Judaizing and Antisemitism

Creeps and Scoundrels: Judaizing and Antisemitism

A Reading from the Acts of the Apostles:

Some men came down from Judea and were teaching the brethren, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.” And when Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with them, Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and the elders about this question … When they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church and the apostles and the elders, and they declared all that God had done with them. But some believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees rose up, and said, “It is necessary to circumcise them, and to charge them to keep the law of Moses.”

The apostles and the elders were gathered together to consider this matter. And after there had been much debate, Peter rose and said to them, “Brethren, you know that in the early days God made choice among you, that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe … He made no distinction between us and them, but cleansed their hearts by faith. Now therefore why do you make trial of God by putting a yoke upon the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we shall be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will” …

After they finished speaking, James replied, “Brethren, listen to me. Simeon has related how God first visited the Gentiles, to take out of them a people for his name … Therefore my judgment is that we should not trouble those of the Gentiles who turn to God, but should write to them to abstain from the pollutions of idols and from unchastity and from what is strangled and from blood.

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

A Reading from Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho:

If some, through weak-mindedness, wish to observe such institutions as were given by Moses, from which they expect some virtue, but which we believe were appointed by reason of the hardness of the people's hearts, along with their hope in this Christ, and [wish to perform] the eternal and natural acts of righteousness and piety, yet choose to live with the Christians and the faithful, as I said before, not inducing them either to be circumcised like themselves, or to keep the Sabbath, or to observe any other such ceremonies, then I hold that we ought to join ourselves to such, and associate with them in all things as kinsmen and brethren.

But if [some] who say they believe in this Christ compel those Gentiles who believe in this Christ to live in all respects according to the law given by Moses, or choose not to associate so intimately with them, I in like manner do not approve of them. But I believe that even those, who have been persuaded by them to observe the legal dispensation along with their confession of God in Christ, shall probably be saved … for the goodness and the loving-kindness of God, and His boundless riches, hold righteous and sinless the man who, as Ezekiel tells, repents of sins.

Here ends the reading.

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Welcome back to Creeps and Scoundrels, an exploration of how Christian heresies have shaped Christian orthodoxy. That is, teachings which the greater Church could not in good conscience endorse, led us to clarify that which we ought to be teaching. Last week we looked at Marcionism, the heretical notion that Christianity must be purged of any and all elements of Judaism—something rather hard to reconcile with the undeniably Jewish character of Christ, the Apostles, and the entirety of the Bible.

Tonight we’re going to look at the opposite extreme, which historians and theologians have come to call Judaizing. And honestly, I wish we had a better name for it, because Judaizing is not Judaism, and I don’t want us to confuse the two. Judaism is a religion, one that is related to other Abrahamic faiths, such as Christianity and Islam, but which remains very much independent of them. The Jewish people have their own Scriptures and theologies, their own liturgies and holidays.

Judaizing, on the other hand, is a Christian heresy, which is to say that it’s an in-house disagreement, a family dispute between Christians, as to what we ought to teach. It arises from the question that convened the very first Apostolic Council in Jerusalem, namely: can someone become a Christian without first becoming Jewish?

That might sound rather odd to us today. Did I not just clearly state that Judaism is its own religion, its own tradition? To speak now of a Jewish Christian might seem oxymoronic, akin to talking about a square circle or an only choice. But 2000 years ago, it simply wasn’t so. Jesus was Jewish. Mary and Joseph were Jewish. Peter and Paul and John and James and Mary Magdalene were all Jewish, as were all the authors of the Gospels, all the authors of the New Testament.

I know there’s some controversy in my saying this. I recently met a rabbi who told me in no uncertain terms that the New Testament is vehemently anti-Jewish. I’ve also read respected modern Jewish scholars who have published entire volumes on just how deeply and undeniably Jewish the whole of the New Testament is. Then of course there are Christians of Jewish descent, proud of both their faith and their heritage, who insist that Christian theology in no way negates Jewish identity.

I don’t have a dog in this fight. It is certainly not my place—especially not as a Christian cleric—to weigh in on issues of who is or is not a Jew. What I can say, without risk of overstepping my bounds, is that Christianity began as a Jewish movement. Jesus’ disciples understood Him as both Rabbi and Messiah. They wanted to know what He taught of the Law. He preached in synagogues and worshipped at the Temple. Jesus’ last acts were to celebrate the Passover and quote Psalms from the Cross.

After His Resurrection and Ascension, the Christian community centered in Jerusalem turned to the leadership of James the Just, who appears to have been Jesus’ closest living male relative. We talk a lot about Peter and Paul, but the Book of Acts makes clear that both of those Apostles deferred to the authority of James the Just. And the thing that Peter and Paul had to deal with—the issue that all of the Apostles found themselves encountering—is that as they went out into the synagogues to preach the Risen Christ, other peoples listened. Other peoples came.

By some estimates, 10% of the Roman Empire at the time of Jesus Christ consisted of Jews, proselytes, and God-fearers. That’s actually an impressively high number. Now, in this terminology, a Jew would be someone born Jewish, a proselyte would be a convert to Judaism, and a God-fearer would be someone who worshipped the Jewish God without full conversion; that is, without circumcision or dietary regulations and the like.

When proselytes and God-fearers and outright pagans came asking to be baptized, to be welcomed into the Church and the Body of Jesus Christ, how should they be treated? How should they be welcomed? Did they have to be circumcised? Did they have to follow all of the 613 commandments of the Hebrew Bible intended for the Jewish faithful? Or should they simply look to the seven Noahide Laws intended by God for all of humankind? It’s like 10 Commandments Lite. Again, did someone have to be Jewish in order to receive Jesus as the Jewish Messiah?

And the answer, from no less strict an observer of the Jewish faith than James the Just, was that no, non-Jewish peoples need not become Jewish in order to be Christians. At the time, Jewish Christians like James did not cease living as Jews. They kept the faith, the rules, the regulations, the holidays, the observances. Of course they did. But they didn’t expect others to do the same. Christ is the Messiah, and the Savior of the world. This latter identity in no way negates the former.

At one point in his ministry, St Paul had two traveling companions, Timothy and Titus. Timothy was of Jewish descent while Titus was of Greek descent. Neither one happened to be circumcised, circumcision being a sign of Jewish identity. Paul had Timothy go ahead and get it done, so as not to cause a stir amongst the Jewish believers to whom they preached the Gospel. But he had an absolute fit when people insisted that Titus, as a Greek, ought to be circumcised as well.

Timothy is a Jew; Titus is not; both are Christians. And Paul makes it clear that neither circumcision nor uncircumcision matter in new life in Christ. To teach otherwise—to insist that non-Jews must become Jews in order to know Jesus—is the rejected opinion which we have come to call Judaizing. And believe it or not, this still has great significance for Christianity today.

Much of modern fundamentalist political debate arises from the notion that twenty-first century Americans need to follow laws laid out for Iron Age Israelites in books like Numbers and Deuteronomy. But this is an ancient Christian heresy. Forget the fact that such people always pick and choose, skipping the bits about no shellfish or blended fabrics, while focusing on sexuality and stoning blasphemers.

Fundamentalists imagine that they can interpret the meaning, nuance, and cultural context of Jewish Law better than our Jewish brothers and sisters; and that Christians must then conform to the resulting farcical caricature of what they imagine ancient Israelite religion to have been: “I’m a better Jew than Jews.”

That’s Judaizing in a nutshell. It isn’t “being too Jewish.” It’s us creating a prejudiced pastiche of Judaism and then laying that on the backs of unsuspecting Christians. Thus not only do we betray the traditional teachings of the Church, and the moral vision of Jesus Christ; we also do yet more violence to the Jewish community, whom we have treated as our scapegoats for centuries.

There’s so much more that deserves to be said about the persistent abomination of Christian antisemitism from the moment Church and Synagogue were severed.

Suffice to say for now that Christians must ever strive in humility and repentance to keep to the middle path: neither denying Jesus’ Jewish identity and our dependence upon the cultivated stock of Israel to which we are grafted by grace; nor imagining that we can claim Jewish identity as Christian property and then force our parody of Judaism upon the general population in a naked bid for power and control. Because that’s exactly what a lot of American televangelists are doing.

There’s an early Christian work called the Epistle of Barnabas, which interprets all the tales of the Old Testament non-literally, as spiritual allegories pointing to Christ. And it’s funny because some scholars denounce it as the most virulently antisemitic propaganda piece, while others hail it as a thoroughly Jewish midrash. Now that seems to me a perfect example of just how fraught and complex our relationship with our Jewish neighbors remains to this very day.

May we listen with an open heart. May we honor the Image of God within every human being. May we beg forgiveness from, and seek restitution for, those whom we have most wronged in the Name of Jesus Christ.

Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy. Amen.