How Long, O Lord, How Long?

more desirable than gold, than much fine gold; sweeter than honey, than drippings of the honeycomb   Psalm 19:11  Jack Riemer

Sweeter than honey – I am often amazed at the ignorance of biblical scholars—on both sides of the aisle.  Christian scholars for centuries completely misunderstood the importance of Moses in the background of the Messiah.  Since their paradigm viewed “Jesus” as the universal Man, his actual Jewishness was simply swept aside, and along with it the crucial role of the Mosaic code.  The Church had its own agenda, arguing that it replaced orthodox Judaism in order to justify its very existence, so reading the text as a Jewish document was an enormous threat.

But Judaism and Jewish scholars made an equally disastrous mistake.  They read Paul as if he were a Christian convert, similarly ignoring his own testimony and the crucial role that Moses played for the first century Messianic community.  In other words, they took the Church’s view of Paul as gospel, completely overlooking evidence to the contrary.  As a result, both sides used their paradigms to invent caricatures that never existed.  And they continue to do so.  Read this comment by Rabbi Jack Riemer in a book published just a year ago:

“These two Christians[Samuel Pepys and C.S. Lewis] who lived centuries apart shared the same view: the Law of the Jews is a burden and not a delight, as this psalm claims [Psalm 19].  And they are not alone in holding this view.  The apostle Paul started the tradition of looking at the Law as a burden that was too heavy to bear when he taught that God sent a redeemer in order to liberate us from the impossible task of trying to live by the Law.  And there were many more among the church fathers who spoke of the Law in the same terms.”[1]

How long, O Lord, will it take for important men in both communities to stop thinking inside the paradigm and look at the actual evidence.  Pamela Eisenbaum’s work on Paul is compelling.  She demonstrates that Paul was a Hellenistic Jew following a sectarian group of Jews in the first century.  It was Augustine’s reading of Paul that “converted” him to Christianity, but there are direct citations and religious behaviors in Acts that dispute this reading.  The “convert” view held sway for both religions for centuries until some Christian scholars began to pay attention to the text and the context.  E. P. Sanders was the first of these (1977) and a host of others have followed suit, some of which we have engaged (Mark Nanos, for example).  But theological change is very slow since the change usually threatens well-established structures.  Imagine, if you can, what would happen to both Christianity and Judaism if Paul never converted.  All the first-century letters (and the supposed history) would need to be re-evaluated.  And statements like the one from Rabbi Riemer would be recognized as false.  Walls would come tumbling down.  Rabbis would have to rethink the supposed divide between orthodox Judaism and the early “church,” while pastors and priests would wring their hands over the question about their own existence in a religion that was created by men!  Oh, the humiliation of it all!

Topical Index:  Paul, Christian, convert, Law, religion, Psalm 19:11

[1] Rabbi Jack Riemer in Jack Riemer and Elie Spitz, Duets on Psalms: Drawing New Meaning from Ancient Words (Ben Yehuda Press, 2023), p. 67.