AN ATHEISTIC BIBLE READING – HOW JEWISH WAS JESUS?
It embarrasses and frightens many Christians to think that Jesus was Jewish, but he clearly was. He never saw his movement as a new religion, separate or independent from its Jewish roots. It was only after the crucifixion, with Saul / Paul’s arrival on the scene (as depicted in The Acts Of The Apostles) that the conversion of uncircumcised Gentiles (non-Jewish peoples) becomes important, and Christianity begins to sever itself from its Jewish foundations. It is unlikely that Jesus would have approved.
Just how Jewish was Jesus?
Jesus was circumcised. This plainly takes place in Luke 2:21. It takes place eight days on from his birth. Many of his sermons take place in Synagogues. No non-Jewish teacher would have been allowed to lead a service. Even late in his ministry, he gets to preach in the Temple of Jerusalem itself.
Several times, Jesus talks of coming to represent the Mosaic Laws, and teachings of Moses. He threatens dire consequences for anyone changing such laws or departing from them.
Jesus sets great importance on the Passover feast in the Jewish calendar, and aims to be in Jerusalem for its celebration, which is to be the time of his arrest and execution. One of the few episodes we see from his childhood was where Mary and Joseph lost sight of the boy Jesus during the busy crowded Passover period in Jerusalem too. They eventually found him safely in the company of Jewish rabbis, impressing them in erudite discourse on Mosaic scripture.
Several times, Jesus is referred to as ‘Rabbi, even by his own Apostles, the word Rabbi is that of a Jewish religious father.
Separation from the Jewish tradition lies rooted in Jesus’ preaching of himself as a living incarnation of God, and a physical embodiment of the latest Covenant. Many Jews could not cope with or believe such audacious claims. The Pharisees challenged the claim intellectually. The Sadducees saw Jesus as enough of a threat to petition Rome’s Procurator, Pontius Pilate, to execute him. Pilate saw himself as reluctantly tangled in a purely Jewish dispute, washing his (Rome’s) hands of the matter, to see it as the culmination of a purely Jewish feud. It would be Gentile converts who would begin to blame the Jews as a whole for killing their founder –leader. The retort that Jesus was ‘King of the Jews’ was Roman one absolving himself of responsibility for his fate. Jesus was executed for being a false messiah – not for being non-Jewish. No one in his time ever made such a claim against him.
Jews then and today rejected and reject the belief that Jesus meets the criteria needed to qualify as the Messiah, a saviour figure promised and prophesised by Old Testament prophets. For one thing, The Messiah is expected to be a man, and not an incarnation of God in human form.
A few scholars try to argue that while Joseph was descended from David in a direct Jewish bloodline family tree, Mary, the Virginal mother was not given any bloodline and therefore potentially non-Jewish. However, it would have been near impossible for Joseph to get to marry a Gentile bride, and they were married, and consummated their love after Jesus was born, giving him two brothers, John & James, if scripture is to be believed. Jesus was Jewish and illegitimate. Given the limited evidence however, it is not impossible that Jesus never existed at all.
Arthur Chappell.
