The Jewish Gospels

by Daniel Boyarin

  40.Shemesh, “Shabbat.”

  41.There is a tendency among certain Christian scholars to insist on an absolute contrast and hence conflict here between “Judaism” (bad) and “Christianity” (good). Exemplary of this tendency is Arland J. Hultgren, “The Formation of the Sabbath Pericope in Mark 2:23–28,” Journal of Biblical Literature 91, no. 1 (March 1972): 39n8, who delivers himself of the following statement:

  There is a close parallel, to which many commentators refer, in the statement of the second century R. Simeon b. Menasya (Mekilta on Exod 31:14): “The sabbath is delivered unto you, and you are not delivered to the sabbath.” But this saying does not have the same meaning as Mark 2:27. In context it emphasizes the sabbath as a distinctive Jewish institution, i.e., as given to Israel (so Exod 31:14). The sabbath is delivered to Israel as a gift, and it is understood that Israel will therefore observe it. In Mark 2:27 it is understood that the sabbath has been established for man’s good. It will be kept in a Jewish milieu, of course, but what is to prevail is that which enhances human life, not sabbath casuistry—even if the intention of the latter is to make the day one of celebration.

  The willful ignorance displayed in this statement simply takes the breath away, since it is absolutely clear from the context that the saying of Rabbi Shimʾon ben Menasya is, indeed, about the permission to heal on the Sabbath. Hultgren is precisely wrong; his sentence should read: “The Sabbath is delivered to Israel as a gift, and, therefore, it is permitted to heal Jews on Sabbath.” Lest matters be less than clear, I emphasize that I am not denying the highly significant difference between Jesus and the Mekhilta (the Rabbis) here. The Rabbis surely restrict the permission to heal on the Sabbath to Jews, while Jesus seems to intend this to be a general permission to save all human life. It remains the case, nonetheless, that the Rabbis here use exactly the same argument to justify healing on the Sabbath as Jesus does, namely, that the Sabbath was given to human beings (Israel) for their welfare and that the humans were not given to the Sabbath. My point, then, is not to deny the possible moral superiority of Jesus’ position over the Rabbis (see Shemesh in previous note) but to protest rather the assertion of absolute and total difference between allegedly polar opposite religious approaches, one allegedly rigid, harsh, and legalistic and the other promoting a humanistic religion of love. Hultgren’s contemptuous use of “casuistry” gives his game away. Even more offensive than Hultgren’s is the opinion of E. Lohse that “The Sabbath was made for man” etc. is an authentic saying of Jesus owing to its alleged dissimilarity from Judaism, following the highly questionable criterion that only what is not like “Judaism” can be asserted to be the actual words of the Lord. This statement is dissimilar from Judaism and therefore allegedly authentically dominical, since precisely the same statement when it does appear in Jewish texts (the Mekhilta, as above) “means something different.” If there ever was an example of begging the question, this is it. The perversity of this kind of argument must be obvious, for even Occam’s razor would demand that if we find the same (or virtually the same) saying in a similar context in two historically related texts, they must mean roughly the same thing. The special pleading involved in distorting the rabbinic saying from its obvious meaning in order to make it different (and “worse”) than Jesus’ and then using this as an implicit argument against “Judaism” is simply anti-Judaic special pleading. For the Lohse, see Frans Neirynck, “Jesus and the Sabbath: Some Observations on Mark Ii, 27,” in Jesus Aux Origines de la Christologie, ed. J. Dupont et al., Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium (Louvain: Leuven University Press, 1975), 229–30. Neirynck himself surely gets this right; Neirynck, “Jesus and the Sabbath,” 251–52. However, he is exactly wrong to say that “on both sides [i.e., with respect to the Gospel and the rabbinic saying] we are confronted with a variety of interpretations.” No interpreter in the history of Judaism has ever seen this saying, nor does its context permit seeing it, as anything but a support for the principle that saving a life takes precedent over the Sabbath; any other readings by modern New Testament scholars are the product of prejudice and nothing else. The alleged “chaos of talmudic scholarship,” at least in this instance, is a pure figment of the imagination. Much better is an interpreter such as William Lane, for whom the similarity of Jesus’ saying to that of the Rabbis is taken as evidence in favor of its dominical origin (William L. Lane, The Gospel According to Mark: The English Text with Introduction, Exposition, and Notes, New International Commentary on the New Testament [Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1974], 119–20). More recent Christian scholars follow in this general tendency, such as Joel Marcus, Mark 1–8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 245–46, and Collins, Mark: A Commentary, 203–4, who get this just right.

  42.Menahem Kister, “Plucking on the Sabbath and the Jewish-Christian Controversy” [Hebrew], Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 3, no. 3 (1984): 349–66. See also Shemesh, “Shabbat.”

  43.John P. Meier has written, “Clearly, then, this Galilean cycle of dispute stories is an intricate piece of literary art and artifice, written by a Christian theologian to advance his overall vision of Jesus as the hidden yet authoritative Messiah, Son of Man, and Son of God. As we begin to examine the fourth of the five stories, the plucking of the grain on the Sabbath, the last thing we should do is treat it like a videotaped replay of a debate among various Palestinian Jews in the year A.D. 28. It is, first of all, a Christian composition promoting Christian theology. To what extent it may also preserve memories of an actual clash between the historical Jesus and Pharisees can be discerned only by analyzing the Christian text we have before us.” Meier, “Plucking,” 567. I completely agree with Meier’s formulation here; the text will not allow us to see simplistically here only a record of halakhic controversies (although the fact that it allows us to see this also is of enormously precious importance). My dissent from Meier is only in his mobilization of the term “Christian” here as a term in opposition to “various Palestinian Jews.” I would like to present here a reading based on my views expressed until now in which both the halakhic controversy and its apocalyptic radicality go back to the same Palestinian Jewish milieu.

  44.The fact that David’s action did not take place on the Sabbath is completely irrelevant, pace Meier, “Plucking,” 576–77, and Collins, Mark: A Commentary, 203. Also partly disagreeing with Meier, I would suggest that Jesus’ erroneous substitution of Abiatar for Ahimelek as the name of the high priest denotes familiarity with the biblical text, not ignorance, and rather supports the historicity of the moment. Someone very familiar with a text and quoting it from memory could easily make such a mistake, while a writer rarely would. I thus disagree on all points with the following sentence: “The conclusion we must draw both from this error and from the other examples of Jesus’ inaccurate retelling of the OT story is simple and obvious: the recounting of the incident of David and Ahimelech shows both a glaring ignorance of what the OT text actually says and a striking inability to construct a convincing argument from the story;” Meier, “Plucking,” 578. And I don’t think I fall into the category of Meier’s “conservative scholars.” My reading, if he accepts it, could somewhat reduce Meier’s “surprise” at discovering that Haenchen claims that the author (or inserter) of vv. 25–26 was knowledgeable in Scripture; Meier, “Plucking,” 579n35., citing Ernst Haenchen, Der Weg Jesu. Eine Erklärung Des Markus-Evangeliums und der Kanonischen Parallelen, Sammlung Töpelmann, vol. 6. (Berlin: Töpelmann, 1966), 121. I believe that the Lukan version supports my interpretation in that the direct move from David to the Son of Man implies the messianic parallelism strongly (Luke 6:4–5). For this reading of Luke, see Neirynck, “Jesus and the Sabbath,” 230.

  45.Cf. the similar but also subtly different conclusion of Collins, Mark: A Commentary, 205. For me, it is not so much the Messiah as king that is at issue but rather the Son of Man as carrier of divinity and divine authority on earth.

  46.This
interpretation obviates the apparent non sequitur between vv. 27 and 28, pointed to inter alia by Beare, “‘The Sabbath Was Made for Man?’” 130.

  47.Cf. Robert H. Gundry, Mark: A Commentary on His Apology for the Cross (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004 [1993]), I: 144. For other authors holding this view, see discussion in Neirynck, “Jesus and the Sabbath,” 237–38, and notes there.

  48.As far as I can tell, my view is closest in certain respects to that of Eduard Schweizer, Das Evangelium Nach Markus [Bible. 4, N.T. Mark. Commentaries], Das Neue Testament Deutsch (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973), 39–40.

  49.For discussion of these two apparent difficulties, see Marcus, Mark 1–8, 243–47.

  50.This is, indeed, one of the main points of Shemesh’s unpublished paper; indeed, Shemesh makes so (appropriately) bold as to argue that Jesus’ halakhic arguments are not infrequently more coherent and cogent than some of those of the latter-day Rabbis. But they remain, none the less, and even more so, halakhic arguments.

  51.Cf. Beare, “‘The Sabbath Was Made for Man?’” 134. I disagree with Beare, however, in his assumption that the David argument could only have been mobilized with messianic overtones, given that we find it in rabbinic literature without such overtones and in a very similar context, namely, as a justification for violating the Torah in a situation in which there is a threat to life (even a very mild such threat, such as a sore throat). Palestinian Talmud Yoma 8:6, 45:b.

  52.For a similar view, see Collins, Mark: A Commentary, 185 n28.

  2. The Son of Man in First Enoch and Fourth Ezra:

  Other Jewish Messiahs of the First Century

  1.Howard Jacobson, The Exagoge of Ezekiel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 55.

  2.Richard Bauckham, “The Throne of God and the Worship of Jesus,” in The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism: Papers from the St. Andrews Conference on the Historical Origins of the Worship of Jesus, ed. Carey C. Newman, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism (Boston: Brill, 1999), 53. See too Charles A. Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology: Antecedents and Early Evidence, Arbeiten Zur Geschichte Des Antiken Judentums und Des Urchristentums (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 93–94.

  3.For the formerly held position that the parables were earlier than this, see Matthew Black, “The Eschatology of the Similitudes of Enoch,” Journal of Theological Studies 3 (1953): 1. For the latest and generally accepted position, see essays in Gabriele Boccaccini, ed., Jason von Ehrenkrook, assoc. ed., Enoch and the Messiah Son of Man: Revisiting the Book of Parables (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2007), 415–98, especially David Suter, “Enoch in Sheol: Updating the Dating of the Parables of Enoch,” 415–33.

  4.“We certainly find blurring of the lines between human messiah and heavenly or angelic deliverer in the Son of Man tradition.” Adela Yarbro Collins and John J. Collins, King and Messiah as Son of God: Divine, Human, and Angelic Messianic Figures in Biblical and Related Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2008). It is of the Similitudes that the Collinses are speaking.

  5.George W.E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, trans. and eds., I Enoch: A New Translation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 59–60.

  6.It is not clear to me how the Aramaic , something like “Ancient of Days,” yields “head of days,” but this is immaterial for the present case. For different solutions of this problem, see Matthew Black, in collaboration with James C. VanderKam and Otto Neugebauer, The Book of Enoch, or Enoch: A New English Translation with Commentary and Textual Notes. With an Appendix on the “Astronomical” Chapters (72–82), SVTP (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985), 192.

  7.The major exegetical work to demonstrate that this chapter is constructed as a midrash on Daniel 7:13–14 has been done by Lars Hartman, who shows carefully how many biblical verses and echoes there are in the chapter. Lars Hartman, Prophecy Interrupted: The Formation of Some Jewish Apocalyptic Texts and of the Eschatological Discourse Mark 13, Conjectanea Biblica (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1966), 118–26. My discussion in this and the next paragraph draws on his, so I will forgo a series of specific references. In any case, I can only summarize his detailed and impressive argument.

  8.Pierluigi Piovanelli, “‘A Testimony for the Kings and Mighty Who Possess the Earth’: The Thirst for Justice and Peace in the Parables of Enoch,” in Enoch and the Messiah Son of Man: Revisiting the Book of Parables, ed. Gabriele Boccaccini (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007).

  9.Nickelsburg and VanderKam, I Enoch: A New Translation, 61–63.

  10.Ibid., 91–92.

  11.James R. Davila, “Of Methodology, Monotheism and Metatron,” in The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism: Papers from the St. Andrews Conference on the Historical Origins of the Worship of Jesus, ed. Carey C. Newman, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 9.

  12.My reading here of the Similitudes is close to that of Morna Hooker, The Son of Man in Mark: A Study of the Background of the Term “Son of Man” and Its Use in St Mark’s Gospel (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1967), 37–48.

  13.Moshe Idel, Ben: Sonship and Jewish Mysticism, Kogod Library of Judaic Studies (London: Continuum, 2007), 4.

  14.I am fully persuaded by the argument of Daniel Olson, “Enoch and the Son of Man,” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigraphica 18 (1998): 33, that chapter 70 also originally identified Enoch with the Son of Man. His article is exemplary philology in that it supports one variant of a manuscript tradition and then explains compellingly why that reading had been changed in other branches of the paradosis.

  15.For a study of the ubiquity of this pattern, see Idel, Ben, 1–3.

  16.Bauckham, “The Throne,” 58.

  17.Pierre Grelot, “La légende d’Hénoch dans les Apocryphes et dans la Bible: Origine et signification,” RSR 46 (1958): 5–26, 181–220; James C. VanderKam, Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition (Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1984), 23–51; Helge S. Kvanvig, Roots of Apocalyptic: The Mesopotamian Background of the Enoch Figure and of the Son of Man (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1988), 191–213; Andrei A. Orlov, The Enoch-Metatron Tradition, Texte und Studien Zum Antiken Judentum (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 23–78.

  18.Kvanvig, Roots, 187; John J. Collins, “The Sage in Apocalyptic and Pseudepigraphic Literature,” in The Sage in Israel and the Ancient Near East, ed. John G. Gammie (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1990), 346.

  19.Idel, Ben, 1–7. Earlier and more directly relating to such merger, see Moshe Idel, “Metatron: Notes Towards the Development of Myth in Judaism” [Hebrew], in Eshel Beer-Sheva: Occasional Publications in Jewish Studies (Beer-sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 1996), 29–44.

  20.Helge S. Kvanvig, “Henoch und der Menschensohn: Das Verhaltnis von Hen 14 zu Dan 7,” ST 38 (1984): 114–33.

  21.This summary draws on Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, 255–56.

  22.Black, VanderKam, and Neugebauer, Enoch, 151–52, accepts this position but offers as well the not implausible hypothesis of a common dependence on a work earlier than the two of these. In any case, this issue is immaterial for my investigation here.

  23.Contrast Sigmund Olaf Plytt Mowinckel, He That Cometh: The Messiah Concept in the Old Testament and Later Judaism, trans. G.W. Anderson (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1956), 384–85.

  24.James Davila also reads the work of the so-called redactor (once again, I call him author) as having specific ideological/theological intent. Davila, “Of Methodology,” 12. He doesn’t interpret this activity in quite the way I do, however, but does note the very important point that the Hebrew 3 Enoch (and thus the Enoch-Metatron tradition) presupposes it.

  25.Daniel Boyarin, “The Gospel of the Memra: Jewish Binitarianism and the Crucifixion of the Logos,” Harvard Theological Review 94, no. 3 (2001): 243–84. Note too Larry Hurtado’s three categories of divine mediation: personified and hypostasized divine attributes, such as Wisdom or Logos; exalted patriarchs; and principal angels (Larry W
. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism, 2nd ed. [Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998]). To these James Davila adds two others, of which one seems relevant here: “archetypes based on earlier biblical characters and offices (e.g., the Davidic king, the Mosaic prophet, and the Aaronid high priest) but whose incarnation as individuals is projected either into the future (future ideal figures) or into the heavenly realm (exalted ideal figures).” Davila, “Of Methodology,” 6.

  26.Bauckham, “The Throne,” 61.

  27.I find incomprehensible, therefore, Baukham’s claim that “early Christians said about Jesus what no other Jews had wished to say about the Messiah or any other figure; that he had been exalted by God to participate now in the cosmic sovereignty unique to the divine identity” (Bauckham, “The Throne,” 63), since Bauckham himself had just demonstrated the significance of Enoch in this regard. To answer, as he does implicitly in the next paragraph, that “the Parables represent a parallel rather than a source” does not in any way impugn the authority of the Similitudes to render his claim false; in fact, as I have argued here, it enhances it, since now we have at least two independent witnesses to this religious concept, neither dependent on the other. Further, it should be emphasized that accepting Bauckham’s premise, which seems compelling, that there are not a series of semi-divine mediator figures within Second Temple Judaism to which Jesus could have been assimilated forces us to recognize that Daniel 7:13–14 already assumes that the Son of Man shares in God’s divinity, thus once again giving the lie to Bauckham’s claim to some absolute uniqueness to Christology in the Jesus version. The Similitudes and the Gospels represent two developments out of the Danielic tradition. Of course, this does not preclude further religious creativity on the part of each of these traditions, as we see from the Gospels’ apparent powerful addition of Psalm 110:1 to the mix (if Bauckham is right) and the continuation of the Enoch tradition in 3 Enoch (if he is, as I suppose, wrong).