Michael Zank

I teach the New Testament as part of an entry-level college course on the Bible. My overall approach is to teach the Bible as literature. I start with canon and canonization, then work my way through the parts of the canons, from Genesis to Daniel, canonical to apocryphal and deutero-canonical, Iron Age to Hellenistic, all the while foregrounding questions of genre and literary form as a means of getting from simple content to historical context. I encourage students to distinguish between heroic and narrative time. I point, again and again, to the pivotal moments in Israelite and Judahite history that we can grasp and pin down, around which some of the datable chunks of texts, books, and editorial compilations revolve: the destruction of Israel, the destruction of Judah, exile and return, the transition from Ptolemaic to Seleucid rule, the beginning and end of Hasmonean kingship, the age of Herod and Roman rule.

Then we turn to the New Testament.

The four canonical lives of Christ can be classified as “lives” (vitae or bioi), biographies of a particular “illustrious” man, a saint of sorts. They can be compared, in form, to the Lives of Plutarch. Luke in particular follows the conventions of that genre. But reading the gospels after reading biblical wisdom and apocalyptic literature is not just a shift in genre. It is a rupture.

For those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, the New Testament is discontinuous with the old. It is a metabasis eis allo genos. To think otherwise is to be fooled by the triple power of codex, language, and habit. Just because New and Old Testament are bound in one volume doesn’t mean they’re one book. Just because they’re written and translated so as to resemble one another doesn’t mean they speak the same language. Just because we (Christians and Christian-acculturated others) are used to mentioning them in one breath doesn’t mean they’re of the same spirit.

It was not until today that I fully realized the scandalon, the powerful magic trick by which difference and discontinuity between these compilations are rendered invisible.

Not that Talmud or Midrash are any more continuous with “scripture” than the gospels and letters of the New Testament. Both traditions, early Christian and early Jewish, employed interpretive techniques and hermeneutical rules to make those ancient and time-honored texts of Moses, the Prophets, and Psalms (or Writings) say what they wanted to hear. Learned Christians looked to Philo of Alexandria for inspiration who allegorized the laws of the Pentateuch; the rabbis honed R. Ishmael’s thirteen measures of interpretation. Both communities became inured to the resistance of the literal and historical meanings of texts whose sanctity was affirmed by bending its meaning to the will of the competing interpreters. And yet, there are important differences between Jewish and Christian readings of the same texts.

1. Hebrew v. Greek

Though the language of the early Christians and the Jews of Judea and Galilee was the same admixture of Aramaic and Greek, the dominant idiom of Roman era Christian discourse was Greek (the language of Paul), while the dominant idiom of Roman age Jewish discourse remained Aramaic. While sayings attributed to Jesus may have circulated in his own native language and that of his disciples, they were soon translated into Greek and other languages, which was part of the point of the gospel’s urgent dissemination to the “ends of the earth.” The kingdom of god arrived in deliberate acts of breaking down language and other barriers between nations, social classes, and – in some cases – also between the sexes, to forge a new humanity that was one in Christ. The vehicle of dissemination of the good news was comprehensible speech, even as one of the signs of the holy spirit was incomprehensible speech.

The rabbis condemned the Greek language and regarded it as a means of self-alienation that should no longer be cultivated. This inward turn came with the renewal of Hebrew as the language of the new law, the Mishnah that took the place of the old as the New Testament did for the Christians. And yet, the Mishnah was promulgated in Hebrew, commented on in Aramaic, and linked to the jots and tittles of the law by means of elaborate exegetical moves. While the oral torah was often suspended from the old like a mountain by a hair, it remained connected through linguistic proximity, wordplay, and the unceasing gesture of honoring the law as one and the same, received by Moses at Sinai.

2. Nation v. movement

The Jews never ceased to be a nation. But what were those early Christians? The religion of the Jews was never anything but an ethnic religion that, in that sense, never offended Roman sensibilities. But what was that Christian “way” proclaimed by the apostles after the death and resurrection of Christ? Binding or not, rabbinic law was meant to unify the Jews within and outside the land of Israel lacking access to their national center, their central sanctuary, and any semblance of national sovereignty. In place of these accustomed forms of independence the rabbis of the late second and early third century created a system of legal autonomy under the auspices of Roman rule. For the next seventeen centuries, this became the dominant way of life and the means to preserve ethnic cohesion and continuity among the Jews. The basic understanding of the Jews as a covenanted community was rooted in and continuous with the Pentateuch, a document forged in the crucible of Babylonian exile and Persian-age reconstruction.

In contrast, the Christian “Way” transcends the boundaries of ethnic nationality, custom, class, and gender. It forges a new humanity that is neither beholden to Moses nor to Homer (Droge), neither Jew nor Greek, rich or poor, male or female, according to Paul. This angelic race anticipates the kingdom of heaven right here on earth. Those who proclaim it might suffer at the hands of powers beholden to Satan and his demons, but they hope to be vindicated either in this life or in the next. They are innocent of the conflicts between nations and they are no threat to the empire (“my kingdom is not of this world”). This innocuous proclamation, which is the gist of the gospels and of Acts, was forged in the crucible of years, during and following the violent suppression of the first Jewish rebellion, when Romans saw the Jews as a rebellious people, barely subdued by the Emperor and his son, Titus, himself immortalized by his brother Domitian.

But instead of proclaiming their complete independence of the Judaic dispensation, as Marcion would, the canonical gospels, the Book of Acts, the rest of the New Testament insist on continuity with the Israelite heritage as one of prophecy and fulfillment. Christ is not simply a spiritual being, as Christian Gnostics would have it, but the Son of David, promised and foreseen by Moses and the prophets, proclaimed through the ages, adumbrated and prefigured by the unwitting testimony of the ancients. Avoiding the odium of innovation, Christians presented themselves as heirs to the most ancient dispensation, going back to Adam, Abraham, Moses, and King David while disowning the stubbornness of the Jews.

Looked at from the outside, from beyond all the rhetoric aimed at persuasion, the Christians appear as a movement rather than a new humanity, a community of believers, a mystery cult devoted to Christ, buoyed by enthusiasm and charisma. Surely successful in forging a new way of life, yet one whose ultimate implications were neither as benign nor as irenic as they foresaw when they were without power or sovereignty of their own.

3. Continuity v. supersession

Perhaps the major difference between Jewish and Christian ways of reading their antecedent scriptures is that between those who assert historical continuity and subject identity and those who appropriate that same tradition while superseding those who are most obviously devoted to its substantive continuation. In this competition, because the Christian way became politically dominant, the spiritual appropriators of an antecedent tradition were privileged over the literal (“carnal”) appropriators of that same tradition.

There are counter-arguments against the stark disjunction between Christianity and Judaism. Despite their pious demurrals the Jews of Palestine were connoisseurs of Greek and Hellenistic civilization. And despite their claim to speak for the entire nation the rabbis had started as a movement of their own and faced competition from other heirs of the same ancestral traditions, among them the Samaritans (kutim) and Karaites. Finally, the oral law didn’t merely augment the written laws of Moses but ultimately superseded them. Very aptly, Susan Handelman (before her most recent turn to Israeli biblical literalism) praised the rabbis as “slayers of Moses.” On the other end of the spectrum, the fact that proto-orthodox Christians affirmed their roots in Moses and the Prophets created a complex continuity between Jews and Christians, progenitors and inheritors, mother and daughter religion. To be sure, the relationship was for the most part one-sided. The mother never acknowledged her daughter, and the daughter was not always inclined to honor her progenitor.

From a strictly pedagogical point of view it served me well to admit that I did not comprehend how this New Testament was rooted in the “Old.” Students were forced to argue whether and if so how the authors of the New Testament gospels and the Book of Acts made a compelling case for continuity between their proclamation and the earlier scriptures. Students  argued that the New Testament represented an “Act II,” a spirited argument that hopes for a restoration of an ideal state of Israel was fulfilled in the advent of Christ. I suggested that Jesus was at best a failed messiah, as he was killed. In the end the New Testament seemed to students like a “surprise ending” that sent the viewers back to what had preceded it to look for a foreshadowing of the end.

Pedagogically speaking I’d say this interpretation was a success. Students admitted that this surprise ending wasn’t as much foreseen as it was found in hindsight in texts that could also be interpreted otherwise.