Posted on 09/25/2003 9:18:42 AM PDT by Greg Luzinski
Jewish leaders continue to decry Mel Gibson’s forthcoming Jesus movie for supposedly threatening to whip up anti-Semitism. Due out next April, "The Passion" identifies Jewish priests as instigators of the crucifixion. Maimonides, too, in his Mishnah Torah, affirms Jewish involvement in Jesus’ execution — which must make the greatest of medieval Jewish sages an anti-Semite, too.
But the film I’d like to see produced that would really make some Jews nervous, while teaching a healthy lesson: an honest depiction not of Jesus’ death, but of his preaching. The Christian Bible makes clear what was probably the main theme of his sermons. It is a theme that many liberal rabbis, to their discomfort, would feel obliged to endorse.
Today’s secular historians generally assert that Jesus was a loyal adherent of Pharisaic (rabbinic) Judaism. They argue against the conventional Christian understanding that Jesus radically critiqued Judaism. On this, the Christians are right.
True, Jesus is repeatedly quoted in the gospels as embracing Torah observance (e.g., Matthew 5:17-18). He must have accepted certain broadly defined mitzvot like the Sabbath and Temple sacrifice, because his followers were still practicing these commandments just after his death.
What Jesus rejected was the oral Torah that explains the written Torah. Essential to rabbinic Judaism, this notion of an oral Torah recognizes the Pentateuch as a cryptic document, a coded text. It posits that the Bible’s first five books were revealed to Moses along with a key to unlock the code — for a lock is never made without a key.
This oral tradition was passed from Moses to the prophets to the rabbis, later to be written down in the Mishnah and Talmud. At least that’s the theory presented in the first chapter of the Mishnah’s tractate Pirke Avot, a theory that still animates traditional Judaism.
On point after point, Jesus derides not the written Torah but its orally transmitted interpretations. He does so on matters like the details of Sabbath observance (no carrying objects in a public space, no harvesting produce or use of healing salves except to save a life), donating a yearly half shekel to the Temple, refraining from bathing and anointing on fast days like Yom Kippur, hand washing before eating bread and praying with a quorum.
Stated this way, laundry-list fashion, such commandments from the oral tradition might seem like trivialities, as they did to Jesus. But from the constellation of such discrete teachings there emerges the gorgeous pointillist masterpiece of Torah — not merely "the Torah," the finite text of the Pentateuch that the Christian founder accepted, but the infinite tradition of Judaism as a whole, reflecting God’s mind as applied to human affairs.
For Jesus, oral Torah was a manmade accretion without transcendent authority. He tells a group of Pharisees, "So, for the sake of your tradition, you have made void the word of God," citing Isaiah. "In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men" (Matthew 15:7-9).
Elsewhere, "Woe to you lawyers also! For you load men with burdens hard to bear" (Luke 12:46).
From this position, it was a logical next step to that of the apostle Paul, who abrogated the Torah altogether, oral and written. Abandon the former and you’ll soon abandon the latter.
A phenomenally charismatic person, Jesus mocked the Jewish establishment of his day and was adulated by a following from Galilee, the region where he conducted his brief ministry, famous in this period (as professor Geza Vermes shows) for the ignorance of the local populace. Knowing no better, loathing Pharisees as their own teacher did, they thought Jesus uniquely had Judaism all figured out.
Sound familiar? Reform ideology has always viewed oral tradition as being pretty much nothing more than the "precepts of men," while the Conservative movement increasingly understands it as a human creation, "hard to bear." Having grown up in a Los Angeles-area Reform community, I can testify that most Reform and Conservative temples impart a level of lay education that is approximately Galilean. As radio commentator Michael Medved has memorably said, the majority of Jews in our country know little about Judaism other than that it rejects Jesus.
Yet when it comes to the oral Torah, most American Jews follow Jesus without know it.
Mr. Gibson, please consider making another movie, a prequel about his career before the crucifixion showing how much Christianity we have unwittingly absorbed.
Torah indeed necessitates rejecting Christianity, but that means rejecting also the Christian view on the most fundamental of concepts in all Judaism: oral Torah. A Jesus movie about his life as a preacher would be a good dose of reality, if unpopular with our beloved Jewish leaders — not, come to think of it, unlike the film that Gibson will give us next year.
David Klinghoffer’s new book is “The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism” (Doubleday, 2003).
But they cannot stand Jesus portrayed as Messiah and sacrifice which is precisely the movie that Gibson should be making (and has made).
Jesus did not reject the oral Torah at all - he told the disciples that the Pharisaic teachers sat in Moses' seat and that their teaching should be observed.
What he was critiquing was too intense a focus on the letter.
The Pharisaic interpretation believes that the Torah was twofold: written and oral.
Jesus believed that too.
But the Pharisaic tradition also believes in "building a protective hedge" of observances around both the written and oral Torah as well.
As far as Galilee was concerned, Vermes shows that Galilee was a wealthy province with many well-educated scholars and charismatic tzaddikim (holy men).
He demonstrates that Galilean Jews thought that their counterparts in the Judaean homeland were too wrapped up in the finer points of legal disputes, that they had an aversion to work and enterprise and all the other prejudices that crop up in regional rivalries.
Klinghoffer does Vermes a real disservice here.
The true story of the gospels is that Christ our Lord died for our sins and rose again. Everything after that is secondary. Which is why the movie is what it is.
Klinghoffer's statement about St. Paul "abrogating" the Torah is similarly incorrect. A good study of Paul's letter to the Romans should set him straight.
You're kidding, right? Jesus heavily criticized the religious leaders of his day for substituting their own man-made rules for God's law.Interestingly, that's still the main bone of contention between Catholics and Protestants. Both have invented man-made rules -- like Baptists demanding abstinence from wine or pretty much any Catholic doctrine developed after about 400 AD, like the perpetual virginity of Mary.
I agree that Evangelicals are not Protestants in the same sense of, say, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Anglicans, but they have a lot more in common theologically with mainline Protestants than with Catholics.I would argue that Evangelicals reject tradition too much and put themselves in danger of making each church member their own private interpreter of scripture. Thus, we end up with the nutsos like Robert Tilton and all sorts of theological nonsense, like the "name it and claim it" movement. It's utterly repugnant and not at all scriptural, nor is it a part of the Apostolic tradition.
On the other hand, I would also argue that the Catholics have almost completely substituted the teachings of the Magisterium for both scripture and true tradition. It's easy to prove that many Catholic traditions are neither scriptural nor based upon the tradition of the fathers. However, the current teaching is that scripture and tradition is what the Magisterium says it is, no matter how much the facts get in the way.
Josephus, the Jewish historian and general who lived during Christ's era, also wrote that Jesus was crucified "at the suggestion of our own people". There is no getting around this fact, no matter how much they may try to.
Sure. I'm always telling funny jokes about the God I worship.
Jesus heavily criticized the religious leaders of his day for substituting their own man-made rules for God's law.
Yet he also observed many of those same rules punctiliously and instructed the Apostles to follow them.
Interestingly, that's still the main bone of contention between Catholics and Protestants.
For Protestants perhaps. For Catholics the original matter of contention is ecclesiological.
Both have invented man-made rules -- like Baptists demanding abstinence from wine or pretty much any Catholic doctrine developed after about 400 AD, like the perpetual virginity of Mary.
(1) The doctrine of Our Lady's perpetual virginity isn't a "rule" - it's a teaching.
(2) The doctrine of Our Lady's perpetual virginity is well attested long before 400 A.D.
Our Lady was routinely described by St. Athanasius as "Ever-Virgin" in the 300s, for example.
It was a doctrine taken for granted by early Christians. So much so that St. Jerome in debating Helvidius in 383 on the matter informs Helvidius that the idea that Mary was not always a virgin is an innovation unheard of before.
A thoroughgoingly false statement.
Please. Are you going to tell me that, for example, the physical assumption of Mary can be inferred from the scriptures? Can you point me to a single tradition from the early Apostolic church that states it? Citations, please. How about papal infallibility? Are you aware that it resulted from a church dispute less than 1,000 years ago and that initially the papacy rejected it (until it was decided that it might be convenient on occasion)?
To wit; "you must become as a little child" - Jesus
Little children don't start, organize, get paid, or go to war for religion... Good children mind their fathers, but alas the bad ones start religions.... so its been since the beginning... The Romans did a bad thing when they invented clubs.. ever after when the bad children played religion they needed handshakes, pass words, and door knocks to get admitted..
ex-communicating some of the bad children... which frustrated the little blight'ers.. causeing them make other clubs like the "REALLY REAL Club of God", and on like that there...
What did the good children do in all this time..?
DUNNO, I've been a BAaaaad boy...
Ok, you got me on that one. Find one Church Father, East or West, that would affirm Protestant doctrine over classical Catholic or Eastern Orthodox traditionm, ie, on the True Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, the Priesthood, the perpetual virginity of Mary(which far predates the fourth century), apostolic succession, the Primacy of Peter, forgiveness of sins through the ministry of the Church, etc.
The early Fathers weren't Protestants; they were Catholic.
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