The first of two videos of the Hebrew Scholar Dr Daniel Boyarin – recommended on one of my Substack feeds.
This is an interesting lecture on the Jewishness of the New Testament, in detail a reading of a text from Mark 7.
Dr Boyarin's contention is that the New Testament "can, and ought to be, read as part and parcel of the Jewish literature of the first century. In fact our best evidence for jewish piety in the first century."
Secondly, and this I found a deep resonance with me, is why Dr Boyarin is not a Christian. Below is extracted from about 45 minutes in – an answer to a question at the end of his lecture:
"I gave a lecture on the Prologue to John, my infamous argument that the Prologue is not a hymn nor a poem, but a Jewish sermon, and one that could have been heard in any synagogue in the Greek speaking Jewish world at the time...
... I said (to Messianic Jews) the first thing you got to do is let go of the Nicene Creed if you want to be real Messianic Jews. I don’t have any problem with Trinity, I don’t have any problem with Incarnation – the seeds of both are already there in in first century Jewish writing, three persons and one God and all of that.
Nicaea was designed precisely to make the final break with Jews ... by imposing on the whole Christian world an orthodoxy that set it apart from Judaism. So the Arians, for example, and other sundry ‘heretics’ were called ‘Judaizers’ by Nicene folk. This explains why the date of Easter was so fraught, because half the church was having Easter when the Jews had Passover.
My argument is not that Jesus is the Messiah, my argument is that Jesus is a plausible Jewish Messiah, and the argument between Jews and Jews was whether he was the one. Not that it was impossible that a human being could be the joining of the divine and the human in one person; not that it was impossible that God would send his Logos to the world in the form of a man, that was not a problem.
The argument was whether this kid, the son of a carpenter, is he the one, or should we look for another? And that’s a very very typical kind of Jewish argument that took place over and over again.
Many times I’m approached by Christians who say "Why did the Jews reject Jesus?" You know what my answer is? Who do you think accepted Jesus, right? And I say, you know Jews, you expect all Jews to agree on anything?
It wasn’t the Jews who rejected Jesus, Jews had an argument about whether or not this man was the Messiah, and from a latter-day Jewish perspective, when people ask why I don’t believe that Jesus was the Messiah, my problem is not that he suffered, not that he was killed on the cross – I don’t have any problem with the possibility that he was resurrected then taken up into heaven, all that fits within the framework of a possible Jewish belief.
He didn’t redeem the world. The world is palpably not redeemed, that’s my problem.
In my reading, and you can tell me I’m all wrong on this, in my reading, much of Christian theology substituted a sense of individual redemption for global redemption, right?
I can understand that, but that’s the part that I and other non-messianic Jews find difficult to swallow. That’s not our understanding of the way the world is going to look after the Messiah comes. So I know there’s going to be a second coming. I know that Christians believe that there’s going to be a second coming, so the whole argument is whether it’s the second coming or the first coming. But the redemption is not here yet, right, and I would have absolutely no problem with Jesus being the Messiah, as long as whoever the Messiah is, Jesus or somebody else, redeems the world."
