was parallel to and nearly identical to the language of theophanies of Baʿal among northern Canaanites. Cross, of course, recognizes the merger here, but it is less clear why, according to him, ʾEl/YHVH should have absorbed characteristics of Baʿal that seemingly did not exist before in Israel’s religion. As Cross’s reconstruction seems not to recognize YHVH as a variant of Baʿal, where would he come from? This difficulty is obviated if we assume an ancient cult of ʾEl as the universal old god of all of the Canaanites and Baʿal and YHVH as variant forms and names of the young god, with YHVH merged into ʾEl in the later forms of official biblical religion. Of course, I do not imagine for a second that YHVH did not further appropriate characteristics of Baʿal as he moved northward and became more of a rain and storm god in addition to the mountain and volcano god that he had been in his putative original southern home. See also Peter Hayman, “Monotheism—a Misused Word in Jewish Studies?” Journal of Jewish Studies 42, no. 1 (1991): 5. See also especially Paula Fredriksen, “Mandatory Retirement: Ideas in the Study of Christian Origins Whose Time Has Come to Go,” in Israel’s God and Rebecca’s Children: Christology and Community in Early Judaism and Christianity: Essays in Honor of Larry W. Hurtado and Alan F. Segal, ed. David B. Capes et al. (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007), 35–38.

  22.A similar explanation,
mutatis mutandis, might, just might, help to understand the place of Ḥokhma, Lady Wisdom, as a virtual consort to God in Proverbs 8 and her connections with Ashera, for which see Smith, Early History of God, 133.

  23.It is here that I part company most decisively with Otto Eissfeldt, “El and Yahweh,” Journal of Semitic Studies 1 (1956): 25–37, and Margaret Barker, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God (London: SPCK, 1992).

  24.Daniel Abrams, “The Boundaries of Divine Ontology: The Inclusion and Exclusion of Meṭaṭron in the Godhead,” Harvard Theological Review 87, no. 3 (July 1994): 291–321.

  25.Pace Barker, Great Angel, 40. I thus agree with Emerton’s conclusion that “the language used of the Son of man suggests Yahwe, not the Davidic king.” Emerton, “The Origin,” 231.

  26.Seen in this light, it really is a sort of quibble to distinguish between second divinity and highest angel. We need to remember that in antiquity monotheism meant not the sole existence of only one divine being but the absolute supremacy of one to whom all others are subordinate (and this was good Christian theology until Nicaea as well). Fredriksen, “Mandatory Retirement,” 35–38, is a concise, excellent presentation of this position.

  27.“Yahoel” appears in the Apocalypse of Abraham (A.D. 70–150), but then as late as 3 Enoch (fourth–fifth centuries), we find “Little Yahu,” “Yahoel Yah,” and “Yahoel” explicitly given as names for Metatron. Andrei Orlov, “Praxis of the Voice: The Divine Name Traditions in the Apocalypse of Abraham,” Journal of Biblical Literature 127 (2008): 53–70, and Philip S. Alexander, “The Historical Setting of the Hebrew Book of Enoch,” Journal of Jewish Studies 28 (1977): 163–64. (See also in this context Gedaliahu G. Stroumsa, “Form[s] of God: Some Notes on Metatron and Christ: For Shlomo Pines,” Harvard Theological Review 76, no. 3 [July 1983]: 269–88.) As Alexander points out in that article as well, these very names are predicated in other contemporary texts of God himself. The lines between exalted angels and gods get harder and harder to draw and see. “At some stage, the old myth was reinterpreted in terms of the supremacy of Yahwe, who had been identified with both Elyon and Baal. Then the Son of man was degraded to the status of an angel, even though he retained the imagery which was so closely attached to him in tradition. This would help to explain the attribution of an exalted status to such beings as Michael and Metatron in later Judaism” (Emerton, “The Origin,” 242). It is important to add, however, that angel is not necessarily such a degradation, but perhaps precisely the point of a tension or ambiguity about monotheism at the heart of Israel’s religion (this is more an explication of Emerton than a correction of him). Throughout the Hebrew Bible there is confusion between YHVH himself, as it were, and his Mal’akh, the single, unnamed angel of the Lord, precisely in theophanies. The first example of the use of the term in Genesis already manifests this conflation. In Genesis 16:7 the “angel of YHVH” appears to Hagar and performs a series of clearly divine offices. No wonder that in v. 13, she refers to him as YHVH. As Robert Alter remarks in the name of Richard Elliot Friedman, “No clear-cut distinction between God and angel is intended.” Similarly in Genesis 22:11–18, where clearly the angel of YHVH is performing precisely the offices of YHVH himself. Another brilliant example is Exodus 3, where Moses sees the angel of YHVH inside the burning bush and then in v. 7 the very same figure addresses him and is called YHVH. There is, indeed, no clear distinction between YHVH and this special Mal’akh; they are two aspects of one divinity but also the product of a productive tension derived from the hypothetic originary ditheism of Israel’s religion.

  28.Collins, Daniel, 281. Collins seems to consider the pattern of religion enshrined in the throne vision as a frozen relic from Israel’s past (or even a foreign past): “it has been argued that motifs should not be ‘torn out of their living contexts’ but ‘should be considered against the totality of the phenomenological conception of the works in which such correspondences occur.’ Such demands are justified when the intention is to compare the ‘patterns of religion’ in a myth and a biblical text, but this has never been the issue in the discussion of Daniel 7.”

  29.See Daniel Boyarin, “Beyond Judaisms: Meṭaṭron and the Divine Polymorphy of Ancient Judaism,” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Periods 41 (July 2010): 323–65.

  30.Andrew Chester, “High Christology—Whence, When and Why?” Early Christianity 2, no. 1 (2011): 22–50.

  31.Chester identifies three trends within the group of scholars who see the divinity of Christ as emerging within Jewry, defined almost according to the tempo of the emergence: (1) James Dunn’s, according to which “high Christology emerges within essentially Jewish categories, but does so only very gradually,” and it is in John that it emerges (in this respect like the first view but without necessitating Gentile sources); (2) Martin Hengel’s and Larry Hurtado’s, according to which high Christology emerges very rapidly—“explosively”—within a Jewish context in response to the resurrection and is seen most clearly in Paul; and (3) the view of Horbury and Collins that I am maintaining here, namely, that the theological ideas behind a high Christology were already present within Second Temple Judaism. Chester, “High Christology,” 31.

  32.I have modified the translation of the end of the sentence (RSV: “but God alone”) following Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary, ed. Harold W. Attridge, Hermeneia—a Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 181, and see her discussion, 185.

  33.Given the meaning of the underlying Aramaic word in Daniel, “authority” strikes me as a rather weak rendering; “sovereignty” would be much better. Sovereignty would surely explain why the Son of Man has the power to remit sins on earth.

  34.Cf. Morna Hooker, The Son of Man in Mark: A Study of the Background of the Term “Son of Man” and Its Use in St Mark’s Gospel (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1967), 90–91, who seems to take this (in partial contradiction to her own position earlier) to be significant of a prerogative of “man” in general.

  35.This final insight was stimulated by a comment of Gudrun Guttenberger, followed by a further comment of Ishay Rosen-Zvi. See too Seyoon Kim, “The ‘Son of Man’” as the Son of God, WUNT (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1983), 2: “In claiming this divine prerogative Jesus classes himself as the Son of Man into the category of the divine, and his superhuman act of healing is the sign for this claim. So already in 1927 O. Procksch suggested that here ‘the Son of Man’ stands for the Son of God.”

  36.As New Testament scholar F.W. Beare has written, “In the gentile churches, this will not have been a burning question in itself; it will have arisen only as one aspect of the much broader issue of how far the Law of Moses was held to be binding upon Christians. Insofar as the pericope [discrete passage of the narrative] is a community-product, accordingly, it will be regarded as a product of Palestinian Jewish Christianity, not of the Hellenistic churches. The way to understanding will therefore lie through the examination of Jewish traditions and modes of thought.” F.W. Beare, “‘The Sabbath Was Made for Man?’” Journal of Biblical Literature 79, no. 2 (June 1960): 130.

  37.Generally, and this is highly important, New Testament critics have seen vv. 27–28 as an addition to an original text that incorporated only the answer regarding David—or the opposite, that only vv. 27–28 were original and that the reference to David is a secondary addition. “As Guelich observes (similarly Back, Jesus of Nazareth, 69; Doering, Schabbat, 409), these four suggestions basically boil down to two: (1) either Jesus’ argument from the action of David is original, with vv. 27–28 being added later in one or two stages, or (2) v. 27 (and possibly v. 28) constituted Jesus’ original answer(s), with the story of David being added later.” John Paul Meier, “The Historical Jesus and the Plucking of the Grain on the Sabbath,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 66 (2004): 564.

  38.Translation mine: .

  39.To be sure, Matthew is frequently closer in thought and expression to rabbinic t
exts than Mark. It is this point, in fact, that has given rise to the notion that Matthew’s Gospel is more “Jewish” than Mark’s, a distinct error in my view, although Matthew may have been closer to proto-rabbinic traditions than Mark was. Rabbi Akiva’s own argument is somewhat difficult to understand, but may be best understood as meaning something like this: We know that one removes a murderer from the altar, even in the midst of a sacrifice, from Exodus 21:14, where we are told of the premeditated murderer that “You shall take him from the altar to execute him.” Now, it follows that redressing murder is more important than even the sacrifices, and the sacrifices are more important than the Sabbath (since the Sabbath is violated in the Temple in order to maintain the cult); therefore, argues Rabbi Akiva, it follows that saving a human life is more important than the Sabbath and sets it aside. The reasoning from executing the murderer to saving a life seems to be an instance of the general tannaitic principle that the measure of mercy is always more powerful than the measure of retribution. This will enable us to understand anew v. 6 there. When Jesus says, “I tell you, something greater than the temple is here,” he is, at the first glance, simply anticipating the a fortiori argument that we hear later from Rabbi Akiva’s mouth, to wit, that benefit to humans is greater than the worship in the Temple, and if, therefore, we violate the Sabbath for the Temple worship, even more so for the benefit of humans. It must, however, also be recognized that Jesus’ halakhic statement is afforded a much more radical import in that it includes a broader test for benefit, not merely the saving of a life, as the Rabbis would have it, but also the saving from hunger. (Cf. Aharon Shemesh, “Shabbat, Circumcision and Circumcision on Shabbat in Jubilees and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” unpublished paper [2011]. I am grateful to Prof. Shemesh for his comments on this chapter and for sharing his work with me prior to publication.) Finally, in a pattern that repeats itself in Mark 7, as we shall see in chapter 3 below, Jesus’ halakhic argument—a virtually impeccable one and well formed on rabbinic principles that are thus shown to be far older than the Rabbis—is interpreted as a kind of parable and one with reference to the messianic age in which Jesus and the evangelist were living. As Shemesh remarks, “It should be admitted that in both arguments, Jesus makes a better case than the Rabbis.”