Are the Torah and the Gospel mutually exclusive?

Vivificat - from Contemplation to Action ^ | 26 July 2012 | TDJ

[Teófilo]

Brethren: Peace and Good to all of you.

I've been reading lately several works on textual, form, literary, and historical criticism of the Bible, as well as the relationship between both Testaments, and as corollary, the relationship between the Church and the Jewish people. Today I reached the millenary impasse: for the Jews to accept Jesus as their Messiah would entail, in their view, a rejection of the Torah; for us Christians to reconcile with them would entail the rejection of the core of Christianity  - without a necessary conversion to Judaism which they don't see as necessary for "righteous Gentiles" to reach "the world to come". At least in the view of those Jews who still believe in "a world to come."

Testing my diamond

During my investigation, I found a letter to Yemeni Jews by the Jewish medieval sage Moses Maimonides to be upsetting. The quote is as follows:

Ever since the time of Revelation, every despot or slave that has attained to power, be he violent or ignoble, has made it his first aim and his final purpose to destroy our law, and to vitiate our religion, by means of the sword, by violence, or by brute force, such as Amalek, Sisera, Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, Titus, Hadrian, may their bones be ground to dust, and others like them. This is one of the two classes which attempt to foil the Divine will. 

The second class consists of the most intelligent and educated among the nations, such as the Syrians, Persians, and Greeks. These also endeavor to demolish our law and to vitiate it by means of arguments which they invent, and by means of controversies which they institute.... 

After that there arose a new sect which combined the two methods, namely, conquest and controversy, into one, because it believed that this procedure would be more effective in wiping out every trace of the Jewish nation and religion. It, therefore, resolved to lay claim to prophecy and to found a new faith, contrary to our Divine religion, and to contend that it was equally God-given.  

Thereby it hoped to raise doubts and to create confusion, since one is opposed to the other and both supposedly emanate from a Divine source, which would lead to the destruction of both religions. For such is the remarkable plan contrived by a man who is envious and querulous. He will strive to kill his enemy and to save his own life, but when he finds it impossible to attain his objective, he will devise a scheme whereby they both will be slain. 

The first one to have adopted this plan was Jesus the Nazarene, may his bones be ground to dust. He was a Jew because his mother was a Jewess although his father was a Gentile. For in accordance with the principles of our law, a child born of a Jewess and a Gentile, or of a Jewess and a slave, is legitimate. (Yebamot 45a). Jesus is only figuratively termed an illegitimate child. He impelled people to believe that he was a prophet sent by God to clarify perplexities in the Torah, and that he was the Messiah that was predicted by each and every seer. He interpreted the Torah and its precepts in such a fashion as to lead to their total annulment, to the abolition of all its commandments and to the violation of its prohibitions. The sages, of blessed memory, having become aware of his plans before his reputation spread among our people, meted out fitting punishment to him. 

Daniel had already alluded to him when he presaged the downfall of a wicked one and a heretic among the Jews who would endeavor to destroy the Law, claim prophecy for himself, make pretenses to miracles, and allege that he is the Messiah, as it is written, "Also the children of the impudent among thy people shall make bold to claim prophecy, but they shall fall." (Daniel 11:14). [1]

The allegation that Jesus had "a Gentile father" notwithstanding - based on a Talmudic passage alleging that Jesus was the product of a Roman soldier's rape - I took the text of the letter at face value for analysis and asked myself C.S. Lewis' famous questions: Jesus was either evil, a madman, or who he said he was, the Messiah, Son of God. Maimonides, along with post-Second Temple Judaism denied the third option. Therefore, we're left with defining Jesus within an spectrum of possibilities located anywhere between two extremes: he was either crazy as a loon or as evil as the devil.

(You might be asking why I even care to ask that kind of question. Well, because I care about the truth. I tell people I possess a diamond that I want to share with them, but that this diamond is unique because giving it away will not make me any less wealthy, whereas those receiving it may become as wealthy as I am. Ocassionally, I like to step back and test my diamond for its beauty and hardness.)

Ratzinger's reply

As I said before, I asked myself: is the price to pay to reconcile myself with my Jewish brethren fully and in heart and through this reconciliation, reach the "true" knowledge of the God of Israel, my abandonment of the central claims we make about Jesus of Nazareth, namely that he's God incarnate, the new Moses and lawgiver, Son of God and of Man, and Israel's Messiah?

I didn't have an immediate answer and therefore I prayed for one. God answered the prayer inmediately. It so happens that someone else had asked that question before. Here's how he put it:

The history of the relationship between Israel and Christendom is drenched with blood and tears. It is a history of mistrust and hostility, but also — thank God — a history marked again and again by attempts at forgiveness, understanding and mutual acceptance. After Auschwitz, the mission of reconciliation and acceptance permits no deferral.

Even if we know that Auschwitz is the gruesome expression of an ideology that not only wanted to destroy Judaism but also hated and sought to eradicate from Christianity its Jewish heritage, the question remains, What could be the reason for so much historical hostility between those who actually must belong together because of their faith in the one God and commitment to his will?

Does this hostility result from something in the very faith of Christians? Is it something in the "essence of Christianity," such that one would have to prescind from Christianity's core, deny Christianity its heart, in order to come to real reconciliation? This is an assumption that some Christian thinkers have in fact made in the last few decades in reaction to the horrors of history. Do confession of Jesus of Nazareth as the Son of the living God and faith in the cross as the redemption of mankind contain an implicit condemnation of the Jews as stubborn and blind, as guilty of the death of the Son of God? Could it be that the core of the faith of Christians themselves compels them to intolerance, even to hostility toward the Jews, and conversely, that the self-esteem of Jews and the defense of their historic dignity and deepest convictions oblige them to demand that Christians abandon the heart of their faith and so require Jews similarly to forsake tolerance? Is the conflict programmed in the heart of religion and only to be overcome through its repudiation?

In this heightened framing of the question, the problem confronting us today reaches far beyond an academic interreligious dialogue into the fundamental decisions of this historic hour. One sees more frequent attempts to mollify the issue by representing Jesus as a Jewish teacher who in principle did not go beyond what was possible in Jewish tradition. His execution is understood to result from the political tensions between Jews and Romans. In point of fact, he was executed by the Roman authority in the way political rebels were punished. His elevation to Son of God is accordingly understood to have occurred after the fact, in a Hellenistic climate; at the same time, in view of the given political circumstances, the blame for the crucifixion is transferred from the Romans to the Jews. As a challenge to exegesis, such interpretations can further an acute listening to the text and perhaps produce something useful. However, they do not speak of the Jesus of the historic sources, but instead construct a new and different Jesus, relegating the historical faith in the Christ of the church to mythology. Christ appears as a product of Greek religiosity and political opportunism in the Roman Empire. One does not do justice to the gravity of the question with such a view; indeed one retreats from it.

Thus the question remains: Can Christian faith, left in its inner power and dignity, not only tolerate Judaism but accept it in its historic mission? Or can it not? Can there be true reconciliation without abandoning the faith, or is reconciliation tied to such abandonment? In reply to this question which concerns us most deeply, I shall not present simply my own views. Rather, I wish to show what the Catechism of the Catholic Church released in 1992 has to say. This work has been published by the magisterium of the Catholic Church as an authentic expression of her faith. In recognition of the significance of Auschwitz and from the mission of the Second Vatican Council, the matter of reconciliation has been inscribed in the catechism as an object of faith. Let us see then how the catechism sounds in relation to our question in terms of its definition of its own mission.

Read the whole essay here.

The man who asked himself the same question and then proceeded to answer it was Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

God does answer prayer and comes to the rescue at the precise moment when one is looking down the chasm on the point of vertigo.

A torn, seamless garment

In words repeated by the scholar - and frequent advisor to the US Catholic Bishops - Amy-Jill Levine, I feel a "holy envy" towards Judaism, more so because without Judaism, Christianity would be unintellgible. I study Judaism just before, during, and after the New Testament era with utter seriousness, respect, and many times, admiration.

Yet, my readings have led me to believe that after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD, Judaism resembled - if you allow me the analogy - a seamless garment ripped and torn at the bottom. I think that the Jewish remnant in the Holy Land also saw the discontinuity because, starting with the sucessors of the Pharisees at Jamnia and through the Talmudic age, the Jewish sages applied themselves to "hem" the jagged edges, cut, tie, and add new tzitzits to the torn, seamless garment, sometimes without paying attention to the discontinuities their repairs created.

As a consequence, Judaism became self-contained, unique, standard, and logically impervious to Christian evangelism and apologetics. This is, for the most part, the Talmudists greatest achievement which in turn guaranteed the survival of Jewish identity throughout the centuries.

These centuries were not not good for the Jewish people as they endured persecution by Christians in East and West which in turn  cemented in the emotions of the Jewish people what they had previously held intellectually: that any claim of Jesus as the unique Jewish Messiah was a non-sequitur, to be rejected a priori at all times, and at all places. For, "how can this man ever be considered as God's supreme intervention when his followers kill, persecute, and often disposses and disenfranchise us." It is a fair question and the answer should encourage in us a deep self-reflection.

Nevertheless, and setting momentarily aside the Jewish people's sorrowful history. as a Catholic Christian I can see that the "ripped garment" missing piece is precisely Jesus of Nazareth, his life, teachings, and redemptive mission. Every fiber, every shape of the missing part fits perfectly to its ripped counterpart to the last thread. That many Jews understood this explain why so many of them accepted Jesus as Messiah - and a crucified one at that - shortly after his reported death. For these Jews - and not all of them were yokels from the boondocks - the Christ-event made sense in the light of Israel's election, the Torah, and the designs of a universal God who wanted to draw every single human being toward himself. If Jesus made sense to these Jews, then there was something to Jesus that can invalidate Maimonides' the harsh evaluation he made of Jesus.

This is so, in my view, because as then Cardinal Ratzinger said, Israel's vocation was oriented toward universality. Judaism after Jesus placed its universal vocation in the back fire, at times because survival was of the essence and other times, well, what's the point? Since God will admit righteous Gentiles into his Kingdom, Jews are free to be themselves while leaving to God the fulfillment of Israel's universal vocation.

Yet, this very vocation uniquely seems to have been fulfilled in a single Israelite, Jesus of Nazareth. Therefore, and based upon then Cardinal Ratzinger's solution, I can conclude that not only there is no mutual exclusivity between the Torah and the Gospel, but that their ultimate intelligibility depends on their mutual dependence. Only in this way Israel's universal vocation can be realized, as the God of Israel is made known to all peoples. This is why so many Jews accepted Jesus as Messiah, this is why Christianity is intelligible in Jewish terms.

Love is the key

Yes, I know that most of my Jewish brethren, conditioned as they are to deny any thought of Jesus as Messiah (and for the reasons we have discussed) will reject my conclusion. Alas, I can't do more.

The rift between Jews and Christians will not be healed in my lifetime, I don't think. However, I do think that the claims of Jesus, as preserved and proclaimed by the Church, make sense even withing the Jewish crucible from which Christianity surged. My faith and my reason are secured, but the problem remains: how do I take the Gospel in an affirmative fashion to my Jewish brethren while preserving both our identities? The only personal solution I can find at the moment is by loving them as Jesus loves them, and as we love ourselves. Once we love with this intensity, the remainder will resolve itself through mutual forgiveness before the God who loves, forgive, and judge us all.
[1] Halkin, Abraham S., ed., and Cohen, Boaz, trans. Moses Maimonides' Epistle to Yemen: The Arabic Original and the Three Hebrew Versions, American Academy for Jewish Research, 1952, pp. iii-iv. as quoted in the Wikipedia.

[Teófilo]

This post may have merit. But the end result is that it will drive a wedge between Christians and Jews. And that is not a good thing.

Why will this post "drive a wedge between Christians and Jews"? Please, explain.

~Theo

[US Navy Vet]

You question has the veneer of “Replacement Theology”. Is it?

[Twinkie]

I can’t keep the Law; don’t know of but one person who did. I acknowledge that the Law is good. One day, the Judge will clear it all up; for now, I’m asking Him to help me get it right. Being afraid to ask Him to help me get it right would be ignorant; and so, grace and peace to all who seek Him and His Salvation.

[Sherman Logan]

The Jewish leaders considered him a blasphemer and as such subject to the death penalty under the Law.

And if his claims about himself were not true, then he was a blasphemer.

[US Navy Vet]

YOU AND ME AND THE ENTIRE HUMAN RACE put Jesus on that cross. Remember Jesus’ death and resurrection was NOT a tragedy it was an ACHIEVEMNT! He gave us the chance to avoid DAMNATION by accepting HIM as lord and savior and head of our lives!

[xzins]

25 I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers, so that you may not be conceited: Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in.

26 And so all Israel will be saved, as it is written: “The deliverer will come from Zion; he will turn godlessness away from Jacob. 27 And this is my covenant with them when I take away their sins.”

28 As far as the gospel is concerned, they are enemies on your account; but as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs, 29 for God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable.

30 Just as you who were at one time disobedient to God have now received mercy as a result of their disobedience, 31 so they too have now become disobedient in order that they too may now receive mercy as a result of God’s mercy to you. 32 For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.

33 Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! 34 “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?” 35 “Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him?” 36 For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen. Romans 11:

[Sherman Logan]

I agree. But those individuals who conspired to commit and did indeed commit murder, under the provisions of their own Law, are not thereby freed from guilt for their crime.

That Good comes from Evil does not make it any less evil.

[Sherman Logan]

I would say that Jesus’ death was a tragedy, an achievement and a crime. The three are not mutually exclusive.

[Invincibly Ignorant]

Hows this for pointing at the Gospel?

Deuteronomy 13

King James Version (KJV)

13 If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder,

2 And the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them;

3 Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the Lord your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.

[freedomlover]

If it was part of Jewish Law, fine. If it was part of Roman Law, not so. Which was the case?

Again an honest Q

[Teófilo]

You question has the veneer of “Replacement Theology”. Is it?

Did you read my conclusion? Just jump there.

~Theo

[Sherman Logan]

In the Sanhedrin trial Christ was condemned for blasphemy under Jewish law, because he made a statement in court the judges saw as tantamount to claiming he was God. (Whether this statement did indeed constitute such a claim is an entirely different question.)

Had the Jewish leaders hauled him before Pilate charged with blasphemy, Pilate and the other Romans would have got a huge laugh out of the situation. Romans just did not care whether someone infringed Jewish law.

So instead the Jewish leaders charged him with political crimes: instructing people not to pay taxes, saying he was a king (therefore in direct confrontation with Caesar), and incitement to riot. The Roman judge condemned him on these charges, despite being fully aware of his innocence.

If Jesus was NOT the Christ, then he was justly condemned for blasphemy by the Jewish courts. He was completely innocent of the charges against him in the Roman court.

[100American]

I personally do not think Jesus was ministering only to those who were Jews

[Zionist Conspirator]

Whether the gospel excludes the Torah is something that chrstians have been arguing about for two millenia, though Paul and the vast majority say that it does. But there is no doubt whatsoever that the Torah does exclude the "gospel" or any other later religion.

[Sherman Logan]

Not exclusively, but he was pretty clear that his ministry was focused heavily on the Jewish nation.

Mark 7

24 And from thence he arose, and went into the borders of Tyre and Sidon, and entered into an house, and would have no man know it: but he could not be hid.

25 For a certain woman, whose young daughter had an unclean spirit, heard of him, and came and fell at his feet:

26 The woman was a Greek, a Syrophenician by nation; and she besought him that he would cast forth the devil out of her daughter.

27 But Jesus said unto her, Let the children first be filled: for it is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it unto the dogs.

28 And she answered and said unto him, Yes, Lord: yet the dogs under the table eat of the children’s crumbs.

29 And he said unto her, For this saying go thy way; the devil is gone out of thy daughter.

[Tzfat]

Are Torah and the Gospel mutually exclusive?

Christianity is the only religion that uses the back 1/4 of its Scriptures to nullify the front 3/4. I would say that if the question is legitimately a question that Christians ask, then they must follow a different Messiah than the one quoted in Matthew 5:

"Do not think that I came to abolish the Torah or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Torah until all is accomplished. Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. " Matthew 5:17-19

What convoluted logic can conclude that "fulfilled" or " accomplished" means nullified? Especially after the direct challenge to DO and to TEACH the commandments therein?

[jonno]

...and that he was the Messiah that was predicted by each and every seer...

Curious - how will the Jews know the Messiah when they see him? It is estimated that Jesus met over 300 OT (Torah) prophecies.

What other signs or markers for Messiah would the Jews accept?

[5thGenTexan]

Did you misread my statement? You say it's odd, but seem to be in agreement that "the Jews" did not kill Jesus.

My contention is that He was killed by the political leadership of the area in power at that time, who just happened to be Jews and Romans.

My point is, as a Christian, I hold no animosity towards the Jewish faith for the crucifixion. I was not trying to be controversial (this time :-).

[Leaning Right]

Why will this post "drive a wedge between Christians and Jews"? Please, explain

The post emphasizes differences, not commonalities.

For example, the statement by Maimonides would be seen as offensive by many Christians. And then there is the statement from Cardinal Ratzinger, asking if Christians should "tolerate" Judaism. Many Jews would find that offensive.

But I will say this. The article ended well, with the "Love is the Key" remarks.

[Boogieman]

“Judaism dosn’t need the NT”

I think they do need it, but they don’t know it, and wouldn’t admit it if they did.