Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible

by Bart D. Ehrman

  The followers of Jesus known as the Ebionites urged that Jesus never intended to abrogate the law; since he was the Jewish Messiah sent from the Jewish God to the Jewish people in fulfillment of the Jewish law, and since he himself wholeheartedly embraced the Jewish law, his followers needed to be Jewish—and needed to keep the law. If the law says that the males among the people of God are to be circumcised, then they must be circumcised. If it says the people of God are to keep kosher, they must keep kosher. If it tells them to keep the Sabbath, they must keep the Sabbath. The Ebionites claimed that this was the view promoted by Jesus’ own brother, James, the leader of the Church in Jerusalem. Scholars have conceded that they may have been right.

  A similar view seems to be preserved in the Gospel of Matthew. To be sure, this Gospel expresses the belief that the death and resurrection of Jesus are key to salvation, as the Ebionites themselves insisted. But it also indicates that Jesus taught his followers that they needed to keep the law if they wanted to enter the kingdom of heaven. In fact, they had to keep it even better than the leaders of the Jews themselves (Matthew 5:17–20). Jesus in this Gospel is portrayed as a teacher of the law who conveys its true meaning to his followers. He never urges them to break any of the laws. He urges them to follow him by observing the law.

  The Anti-Jewish Teachings of Jesus’ Later Followers

  This view of what it meant to follow Jesus was destined to lose out in the struggles over core beliefs in the early church. The apostle Paul’s views were different from those of the Ebionites (who saw Paul as the archenemy), of Matthew, and of Jesus himself. Paul was quite vociferous in claiming that the law can have no role in having a right standing before God. Any gentile who came into the church was decidedly not to start keeping the law of the Jews. Paul thought that if a gentile man was circumcised, he was not only doing something unnecessary but was denying the grace of God, which offered salvation as a gift through the death of Jesus, not through the law and the covenant of circumcision. Such a man was actually in danger of losing his salvation (Galatians 5:4).

  Did Paul and Matthew see eye to eye on keeping the law? Evidently not. Did Paul and Jesus advocate the same religion? It is a key historical question, and the answer is hard to deny. Jesus taught his followers to keep the law as God had commanded in order to enter the kingdom. Paul taught that keeping the law had nothing to do with entering the kingdom. For Paul, only the death and resurrection of Jesus mattered. The historical Jesus taught the law. Paul taught Jesus. Or, as some scholars have put it, already with Paul the religion of Jesus has become the religion about Jesus. (Although, as I have pointed out, Paul did not invent this new take on Jesus but inherited it.)

  Later Christians pushed Paul’s distinction even further. And so we have seen that Marcion insisted that Paul’s distinction between law and Gospel was an absolute one. The law has nothing to do with the Gospel. The law was given by the God of the Jews to the Jewish people, and it leads only to their (and everyone else’s) damnation. The Gospel came from the God of Jesus; it was the way of salvation, through Jesus’ death, and brought deliverance from the wrathful God of the Old Testament. For Marcion there were literally two Gods, and the God of the law has nothing to do with the God of Jesus. The Old Testament belongs to the wrathful God of the Jews. It is a Jewish book and nothing more. It is not part of the Christian canon and is to be completely rejected.

  Other Christian thinkers from around the time of Marcion took just the opposite view, which ironically led to even more virulent forms of anti-Judaism. A key example is the letter of Barnabas (see chapter 6). For Barnabas, the Old Testament is a Christian, not a Jewish, book. The Jews misunderstand its teachings, and always have. They are a hardhearted, ignorant, willful, and disobedient people, and have been since the days of Moses. According to Barnabas, the Jewish people broke the special covenant that God made with them as soon as it was given. When Moses smashed the first set of the Ten Commandments, that was the end of the Jews’ covenant with God. God never restored the covenant to them. It was with the followers of Jesus that he made the “new covenant.”

  Barnabas tells his Christian readers in Letter of Barnabas, 4:6–7:

  Watch yourselves now and do not become like some people by piling up your sins, saying that the covenant is both theirs [the Jews] and ours [the Christians]. For it is ours. But they permanently lost it…when Moses had just received it.

  As a result, says Barnabas, the Jews have always misinterpreted their law, thinking that it was to be taken literally, including rules about what foods could or could not be eaten. These laws were never meant literally but as spiritual descriptions of how people were to live. The Jewish religion is built on a false understanding of the Jews’ own law.

  Barnabas has a remarkable ability to find Christ and the Christian message throughout the pages of the Old Testament. Just one example: He argues that circumcision, the sign of the covenant given to the father of the Jews, Abraham, was always misinterpreted by Jews as indicating that they were to cut off the foreskin of their baby boys. That was never what it was about. Instead, circumcision means that a person has to believe in the cross of Jesus. How does Barnabas prove his point? He notes that in the Old Testament, Abraham leads his army of 318 servants into battle, but prepares them for victory by first circumcising them (Genesis 14:14; 17:23). What, asks Barnabas, is the significance of the fact that there were 318 circumcised servants? It is a symbolic number.

  Recall that ancient languages used letters of the alphabet for numerals: the symbol for the first Greek letter, alpha, was 1; beta was 2; gamma, 3. (Barnabas is basing his interpretation on the Septuagint—the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.) The number 318 is made up of the Greek letters tau, iota, and eta. Barnabas points out that the tau, which looks like our letter t, is in the shape of the cross, and iota and eta are the first two letters in the name of Jesus. Circumcision is not about foreskins. It is about the Cross of Jesus.

  What happens when a Christian author states that the Jews have never understood their own religion, and that the Old Testament is a Christian, not a Jewish, book? It is an obvious attempt to rob Judaism of all its validity. And that was Barnabas’s goal. His book is anti-Jewish to the core.

  As time went on, Christian anti-Judaism got worse and worse, as Christian authors began to accuse Jews of all sorts of villainous acts, not just of misinterpreting their own Scriptures. Some Christian authors argued that destruction of the city of Jerusalem, the heart of Judaism, by the Romans in 70 CE was God’s judgment on the Jews for killing their own Messiah. Eventually Christian authors appeared on the scene who took the logic a step further. As Christians began to see Jesus himself as divine, some maintained that by being responsible for Jesus’ death, Jews were in effect guilty of killing God.

  This charge of deicide first occurs in the writings of a late-second-century author named Melito, who was bishop of the city of Sardis. A sermon that Melito preached at some unspecified Easter celebration was discovered in the mid-twentieth century. In Melito’s church, Easter was celebrated at the time of the Jewish Passover, and so this sermon is called his Passover homily. In it he reflects on the Jews’ guilt in killing Jesus, their own God, in rhetorically powerful but frightful language:

  This one was murdered. And where was he murdered? In the very center of Jerusalem! Why? Because he had healed their lame and had cleansed their lepers, and had guided their blind with light, and had raised up their dead. For this reason he suffered. (chapter 72)

  Why, O Israel, did you do this strange injustice? You dishonored the one who had honored you. You held in contempt the one who held you in esteem. You denied the one who publicly acknowledged you. You renounced the one who proclaimed you his own. You killed the one who made you to live. Why did you do this O Israel? (chapter 73)

  It was necessary for him to suffer, yes, but not by you; it was necessary for him to be dishonored, but not by you; it was necessary for him to be judged, but not by you; it was necessary for him
to be crucified, but not by you, not by your right hand, O Israel! (chapters 75–76)

  Therefore, hear and tremble because of him for whom the earth trembled. The one who hung the earth in space is himself hanged; the one who fixed the heavens in place is himself impaled; the one who firmly fixed all things, is himself firmly fixed to the tree. The Lord is insulted, God has been murdered, the king of Israel has been destroyed by the hand of Israel. (chapters 95–96)

  Explaining the Rise of Christian Anti-Judaism

  How did it get to this point? How did the passionately Jewish religion of Jesus become the virulently anti-Jewish religion of his followers?

  You can probably trace the logical progression of Christian anti-Judaism from the information provided in this chapter. A rift naturally occurred as soon as Christians insisted that Jesus was the Messiah, that the Messiah had to suffer for sins, that the death of the Messiah was the means by which God made people right with Him, that the law could play no role in the act of salvation, and that Jews therefore had either to believe in Jesus as the Messiah or be rejected by God. Believers in Jesus were right with God; everyone else, including faithful Jews, stood under God’s curse. We find this view in Paul, but he didn’t invent it; it was already being propounded before he came on the scene. It is no wonder that Paul, when he was still a non-Christian Jew, found the followers of Jesus so offensive.

  The logic of this position more or less drove some Christians to say that by rejecting God’s Messiah, Jews had rejected God. The natural corollary was that God had rejected them.

  Christian thinkers could argue that the Jewish Scriptures themselves indicate that the Jewish people had been rejected by God. The Old Testament prophets repeatedly warn the ancient Israelites that since they have violated God’s will and law, he is turning on them in judgment. Such prophets as Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah say that God has rejected his people because of how they have chosen to live. The early followers of Jesus latched on to this view and made it into a kind of general principle. The culmination of Jewish hardheartedness and willfulness was the rejection of their own Messiah. For God this was the last straw. No longer were the Jews the chosen people of God. They had been replaced by the followers of Jesus.

  This was not because God had gone back on his word or his promises. The Jews themselves were at fault. We find some of this anti-Jewish sentiment already in the pages of the New Testament. Paul deals at length with the rejection of the Jews, although he thinks that all of Israel will eventually come to see the error of its ways, come to believe in Jesus, and be saved (Romans 9–11, especially 11:1–26). Other authors were not so sure. The Gospel of John blames “the Jews” in quite graphic terms for rejecting and killing Jesus (chapters 19–20); and in one frightful passage he actually indicates that the Jews are not the children of God but the children of the Devil (John 8:42–44). It’s hard to be saved if Satan is your father.

  Starting in the middle of the second century the vitriol becomes even more extreme. Christian authors such as Justin Martyr and Tertullian wrote treatises directly meant to oppose the Jews and their religion. They argue that the Jews misunderstand the meaning of their own religion and their own law, that they don’t recognize the prophecies referring to Jesus, that they reject their own Messiah sent from God and thus reject God himself. According to Justin the sign of circumcision was never meant to set the Jews apart as the people of God; it was meant to show who was worthy of persecution.2 Such anti-Jewish tractates continue on long after the second century, becoming a steady diet for Christian readers down through the centuries.

  It comes as a surprise to some readers to learn that this kind of anti-Judaism did not exist in the Roman, Greek, or any other world before the coming of Christianity and is therefore a Christian invention. To be sure, some Roman and Greek authors maligned the Jews for what seemed bizarre customs—mutilating the penises of their boys, refusing to eat pork, being so lazy as not to work on one day of the week (the Sabbath). But Roman and Greek authors maligned everyone who was not Greek or Roman, and the Jews were not singled out.3 Until Christianity appeared. Then Judaism came to be seen not just as a set of odd and risible practices but as a religion that was perverse and corrupt. Jews were no longer simply strange. They were willful and evil. As a people they had rejected God, and in response he had rejected them.

  These views may have seemed harmless enough in the days of Paul, Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and even Serapion. After all, Christianity in these times was a tiny religion in the context of a very large empire. Jews outnumbered Christians many times over, and Christians had no social or political power. In those days the rhetorical attacks against Jews did not lead to physical attacks.

  All that changed as Christianity grew and eventually came to be adopted by none other than the Roman emperor, Constantine. When Constantine converted to Christianity, at the beginning of the fourth century, Christians already outnumbered Jews and were about 10 percent of the population of the Roman Empire. But unlike the Jews, who never were persecuted as a people in the empire, Christians were still a persecuted minority.4 All of that changed when Constantine converted. It became popular and fashionable to be a Christian. Conversions started occurring en masse. By the end of the fourth century, fully half of the empire would claim to be Christian, and the Roman emperor, Theodosius, proclaimed Christianity to be the empire’s official religion.

  This turn of affairs played a pivotal role in Jewish-Christian relations.5 Since the early days of the church, antipathy toward Jews had been expressed at the rhetorical level; soon it became a matter of action. Roman officials who were now Christian took the rhetoric of their predecessors seriously, and saw the Jewish people literally as enemies of the truth who were to be punished for their rejection of Jesus. The official policies of the empire in the fourth century did not require the persecution of Jews, but people in power, such as Christian governors of Roman provinces, often looked the other way or privately condoned it. Synagogues were burned, properties were confiscated, and Jews were publicly mocked and sometimes subjected to mob violence.

  And so we have one of the great ironies of the early Christian tradition. The profoundly Jewish religion of Jesus and his followers became the viciously anti-Jewish religion of later times, leading to the horrific persecutions of the Middle Ages and the pogroms and attempted genocides that have plagued the world down to recent times.6 Anti-Semitism as it has come down to us today is the history of specifically Christian reactions to non-Christian Jews. It is one of the least savory inventions of the early church.

  THE DIVINITY OF JESUS

  When I was in college I had already for many years believed that Jesus was God, that this was and always has been one of the most central and fundamental tenets of the Christian tradition. But when I began studying the Bible seriously, in graduate school, I began to realize that this was not the original belief of Jesus’ earliest followers, nor of Jesus himself.

  When Did Jesus Become the Son of God?

  We have seen that the Gospels of the New Testament, three of which do not call Jesus God, were written many years after Jesus lived and died. There are other portions of the New Testament that were written earlier. It has long been thought by scholars that some of the speeches of the apostles in the book of Acts may represent views that were popular among Jesus’ early followers, years before Luke wrote them down; in other words, parts of these speeches had been circulating as part of the oral tradition in the decades before Luke wrote his Gospel and Acts. In none of these speeches in Acts is Jesus spoken of as divine. And it is striking that some of the speeches embody a very primitive belief that it was specifically at the resurrection that God bestowed a special status on Jesus. To the Christian storytellers, who came up with these speeches long before Luke recorded them, Jesus was a flesh-and-blood human being who was exalted to a special position when God raised him from the dead.

  For example, consider Peter’s speech on the day of Pentecost in Acts 2. He speaks of “Jesus of
Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him.” Here Jesus is a human miracle worker, empowered by God but not God himself. According to Peter in this passage, the Jewish people in Jerusalem rejected Jesus and crucified him, but God raised him from the dead. And then comes a key line, the climax of the speech:

  Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified. (Acts 2:36)

  Only after his death, at his resurrection, did God make Jesus Lord and Messiah. A speech that Paul delivers in Acts 13 speaks of Jesus as one who was rejected by the Jewish people of Jerusalem who “asked Pilate to have him killed.” But God then “raised him from dead.” Paul goes on to proclaim, in Acts 13:32–33, “the good news,”

  that what God had promised to the our ancestors he has fulfilled for us, their children, by raising Jesus; as also it is written in the second Psalm, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.”

  At what point does Jesus come to be “begotten” as the Son of God? At his resurrection: “Today I have begotten you.”

  This appears to be the oldest form of the Christian faith. Jesus was a man who was empowered by God to do mighty things; he was rejected by the Jewish leaders and killed; but God vindicated him by raising him from the dead and giving him an exalted status.

  It was not long before some followers of Jesus reasoned that he must have been the Son of God, not just after the resurrection but during his entire public ministry. It was no longer the resurrection that made Jesus’ God’s son, but the baptism. Thus, in our earliest Gospel, Mark, right off the bat Jesus is baptized by John; coming up out of the waters he sees the heavens split apart and the Spirit descending upon him as a dove; and he then hears the voice from heaven, “You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11; there is no birth narrative in Mark).