Judaism as a Foundation for Christianity?

[Divine Insight]

I believe this topic is fundamental for discussions of Christianity and Apologetics.

Everyone knows that Jesus was a Jew. And he often referenced the Torah. But how did Jesus himself view the Torah and Judaism in general? Was there even a consistent view of Judaism in those days? According to the gospels I think it's fair to say that the Pharisees held a view of the Torah and God that Jesus did not support.

Were the views of the Jewish Pharisees the orthodox views of Judaism? Or did many Jews, like Jesus, hold views that were quite different from what the Jewish Pharisees held?

I would very much like to hear views on this question:

Question for debate: "Was there a consistent view of Judaism in the days of Jesus?"

And if so, what exactly did that view entail?

[kayky]

He didn't have much affinity with the Sadducees either. I have always been fascinated with the idea that Jesus was a member of the Essene sect before beginning his public ministry. I find the idea quite plausible, though, of course, impossible to prove.

[cnorman18]

I believe this topic is fundamental for discussions of Christianity and Apologetics.

Everyone knows that Jesus was a Jew. And he often referenced the Torah. But how did Jesus himself view the Torah and Judaism in general? Was there even a consistent view of Judaism in those days? According to the gospels I think it's fair to say that the Pharisees held a view of the Torah and God that Jesus did not support.

Were the views of the Jewish Pharisees the orthodox views of Judaism? Or did many Jews, like Jesus, hold views that were quite different from what the Jewish Pharisees held?

I would very much like to hear views on this question:

Question for debate: "Was there a consistent view of Judaism in the days of Jesus?"

And if so, what exactly did that view entail?

There has never been one, single, unified and consistent "view of Judaism." That's "never" as in "not ever." The Torah itself reflects multiple points of view; there are at least two Creation stories, and several narratives are repeated with inconsistent details. There are multiple viewpoints reflected within one story, as I demonstrated elsewhere with the Balaam narratives in "The Bible as it IS," a thread that appears in the Judaism subforum as well as elsewhere. There are even three separate and differing versions of the Ten Commandments!

Whatever the redactor(s) of the Torah and the Tanakh were, they were not idiots. It has LONG (as in since before the time of Jesus) been Jewish teaching that those conflicting versions and stories were left in the Torah consciously and for good reasons -- one of which is that multiple points of view are not only tolerated in the Jewish religion, but encouraged.

Now in Jesus's day, there was obviously no one consistent view; there were not only Jesus and the Pharisees (who actually agreed on most matters -- Jesus was more a Pharisee himself than akin to any of the other groups; more on that in a moment), but there were the Sadducees (the Temple hierarchy, heavily influenced by Greek culture and learning and heavily into collaboration with the Romans; they are obviously now extinct), the Essenes (mystics concerned with ritual purity and other esoteric teachings), the Zealots (violent anti-Roman revolutionaries, the Weatherman of their day), and even the Samaritans, who represented (then and now) a wildly different variant of Judaism. As there are in our own time, there were probably splinter groups like the Karaites and other extremists, such as ascetics and anchorites (e.g. John the Baptizer), that we don' t even know of today.

The major split in Jesus's day was between the Sadducees, for whom authority and worship were centered on the Temple, and the relatively new Pharisaic movement, whose worship took place in the local community and whose authority rested in "rabbis" who were learned in the study of Torah as opposed to hereditary members of the Temple priesthood, and who were more concerned with justice and ethics and the lives of the common people than with Temple rituals and sacrifices. Jesus was obviously more into Torah study and ethics than Temple worship, and so was more allied to the Pharisees than to the Temple priests.

He castigated SOME Pharisees as "hypocrites" for making a big show of their religion and piety, and with precise and punctilious observance of the details of the Law, but paid no attention to the ethical principles that lay BEHIND the Law. Since the Gospels were written by Greek-speaking Gentiles (with the possible exception of Matthew), the real controversy between Pharisee and Sadducee -- and even the existence of the Essenes -- were relatively unknown to them.

Pharisaic Judaism was all that was left after the fall of the Temple and the Jewish revolt; it developed into Rabbinic Judaism, which in our own time has developed into Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative Judaism, and the two smaller and more liberal branches, Reconstructionist and Humanistic Judaism.

One really can't get a clear picture of Judaic belief and practice from even the Hebrew Bible (aka the "Old Testament"), and the New Testament is of no help at all. Though some scholars go so far as to doubt that Paul, author of most of the NT, was even Jewish, it is certain that he was far out of step with the normative Judaism of even his own time. If you want to learn about Judaism, whether history, beliefs, culture, or practice, you don't do it by reading Christian books -- and that emphatically includes the NT.

The "'foundations" for Christianity are more Greek and Egyptian than Jewish. Think about it; the Greek and Egyptian gods fathered literal children, who had godlike qualities themselves; the God of the Hebrews did not. Greek and Egyptian gods rose from the dead with predictable regularity -- Persephone, Osiris, Mithras, etc. Nobody rises from the dead in the Hebrew Bible but the ghost of Samuel at the call of Saul and the witch of Endor -- and Samuel himself wasn't happy about it, and that act was called an "abomination." There are no magical "saviors from sin" in Jewish religion, not even in the (abolished after the fall of the Temple) animal sacrifices; those were for unintentional sin only. The Greeks, and especially the Egyptians, were much concerned with the Afterlife; the Hebrew Bible, and Jewish teachings from that time to this, contain little on the subject at all, and what there is is clearly speculation, not "doctrine." And so on.

So; There has never been one single consistent view of Judaism among the Jews, and Christianity has at least as much to do with Greek and Egyptian religion as with Jewish.

I hope all that helps.

[kayky]

cnorman, you are a very important voice here. I hope you will hang around--at least occasionally.

[cnorman18]

cnorman, you are a very important voice here. I hope you will hang around--at least occasionally.

I think it's clear enough by now that I will, at least to some degree; but I will also protest when "religion" is spoken of as if it were a monolithic and homogenous thing -- and ESPECIALLY if it is so characterized by longtime members who should know better.

PS -- Jesus may have had some contact with the Essenes, but besides being hard to prove, the few common points in his teachings and theirs are as likely as not to be coincidence as direct influence. Even then, there was a lot of "cross-pollination" among the various schools of thought.

Even among the Pharisees, there were intense disagreements; the two most famous rabbis of the day, Hillel and Shammai, argued on very many matters and were famously rivals and leaders of two opposing schools of thought -- and they were both Pharisees. Shammai was the "rightwing" strict rabbi, and Hillel the "leftist" liberal rabbi; Jesus seems to follow Hillel's teachings in most ways, though oddly enough, on sex and marriage his views were far stricter than either.

[kayky]

I am happy to hear it.

[cnorman18]

(note edits above)

[Divine Insight]

@ Cnorman, Thank you for posting. I very much appreciate it.

My hope is that we can better understand where each other is coming from.

So with that in mind allow me to comment on a few things you've posted here.

If you want to learn about Judaism, whether history, beliefs, culture, or practice, you don't do it by reading Christian books -- and that emphatically includes the NT.

Well, I would certainly agree with you on that point. However, what you need to understand is that I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in learning about modern day Judaism. That is totally irrelevant to me. I'm not interested in modern day Judaism.

My sole interest in Judaism is how it relates to Christianity. So that would bring my interest in Judaism to the views of Judaism that were held in the days of Jesus. Not the modern views of Rabbinic Judaism. I simply have no interest in modern Judaism at all.

Christianity is based upon Jesus who was supposedly a Jew. The Christian Old Testament is basically supposed to be the same religion that Jesus believed in as a Jew. So, because of this, it's important to establish how the Jews of his day viewed the Old Testament (Which would have been the Torah).

I'm also concerned with the behaviors described in the New Testament. Both the behaviors of Jesus, and the behaviors of the Pharisees as described in the New Testament.

The New Testament describes the Pharisees as often wanting to stone Jesus to death for blaspheme. So it makes sense that the Pharisees believed in the literal laws of the Torah that God had commanded them to stone heathens to death. Otherwise why would they be making these threats all the time?

Jesus, on the other hand, taught people not to judge one another and not to cast the first stone. So clearly Jesus was taking a totally different view. Jesus was not accepting the Torah to be the definitive laws of God.

Therefore Jesus was not in agreement with the views of the Pharisees.

The fact that there were many different sects and views of Judaism at that time actually supports my position that Jesus did not view the Torah as the definitive instructions of God.

This is important in Christianity because Christianity holds Jesus up as an excuse to point to the Old Testament as the "Word of God".

I'm actually suggesting that Jesus himself did NOT view the Torah in that way. But the Old Testament gospels DO indeed portray the Pharisees as taking all these directives to stone people to death as serious commandments from God.

~~~~

So it is with respect to these points that I'm concerned with

You say:

So; There has never been one single consistent view of Judaism among the Jews,

This actually supports my views very much. Because this supports my position that Jesus was viewing the Torah radically different from how the Pharisees were viewing it. Especially in terms of taking things like God commanding people to stone someone to death seriously. Clearly Jesus did not accept that as he taught against it. But according to the New Testament we must believe that the Pharisees did take this seriously as they were often wanting to stone Jesus to death for blaspheme.

and Christianity has at least as much to do with Greek and Egyptian religion as with Jewish.

I agree with you here as well.

So I'm really not in disagreement with what you are claiming. Apparently you have a mission to try to get people to understand modern day Rabbinic Judaism, and you get upset when it appears that they aren't paying attention.

But I am paying attention to what you are saying. I simply have no interest in modern day Rabbinic Judaism. For my purposes that's a topic that is totally irrelevant.

So the fact that I keep coming back to the point of what Judaism might have meant in the days of Jesus really has nothing at all to do with the points you're trying to make concerning modern day Rabbinic Judaism.

The fact, that you say, "So; There has never been one single consistent view of Judaism among the Jews", actually supports my position and theories of Jesus.

And I'm more than willing to accept that this is indeed the case.

I agree with you on this point.

So I don't see where I'm disagreeing with you in any way.

[cnorman18]

A couple of corrections: First, the Torah consists of the first five books of the Bible. The Old Testament, which is the Christian name for the entire Hebrew Bible, contains the Torah and all the rest of the books. The Jewish name for the whole OT is the Tanakh, a Hebrew acronym.

Second, the Pharisees didn't accuse Jesus of blasphemy and want to stone him because he disagreed with them about reading the Torah literally. As I said, there was LOTS of disagreement in his day, over the Afterlife, the authority of the priests, and many other things -- and virtually no one read the book literally in the modern sense. He was accused of blasphemy because he claimed to have the authority to forgive sins -- ALL sins, even sins against other people. In the Jewish religion, God Himself doesn't have that authority; only the person sinned against can forgive. So Jesus was essentially claiming to be more powerful than God.

I understand your disinterest in modern Judaism and am OK with it. I'll try to bear it in mind in the future.

More later.

[Danmark]

There has never been one, single, unified and consistent "view of Judaism." That's "never" as in "not ever." The Torah itself reflects multiple points of view; there are at least two Creation stories, and several narratives are repeated with inconsistent details. There are multiple viewpoints reflected within one story, as I demonstrated elsewhere with the Balaam narratives in "The Bible as it IS," a thread that appears in the Judaism subforum as well as elsewhere. There are even three separate and differing versions of the Ten Commandments!

Whatever the redactor(s) of the Torah and the Tanakh were, they were not idiots. It has LONG (as in since before the time of Jesus) been Jewish teaching that those conflicting versions and stories were left in the Torah consciously and for good reasons -- one of which is that multiple points of view are not only tolerated in the Jewish religion, but encouraged.

Now in Jesus's day, there was obviously no one consistent view; there were not only Jesus and the Pharisees (who actually agreed on most matters -- Jesus was more a Pharisee himself than akin to any of the other groups; more on that in a moment), but there were the Sadducees (the Temple hierarchy, heavily influenced by Greek culture and learning and heavily into collaboration with the Romans; they are obviously now extinct), the Essenes (mystics concerned with ritual purity and other esoteric teachings), the Zealots (violent anti-Roman revolutionaries, the Weatherman of their day), and even the Samaritans, who represented (then and now) a wildly different variant of Judaism. As there are in our own time, there were probably splinter groups like the Karaites and other extremists, such as ascetics and anchorites (e.g. John the Baptizer), that we don' t even know of today.

The major split in Jesus's day was between the Sadducees, for whom authority and worship were centered on the Temple, and the relatively new Pharisaic movement, whose worship took place in the local community and whose authority rested in "rabbis" who were learned in the study of Torah as opposed to hereditary members of the Temple priesthood, and who were more concerned with justice and ethics and the lives of the common people than with Temple rituals and sacrifices. Jesus was obviously more into Torah study and ethics than Temple worship, and so was more allied to the Pharisees than to the Temple priests.

He castigated SOME Pharisees as "hypocrites" for making a big show of their religion and piety, and with precise and punctilious observance of the details of the Law, but paid no attention to the ethical principles that lay BEHIND the Law. Since the Gospels were written by Greek-speaking Gentiles (with the possible exception of Matthew), the real controversy between Pharisee and Sadducee -- and even the existence of the Essenes -- were relatively unknown to them.

Pharisaic Judaism was all that was left after the fall of the Temple and the Jewish revolt; it developed into Rabbinic Judaism, which in our own time has developed into Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative Judaism, and the two smaller and more liberal branches, Reconstructionist and Humanistic Judaism.

One really can't get a clear picture of Judaic belief and practice from even the Hebrew Bible (aka the "Old Testament"), and the New Testament is of no help at all. Though some scholars go so far as to doubt that Paul, author of most of the NT, was even Jewish, it is certain that he was far out of step with the normative Judaism of even his own time. If you want to learn about Judaism, whether history, beliefs, culture, or practice, you don't do it by reading Christian books -- and that emphatically includes the NT.

The "'foundations" for Christianity are more Greek and Egyptian than Jewish. Think about it; the Greek and Egyptian gods fathered literal children, who had godlike qualities themselves; the God of the Hebrews did not. Greek and Egyptian gods rose from the dead with predictable regularity -- Persephone, Osiris, Mithras, etc. Nobody rises from the dead in the Hebrew Bible but the ghost of Samuel at the call of Saul and the witch of Endor -- and Samuel himself wasn't happy about it, and that act was called an "abomination." There are no magical "saviors from sin" in Jewish religion, not even in the (abolished after the fall of the Temple) animal sacrifices; those were for unintentional sin only. The Greeks, and especially the Egyptians, were much concerned with the Afterlife; the Hebrew Bible, and Jewish teachings from that time to this, contain little on the subject at all, and what there is is clearly speculation, not "doctrine." And so on.

So; There has never been one single consistent view of Judaism among the Jews, and Christianity has at least as much to do with Greek and Egyptian religion as with Jewish.

I hope all that helps.

I echo Kayky's personal note and want to add that I appreciate this perspective . . . tho' . . . I do not like admitting how ignorant I am of the state of Judaism immediately before and during the time of Jesus. What resources do you recommend for supplementing one's education in this area?