Scot McKnight says calling people Pharisees gets close to anti-Semitism

From Pharisees: Revisiting an Old Problem:

It is a standard procedure to say “Pharisee” and mean “legalist, bigot, hypocrite, or picayune meddler into other people’s religious business.” Look at any dictionary. But this is in and of itself a caricature and stereotype, for no one (I hope) would think that all Pharisees have always been religious bigots. Such language spells danger down the road in ways that might surprise us. Even more, we have tended to download anger or extreme disagreement with others onto this term “Pharisee.” So, when I call someone a Pharisee I do not mean anything nice or even charitable. Which, in and of itself is dangerous because no group (well, there are exceptions) is always wrong and always bad.

Martin Luther — and this was all charted out in 1977 in EP Sanders’ Paul and Palestinian Judaism – tended to equate the Roman Catholic establishment with the Pharisees of the Gospels. Everyone should read this book, regardless of all the scuttlebutt about his ideas ever since. The invective of Luther against the Roman Catholics in the 16th Century then was downloaded onto the Pharisees of the New Testament.

Here’s the problem: the impact of our use of Pharisee is that we have learned to call all Jews and anyone we think is too conservative a “Pharisee.” This can get very close and often actually is anti-Semitism.

Good on you, Dr. McKnight!

On "the Soloveitchik who loved Jesus'

A friend of mine asked me for my thoughts on the Tablet piece The Soloveitchik Who Loved Jesus.  Here's what I wrote her:

I'm glad this article caught your eye and happy to discuss it! 

While we tend to think of the Messianic Jewish movement as beginning in the late 1960's, there was actually a movement of Jewish Yeshua-believers in the late 1800's in eastern Europe which dwarfed our current movement--hundreds of thousands.  Many of the leaders of this movement were trained, learned rabbis who came to believe the New Testament--men like Joseph Rabinowitz, Theophilus Lucky, Paul Philip Levertoff, R' Isaac Lichtenstein, R' Yechiel Tzvi Lichtenstein, and R' Daniel Zion.  Some in our movement have actually described this time period as the golden age of Messianic Judaism. 

What happened to all these?  Sadly, the Holocaust all but wiped these communities out.  However, there is a growing awareness and desire to connect to this heritage.  Vine of David, the Messianic Jewish publishing arm of First Fruits of Zion, has led the way in bringing the works of these Messianic luminaries to light (no small task since many of these writings are in languages other than English!).  They have a "Remant Repository" on their website where you can browse these valuable texts.  They also have published Paul Philip Levertoff's Love in the Messianic Age and Franz Delitzsch's Hebrew translation of the gospels, beautifully designed and bound editions which befit their majestic contents. 

R' Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik did not identify with this European Messianic community.  However, he was one of several rabbis in modern Europe who looked into the New Testament and did not find it anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish but rather deeply resonant with the teachings of Jewish tradition...who saw Yeshua as a faithful Jew and who felt that the world would be a better place if everyone, Jews and Christians, came to understand this.  In this sense, he was the forerunner of many contemporary Jewish and Christian scholars who (based on far more evidence than R' Soloveitchik had at the time) have come to the same conclusions.  It is a marvel that, at a time when the idea of Jesus as a faithful Jew was much more rare, R' Soloveitchik and others (R' Jacob Emden comes to mind) somehow perceived this truth. 

Boaz Michael (president of First Fruits of Zion) wrote a blog post commenting on this Tablet article about R' Soloveitchik.  You can read it here: A Rabbi Who Loved Jesus: Preface to Mark.

Rabbi Lawrence Schiffman on the gospels

Check out Rabbi Lawrence Schiffman talking about the gospels in From Jesus to Christ: Panel Discussion at PBS's thirteen.org.

Joel Willitts Reviews Daniel Boyarin's The Jewish Gospels

If you're not following New Testament scholar Joel Willitts, you should be.  He's the one working with David Rudolph on Zondervan's forthcoming compendium of essays entitled Introduction to Messianic Judaism.


In his review of Daniel Boyarin's recent release, Willitts focuses in particular on Boyarin's claim that "Son of Man" is actually a divine title, derived from Daniel chapter 7.  This leads Boyarin to the surprising conclusion that

The theology of the Gospels, far from being a radical innovation within Israelite religious tradition, is a highly conservative return to the very most ancient moments within that tradition, moments that had been largely suppressed in the meantime-but not entirely . . . It follows that the ideas about God that we identify as Christian are not innovations but may be deeply connected with some of the most ancient of Israelite ideas about God (47).

Willitts has this to say:

Irrespective of the highly speculative nature of Boyarin’s argument, the claim that Daniel 7 contains both ideas,  individual and corporate, with one not outstripping the other is interesting. What’s more, the assertion that two divine beings is a thoroughly Jewish idea is extremely provocative. I have not studied the issue of the Son of Man sufficiently enough to have any definitive evaluation. However, I think Boyarin’s argument could open up new trenches for research.

Read the entire review here: The Divinity of Jesus in Early Judaism

Delitzsch on Matthew 5:28

How much help can a translation of a translation be in studying the gospels?  Answer: plenty!  Here's the first of what could become a running series of examples.

Last week in a weekly Torah study I'm a part of, I mused (on the tenth commandment):

Is coveting your neighbor's wife necessarily the prelude to committing adultery? Is coveting your neighbor's donkey the prelude to stealing? If so, then is this last mitzvah a sort of "fence" around the previous mitzvot? If it is a fence, then why did Yeshua teach that 'anyone who looks on a woman lustfully commits adultery with her in his heart'--why didn't he simply refer to this as coveting? (Possible answer: adultery has a penalty of death, so it's considered a more severe transgression...thus he heightened his point by focusing on the mitzvah with the greater penalty.)

These thoughts were rather stream of consciousness, and afterwards I delved into a more detailed word study in both the Tanakh and the Apostolic Writings.  So imagine my surprise (and joy) when I discovered that I was wrong, and Yeshua actually DID use the word for coveting. Here's what I wrote back:

I was incorrect; Yeshua DOES use the word for coveting in relation to his statement about not lusting: "But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman to COVET AFTER HER [my literal translation] has already committed adultery with her in his heart." [Compare the Greek text with Paul's lists of the commandments in Romans or Galatians.]  This verse seems to be universally translated as "to lust after" [See http://bible.cc/matthew/5-28.htm], with Young's literal translation being one notable exception.  By contrast, the Delitzsch Hebrew Gospels explicitly highlight the presence of the word covet in the text: "whoever gazes at a woman to covet [footnote: desire] her..."

I am curious about the near-universal choice of "lust" here over "covet" in English translations: is there a strong linguistic basis for it or does it have more to do with the meanings of the English words "lust" and "covet" in our modern day? Or is it simply the profound literary influence of the masterful KJV translation?

In any case, I think this is one great example of how the Delitzsch Hebrew Gospels can be highly effective in helping us to get to know the canonical Greek texts better, while simultaneously highlighting for us the fact that our English translations are just that: translations.

(Update: Rabbi Russ Resnik also draws this connection in his book Divine Reversal--see my comment below.)