A Short Introduction
E-Book, Englisch, 184 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-68359-584-7
Verlag: Lexham Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Gerald Bray is research professor of divinity at Beeson Divinity School of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author of numerous books, including Biblical Interpretation: Past and Present,God Has Spoken: A History of Christian Theology, and Preaching the Word with John Chrysostom.
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II THE CLASH of WORLDVIEWS CHRISTIANS IN DIALOGUE WITH JEWS AND PAGANS Everybody in the ancient world knew that Jews were different from other people. As strict monotheists, they were religiously exclusive in a way that other nations did not understand and found hard to accept. A polytheistic society can always add extra gods to its pantheon, and this was often done. Around 164 BC Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Hellenistic ruler of Syria and Palestine, tried to erect a statue of Zeus in the temple at Jerusalem, no doubt thinking that the Jewish God was just a different form of the Greek deity. The result was a national rebellion that led to the recovery of Jewish independence for the next century, when the country came under the sway of Rome. The Romans probably thought much the same thing about Judaism as Antiochus had done, but they were wise enough not to press the point. At the trial of Jesus, Pontius Pilate did all he could to avoid getting involved in a Jewish religious dispute because he knew that it was more trouble than it was worth. Later on, when the apostle Paul fell out with Jewish leaders because of his preaching, the state authorities took a similar approach. Neither Paul nor the Jews made much sense to them, and they did what they could to stay out of the quarrel. When the Jews of Rome started arguing about the claims of Christ, the Emperor Claudius expelled them in order to preserve the city’s peace. Jews were tolerated as long as they kept quiet, but they were not understood, nor were their theological disputes considered significant. For their part, the Jews practiced as much social distancing from others as they could. In Palestine that was relatively easy because they were the majority of the population. Elsewhere it was more difficult, but if they were sometimes forced to compromise, they nevertheless did what they could to maintain their distinctiveness. The Romans did not erect temples to specifically Roman gods in the lands that they conquered, but the Jews built synagogues wherever they went and worshiped separately. More than that, they were happy to explain why they did so. From the days of their exile in Babylon, they made it clear to their pagan neighbors that they worshiped their own God because he was the only one who deserved it. The gods of Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia were nonentities, and to bow down to wood and stone images of them was the height of folly. Worse, it was blasphemy, because it meant worshiping created things instead of the Creator. The Jewish priestly caste was also unlike anything in the pagan world. Jewish priests performed temple sacrifices much as their pagan counterparts did, but they were also intellectuals in a way that pagan priests were not. In the Greco-Roman world intellectuals tended to be anti-religious, viewing temple practices as irrational superstitions, but Jewish leaders thought that faith and philosophy were essentially the same thing. In the words of Psalm 19:7, The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple. Some pagans were impressed by this combination of piety and reason and were attracted to Jewish beliefs, though relatively few became converts. This was not for what we would call theological reasons—most of these people, whom the Jews called God-fearers, were quite happy to accept the main principles of Jewish theology. The problem was that to become Jewish involved more than just adopting a new set of beliefs. The potential convert also had to adopt a different way of life, governed by food laws and other restrictions that posed a formidable challenge to those who were not used to them and who failed to see why they were so important. For men, it meant being circumcised, which was painful for an adult and liable to expose him to ridicule among his peers. Jews were an ethnic minority, and while ethnic minorities can dissolve themselves in the wider population, the reverse is much harder—and therefore rare. Nor were Jews especially welcoming to outsiders. Like white people who attend a black church in modern America, the God-fearers might be perfectly acceptable as adherents but not encouraged to become members of the congregation, because if too many of them did so, the identity of the host community would be lost. We have to admit that the Jews had a point. When the Christian church broke down these ethnic barriers, the God-fearers flooded in and within a generation they had taken over. By AD 100, Jewish Christianity, dominant in the New Testament period, had all but disappeared. By then, of course, the early church had developed its own approach to the Hebrew Bible, which continued to serve as its sacred Scriptures, even though the books of the New Testament were beginning to take their place alongside them. Jews and Christians agreed that the Hebrew Bible was the word of God, inspired by the Holy Spirit, revealed by the work of holy men of old, and given for the instruction of God’s people (2 Pet 1:21; 2 Tim 3:16). Where they differed was in the way in which they interpreted it. Jews continued to regard it as God’s law, meant to be fulfilled by them in detail, even after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in AD 70. The disappearance of the daily sacrifices required considerable adaptation on their part, but the practices of the synagogues had long been in place as a guide, and their teachers (rabbis) took the place of the priests and Levites who could no longer perform their duties in the customary manner. The result was the gradual emergence of what would become an enormous body of “case law,” preserved in what we call the Mishnah and later in the Talmud. Scholars differ about the extent to which this was a consciously anti-Christian development, but Christians played no part in it, and as time went on they became increasingly ignorant of it. This progressive estrangement was probably inevitable because Christian interpreters of the Hebrew Bible read the texts in the light of the revelation of Jesus Christ, whom Jews rejected as their Messiah. As Christians understood it, the Old Testament spoke about Jesus in the sense that it was a collection of prophecies that foretold his coming. The Jewish laws illustrated how Christ would deal with the problem of sin and redemption. By becoming both the great high priest of Israel and the sacrificial victim who paid the price of sin once and for all, Jesus vindicated the truth of the Hebrew revelation and made it redundant at the same time. The fact that the temple had been destroyed was confirmation of this, because its rituals and sacrifices were no longer necessary. Jews had no answer to that other than to hope for the rebuilding of the temple at some future time, but Christians could claim that the Scriptures had been fulfilled in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, making the temple and its sacrifices redundant. To them, the law of Moses was no longer applicable in physical terms, but it remained fully valid at the spiritual level because the ascended and glorified Christ continued to perform the law’s requirements even as he sat at the right hand of his Father in heaven. To the early Christians, therefore, a spiritual interpretation of the Hebrew Bible was the only one that made sense. The letter of the law, to which the Jews obstinately clung, was obsolete, but the spiritual principles that the law taught were fully manifested in Christ and were brought to life in the Christian by the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit in the heart of every believer (Gal 4:6). In this way, Christians could claim that the Old Testament was actually more central to their religious beliefs and practices than it was to the Jews, making them, and not the adherents of rabbinic Judaism, the true Israel and the authentic heirs of the ancient Hebrew patriarchs and prophets. This line of argument permeates Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, where he quotes numerous psalms, in addition to the prophets, as evidence not only that the historic Israel had failed to live up to the covenant that God had made with Abraham and Moses, but that the ancient covenant contained a built-in obsolescence that the coming of Christ has demonstrated and superseded. Consider the following: The lamb that God ordered to be sacrificed as the Passover was a type of Christ, with whose blood (in proportion to their faith in him) they anoint their houses (i.e., themselves), who believe in him. That the creation that God made—Adam—was a house for the Spirit that proceeds from God is something you can all understand. That this injunction was temporary, I prove as follows. God does not allow the Passover lamb to be sacrificed in any place other than the one in which his Name was named, knowing that the days would come, after the suffering of Christ, when even that place in Jerusalem would be given over to your enemies, and all the offerings would cease. And that lamb that was commanded to be wholly roasted was a symbol of the suffering of the cross which Christ would undergo. For the roasted lamb is dressed up in the form of a cross. One spit is transfixed from the lower parts to the head, and one across the back, to which its legs are attached.1 Here we can see clearly the various ways in which the early Christians tackled the Jewish Passover tradition. The lamb was a type of Christ and his suffering, something that Justin claimed was prefigured in the fact that the roasted lamb was dressed up in the shape of a cross. The sacrifice could only be properly accomplished in Jerusalem, which would eventually be destroyed, proving that it was not...
