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Loading...We earlier had a guest post by Marc Zvi Brettler, an internationally renowned scholar of ancient Judaism, as related to his book The Bible With and Without Jesus (HarperOne, 2020), co-authored with New Testament scholar (and my long-time friend) Amy-Jill Levine. Many of you will know of Amy-Jill: she is an extremely popular lecturer, full of energy, humor and wit, author of numerous important books on Jesus and the New Testament. Here now is her follow-up post, a complement to Marc’s.
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My friend and frequent co-author, Marc Zvi Brettler, just posted on this blogsite, “Marcion is Alive and Well – and What to do About It.” Marcion, back in the second-century C.E., distinguished between what he perceived to be the angry and inept Old Testament God and the wise and loving God of the New Testament. Although Christian authorities proclaimed this view heretical, it still has traction. When we hear the contrast between the “Old Testament God of wrath” and the “New Testament God of love,” or other such comparisons that throw the Old Testament under the camel, that’s Marcionism.
Why it exists is more complicated topic. Here are the top seven reasons.
First, People don’t read. It’s much easier to accept a stereotype that fits into a broader narrative than it is to see if the stereotype itself is credible. Marc’s blog and its links, especially Eva Mroczek’s chart (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BG5PvCO5pTTATcgBF-Da5j9p0myFgg9wj1ECkrRhFbI/edit?fbclid=IwAR2YMomv0s6SmBpG9kjOt5rroKd9tkp7XB7m7QaV8iHGEpx-vAbzsJeYpKE) provide the initial corrections.
Reading failures continue when people take verses out of context. For example, Christians have told me that because Jesus makes “all things new,” the Old Testament is defunct. The argument begins with the wrong premise. The phrase about making all things new, from Revelation 21:5, is set after the world has been destroyed about one and one-third times. As Revelation 21:1 puts it, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.” These lines echo Isaiah 65:17, “For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.” Christians who think we’re there now have misread both divine timetable and desk calendar.
Alternatively, Christians, misreading Paul’s letters, think that Torah’s commandments are impossible to follow, designed to drive us to despair, and so prompt us to throw ourselves on the mercy granted through the cross. This approach, which makes God a sadist, misreads both Torah and Paul. Addressing sin, the Hebrew text emphasizes shuv-ing, “turning” (Hebrew: shuv) from the bad and to the good. As for following Torah, John the Baptist’s parents had no problem (Luke 1:6 describes them as “righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord”); neither did Paul (see Philippians 3:6). For Paul, “the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good” (Romans 7:12). As the apostle to the gentiles (Romans 11:13), Paul proclaimed that gentiles should eschew their local deities and turn to the God of Israel. Gentiles were not, however, to convert to Judaism and therefore were not to follow those commandments that kept Jews distinct (we might think of Torah as an ancient model of multiculturalism). The commandments did not apply to non-Jews.
A second reason Marcionism prevails is bad advertising. The first line of a Christianity Today review of Brent Strawn’s excellent volume, The Old Testament Is Dying: A Diagnosis and Recommended Treatment (Baker Academic, 2017) is “What do Christians do with the Old Testament, with its weird laws, brutal violence, and unpredictable God?” (https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2017/july-web-only/man-shall-not-live-on-new-testament-alone.html). Why not lead with “What do Christians do with a text that proclaims not only love of neighbor but also love of stranger (Leviticus 19:18, 34), that offers multiple perspectives on the glories of creation (Genesis 1-2), and that provides Israel a set of practices that help them resist assimilation, preserve their cultural integrity, and celebrate their identity?
The advertising problem also concerns visuals. Pictures of the Old Testament God – since Jews traditionally do not depict the divine in art, the artists were likely Christians – God looks old, if not cranky. Or, we get Moses in the God role, and it’s a quick slide to Charlton Heston, looking angry and wielding a staff that portends an NRA product. Jesus, in paintings and on camera, is usually someone I’d date, like Jeffrey Hunter or Jim Caviezel.
.Finally, on advertising, we need to think about the connotations of the terms we use. If we think “Old Testament” means “outdated, useless, remaindered Testament,” we have misapplied the adjective. Old (I note that I’m old, and old is fabulous) should be thought of as honorable, epitomizing wisdom gained by experience, bedrock. We would equally dishonor the New Testament were we to think of it in term of “callow” or “faddish.”
A third reason why Marcion’s view continues is, I suspect, the fear that non-messianic Jews were right all along. Since there are no distinct signs of the messianic age – -no general resurrection of the dead, final judgment, or peace on earth –why is a New Testament needed? A variant of this view surfaces in the question a minister asked Marc, “If the revelation of the Old Testament were sufficient, why would we need the new?” One simple response is to paint the Old Testament and subsequent Judaism in such noxious terms that anything looks better in comparison. That the New Testament offers hellfire, damnation, and other eschatological unpleasantries is just a minor problem. Further, the minister asks the wrong question. We could equally ask ‘If the New Testament were sufficient, why do we need pastors to interpret it?” All texts require commentary. Nor does a new covenant abrogate the old: promises to David do not abrogate promises to Abraham.
Marc’s posting flags “poorly trained and uninformed evangelical/atheist social media.” Each contingent warrants notice.
Fourth, professional atheists (you know who they are) read the Bible selectively, see the text as endorsing a bellicose God, and so reject its theology. An alternative response is not rejection but wrestling. The biblical etymology given for Israel is “to wrestle with God” (Gen 32:29), and that is what Jewish tradition teaches. The Tanakh depicts Cain’s complaint about being exiled, Abraham’s plea for the righteous in Sodom, Moses’s defense of Israel who, after liberation from slavery, complained about the food in the desert, numerous psalms plus the entire book of Lamentations, and Job’s multi-chapter kvetch. We could add Jesus’ plea, “let this cup pass from me,” and his cry from the cross, taken from the beginning of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The biblical God allows free will and exhorts people to live morally: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19). In cases of the so-called “angry God,” the biblical response is not atheism; it is lament, protest, and acting to bring about the good.
Fifth, some pastors see Torah as designed to point to Jesus, and now that it’s done its job, it is defunct. They fail to see how the commandments not only preserve but also celebrate Jewish life, even today (these pastors are not often wont to celebrate multiculturalism). They fail to see how the stories are both good literature and prompts for discussions of morality; they fail to see the wisdom in Wisdom literature or the sacrality of the Psalms. They fail, in effect, to see its ongoing meaning: texts can do more than point to Jesus, as Marc and I demonstrate in our The Bible With and Without Jesus (HarperOne, 2020). While he does find the Old Testament to be inspired, Pastor Andy Stanley speaks of the need for Christians to become “unhitched” from the “Jewish Scriptures” (see, e.g, https://www.christianpost.com/news/christians-must-unhitch-old-testament-from-their-faith-says-andy-stanley.html). The call is both ahistorical and sad. Jesus proclaims that he does not come to abolish Torah; to the contrary, in the Sermon on the Mount he makes Old Testament commandments more rigorous. His followers, James, Paul, etc., do not unhitch their Scriptures, they read them instead in light of the Christ event, and they continue their Jewish practices. To unhitch Jesus and his followers from Torah jettisons Jewish believers and leads nicely into both Marcionism and antisemitism.
Sixth, bad theology begins with children’s education. Christian children do not, generally, grow up hating the Old Testament. To the contrary, many Christian children love it, since it has all the good animal stories, as opposed to Jesus drowning two thousand pigs. Yet many of my students have recounted how their Sunday School teachers spoke about the Old Testament God who demands rules, rules, rules, while Jesus talks about love.
Finally, lectionary-based Churches convey an “Old Testament” bad message. For example, while pairing the “Ten Commandments” (Exodus 20:1-17) with Psalm 19 (“The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul; the decrees of the LORD are sure, making wise the simple”) is a good move, the lectionary undercuts this praise of Torah with 1 Corinthians 1:21, “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe.” For a sermon preached for the National Cathedral this past March on why this is a terrible lectionary reading, see https://cathedral.org/sermons/sermon-dr-amy-jill-levine/).
Pitting one Testament against the other is a nasty game, and no one wins. Separating the God of the Old Testament from the God of New Testament is a Christian heresy, for the God who created the heavens and the earth is the same God to whom Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Our father.” Let’s retire the image of the “Old Testament God of wrath” or the view that “Old Testament” means “less good” or “replaced Testament.” To do so would make us all better readers of the Bible, better prepared to engage healthy Jewish-Christian relations, and better able to do theology.
There are quite a few “professional atheists” who think the New Testament is worse than the Old. As Christopher Hitchens put it “In the Old Testament, you can at least f*cking die.” The New Testament is where things like thought crime and eternal punishment really come into their own (although thought crime os in the OT as well).
Thanks for your comment. Indeed, some do regard the NT as worse, although I’ve never encountered any in my classroom. The parable of the unforgiving slave is particularly nasty. We could also debate whether the NT is speaking about oblivion rather than eternal punishment – a subject Bart has addressed.
I agree that the New Testament had an annihilationist perspective. but annihilation is a punishment that lasts forever. It’s not as nasty as the traditional hell, but it’s still eternal.
No, the common perspective is probably that the New Testament is better.
Sweden used Leviticus as the basis for laws against sexual immorality at the beginning of the 17th century, but they rapidly realized that following God’s laws strictly would have depopulated the country.
it seems like the Christian consensus offers a ‘better’ divine, but all depends on the verses one chooses to foreground. Seems to me the more gracious reading is to admit both benefits and difficulties with each text.
The NT should never be unhitched from the OT because everything in christianity needs to be understood within the context of judaism.
But the NT transfers all law giving authority over to the commands of Jesus.
yes, and no – since Jesus ‘ascended’ (or, for non-believers, died, and so had nothing more to contribute), the teachings had to extend to his followers: Hence, e.g., Peter’s authority according to Matthew 16, and the role of the Paraclete in John. The NT in general removes ‘authority’ from the community to Jesus and then to his authorized representatives. Weirdly, in terms of authority, Jews are more like Baptists in the “free church” tradition.
Thanks for an interesting post.
Sometimes I feel that discussions from biblical, (often litteral oriented scholars) circles like birds in a locked (actually isolated) room.
When I opened the window in the same room, there was a breeze of ideas that could easily influence this theology just outside the window, such as other worldviews such as
• Hellenistic ideas
• Ancient Egyptian religions ideas
• Ancient Sumerian (Babylon) ideas
• Zoroathism and its creation, their ideas of good and evil, and as they explain it today, are an allegory of levels of divine consciousness
• Hinduism, the idea of Brahman and Atman, a story of descent and ascent to unity, and also the humans spiritiual being, with its 7 spiritual centers which needs to be awakened.
• Estorian Christian views, found in Gnostic and (perhaps pre-Gnostic ideas such as Odes and the Gospel of Thomas etc.etc) and also other esoteric (non-dualistic Christian views).
• Esoteric Jewish views, later gathered in Kabbalistic views.
And by itself, and perhaps influenced by external ideas, so many reflect on the Hebrew steps in an allegorical fame, all the narratives from its creation story, From Eden to Babylon, the story of Abraham, the exodus from Egypt, assumingly who don’t have sufficient historical support (could have been legendary, based on a historic event) but it fits well as allegorical narratives. These influences could also in my mind be found in the New Testament as in the striking resemblem as ideas found in Hindi concepts.
One think is for certain, that 2000 years ago most people on earth (including the environment where the Israelites were even part of (the Persian Empire) and surrounded them) had ideas that we would call “esotreric”, and which in my mind easily can be traced into the Bible
The FUCD (fictionally universal cosmic deity)
commonly known as God of the OT is the same as NT, a fictional entity that mirrors the esteemed values & persona of the writer/speaker which were influenced heavily by his contemporary culture.
It is upsetting though to witness how wishful thinking subjugate critical mind skills and how reason becomes a tool to defend one’s ancient religion & culture primitivism (a perceived identity).Although it is expected since mountains ⛰ of generations have been domesticated from birth by the illusion of FUCD (God).
Your approach seems to be Old is gold, it is not bad but actually very good. Let’s respect it & cherish it 😳.
Now a question 🙋♂️, would you demand respect for a collection of sacred ancient books from another culture.
In those books,
Legends about physics/chemistry shattering miracles,
Primitive rules like stoning you to death for swearing at your parents,
Promotion of superstition to handle reality,
A pantheon of gods (Elohim) that gradually turns into singularity (Eloh). As if the FUCD doesn’t know to inspire the monotheistic language from the start.
Commanded genocides against other nations, Mercy for your daily life Conditional on complete subjugation,
Rituals that are blood thirsty 🩸 since that FUCD can’t get calm unless a life is destroyed with the shedding of its blood & get pleased with the charring of its corpse, etc.?
lots here — so for efficiently one comment: the genocidal commands (which disgust me) are limited to the seven nations of Canaan, and the commandments were not likely carried out, as Judges makes clear. My son’s Torah passage when he became Bar Mitzvah was the ‘wipe out the Canaanites’ passage in Deuteronomy (Shoftim); he spoke about how he was appalled by the text, but proud to be a member of a community that allowed him to wrestle with it.
Oh, when the blog didn’t post the comment in couple days. I didn’t follow up & I thought 💭 it will not be posted but here we are.
Thank you both for posting & replying.
Here we go.
Was AlBagdadi more or less destructive than Hitler?
AlBagdadi caused less & LOCAL harm and limited most of his actions to be against ethnicities around him. WHY?
It was logistical and capability’s LIMITATIONS. Nothing more.
Your alleviation of the savagery by limiting damage to 7 ethnicities doesn’t make the commands reconcilable.
Example to confirm the above is Judges19:1.
Ironically, AlBagdadi was savagely more destructive than Hitler though didn’t have the means.
Divinely Genocidal commands which have comparable commands in Quran illustrate a leader indifferent 😐 to competing Sapiens blood 🩸 around him but hide behind his imaginary FUCD to give commands strong enough to motivate his armies to commit those atrocities & blood baths.
It is hard to see toxic flaws in your parental house 🏡 and it is a huge struggle whether to abandon the house or choose the easier option & keep trying to brush over the flaws to continue calling it home.
I think that part of what is missing in this discussion is that there is something of a divide between the two sections of the Bible. God is frequently a direct participant in the Old Testament, but he is mostly present in the New Testament only by indirect reference. There is also the whole notion that the nature of salvation is different after the sacrifice of Jesus. I am not saying that any of this is necessarily “true,” merely that it is silly to suggest that there is absolutely no division. Maybe one can argue that the division is mostly a creation (or extension) of subsequent interpretation.
thanks for this interesting point. The idea of the divine presence becomes complicated if we think that the Gospel writers viewed Jesus as divine, so the reference in the NT is entirely direct. There are lots of distinctions between the “OT/Tanakh” and the NT, but the Marcionite perpective of bad OT vs. good OT divine should not be one of them.
Oh, when the blog didn’t post the comment in couple days. I didn’t follow up & I thought 💭 it will not be posted but here we are. Thank you both for posting & replying.
Here we go.
Is AlBagdadi more or less destructive than Hitler?
AlBagdadi caused less & LOCAL harm and limited most of his actions to be against ethnicities around him. WHY?
It was logistical and capability’s LIMITATIONS. Nothing more.e.g. Judges19:1
Ironically, AlBagdadi was savagely more destructive than Hitler though didn’t have the means.
Divinely Genocidal commands which have similar commands in Quran illustrate a leader indifferent 😐 to competing Sapiens blood 🩸 around him but hide behind his imaginary FUCD to give commands strong enough to motivate his armies to commit those atrocities & blood baths.
It is hard to see toxic flaws in your parental house 🏡, so it is a huge struggle whether to abandon the house or choosing the easier option & trying to brush over the flaws to continue calling it home.
Would you comment on what Matthew 5:17-20, where Jesus, delivering the Sermon on the Mount, declares that he is there not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it, means in the context of this debate? I would also be interested in hearing your opinion what it means to “fulfill the law.” I was raised in a Southern Baptist Church. If the doors were open, we were there. I still do not understand what this means, and as best I can remember, nobody bothered attempting to explain it.
happy to comment – have commented: see THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT: A Beginner’s Guide to the Kingdom of Heaven. To fulfill does not mean “I’ve checked it off so you no longer have to bother”; it means “I’ll show you how to do it so you can follow my model.” Jesus does not ask his followers to do what he himself will not do.
Ah!! Dr Levine, I Love your work and recently I have been binge-watching any and all lectures of yours that I can find online! Thank you for this brilliant post.
I have two questions:
1. How misogynistic was ancient Judaism? And how do we go about addressing that misogyny in a non-problematic way?
2. When Jews accepted Jesus as messiah, post crucifixion, during the first couple of centuries, (if they did?) how did they see his role in salvation, since they were already within covenant?
Thank you for the work that you do!
Oh my – thank you for your kind words.
On misogyny _ neither ancient Judaism nor Christian origins was an egalitarian wonderland. One of the common, and I think incorrect, stereotypes is that Christianity replaced a patriarchal Judaism with an egalitarian system. Nope. Were Jesus egalitarian, at least 6 of the apostles would have been women.
Good question on the Jewish understanding of soteriology regarding Jesus’ role — the answer would have depended on the Jew one asked. Some saw Jesus as a replacement of the Temple; some saw him less as a savior from sin than as the guarantor of the beginning of the eschatological age; some saw him as a prophet, etc. How strong the ‘salvation from sin’ motif figured would have varied. The same, more or less, holds for other Jews who hailed other messiahs, such as the Lubavitcher rebbe. More to say here, perhaps in another post.
“Job’s multi-chapter kvetch” is the best short description I’ve seen!
I think there’s an additional reason for this attitude: supersessionism. The first Christians, all Jews, believed that Scripture predicted the coming of Jesus and expected all other Jews to agree with them. When the Jews declined, and the composition of the Jesus movement became more Gentile, Christians began to argue that God had rejected the Jews as his chosen people. It’s not so much that the “God of the Old Testament” was “angry and inept”; the “God of the Jews” was – or, rather, the Jews had made him that way, one of their many mistakes.
This isn’t a rational argument, of course, and doesn’t fit the texts. But it fits an emotional and spiritual need.
Great post. Not sure who would respond to this question but here goes.
If Christianity had not emerged as a distinct religion (ie, no disciples thought Jesus was raised from the dead) would Judaism have had good enough reasons to respect and remember the historical Jesus as at least a somewhat important Jewish prophet or teacher or holy man; or would there still have been, from the standpoint of Judaism, strong reasons to reject him, eg, his apocalypticism. Or perhaps the historical Jesus (without the resurrection) did not have enough impact to warrant either kind of attention?
Is Josephus’s mention of Jesus an indication of how memorable Jesus would have been to Judaism without the emergence of Christianity; or was that mention due in large part to the emergence of Christianity?
I ask this in part because I sometimes think that people who want to be followers of the historical Jesus should most logically become Jews-except that as far as I know there aren’t many apocalyptic Jews nowadays. Plus Jesus was mistaken about the imminent arrival of God’s kingdom in the first century.
good questions, but difficult to answer. we would be moving here into ‘alternative history’ (a genre my husband very much likes; I find ‘real’ history difficult enough). I suspect his eschatology, his personal rather than communal authority, his celibacy, and his afamilial ethos would not have promoted strong support. He’s also too late for biblical authority and too early for rabbinic approval.
Being a follower of the ‘historical Jesus’ is a fascinating question, since the church is not built on an anterior construction of the historical Jesus (heaven forbid, as it were, that Jesus scholars should determine theology- I’m not sure what Bart would say about this, but ‘theology’ is something I do not do.
I would love it if some of Jesus’s teachings, like the parables, made it into Jewish cultural and religious imagination.
Thank you, Dr. Levine for your interesting responses. As you know, various Jews, for decades (or longer), have tried to recapture Jesus (stripped of any Christian claims about him) for Judaism. It seems to me that this is still a viable goal. But such Jews would need to get out there and teach Jesus’ Jewishness in the New Testament and also where portraits of him (Like in John) are utterly unrealistic. They would need to explain clearly why his teachings about himself either as the way or as God are historically unacceptable. It bothers me to no end to hear some Christians say, “I am a Christian because I try to follow Jesus’ moral teachings but not as Savior.” What they are really saying is that they like to follow some Jewish teachings or, at least, I like to follow some of the teachings of the Jew Jesus.
Well said Amy-Jill Levine! Thank you for sharing this.
thanks for your kind words. Affirmation helps!
“Fourth, professional atheists (you know who they are) read the Bible selectively, see the text as endorsing a bellicose God, and so reject its theology.”
You’re right of course. Yahweh has been unjustly maligned. But that’ the way it goes. A few genocidal wars and you’re branded forever!
There’s an old joke, along similar lines, regarding one singular action that gets one branded for life, but for the sake of good taste, I shall not repeat it here.
So I am one of those atheists (item 4), and I find it galling to be accused of selective Bible reading by someone who then turns around and does the same thing, picking verses about ‘wrestling with god’ and ‘lamenting and protesting’. As the author full well knows, there are numerous stories in the Bible in which god perpetrates or commands cruel acts (killing the Egyptian newborns; killing the baby of David and Bathsheba; the killing of the Midianite women and boys and subsequent rape of the girls; to name but a few). Nobody in the Bible laments these deaths or wrestles with them. They are portrayed as good and just. These actions, in my opinion, eclipse anything good this god could possible stand for.
To use an illustration: Imagine I found out that a relative of mine is a serial killer. Would I say, “Sure, John brutally raped and murdered those five young women, but aside from that, he’s such a wonderful young man”? No, I would never say that. John’s criminal acts would totally eclipse any wonderful-ness I might otherwise have seen in him. No apology is possible.
I did not know that the professionals were among the readers of this blog.
That the biblical texts records material is not the same thing as the biblical text AFFIRMING what is recorded. I think the rape narratives are designed to disgust and horrify, not approve. An event is simply that, an event – whether it is ‘good’ or ‘just’ depends on the reader. That you — or someone else– take the message that the Bible approves of rape, for example, is a reader’s choice. I do think that the majority of the ‘kill the whoever…’ texts are designed to create horror, not approval.
Do you think the stories of cruelty and murder apply to an earlier time in Israel’s life? That is to ask, “Does it work to think of Israel and Judaism evolving?” If Israelites ever did practice an “eye for an eye” literally, they grew out of it might be an example.
In reference to the author’s statements about “practices that help them resist assimilation, preserve their cultural integrity, and celebrate their identity” – this really makes my blood boil. Maybe this sounds cute because the stories are all placed in a far distant past and come to us in literary format. But really, to put this into modern terms, what else is this but jingoistic nationalism, religious and cultural intolerance, and an obsession with keeping their blood pure? For context, I grew up in Germany of the 70s and 80s when the nation came to terms with its terrible past of the Third Reich. I have always carried that guilt that my people were the ones who committed one of the worst genocides in human history. The Nazis celebrated the German identity, were intent on keeping the Aryan blood pure and preserving their Germanic culture, and unleashed a war to conquer land that they thought was rightfully theirs. Sounds like any Biblical people you know?
I am an atheist, a pacifist and a humanist, and I don’t suffer this kind of apologetics gladly, especially coming from learned people who should know better.
If you have a problem with Jews engaged in practices that serve to resist assimilation – which is in ancient rather than just a modern concern — then you may well be speaking from the position I have defined as ‘christian privilege’ (see my article on this topic in Adele Reihartz’s edited volume on John and the Jews. To celibrate one’s identity by wiping everyone who is not ‘us’ out is not, wells, healthy. To celebrate one’s identity along with allowing others to celebrate theirs is the opposite of Nazi ideology.
It might be interesting to interpret the “New Testament” as a continuation of the “Old Testament” in the sense that it is a focused story about the struggles of one particular Jew to come to terms with various prophetic books (as he interpreted them) and a world in which there were strong hopes and even expectations that certain prophecies would be fulfilled. And perhaps the lesson would be, don’t do what he did. Be patient and be modest. And the rest of the story shows one how very wrong one can go, and what awful things can happen, when patience and modesty are thrown aside, and how terrible the consequences can be for following a false messiah. Again, the lesson would be: don’t do what that person did, and don’t do what the followers of that person did.
I appreciate this ethically focused reading.
If we go with the ‘what one Jew thought,’ then how do we move to the next step and fit in what other Jews also thought? Ideally, there’s be room for more than one view.
Now we have the problem of the evangelistic movement outside the Jewish people.
Jews can deal with diverse views given a sense of ethnic identity. But if one enters a movement by belief – as was the case with Jesus’s followers — then one also exits by belief. The belief-focused defining factor of the followers of Jesus constrains a variety of views.
Dr Levine,
A huge fan of your work. Actually requested Dr Ehrman a few months ago to invite you to his blog.
A few questions:
1. Did early Christianity assist the birth of Rabbanic Judaism or Rabbanic Judaism assisted the birth of early Christianity?
2. How accurate you consider Josephus as a historian or a chroniclar?
3. Do you have a blog where you could be contacted or followed?
Regards,
Kashif
Thanks for your kind words.
a. Yes, and vice versa. groups self-define in relation to other groups. But the amount of influence varied from rabbi to rabbi, church member to church member. See on this the various chapters in THE BIBLE WITH AND WITHOUT JESUS.
2. I wouldn’t date him, and I wouldn’t want my children to date him either.
3. I have a facebook page, but I do not know how to access it — my daughter checks it to let me know if I am to respond to anything.
best,
aj
A few years ago I listened to your course on the OT from The Great Courses and really enjoyed it. Your first reason in this post is that many people don’t read. But many who do read come away with a negative impression of God in both testaments! That happened with me when I took the time to read through the Bible cover-to-cover a few years ago. Still, there are meaningful stories and teachings in the Bible; it can provoke some very important questions. However, I think it’s value is in provoking discussion, not in providing answers. Those who claim the Bible has all the answers do both the Bible and humanity a disservice. I sense you are one who values the questions and discussion, and I thank you for that.
I always tell people that I am not an atheist because I *haven’t* read the Bible; I’m an atheist because I read it…all the way through!
Yes, “However, I think it’s value is in provoking discussion, not in providing answers” _- right – it’s a book that helps us often ask the right questions, but the answers may vary.
on the ‘atheist’ vs. ‘not atheist’ view — belief is a matter of love, not logic. My focus for the article was, but only in part, those who argue that the “OT’s” picture of the divinity is only one of disgust.
I do quibble with this: Fourth, professional atheists (you know who they are) read the Bible selectively, see the text as endorsing a bellicose God, and so reject its theology.
Most atheists I know (including myself) did not arrive at that stance by selectively reading the Bible. Many of us reject theology (while still finding it interesting) because we see physics, biology, social science, and anthropology as more compelling descriptors of what it means to be human and means to find our place in the natural world and build better human relations.
I agree, in many cases atheists are more knowledgeable of the Bible than majority of church goers, some even wrote commentary and pleaded for biblical education (Isaac Asimov). It’s not even think that rejection is unjustified and that it comes from reading a few verses “out od context”. After reading about Jeptah’s daughter in Judges 11, calling God “angry” is a bit of na understatement, IMHO…
Thank you for your comment.
By “professional atheists” I think of those who use the Bible to demonstrate the validity of their claims.
I suspect that both theists and atheists, for the most part, do not begin with the Bible; the Bible becomes either the source of deeper belief or the source to bolster the lack thereof. Then again, I’m (So) not a theologian; I’d much rather study a text than engage in theological speculation. I am happy to try to understand the various biblical portraits of the divine (see the chapter on this in my book, co-authored with Doug Knight, THE MEANING OF THE BIBLE (granted a pretentious title), but that is not the same thing as doing my own theologizing.
aj
“. . . those who use the Bible to demonstrate the validity of their claims.”
That is a helpful response. Thank you. I see what you mean that some could justify their atheism based on finding fault with the theology they once accepted. What I enjoy about the approach of textual criticism about which this blog is so informative is that it allows researchers to correlate what is written to the times in which it was produced. Though I followed a fringe theology for the first decade of my adult life (Rev. Moon’s Divine Principle) at 67 it sometimes seems a dim memory how arguing within the confines of the theology satisfied me. Collision between what the teachings promised and what actually came to pass created the chasm that I filled with academic studies (particularly the anthropology of religion) to arrive at a worldview without a deity. Again, thank you for your guest post. It was illuminating.
thanks for your kind words. I personally find theology of less interest than I do textual questions: what the passage might have meant in its original context, how it has been interpreted over time, how different subject positions lead to different readings. If belief in a divinity comes along with such concerns, fine, but if not, the concerns, for me, remain worth pursuing. I don’t find that the text makes me more or less of a ‘believer’,’ but the study I think makes me a more ethical person.
Are we having a Gold Q&A this month?
Got away from me. I’ll be scheduling a longer one for October.
Comments like “…for the God who created the heavens and the earth is the same God to whom Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Our father.”” make my mind quiver. If Jesus is I Am then was he saying “pray to me”? This is based on John who says Jesus was the creator of the heavens and earth. Perhaps the reason Jesus spends so much time asking people who they think he is, is an indication that he honestly didn’t know.
I am reminded of the moderately confused Jesus of SUPERSTAR. Jesus does not generally say ‘pray to me,’ and the Pauline approach is that everything gets handed over to the Father (cf. the Philippians Christ hymn). Here is the ‘mystery’ of the text and of subsequent Christian theology, which concluded that Jesus was both G-d and Son of G-d. it’s a both/and approach rather than an either/or one, given the monotheistic (or bitheistic) starting point.
I had a hard time wrapping my head around this one, forgive my ignorance. While I agree verses can be cherry-picked to support stereotypes, however, doesn’t the overall character of God in the OT stand in stark contrast to NT writings overall about God? And wouldn’t that be mainly due to the writers of the OT living during a completely different time, place and culture than writers of the NT many centuries later with different agendas?
Sure there are beautiful passages, moving poetry and wisdom to be found in the OT, but also a lot more violence and dark messages. Amy-Jill points out Leviticus 19:18, 34 and the creation stories, but reading the bible in my youth attempting to search for God’s character and meaning, I also ran across things like Deut 21:10-14, 22:13-21, Numbers 31:17, Exodus 21:20. I recall a lecture from Dr. Ehrman on suffering, quoting Amos 3 – that’s quite an angry, vengeful God! The NT certainly has its problematic messages as well, but when I was still a Christian, I certainly found perhaps a bit more comfort in the NT as I sought to understand God. I’m curious your thoughts. Thanks!
On the head-wrapping concern: see the website to which Marc Brettler and I both point on the stereotypes of bad vs. good OT vs. NT divine. Nor do I think the times of the OT and the NT (to use Christian language) were all that different – none was a participatory democracy. There are lots of good things, and lots of problems, in both texts. Even the ‘nasty prophets’ can be helpful – for example, to the traumatized soldier, the prophets can say, “Yes, I know exactly how you felt.” For a negative view, see Revelation, and on the other hand, Revelation responds to the desires of those who want some sort of vengeance, but also recognize that vengeance is not THEIR call.
This is very well presented and makes many great points. One of the things that bothers me a lot in mainstream Christianity is how “the church” keeps perpetuating myths and doctrines and conceptions about Judaism that are just flat out wrong. If I have heard it once, I have heard a thousand times how Judaism is a works based religion, how Jews have to keep the law to earn favor with God. It is a total misreading of scripture, and yet it continues. How do ministers go to theology school and still maintain that view and pass it along? It is beyond me.
Thanks to Marc Zvi Brettler and Amy-Jill Levine for guest posting. I also very much enjoyed reading the sermon Ms Levine preached at the National Cathedral and am glad she supplied the link. Like her blog post, it was spot-on.
Thanks for kind words.
I suspect that one reason such pernicious nonsense continues among more liberal church members is a matter of weak Christology. Christians who have problems with the supernatural aspects of the Bible and dismiss the more difficult sayings of Jesus (that’s a plug for my new book with Abingdon) but still want to find value in their tradition do so by making the “OT” and its Jewish interpreters look bad. Jesus becomes in this imaginative reading the only Jew who cares about social justice, health care, women, ecology, etc., and thus he is unique. “Unique” functions as a theological category. To show any of this material is from the Scriptures of Israel is to compromise the “uniqueness” of Jesus.
We can do better.
Best,
aj
By coincidence, I’m reading David Bentley Hart’s _Atheist Delusions_ right now. (For those who don’t know him, Hart is a major Eastern Orthodox scholar and theologian.) He does almost the same thing you’re describing here, from the opposite direction (he has no problem with the supernatural aspects of the Bible): he strongly implies that’s it only because of Christianity that we have hospitals, social networks, and such. “A world from which the gospel had been banished would surely be one in which millions more of our fellows would go unfed, unnursed, unsheltered, and uneducated.”
I find him as chauvinistic for his beliefs as he finds the “professional atheists” (to use your term) for theirs.
yes – we tend to cherry pick the passages and results we like and ignore the rest.
To care for the sick is not an issue unique to Christianity, and to have social networks was not a Catholic invention.
Yes, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament should not be pitted against each other. I propose that the best solution is understanding the use of allegory in both. Unfortunately, Marcion and many others from then until today fail to see that.
yes ,and no.
the church tended to do more allegorical interpretation than did rabbinic Judaism, for which the ‘peshat,’ the literal meaning of the text was not lost.
Allegory can be terrific; on the other hand, it can also be elitist, since it presumes a special answer key to which not all readers have access.
I agree that we should never lose sight of the plain meaning of Scripture. And any proposed symbolism in Scripture should not be too difficult to describe to the general public even if everybody will not agree on the interpretation.
Some of my journey follows:
1. Back in the mid-1980s, I insisted on a literal interpretation of Genesis 1. But within a couple years, I conceded to estimations of the universe’s age based on the redshift of most galaxies. That put me in the camp of old-earth creationism.
2. In the early to mid-1990s, my study of comparative genetics and molecular phylogeny convinced me of the evolutionary theory. At that point, I concluded that Genesis 1-11 was nonliteral while Genesis 12 to the Deuteronomistic History was literal,
3. Also in the mid-1990s, I conceded to some form of the documentary hypothesis, and I did not know what to do with it for a long time. And I tended to interpret prophetic oracles, parables, and apocalypses in the Bible as nonliteral.
4. Now I am enjoying reading about a recent resurgence of allegorical methods that are elite or esoteric. For example, D history describes the complete destruction of the Amalekites that keep reappearing. word limit….
Sorry, but I missed a word. I meant “Now I am enjoying reading about a recent resurgence of allegorical methods that are [not] elite or esoteric.”
Thanks for your kind words and comment.
On the “Scripture predicted Jesus” approach: that’s one of the reasons Marc Brettler and I wrote THE BIBLE WITH AND WITHOUT JESUS — it explains how non-messianic Jews have interpreted the major “OT” passages deployed in the NT.
I’m not sure that supersessionism is a prompt for Marcionism — will have to think more on this idea – although Marcionism is a prompt for supersessionism. The reason I’m hesitating on your formulation is that supersessionism tends to incorporate and then appropriate what had come before (e.g., the covenants get transferred from Jews to [gentile] Christians) rather than erase the earlier material. Then again, you are correct: Nothing said the argument had to be rational.
I hadn’t intended to suggest supersessionism as a prompt for Marcionism (though now that you’ve mentioned it, I can see it as a possible inspiration, rather than a prompt). My point was I think some of the fulminators (including present-day ones) contrasting the “God of anger” with the “God of love” weren’t trying to delegitimize the OT; they were trying to delegitimize the Jews.
It occurred to me that my previous comment about would-be followers of the historical Jesus becoming Jews might have made the kind of “imperialist” assumption that you and Marc Brettler are warning against. Was I assuming that, without claims of divinity and messiahship, Jesus could have become a leading figure in Judaism, maybe even the “Seal of the Prophets” so to speak? Not fully or with full awareness. But I think I was assuming, without long, careful thought, evidence, any expertise, or appropriate humility, that the historical Jesus could have automatically become a very important figure in an ancient religion that already had a host of very important figures.
What I should have said was that people who want to follow the same religion that the historical Jesus followed should consider becoming Jews.
yes, and no. there would be no reason for gentiles to become Jews (as there is no reason for Kenyans or Germans to become Americans). Your (good) comments get us into that messy distinction between being in a ‘religion’ and being in a ‘people,’
How about i find both testaments full of entertaining sometimes disturbing sometimes uplifting stories without looking for any ultimate spiritual value? That is how I approach Greek myths. I can do that easily with Greek myths because Greek religion has not been shoved down our throats in America.
Yes, on deligitimizing Jews (whether intentionally or as a by-product). Ascribing motives can be precarious.
AJ
Dear Amy-Jill,
I’ve consulted “The Jewish Annotated New Testament” on a regular basis over the years, particularly on Paul and Galatians. I’ve also done close readings of about half the chapters in “Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi”. After reading your essay above, I watched the “A Polite Bribe” with attention to your part in it. To say I like your work is an understatement. To me, it is a modern miracle, a sign, a cause for wonder. Sorry it this is too gushy. This praise does not mean I think I understand your work as you understand it.
My summary takeaway on your contribution to New Testament studies is that you are transcending the antithesis of Paul versus “the circumcision” without denying it, and also teaching Christians how to embrace “difference”. I’m curious to know if this fits with what you think you are doing.
Thanks for your kind words. I’ve never seen POLITE BRIBE (once something is taped, I can’t do anything about it). But please, do “gush” (being affirmed when one is often seen as something of a cross between the antiChrist and an apostate is helpful). On the Pauline matter, Paul sees, in the messianic age, Jews and Gentiles united, as equals, in the worship of the Christ. But for Paul, Jews remain Jews and Gentiles remain Gentiles. For Jews to remain Jews means that Jews still follow the Mitzvot (cf. Paula Fredriksen’s article on Paul in the JANT2). Paul offers a ‘both/and’ – we human beings I think tend to be more comfortable with an either/or, with distinction rather than hybridity.
It seems to me that we should distinguish two views:
View A: The OT god is bad and the NT god is good.
View B: The OT god is bad.
As far as I can tell, we’ve been given reasons to think View A is implausible, but not reasons to think View B is implausible. One reason to think View A is implausible is that the NT god is pretty monstrous also. Fair enough.
But View A being implausible does not entail View B is implausible. And View B does not seem implausible. God does monstrous things in the OT. Yes, god also does good things in the OT, but most monstrous people also do some good things. Perhaps the best correction to Marcionism is to conclude that the god of the whole Bible is bad.
View C: The OT god is bad and the NT god is bad.
or, that we readers have a responsibility to engage the biblical views of theology, and at times, as the lament psalms insist, protest.
Great post, thanks! I’m an (amateur) atheist, so take my comments with a grain of salt, but . . . I find the New Testament horrifying because it glorifies human sacrifice (crucifixion of Jesus). I know, I know — I’ll get lots of pushback on this. But that’s still what it is, no matter how you sugar coat it. Is there anything comparable in the OT? Maybe Jephthah’s daughter, but that seems to be presented as a warning against making foolish vows. The near sacrifice of Isaac scared (maybe scarred) me as a child, but he ultimately was spared. Also, I may steal your line about throwing the OT under the camel. 🙂
Don’t forget cannibalism, if we take the bread and wine to be actual body and blood, under the “appearance” of bread and wine, as some do. And in that case we have not only human sacrifice but a cannibalistic meal of the victim’s body. Nasty stuff, I think. And certainly an abomination in the Judaic world view, as it should be. But with Christians such a thing seems to be A-OK, as the astronauts say. Yet another reason to view Christianity with a jaundiced eye.
well, throwing under the bus would have been anachronistic.
Human sacrifice is a fascinating topic on its own (see Jon Levenson’s DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF THE BELOVED SON). We still do this, when we send our children to war.
Hi Dr Levine!
I also just wanted to ask: where could I find any lectures that you have given on the topic of homosexuality (if you have done any)? Or any writings of yours on the topic?
Thank you so much!!
on homosexuality in the OT/Tanakh, see my book with Doug Knight: THE MEANING OF THE BIBLE (yes, a pretentious title; thank HarperOne); on the NT, see the textbook with Warren Carter: THE NEW, METHODS AND MEANINGS.
As an Atheist, not a professional one, I wanted to thank Dr. Levine for this post, and Bart for providing the space to host it. So many people over simplify things in order to believe them. My experience in the various churches I grew up in (my dad was an episcopal priest), was that parishioners wanted to short-hand everything to find the right answers and memorize them, be able to reject them out of hand as not part of the profile, as it were. In short, (with one Sunday school teacher) it was better to memorize the bible’s words than it was to know what it was saying, if that makes sense.
I always enjoy it when some scholar provides a nuanced understanding of both sides of an argument. What I do know regardless of Marcian, and the idiots who are teaching the world’s christian children Sunday school, without The Tanakh, Christianity is missing the meat of it’s body. That alone makes it worthy, important, and essential to understand and take seriously. You don’t stand up and say, “I don’t need my legs now that I’m standing.”
thanks for these comments. One of the reasons I started writing Bible studies for churches (you can find these on the Abingdon site) was to show that one did not need to make Judaism look bad in order to make Jesus look good. I do think that a lot of religious hatred begins with children’s education, and the problem is by no means limited to Christian readings. I’ve also been writing (with Sandy Eisenberg Sasso) children’s books, mostly about Jesus’s parables, to start Christian children with a positive image of Judaism and to introduce Jewish children to the Jewish wisdom of Jesus the Jew.
Just wanted to say I really enjoyed reading this excellent piece and thank you so much for contributing to the blog.
thanks! you made my day!
“Fourth, professional atheists (you know who they are) read the Bible selectively, see the text as endorsing a bellicose God, and so reject its theology.”
Not a professional atheist, but which part of this am I reading selectively?
“See, the day of the Lord comes, cruel, with wrath and fierce anger, to make the earth a desolation…Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses will be plundered, and their wives ravished.” (Isaiah 13:9–16)
My teacher, Fr. Roland Murphy (a Carmelite) at Duke, talked about this Psalm as one of his favorites, for it expressed with stark honesty how some people felt, At the same time, the very image provokes horror. We see what we want in terms of revenge, and then we reject the approach. We do not have to hide our emotions, but we do need to recognize where they may lead.
Well this is certainly very topical. I just watched a YouTube video interview of M David Litwa’s new book The Evil Creator. I was horrified. I found the author very charming and erudite, but FFS…suggesting that today’s Jews are “so violent” because they worship a bloodthirsty God? Really? It was a hour defense of Marcion based on 1. The OT God is a liar from the get go “You will surely die” (Adam and Eve didn’t) and he’s insecure (they got kicked from the Garden) 2. Elisha and the She Bears…how could a God kill kids…3. A novel translation of Jesus in John where he supposedly said to the Pharisees your Father (Satan) is a liar and murderer, and his Father (YHWH) is too. I don’t know where to start with all that, but seriously WTF. How can an academic promote this anti-Jewish nonsense?
He said Jews today were violent because of this? You sure? Wow.
Hello Dr. Ehrman-
I’m sure. See October 24, 2021 YouTube Litwa interview with Mythvision. Is there any validity to the idea that YHWH is portrayed as a demiurge in John? Or that prior to Marcion, there was already the idea that YHWH was an evil creator?
I really enjoyed this guest post because you two are my favorite authors and between the two of you take up a full shelf in my bookcase!
Matt
Demiurge just means creator. An idea that YHWH was evil? I don’t know of anything like that before Marcion, but he may have something in mind I’m not thinking of.
I watched the interview too, and don’t think he believes today’s Jews are violent because they worship a bloodthirsty god. He was explaining the views of Marcion and would speak in Marcion’s “voice” for minutes at a time before reminding us that this was a view contending with other views and that Marcion’s thinking did not prevail. In an aside during one of these extended riffs as Marcion, he said that the modern violent conflict in the Middle East was reminiscent of the 1st & 2nd century’s Jewish wars, when Irenaeus quoted the gnostic Basilides as explaining the “violent nature” of the first century Jews as being due to their warlike creator god.
The words did come out of his mouth, on video, and a soundbite WOULD make it sound like he was speaking his own belief that Israel is “warlike” because of their god.
on the comment: “today’s Jews are “so violent” because they worship a bloodthirsty God? Really?” — today my friend Joseph Sievers is speaking at St. Peter’s Square about the Nazi deportation of the Jews of Italy. The Jews are the violent ones? Dear G-d!