Hitzonim | Outsiders

When we left off in John chapter 6, I argued, “the rhetoric against ‘The Jews’ must be understood within its first century context, and, to this end, I wanted to contextualize both the term, Ioudaios, and situate the Bread of Life Discourse in an existing Jewish literary tradition.”

My effort generally with my writing is twofold, right? First, to defang some of the rhetoric that has been leveraged against Jewish people over millennia. For example, by following the consensus view that the English translation of Ioudaios to “The Jews” is anachronistically applied when extended to a modern context and our modern categories of religion and people. The term initially designated an ethno-identifier as those from Judea, and probably a subset of Judeans with whom the Johannine author had some dispute. While I don’t want to waste too much space on this argument here because I gather my posts are too long as is, I do want to say once more that any episode in John’s gospel that complains about being kicked out of the synagogue for their following of Jesus the Christ was most likely the record of a later event read back into the life of Jesus.

Sure, this dispute may have a history behind it. However, I’d submit that this is anachronistically inserted back into Jesus’s life by the Johannine author to motivate their case against other sectarian groups, namely, the Pharisees who developed the institution of a synagogue. John’s author consistently targets the Pharisees through pericopes that are rhetorically motivated.

If I were writing a paper, I’d footnote this: I want to mention one salient view on offer, articulated most recently by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, or endearingly “RDR,” in her newsletter, LIfe is a Sacred Text. She argues that Jesus was a Pharisee in the House of Hillel, and many of the arguments with the so-called Pharisees, as reported in the gospels, record a history of disputes with the rival Pharisaic House of Shammai. Again, I won’t spend time on this here because of my earlier note; my posts are too long as is, and also because Rabbi Ruttenberg’s work is behind a paywall, a nominal subscription fee that I pay, and it wouldn’t be ethical of me to discuss her ideas at length by bringing significant parts of her argument out from behind the paywall. Academic publishing is a racket, so pirate away! But creators like RDR, and to a much lesser extent me, are owed respect and, when applicable, compensation for being individuals working outside of institutions. I’ll save my economic analysis for another day.

While not directly applicable to today’s text, I want to raise the general approach I share with RDR and others. There is a lot more Jewish stuff happening behind the NT text than is part of mainstream discourse. As we’ll see today, Jesus is reported as teaching in a synagogue, and this account appears in all four gospels. Hence, the evidence of the four gospels speaking in favor of Jesus’s teaching in a synagogue speaks against John’s author’s complaint of expulsion from the synagogue during Jesus’s lifetime.

To land my plane with respect to the term Ioudaios, while this ethno-identifier overlaps significantly with those Israelites who were engaged in cultic practice at the Temple, this is conceptually distinct from, say, me and my neighbors wishing each other Shabbat Shalom and baking challah for each other. Yes, there is a thread of (pretty attenuated) continuity from first-century cultic practice to modern practice, but first century Judeans are not 21st century Jews. If I say more on that last point, I’ll open a can of worms.

The point is this. John’s author is not marching with tiki torches chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”

Likewise, the language of eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood, at least in the Johannine tradition, does not refer to the Eucharist or any literal act of consumption but to teaching and learning, already present in the Jewish literary tradition. If you didn’t read the post last week, I saved you about 15 minutes! I’ll add further evidence to this claim in today’s discussion.

If my first effort is a negative pursuit, that is, to say what the text is not saying, my second aim is to offer a more historically sensitive and contextually accurate depiction of the gospel accounts.

I think there is a way to understand my work here as speaking against Christian theology, but this isn’t my objective. I want to make two further points. First, Judaism and Christianity are two different traditions. Because I counter some Christian theology from a Jewish perspective, I leave it to Christian readers to choose how they integrate the information I offer into their theological understanding; though I do hope you understand how some classic Christian rhetoric is harmful to Jewish people. Second, in some sense, my project is one of reclamation. I do sincerely hold the view that the gospels are Jewish literature. They represent a shared history during their time of composition when the late-first and early-second century life in Judea was turbulent and volatile, with the future of the Jewish cult uncertain. By seeking to understand the gospels as one part of this volatility and uncertainty, we can bring to bear yet more data to peer into the development of post-Temple Jewish thought.

Likewise, to the extent that Christians can read some of this literature disrobed from presuppositions and background beliefs, there is an opportunity in this sort of analysis that might more keenly capture what the Jesus movement was about. I’m always trying to take the text on its own terms.

The Text

We pick up the discussion today by continuing the discourse in John. I’ve inserted the passage in whole. John 6:56-69 (NRSVUE):

Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which the ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.” He said these things while he was teaching in a synagogue at Capernaum.

When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” But Jesus, being aware that his disciples were complaining about it, said to them, “Does this offend you? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But among you there are some who do not believe.” For Jesus knew from the beginning who were the ones who did not believe and who was the one who would betray him. And he said, “For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father.”

Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. So Jesus asked the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

Today, I will present further evidence that eating and drinking refer to teaching. Again, I introduced this case last week. Then I’ll pivot to discuss this term, “Holy One of God.” In fact, this analysis won’t take me long, so if you’ve made it this far, you don’t have much more to go!

The Analysis

This Capernaum episode is evidently important to early Christians, appearing in all four canonical gospels, adding weight to the idea that just such an episode occurred or at least that situating Jesus in a synagogue setting and giving instruction mattered to the community. Of course, this is what we would expect from a first-century Jewish teacher and interpreter of the law. Consider these verses from Mark, Matthew, and Luke, where the scene is also reported:

“They went to Capernaum, and when the Sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught” (Mark 1.21 NRSVUE; my emphasis).

Now when Jesus had finished saying these words, the crowds were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority and not as their scribes (Matthew 7:28-29 NRSVUE; my emphasis).

“He went down to Capernaum, a city in Galilee, and was teaching them on the Sabbath” (Luke 4.31 NRSVUE; my emphasis).

To add to the evidence I presented last week that a well-established Jewish literary tradition compares teaching and learning to eating and drinking, the reference to teaching is made explicit in these synoptic accounts.

Now the Synoptics are those that actually have a Eucharistic account or serve as the basis for one, so more would need to be said in a full analysis. For today, I only want to deploy these texts in support of my claim involving John’s gospel that evoking flesh and blood is to mean instruction. That would cohere with a broader interpretation that the author of John’s gospel was developing an instruction manual to teach Jewish and non-Jewish believers about Jesus as the Christ. I think we could see that “this teaching was difficult to accept,” as reported in John 6, especially for Jewish members of the audience because the Jewish population generally did not accept Jesus as Christ. And so, that interpretation doesn’t necessarily speak against the idea that the teaching is difficult because Jewish people are forbidden explicitly to eat living flesh or to consume blood, on either reading, this claim about Jesus would be difficult.

What of the Holy One of God? Here, I think the author of the fourth gospel is situating Jesus once again in Jewish literary tradition, namely, a Deuteronomistic and Levitical tradition. Take this longer passage from the book of Judges, an ancient work of the Hebrew Bible that, in fact, includes some of the oldest material that scholars think appears in the Bible, the Song of Debra (Judges 5.2-31), which could be as old as the ealry-12th, late-11th century BCE, well over 3,000 years ago.

Judges 13:

There was a certain man of Zorah, of the tribe of the Danites, whose name was Manoah. His wife was barren, having borne no children. And the angel of the Lord appeared to the woman and said to her, “Although you are barren, having borne no children, you shall conceive and bear a son. Now be careful not to drink wine or strong drink or to eat anything unclean, for you shall conceive and bear a son. No razor is to come on his head, for the boy shall be a Nazirite to God from birth. It is he who shall begin to deliver Israel from the hand of the Philistines.” Then the woman came and told her husband, “A man of God came to me, and his appearance was like that of an angel of God, most awe-inspiring; I did not ask him where he came from, and he did not tell me his name, but he said to me, ‘You shall conceive and bear a son. So then, drink no wine or strong drink and eat nothing unclean, for the boy shall be a Nazirite to God from birth to the day of his death.’”

Who is the son to be born? Samson! This ancient story from the 8th century BCE was edited by the Deuteronimistic Historian to fit the general Deuteronomic History that kicks off with the book of Deuteronomy. And you all know about this because you’ve been reading our Torah posts, nu? So what does this Nazirite, a holy or righteous person in Jewish tradition who lives an ascetic life, have to do with the Levitical tradition? Well, allow me to drop another passage on you! This time we’re in Psalms. 

There was envy of Moses in the camp,

and of Aaron, the holy one of the LORD (Psalm 106.16, JPS).

Aaron is also considered the Holy One of God, or of Adonai, of YHVH, which observant Jews never pronounce out of respect and replace with Adonai, another name for God or HaShem, meaning literally “the name.” Pro tip: Whenever you see LORD in all caps in English translations of the Bible, the Hebrew behind it is YHVH, the tetragrammaton.

Aaron is the head of the Levitical priesthood, or the Aaronid priestly line, distinct from the Moshite priestly line descended from Moses. The Elohist, Priestly, and Deuretonomistic sources are composed by the Levitical priesthood. When we see Samson, or Judges, edited by the Deuteronimist, and praise of Aaron by the psalmist, we’re seeing validation of, or influence by, the Aaronid, or Levitical priestly line that was the priesthood of the Second Temple.

Very Speculative Closing Thoughts

I want to suggest that the author of John’s gospel is rhetorically attacking Pharisees and lifting up Jesus’s instruction, and positioning him within the Levitical tradition as the answer to what happens to priests after the destruction of the Temple. In effect, to his audience, we know the Temple is destroyed, and thse synagogues and houses of worhsip are important, but they’ve expelled us. What we have in Jesus is the Christ, the one with intimate relationship to God, the father, who offers instruction to eat and drink, like you’ve heard about our Wisdom literature, and like the Holy Ones of God, the ascetic Nazirites and the Prieslty Levites, we can follow Jesus the Christ and recruit others to our movement.

The author seems to have the rhetorical chops and the depth of scriptural knowledge to construct such a nuanced and complex proclamation. Of course, this is my speculation and takes me way further than my lay scholarship entitles me to—anyway, food for thought. See what I did there. In the end, the Jewish people do not follow the Jesus movement. Rome does, and in so doing, they explicity write Jews out of the story. The traditions become separate, and the rest is history, as it were, but this is the case I’m making about the fourth gospel. I guess we’ll have to see how my claims hold up to future scrutitny as we continue together.

Until next time. xx. ❤ -a.