Introduction: Christian Texts; Jewish Context

If you’re new around here, my tradition of the Sunday Post has been in the style of a longform essay. This week I’m sharing a little more personal anecdote, which I’d be happy to hear others remark on, whether this offers a three-dimensional view of my thinking or only serves to obfuscate a treatment of the text. Let’s dive in, and feel free to share your comments. We’re settling into a rhythm of Thursday Torah posts and Sunday gospel posts, all through a humanist Jewish lens

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In the past, I’ve sloganized this project as “Christian texts; Jewish context.” In the early days, I was following in the footsteps of authors like Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish woman, prolific author, and professor of Jewish Studies and New Testament Studies. AJ Levine’s engagement reaches far beyond her academic appointment, she also invests countless hours in workshops for Christian clergy members to examine subtle yet pervasive notions of replacement theology, that Jesus came to fulfill and/or replace the Mosaic Covenant, and challenges old antisemitic tropes, like “the Jews killed Jesus,” which is most certainly not the case. Rome killed Jesus in a common act of public deterrence reserved for rebels and revolutionaries: state-sanctioned execution.

Autobiography Meets Pedagogy

Let me begin with a few personal words about my way into this work because I think it will be instructive to commenting on the New Testament text I am addressing today: a reading from the fourth gospel, the Gospel According to John, along the way I’ll flesh out why I find this approach to gospel commentary to be a valuable one.

While I didn’t have the words for it as a kid, my earliest understanding of Jesus was informed by a low Christology. More on that in a sec.

My granddad on dad’s side was a lot of things in his life: farmer, school bus driver, grain elevator operator, and pastor, as a second career later in his life. Being one of the youngest of something like 23 grandkids, it was in this later role that I knew my grandad best. His stories, old pictures, his adept gardening, and my dad’s own childhood memories let me know about the days on the farm, but my earliest memories of granddad center around his study and preaching. He was working on this third maser’s degree when he died. Not bad for a farmer!

Some of you know that my own dad is a pastor in the same denomination as the United Church of Christ, and so are his two brothers. The theology and worldview of the UCC, even when I was a kid in the late 80s and early 90s, included some loose association with the so-called Jesus Seminar that, as far as I recall, was a somewhat progressive school of thought in mainline Christianity to recover the “Historical Jesus.” No bullshit, I really do have pretty well formed memories form a fairly young age that studying the NT is also a study in history; not that the gospels are recording history; rather, understanding historical context better informs a study of the gospels.

The work of the Jesus Seminar was to flesh out a characterization of Jesus, the man, in his first century context, and with such context identified, the scholars also worked to judge the veracity of claims attributed to Jesus in the gospel accounts.

Now to be honest, I don’t know the full commitments of the Jesus Seminar, and if I were to apply my framework of biblical criticism to judge the effort of attributing authentic sayings to Jesus, I’d submit that’s not really the right question to be asking: “Which of these attributions are historically accurate?” Rather, I’d suggest that we zoom out just a bit and ask instead questions like, “Did Jesus call himself the Son of Man?” as suggested by the text we’re taking a look at today, or, “What significance does such an idiom, ‘Son of Man’ hold in the Jewish literature of the Second Temple period?” Maybe, “Why would the authors of the gospel accounts use this title or phrase some 80+ times in the gospels?”

But none of this is my central point when raising these bits about Christology and Historical Jesus. What I’m getting at here is part autobiographical and part pedagogical. Let me revisit the question framing I raised a paragraph above. See how these questions move us away from a preoccupation with quoting Jesus and shift us toward asking questions about the broad political, theological, and philosophical milieu into which, first, the Historical Jesus and Jesus movement would have operated, and, second, about the milieu of the gospel writers, some decades after Jesus’s death.

The idea of a low Christology, as contrasted with a high Christology, is to emphasize the human aspects of Jesus that may rise to the divine, on the former outlook, instead of focusing on full divinity, on the latter. So it is, in my mind, that the work of something like the Jesus Seminar to flesh out a historical portrait of a man and a theology of low Christology share significant overlap on the Venn Diagram of my early religious education.

To put things plainly, the Jesus of my childhood was a fully human teacher, healer, and law interpreter—a Jewish rabbi.

Relatedly, the UCC, again, the tradition of my dad, his family, and my childhood, is non-doctrinal and non-creedal. We didn’t say much about the Trinity, but the idea may pop up in this liturgy or that. Ideas of substitutionary atonement never came up until later in my life, and I wasn’t taught the doctrine of original sin. Most powerfully, the tradition I was raised in simply didn’t have a hell. Now I could go on, but it’s probably time I tie a bow around this, before remarking on the text.

After my mom connected with her biological family, discovering that they (we) are Jewish, I experienced a sea change in my life, and my dad was incredibly supportive. When we learned this, I was 16 or 17 years old, and my dad encouraged me (and my mom) to lean into this newly discovered connection to see what it meant for us. Over the next few years, this was a process, I came to realize that connecting with this family and our shared heritage was a puzzle piece falling into place. I met with several rabbis and continue to do so! I was asked, “Do you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?”

I nearly scoffed. And I mean no disrespect. Walk slowly with me.

In the UCC, at least in my experience, that isn’t a question that is asked! Many friends who I know in the UCC wouldn’t even use the term ‘Christian’ to describe themselves, favoring ‘Jesus follower’ as a more apt label. This matters and foreshadows a point I’ll make in just a little while.

Now I don’t want to mischaracterize the UCC as a Christian denomination without some unlearning that is needed to address subtle antisemitic elements, patriarchy, and systemic discrimination that is often part and parcel of Western traditions. Also, despite progressive theology at the national level, given its congregational polity, what is true in one setting of the UCC may not be so in another. Whereas some UCC leaders may affirm a variety of theist, agnostic, and atheist parishioners in the pews, others would demand a more traditional confession of faith.

Regardless, I’m so appreciative of my childhood that emphasized multiculturalism, pluralism, rationalism (maybe to a fault), and more or less this low Christology. Rather than evangelism, we volunteered on service projects; rather than proselytizing, we participated in interfaith dialogues. I don’t ever recall being tasked with “saving souls.” Hell, we knew in the UCC that other Christian traditions found us to be just as damned as so-called unbelievers!

It is no doubt funny and fit for a sitcom that my progressive pastor dad and Baptist mom, through adoption, found she was from a Jewish family. Their oldest son, me!, would embrace this identity and turn his adult life toward the study and practice of Moses, as I’ve done for the past 25 years! But where the autobiographical meets the pedagogical, I note how my childhood religious identity, uncoupled from dogmatic theology, created the possibility space for me to embrace a discovered identity without the need to “deconstruct” a rigid theology of doctrine and dogma. My dad has been one of my most influential teachers, and I love him dearly for it.

Okay, so what? Adam your stories are nice, old man, but I’m here to talk about the text.

The High Christology of the Fourth Gospel

The protracted discussion of low Christology and Historical Jesus set the stage for this discussion. I’ve never much cared for the Gospel According to John. When deployed (inappropriately, if you ask me) by some Christian traditions, the book is a storehouse of proof texts. Everything from attacks on “the Jews” and Pharisees to claims like, “The only way to the Father is through me,” has argued for, or frankly simply presupposed, the full divinity of Jesus who they called the Christ.

I don’t want to get too beyond the purpose of today’s post because next week we’ll have an opportunity to look at some of this rhetoric specifically, but I’ll say for today that this gospel was written for a particular audience in a particular setting, making extensive use of the Hebrew scriptures to build the case for Jesus as one especially anointed. The book is both deeply engaged with Jewish thought (sort of anachronistic term to use here) and the historical details of the first century, while also being deeply critical of the same.

As the introduction to the Gospel According to John appearing in the Jewish Annotated New Testament makes clear, the Johannine community saw themselves as separate from a broadly accepted Judaism in at least some salient ways. This community of both Jewish people and non-Jews sought to create their own identity, and the antisemitic rhetoric is couched in differences over belief (not race/ethnicity).

Jewish readers, for our part, should recognize the Jesus of the gospels as a Torah observant Jew who’s written in similar tone, theme, and imagery as the literature of Daniel, Enoch, Baruch, Esdras, Tobit, and the New Testament Revelation. Even if the early Christians were departing from Judaism, one of the early gatherings of the community in Jerusalem debated whether a person must first become Jewish before following Jesus.

This week, the Lectionary directs readers to John chapter 6 (6.24-35 is the assigned reading). John’s author is constructing his narrative about Jesus to proclaim him as a second Moses, serving bread of eternal life, not the manna served by God during the Exodus trek.

The reading opens with a crowd searching for Jesus after a scene of feeding the multitudes, an event that is reported in all four of the gospels. When the crowd find him, Jesus explains that they seek him not for his signs but because they were fed. Jesus urges them to seek eternal sustenance, which he, the Son of Man, provides. Jesus emphasizes that believing in him is the work of God. The crowd asks for a sign, referencing manna from Moses’ time. Jesus clarifies that the true bread from heaven is given by God and gives life to the world. He declares himself as the bread of life, promising that those who come to him will never hunger or thirst.

Who is the Son of Man?

The label, Son of Man, is used more than 80 times in the gospel accounts and seems to be the preferred label for Jesus—whether by his own use or by the gospel writers placing it on Jesus’ lips, we cannot be sure. To say more about the Son of Man concept, I summarize two chapters from the terrific resource, The Bible with and without Jesus (AJ Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, 2020).

Levine and Brettler note that this somewhat opaque title and concept is a perfect label for the Jesus of the gospels who teaches in parables that are often only understood by those with intimate knowledge of his references (386).

While the title is very popular in the gospels, Levine and Brettler observe that its use drops out of favor very quickly in the writings following the composition of the gospels. They suggest that this decreasing use is because the idiom makes sense in original context, especially noting similar idiomatic use in aramaic phrases, but the more dramatic Son of God title would be more compelling to non-Jewish audiences (386). We know from Roman sources that the Caesars were divinized “Sons of God,” and the gospel use of some phrases, especially proclamations about Jesus in the Lukan birth narrative, including Son of God and Prince of Peace, co-opt the honorifics of the Caesars as a subversive political message against empire.

On those insider-hebrew and aramaic idiomatic uses, Levine and Brettler point to the hebrew use of Son of Man, ben (singular) and b’nei (plural) Adam, as the phrase for a human being and humanity, respectively. This phrasing connects to frequent use of b’nei Yisrael, Israelites, literally children of Israel, that suggests both ethnicity and genealogy (388). B’nei Adam is often used to identify humans, especially contrasted with the power and perfection of the Divine (389). Indeed, a Qumran prayer uses ben Adam, Son of Man, to identify humans “like worms” in contrast to God. To summarize here, ben Adam was a familiar expression used commonly in the Hebrew Bible to contrast humans and humanity from God and to describe the ethnic connections of the Jewish people. This ancient expression is assigned new meaning in the apocalyptic period.

In the book of Daniel, a first century “best seller,” given its prevalence in the Dead Sea literature (400), the phrase, “One like a Son of Man,” intends to communicate the idea of a supernatural figure imbued with the authority of the Ancient of Days; human in appearance (“like a Son of Man” i.e., like a human being) but having a nature more like an angel (“coming on the clouds). We see that this title and imagery for Daniel is personified in the gospels: Jesus is the son of man (399).

Levine and Brettler quote the scholar and professor of Jewish History, Daniel Schwartz, who notes that the major Christian innovation was to take the idea of a Davidic messiah that would restore Israel toward a new belief that the Son of Man, with the authority of God, with new religious status as God’s son, had inaugurated the kingdom (399)—a realized eschatology. The messianic era is not coming; it is here.

Levine and Brettler conclude:

This increasingly divine Son of Man, who becomes the focal point for divine justice, speaks to both the human yearning for a savior and the despair that no one on earth has the power or authority to change the present state of the world. At the same time, it opens the door for anyone who has the charisma, the force, and talent to take on this role (403).

I want to connect this note about the “increasingly divine” Son of Man to theological evolution reported in 2 Esdras, like 7.28-30:

²⁸ For my son the Messiah shall be revealed with those who are with him, and those who remain shall rejoice four hundred years. ²⁹ After those years my son the Messiah shall die, and all who draw human breath. ³⁰ Then the world shall be turned back to primeval silence for seven days, as it was at the first beginnings, so that no one shall be left.

While I’m no specialist, I do suggest that here we have evidence to suggest the evolution of the anointed one from human, ben Adam, Son of Man, toward something more divinized, God’s son, and then we see how the gospels leveraged this new meaning attached to an older phrase to adapt the message for gentile communities.

Behind John’s high Christology is ongoing development of Jewish apocalyptic thought. What began as Jesus the historical figure in the first quarter or so of the first century, continues to grow in divine attribution by the end of the first century when the Johannine Community is composing its guiding document.

Feeding those in the Wilderness

Miraculous feeding is not distinct to Jesus. If you are familiar with Judaism—like, if you’re Jewish—you may be thinking of your own blessing for a meal, and when thinking about blessing bread, there is one bread in particular that features significantly in Jewish tradition: the bread of affliction, matzah! We’re now tapping into the Passover meal! Passover is from the Exodus story, and while journeying in the wilderness, Israel is provided for by its own miraculous feeding of the multitudes.

Manna in the wilderness of Exodus 16. Read, especially, 16.31-32:

The Israelites called it manna; it was like white coriander seed, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey. Moses said, “This is what the Lord has commanded: Let an omer of it be kept throughout your generations in order that they may see the food with which I fed you in the wilderness when I brought you out of the land of Egypt.”

I think we have some classic gospel writer proclamation going here. For the obvious mention, see John 6:31, Jesus speaking:

Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’

Jesus’s feeding isn’t the first time in the tradition of Israel that a hungry and poor multitude was fed through a miraculous act! Recall the Exodus tradition! But it’s not only Jesus and Moses, there is Hebrew prophet Elisha also feeding a multitude!

Elisha, the predecessor of the prophet Elijah, not only shares thematic similarities with feeding the multitudes, he, in fact, participated in his own meal for many, as told in 2 Kings 4:42-44:

A man came from Baal-shalishah bringing food from the first fruits to the man of God: twenty loaves of barley and fresh ears of grain in his sack. Elisha said, “Give it to the people and let them eat.” But his servant said, “How can I set this before a hundred people?” So he repeated, “Give it to the people and let them eat, for thus says the Lord: They shall eat and have some left.” He set it before them; they ate and had some left, according to the word of the Lord.

I submit that the author of the Elisha story and the evangelists reporting Jesus’ feeding were both drawing from Exodus 16 to recall the manna that miraculously provided for Israel in their time of need.

The Apocalypse of Baruch, a late first century, early second century Jewish pseudepigraphical text in the Jewish apocalyptic tradition, also discusses manna. If you choose to dig into this text, also called 2 Baruch, you’ll want to pay attention to 29.8 through 30.5 (complete text). In these verses, the author of 2 Baruch connects the wilderness meal of the Exodus, the manna that we’ve just described, with the messianic age. Consider 29.9 through 30.1 from the Apocalypse of Baruch:

And it shall come to pass at that self-same time that the treasury of manna shall again descend from on high, and they will eat of it in those years, because these are they who have come to the consummation of time.

And it shall come to pass after these things, when the time of the advent of the Messiah is fulfilled, that He shall return in glory.

See how the messianic age is signaled by the author of 2 Baruch to commence with manna once again providing for the Israelites. We have another end-times text that draws this same connection, and this one is even in the Greek scriptures! Revelation 2:17:

Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches. To everyone who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give a white stone, and on the white stone is written a new name that no one knows except the one who receives it [my emphasis].

Conclusion: Messianism, Provision, and the End Times

I am mindful of my own limitations in this research. I hope that I know more than enough to simply be dangerous, but I wouldn’t submit my blog for an academic journal to be sure! But what I’ve argued for here is that, personally, rooting my discussion of NT texts in my understanding of Historical Jesus and the Second Temple period, we see that over time, the evangelists were sharing thought with other apocalyptic texts, either deliberately so, or only responding to the zeitgeist.

Here, Christians interpret divinity and eternal bread of life, which of course I welcome Christians to do! An idea about Torah is that it has 70 faces, emphasizing diversity of interpretation, and I’m happy for the 2,000 year tradition of Christianity to participate in this interpretive pluralism! As for me, I read this text as authored for and by a mixed community of Jews and non-Jews and their hope for deliverance from occupation, like the wilderness manna signals, and a time of abundance in the messianic age.