At the 2021 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, two senior scholars (Adele Reinhartz and Judith Lieu) and two junior scholars (Deborah Forger and Krista Dalton) whose work relates to the study of early Jews and Christians convened to reflect upon their career trajectories. To see the full panel of papers, visit https://www.ancientjewreview.com/read/2022/9/13/careers-in-jewish-christian-relations.
What might the eye, the sense of sight, and the desire of many in the ancient world to see God tell us about points of continuity and discontinuity between Jews and Christians in antiquity? Moreover, how might this specific question about humanity’s ability to see God offer us fresh perspectives on our primary task for this morning? Namely, to think about and discuss what it means to invest in a career in early Jewish Christian relations—the opportunities, pitfalls, joys, and challenges of centering one’s work on questions related to the relationship between Judaism and Christianity.
In John 1:18, the Evangelist famously quips, “No one has ever seen God (θεὸν οὐδεὶς ἑώρακεν πώποτε).”[2] Then, in the latter half of the verse, he qualifies his assertation. He states that the only begotten God (μονογενὴς θεὸς), or in other textual versions, the only begotten son (ὁ μονογενὴς υἱός), namely Jesus, who was in the bosom of the Father, has made him known. These are clearly strong claims regarding God’s invisibility and Jesus’ unique ability to make God corporeally known (cf. John 1:14). Such strong assertions are not unique to John 1:18, however; rather, they reverberate through John’s Gospel and the Johannine epistles as well. In John 5:37, for instance, the Evangelist has Jesus assert to his Jewish interlocutors how they “have never seen [God’s] form (οὔτε εἶδος αὐτοῦ ἑωράκατε).” In John 6:46, the Evangelist claims that no one “has seen the Father except he (i.e., Jesus) who is from God, he has seen the Father.” In 1 John 4:12, the author reiterates how “no one has ever seen God (θεὸν οὐδεὶς πώποτε τεθέαται).” Moreover, slight iterations on this theme emerge in 1 John 4:20 and 3 John 11. In light of this evidence, what might one likely conclude if one were to read the Johannine literature in isolation from other contemporaneous literature? First, one would probably assume that God is invisible and, therefore, beyond the gaze of the human eye and, second, that Jesus uniquely makes God visible through his body. It is in John’s Gospel, after all, that the Evangelist makes the striking claim that in the person of Jesus the divine word became flesh, and later Christian thinkers often took up John’s words to suggest that if one wants to see God, one need only to look upon Jesus himself.
One of the challenges I face in the encounter with the first-century Jewish text of the Gospel of John, both substantively and academically, is its being more widely known than most of the ancient Jewish literature that I study. Most of my students, for instance, have never heard of texts like 2 Baruch or 4 Ezra, 2 Enoch, or the Apocalypse of Abraham. Some might not be familiar even with a more prominent, first-century Jewish author, like Philo. And some of my non-Jewish students have never in their lives encountered a rabbinic text: no Mishnah, no Bavli, no Midrashim. But for all Christians today the Gospel of John has become sacred canonical scripture. As such, it is more widely known and carries a certain weightiness due to that familiarity and canonical status. So, many of my students treat John’s Gospel differently, and they read it differently than other ancient Jewish sources. Accordingly, my pedagogy, and to a lesser extent my scholarship, defamiliarizes the Gospel, situating it within the first-century Jewish milieu out of which it emerged. Only when we read John’s Gospel within its historical context and not solely or anachronistically through the lens of later interpretative history does a different picture of the rhetorical claims present within the Gospel emerge.
For instance, in ancient Jewish tradition, Moses, Enoch, and Jacob are all said to have seen God. Regarding Moses, despite the assertion in Exodus 33:19 that Moses could not see God and specifically that Moses could not see God’s face because “no one can see God and live,” a few lines earlier, we learn that God spoke to “Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” (Exod 33:11; cf. Deut 34:10). Moreover, a few chapters earlier, we read how Moses, along with Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and 70 of the elders of the people of Israel, see God’s feet resting upon a pavement of lapis lazuli stone and God’s glory ablaze in corporeal form (Exod 24:9-17). Both examples suggest that Moses and, in the latter case, a few select others could actually see parts of God’s body. But they are not alone. Enoch, too, is said to have seen God. 2 Enoch 22:1-7, for instance, notes how Enoch saw the Lord’s face while Enoch was in the celestial realm. Yet the text also emphasizes how God’s face was marvelous, supremely awesome, and frightening; indeed, it was like burning hot iron, emitting sparks and flame (2 En 22:1–2). Moreover, a bit later, the text differentiates between God’s body and that of humans, underscoring how parts of God’s body, like God’s eyes, are terrifying in the eyes of humans and how the Lord’s form is without measure or analogy. Indeed, it has no end (3 Enoch 39). Likewise, regarding Jacob, the Prayer of Joseph specifically mentions God’s face and even goes so far as to describe Jacob as the “one who sees God” (Pr. Jos. Frag. A.3, 9; cf. Gen 32:20). These examples demonstrate how many ancient Jews viewed God as both visible and corporeal; however, they also recognized that such corporeality was dangerous to humans (Ex 33:19; 2 En 22:1-2; 3 Macc 6:17-18), necessitating an elevated or divine-like status for viewers to catch a glimpse of God.
Considering this broad set of evidence from the ancient Jewish tradition that depicts several different people, oftentimes specifically divine-like people, as being able to see God, what are we to make of the Johannine author’s assertion that no one can see God? Or that Jesus is the unique means by which an ostensibly invisible deity can be seen? Four main points are in order.
First, when we raise questions about the human eye, the sense of sight, and their relationship to God’s visibility and then map those questions onto the Gospel of John, the evidence makes known that we cannot read a first-century Jewish text that later becomes sacred, canonical scripture for Christians in isolation from other ancient Jewish literature since doing so leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of the contents of the Gospel itself. Already in the early twentieth century, George Foot Moore wrote a series of articles wherein he lamented how “the organization of theological faculties [have] made the Old Testament a field by itself and the New Testament another, leaving the so-called Apocrypha” and the texts now associated with the Pseudepigrapha “in a no-man’s land between them.”[3] What is more, the “Judaism of the second century was outside the bounds of Christian biblical science altogether” and the “internal history” of Judaism “was nowhere treated as a whole by Christian scholars, and Jewish work in this field has been little regarded.”[4] Consequently, without training in these ancient Jewish traditions and in rabbinic Judaism of a later date, many past scholars, and Christian scholars, in particular, were not able to recognize how these texts and traditions interrelated to one another. Nor were they able to attend to the Greek and Roman histories of which they were situated. Consequently, texts like John’s Gospel were often read without attention to the broader histories of which they were a part.
The restructuring of centers of knowledge and encouragement of pedagogies that foster interconnectedness increasingly empower scholars to strive to move beyond these silos. My own academic training at the University of Michigan, for instance, where I studied under a specialist of Second Temple Judaism, a specialist of Late Antique Christianity, a specialist of Rabbinics, and a specialist of Greek and Roman history, is a good example of how scholars can move beyond past disciplinary boundaries. Notre Dame’s Centre for the Study of Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity similarly offers opportunities for doctoral students to apprehend the contours of antiquity through a more holistic lens. What is more, newer publishing venues, such as the Ancient Jew Review (AJR), Metatron, The Journal of the Jesus Movement in its Jewish Setting (JJMJS), Advances in Ancient Biblical and Near Eastern Research (AABNER), and the Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies (JIBS), are striving to work across these disciplinary categories. As the AJR site states, the journal joins together “biblical studies and religious studies, historians and classicists together in a joint inquiry into the ancient world.”[5] Moreover, at the same time we ponder the limitations of classical methods, breakthrough technologies available on a broad scale are endowing the academy with astonishingly powerful tools for moving beyond these silos erected for purposes of taxonomic convenience. In my estimation, the coupling of technological advance with cross-disciplinary spaces offers a cornucopia of real opportunity for all those interested in careers in early Jewish-Christian relations.
Significant challenges still persist; a quick look at the job market reveals that most openings continue to be advertised with past disciplinary divisions in mind. Postings frequently seek, for instance, a specialist in Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, or New Testament, or Early Judaism/Rabbinics, or Late Antique Christianity. These disciplinary boundaries have modern-day import, but they do not encourage scholars to consider potential linguistic affinities, physical interactions, social structures, and religious practices that may be shared between these divisions. These academic divisions also continue to leave the texts and traditions that are now housed in the Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, and Dead Sea Scrolls without a proper disciplinary home. Likewise, though conversations between specialists of Late Antique Christianity and Rabbinics have increased in frequency, academic positions that combine these two areas of expertise remain few and far between, in part because the requisite languages to become experts in both of these areas would include Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac/Aramaic, and perhaps ancient Ethiopic (Ge’ez) and Old Church Slavonic, exhausting the efforts of even the most enthusiastic scholars to master them.
Consequently, the very academic positions that many scholars within our respective fields hold continue to reinscribe both later-dating canonical categories and religious categories onto texts and traditions that, in the early centuries of the Common Era, did not yet exist as such. To a lesser degree, many of the most prestigious and longest-standing academic journals in our fields also reinscribe these later-dating categories, even as some recent studies have problematized the hegemony of the biblical and have underscored the importance of texts, traditions, and material evidence that stands outside of canonical sources.[6] Clearly, much work remains for those interested in questions related to early Jewish-Christian relations to break down these dividing walls and to think more holistically about the relationship between early Jews and Christians in the ancient Mediterranean world. One potential workaround for some of these persistent challenges is encouraging increased collaborative efforts between scholars with different areas of expertise and not penalizing specialists who choose to co-publish. The era of the lone scholar is no longer tenable.
Second, questions related to the relationship between the eye, the sense of sight, and God’s visibility reveal that if scholars continue to read texts like John’s Gospel in isolation from its historical context, they will miss the rhetorical weight of the arguments present within the Gospel itself. This observation holds true for the topic at hand, namely, the question of God’s (in)visibility and its relationship to the question of God’s (in)corporeality in the interplay of early Jewish-Christian relations. However, the issue holds equally true for other examples from the Gospel. John’s employment of the term οἱ ’Ιουδαίοι (e.g., the Jews), for instance, referenced some seventy times throughout the Gospel, likely originally reflected an intra-Jewish debate. But, after the Gospel was canonized as Christian scripture, the phrase—and particularly jarring examples of it, such as John 8:44, wherein the Johannine Jesus ostensibly asserts: “οἱ ’Ιουδαίοι are the children of the devil”)—was weaponized and deployed against Jews by Christians for centuries for their unwillingness to believe in Jesus and their alleged role in his death.[7] Consequently, failure to contextualize this Gospel in its broader historical context has had and has continued to have significant ramifications for how persons throughout history, in both academic and ecclesiastical settings, have interpreted the text in supersessionistic and antisemitic ways.
It is important to note here that the strong claims found in John’s Gospel regarding God’s invisibility and Jesus’ unique ability to make God corporeally known played a prominent role in the development of Christianity. John’s strong assertions influenced how later Christians viewed God as an incorporeal being. They also shaped Christological formulations of who Jesus was and continues to be for Christians today. As the late David L. Paulson poignantly put it, the “view that God is incorporeal, without body or parts, has been a hallmark of Christianity.”[8] However, this view was not a hallmark of the early Jesus movement, nor was it a fixed point among those who followed Jesus, both Jew and Gentile alike, in the first few centuries of the Common Era.[9]
Unlike scholars of earlier generations, I do not think John’s Gospel signals an already secured “parting of the ways” between a distinctive Judaism and Christianity. Not only has recent scholarship demonstrated that it is anachronistic to posit any established religions in the first century CE since persons living in such antiquity built their identities around shared ethnicity, locales, culture, and language—not religious beliefs— but from a historical perspective, it is similarly anachronistic to think of a first-century text as “Christian.”[10] The first attested use of the Greek word Χριστιaνισμός, which develops into our concept of Christianity, does not occur until the early second century CE in the writings of Ignatius of Antioch. Ignatius coins the term Χριστιaνισμός in opposition to Ἰουδαϊσμός. In his reading, Ἰουδαϊσμός meant “Judaizing,” “Judeanness,” or Jewishness” (Ignatius, Magn. 10.1–3; cf. Ign., Phld. 6.1).”[11] Moreover, recent scholarship on the “parting of the ways” has shown that this so-called “parting” did not occur at a definitive moment; instead, it ensued as a localized, protracted, and manifold process that likely began in specific locales as early as the second century CE but continued throughout and past the fourth century CE.[12] Indeed, my own work on the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and other texts likely originating from Roman Syria suggests fluidity and hybridity in this specific geographical location long after the so-called parting.[13] Considering this framing, many authors and texts from the early centuries of the Common Era, including those written by Jesus-followers, emerged before the official rise of Christianity.
If we accept the diffusion implied by the “parting of the ways” concept, we crucially ask at what point we can truly talk about early Jewish-Christian relations? In my estimation, such terminology is not appropriate for the first century CE. For some locales, it is even questionable in the second and third centuries of the Common Era. However, if we choose to use it with respect to these centuries, then we need to acknowledge the diversity of the early Jesus movement and incorporate the voices of authors and texts that did not ultimately become a part of the “orthodox” Christian tradition. These traditions include but are not limited to: Coptic texts and treatises, many of which were discovered in a cache of texts near Nag Hamadi, Egypt and are now often associated with the so-called Gnostic tradition; authors and texts that likely emerged in Roman Syria, such as the Didascalia Apostolorum and the Pseudo-Clementine Literature; and other forms of Syriac literature—not just the standard canon of orthodox Greek and Latin authors. In other words, if we are discussing the early relations between Jews and Jesus-followers, how do we account for the diversity of the latter category in the early centuries of the Common Era?
By the fourth century CE, the texts and traditions that now comprise the New Testament likely became a part of the Christian canon. But at the earlier time of their composition and initial circulation, they found their place within a Jewish world.[14] This chronological mismatch suggests that at the end of the first century CE, groups of Jesus-following Jews, even those that increasingly included non-Jews within their mix, continued to function within a Jewish matrix. For this reason, to borrow the phrase from Karin Zetterholm and Wally Cirafesi, I think that John’s Gospel demonstrates a form of Jesus-oriented Judaism, or as I prefer to say, Jesus-oriented Jewishness.[15]
Third, moving our gaze away from John’s Gospel, we can introduce and focus explicitly on new methodologies, such as embodiment theory and sensory analysis, and hopefully forge fresh perspectives on the interrelationship between Jews and Christians in antiquity. In the case study that I have been examining throughout this piece involving the eye, the sense of sight, and humans’ ability to gaze upon God, points of contact and continuity continue between the two traditions long after their so-called parting. The fourth-century Jewish-Christian Pseudo-Clementine Homilies 17, for instance, presents God as a corporeal being, but the text also emphasizes how God’s corporeality differs from that of humans due to its exquisite beauty and awe-inspiring brightness. Likewise, certain strands of Christian mysticism, such as those evidenced in the visions of the sixteenth-century Christian mystic, Teresa of Avila, like their counterparts in Jewish mysticism as exemplified in texts like the Hekalot literature, emphasize how the apogee of mystic ascent was to behold the King in his beauty and, thereby, catch a glimpse of the body of God.
Although beyond the scope and aims herein to unpack other streams of thought that emerge within ancient Jewish and Christian circles, wherein God’s invisibility or hiddenness is emphasized, it is of interest that already in the book of Exodus, a tension emerges regarding God’s visibility[16]—a startling paradox, you might say, and one that has potentially lethal implications. Does the sight of God, a God whose glory looks like a devouring fire, equate to the death of the onlooker [as suggested in God’s comments to Moses, wherein God tells Moses that Moses cannot see God. In particular, he cannot see God’s face because “no one can see God and live” (Ex 33:19)]? Or can one look upon God, as Moses, Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu do, along with the seventy elders of the people of Israel, as described in Exodus 24, and carry on with one’s day-to-day life, or even, as in the case of Moses, become radiant (or deified) oneself (Ex 34:29-35)?[17]
Finally, questions about the relationship between the eye, the sense of sight, and God’s visibility cannot be considered without reflecting on our own corporeality—our eyes, our identities, and our subjectivity. In previous generations of scholarship, the preferred methodological approach—the historical-critical method, especially when coupled with positivism—assumes disembodied scholars who can separate their academic work from their personhood. But many types of scholarly bodies, including my own, are not afforded that luxury. Moreover, it is facile to assume that just any scholars can separate their bodies from their scholarship. By acknowledging our embodied statuses and the diverse knowledge that arises therefrom, fresh perspectives related to the topic of early Jewish-Christian relations can emerge. Still, a key question remains: how much of our personhood should we disclose? So, I conclude with this question: As scholars of early Jewish-Christian relations, how much of our identities should we reveal? Which, of course, lies at the heart of the question: What are the opportunities, pitfalls, joys, and challenges of incorporating our subjectivity and identities into our scholarship?
[1] It is beyond the scope of this short article to interrogate what we mean by early Jewish-Christian relations. The term “relations” has such a broad domain of coverage—interactions, social structures, linguistic affinities—that in subsequent forums I hope we’ll take up the task of offering more precision to the term.
[2] I employ the term “the Evangelist,” or at times, the shorthand “John” to refer to the author of this Gospel, acknowledging that its authorship has been the subject of extensive scholarly debate. I agree with the general consensus, articulated by Raymond Brown, that a late, unknown, first-century author likely put together the final form of the Gospel. See Raymond Brown, The Gospel According to John (i-xii): Introduction, Translation, and Notes (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966): lxxx-civ.
[3] George Foot Moore, “The Rise of Normative Judaism,” Harvard Theological Review 17, no. 4 (1924): 307–373, esp. 325.
[4] Moore, “Rise of Normative Judaism,” 325.
[5] https://www.ancientjewreview.com/about
[6] See, for example, Eva Mroczek, “The Hegemony of the Biblical in the Study of Second Temple Literature,” Journal of Ancient Judaism 6 (2015): 2-35.
[7] By way of example for how John 8:44 featured prominently in the social media pages of the perpetrator associated with the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting (27 October 2018) and how to address anti-Jewish sentiments in the classroom, see Sarah E. Rollens, Eric Vanden Eykel, and Meredith J. C. Warren, “Confronting Judeophobia in the Classroom,” Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies 2, no. 1 (2020): 81-106.
[8] David L. Paulsen, “Early Christian Belief in a Corporeal Deity: Origen and Augustine as Reluctant Witnesses.” Harvard Theological Review 83, no. 2 (1990): 105-116.
[9] For recent articulations of this argument, see Brittany Wilson, The Embodied God: Seeing the Divine in Luke-Acts and the Early Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021) and Christoph Markschies. God’s Body: Jewish, Christian, and Pagan Images of God. (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2019).
[10] See, for instance, Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). Daniel Boyarin, “The Christian Invention of Judaism: The Theodosian Empire and the Rabbinic Refusal of Religion,” Representations 85, no. 1 (2014): 21-57.
[11] On how to understand these terms and other -ισμός nouns in Greek, see Steve Mason, “Jews, Judeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 38, no. 4-5 (2007): 457-512, esp. 470-471.
[12] See, for instance, Lori Baron, Jill Hicks-Keeton, and Matthew Thiessen, The Ways that Often Parted: Essays in Honor of Joel Marcus (Atlanta, SBL Press, 2018); Adam Becker and Annette Reed, The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003).
[13] Deborah Forger, “Interpreting the Syrophoenician Woman to Construct Jewish-Christian Fault Lines: John Chyrosstom and the Pseudo-Clementine Homilist in Chrono-Locational Perspective,” Journal of the Jesus Movement in its Jewish Setting 3 (2016): 132–166.
[14] The first unequivocal historical evidence for the twenty-seven books now found in the New Testament canon arises in Athanasius's thirty-ninth festal letter, likely written in 367 CE. See David Braake, “A New Fragment of Athanasius’ Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter: Heresy, Apocrypha, and the Canon,” Harvard Theological Review 103, no. 1 (2011): 47-66.
[15] Wally Cirafesi, John within Judaism: Religion, Ethnicity, and the Shaping of Jesus-oriented Jewishness in the Fourth Gospel (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2022); Karin Hedner Zetterholm, “Jesus-oriented visions of Judaism in antiquity.” Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis 27 (2016): 37-60.
[16] Many Greek-Jewish writings describe God as invisible (see, e.g., Sib. Or. 5.427; T. Ab. 16:4; Apoc. Mos. 35:3; Philo, Cher. 101; Post. 15; Rom 1:20; John 1:18; Heb 11:27); indeed, Philo of Alexandria is famous for his assertions regarding the absolute otherness of Israel’s God. Non-Jews also frequently commented on the Jews’ imageless conception of God (see, for instance, Louis Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), esp. 48, 149, 206, 336, 662.
[17] For more on how Exodus 34 presents Moses as “no longer precisely human,” see Seth Sanders, “Old Light on Moses’ Shining Face,” Vestus Testamentum 52, no. 3 (2002): 400–406.