Abraham

by Bruce Feiler

  Bishop Theophanes is a kitchen-table conjurer of sorts, a short, hearty Nathan Lane look-alike with a beard who could serve as the magician at a backyard birthday party but who happens to be the head of the Greek Orthodox Church in the holiest spot in Christendom. He controls half of the church where Jesus was crucified, he supervises the Golgotha itself, and he views himself as the spiritual heir of a line that stretches from Adam to today, with two pivotal stops along the way—Abraham and Jesus. Abraham is so important to the Greek Church that the chapel just above the Golgotha is called the Convent of Abraham.

  “The greatness of our father Abraham is that he had a clear idea of God, clearer than other nations,” he says.

  I have come to talk about how Christians have viewed Abraham over the centuries. The Christian interpretation grew out of the Jewish one and for generations offered a similarly broad message, that Abraham’s blessing was open to all people, regardless of lineage. But over time, just as Jews tried to claim Abraham uniquely, Christians attempted to commandeer Abraham for themselves. The deterioration of the relationship between Jews and Christians can be seen as vividly as anyplace else in their rivalry over their shared father.

  “God talked to Abraham in the way he talks to other people, but we don’t hear it,” Bishop Theophanes continued. “We are not on the same level. But Abraham, at that happy moment for humanity, heard God’s words. He understood that God was a figure you could talk to in an anthropomorphic way. It’s very moving. Meeting God is something overwhelming, and Abraham did it first. He’s the beginning of revelation. Spiritually speaking, he’s the beginning of humanity.”

  “And is he the beginning of Christianity?”

  He shook his head. “God’s revelation traveled from Abraham to the prophets to Jesus. You can say that this revelation was meant only for Christians, but I don’t think that way. There is a common psyche in the world in which humans lunge for the divine. That is God’s imprint left on us, which all religious people feel. Abraham just felt it more clearly.”

  AS BEST AS anyone can tell, Jesus was likely born in the last years of the first millennium B.C.E. in Roman-controlled Palestine. Jesus (his actual name was Joshua) was born a Jew and died a Jew. He and his followers practiced circumcision, observed Passover, and followed the law. They were not out to found a new religion but, like the residents at Qumran and elsewhere, hoped to improve the existing one. Judaism, they claimed, had corrupted the Temple, abandoned the poor, and blasphemed the laws of purity.

  But these problems could be mended with a new leader. In the future, Jesus says in Matthew, “Many will come from east and west and will eat with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.”

  Many flocked to hear this new preacher, a development that aroused the suspicions of both the Jewish guardians of the Temple and the Roman authorities. Jesus was ultimately crucified for his crimes against the state, a distinctly Roman method of execution. But Jesus’ story did not end there. If anything, his popularity ignited as his followers spread word that Jesus had not actually died irreparably on the cross. He was returned to life. Many began saying what Jesus himself had not claimed, which is that he was the messiah Jews had been awaiting for centuries. He was, as Paul called him, the “Son of God.”

  Jesus’ followers—still Jews at the time—were so inspired by their belief that Jesus was the savior that they rushed to share the gospel. “Join us!” they shouted to their fellow believers. “The good news of the kingdom is proclaimed.” Few Jews came. Perhaps the destruction of the Temple made them skittish. Perhaps they were blinded by habit. Perhaps they were unpersuaded. Whatever the reason, Jesus’ disciples decided to broaden their appeal to include non-Jews. To do this, they needed to link Jesus to a figure who was not Jewish. They needed a founding father who was blessed by God, who had a deep spiritual pedigree, and who exemplified the faith that Jesus himself embodied.

  They needed Abraham.

  The first to realize this was Paul, the earliest apostle to write extensively about Jesus. Paul was a deeply believing Jew who came to believe in Jesus. He was bright, very logical, but not formally educated. He was a man of action who was aggressive and combative with his interlocutors. Paul dictated a series of letters that are named for the people he sent them to—Romans, Galatians, Corinthians—in which he addresses particular problems in each community and tries to lure believers to his cause. To help make his message more resonant with Jews in particular, he uses the techniques most familiar to his audience: rabbinic midrash. He retells the story of Abraham to emphasize what he thinks is most important.

  In the fourteen letters of Paul included in the New Testament, Paul refers to Abraham a total of nineteen times, more than to any other figure except Jesus. Paul refers to Abraham more than twice as often as all the prophets in the latter half of the Hebrew Bible refer to him. We are clearly seeing an increase in Abraham’s importance. Paul essentially chooses Abraham in the same way the rabbis chose him. Why?

  First, Judaism was the dominant religion at the time, and Paul needed to define himself in terms that Jews could understand but also in terms that distinguished him from the Jews. Second, Paul wanted to sidestep what he viewed as the tyranny of the law in Jewish life. Finally, he desired a way to circumvent the tribal particularism of Judaism, the defining characteristic of which was that all men were required to be circumcised. In Paul’s mind, these strands combined to limit Judaism, whereas he wanted to expand it by welcoming Gentiles through the gospel of Christ.

  Abraham was the perfect model for Paul’s new vision of Christ-enhanced Judaism, because Abraham developed a unique relationship with God before Judaism was invented, before the law was given, even before circumcision was prescribed. To prove his point, Paul turned to a line in Genesis 15. After Abraham arrives in the Promised Land and questions God’s vow to give him a son, God reassures him by showing him the stars in heaven and saying his offspring will be just as uncountable. As the New Revised Standard Version describes the moment, in language more familiar to Christians, Abra ham “believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”

  For Paul, this is the key line in the Abraham story, and possibly the most important line in the entire Five Books of Moses. Abraham received recognition in God’s eyes because he believed God, because he had faith that if he left his father’s house and went forth as God asked he would become a great nation. “How then was it reckoned to him?” Paul asks in Romans 4:10. “Was it before or after he had been circumcised? It was not after, but before.” This could mean only one thing: Circumcision is not central to faith.

  Abraham’s circumcision, which comes at least thirteen years later, is not a precondition for righteous behavior, Paul argued, it’s a reward for it. For Paul, the purpose of circumcision was twofold. First, to make Abraham “the ancestor of all who believe without being circumcised,” and second to make him “the ancestor of the circumcised.” Abraham, in other words, is the father of Jews and Gentiles alike. Any person who shows faith is a descendant of Abraham.

  Paul views faith as the keystone in Abraham’s relationship with God. But faith for Paul is not blind observance; it’s a dynamic, inner experience. As the Reverend Dr. Richard Wood, the former dean of Yale Divinity School, explained to me, “Paul is haunted with the sense of his own sin. In some ways the most profound thing he contributed to the history of Christian thought was his analysis of the nature of human evil. He says the fundamental problem we face is that, in our attempt to be righteous, pride sets in.” Paul reads Abraham as someone who was blessed by God even though he was not righteous. And the reason: He had faith. “ ‘That’s it!’ Paul says. If God will treat me as righteous in spite of my sin, then I display no pride. The initiative is all God’s.”

  This is midrash at its most creative—and most elastic. As the Reverend Dr. Wood, a gregarious midwesterner and former president of Earlham College in Indiana, said, “He takes Genesis and does something questionable with it, in that he’s
using it to answer a question different than the author of Genesis had in mind.” But Paul does not stop there. He goes further in Romans 4 to say that because Abraham received God’s promise half a millennium before God delivered his law on Sinai, the law itself is not central to God’s blessing. “If it is the adherents of the law who are to be heirs,” Paul says, “faith is null and the promise is void.”

  Paul’s minimization of the law is not inconsistent with Israelite history. Mosaic law was not central to the nation during the time of David and Solomon. But Paul’s view did run counter to Judaism in his time, which was built on the law. Paul goes around God’s more detailed covenant with Moses in order to get back to his more general covenant with Abraham. “All who rely on the works of the law are under a curse,” he says in Galatians 3. “My point is this, the law, which came four hundred thirty years later, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God.” God granted inheritance to Abraham through promise, not through legislation.

  This point sets up Paul’s climactic flourish. In Genesis, God promised his blessing to “Abraham and his offspring,” he notes. Offspring in the text is singular, not plural. (Though Paul was writing in Greek, the same distinction holds.) “It does not say, ‘And to offsprings,’ ” Paul notes. This means the promise of Abraham is actually intended not for many people, as Jews claim, but for one person. That one person is Christ. “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.” Jesus, Paul stresses, is the true descendant of Abraham, and people who accept him as their savior become members of Abraham’s family, regardless of whether they are circumcised.

  Paul’s accomplishment here is masterful: He completely reinterprets the Hebrew Bible, not by abandoning the biblical story but by using it for his own purposes. He discards genealogy, which would appear to be a central focus of Genesis, and replaces it with faith. Biology is no longer important; lineage is passed down through belief, not through blood.

  Moreover, Paul does this while claiming that he’s still Jewish and that Jews who follow the law are still Abraham’s descendants. The law, he explains, was merely added by God as a temporary measure because the Israelites had transgressed. They needed the law to guide them until pure faith returned. Jesus provided that faith. Paul goes on in Galatians 3 to say, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

  What Paul does here is exactly what the rabbis and philosophers of his time were doing: he creates a new Abraham for his own purposes. He deemphasizes the narrative dramas of Abraham’s life—his arguing with God at Sodom and Gomorrah, his attempt to sacrifice his son—and focuses instead on the early, primal moment when he left his father’s house and went forth into the unknown. And Paul does this, he stresses, to emphasize that Abraham was a vessel of God’s universal grace.

  Whether Paul’s words actually are universal, or whether they subtly exclude Jews who don’t believe in Christ, is a matter of debate. Paul, for his part, claims to be inclusive. “I ask then, has God rejected his people?” he says in Romans 11. “By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham.” And, unlike his successors, Paul does not blame the Jews for Jesus’ death or say God founded the church as a wrath against his people.

  But he does vacillate, as when he says in Romans 11 that some Jews will be broken off the holy tree of life and the Gentiles, “a wild olive shoot,” will be grafted in their place. “Paul’s big problem,” said Jon Levenson of Harvard, “is, How reliable is his God? Why should we believe this deity whose past promises to Abraham’s children have proven false? From now on, whatever difficulties arise will be resolved through Christ. The Jews have been sawn off the tree.”

  Still, most observers agree that Paul was primarily trying to draw Gentiles into the family of Abraham rather than to keep Jews out. As the Reverend Dr. Wood explained, “Suppose you and I were in a Jewish congregation at the time, and we came to believe that indeed Jesus was the messiah. Would Paul expect us to stop practicing circumcision, or abandon the law? I don’t think so. In fact, I think he’d be shocked at the idea. He’s trying to make a bigger tent.”

  “So you think it’s an inclusivist message?”

  “I do.”

  “But what about the consequences of his argument?” I said. “I have a visceral response when I read these passages that while his message might be inclusivist, you can already see the machines of anti-Judaism turning.”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “I can identify with that response. I didn’t grow up thinking about it, because I didn’t grow up thinking about that question. But you can see in Paul’s more radical moments that he almost seems to condemn the law. In hindsight, when you look at the tragic history of the split between Judaism and Christianity over a two-thousand-year period and you read these passages, you say, ‘Darn it, Paul! You’ve created huge problems without realizing it.’

  “Because once you’ve got two rival groups toward the end of the first century, Paul has given the justification, I think quite unintentionally, for abandoning the good things in the Jewish tradition. And he’s done this through the great patriarch of the Jewish tradition himself.”

  AFTER ABOUT AN HOUR in Bishop Theophanes’ kitchen, he suggested we visit the church. He donned a black cape and a high black hat that looked like a top hat without the brim. When he stepped outside and led the way through his garden, I couldn’t help thinking that he looked like the king on a chessboard.

  Outside, the bustle around the entrance to the Holy Sepulcher parted as the bishop entered. Monks scurried over to greet him. A female worshiper darted forward, bowed on one knee, and kissed the top of his hand, uttering prayers. He greeted her for a few seconds, bowed, and gestured me behind a door I had never noticed before and into a stone stairwell.

  Within seconds we were standing on the roof of the basilica. It was dimpled with the tops of domes and scarred with brick, plaster, and concrete from a hundred renovations and expansions. He led me into a chamber just large enough to hold a dozen people. The room, built in the fifteenth century, was encircled with frescoes. The images in the upper tier depicted events from the life of Jesus; the lower tier depicted scenes from the life of Abraham, including his near sacrifice of his son and his meeting the messengers of God on their way to Sodom and Gomorrah.

  “Here is the place, according to tradition, where Abraham sacrificed his son,” the bishop said, “and where God sacrificed Jesus. We are directly above the Golgotha. They bring simple people here and tell them this is the exact spot. For some people that’s important.”

  “But not for you?”

  “I don’t care about archaeology. For me the allegory is more important. Everything in life has two natures, you see, the physical and the spiritual. In this wall there are two dimensions. In you there are two dimensions. In Abraham there are two dimensions, too.”

  I asked him what he meant.

  “Abraham has God in him and humanity in him. He established the unity that reached its fulfillment in Jesus Christ.”

  “So Abraham is the tension between being human and being God.”

  “Not negative tension!” he said. “Positive tension. You can’t separate being human and being godly.” To illustrate, he began to explain the reason behind the chapel’s depictions of Abraham and Jesus. The visitor enters on a human level and meets Abraham eye to eye, then lifts his eyes to Jesus, then lifts his eyes again toward heaven. Each visitor reexperiences the ascension to God.

  “The important thing to remember about Abraham is that he lives in all of us. When we do the liturgy, we lay out the bread, which represents Jesus. Next to it we put another piece of bread, which represents Mary. Next to it we put nine smaller pieces that represent the nine altars of servants, apostles, prophets, and others. Abraham is one of the prophets. In front we put a small crumble that represents the people. All this we put into the chalice, with the Holy Spirit.” He closed
his eyes and waved his hands in the air to indicate the transformation. “And this becomes the body of Christ.”

  He opened his eyes and looked at me. “To me this crumble of bread is more important than the Bible. That’s just a story that happened a long time ago. The liturgy happens every time we do it. For me, Abraham still lives in that chalice. And he lives in me.”

  “Does that mean he doesn’t live in me?” I asked.

  “He does live in you,” he said. “Look, I’m not going to make excuses. What the Church did with Abraham was bitter and cruel. But a hundred years from now, the serious people will be considered ecumenical. They will understand that Abraham belongs to all humanity.”

  THE IDEA THAT Abraham belongs to all humanity, which appears at least in spirit in the Letters of Paul, began to dissipate rapidly in early Christian writing. Abraham is a frequent though not dominant figure in the Gospels, the four accounts of Jesus’ life that were written in the late first century C.E. The Gospels, along with Paul’s Letters and various other writings, collectively make up the New Testament. Though the Gospels were written after Paul, they actually appear earlier in Christian Scripture under the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Abraham is important enough to appear in the first sentence of the New Testament, in the Gospel of Matthew: “An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.”

  Unlike Paul, the Gospels pick up on the importance of genealogy in the Hebrew Bible and try to link Jesus directly with Abraham. Matthew ignores Ishmael, for instance, and says that Abraham was the father of Isaac, who was the father of Jacob, and on down the line. Matthew counts fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen more from David to the deportation to Babylon, and fourteen more from Babylon to Christ. David almost certainly appears in this lineage because the prophet Micah said the Jewish messiah would come from his clan. Abraham most likely appears because Matthew wants to root Jesus as deep as possible in the soil of Israelite history and give him the prestige of antiquity.