The Gospel and Israel

The Edersheim Lectures

Morris

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781630871727
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The mission of the church to the Jews is a unique one. The biblical, theological and practical issues differ from those with other groups because Israel was, and is, the people to whom God gave his promises. However, the unbelief of many Jewish people and the persecution of Jewish people in the name of Jesus makes mission to the Jews uniquely difficult, requiring considerable sensitivity. But it is also full of hope, for there is promise of both a remnant and a fullness coming to faith in Jesus the Messiah. The lectures in this book were part of a series organized by Christian Witness to Israel in Australia to explore this unique challenge and to encourage an intelligent, heartfelt, and persevering interest in mission to the Jewish people. The studies focus on Biblical, theological, historical, and current issues. They were named the Edersheim Lectures after Alfred Edersheim, the well-known nineteenth-century Jewish Christian scholar and author who served in Romania as a missionary and in the United Kingdom as a pastor. Following in his example, The Gospel and Israel engages in an in-depth examination of themes relating to the Jewish people and the Christian faith.

1

Jews and Gentiles and the Gospel of Christ

—Dr. Paul Barnett

I. Historical Reflection

Jewish people are rightly sensitive to their relationship with Christians over two thousand years, having suffered at times greatly at the hands of Christians. But it is worth remembering that Jews faced enormously difficulties from the Greek and Roman world beforehand. Anti-Semitism didn’t begin with Christianity.

In New Testament times the population of the Roman Empire is estimated at fifty-five to sixty million people. As many as 15 percent of that number were Jewish people, though only a minority of them were living within the historical land of Israel. The great majority were living in the Diaspora, six or seven million of them. The family of Saul of Tarsus comes to mind as an example of a Jewish family in the Diaspora.

These Diaspora non-Palestine Jews were for the most part Greek speaking. They met in synagogues and heard the Old Testament read in the Greek Septuagint or some other Greek-language Bible. Many of them made pilgrimages to Jerusalem. In the early 1900s, archaeologists discovered an inscription dedicated to a man called Theodotus whose synagogue and guesthouse was devoted to the accommodation of visiting Jewish people from outside Palestine. We can imagine that such facilities were numerous—a synagogue with a guesthouse attached.

In addition to this very large number of Jewish people in the Greek and Roman world there were also a considerable number of Gentiles who had become disaffected with the polytheism and temple-based paganism of the day, with its lax morality, its numerous gods (who had no morality at all). They were attracted to the monotheism of Israel, to the ethics expressed in the Ten Commandments, to the high standard of family life, and to the stability of family life that Jewish people upheld. Jewish people refused altogether to have anything to do with the termination of the unborn, which of course was prevalent in the Roman world; divorce similarly. And so there was something about the stability and order of family life among the Jewish people that attracted vast number of God-fearers, sometimes called Jewish sympathisers. Hear the words of Josephus:

The masses have long since shown a keen desire to adopt our religious observances, and there is not one city, Greek or Barbarian, nor single nation, to which our custom of abstaining from work on the seventh day has not spread, and where the fasts and the lighting of lamps and many of our prohibitions in the matter of food are not observed.1

There are passages that indicate that Gentile people in large numbers would gather Sabbath by Sabbath, sit in the synagogue, and listen to the Law of the Prophets read and the prayers offered. That is on one side.

On the other side, however, there was hostility toward Jewish people in the Greek and Roman world. It is true that the early Julio-Claudian Caesars (Augustus and Tiberius) protected the Jews. Not that they were particularly drawn to the Jews, but they recognised that there were so many of them in the empire, and they were such a tight community with such an incredible network, that they were a group of people you would not want to alienate because they could do you damage.

So the earlier Julio-Claudian emperors gave Jews a right of assembly in synagogues; they were permitted to meet in ways that other groups were not. They were not required to engage in military service, and there were quite a number of other items that were matters of concession for Jewish people.

Then, on the other hand, we only have to turn to classical authors like Tacitus to see the mockery and scorn with which many intellectuals regarded the Jews. They attacked them for their refusal to eat with other people, to fraternise around the meal table. They mocked them for worshipping the sky; they worshipped no depiction of a god, but nothing at all—just the open sky! “Atheists,” they called them, as they would soon also call the Christians. They mocked Jews for venerating pigs of all things (for not eating pork), and they regarded them as lazy (because they would not work on the seventh day), and so on.

So we find a writer like Josephus engaged in writing apologetics for his fellow Jews. In the period after the New Testament, Christian writers engaged in apologetics to explain misunderstandings about the Christian faith. So too did Philo and Josephus, for Judaism.

Something of a sea change occurred in the Julio-Claudian period under Tiberius Caesar, who retired as a semi-recluse to the island of Capri and handed over the reign of government to the sinister Praetorian prefect Sejanus, who, it would appear, was strongly anti-Semitic. Evidence points to the fact that his appointee, one Pontius Pilate, was actually dispatched to Judea with the brief to subvert the Jewish people. Pontius Pilate was a minor player in the fairly unimportant province of Judea, and yet there is quite a lot written about him in ways that are quite unexpected given his relative unimportance. It appears that Pilate came to Judea to stir up the Jewish people. He had his military troops march into Jerusalem with a depiction of the gods of Rome on the military standards, something previous governors had been careful not to do. Pilate deliberately did this. He introduced coinage into Judea that portrayed the emperor of the day as a god or demigod. Whereas other Roman governors has been careful not to upset the Jewish people, it appears that Pontius Pilate took every opportunity to upset them.

Caligula’s tenure was for a mercifully short period: AD 37–41. He had delusions of grandeur, and not only of grandeur, but also of being a god. So it comes as no surprise that he came into headlong conflict with Jewish people. During his watch, near civil war broke in Alexandria between the very large Jewish community there and the remainder of the Graeco-Egyptian population. Similarly, something approaching civil war occurred also in Antioch in Syria. We know that the same Caesar gave orders that the statue of himself be erected in the temple in Jerusalem, creating a crisis of the magnitude as under Antiochus IV that provoked the rise of the Maccabees in 175 BC. Caligula’s crisis is possibly hinted at in 2 Thessalonians 2:4, which speaks about the man of sin taking his place in the temple. Caligula was succeeded by Claudius, who was friendly to the Herod family but not particularly friendly to the Jews as a people. Whereas Jews hoped for a higher status of citizenship around the empire on an equal footing, one to one, Claudius would do no more than grant them a kind of corporate recognition, but refused entirely to grant them individual citizenship rights.

Nero, who succeeded Claudius, was more interested in acting, singing, and town planning than governing. During his reigning years (AD 54–68), there was a succession of incompetent and corrupt governors appointed to the province of Judea.

And so Judea slid towards the war that broke out in AD 66 with the destruction of much of the city in Jerusalem and the temple itself in AD 70. That occurred under the new Flavian dynasty, whose Caesars were particularly harsh towards the Jewish people. Vespasian decreed that the temple in Jerusalem was to be rebuilt for the Roman god Jupiter.

There were further wars between the Jews and the Romans: in AD 112 and 132–135 (the Bar Kokhba revolt). Jewish people were then expelled from their homeland in 135.

In the period that follows, we now see the development of Mishnaic and Talmudic Judaism—what we would call Rabbinic Judaism. Judaism today is a development out of the Judaism that followed the 132–135 period.

It is within this set of documents we find a few references to Jesus. These are, without exception, negative; they account for his virgin birth in term of an illicit liaison between a Roman soldier named Pandera and a Jewish girl, Miriam (Mary).

Well, so much for this brief sketch.

During this period we see that the Christians were very much identified as within Judaism in the beginning, and only later did they emerge in their own right. In Acts 18, in the incident involving the governor Gallio—dated about AD 51–52—the believers are still part and parcel of Judaism. And the accusation against them, said Gallio, must be sorted out by them, “in house,” not by the civic authorities. Yet just a dozen years later in the year 64 we have the great fire of Rome. Christians (not the rabbinic Jewish community) are scapegoated by Nero as the cause of the fire and persecuted accordingly. By that time, just a dozen years after Gallio’s verdict, in the eyes of the Romans Christians are a group distinct from the Jewish community.

The Gospel of Matthew, written in the 70s, makes references to “their synagogues,” which certainly implies a distinction from Christian “synagogues,” or churches. The Book of Revelation refers several times to the synagogue of Satan, also implying separation of church from synagogue. The Jerusalem church—Christians in Jerusalem—escaped from the war zone to the city of Pella, one of the cities in Decapolis, on the eastern side of the Jordan River, for the duration of the war, 66–70. But they came back to Jerusalem after the war in AD 70, and the Christian historian Eusebius gives us a list of bishops of that Jewish Christian church, many of whom were relatives of Jesus.

But Jewish Christianity after a period degenerates into a heresy called Ebionism—a set of beliefs where Jesus is the Messiah, but his deity is questioned. He was not born of a virgin; he is not regarded as God; there is still an emphasis on legalism, circumcision, Sabbath keeping; and the apostle Paul is not spoken well of. So Ebionism, which is referred to by the early Christian writers Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Hippolytus, survives for a while, but inevitably disappears since it is neither Judaism nor Christianity.

In the 90s, there is evidence from the Book of Revelation that Jews were a source of persecution against Christians. So, in the 70s the Jews lose their temple, but they still have to pay the temple tax each year for the upkeep of the temple, which, to rub salt into the wound, is now the pagan temple to the god Jupiter. Nonetheless, the payment of the Fiscus Judaicu...