misc essays

Wrapping up Jesus

A sample platter of Gospel x Rabbinics mashups

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg

Aug 19, 2024 • 23 min read

This is Life as a Sacred Text 🌱, an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives. It‘s run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:

Subscribe!

We've been spending a while in Jesus Country, but to all things there must come an end. And yet, I do in so many ways feel like we're just getting warmed up. So please indulge me with one last post, with some miscellaneous Jesus and Rabbinics Bits and Bobs.

If you haven't read Part One and Part Two of this series, please do those first, because things will make a lot more sense if you do.

Part One! Read it here!

Part Two! Read it here!

White dude with a christmas tree behind him says, we'll be here waiting for you — Feels not inappropriate to pick what is clearly a gif from a Lifetime or Hallmark Christmas movie for this one, no? Go read Parts One and Two. Conventionally Suitable White Dude over here will have a beverage waiting for you when you're done.

Today we'll be bouncing around. Topic to topic, Gospel to Gospel, all over the place.

You know where we are in the story:

We're reading Jesus as playing in the Pharisaic League, (mostly) on Team Hillel, arguing according to the mutually agreed-upon rules of the game.

Why? Because understanding how the Jews and Judaism may be situated in the Gospels should matter to Jews, and it should matter to Christians, and doing this kind of textual detective work is a great case study for anybody of any kind of background, I gander– in how assumptions can change with new information and context, to say nothing about better understanding one of the major religions trying to pull a theocracy these days.

If, indeed, Jesus is (mostly) Beit Hillel (potentially among other identities or relationships, or not, or whatever) and the Pharisees portrayed in the Gospels are Beit Shammai– so the Gospel stories are really about Jesus and the Pharisees having reasonable conversations about in-group matters, this impacts what the text is, says, means. It changes the very substance of what those conversations were. Now, obviously the Jews' takeaways from this might be different from a range of Christians' takeaways, and from those of other non-Jewish non-Christians (who may have a variety of relationships to these texts, for various reasons). But, let's be clear about this one bit:

At some point– certainly by the time the impacts of the failed Bar Kochba Revolt had landed– Christianity and Judaism became separate religions. And Judaism has evolved and changed significantly since the fall of the Temple and in the, say, 2000 years since then. So no matter where we ultimately position Jesus vis a vis these texts, one should thus not reach the conclusion, "therefore Christians today should co-opt Judaism, or Jewish texts or practices." Nope. That breakup already happened, no matter what Jesus and his buddies were chatting about. Y'all have your own robust set of traditions, teachings and practices, and those are still your own treasure troves and exegetical battles you gotta fight.

BUT it sure changes how one might understand the Jews and their role in the story, eh? One can see how angles were sharpened to make them more antagonists (because Rome certainly couldn't be the problem, Caesar Domitianus Augustus Sir!). And a myriad of takeaways – and new questions– may flow from all these observations.

But let's finish up before we get too far ahead of ourselves.

What else might we see through the lens of this thesis? Was Jesus Beit Hillel, were his interlocutors "the Pharisees," Beit Shammai?

Today! A textual sample platter:

The Resurrection of the Dead! 🧟

As previously mentioned, this was a big hot intra-Jewish point of controversy at the time– and there were a range of legitimate "Jewish" answers. In Mark 12:18, we see some Tzadokim/Sadducees trying to get Jesus in a gotcha on this– because they were not big on resurrection in the slightest.

But! Jesus believes in resurrection like a good Pharisee:

Then the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. “Teacher,” they said, “Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first one married and died without leaving any children. The second one married the widow, but he also died, leaving no child. It was the same with the third. In fact, none of the seven left any children. Last of all, the woman died too. At the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?” Jesus replied, “Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God? When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. (Mark 12:18-24)

Rabbinic Judaism – the Tanaaim – the Pharisees – Whatever you want to call them all had "Resurrection of the dead" on their best-of albums. Everyone did.

It's an album cover for the band the Liz Pharisees — Featuring bangers like, "My Prooftext Is Bigger Than Yours" and "Oral Torah is Torah in the Mouth." (Nobody will ever forget their first album, *Exile in Goyville*.)

Here's one little snippet of a multi-page run of stuff about the resurrection of the dead:

The school of Rabbi Yishmael taught about resurrection of the dead a fortiori from glass vessels: If concerning glass vessels, which are fashioned by the breath of those of flesh and blood, who blow and form the vessels, and yet if they break they can be repaired, as they can be melted and subsequently blown again, then with regard to those of flesh and blood, whose souls are a product of the breath of the Holy One, Blessed be God, all the more so can God restore them to life. (Talmud Sanhedrin 91a)

Heretics asked Rabban Gamliel: From where is it derived that the Holy One, Blessed be God, revives the dead? Rabban Gamliel said to them that this matter can be proven from [verses from] the Torah, from the Prophets, and from Writings, but they did not accept the proofs from him. (Talmud Sanhedrin 90b)

And the examples keep going and going and goooingggg. In fact, the prayer observing the might of the divine, Who Resurrects the Dead, is still part of the liturgy that we Jews recite three times every single day. Just super-doooper Pharisaic, is all I'm saying. (Whether we engage that language as literal or metaphoric now is a longer conversation.)

Shabbos!! 🕯️ 🕯️

Shabbat, the Sabbath, the seventh day, day of rest. There are many conversations in Rabbinic literature about what qualifies as [various types of] "work" – and thus a prohibited [or discouraged] activity.

First, look at who generally holds the more permissive and who generally holds the more stringent positions around Shabbat activity that may be comparable to the Matthew story we'll see in a second: