The Bible With and Without Jesus

What Jews and Christians Can Learn from Each Other's Scriptures

Amy-Jill Levine, Marc Zvi Brettler

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780062560179
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

The editors of The Jewish Annotated New Testament show how and why Jews and Christians read many of the same Biblical texts – including passages from the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and the Psalms – differently. Exploring and explaining these diverse perspectives, they reveal more clearly Scripture's beauty and power.
Esteemed Bible scholars and teachers Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Z. Brettler take readers on a guided tour of the most popular Hebrew Bible passages quoted in the New Testament to show what the texts meant in their original contexts and then how Jews and Christians, over time, understood those same texts. Passages include the creation of the world, the role of Adam and Eve, the Suffering Servant of Isiah, the book of Jonah, and Psalm 22, whose words, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me, " Jesus quotes as he dies on the cross.

Comparing various interpretations – historical, literary, and theological - of each ancient text, Levine and Brettler offer deeper understandings of the original narratives and their many afterlives. They show how the text speaks to different generations under changed circumstances, and so illuminate the Bible's ongoing significance. By understanding the depth and variety by which these passages have been, and can be, understood, The Bible With and Without Jesus does more than enhance our religious understandings, it helps us to see the Bible as a source of inspiration for any and all readers.

Chapter 1

On Bibles and Their Interpreters

Same Stories, Different Bibles

THE BIBLE, in the singular, does not exist; different communities have different Bibles. We don’t mean that they prefer different translations but that they have Bibles comprised of different books, in different orders, in different languages. The biggest difference is between the Jewish and Christian communities, for only Christians have a New Testament. In fact, only Christians have an “Old Testament,” which itself differs among the various Christian communions. Jews have the Tanakh, and although the Old Testament and Tanakh share books, the communities interpret the shared verses differently. The Old Testament and the Tanakh are not, today for Christians and Jews, self-standing books. Christians read their Old Testament through the lens of the New Testament, and Jews read the Tanakh through the lens of postbiblical Jewish commentaries.

These differences raise major interpretive questions. For example, who is the Bible’s main character? Is it God? Is it Jesus? Does it lack a main character? What is its main point, or is there one? Does the “original” meaning of a passage, apart from Christian or later Jewish interpretation, still have anything to say to us?

Different interpretive communities answer these questions differently—and that is what this book is about. What does it mean to read, and interpret, sections of the Bible with and without Jesus? What is gained, or lost? We are not advocating for one correct way of reading, but we hope, first, that our book will help all readers to see how and why the Bible is such a contested work. Second, we hope that people with different interpretations—with and without Jesus—will talk to each other and understand each other better. The goal of biblical studies should not be to convert each other or to polemicize. Conversion is a matter of the heart, not of the academy; polemics function more to “speak to the choir” and shore up internal unity rather than to facilitate understanding, let alone to show love of neighbor. Biblical studies, as we understand it, can rather help us better to understand each other, and to move forward in appreciating the Bible’s power and importance.

As the early followers of Jesus, reflecting on the proclamation of his resurrection, turned to books such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Psalms more fully to understand their risen Lord, they found throughout the ancient sources new meaning. Instead of asking what the texts meant in their original contexts, they asked what the texts meant to them, in their own lives centuries later. Jews throughout the ages have done the same. They looked to their ancient scriptures to understand practices such as honoring the Sabbath and aiding the poor, as well as postbiblical events such as the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by Rome in 70 CE and later their persecution by Christians. In this turn to scripture, Jews and Christians also fought like family members over the disposition of their parents’ legacy. Each claimed the scriptures for themselves, and in doing so they read the texts not only as sources of comfort and inspiration but also as sites of contention and polemic. This book seeks to foster a different future, where Jews and Christians come to understand each other’s positions and beliefs, and at the minimum, respectfully agree to disagree.

This is no easy task. It involves appreciating what biblical texts meant in their earliest contexts¹ and then explaining how over the centuries different communities with different concerns developed different interpretations. It also means understanding how these ancient scriptures became weaponized—on papyrus, parchment, vellum, paper, and now online—in the war over the “rights” to their meaning. This war continues today, when a Christian tells a Jew, “You obviously don’t understand your Bible because, if you did, you would see how it predicts the Messiah Jesus,” and when a Jew responds, “Not only do you Christians see things in the text that are not there, you mistranslate and you yank verses out of context.” Neither position is helpful, since neither appreciates how and why Jews and Christians understand their own texts. When read through Christian lenses, what the church calls the “Old Testament” points to Jesus. When read through Jewish lenses, what the synagogue calls the “Tanakh” speaks to Jewish experience, without Jesus. When read through the eyes of historians, these original texts yield meanings often lost to both church and synagogue. Even the terms “Old Testament” and “Tanakh” create problems, as we’ll see below.

In this book we focus on texts from ancient Israel that are central in the New Testament. We cannot be comprehensive, for the New Testament either cites directly or alludes to this antecedent scripture from the first verses of Matthew’s Gospel to the last verses of John’s Revelation. Therefore, we chose texts and ideas most people would know, such as God’s speech in Genesis 1:26, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness”; the meaning of Isaiah 7:14, “A virgin shall conceive” or “a young woman is pregnant”; and the centrality of blood for atonement.

Each of our ten central chapters, Chapters 3–12, attends to a particular text or theme and has the same structure. In most cases beginning with a New Testament citation, we then backtrack to examine that citation in its original context. We do our best to determine when and why that original text was written as well as how to translate the Hebrew words (often a problem). Next we see what the verses meant in Jewish sources earlier to and contemporaneous with the New Testament, such as the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew texts) and the Dead Sea Scrolls (scrolls and fragments of biblical and nonbiblical texts, dating from the fourth or third century BCE to the second century CE, found near the Dead Sea). Here we show both how the New Testament draws from Jewish reflections and where it offers distinct readings. The next step is to look at later selected Jewish texts, some of which engage those New Testament readings, and not usually sympathetically. In some cases, we look at how the text was interpreted in early Christian, post–New Testament tradition. We conclude each chapter by seeing what Jews, Christians, and indeed all readers might learn today from those ancient verses. We cover a broad chronological sweep, from the early first millennium BCE, to the first century CE, to the twenty-first century.²

We roughly follow the canonical order of the Bible, but to do this precisely is impossible, since the order of books in the Old Testament differs from that of the Tanakh, and we do not want to privilege either.

Christian and Jewish Bibles

THE IMPRECISE TERM “Bible” derives from the Greek ta biblia, “the books,” and it suggests that a particular collection of books has priority. There is no such thing as “the Bible”; different religious communities have different Bibles.³ The Samaritan community has only the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, as its Bible; it lacks works such as Jeremiah and Psalms. Extending scripture, the Orthodox Tewahedo canon used predominantly in Eritrea and Ethiopia includes 1 Enoch and Jubilees and 1, 2, and 3 Meqabyan (which are not, contrary to the sounding of the name, related to 1, 2, and 3 Maccabees, which are found in other Christian canons); additional books have canonical status as well. Other Christian movements, such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (commonly called “Mormons”) and Christian Science, regard denominationally specific works as also authoritative. It should be obvious that the Jewish Bible does not include a New Testament—and thus reflects a Bible “without Jesus”—although we have often been surprised by our students’ unawareness of this fact. Then again, Messianic Jews do include the brit chadashah—which is how one would say “the New Testament” in Hebrew—as part of their canon.

Nor is the Old Testament the same for all Christians. The Roman Catholic, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox, and Assyrian Churches include books written by Jews before New Testament times but preserved in Greek, such as Sirach or Judith, as part of their Old Testament. These books are typically called the “Apocrypha” by Protestants or, for those communions that hold them as having the status of scripture, “deuterocanonical” or part of the “second canon.”

Part two of the Christian Bible is “the New Testament.” The word “testament” is a synonym for “covenant,” and the term “New Testament” used for the second part of the Christian canon is first attested by the North African church father Tertullian (ca. 155–ca. 240). The expression refers to Jeremiah 31:31: “The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.” We return to Jeremiah 31, which the New Testament frequently either cites or evokes, in our concluding chapter.

The terms “New Testament” and “Old Testament” are theologically loaded. In this book, we use “New Testament” in a technical sense to refer to the twenty-seven books from Matthew to Revelation that all Christian churches eventually recognized as canonical.⁴

It is more difficult to know what to call scripture’s first section. The early rabbis used the Hebrew terms mikra’, “that which is read,” or kitvei hakodesh, “the holy writings,”⁵ but these terms are no longer broadly employed. “Old Testament,” first attested in the late second century CE by the church father Melito of Sardis,⁶ makes sense only within a Christian context. One needs a “New Testament” in order to have an “Old Testament.” Making the expression “Old Testament” even more problematic is a verse from the New Testament, Hebrews 8:13, which says, “In speaking of ‘a new covenant’ [the Greek can be translated as “new testament”] he [Jesus] has made the first one obsolete. And what is obsolete and growing old will soon disappear.” In fact, in the early second century, a fellow named Marcion declared that this first testament should be rejected, along with the God it proclaimed. The nascent Christian Church declared Marcion a heretic—yet the rhetoric of the “Old Testament God of wrath” versus the “New Testament God of love,” frequently heard in churches even today, repeats Marcion’s heresy and is a misreading of both testaments.

The term “Hebrew Bible,” coined by modern biblical scholars seeking a more religiously neutral term than “Old Testament,” is inaccurate, since part of this text is in Aramaic, not Hebrew. “Jewish Bible” is problematic for a different reason: it strips this work from the Christian canon.

Some scholars, in the effort to avoid the problem of connecting the term “old” with something outdated or decrepit, speak of the “First Testament.”⁷ This good-faith effort has its own problems, as Jews don’t have a “first Testament” but an “only Testament.” Worse, if the earlier material is the “First Testament,” then the New Testament becomes the “Second Testament,” and there is nothing positive about “second,” as second hand, second place, and second rate all suggest.

To refer to the Jewish Bible, we use the medieval term “Tanakh,” an acronym of Torah (Hebrew “instruction”; the first five books, also known as the Pentateuch), Nevi’im (Hebrew “prophets”), and Ketuvim (Hebrew “writings”), the term Jews typically use, and the title for the New Jewish Publication Society translation.⁸ “Tanakh” refers to the Jewish Bible in its medieval form, as codified by scholars called the Masoretes, and therefore it is also called the Masoretic Text (MT); these scholars added written vowel points, cantillation marks, and other signs to the consonantal text.⁹ When we refer to more or less the same work within a Christian context, we use the term “Old Testament.” When we are talking about the books of this corpus, in their original historical setting, we will use, for convenience, both “Hebrew Bible” and “scriptures of Israel.”

We say “more or less” because the Christian Old Testament is not identical to the Jewish Tanakh. This is true even within Protestantism, which lacks the Apocrypha. Unlike the three-part division of the Jewish canon, the Christian Old Testament has four sections: Pentateuch, Histories, Poetry and Wisdom, and Prophecy. The last book in the Old Testament is Malachi, and the end of Malachi predicts the return of the prophet Elijah and the coming of the messianic age. Thus, the Christian canon emphasizes prophecy in the Old Testament and fulfillment of that prophecy in the New Testament. By putting the pro...