TO BE a Jew in antiquity was to be part of an ethno-religious group. One belonged to a people (Greek patria) or “nation” (ethnos) that was connected with the patris (homeland) of Judaea, and whose members had particular distinctive beliefs and customs concerning their threskeia, or “worship system” or “religion”. Loudaismos, Judaism, is specifically defined as a kind of threskeia in Acts 26.5.
One adhered to the beliefs and praxis of Judaism, with central foci on the interpretation of scripture and the cult of the Jerusalem Temple. Jews from far and wide came to Jerusalem for key festivals, particularly the Passover, where they met, networked, studied, and debated in the Temple’s vast precincts. This activity connected Jerusalem to many other lands, as we see in the story of Acts 2.5 when, fired by the Spirit, the disciples communicate with “Jews living in Jerusalem [who] were people from every nation under heaven”.
If we look at Jesus’s identity within this rubric, it is helpful to start with our earliest evidence: the letters of the apostle Paul, composed c.48-60 CE. Paul was not himself part of Jesus’s group in Galilee or Jerusalem; indeed, he tried to stamp out the Jesus movement by arresting and punishing Jesus’s disciples, but, after his conversion on the road to Damascus — thanks to an astonishing vision — he became one of its foremost missionaries.
Paul did not therefore know Jesus personally, but he visited Jerusalem, and talked to Jesus’s closest disciples there, including members of Jesus’s family. While there, we can assume that he picked things up, and so Paul incidentally mentions matters about Jesus as a man, presuming that everyone knew much the same things. This makes what he says very important. Despite this, almost all scholars of the historical Jesus skip over Paul’s evidence quite lightly, and it is quite easy to see why.
Reading the New Testament in order, with the Gospels first, by the time we get to Paul we already know, as he says, that Jesus was crucified (1 Corinthians 1.17 – 2.5; Galatians 3.1; 6.14; Philippians 2.8) by the “rulers of this age” (1 Corinthians 2.8) and that he was buried in a tomb (1 Corinthians 15.4; Romans 6.4). We know he had disciples and apostles (1 Corinthians 15.5-7), including a group designated as “the Twelve” (1 Corinthians 15.5), one of whom was called “Cephas”, which is Aramaic for “Rock” (in Greek Petros = Peter; Galatians 2.7–8), and another of whom was called John (Galatians 2.9). We know very well that he was a teacher who taught his disciples (1 Corinthians 7.10–11), and that he had a last supper on the night he was arrested at which he asked them to remember him (1 Corinthians 11.23–5).
But Paul also provides some historical details that we do not immediately know from the Gospels: for example that Jesus’s brother James was so important that he witnessed one of Jesus’s resurrection appearances, and led the church in Jerusalem (1 Corinthians 15.7; Galatians 1.19; 2.9, 12), or that Jesus’s siblings as a whole were a leadership group (1 Corinthians 9.5; 15.7), or that Jesus’s male apostles travelled around with female companions, called “sisterwives”, as did the “brothers of the Lord” (1 Corinthians 9.5).
THIS kind of incidental historical information in our earliest source should make us reflect on the fact that our Gospel authors do not aim to tell us everything about Jesus, but only the things that matter to the writers. Paul’s incidental information is vital because it is the well-known ground on which he builds his points; it has to be firm for the points to stand. For this reason, it is likely to be true.
At the time when Paul was writing, many of Jesus’s disciples were around, Jesus’s brother James was still alive, and his other siblings probably were, too. Paul’s writing is important for defining Jesus as a Jew, because, when he says in his letter to the Galatian Church that Jesus was “born of a woman, born under the Law” (Galatians 4.4), he tells his non-Jewish readers that Jesus’s identity was distinctively different from theirs. Here, Paul defines Jews as normatively being “under Law”. By “Law”, he means the core part of Jewish scripture: Torah, known in Greek as the “Pentateuch”, the five books believed to have been written by the prophet Moses.
In this letter, Paul clarifies what it means to follow Christ for non-Jews in a context outside Judaea: he argues that, even though Jesus was a Jew, this did not mean that all his followers should be, because they could be considered equally righteous by God as non-Jews. If Paul knew the story of the Syro-Phoenician woman, he would likely have wanted to adjust it to ensure that, in the picture painted by Jesus, she is included as a hungry child being fed at the table, not as a little dog underneath it.
In fact, Paul preferred quite a different picture. Just a few lines earlier, Paul created an image of the Law being like a guardian over a place where Israel was looked after (Galatians 3.23-5). It was customary to have unmarried virgins kept safe and guarded inside the house. Jesus himself was like this, like all Jews: guarded and protected by being “under” the Law. Paul therefore mentions Jesus as a born Jew, a Ioudaios, but someone not to emulate exactly in all respects. A Syro-Phoenician, or a Galatian, or a Roman, could be accounted just as worthy and righteous as a Jew without having to be one. Clearly, his readers were saying: “Paul, we just want to be like Jesus.” But Paul said Jesus’s identity did not need to be replicated.
PAUL then gives us some idea about Jesus. We see here how Jesus’s identity is a combination of physical descent (born of a woman) and religious affiliation (under the guardianship of the Mosaic law). Being born of a Jewish woman is a critical thing, because the determining factor in the Jewish identity of a newborn is the mother. This would have been noted by Paul’s readers, because some Jews were not born of a Jewish mother, but rather adopted into “Judaism” (Ioudaismos) by conversion; indeed, some of his readers had gone through conversion themselves, a matter he considered plain “stupid” (Galatians 3.1).
By focusing on the body’s physicality, we see here a biological dimension to the term Ioudaios, but the fact that people could convert to Judaism and be counted as Jews meant the category of being a member of a patria, in Greek, was not entirely about biology. As a convert, you were adopted into what we might call an ethnicity, or “people” (in Latin a gens; Pliny, Natural History 13.4.46).
PexelsA close up view of a Sefer Torah
But Paul could also separate out the ethnic and the religious elements of the category Ioudaios, which serves only to demonstrate the complexity of the term. For example, in debate with those who wanted non-Jews (Gentiles) in Galatia to follow Jewish customs and law, including circumcision of males, Paul scorns the supposed hypocrisy of Jesus’s disciple Peter, and states: “We are Jews by nature, and not Gentile sinners” (Galatians 2.15).
Peter and Paul are both Jews “by nature”, that is, physically, by descent. That marks them as different from non-Jews by descent, who — simply on these grounds — can be defined as “sinners”. But, paradoxically, in the same breath, Paul could claim that “through the law I died to the law that I might live to God” (Gal. 2.19).
By this he means that the Mosaic law actually predicted Christ, if interpreted correctly, and for him Christ’s death — regarded as inaugurating a new covenant between humanity and God — released him from needing to follow that law. Paul could note that “[his] former manner of life” in Judaism (Ioudaismos) was one in which he was earnest for “the traditions of [his] ancestors” (Galatians 1.13-14), but he now rejected that. Paul rejected the necessity of the practice of the law, even though “by nature” (in terms of physical descent) he was still a Jew.
The ethnic element was therefore detached in some way from the religious. The category of “law” itself is confusing. In Paul’s context within the Jewish Diaspora of the Roman East, which was largely Hellenic (Greek) in culture, Jews followed Jewish law as part of their identity within a given city, in a wider environment in which each city had its own law.
FOR Paul, Jewish scripture, read in this symbolic/allegorical way, led to truth, but it did not lead Gentiles to the practice of the law, because that would mean a literal reading and, as he said, “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3.6). The Spirit guides you to the correct interpretation of the law, which can undo the literal meaning, and point to Christ.
Therefore, when Paul referred to Jesus as being born “under the Law” (Galatians 4.4), he defined him as a Jew, categorically. Unlike himself, Paul never indicated that Jesus was anything but a “lawed” Jew. Not once in his surviving letters did Paul appeal to Jesus as an example of someone who broke the Jewish law in order to justify what Paul himself did: for example, while not following a kosher diet, Paul did not quote Jesus as having declared all foods to be “clean”. Jesus was born and remained under that law which Paul defined as “material” (cf. Galatians 3.3; 4.24-31). Paul knew that he was the anomaly, not Jesus. For Paul, the possibility of living in an “unlawed” way, as a Jew, was only available by means of the death and resurrection of Jesus, not the life of Jesus.
That Jesus was a Jew might seem extremely obvious today, but this was not so obvious in the past. It was recognised that Jesus kept Jewish festivals, and that he saw the sabbath as given by God, though he was concerned about what was and was not binding in terms of sabbath laws (as in his saying: “The sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the sabbath, so the son of humanity is lord also of the sabbath”, Mark 2.27-8).
It was recognised that he claimed that not one “jot and tittle” of the Jewish law would pass away until all was accomplished (see Matthew 5.17-20), but there was more emphasis placed on the points that Jesus argued for in his stance against what was seen as Jewish legalism. Jesus’s refusal to accept the interpretations and practice of the legal school known as the “Pharisees”, and his criticism of the “scribes and Pharisees” as hypocritical and unkind (e.g. in Matthew 23), were read as indicating that Jesus spurned Jewish law itself.
In other words, internal debates within Judaism were read by Christian scholars as debates with Judaism. Judaism was deemed rigid, while Jesus emphasised compassion and forgiveness. As T. W. Manson stated in 1935: “The difference between the ethic of Jesus and that of Judaism is . . . simply this, that with Jesus the fact that the good heart is fundamental is accepted and carried to its logical conclusion, while in Judaism the whole apparatus of Law and Tradition is still maintained beside the moral principle which renders it obsolete.”
This crushing dismissal of the Judaism of Jesus’s time as involving a law and tradition that should be obsolete next to the moral principle of the good heart is shocking for us to read now. In Judaism in antiquity, as now, a good heart is a core part of the law and tradition. It is the basis of it all, not a moral principle in opposition to it: “I desire compassion, and not sacrifice; the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings,” the prophet Hosea says (Hosea 6.6).
This is an edited extract from Boy Jesus: Growing up Judaean in turbulent times by Joan Taylor, published by SPCK at £24.99 (Church Times Bookshop £22.49); 978-0-281-08498-2.