McDermott Understanding the Jewish Roots of Christianity

Biblical, Theological, and Historical Essays on the Relationship between Christianity and Judaism
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68359-462-8
Verlag: Lexham Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 264 Seiten

Reihe: Studies in Scripture and Biblical Theology

How Jewish is Christianity? The question of how Jesus' followers relate to Judaism has been a matter of debate since Jesus first sparred with the Pharisees. The controversy has not abated, taking many forms over the centuries. In the decades following the Holocaust, scholars and theologians reconsidered the Jewish origins and character of Christianity, finding points of continuity. Understanding the Jewish Roots of Christianity advances this discussion by freshly reassessing the issues. Did Jesus intend to form a new religion? Did Paul abrogate the Jewish law? Does the New Testament condemn Judaism? How and when did Christianity split from Judaism? How should Jewish believers in Jesus relate to a largely gentile church? What meaning do the Jewish origins of Christianity have for theology and practice today? In this volume, a variety of leading scholars and theologians explore the relationship of Judaism and Christianity through biblical, historical, theological, and ecclesiological angles. This cutting-edge scholarship will enrich readers' understanding of this centuries-old debate.

Gerald R. McDermott is Anglican Chair of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author of several books, including Everyday Glory and Israel Matters, and the editor of The New Christian Zionism. His research primarily focuses on Jonathan Edwards, Christian understandings of other religions, and the meaning of Israel.

Autoren/Hrsg.

McDermott

McDermott, Gerald

Leseproben

2 Old Testament: How Did the New Testament Authors Use Tanak? Mark S. Gignilliat A mother in our church stopped me after Sunday school one day to tell me about her son. He has high-functioning autism, she relayed, and, as many with autism, Jeremiah demonstrates a high level of focus and energy on subject matters that interest him. His mom told me about Jeremiah’s passion as of late, the Old Testament. He reads nonstop about it, she reported, and loves this portion of Holy Scripture. I listened carefully because I was sensing with this little boy that we were dealing with someone whose election was sure. So, I was intrigued. I spent some time with Jeremiah at Beeson Divinity School this past summer. He came to my office, and we looked at books together and talked about the kings of the Old Testament and his other interest, the Neo-Assyrians. Jeremiah was very curious about what the ancient Israelites ate, and I had to hunt around the office for some information to satiate his curiosity. Our conversation in my office was delightful and memorable. When we went down to our chapel together, I asked Jeremiah to look at the painted panels around the apse. They each depict a scene from the Bible, with the last scene displaying Martin Luther’s tacking up of the Ninety-Five Theses on the Castle Church’s door in Wittenberg. I said, Jeremiah, do you notice something troubling about our panels? There are ten of them, and only one depicts a scene from the Old Testament. Jeremiah was aghast. In the midst of our shared incredulity, one of the chapel attendants overheard me and came to our rescue. The panels are representative of the church calendar, he explained, beginning in Advent (the Isaiah panel) and moving forward through Christmas to Epiphany. Fair enough. But what I meant as good tongue-in-cheek humor, Jeremiah took with all seriousness, and he had a hard time letting it go. For the rest of our time together that morning, Jeremiah kept asking me, Why is there only one Old Testament scene in your chapel? THE OLD TESTAMENT’S SIGNAL ROLE IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY Jeremiah’s question is a good one, despite our chapel attendant’s best efforts to minimize it by liturgical means. In fact, it is the kind of question that helps to frame the thesis of this chapter. The church has never operated apart from the Scriptures of Israel as a governing body of authoritative Scriptures. Moreover, the New Testament leans on the Old Testament for its own theological sense making and, perhaps more provocatively, does not even exist apart from its relation to the Old Testament. This chapter will lean into these claims and aim to unpack them in the ensuing material. Despite the complexities of sifting through the canonical history of the New Testament documents, there was never a time that Jesus Christ, the apostles, or the earliest members of Christ’s church did not recognize the Scriptures of Israel as a constraining authority and privileged source of divine revelation. In other words, the church from its inception did not operate without scriptural authority. The Scriptures of Israel provided much of the substance and language for the earliest of Christians in their coming to terms with the identity of Jesus Christ in that unique moment of God’s eschatological unveiling—“In the former days he revealed himself in various and sundry ways but in these latter days in the Son” (Heb 1:1–2).1 In Hans von Campenhausen’s classic work The Formation of the Christian Bible, he puts a point on the matter when he claims that for the early church, the question was never, What do we do with the Scriptures of Israel now that Jesus Christ has appeared? Rather, the question was quite the reverse. What do with do with Jesus Christ in light of the assumed and anterior authority of our canonical inheritance in the Scriptures of Israel?2 The canonical logic is plain to see in terms of classic Christian theology. If knowledge of the Triune God is the subject matter of Christian theology, then Holy Scripture is theology’s chief and principal instrument for apprehending that knowledge. Whatever gray area may exist in the early church’s life as it pertains to the New Testament canon’s composition and canonization, such gray area does not exist with what Christians call the Old Testament. Little wonder that the church’s second-century struggles against the cruelty of heresy sat right on top of the Old Testament’s enduring authority. Brevard Childs describes the onslaught of Marcion’s theological and canonical outlook in the following description: The first major challenge to the unbroken continuity between the Old Testament and the church was raised when Marcion opposed the traditional view of the canon and sought to introduce a critical principle by which the church could determine its authentic scriptures. He argued that the original Christian tradition had been corrupted and needed not only to cut loose from the Jewish scriptures, but also to be critically recovered by sifting the allegedly authentic sources of the faith.3 The earliest of Christian apologists recognized that to cut the church off from Israel’s Scriptures was to cut us off from the very word of God. Or as I tell my students at Beeson Divinity School, they are called to a ministry of exorcism wherever and whenever Marcion’s lingering ghost might still pester Christ’s church.4 THE OLD TESTAMENT IN THE NEW TESTAMENT: BROAD BRUSHSTROKES Despite Marcion and his progeny’s best efforts to suggest otherwise, it does not take a deep reading of the New Testament to see the Old Testament’s presence from beginning to end. The past forty years of New Testament scholarship has given an inordinate amount of attention to the presence of the Old Testament in the New Testament, stemming from the work of Barnabas Lindars and Earle Ellis, and the catapulting efforts of Richard Hays.5 I remember reading Hays’s Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul as a young seminarian and feeling as if the sky of Scripture had opened to me in new ways. Hays’s work spawned a whole generation of New Testament scholars who pursued the quotations, allusions, and echoes of the Old Testament in the New Testament. I often repeat the story of my own doctoral studies. One day while in a seminar, my Doktorvater made a joke about all the dissertations out there on Paul and Isaiah. The whole room laughed. I laughed too and then went back to my desk to work on my dissertation on Paul and Isaiah. These reflections are no report on the state of research on the subject matter. I only mention these things briefly to highlight the unstated and unintended humor of this chapter’s topic: the influence of Tanak on the New Testament. The influence is so thorough and replete and constitutive of the New Testament’s compositional history that not much argumentation is needed to speak of the Old Testament’s presence and influence on the New. One only need start reading in Matthew 1 and follow the logic of the genealogies, linking Christ’s birth to the redemptive history of Israel. Or the character of the whole history of Israel, played out in Jesus Christ’s historical narrative. Follow Jesus to the mountain in Matthew 5–7 as the new Moses who clarifies the true intent of Torah as directed toward our whole person—act and motive—and not merely outward conformity to the strictures of the law. Sit on the sidelines in the Synoptic Gospels as Jesus hashes it out with the Pharisees over various applications (halakah) of the Torah—the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.6 The very logic of the parables, for example, in Luke 8, rests on Isaiah’s portrayal of deafness and hearing as respective metaphors for judgement and redemption. Jesus’ clarion call, “Let those who have ears to hear understand,” inhabits the redemptive portrayal of Isaiah’s promised future. Follow Luke’s Gospel to its final chapter, where we see the risen Jesus Christ shaping his disciples in the practices that should constitute their very being as followers of him (Luke 24). What does Jesus do in the upper room? He explains all things concerning himself in the Scriptures, beginning with Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms, conjoining the study of Scripture with a eucharistic moment in the breaking of the bread. What is the result of Jesus’ conjoining of Scripture exposition and eucharistic celebration? They see Jesus. Do you want to know who Jesus Christ is, to see his face? Jesus exemplifies for his followers where such encounters are to be had: in the study of Moses, the Prophets, and the Writings in the shared sacramental life of the faith community. The so-called Noachian laws of Leviticus 17–19 help adjudicate tricky matters on Jew/gentile relations at the Jerusalem counsel in Acts 15.7 Do we even need to speak about Paul and Isaiah, given the plethora of studies in this field and my Doktorvater’s good-natured humor?8 Readers might engage Paul’s use of Deuteronomy in the 1 Corinthians, where the Torah shapes Paul’s instruction on complicated matters of church discipline and ethics.9 They could turn to Hebrews and the Levitical logic of sacrifice and atonement rooted in the life of the blood, or to James’ reception of the wisdom traditions, or to Revelation’s immersion in Old Testament imagery.10 This litany of suggested paths for the topic at hand only touches the surface: one could...