the Bible with and without Jesus

The book I wanted to present this month is The Bible With and Without Jesus by Levine and Brettler. I am not a Biblical scholar but I love Biblical scholarship; this book was a slog. If this post stimulates interest, a shorter and very readable book with a related theme is Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman.

After the slog, a number of impressions and memories flowed………

The latter half of the 1950’s found me in a magical place and time, Coronado, California. Then, as now, each daytime hour is identified by a tolling bell that can be heard virtually anywhere in town. Ding dong ding dong, dong ding ding dong…..The source? A small granite church housing the town’s Episcopalian congregation (corner of (9th and C). All the book learning in the world did not prepare me for the surprise in downtown London, years later, to hear the same church bells, the same melody.

I attended Sunday school at this church from 1957-1960. It was here I learned of the story of Adam and Eve, Jonah and the whale, and the Passion story. Bits of the Sermon on the Mount found their way to me as we watched slides which were changed by the prompting bell found on the LP recording with the day’s story. The ritual and fun that are a part of those Sundays found me to be a fan. I liked the little crosses made from palm fronds for Palm Sunday. I aspired to be an acolyte. Acolytes got to carry the candles in the main church, in front of all the adults. What’s not to like?

An interesting point about my attendance, and that of my brother and sister. We walked to Sunday school, something close to half a mile each way unaccompanied. My parents sent us off after breakfast but did not attend. In adolescence, I suspected that this was a morning off for the parents who were found in their bed on our return. Other than weddings, I don’t think I ever saw my mother in a church with one exception: my suggestion, to stop by in remembrance, the weekend after the assassination of JFK.

This was perhaps a sort of Hail Mary: we lived outside of Coronado from1960 to 1963 and during those years, I only went to church functions when invited by friends. If Lenin’s notion that young brains are susceptible to a lifetime of influence, the Church lost me in those years. The return to the old pattern, again, in Paradise, which is to say, Coronado, there was no longer Sunday school. There were formal classes with testing and memorization. The teacher was an insurance broker who had no business trying to influence young minds. I checked out other than that sentimental nod to JFK.

I was in sixth grade when JFK died. Already, I was a skeptic as it related to formal Christian beliefs. Influences on my perspective were many: my father went to a Jesuit High School in the 1920’s in Iowa. His love for, “the Jesuit way” as it related to logic would be legend as I came of age and had actual conversations with him but in my childhood, he was silent on most things, including religion. I have no idea if he believed! My mother had gone to Bishop’s private school in La Jolla before and during World War II. Her language on matters of religion reflected the discipline and teaching of that environment but mostly, a polite request that I attend church in Coronado was the limit we reached for teasing out details. In a sense, I was a religious orphan.

Saint Thomas Aquinas is famous for generating five proofs for the existence of God. My early years found my beliefs formed by something of the converse. For example, my parents subscribed to the New Yorker Magazine. Even as a seven year old, I loved the cartoons and a common theme was the long haired, bearded man on the street with a sign: “the end is near.” Not understanding the jokes, the skeptical tone was always clear; skepticism 101 delivered subliminally. Another counter proof: my mother related to me once that our cats would not join us in heaven. I was appalled at the injustice of that. Now things were becoming more concrete. Around 1961, I was an avid reader of anything related to Greek, Roman, or Norse history. Eric the Red who explored lands West of Iceland was motivated in part because it was believed, near the millennium anniversary of the death of Jesus, the second coming was expected and he hoped to find a refuge from the end times.

And that was a thousand years ago, and counting. Skepticism reinforced.

My brother had the influence Lenin was talking about. When Jackie Onassis had a premature birth in 1963 the baby died after two days. My brother took pains to explain that in the Catholic Church, that baby was going to Hell because there had been no baptism. Right or wrong, this made an impression on me. Just a year before, we were living in Rio de Janeiro and Adolph Eichman’s trial was brought to my attention by that same brother who had a morbid fascination (he was in the ninth grade at the time) with the Holocaust. I saw the photos in numerous books on that subject with an older brother’s counsel on what it all meant. Years later in an English class in High School, existentialism made some sense to me largely because of how I had taken that all in. That same year, I came under the influence of a famous atheist: Ayn Rand. This was my first introduction to a formal philosophical system and I was fascinated by it. It took just a year for a late-blooming adolescent to come to the conclusion that she and Nathanial Brandon (her lover and co-writer of Objectivist essays) were, as I like to call them, wack-jobs. An ethical system based on enlightened selfishness as they described it, was too easily corrupted into something tone deaf to important qualities of humanity, both good and bad.

I have always admired people of Faith who are not tone-deaf. This found me disdainful of many Evangelical followers I came to know. In the awkwardness of going to college, I put some of my art on the wall before my roommate had presented himself. One picture was a portrait of a smiling Jesus, my adolescent sense of who I wanted him to be. On a whim, when my roommate and I began to speak, he remarked on the picture, and I asked if he had found Jesus as his personal savior—as an overtly anti-evangelical joke. It turned out my roommate was Jewish and in fact aspired to be a rabbi some day. I was embarrassed and made my apologies.

Rick (my freshman roommate) demonstrated time and time again the difference between the Jewish and Christian Faiths. As we debated many points of faith and philosophy, he would come back to Jewish traditions and time. “You just can’t understand the power of four thousand years of a continuous culture. It makes your arguments look flimsy and all about style but without substance.” Not being a Christian, and being a science major, I found this approach just a bit condescending and we commonly, as was the spirit of the times, agreed to disagree. This allowed for a peaceful co-existence in the dorm that would have been all but impossible if I was an “Orthodox” Christian.

There was a statistic when I went to UC Santa Cruz in 1970, that 40% of the student body (underclassmen) were Jewish. That seems high but I was befriended by many people of that faith and the diversity in spiritual and worldly outlooks was a wonder to behold. I participated in a Seder in my college home. My friend Barry would take the Birthright Israel trip after his freshman year and reported back in the Fall. The trip had afforded him, in 1971 not only a visit to Israel, but Western Europe and the Soviet Union as well. Barry stunned me when he proclaimed that Israeli men were “assholes.” Asked to clarify, he reflected his upper middle class Bay Area upbringing: “Israeli men were chauvinistic, aggressive, assholes who disdained Americans—and American Jews— and took them for granted.”

From the introductory chapters of the featured book, The Bible With and Without Jesus, the diversity I experienced is discussed. Belief is important to religious Jews though the diaspora clearly finds many variations. An Ethiopian Jew and a Spanish Jew or a Russian Jew will have very different cultural reads on the shared religious texts as well as a hosts of religious texts unknown to each other. In all those settings, they were oppressed isolated minorities. There is a flexibility and sense that the religion has and should evolve with time and place to be relevant to its believers. And despite this variation Jews remain identified by a common ancestry. One can be an atheist Jew.

One cannot be an atheist Christian. Christians are defined by belief and all Christian sects have a compelling need for Orthodoxy — of belief,—no small thing for millions of Christians in conflict over the issue through history. Forgetting about all the divisions within Christianity, what are the common beliefs that unite Christians?

1) Christians believe in one God, the only God.

2) Christians believe that Jesus was his only son and sent to us for salvation—from sin and death.

3) Christians believe that Jesus was resurrected; in believing this and the above, you have a special relationship with God whose forgiveness was made manifest through the death and resurrection.

4) Christians believe in the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

5) Christians believe in an afterlife.

This definition is helpful as I read the book comparing the interpretations of the Bible over the centuries by Jewish and Christian leaders.

GENESIS:

Before there was a Torah, there was Jewish mythology: for example, there was Lilith, Adam’s first wife. My Episcopalian Sunday school would have relished that story: she was created with Adam, out of clay. They did not get along. She moved to Egypt. Adam then was presented with Eve. The rest, as we say, is history.

The Misquoting Jesus book I reference is all about translation; with regards to Genesis and other Bible stories consider this: There are no capital letters in the ancient languages Hebrew/Greek/Latin. Consider the meaning of spirit, or Spirit. In Genesis, God’s breath instilling life into the body of Adam can be translated, “spirit” or “wind.” To an early Christian, any reference to the Holy Spirit in the Genesis story is appreciated and so, the translation would lean to “spirit.” To the Hebrew scholar, “wind” might suffice just fine.

In the Gospels, only Luke discusses Adam, not Eve; Jesus cites the garden of Eden story when talking about divorce, as in the two becoming one flesh. This and other interpretations of the garden of Eden story are fundamental to Christianity and contribute to teaching original sin, the fall of man, the subordination of women and restriction of divorce. None of these ideas are explicit in translations of Genesis from the Jewish/Hebrew perspective. By the Middle Ages, they became axiomatic to European Christians.

For me, an unexpected Jewish point of view is that Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden, not as punishment, but to avoid humans reaching for the tree of life which would confer immortality; they had proven themselves unreliable as to obeying the rules and the temptation was too much to risk; the Cherubim are left to guard that tree and prevent this from happening.

The Jewish reading of Genesis has no return to the garden or paradise for the afterlife, no immortal soul, no Satan, no breach between humans and God. Sin is not in this story and it is not a story about alienation; while outside Eden, God remains with and guides humans.

With regards to sin, the Hebrew bible refers to sin being ubiquitous in humans but does not identify Adam as the source of sin. The Jewish focus on Genesis is an idealized beginning and the transformation of humans into mortals as well as sexual beings. A host of writers in both Christian and Jewish faiths wrestle with the tension of sexuality as a source of sin and potentially corrupting behavior. Christians like Jews have historically made women subservient in society with this tension or blame in mind.

Lastly: St Augustine’s education followed the principles of Greek intellectual traditions from the classical age. He believed that semen carries sin genetically and confers it to offspring. The Jews…..not so much. The notion of original sin is not accepted in the Jewish Faith; God forgave Adam and forgives all humans.

THE VIRGIN BIRTH:

CONSERVATIVE PROTESTANTS BURNED COPIES IN THE 1952 STANDARD VERSION BIBLE BECAUSE OF ITS TRANSLATING “ALMAH” AS, “YOUNG WOMAN” RATHER THAN, “VIRGIN.”

Was the messiah prophesied to be born unto a virgin? The book reviewed suggests that the Old Testament Book of Isiah is the source of this prophesy and again, serves as an example of both a translation choice as well as what is defined as proof texting, the process by which one goes back to an old text after an event has occurred and mining for the words and intent that predict what has now happened. A modern example would be the prophesies of Nostradamus nicely gelling to predict Napoleon—or was it Hitler?

The Book of Isiah, in the Jewish religion, is not an especially important text.

In this case, the Hebrew and then Greek translation can be at odds with each other when translating Isiah. Around the 1200’s the translation of “maid” led to a change to “virgin.” The term may well have meant that in France or Italy in 1200, but with time, we now have meter maids, milk maids, bar maids, and bridesmaids. Our assumptions now are that it in no way implies virginity as it might have in the 1200’s. But 1200 BC? Who knows? Specific to Isiah, the other issue is if the prediction is for someone of that generation and unrelated to a prophesied messiah.

JONAH AND THE WHALE: This was a popular story when I was a child. It is likely this story resonated for my generation because hearing it in Sunday school aligned in time with the cartoon movie Pinoccio. Its importance as religious text was meaningless to me growing up and I had to refresh my memory with this book’s reading. it is noted in that book that the story of Jonah is hard to find in the Jewish bible; it is buried within the collection known as the twelve Minor prophets. It turns out, the story has a lot of interesting dimensions, Christian interpretations included.

If you are not aware, Jonah was asked by God to preach to Gentiles in Ninveh, the enemy of Jonah’s people. He did not want to do this and fled on a boat. A storm rises while he is sleeping as a passenger and when awakened; he is asked what they might do about the storm that is about to sink them. He sees God’s hand in this and still does not want to preach to the gentiles so he suggests they throw him overboard. They do; the storm lifts. Jonah is swallowed by the whale. After three days, Jonah caves and prays for deliverance which comes. He goes to Ninveh, preaches, the people listen and are redeemed. The city is spared from God’s judgement.

Jonah is anomalous—there are not many stories like this in the Old testament—he is not a prophet and the word, “prophet” is never used in this book. Of interest, as with Cassandra in Greek Mythology, the prophets in the Old Testament are usually not taken seriously by their peers which is to say they are not heeded. Jonah’s words have meaning and in the end, there is repentance. HIs preaching finds an audience open to his message and is redeemed. It is a moral tale that in one sense, brings gentiles, “into the fold.” That path to this outcome is Jonah’s sacrifice which has significance to Christians as is the notion that all humans are God’s children. There are the three days in the whale, the number three being relevant to Christian interpretation of prophecy as well and tied to the sacrifice and resurrection three days later. St Peter’s Aramaic name is “son of Jonah” who in turn brings a message of repentance to Gentiles (Matt 28:19). Peter too, was resistant to his mission. Lastly, the sailors who throw Jonah into the sea beg for forgiveness as do both Judas and Pontius Pilate in the Passion story.

Despite being a minor character in the Torah, Jonah is recited at Yom Kippur secondary to the book’s concern for repentance—even the most wicked, if they repent, will be forgiven.

Sermon on the Mount—More than any other part of the the New Testament, the Sermon on the Mount reaches people who don’t have the five characteristics that are needed to be a faithful Christian. It has power and is used as an elevated expression of a “higher religion.” In the centuries after the death of Jesus, this reference has been used to contrast the profile of the Old Testament God (angry/vengeful) and the New Testament God (Merciful/forgiving) as found in the Bible.

But does it? The word used for this concept is supersessionism ie Jesus elevated the principles of his religion to a higher order; he used Judaism and its traditions to build a better and different religion. He of course, did not do that—his disciples and subsequent religious scholars in early Christianity supported this point of view and the more time that elapsed the more the Jews were left behind.

The Jewish read of this New Testament passage is fascinating. Jesus states clearly that his audience should not think he has come to abolish the law or supersede the prophets. He reinforces the Torah and objects to the interpretation of his time’s religious leaders. Several Torah practices are reinforced. He does not suggest doing the opposite of what you (the listeners of the sermon on the mount) were taught. He wants the laws of the Torah fulfilled properly. In effect, he is saying, “We have to do better than the Pharisees and their interpretation of the Torah.”

As many of the points from the sermon are reviewed, Josephus (an historical Jewish source from 70 years after the birth of Jesus) is cited as pointing out norms of his culture; as Christians and conservative Jews interpret the “laws” laid down in the Old Testament, this ancient resource suggests that such laws were principles — not specific laws as in, “if you go over the speed limit, you will get a ticket and have to pay $150.” He cites the Misnash (a pre Christian Jewish reference) that notes that punishment is typically in the form of money for injury, pain, medical costs, loss of income, and indignity. As primitive as the ancients are sometimes thought to be with our modern eyes, it is reassuring to see how much like us and our own society they were. The “eye for an eye,” principle set the standard for the debt to be paid and the specific context in 20 BCE is unknown to us.

On a related point: scripture can be found that suggest those guilty of infidelity should be stoned to death. The authors point out it rarely happened but as in our society now, it is a moral failure and needed correction. Note that Mary, when pregnant, found Joseph considering divorce, but she was not tried, judged, or stoned as punishment for what certainly looked compromising.

Matthew’s gospel speaks to Jesus preaching that what you do is as important as what you believe. In the Sermon, he interprets the Torah contrasting the traditional or institutionalized rules and interprets them in the context of his people and his time. The problems addressed are universal: how do you respond to violence or sexual impropriety? How does one cover every situation? Josephus suggests that the Pharisees were popular because their traditions of Torah interpretation ,“alleviated the harsher prescriptions of the Bible in civil and criminal law.”

The Gospel of Matthew finds him using “extensions" to make points: “”You have heard that it was said…..but I say to you….” These parts of the sermon are used to flesh out interpretation of the Torah by Jesus.

Adultery as managed in his time, is attacked at its root: “But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” It is a strict code for his society of believers, and an extending interpretation of the Torah.The interpretation includes divorce: If you divorce your wife, you cause her to commit adultery; whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.” Jesus’s prohibiting divorce makes him more conservative than the prevailing mores of his times.

Oath Taking: Jesus forbids false swearing and positive vowing. The scriptures of Israel advise the same. Jesus mandates honesty at all times; if you promise something, you should keep the promise and an oath should not change that. Honesty should be the norm.

The use of , “you have heard it said, but I say….” Shows how the Torah is to be followed and extended: from forbidding murder to forbidding or curbing anger; from forbidding adultery to forbidding lust; from forbidding false or violated oaths to forbidding the taking of oaths in the first place.

The Verses about “an eye for an eye” are more problematic and the discussion reviewed both Hebrew and Roman norms about compensation for harm done. The Old Testament looks barbaric if the expression is taken literally—and when referenced now, it usually is taken literally. No society can reasonably work well if this principle is taken literally. The principle was that if you cannot come to terms after an injury is suffered, the same injury should be dealt. The methods for determine monetary value for an injury were stark: if one is blinded, you are owed the difference of what a slave could be sold for with both eyes vs the missing eye. In a similar way as to the previous discussions of law, Jesus fixes his eye on a different path, one that doesn’t change the formula but reduces the eventual cost—the actual harm. His message is “don’t escalate violence; do not give up your agency; shame your attacker and retain your honor,” by turning the other cheek.

Precedents for this approach are found in the Torah.

As I took this in, finding precedents in the Torah is not quite enough. These interpretations found in the Sermon on the Mount, remain for me, transforming. There is the nucleus of a new religion here with an alternative approach to the traditional formula. And it serves more than Christians. While Jesus’s intent may never have been supersessionism ie the evolution to a non-Jewish religion, the sermon served that cause admirably. Consider how those principles have played out even in our lifetime, specifically, the Civil Rights Movement as we saw it come to life under Martin Luther King: “Don’t escalate violence, do not give up your agency; shame your attacker and retain your honor.”

These forays into the book reviewed are by no means comprehensive. The specifics I raise were the ones that caught my interest. The book did not inspire me to read the Old Testament. If I were to do that, I would need a companion to help sort out the history and context of so many passages that otherwise are hard to understand. It made the ancient world come alive and it taught me a lot about the Jewish scholarly traditions through the Middle Ages which largely tackled some of these proofreading issues defensively. Many of the Jewish orientations to stories I did know were surprising in the assumptions and conclusions presented in The Bible with and without Jesus.

The book helped me reframe my thinking about why I bristle with those Christians for whom Orthodoxy is so important: it suggests that if you don’t have it, you are inferior in some way. I reject that. Orthodoxy when evidenced in all the religions puts me on my guard and I actively engage my frontal lobes to be as objective as I can when a personal interaction is called for. It has served me well as more than one Jehovah Witness has expressed their sorrow in my office for being damned to eternal hell.