The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  Mark 1:1  NASB

Son of God – Jewish orthodox rabbi Daniel Boyarin (yes, the Daniel Boyarin) wrote The Jewish Gospels, just published this year.  In it he makes the claim that the gospels are thoroughly Jewish, including the idea of a divine Messiah who will suffer and die.  Working from the Jewish understanding of the prophetic passage of Daniel 7, Boyarin shows that long before Yeshua was born, some elements of Judaism were already teaching about, and looking forward to, a second divine person who would fulfill the role of the Messiah.  In fact, Boyarin shows that in ancient Jewish thought the title “son of God” designates a human potentate, anointed by God as king of His people, while the title “son of Man” designates a divine personage who comes to earth with the full authority of God’s throne.  That’s right.  I didn’t mix these up.  “Son of God” is the human savior.  “Son of Man” is the divine manifestation.  Boyarin’s point is that both of these figures were present in Judaism from at least the 2^nd century BC.  Boyarin suggests that we can now perfectly understand why thousands of Jews accepted Yeshua as the prophesied Messiah.  They were expecting him.  The only significant difference between Judaism’s view of the Messiah and the claim of the gospels is that the gospels tell us that the Messiah has arrived.  Clearly, those Jews who accepted Yeshua’s claim did not do so because they converted to a new religion called Christianity.  Christianity as a separate religious system (with a separate Christology) didn’t emerge for another 200 years.  The earliest followers of the good news of Yeshua were Jews, and they remained Jews while they believed Yeshua was the Jewish Messiah.

Boyarin’s book is just one more in a line of scholarly works that questions the traditionally held Christian position concerning the uniqueness of Yeshua.  But Boyarin is a Jew.  Other scholars such as Gage, Young, Eisenbaum, Hengel and Hegg have been in the Christian camp.  Now a world-famous Jew has announced that the precursor to Trinitarian dogma and the inclusion of Torah in the Messianic community is Jewish, not Christian.  “The implication of my argument,” says Boyarin, “is that Christianity hijacked not only the Old Testament but the New Testament as well by turning that thoroughly Jewish text away from its cultural origins among the Jewish communities of Palestine in the first century and making it an attack on the traditions of the Jews, traditions, I maintain, it sought to uphold and not destroy, traditions that give the narrative its richest literary and hermeneutical context.”[1]  Take that to the bank!

If Boyarin is right, then Christianity has been reading the text of the New Testament from the wrong direction.  If Judaism already embraced what is commonly held to be Christian-only doctrines, maybe we need to rethink the whole demarcation between Judaism and Christianity in those early centuries.  Maybe “the Way” was never anything but a sect of Judaism.  Maybe the Christianity that we know today isn’t what we find in “the beginning of the good news of Yeshua HaMashiach, the Anointed King.”

Topical Index:  Son of God, Boyarin, Trinity, Mark 1:1