Once More Around the Block

All Scripture is inspired by God and beneficial for teaching, for rebuke, for correction, for training in righteousness;  2 Timothy 3:16 NASB

Scripture – if you’re one of those followers who has serious concerns about the integrity of the biblical text, about its history and development, about its contemporary application, then you’ve probably been distressed by the anti-Judaism of Christian theology.  You want to explore what the text meant to the first listeners and what it has come to mean to modern worshippers.  But you want to be able to investigate without the overlays of theological bias and unfounded presumptions that often characterize Christian commentary.  Well, you’re not the only one.  Benjamin Sommer’s article helps clarify what is at stake here and what we must seek to avoid if we’re going to dig deeply into the real Bible.  The citation is long but worth it:

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as Jewish biblical theology.  While many definitions of the term ‘biblical theology’ exist, they all accord some privileged place to the Bible.  All forms of Jewish theology, however, must base themselves on Judaism’s rich postbiblical tradition at least as much as on scripture, and hence a Jewish theology cannot be chiefly biblical.  (By Judaism’s rich postbiblical tradition, I mean first of all rabbinic literature found in the Talmuds and midrashic collections, which stem from the first through eight centuries C.E., and also post rabbinic Jewish commentaries, legal literature, mysticism, and philosophy from the eighth century through the present.)  Conversely, any theology that focuses especially on scripture is by definition Protestant and not Jewish, for the notion of sola scriptura has no place in Judaism—even as an unrealized ideal.[1]

Let that sink in.  We have spent enormous energy trying to peer into the biblical text, but Sommer points out that this just scratches the surface of Judaism.  Hopefully we have left Luther’s sola scriptural behind, but that just means we have entered into a theological vacuum. Without investigating the rabbinic material, we’re still trapped in between Christianity and Judaism.  The tradition is the way Jews read the text—and we should at least know how they read it if we’re going to look deeper than the vocabulary and grammar.

Sommer continues:

Levenson[2] devotes considerable space to describing the anti-Semitism (better: anti-Judaism) of many classics of Old Testament theology.  When Eichrodt describes rabbinic legalism as dead and stultifying, he does not merely offend Jews.  More troublingly, he jettisons any pretensions to scholarship, since his description of rabbinic religiosity is based neither on textual analyses of rabbinic literature nor sociological investigations of living rabbinic communities.  Rather, his description is founded on preconceptions found in Pauline and later Christian literature.  When von Rad speaks of the New Testament as the only possible continuation of Israel’s heritage without even acknowledging the existence of another tradition that stems from that heritage, he commits as greater offense.  Eichrodt merely misrepresents Judaism, but in this particular assertion, von Rad fails to acknowledge that Judaism exists.[3]

I hope you caught the reference to “Pauline” literature.  Paul is the problem.  Reading Paul from a Christian perspective demolishes Judaism, but apparently Jews are unable to read Paul any other way.  If we’re going to rescue apostolic literature from the Jewish trash can, we’ll have to find a way to understand Paul as a Jew.  A few scholars are trying to do that.  Most Christian preachers and commentators assume Paul left Judaism.[4]

. . . the legacy of this sort of anti-Judaism does not disappear the moment a scholar decides to repudiate it.  Leo Perdue points out that contemporary Protestant scholars reject the sort of anti-Jewish attitudes that motivated Wellhausen, Eichrodt, and others.  Yet contemporary biblical scholarship remains deeply influenced by those attitudes.[5]

Krister Stendahl’s essay on biblical theology in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible adumbrates something like the dialogical approach . . . Stendahl famously distinguishes between what the Bible meant and what the Bible means.  Biblical theologians . . . attend to what the Bible meant: they describe biblical views of certain issues . . . Other scholars . . . can attend to what the Bible means, or how it can function in our world, and this second process is based on the descriptive work performed by the biblical theologian. . . the crucial distinction is more accurately captured if we speak not of ‘what it meant’ and ‘what it means’ but rather ‘what it meant’ and ‘how modern religious people can appropriate or reject or accept what it meant in light of the way our respective traditions, in reading scripture, have long appropriated, rejected, or accepted what the Bible meant.[6]

This leaves us with a thorny problem.  How can we even begin to approach the Talmud and the vast corpus of rabbinic commentaries, especially when many are written only in Hebrew?  How can we make sense of a Hebrew Bible if we have no access to Hebrew thinkers?  What we face, even after years of investigating, is a monumental paradigm shift; a paradigm so deeply embedded in Western theology that it seems at times impossible to escape.  But we must try.

Topical Index: Sommer, Scripture, Talmud, anti-Judaism, Paul, 2 Timothy 3:16

[1] Benjamin D. Sommer, Dialogical Biblical Theology: A Jewish Approach to Reading Scripture Theologically in Biblical Theology: Introducing the Conversation, eds. Perdue, Morgan and Sommer (Abingdon Press, 2009), pp. 1-2.

[2] Levenson, Hebrew Bible, Old Testament.

[3] Benjamin D. Sommer, op. cit., pp. 8-9.

[4] Cf. Pamela Eisenbaum, Mark Nanos, Magnus Zetterholm, Paula Fredriksen

[5] Benjamin D. Sommer, op. cit., p. 9.

[6] Ibid., p. 22.