Surprised by Jesus Again

Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

Jason Byassee

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780802871688
• eBook ISBN:
  9781467456524
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

A bold, historical, robust approach to reading Scripture and encountering Jesus anew

No one expects to be surprised. Yet biblical interpretation can do exactly that. Christians expect to see Jesus as they read the Bible, but when and how Jesus actually speaks through Scripture can still surprise us!

Drawing on the early church's theological giants—Origen, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and more from the historical cloud of witnesses—author Jason Byassee models how we can recover ancient Christians' multiple ways of reading the Bible to our benefit. As Byassee says, God himself is Jewish, Catholic, and Pentecostal—so much larger than our own little corner on the truth—and this book offers readers a refreshingly enhanced vision of the Bible and of Jesus himself.

1

Grafted In

Relearning God’s Promises to Israel

It is the spring of 2017. I am co-teaching a class to a room of Jews and Christians. My colleague, Rabbi Dr. Laura Duhan Kaplan, and I are trying to talk about God again. For a millennium and a half or more, Christians and Jews couldn’t talk explicitly about God. Jews mostly had to figure out how to survive Christian mistreatment. Christians launched evangelism efforts that didn’t work and crusades and inquisitions and pogroms of which we’re still ashamed. More recently, in modernity, as Christians recoiled and reassessed after the Holocaust and Jews in the West muscled in to a more secure place, we had conversations about things that matter: civil rights, human rights, justice around the world, Israel and its policies toward its neighbors and its protection.¹ These weren’t always pleasant, but they were good. And they’re not what I mean here.

In our class, Jews and Christians: A Theological Journey, we’re talking about the God of Israel, who Christians believe has grafted us into his covenant with his people by grace. That’s new, perhaps unprecedented since Christians took civic power in exchange for blessing the emperor in 313 CE. And it’s really hard. Few of us are good at it. In my sentence above we would have to define and endlessly qualify some words: God, Israel, Christians, graft, us, covenant, people, and grace, for starters.

So there I was in class, giving a lovely talk (or so I thought) on the virgin birth. Our textbook’s author, Michael Goldberg, had slid by this sticking point fairly quickly.² His book gives brilliant, sometimes breathtaking readings of Exodus and Matthew that show Christianity itself to be a reading of Judaism, a re-presentation of the Jewish people and story and God in a new setting. Some scholars, Christian and Jewish and secular, dismiss Matthew’s quotations of Israel’s scripture. Matthew tends to break out the trumpets: “Behold! This was done to fulfill . . .” The easiest response among modern critical scholars is to say, “Um, actually, Isaiah didn’t mean that at all.” I’ve heard one rabbi say that Christians’ claims that Jesus fulfilled the law is a bit like shooting arrows into a forest, going and seeing where they stick, and then painting a bull’s-eye around the arrow. He’s not impressed. Neither have modernist biblical critics been. Isaiah 7 is not, on any reasonable grounds, about Jesus of Nazareth. As Jews pointed out millennia ago, when the prophet says an almah will be with child, it means, in Hebrew, simply “a young woman” (Isa. 7:14). The Jewish translators who created the Septuagint rendered the word in Greek as parthenos, a virgin. That’s an acceptable translation, not just in Greek, but in many cultures. But then for Christians to take that word as a prophecy of a future virgin birth fulfilled in Jesus is . . . not convincing. Unless you’re already convinced.

We Christians have had responses to this.³ Isaiah 7:14 seems to blow its own trumpets: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son” (KJV). Why the excitement? It’s not surprising that a young woman gets pregnant. Isaiah’s own enthusiasm suggests something more is afoot than the birth even of a very special child. Jews would say: still not convincing. In class I wasn’t trying to make the virgin birth convincing. It’s not, on its own. You only believe in it because you already believe in Jesus. If you believe God is fleshed in this one Jew, you’re ready to believe a lot more. My goal was to make it sound as not-ridiculous as possible. My colleague, Rabbi Laura, helped a great deal. “Matthew is just doing what we Jews always do,” she said. “Reading the Bible in a new circumstance in surprising ways.” She doesn’t think the virgin birth is true, I imagine. She just doesn’t think it’s ridiculous.

I taught the virgin birth in as Jewish a way as possible. Think back over the history of Israel: Almost no important figure gets born without trouble. Every time, there is a problem getting them born. Abraham and Sarah cannot have a child at first. Now they have more children than anyone can count, more than the sands of the sea or the stars in the sky. Ditto Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel. These are the children of Israel, among whom we Christians count ourselves in Christ. Hannah is desperate for a child. Her husband, Elkanah, comforts her tenderly, “Am I not more to you than ten sons?” (1 Sam. 1:8).⁴ The text is too nice to say it, but Hannah must think, “Yeah, no, not actually.” She prays feverishly. And she is given Samuel. Whom she immediately gives back to God. These stories show that God is the giver of life. They show that God understands women and men who wish to give birth more than they wish for air or water, but cannot conceive. They do not show that if we just pray enough, we will get a child, contrary to much pastoral malfeasance. They do promise that we can all bear miraculous fruit. We just don’t get to determine in what form that fruit will be born: in physical wombs or spiritual. And a great mystery hangs over it all that no one can pretend to understand.

Then we Christians start up with stories that are fashioned in the forge of Israel but not celebrated by Jews as scripture (Luke 1:5–25, 57–80). Elizabeth and Zechariah want a child, like the matriarchs and patriarchs of old. Zechariah is a priest. And Gabriel turns up in the temple to tell him the good news: old as they are, God has heard their prayer and will grant them a miraculous child, who will make for rejoicing in Israel. Zechariah’s response is priceless: “I work here every day, and one thing that cannot happen is an angel cannot show up and say a miracle is coming. I have a Master of Divinity degree to prove it” (I’m paraphrasing a little). The angel’s response is more priceless still: “You claim to speak for God, but you can’t listen when God has something to say back? You’re not allowed to talk anymore.” Zechariah is voiceless until the child’s birth, and it all turns out as the angel said: Elizabeth becomes as great with child as she ever wanted. Their son announces the coming king of Israel, savior of the world, before whom idols fall and shatter.⁵

That’s a Jewish story. Retold and treasured by what quickly became a largely gentile church, but that doesn’t make it not-Jewish. We Christians are a Jewish sect at first. Israel’s stories are not our stories originally, as gentile Christians. The Bible is not our book. God is not our God. Only by grace, through Jesus, are we given access to Israel’s stories, scriptures, salvation. And this is how that happens.

The same angel, perhaps still a little miffed from the visit with the priest, turns up to an unmarried Jewish teenager from the sticks. The angel tells Mary she’ll have a child. And that child will be God’s child. And will save the universe. All creation waits with baited breath for her reply. What will it be (Luke 1:26–38)? God will not force himself on anyone. God wants willing conspirators, not slaves. The entire hackneyed plan to save the world and make right all things humans have made wrong waits on the word of a teenage girl from a despised religion in an occupied backwater from which nothing good is supposed to come. What will it be?

OK.

Or, as the church has often rendered this in Latin, fiat, let it be. Just as God said when creation fell from his fingers: “Let there be light.” Just as Abram said when God appeared to him to uproot and go away and become father to countless many . . . he doesn’t say anything; he just goes. This is what God’s people are to do. When God has a cockamamie scheme to repair the world, we roll with it.

Mary’s miraculous pregnancy is a presentation-all-over-again of Israel’s miraculous pregnancy tradition. It is, of course, re-presented with a twist—a fulfillment, we Christians would say. Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah, and Elizabeth got pregnant miraculously, but a man was involved. Through the original cockamamie scheme God designed for us to be intimate with our spouse and bear the wondrous fruit of children, these women bore sons who tilted the world on its axis. Mary requires no man to get pregnant. Rowan Williams, former archbishop of Canterbury, points out that anytime anyone trusts the God of the universe, new things get born.⁶ Miracles happen. New ministries arise. The creative way of God in the world is unleashed anew and inexplicable stuff gets going. Mary trusts so much she gets pregnant. She is the first Christian. Salvation begins with her yes.⁷ Ever since, Christians have tried to go on saying yes like her. We mostly fail. But that she did not fail means salvation is loose in her and then in our flesh. And the Holy One of Israel gets born.

St. Symeon the New Theologian in the eleventh century described the virgin birth this way: God had already made a person with no parents: Adam. God had already made a person from a man alone: Eve. God has made people from two parents: all the rest of us. The one thing God had not yet done was to make a person from a woman alone: Jesus.⁸ What God started in the garden, God finishes with the annunciation. Note well: this proves nothing. There is no bull’s-eye drawn around an arrow here. It just flirts with us. It’s supposed to delight. It suggests God works in the most beautiful way possible. Like an artist finishing a canvas, God returns to the work of creation and finishes it in Mary’s untouched womb. She is like the temple: filled with divine Shekinah (Spirit) that births holiness in the world. She is like the burning bush: filled with the fiery presence of God and yet not consumed. Christians have broken out some of our highest praise and our most Israel-infused language to speak of Mary. The doctrine of the virgin birth might be wrong, but it’s not wrong because it’s non-Jewish or anti-Jewish.

Learning from Jews about the Trinity

Not bad, eh? Did my best.

But the Jewish students didn’t want to talk about Mary at all. They wanted to talk about . . . other things.

“So the virgin birth is a sign that Jesus is God, right?” one asked.

“Yes,” I said, bracing myself.

“So how come you Christians have three Gods?”

“Yes!” our Hasidic rabbi intoned. “That’s why I can go into a mosque and pray but can’t go into a Christian church. You’re technically tritheists.”

“Pagans?” I ask. He nodded solemnly.

Two other Jewish students’ hands shot up. I looked over at Laura for backup. She smiled but did not intervene, as if to say, “You’re on your own, kid.”

I flailed around a little and went away distraught, thinking. I’m still thinking now, months later. Do we Christians worship three gods? Of course not, we have all always been quick to say. But Jews don’t see it that way. Despite our disavowals, it sounds like we have three beings running around claiming to be God. That’s polytheism. Paganism. Not the sort of thing the God or the people of Israel regard benignly.

And, so what? Who cares if Jews think we Christians are tritheists? The word monotheism is a modern, history-of-religions classification. Europeans in the nineteenth century came up with taxonomies to describe religions without confessional language and lumped those who claim to have one God into one category (the superior one, of course—religion scholarship had a long way to go then; still does). But perhaps we Christians should have never been happy with such a classification. We claim that Jesus is God. The Holy Spirit is God. And there is only one God—Father, Son, and Spirit. And we can’t understand that. We can only adore. Jews say, “OK, fine. Just don’t claim not to be tritheists.”

This is a wonderful and blessed challenge, nearly unprecedented since the church’s first generations. To have Jews nosing around in our stuff and diagnosing missteps is a treasure. And it made me ask, Why do I care whether God is one? Or whether Jews think we have the right answer to that question? All my theological concern is trained on those who deny Jesus’s lordship, or the Spirit’s divinity. Christianity falls apart without those beliefs, so I wrote a whole book to support them.⁹ But what if it turns out that God isn’t one, by Jewish or other lights? If we’re not in the right place in German university professors’ nineteenth-century taxonomy? If Jews can’t pray in church and Muslims agree to kick us out of the one-God club? So what? Jesus saves, not proper categorization in the university or among our religious neighbors. Why not give up the oneness of God with a shrug?

Because the Bible will not let us. “Hear O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone” is Israel’s most important affirmation (Deut. 6:4). To have other gods besides the Holy One of Israel is to undo our own Jewish foundations, to saw off the branch on which we sit. Israel’s scripture has hints that there may be something like pluriformity within YHWH’s oneness: “Let us make,” God says in Genesis 1; Wisdom is an agent and deserves capital letters in some places (Prov. 8); Abraham’s visitors by the oaks of Mamre are three and yet they are one “Lord” (Gen. 18). But no one would think this meant anything like a Trinity if they didn’t already think that.

These conversations with Jewish communities are driving Christian scholars to reexamine our own roots and remember that these are Jewish roots. What if our gospel is true—Jesus is Lord of all, not least of his own people, and God’s covenant with Israel is unbroken? Can we redo Christian teaching around God’s faithfulness to Israel? We have to, by the way. Because otherwise this is the gospel we preach: “This man loves you enough that he would leave his wife for you.” Pause. Of course, if he’s the sort of man who would leave his wife for another, why should you trust that man?¹⁰ The gospel cannot be that God left Israel for the gentiles. If it is, why should we trust that God? Flighty and unpredictable and fickle. No thanks. What if instead God has to be true to God’s own word whether we reciprocate or not? That’s a God of grace, who chooses Israel, and then through Israel and church blesses the world.¹¹

In the ancient church, a man named Marcion tried to rip up those Jewish roots. He insisted that nothing Jewish can stay. Jesus is so world-turning that the old is gone. Well, what about the Old Testament bits quoted in the New? They have to go too. The fact that you’re left with little more than some scraps of the New Testament didn’t stop Marcion. The church condemned him. We said no—whatever Jesus is, he has to be a fulfillment of the story of God’s promises to Israel. This is not a new religion. It is the old re-presented in some way. It’s Judaism for gentiles.

But then that’s awkward. There are still Jews. Please, God, let there always be, and may they always flourish. Christians’ relationship to the covenant has always been a contentious one. Because Jewish people already have a Judaism for gentiles. It’s called becoming Jewish. Or honoring the Jews. The laws of Noah, given as his family and the animals disembark the boat in Genesis, are those that Judaism has taken to be for all people (Gen. 9:1–7). The book of Acts shows that the church codified a version of those laws for gentile followers of Jesus: don’t worship idols, don’t eat blood or anything strangled or anything offered to idols, and don’t fornicate (Acts 15:28–29). This is embarrassing too: Christians don’t even follow these few laws! Or if we have, we’ve attended to the ones about sex and dropped the ones about food. Jews have 613 mitzvoth given by God to bless Israel and the world, and they do their best to follow them. I’ve seen Jews cover themselves in tallit, a beautiful prayer shawl, as a symbol for the whole Torah—all 613 commandments—under which they seek God’s tender mercy and find it. We Christians can’t handle five.

Christians looking back at our history find plenty of anti-Judaism for which to repent. And we find occasional sources of light. St. Paul himself, surprisingly, is one of the latter in some places. In Romans 9–11 he wonders how God is being faithful to his covenant to Israel. Most Jews are not interested in the messiah Paul preaches. And yet Israel’s unfaithfulness is not a new theme. It’s as old as Moses (see Exod. 32). The prophets would have nothing to say without this theme. But the covenant is not conditional. God does not promise to keep God’s promises to Israel only if Israel is faithful. God keeps them whether Israel is faithful or not. God is married to the unfaithful spouse in Hosea. God is true even if every person is a liar (Rom. 3:4). How exactly will God keep God’s promises to Israel to bless the whole world through them? Paul isn’t sure. He collapses in doxology, exhausted after wondering at such questions. “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!” (Rom. 11:33). Exasperated doxology is not a bad place to finish. Or start.

Paul says other things elsewhere. ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Michael Gulker
• Preface
• 1. Grafted In: Relearning God’s Promises to Israel
• 2. Origen: Blush While You Read
• 3. Mary: Ponder and Treasure
• 4. Augustine: Suffused with Delight
• 5. Learning Scripture in Nazareth: God Is Jewish, Catholic, and Pentecostal
• 6. Gregory the Great: Tracker of Hidden Mysteries
• 7. The Institution of the Old Testament: No Death, No Resurrection
• 8. Four Senses: Reading the Bible with the Early Church
• Postlude: Doxological Science
• Bibliography
• Index of Authors
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Scripture References