The Jewish Gospels Read online

  Whatever the precise case on the genetic relationship, it is clear that the author of the Similitudes, who clearly derives his Son of Man figure from Daniel 7, could easily have identified the one like a son of man from Daniel with Enoch as described in Enoch 14. Both arrive with clouds; both are brought near the Ancient of Days by one of the angels; both include the description of the throne as having before it streams of blazing fire and of his person as wearing garments brighter than snow. The two texts are thus almost certainly related, with the most likely scenario invoking dependence of Daniel on the most ancient part of 1 Enoch, the Book of the Watchers.22

  The author of the Similitudes associated the Enoch of Enoch 14 and the one like a son of man of Daniel 7 and concluded, quite naturally, in Enoch 71 that “you [Enoch] are the Son of Man.” A crucial step in the developed messianic idea thus had been taken: the merger of the second God, heavenly Redeemer figure and an earthly savior exalted into heaven.23 We can detect in the Similitudes of Enoch the actual tracks of a religious history in which two originally independent strands of tradition have been combined into one. On one hand, we see the development of the one like a son of man of Daniel 7 from a simile into a title; we can literally see this development taking place on the page.24 On the other hand, we see the tradition of the seventh antediluvian human king who was exalted and given a place in heaven, which is one of the most powerful themes of the whole Enoch work. In chapter 71 of the Similitudes we observe these two traditions being combined into one and the two figures of Enoch and the Son of Man coming together. The complex, doubled story of the Son of Man had already been prepared for in pre-Jesus Jewish speculation and was extant at the time of his life: it already included the two elements of a Son of Man who was the preexistent, transcendent Messiah and the element of the human being who would be the embodiment of that Messiah on earth and be exalted and merged with him. Thus was born the Christ, not quite a historical virgin birth or creation out of nothing but the fulfillment of the highest and most powerful aspirations of the Jewish people.

  The Wisdom elements of the newly born Messiah figure come in, I think, together with Enoch, carrying in their wake the early readings of Proverbs 8 and the Logos traditions as well.25 The Son of Man of the Similitudes judges and condemns, was created before the universe like (or even as) the Wisdom of Proverbs, is equated with the Messiah (but not the human messiah), is assimilated to the Deity, and is portrayed as a proper recipient of worship. All that was required then for the full picture was the association of Enoch, the human exalted to heaven, with the Son of Man and the full Christological transformation will have taken place.

  All of the elements of Christology are essentially in place then in the Similitudes. We have a preexistent heavenly figure (identified as well with Wisdom), who is the Son of Man. We have an earthly life, a human sage exalted into heaven at the end of an earthly career, enthroned in heaven at the right side of the Ancient of Days as the preexistent and forever reigning Son of Man. While the Gospels are certainly not drawing on the Similitudes, the Similitudes help illuminate the cultural, religious context in which the Gospels were produced. As New Testament scholar Richard Baukham so well phrased it, “It can readily be seen that early Christians applied to Jesus all the well-established and well-organized characteristics of the unique divine identity in order, quite clearly and precisely, to include Jesus in the unique identity of the one God of Israel.”26 In the worship of the Messiah/Son of Man/Enoch in the Similitudes of Enoch, we find the closest parallel to the Gospels. Since there is no reason in the world to think that either of these texts influenced the other, together they provide strong evidence for the confluence of ideas about the human Messiah, the son of David, and the divine Messiah, the Son of Man, in Judaism by at least the first century A.D. and probably earlier.27

  Fourth Ezra and the Son of Man

  The Similitudes of Enoch was not by any means the only first-century Jewish text other than the Gospels in which the Son of Man was identified as the Messiah. In another text from the same time as the Similitudes and the Gospel of Mark, the apocalypse known as Fourth Ezra, we also find a divine figure based on Daniel 7 and identified with the Messiah. Fascinatingly enough, we also find evidence in this text for yet another attempt to suppress this religious idea, thus adding to our evidence that the idea was controversial among Jews entirely outside of the question of Jesus’ divinity and Messiahship. This text is, as we shall see, dependent as well on Daniel 7 and provides us with one more option for an interpretation of the Son of Man figure that is important for understanding the Gospels. In chapter 13 of that text, we meet the Danielic one like a son of man once again. In some ways the Son of Man figure in Fourth Ezra is even closer to the one of the Gospels than the version in Enoch:

  After seven days I dreamed a dream in the night; 2and behold a great wind arose from the sea so that it stirred up all its waves. 3And I looked, and behold, this wind made something like the figure of a man come out of the heat of the sea. And I looked, and behold, that man flew with the clouds of heaven; and wherever he turned his face to look, everything under his gaze trembled, 4and wherever the voice of his mouth issued forth, all who heard his voice melted as wax melts when it feels the fire.

  5After this I looked, and behold, an innumerable multitude of men were gathered together from the four winds of heaven to make war against the man who came up out of the sea. 6And I looked, and behold, he carved out for himself a great mountain, and flew upon it. 7And I tried to see the region or place from which the mountain was carved, but I could not.

  8After this I looked, and behold, all who had gathered together against him, to wage war with him, were much afraid, yet dared to fight. 9And when he saw the onrush of the approaching multitude, he neither lifted his hand nor held a sword or any weapon of war; 10but saw only how he sent forth from his mouth as it were a stream of fire, and from his lips a flaming breath, and from his tongue he shot forth a storm of fiery coals.28

  Needless to say, the enemies of the man are then burnt to a crisp, if not worse than that. This passage, of course, is clearly based on a reading of Daniel 7, as are the Enoch passages discussed above. Even more sharply (partly owing to its relative density) than in Enoch, the Ezra passage makes absolutely clear the combination of the divine Son of Man and the Redeemer or Messiah—a high Christology indeed, and, of course, one that is independent of the Jesus movement entirely.* Closely paralleling the Enoch passage as well, here too close reference is made to Daniel by citing the appearance of the figure as a man and only then referring to him as the Man. Once again, we see a simile become a Redeemer. And since the simile clearly refers to a divine figure (a divine warrior), the Redeemer is held to be divine.29 As Stone remarks, “It is quite interesting that the passages referring to breath or word are applied both to God and to the redeemer, but, other than our present passage, the passages in which fire is specifically mentioned all refer to God. Therefore, the present passage is unique in this respect and serves to emphasize the cosmic role of the human figure, which in any case many other elements of the text highlight.”30 Pushing the point just a bit further, we arrive at the same sort of argument that has been advanced for the one like a son of man of Daniel, namely, that if it is only YHVH who comes riding on clouds, then here too that figure is a divine one. Ezra’s Man is divine as well.

  The vision concludes:

  12After this I saw the same man come down from the mountain and call to him another multitude which was peaceable. 13Then the forms of many people came to him, some of whom were joyful and some sorrowful; some of them were bound and some were bringing others as offerings.

  This bit of the text nails down the claim that the Man, the Messiah, is God, for this eschatological vision with its offerings is drawn directly from Isaiah 66:20: “And they shall bring all your brethren from all the nations as an offering to the Lord.” Those others brought here as offerings then are brought to the Lord, the kurios, the Son of Man, the Redeemer. Note that the
same sort of argument that is used to prove the divinity of Jesus—namely, the application of verses to him that are in the Bible predicated of YHVH—works here as well for the Man. This Man is the Lord. If Jesus is God, then, by the very same reasoning, so is this Man.

  Here too, as in Daniel 7 itself, we find another witness to a pre-Christian religious conflict within Israel between those who accepted the very ancient idea of an older-appearing divine figure and a younger one who shares his throne and to whom the older one gives authority and other Jews who rejected this idea as a seeming contradiction of monotheism.* Two different strands of the religious imagination, one in which the ancient binitarianness of Israel’s God is essentially preserved and transformed and one in which that duality has been more thoroughly suppressed, live side by side in the Jewish thought world of the Second Temple and beyond, being mixed in different ways but also contesting each other and sometimes seeking to oust the other completely. This background, I think, explains much of the religion of the Gospels as a continuation and development of a strand of Israelite religion that is very ancient indeed.

  The usage of “Son of Man” in the Gospels joins up with the evidence of such usage from Similitudes to lead us to consider this term used in this way (and, more important, its implication of a second divinity incorporated as the Messiah implied by it) as the common coin—which again I emphasize does not mean universal or uncontested—of Judaism already before Jesus.31

  The Gospel of Mark and the Similitudes of Enoch are independent witnesses to a Jewish pattern of religion at their shared time. Texts are not religions (any more than a map is territory), but they are evidence of the religion, tips of icebergs that suggest massive religious developments and formations below the surface, or, perhaps better put, aboveground nodes on a rhizomic system underground that suggest the shape of the rhizomes. The territory was surely as bumpy and variegated as an earthly territory would be; as Carsten Colpe has put it, “The differences in the functions of the Son of Man may be explained by the differences between the groups which expected Him and the times in which they did so.”32

  The great innovation of the Gospels is only this: to declare that the Son of Man is here already, that he walks among us. As opposed to Enoch, who will be in those last days the Messiah Son of Man, Jesus already is. As opposed to the Son of Man flying on the clouds, who is a vision for the future, Jesus has come, declare the Gospels and the believers. The last days are right now, proclaims the Gospel. All of the ideas about Christ are old; the new is Jesus. There is nothing in the doctrine of the Christ that is new save the declaration of this man as the Son of Man. This is, of course, an enormous declaration, a huge innovation in itself and one that has had fateful historical consequences.

  * Although a whole library could (and has been) written on midrash, for the present purposes it will be sufficient to define it as a mode of biblical reading that brings disparate passages and verses together in the elaboration of new narratives. It is something like the old game of anagrams in which the players look at words or texts and seek to form new words and texts out of the letters that are there. The rabbis who produced the midrashic way of reading considered the Bible one enormous signifying system, any part of which could be taken as commenting on or supplementing any other part. They were thus able to make new stories out of fragments of older ones (from the Bible itself), via a kind of anagrams writ large; the new stories, which build closely on the biblical narratives but expand and modify them as well, were considered the equals of the biblical stories themselves.

  * This point is perhaps most sharply brought out in Fourth Ezra 12:32, in which it is insisted that the heavenly Son of Man comes from the posterity of David, “even though it is not apparent why a descendant of David should come on the clouds.” 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), 207.

  * This point is supported by a very important observation made by Michael Stone: the description of the Redeemer in chapter 13 that is being presented here is unique within Fourth Ezra itself. In all other moments within that text, the Redeemer, while in some sense preexistent, seems to fall much more toward the pole of the human Davidic Messiah tradition than the second divinity that we find in Daniel 7, the Similitudes of Enoch, and Fourth Ezra 13. Moreover, as also observed sharply by Stone, the interpretation of the vision in the second half of chapter 13 suppresses the cosmic divine aspect of the Man. What has not been noticed, I think, is that this matches up beautifully with Daniel 7 itself, in which the vision of a second divine figure, the one like a son of man, is also rendered as entirely human and as an allegorical symbol by the interpretation in the second half of the chapter. Michael Edward Stone, Fourth Ezra: A Commentary on the Book 1 Fourth Ezra, ed. Frank Moore Cross (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 211–13.

  3

  Jesus Kept Kosher

  MOST (IF NOT ALL) of the ideas and practices of the Jesus movement of the first century and the beginning of the second century—and even later—can be safely understood as part of the ideas and practices that we understand to be the Judaism of this period. The ideas of Trinity and incarnation, or certainly the germs of those ideas, were already present among Jewish believers well before Jesus came on the scene to incarnate in himself, as it were, those theological notions and take up his messianic calling.

  However, the Jewish background of the ideas of the Jesus movement is only one piece of the new picture I’m sketching here. Much of the most compelling evidence for the Jewishness of the early Jesus communities comes from the Gospels themselves. The Gospels, of course, are almost always understood as the marker of a very great break from Judaism. Over and over, we find within interpretations of them (whether pious or scholarly) statements of what a radical break is constituted by Jesus’ teaching with respect to the “Judaism” of his day. The notions of Judaism as legalistic and rule-bound, as a grim realm of religious anxiety versus Jesus’ completely new teaching of love and faith, die very hard.

  Even among those who recognize that Jesus himself may very well have been a pious Jew—a special teacher, to be sure, but not one instituting a consequential break with Judaism—the Gospels, and especially Mark, are taken as the sign of the rupture of Christianity, of its near-total overturn, of the forms of traditional piety. One of the most radical of these displacements is, according to nearly all views, the total rejection by Mark’s Jesus of Jewish dietary practices, the kosher rules.

  Counter to most views of the matter, according to the Gospel of Mark, 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. According to Mark (and Matthew even more so), far from abandoning the laws and practices of the Torah, Jesus was a staunch defender of the Torah against what he perceived to be threats to it from the Pharisees.

  The Pharisees were a kind of reform movement within the Jewish people that was centered on Jerusalem and Judaea. The Pharisees sought to convert other Jews to their way of thinking about God and the Torah, a way of thinking that incorporated seeming changes in the written Torah’s practices that were mandated by what the Pharisees called “the tradition of the Elders.” The justification of these reforms in the name of an oral Torah, a tradition passed down by the Elders from Sinai on, would have been experienced by many traditional Jews as a radical change, especially when it involved changing the traditional ways that they and their ancestors had kept the Torah for generations immemorial. At least some of these pharisaic innovations may very well have represented changes in religious practice that took place during the Babylonian Exile, while the Jews who remained “in the land” continued their ancient practices. It is quite plausible, therefore, that other Jews, such as the Galilean Jesus, would reject angrily such ideas as an affront to the Torah and as sa
crilege.

  Jesus’ Judaism was a conservative reaction against some radical innovations in the Law stemming from the Pharisees and Scribes of Jerusalem.

  The Gospel of Mark provides the bedrock for this new understanding of Jesus, one with consequences not only for how we understand that Gospel but also for our reading of the Gospels more generally. In the twentieth century a new historical notion of the relations of the Gospels to one another began to form and is now held in most (but not all) scholarly quarters. Mark is now considered the earliest of the Gospels by most scholars today, who date it to some time right after the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70. Matthew and Luke are taken to have used Mark and modified him for their purposes as well as adding other sources for the Gospel, notably a source that communicated many sayings of Jesus.

  This new and compelling explanation of how the Synoptic Gospels relate to each other has the perhaps unintended consequence of making the idea of Jesus’ near-total abrogation of the Law the very founding moment of the Christian movement. If, as most scholars have opined, the author of Mark was a Gentile and one rather ignorant of Jewish ways at that, then the very beginnings of the Jesus movement are already implicated in a rejection of the Jewish way of life. On the other hand, if Mark was himself a member of a Jewish community and so was his Jesus, then the beginnings of Christianity can be considered in a very different light, as a version, perhaps a radical one, of the religion of the Jews. Jesus, in this view, was fighting not against Judaism but within it—an entirely different matter. Far from being a marginal Jew, Jesus was a leader of one type of Judaism that was being marginalized by another group, the Pharisees, and he was fighting against them as dangerous innovators. This view of Christianity as but a variation within Judaism, and even a highly conservative and traditionalist one, goes to the heart of our description of the relations in the second, third, and fourth centuries between so-called Jewish Christianity and its early rival, the so-called Gentile Christianity that was eventually (after some centuries) to win the day.