Understanding Jesus and Paul means Understanding Jewish Practice and Belief

good morning everyone I invite you to be seated whether you're joining us in person or joining us online it is my joy and Delight to welcome you to The Forum here at St Barts in Midtown Manhattan my name is Peter Thompson I serve as the vicar here and it is great to have all of you here with us as well today we are welcoming Professor AJ Levine who uh is uh professor emerita at Vanderbilt and currently professor at Hartford International University of um is it peace religion and peace that's right a new name and she is a prolific author who I'm sure many of you have read already if you haven't her books are available in our bookstore so I hope you'll check that out on your way out this morning and now to more fully introduce Our Guest I'm going to hand it over to my colleague the Reverend Meredith Ward thank you Peter it's a delight to have you all with us and it's a real Delight to welcome Professor AJ Levine I am a I would say I'm one of her fan club uh one of her fan girls um but before we go into our questions just want to give a brief introduction in addition to what Peter said among the books that I have found incredibly helpful um is our the short stories of Jesus which look at The Parables of Jesus uh the controversial Rabbi the Jewish annotated new testament which is uh which she annotated with a colleague a wonderful resource and the Bible with and without Jesus which I have here in my hand this is also available in the bookstore these are really really wonderful resources for Christians and Jews alike and anyone interested in a different way of looking at the New Testament from what we Christians generally are used to so um AJ describes herself as an unorthodox member of an orthodox synagogue and a Yankee Jewish feminist who works with Biblical interpretations that exclude and oppress we are delighted to welcome AJ to talk about understanding Jesus and Paul means understanding Jewish practice and belief so welcome thank you very much thank you for coming by the way one always worries when you do a program will anybody show up so I'm so glad you're here and thank you to the people who are online as well indeed so before we get into our topic I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about how you as an unorthodox Orthodox member of an orthodox synagogue got interested in the New Testament and what Drew you to the New Testament as a field of study sure it's a fair question not every Jewish girl growing up outside of New Bedford Massachusetts decides to become a new testament Professor so I get that um where I grew up it was it was pretty much entirely Portuguese Roman Catholic you know Our Lady of Fatima and I was fascinated by the religious practices of my friends uh Christmas trees Easter Bunnies rosaries whenever we had a sleepover party um when I was in second grade a little girl said to me on the school bus you killed our Lord and I said with with some degree of indignation no I did not because if you killed somebody you would know right and she said yes you did our priest said so so this becomes my first lesson actually in inter-religious dialogue now I didn't know what episcopalians were I just knew from Roman Catholics um but I knew that that Catholic priests had to wear these special collars and I thought that the reason the priests wore these callers was because we're the priests to tell a lie the caller would joke the priest I think this is brilliant it might be I mean who knew so I said is the priest dead because this had to be such a Whopper of a lie the caller would have choked the priest and she said no so I being a rational child thought okay the priest said I killed God the caller did not choke the priest therefore by the transitive property of deicide I must be guilty of killing God and I get off the school bus early 1960s I'm crying my mother meets me at the bus and said what's wrong I said I killed God the priest said I killed God so when my mother finally figured out what had happened she assured me that God was doing just fine which to my seven-year-old heart was a very important bit of information and I found out later she made a few calls to the local Diocesan office something called Vatican II had already started but one of the latest documents of Vatican II we're about to come up to the 60th anniversaries for October 1965 was a text called Nostra a tate and in in our time and in nostray Tate number four the document says that Jews at all times in all places cannot be held responsible for the death of Jesus but I came in before that and I could not figure out how this tradition which had seemed so beautiful to me you know the bunny the Santa what's not to like um was saying horrible things about Jews so I announced you can probably tell I'm an only child I announced to my parents that I was going to go to religious education class with my friends because we all went to public school so religious education class was twice a week afterwards I had Hebrew school in the next town they had catechism religious said on the other two days and I had fabulous parents I had the best parents my mother said to me as long as you remember who you are go you might learn something it's good to know about other people's religious traditions and the nuns and the lay teachers who taught Catholic religious that were delighted I was there because I'm the only kid who wants to be in religious education class you know for a couple of hours a week after school and I fell in love with the stories because the stories that I was hearing were similar to the stories that I was hearing in the synagogue and sometimes they were the same stories um I would say to my friends you have Moses we have Moses you have David we and then they had all these other people I didn't know about um but when you look at the New Testament particularly the gospel so much of it requires knowledge of the antecedent scripture I mean Jesus meets a woman at a well and they talk about marriage that's John chapter 4 it's Jesus and the Samaritan woman but it's Abraham's servant in Rebecca Rebecca and it's Jacob and Rachel and it's Moses and sapora Jesus heals people particularly children he makes food appear miraculously and I'm thinking well so does the Prophet Elijah and so does the prophet Elisha and so do post-biblical rabbis in the Jewish tradition so it all sounded very familiar to me and I never heard anything that was anti-jewish ever and I don't think the people who are teaching me catechism were thinking well let's wait for all those Jewish holidays in the fall when the little Levine girl is not there and then we'll do all the bad Jew stuff they just never read it that way so when I finally sat down to read the New Testament I tried a bunch of times but this is kind of hard getting into when you start with a genealogy um two things occurred to me the first thing that occurred to me is this is all Jewish history uh the first person in literature ever called Rabbi is Jesus of Nazareth um the only Pharisee from whom we have written records is Paul of karsus so this is Jewish history that I did not get in the synagogue and the other thing that occurred to me is that we choose how to read so I did not have the language for it at the time we would call it hermeneutics the art of interpretation so I realized that the people who were teaching me this material chose to read in a benevolent manner they chose not to come out hating Jews you can read the New Testament think Jews are absolutely awful so I thought what is the mechanism that allows people to read kindly and compassionately rather than malevolently and if anybody would teach me how to do that that's what I want to do and if that didn't work then I would go to law school like my mother wanted so I went off and got a PhD in New Testament and got a job and it worked so that's what I do I try to introduce Jews to early Christian history which is in fact Jewish history and disabused Jews of the nonsense that many Jewish people think about Christianity because we don't know and at the same time I work primarily with Christians Christian clergy Christian laity to make sure that a text of love which is what I think the New Testament is does not preach like a text of hate because it can so you don't sacrifice the particulars of your own tradition on the altar of interface sensitivity I'm not saying that people need to pull punches you read the text as it is but then you come up with interpretations which lead toward a greater sense of mutual respect yeah thank you you answer I think you've just answered my first question which is why is it important for Christians to really familiarize themselves and understand the Jewish context that Jesus and Paul were working in right because if you get the context wrong you're going to get Jesus and Paul wrong so that's already bad and if you get the context wrong and you get Jesus and Paul wrong it's probably going to be bad for Jewish Christian relations yeah right so what we're talking about understanding Jesus and Paul means understanding early Jewish practice and belief what are some examples of that coming out how long do we have um you can pick a couple sure um so here are some of the mistakes that I've heard from my students and I've heard from Christian groups and and people write to me so I get this in email as well well Jews are all obsessed about the law and of course it's the term gets in legalism right so Jews are interested in all this kind of minutia and then Jesus comes along and says Don't Worry Be Happy love God love neighbor and everything else will take care of itself well it's and it's wrong on both counts Jews talk about the weight of your Commandments like love of God and love of neighbor and the less lady ones like tithing mint in which I do not have a strong investment so we have to look at how the law is understood in the first century in various ways and when it comes to Jesus he's not law light he's actually law heavy he makes the law more rigorous and he does this by doing what rabbinic Judaism calls building offense about the law this is from a rabbinic text called parakeet vote so what do we do in Judaism we have a law we make a second law to make sure we don't violate the first one which is actually not a bad idea right so the law says don't commit murder Jesus says and I'm in The Sermon on the Mount here Jesus says I tell if you're angry with a brother or sister you're already guilty that's harder I mean I cannot commit murder being angry is a little harder Jesus says you know put that fence there the law says don't commit adultery Jesus says don't think about it that's harder I mean who has time really um but I mean but what he's doing is he's saying let's let's make sure that you actually do follow the law and I'm going to give you some techniques to show you how to do it and then I think what's brilliant about him is he then goes on to say here's how you live it so he never asks his followers to do anything that he will not do himself and he typically models how to do it so I don't worship him as Lord and Savior that's that's a faith thing that's not an academic thing that's a faith thing but boy he was smart and boy he had some really good ideas about how to be a good Jew and I can follow that so I can learn from him yeah um there was this share that this common Heritage that they were all living in and yet at a certain I think relatively early moment there was a shift in the way that the followers of Jesus began to understand what these teachings what these scriptures were saying and one of the things you point out in your book is this question about blood sacrifice and atonement I mean here as episcopalians Holy Communion is Central to our liturgy and we say we eat the body and and drink the blood of Christ this is coming right out of the Jewish tradition but it's different yeah uh obviously um how how does that shift happen and we talk about Jesus as the Paschal Lamb Christ Our Passover is sacrifice for us all of these questions kind of get merged into one can you talk about that a little sure it's a lot um the idea of you know eat my body and drink my blood I mean the Gospel of John chapter 6 which is sometimes called the bread of life discourse Jesus says this and the disciples are going well kind of hard to say you know we're not so sure about this um so you can even see in a late first century context some debate about this uh the followers of Jesus needed to figure out how to understand the crucifixion and they come up with various ways of understanding it one of which is in terms of sacrifice and sacrifice there are different types of sacrifices if you read Leviticus which is a fabulous book by the way it tells you there is Thanksgiving offerings and there are peace offerings and there are holiday offerings and there are also sin offerings so because we had the idea of this uh offering and blood is important because blood's like detergent blood can wipe away sin right so it's got a detergent property to it the idea of reading the cross in light of a sin offering and then in light of an offering and then in light of a sin offering made perfect sense to the followers of Jesus so what you have in these various readings is retrospective readings the event has happened now how do we understand stand it and since the crucifixion is dated according to the gospels to the time of Passover it would have made sense that they would have used Paschal imagery so in the Gospel of John right at the beginning John the Baptist who's actually up on the lectionary this morning from Matthew John the Baptist says Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world and then boom once you get to the crucifixion narrative you know oh now how I know how to understand that for Jews who are not followers of Jesus the Passover offering is not a sin offering so it's a little bit of transferal here it's something else so what we have and this happens with all religious Traditions is you take your basis and then you adapt it based on historical events or major events in your own tradition the technical term here is seminal I prefer ovarial but you know we can we can fuss about metaphors right um so in light of the in light of the Christ event what happened was the Jewish followers of Jesus went back to their scriptures what Christians would call the Old Testament which at the time is the only Testament um and they would see Jesus on every page because he they're now reading through what we might call christological lenses or Jesus informed lenses it's a perfectly good way of reading Jews who were not followers of Jesus have a different set of lenses so they're going to see different things yeah which which you mentioned the retrospective reading and we have Isaiah in the lectionary as well today and we have Isaiah all through Advent let's talk about the Virgin a virgin shall conceive because since we are an advent this this uh this little bit of text from Isaiah chapter 7 verse 14. that was so crucial to the followers of Jesus isn't a big deal in the in Judaism is it or is it it's not a big deal at all in fact it doesn't show up in our lectionary readings I'm Jews in effect have a lectionary the Parsha harshavua um so it the church will have an Old Testament reading a Psalm reading a reading from the Epistles and a reading from the gospels when you come into the synagogue on Saturday morning there's a reading from the Torah and we read the whole thing straight through either on a three-year cycle or in Orthodox synagogue an annual cycle and then there's a passage from the prophets that gets hooked up to it we don't hear Isaiah 7 14. it's not important to us um so what happens Isaiah writing about the year 700 or so um he's he's and I said oh my God Isaiah is all the way through your lectionary I mean you read more Isaiah than we do of course he's got 60 chapters it goes a long way um so what happens uh Isaiah talking to the king says I'm going to give you King doesn't want to sign it's an international brouhaha and Isaiah says I'm going to give you a sign of I'm going to point this way because if I go this way I might hit somebody inappropriately Isaiah says see that pregnant young woman over there I did this once and it turned out to be anonymous you don't want to do that see that pregnant young woman over there by the time her kid is old enough to eat solid food your International problems will go away sit tight don't make an International Alliance the Hebrew is almost like the name Alma and it just means young woman and Hara means the pregnant one nothing miraculous here nothing more or less miraculous than anybody else's pregnancy when the text gets translated into Greek and this is centuries before the time of Jesus Alma the young woman comes in as parthenos and you know the word parthenos from the Parthenon right the Temple dedicated to the Virgin goddess Athena I live in Nashville where there is actually a replica of the Parthenon and if you come to Nashville they will tell you that ours is better than the one in Greece because ours is newer it's also in color it's really quite striking um so it Ed parthenos could at the time mean young woman uh it could also mean virgin um and will conceive so the verb comes into the the the future it's still not necessarily A miraculous sign so if you take like a five-year-old girl and say see that virgin you know she will conceive and bear her child what you're doing is you're giving her an extra 20 years or so right because the time took a little bit more by the time we get up to the gospel of Matthew Who quotes this text directly in chapter one Matthew was taking the Greek text as a prediction of a miraculous conception okay and that's why when you get the gospel of Matthew the Christmas story Joseph and Mary are engaged they haven't cohabited yet Mary turns up pregnant Joseph knows the child is not his he's not thrilled with this but he's not going to make a big stink about it he's just going to divorce her quietly there's no stoning or anything like that and he has as a Dream well of course he has a dream his father's name is Jacob his name is Joseph like been there done that okay so he has a dream and in a dream an angel says Tim Joseph son of David that's the genealogy do not be afraid to take Mary for your wife because that which is conceived in her is conceived by the holy spirit this takes the church another 300 years to work out how that happened and that's above my pay grade and this was done to fulfill what was said by the prophet behold Isaiah 7 14 in the Greek a virgin will conceive and bear a child and you will call his name Emmanuel which means god with us which is in fact what it means and for Matthew just as a side note because Matthew's a really good writer the very end of the Gospel of Matthew the resurrected Jesus says to the disciples behold I am with you unto the end of the age so this with you Isaiah thing brackets the gospels as a sense of the immediate presence of the Divine with the community all right this is such a big deal that by the second century there's a church father who comes into history known as Justin Martyr and I have to explain to my students that his parents did not name him Justin Martyr which would be an unfortunate name for a child so he's he's killed by the the Romans days probably a Samaritan and he writes this very long and tedious document called dialogue with trifo trifo may actually be Rabbi tarfin so if you know the Jewish tradition a colleague of Rabbi Akiva and trifo the Jew this chapter 67 because it really is long and tedious in chapter 67 they get around to talking about this virginal conception thing and trifos says it doesn't say anything about a Virgin It just says a pregnant young woman and Justin says in effect you Jews change the text you know did say you changed it did they no how do we know that the Dead Sea Scrolls so we've already got in the second century in the 160s followers of Jesus and Jewish non-followers of Jesus duking these things out what we tried to do in the Bible with and without Jesus my co-author my brother and I is to say there are various ways of reading the scriptures that we share there's the historical reading what Isaiah would have meant to his own people because if you say to somebody 700 years from now everything will be fine they don't care you know maybe next year we care about two years iffy 700 years fine so what did it mean in historical context how did Christians interpret these texts how did Jewish non-christians interpret these texts Dead Sea Scrolls Josephus Philo and then what do we do in the Jewish Community after the Christian readings have become known to show that you can have mutually exclusive readings and they're both right and we don't have to argue about them and then at the end of each chapter we try to figure out what might this text mean today so if somebody says see that pregnant young woman over there I want to know if she's got decent Health Care right what other questions might arise and then Jews and Christians can work together right right yeah it's so interesting because we we read these texts so differently and there's a question about appropriation that Christians may feel in going back retrospectively and reading these Jewish texts and interpreting them in a christological way but this was what the followers of Jesus as you said needed to do that was the only scripture they had I mean they had options they could have said let's Chuck the entire Old Testament there was a Christian figure named marcian m-a-r-c-i-o-n who said you know it's a it's a bad God it's a different God it's an ignorant god so let's just get rid of that text and we'll be like a New Testament Church and there are people who were claiming that today which makes me really nervous because if you cut out and to use the Christian term if you cut out the Old Testament it's basically cut the legs off the tradition right that's why Matthew starts out with Abraham and David if you cut out the Old Testament who were Abraham and David it doesn't matter I don't think it's appropriation because the the Jewish tradition does exactly the same thing so that when we read Genesis or reread the Psalms we're going to read it through rabbinic lenses so we're all doing that type of interpretation and rather than say one got it right and one got it wrong or one appropriated and one is the legitimate Heir just say they're both legitimate heirs because the earliest followers of Jesus and here Saint Paul is a really good example they're reading out of their own Jewish Heritage as with the rabbis as with the people who wrote The Dead Sea Scrolls as would Philo as would any Jew today who wants to do this it's not appropriation it's a base text the more important thing is to say here's my reading but I do recognize there are some readings over here and even though they might not be part of my tradition I want to see what the logic is rather than just say oh it's stupid to see Jesus in the pages of the Old Testament not at all and it's not appropriation it's just retrospective reading which is what we're all doing unless we're historians so you mentioned a lot of things in in there that I'm really curious about mostly having to do with the misconceptions that Christians have developed over time through teaching and preaching about certain pieces of the New Testament um one of you mentioned Paul is a Pharisee the Pharisees appear in our electionary today John the Baptist is baptizing people in the River Jordan and the Pharisees and Sadducees show up and John calls them says you brood of vipers this is sort of the way that the Pharisees have been portrayed historically in Christian preaching and teaching as legalistic as becoming sort of stereotypical stand-ins for the Jews first of all who were the Pharisees can you clear that up for us a little bit do we what do we know about them yes so in May of 2019 uh the pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome where I was teaching at the time it was a great gig right a semester in Rome fabulous had a conference on who are the Pharisees so an International Conference we actually got a Papal audience which was way cool and the publications of the papers from that conference are now out they came out in November of 2021 from erdman's press so co-edited by me and my colleague Joseph Sievers who is on the staff at the biblical so what do we know about the Pharisees not as much as we might think right because we have to quadrangulate again the only Pharisee from whom we've got written records is Paul I don't think Paul gives up being a Pharisee if you look at the end of the book of Acts he says I'm a Pharisee right um I I think as my friend Paula Fredrickson put it he's just now he thinks he's a better Pharisee because he's had this road to Damascus experience right so who are the Pharisees they are actually not legalists the Dead Sea Scrolls refer to them as Seekers after smooth things they make things a little bit easier right here's what the Torah says but we know you're not going to do it so we're going to give you some leeway here right um uh they're popular teachers Josephus doesn't like them because Josephus is a priest he's a first century or a historian he thinks they've kind of up jumped they've gotten above their station because he thinks people should be listening to the priests and why are they listening to this lay group they're known according to Josephus for liking the simple life they're not elitist they're not running around in like Urban and and gold and diamonds so they actually walk the walk which is why people pay attention to them so what happens already in the gospel of Matthew and you can see this in the lectionary reading this morning if you look at Mark um well Mark has John the Baptist that's how Mark starts but Mark's Mark keeps the Pharisees and said you see separate Pharisees and Sadducees or like people who would not want to eat with each other because they are so different in terms of their view of Tori in terms of their view of class in terms of their political alliances and what Matthew does is combine the two so it's Matthew who starts giving us Pharisees and Sadducees Matthew will go out of uh go out of the way to put in Pharisees where Mark doesn't and make the Pharisees look icky where Mark doesn't so we can already see Matthew recognizing that at the time Matthew was writing probably in the 80s or 90s of the first century that Pharisees are representing the Jews who didn't sign on to the program and that that Jews who didn't sign on to the program that's a viable alternative right you say the Messiah has come people are still dying you say the Messiah has come Rome is still running the country you say the Messiah has come kids are still crying at night because they're scared or they're hungry where's your proof so the Pharisees who walk the walk and talk the talk Matthew has to say don't pay attention to them brood of vipers by the way is a fabulous insult because the view was that baby vipers ate their way out of their mother and thus in a sense killed the parent so what does this expression saying you've killed your own legacy that's how harsh that insult is now let's say John the Baptist actually said it or Jesus actually said it then you've got one Jew arguing with another Jew this is nothing new you just come into my synagogue right I don't agree with you you're wrong you know then you have a glass of synops after and you're fine so but Jews have been arguing with each other since Moses came down the mountain right honor the Sabbath to keep it Holy One Jew says to another what constitutes work now you have two synagogues so if you've got a Jew insulting another Jew this is par for the course but what happens is these various insults find their way into a gospel then that Finds Its way into the Christian Canon which Finds Its way into the Gentile Church so what what was originally an in-house argument and a heightened argument becomes a proclamation over against Jews rather than something that's internal and that's where the difficulty comes in and then you hear it in the church on a Sunday morning and because Pharisees in both the Christian imagination and the Jewish imagination kind of mean all Jews then we have to worry about what message is the lectionary conveying and that's why Christian education is so important so that people in the church recognize this is rhetorical uh that everybody involved here they're all Jews that the Pharisees had their own way of doing things which is a way that should be respected I think you might even you might be a Pharisee if you know you invite Jesus to dinner three times uh you might be a Pharisee if you walk the walk as well as talk the talk you might be a Pharisee if you're interested in taking biblical law a Biblical instruction and saying how do we do this in a first century environment where times have changed so to try to change that sense of the cultural imagination of who these people were and that's going to take Generations you mentioned the lectionary and you preached a sermon at the National Cathedral in uh I think it was a year ago uh during Lent on this question of the way our Episcopal lectionary is set up to kind of set an Old Testament text against a gospel and the big the fancy word for this is supersessionism yeah um talk a little bit about first of all for those of us who made this may be the first time we're hearing the word supersessionism what is supersessionism and how is that excuse me kind of built it baked into some of our lectionary readings um and particularly in in times and Seasons like Advent and lent when we're waiting for something new to happen with Christians okay so supercessionism comes in different flavors hard supersessionism sometimes called replacement theology suggests that all the promises that were made to Abraham that were made to Israel have passed over from what Paul would call Israel according to the flesh or ethnic Jews over to the Christian church and then therefore the Jews are disinherited laws Children of the devil damned uh negative all the way through and the Gentile church the non-jewish church becomes the heir to all that stuff so that's hard super session if that's not nice uh soft supersessionism means well you know we have the best way of doing it and y'all don't and in that sense I think all religious Traditions are super sessionist to some extent right um the rabbis are just as much super sessionist over the Christian churches the Christian church is super sessionist over the rabbis right we got it right you got it wrong soft supersessionism so how do you do that to say well we respect the way you do it but we think we do it better right well so think about the Episcopal Church there's the way the Roman Catholic Church did it and then thank you Henry go see the Tudor exhibit at the med it's fabulous um you know then we have a different way of doing it and then the Methodist came along and says yeah anglicans you're fine but we got a better way of doing it right um that soft superstitionism but as long as you leave the original Covenant in place I think it's okay don't disinherit the Jews don't disinherit the Catholics don't disinherit the episcopalians what happens with the lectionary is sometimes we get a sense of that complete hard super session is disinheriting and sometimes with the lectionary it's Old Testament bad icky can't do you any good so I got an invitation to preach at the National Cathedral which is an Episcopal Church originally it was supposed to be the Sunday after January 6th and I went no somebody on house in-house do that so I wound up doing the third Sunday in Lent the Old Testament reading it begins with the Ten Commandments what's not to like and then the psalm about how beautiful the Commandments are in the law makes you wise terrific and then the reading from Paul in First Corinthians says well God doesn't give this stuff to the wise but to the simple so what the Pauline reading did is in effect you know throw the Jewish tradition throw the Old Testament under the camel it's done and the Gospel reading was the cleansing of the temple in the Gospel of John so it set up Old Testament bad useless unhelpful New Testament get rid of all that old stuff it doesn't do you any good so I you know and I it was covered so I had to take the sermon because I wasn't on site and then what are they going to do right so I taped a sermon on why the lectionary really needs to be revised and this is really good because um at the at the general assembly of the Episcopal Church this past year um there was an initiative to say let's look at least at the Holy Week readings and see if we can do this a little bit better the lectionary skips around all the time it's not like the synagogue where you have to go from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Deuteronomy so since you can skip around anyway skip around better yeah so I think we are ready for some questions from the audience we are indeed so if you're here in person um Brian Johnson in the back there has uh comment cards that you can write a question on and he'll bring them up to me uh if you're joining us online you can fill out the live chat on uh YouTube you can uh include a question in the comment section on Facebook or you can email me P Thompson St barts.org p-tthompson at s-t-b-a-r-t-s dot org um Professor Levine um since as we're waiting for those questions we're we're living in a time of rising anti-Semitism and I'm wondering if you can talk about the importance of this kind of religious literacy in that context a hardcore anti-semites they're their own thing what I what I can do and what I worry about is what happens when someone comes into a church um and Hears A lectionary reading or here's a sermon that goes wonky um and then what happens in the congregation is that anti-Semitism is either reinforced or inculcated um I have had undergraduate students who have never read the New Testament before Who come out thinking boy these Jews are really awful you know why did they kill Jesus because the gospels actually don't make it terribly clear so there has to be some sort of Education right from the get-go to deal with this otherwise when I think about people who move into some of these white supremacists or Neo-Nazi or even by pop churches this anti-Semitism stuff keeps being in there so what can be done because you can't every time you give a sermon you can't get up and say well the Jews are our friends that gets old pretty quickly but if you come into a church or you're you're listening online there's usually some sort of paperwork at some point put in a little note saying this lectionary reading has been misinterpreted to say x and then fix it preach more often from the Old Testament and use rabbinic readings because it's pretty much nothing in rabbinic readings that Christians can't borrow right um show that that connection between and try to avoid the hate because otherwise little kids in the Sunday School are going to pick up all sorts of really bad messages this is by the way why I started to write children's books about Jesus because some of that stuff is really not very good so how do you stop that bigotry from being inculcated to begin with and how do you stop it from being reinforced and that's where history comes in and that's where people like you who care about this can actually do something we have a question from a liturgical artist who wonders if you can talk about shared symbols between Jews and Christians and how they what what symbols show up in common between synagogues and churches yeah that's a really good question if you go to if you go to a Christian worship service particularly High church so Catholic Episcopalian Lutheran it looks kind of like the service in the synagogue the choreography is all the same you bring the word of God out to the people whether it's it's Eucharistic or whether it's the Torah reading uh there are Psalms at the beginning there's some sort of hymn at the end except the Jews it never changes because that's all the same thing and then there are announcements and then there's lunch um so we've kept certain symbols but we interpret them differently I mean we've all kept a symbolism of Light which is particularly important as we come up to Hanukkah Hanukkah is a big deal because of Christmas otherwise it's pretty minor you all have because you're episcopaling you have the books of Maccabees in your Canon we don't even have the books of we got the holiday you got the books okay it's fair um uh it's the symbolism of wine uh but it's going to take on different meaning uh the symbolism of the book and how important the book is the scroll uh the symbolism of the 12 tribes of Israel which is going to come into the churches The Twelve Apostles but still those 12 tribes are there so although we're keeping many of the same symbols we're taking them in very very different directions so you can wind up with a miscue right oh I thought this was this but it's not and then you have to worry about that as well we also keep the same liturgical senses we're all singing Psalms but we're seeing them with very different tunes and we're hearing them with very different readings right we have a question about synagogues and churches having kind of Pulpit exchange and we had a little bit of that here can you talk about uh instances in which you've seen that and how important that might be it can be weren't what I scholar in Residence program so I'm on a synagogue on a Friday night I'm Church on a Sunday morning and very frequently they'll stick me in the Pulpit which is good because then you don't have to prepare the sermon right so everybody benefits it's an opportunity for Christians to come listen to Jewish worship and for Jews to come into the church because if there's a Jew not a messy energy that's another question uh but if there's there if there's a JuJu Messianic Jews are jujus too but you know what I mean um in the Pulpit it's an opportunity for for Jewish people to come into the church and get a sense of what Christian worship is like and I think that's important it's also important to people in the congregations because sometimes they will hear things that they might have heard differently where they're not a Jew in the room some of the hymns are a bit problematic and when there's a Jew in the room some of the Gospel readings are a bit problematic when there's a Jew in the room this really comes to the fore but that's good because then people become more aware of what problems are as well as what what shared and that's also helpful someone who is of Jewish Heritage was surprised to learn that episcopalians claim Abraham's inheritance as their own of course you do why wouldn't you can you talk about um is is that kind of to use the a word appropriative to to take Abraham's inheritance and apply it to us well I mean why not if you go to Genesis when when Abraham starts getting these promises from the Divine it's you know you will be a blessing to All Nations and then the church could read itself into that and so Abraham Abraham who starts Life as a gentile right so he represents for Paul someone who is Justified according to what Paul says faith justify just it's like Justified margins is to be put in a right relationship right um by faith now Jews would say Abraham worked in his father's Idol shop when he was a kid and he realized the adults weren't God so we have to we're all telling different backstories I don't think it's appropriation um because again the initial followers of Jesus are all Jews and this is how they're reading their text if you go to the Dead Sea Scrolls um which nobody is reading today liturgically the Dead Sea Scrolls even say the pressure for habakook for example Apple says even habakkuk didn't understand what he was talking about but we do because our teacher gets it so if a follower of Jesus were to say well you know those Pharisees don't get it but we do well it's a very Jewish reading right and another Jew can say no you're wrong you know then you have lunch as long as you keep that that food is another symbol by the way we're all doing food um as long as you keep that relationship going it's fine can you talk about Jewish traditions of reinterpretation of scripture and how Christians can can use those same strategies sure and there are different ways that Jews have had to do this one of the ways we can do it which makes it harder in the church is you can take Hebrew Hebrews based on ancient Hebrew if you go into a synagogue they see a tour scroll in effect what we have are consonants and not vowels so you can put in different vowels and get different readings right that's fun that's harder to do in the church but we have a tradition called midrash which is just a type of interpretation which is kind of filling in backstory um or taking the story in the next Direction so that's how we get this idea of Abraham when he was a child working in Dad's Idol shop right there's a wonderful midrash it's one of my favorites um where at The Exodus so Exodus 15 the song of the city which I think was originally written by Miriam and then Moses kind of borrowed it and took credit but that's another subject um you know Horse and Rider has been thrown into the sea and the midrash says that at the time the Israelite slaves are escaping from Egypt and the Chariots are being stuck in the mud and Pharaoh soldiers are drowning the angels are singing praises and they go to try to find God because like this is a high moment can't find God which is really awkward and they finally find God wrapped in a prayer shawl which is a little anachronistic weeping uncontrollably and they say why are you weeping the the slaves are now free and God responds uh my children are dying and you're singing praises and he's talking about the Egyptian shoulders right um so everybody is is a child of God and the midrar says don't hate these other people because they too are in the image and likeness of God and once you strip them of that and once you celebrate somebody else's death you're losing a little bit of what it means to be the people of God and a little bit of what it means to understand God and what it means to understand God's children I think that's real helpful do you consider the death and resurrection of Jesus as distinctly Christian or is it an outgrowth of kind of Jewish expectation for the Messiah it's a both and um which is what the answer to most biblical studies questions are it's a both and Jews already had a martyrdom tradition if you look at something like second Maccabees which is in the Episcopal Canon or Catholic Canon Orthodox Kansas uh the maccabean martyrs say you will kill us you know you can rip out our tongue but we will get our tongue back in the resurrection and we will condemn you for that right so we have an idea of efficacious martyrdom uh Jews never settled down to be you know here's what the Messiah is and who here's what the Messiah does but the general view was that when the Messianic age broke through there would be a general resurrection of the Dead everybody would come back and then there would be a final judgment and then you'd get peace on Earth where you get to to go back to your liturgical readings this morning the kind of Peaceable Kingdom where the lion lies down with the lamb and as the saying goes the lamb is not nervous um uh so the idea of Jesus being resurrected and Paul talks about this in First Corinthians his first fruits of the Resurrection that's a very Jewish idea the problem was that nobody else came back so it's a both and if Jesus is the Messiah of course he would be resurrected and that would start the the general Resurrection this also means by the way that both Judaism and Christianity are unfinished products right so the church is waiting for the return of Jesus the synagogue is waiting for the Messiah to come and rather than debate well you know was he here before right which I think is probably the least helpful question to ask when the Messiah comes back to say how do we work together in the meantime right because we don't know so you live in that tension and then you work together yeah so it's a both hand speaking of our Isaiah reading this morning the little child shall lead them Christians often read that as as Jesus we also have two chapters earlier in Isaiah 9 the child will be born for us the son will be given uh who is that child originally probably the ideal davidic King it's not clear when the psalm was written but if it's written after the time that the davidic monarchy disappeared which is right after the Babylonian exile and get hints of it in the prophet Zechariah and then it's gone if you want to find it through Jesus genealogies they disagree and they start disagreeing right after King David So Matthew takes the line through Solomon the Royal Line Luke takes the line through somebody called Nathan so even Joseph's father is is identified differently in the different genealogies so this is the ideal King that everybody's looking for is it here yet no because the little child is not leading them at this point so it's a hope for model we have a lot of Royal Psalms which are designed for the davidic household and then once the davidic household died this ideal Messianic King apocalyptic as catological king what I like to do with these passages and even passages like Psalm 22 which is my God my God why have you forsaken me is to say this might fit Jesus and you can see how it does it might fit somebody else but might it fit any of us could any of us being inspired by the biblical text say well I can do that not so much that I can get the lion to lie down with the lamb for that you need a degree in Zoology and then it's still a little iffy but what can I do to bring about peace how can I read myself into this text to say it can be Jesus but it's not only Jesus or it can be a davidic era but it's not only a davidic air because if the passage is only about Jesus then you can say okay you know been there done that check it off and put it up on the shelf and my sense of the biblical tradition is it's it's it's it's richer than that it's more robust than that so if you go to Isaiah 7 14 you know this virgin will conceive well what about other babies uh if we go to Psalm 22 my God my God why have you forsaken me well pretty much everybody has thought that at one time or another how do we read ourselves into the text so I want to take it again as of both and before I hand it back to Meredith can you've written a book on Advent can you share some hopes with us for this sacred season oh yeah I love advent's great for Jews my mother told me that advent was when Christians put up trees to make Jews happy I was happy with that one right I get to go to my friend's house to trim them and I never have to take them down this is fabulous you know so we're in mid-winter I mean unless you live in in you know Australia so it's it's a sense of of new beginnings it's a sense of light coming into darkness but also appreciating that Darkness because that helps us as well too much light and you're just as blinded if as if you have no light at all um I like the Advent stories um every year think like the Charlie Brown Christmas special okay so I I don't think much of the Advent story is historical in the sense of this is what actually happened but when I listened to Linus get up and read from the King James version from the Gospel of Luke I get a lump in my throat because it works on me um and I think it's it's a way that we can all appreciate it and there's so much that that my friends who are in the churches don't see in the text because we're not reading closely I mean just think that my favorite um is is the the Lucan gospel about you know she wrapped the baby in swaddling clothes which you have to then explain because nobody swaddles anymore um wrap the baby in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger and say what is that well a Manger is a feeding trough right like French monje well where else do you put the person who's supposed to be bread for the world you put him in a feeding trough it's a fabulous pun that nobody gets um and if you go through Matthew chapter one and two or Luke chapter 1 and 2 which are the Nativity stories they're incredible allusions to the Old Testament some Matthew footnotes everything so this was done to fulfill what was said by the prophet but there's a lot of stuff that's not footnoted so the more you know the Old Testament it's like these little lineups you oh this is a connection and this is a connection and this is a connection and they're so rich and they're so beautiful and they're so lovely and they're so political King Herod who kills the babies as opposed to this one rescued child Augustus Caesar who sets out a universal census and the only reason to do a sentence this was for taxes right right who do you want to follow Caesar on the throne or the baby in the manger voices it's resonant what's what and the more you hear it the more the you hear these stories is Jewish stories as midrasheem as ways of interpreting the birth of Jesus retrospectively the more profound they become if I can see all this gorgeous and inspirational stuff there boy Christians should be able to see more than Hark the Herald Angels Sing there's more there and it's gorgeous AJ thank you so much for spending this morning with us and for opening our eyes to new ways or different ways or more dimensional ways to read our very familiar texts I hope you all will take a look at the bookstore because there's much much more to uh to talk about and to learn from AJ's scholarship thank you so much for being with us a pleasure and an honor thank you very much thank you and thank you all for being here as well we hope you'll stick around and join us for worship at 11 A.M and we hope you'll be back here at the Forum next week we'll be welcoming Dr simranjit Singh he directs the religion and Society program at the Aspen Institute and we'll be talking about his new book about sick wisdom so hope you'll be back next week

Channel: ST. BART'S

Views: 7,707

Keywords: stbartsnyc

Id: yqVRJuwjAYw

Length: 52min 21sec (3141 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 04 2022