What the Rabbi Taught Me about Jesus

Rabbinic scholar Jacob Neusner examines what was at stake in Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees.

I have never before met a man who has written, translated, or edited more books than most people have read. Jacob Neusner, however, has nearly 500 to his name, as well as innumerable articles. He is a pre-eminent authority on Judaism in the first centuries of the Christian era when, after the fall of Jerusalem, the Jewish community gradually organized itself along the lines it exhibits to this day. He has translated into English virtually all the important works of rabbinic Judaism, including the entire texts of both the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds and many of the commentaries.

I do not know quite what to expect when I visit Neusner’s house to talk about his most recent book. I suppose I thought I would find a dusty residence filled with old Hebrew books and papers—something out of a Chaim Potok novel. Instead, Neusner lives in a two-story, wood-frame house on a quiet street overlooking Tampa Bay. A heavy-set but healthy man of 60 who swims every day, Neusner greets me with a big bouncing dog at his heels. “Germarnu,” he says firmly to the dog, which is Hebrew for “we’re finished.”

He shows me his upstairs office: a remarkably spare room with a computer, a few (mostly empty) bookcases with some Hebrew books, and not much else. He donated most of his library to a university, he explains, and points to some 3½-inch computer disks that contain his translations of early rabbinic texts. “That’s really all I need for the work I’m doing now,” he says simply.

The book he has just completed, now in bookstores, is A Rabbi Talks with Jesus (Doubleday). Neusner wrote it because he believes Christians and Jews rarely argue openly about the substantive issues dividing them—especially about Jesus. Interfaith dialogues are, for him, largely dishonest exercises in which both parties pretend to take the other side seriously but do not.

Both Judaism and Christianity, he says, are guilty of so misrepresenting the other’s religion that serious argument is impossible. Neusner wants to argue with Christians about the issues underlying Christianity because, at bottom, he likes and respects many Christians. In this, Neusner is thoroughly American, raised in a pre-World War II Reform Jewish household and among friendly and tolerant Protestant friends.

A little talk with Jesus

In A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, Neusner takes a look at the central teachings of Jesus reported in Matthew’s gospel—the “most Jewish” of the Gospels. He ignores all questions about Jesus’ miracles or resurrection and limits himself purely to an examination of what Jesus taught in light of the Torah (the Jewish Law): “I explain in a very straightforward and unapologetic way why, if I had been in the Land of Israel in the first century, I would not have joined the circle of Jesus’ disciples,” he writes in the preface. “I would have dissented, I hope courteously, I am sure with solid reason and argument and fact.” Christians will disagree at many such points in the book, of course, but listening in on the “conversation” can illuminate for us what was at stake in Jesus’ battles with the Jewish leaders of his day.

Neusner’s method is to imagine himself a faithful Jew, a proto-Pharisee living with his family in Galilee when Jesus began to preach and draw crowds. The first-century Neusner, like many others, is intrigued and impressed and goes to listen to what this obvious master of the Torah has to say. But he is troubled by the Master’s teaching. While in many ways it is a brilliant expansion and deepening of God’s revelation at Sinai—something Jewish sages have always attempted—it diverges on important points from what, in his opinion, the Torah clearly says.

Neusner then imagines himself holding a conversation with Jesus, putting to him questions and explaining why he cannot become a follower. Neusner draws heavily from the opinions and discussions of Jewish law found in early rabbinic writings, such as the Mishnah. Except for a few rhetorical devices to help Neusner’s monologues along (“Go on.… Tell me more”), Neusner does not try to make up answers from Jesus but simply uses Jesus’ words in Matthew.

While Jesus claimed he came “not to abolish the Torah and the prophets … but to fulfill them,” in fact, he did abolish them, says Neusner. Like many Jewish thinkers, he finds Jesus logically inconsistent. In Matthew 5:18–19, Jesus says, “For truly I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven.” But then, only a few chapters later, Jesus apparently relaxes the commandment to keep holy the Sabbath by allowing his followers to glean grain on that day.

Far more than a prophet

Neusner’s book is valuable for Christians because, as an observant Jew, he is able to explain to Torah-illiterate Christians just what is at stake in seemingly inocuous statements of Jesus. He shows that based solely on what Jesus taught—leaving aside questions of miracles and the resurrection—Jesus is clearly announcing himself as far more than just another Jewish prophet. Neusner is unimpressed by the theological fashion of distinguishing between the “Jesus of history,” the real Jewish preacher behind the Gospels, and the “Christ of Faith,” allegedly made up by the Christian church after the fact. Neusner shows that even within Jesus’ own testimony are radical claims of divine or quasidivine status.

For instance, Neusner asserts that in the first half of Jesus’ famous statements “You have heard it was said … but I say to you …,” Jesus is referring to nothing less than the Torah, God himself speaking through his prophet Moses. Any observant Jew would immediately recognize that fact. Jesus is not simply being assertive, in our modern parlance; he is claiming for himself the right to adapt, or modify, Divine Law. This divine privilege is behind another saying of Jesus, which also greatly disturbs the first-century Neusner: “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”

Neusner wants to ask Jesus, “Who do you think you are—God?”

But it is not merely Jesus’ radical claim of divine authority that bothers Neusner, or his call to radical discipleship that seems to conflict with the responsibilities of hearth and home. No, something more troubles him. Jesus’ message does not appear to be directed primarily at the Jewish people as a whole, to Eternal Israel, which, for Neusner, is the core of rabbinic Judaism: the covenant between God and the Chosen People.

Jesus seems indifferent, even hostile, to the ritual customs of first-century Pharisaism, customs—such as the laws governing ritual purity—designed to keep Eternal Israel “holy” and set apart from the nations. While conceding that Jesus’ criticism of pious people in his time “could well be addressed to pious people I know in synagogues today,” nevertheless, “what bothers me in Jesus’ harsh judgments about the scribes and Pharisees is that I’m one of those people who do the things that the scribes and Pharisees observe.”

What counts for Jesus is moral righteousness, the Christian will argue, the goodness within the human heart. Jesus demands a righteousness “that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees,” a righteousness that not only avoids adultery but does not even fantasize about it, a righteousness that not only refrains from murder but does not reach that level of anger that could commit murder. Anything that gets in the way of this interior moral righteousness—laws that demand adulteresses to be stoned, for example, or which prohibit pious Jews from eating with prostitutes and tax-collectors—Jesus opposes.

Straining at a gnat?

For Neusner, however, as for other Jews, morality is not the only thing that counts. Holiness, being set apart as a chosen people among the nations, is also important, and the laws of ritual purity that Jesus ignores or deems less important are, he says, very important. The Jews are to be holy because God, in the Torah, commands them to be holy. To sanctify means to set apart, to separate.

For Neusner, it is not really a question of either/or: a good Jew should be both morally righteous and obey the minute ritualistic rules, the 613 mitzvot, of the Torah. And he concedes that, even from a strictly Torah-centered point of view, Jesus was technically correct: there is nothing in the Torah that commands ordinary Jews to keep ritual demands of purity for everyday food. Those rules are for the priests serving in the temple, and Jesus was within his rights to say his disciples need not wash their hands before eating. “When [Jesus] considers my interest in eating food by the rules of holiness, that is, in sustaining my life, meal by meal, with God’s will in mind, he thinks it absurd; straining out a gnat, swallowing a camel,” Neusner writes. “All I can say is, ‘Sir, does not God want us to be holy? And are these not the ways that holiness is defined? True, the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule take pride of place. But the Torah has more in it than those commandments, and you yourself say to keep them all.’ ”

In the end, Neusner parts company with the young rabbi and his ragtag band of followers. They leave for Jerusalem and the Cross; Neusner leaves and returns to his village, his family, and, he says, his dog.

But in making this fundamental choice, Neusner helps us, both Christians and Jews, make it as well. Neusner knows what is at stake in Jesus’ teaching, and that this teaching represents something fundamentally different from what would become normative Judaism. Both the primitive Christian church and the Jewish community recognized that very early on. The Jews expelled the Christians from their synagogues as heretics; the Christian community, while at first just a movement within Judaism, quickly welcomed Gentiles into its universal fellowship and abandoned many customs, including circumcision.

Christianity, while seeing itself as fulfillment of God’s plan of salvation in the Hebrew Scriptures, is a New Way—a covenant between God and a new, larger family. Neusner complains that Jesus does not discuss “Eternal Israel” or the covenant, but in fact he does: in Matthew 26:28, he gives his disciples the cup and says, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”

Christ is the new Moses with a New Law, and he becomes the Paschal Lamb sacrificed in a New Passover as part of the New Covenant. Neusner understands all this better than many Christians: he just does not believe it is true.

After his resurrection—which is outside of Neusner’s purview in the book—Jesus announces his ultimate intention for his disciples: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Matt. 28:18–20).

For Jesus and his followers, God’s plan of salvation extends beyond the people of Israel to “all nations.” All humanity is called to be adopted sons and daughters of the Most High. The justice of God expressed by the Jewish law, by the keeping of the 613 mitzvot of the Torah, comes now, through faith, to everyone—Jew and Gentile alike—who believes in Jesus Christ.

Many Jews, keeping the commandments of the Torah, have faith in God. It is an imperfect faith, lacking the full truth brought by Christ, but it is not a platitude to say that Christians can learn much from observant Jews—from the sages of the Mishnah up through Maimonides and the Ba’al Shem Tov, from Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel to Jacob Neusner.

Neusner strongly opposes a false ecumenism that downplays the real differences between religions. Instead, he wants to have an honest, no-holds-barred talk—polite and friendly, to be sure, but frank and to the point. That is the only way sincere, serious people can really learn anything about one another. Jacob Neusner says he has learned much from his encounter with Jesus and, yes, with Christians. Christians can, in turn, learn from Jews like Neusner what is at stake in following Jesus—away from the temple and toward the Cross.

Loren Wilkinson is the writer/editor of Earthkeeping in the ’90s (Eerdmans) and the coauthor, with his wife, Mary Ruth Wilkinson, of Caring for Creation in Your Own Backyard (Servant). He teaches at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

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