Jews or Christians? The Followers of Jesus in Search of Their Own Identity (review)

Giorgio Jossa addresses the question of when Christianity became a distinct religion, completely separate from Judaism.

The old view was that Christianity developed against a Jewish background dominated by “the Pharisees.” The Pharisees were the heart and soul of “normative Judaism,” out of which was born Rabbinic Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple. Christianity officially separated from Judaism when the birkat ha-minim was added to the Amidah prayer about ten years later. But recent studies have revealed just how rich were the varied facets of Judaism in Jesus’ time that make such a truism questionable.

This book is organized in three chapters that address: 1) The Jews from 4 BCE to 100 CE, 2) The Christians from 30 CE to 100 CE, and 3) Jews and Christian as seen by the Romans.

In the first chapter the author argues that the old liberal Christian view of Schürer and Harnack, that Palestinian and Diaspora Judaism were quite distinct, is incorrect. He agrees with Martin Hengel’s view that Judea before the destruction of the Temple was very Hellenized. Within the Jewish homeland, Jossa writes, so great was the variety within Judaism that “every group in fact deviated from something that others believed essential” (p. 28).

How does this phenomenon bear on the incompatibility of emerging Christianity with Judaism in the milieu of all this diversity? Though all forms of messianism shared a Davidic hope, Jewish messianism was, at least in the first century, reluctant to identify the messiah with a historical person. The messianism of Christianity was distinct from the varieties of Jewish messianism in viewing its Messiah as divine.

Chapter Two offers a tantalizing rebuttal of most current discussion of how early the new ideas Jesus introduced were recognized as distinct from Judaism. Contrary to the view that Jesus taught and did his work entirely as a participant in the manifold Judaisms of his time, the author argues that there was early on a distinct difference in Jesus’ teaching and perception of his identity. This uniqueness did not consist in a complete rejection of the biblical laws, and in particular of the pertinence of the Sabbath, as Neusner and others have proposed. Instead, albeit in an “allusive and enigmatic” way (p. 56), Jesus very early projected his messianic identity. “The explicit identification of Jesus with the Messiah took place only after the resurrection,” but this new identity was clearly implicit earlier in Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and in the term “Son of David” applied to him early on.

Jossa argues, admittedly as a hypothesis, that the use of Psalm 110, “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, till I put thy enemies under thy feet’. . . ,” goes back to Jesus himself. He writes, “I believe that he made this statement not to support, against the scribes, a simple ‘academic’ opinion regarding the nature of the Messiah, but precisely in order to suggest that his messianic claim was in the direction of a different, and higher figure, than the traditional one of the Son of David. His listeners were invited to reflect on the nature of the Messiah and to ask themselves in what way Jesus could be related to it” (p. 57).

Jesus was different from other messianic pretenders before and after in more than one way. For example, he did not gather to himself the elite from the heartland of Judaism’s strength, but humble fellows from the am-ha-aretz. Jossa proposes that Jesus’ vision of the fulfillment of God’s plan intentionally used humble means, “in tension with his future appearance in glory” (p. 59). This idea was not the creation of the early Church, but was present in Jesus and was part of the historical preaching of Jesus.

Regarding the issue of determining what Jesus actually said...