Do Rabbis Belong in Early Jewish Christian Relations?

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.

This panel was convened to feature reflection from senior and junior scholars about the pathways and pitfalls of careers intersecting with early Jewish Christian Relations. We were asked to offer a bit of our own autobiographies in order to think about the future of this area of study. I must confess that I wonder why I was asked as someone who works primarily in rabbinics. Do the rabbis count in early Jewish Christian relations? This question is partly in jest, but it is true that rabbinics has a peripheral place in scholarship about early Jews and Christians in the ancient Mediterranean. Survey the program book for the Society of Biblical Literature’s annual meeting, for example, and you will see only scattered mentions of rabbis and one program unit devoted to the “History of Early Rabbinic Literature.” By comparison there are ten program units devoted to the Apostle Paul alone. The seeming mismatch of rabbinic literature in discussions of “early” Jews and Christians raises to my mind important questions about their joint study. The major concerns that I see are as follows:

1. Very rarely is a scholar actually an expert in both “early Judaism and Christianity.”

2. “Early Judaism” is often a placeholder for everything non-rabbinic, even though I will argue that rabbinic literature has an important role to play in the conversation.

3. The category “early Judaism” as a field of study and a category of knowledge, while in its inception sought to elevate Jewish voices contemporaneous with the early Jesus movement, has not fully reckoned with lingering supersessionist aspects of its existence.

I will use my own journey to rabbinics to think about why rabbinic literature continues to have a peripheral status in the area of early Jewish Christian Relations by examining each of these points.

#1. Can one truly be an expert in early Judaism and Christianity?

I am here today representing the “later” side of early Jewish and Christian relations. I work in rabbinics, but I didn’t start that way. I entered graduate school firmly in the Hebrew Bible camp and increasingly slid forward to late antiquity. One of the many reasons for this shift was that I wanted to incorporate rabbinic literature into my thinking about ancient Jews. Even though I had studied Hebrew for years and worked in biblical and extrabiblical texts, I realized quickly that rabbinic literature required me to study in a different way. I spent many hours in the (now demolished) basement beit midrash of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, learning the linguistic codes and internal argumentation of the rabbis. As someone from a Christian background who later converted to Judaism, this literature was initially quite foreign to me. I saw quickly that one cannot just “pick up” rabbinic texts and go. I had to study with people who had already acquired the hermeneutical keys to unlock the linguistic codes and develop an innate sense of rabbinic textual logic.  

Rabbinic literature is largely impenetrable to the untrained eye. This quality, I argue, is quite distinctive of rabbinic texts. Were I to work with a letter from Paul or a homily by John Chrysostom, for example, I would know more or less what kind of text I’m working with, even if certain concepts and references might elude me. The Mishnah, by comparison, is an anthology unlike any contemporaneous literature. It is extremely terse and uses terminology rife with coded meaning. It has internal logic, desires, and expectations that are intentionally not explicit to the reader. The Talmud, which builds upon statements from the Mishnah, adds further layers of commentary, folklore, stories, and legal argumentation in both Hebrew and Aramaic and whose meaning and significance are not easily discerned even to a scholar with training in the languages or religions of antiquity.

The difficulty of rabbinic literature was further reinforced for me when I co-taught a course called “The Parting of the Ways.” My colleague and I had great aspirations of having our students work with primary sources, learning the much-touted liberal arts skills of close-reading, but it didn’t go as smoothly as we planned. While students could read passages from the New Testament, Apocrypha, or later Christian authors and get the general aim of the document, I had to walk students painfully hand-by-hand through each rabbinic passage. There were so many things that the students needed to know in order to have even basic access to the rabbis. For one, the rabbinic grammarian interest in using linguistic components of passages from the Torah to construct entirely new interpretive frameworks confounded my students’ desire for plain meaning.[1] The composition and argumentation of rabbinic texts did not come as intuitively to students. They also struggled with tracking the relevance between distinct passages, or sugyot, within an individual daf/page. I could not just “scan a page of the Bavli” in the copy machine and hand it out to students like I would do with any another ancient text. Secondary readings from experts of rabbinic literature who talked through rabbinic sources ended up being far more valuable to them.

These personal lessons have left me puzzled over the prevalence of scholars declaring that they are experts in both “early Judaism and Christianity.” I see this declaration of expertise in many Twitter bios, but I do not know exactly what that expertise is supposed to signify. Often these are scholars of Christianity who are interested to some extent in discussing the Jewish background of, say, the New Testament. Or they are scholars working in this muddled area of “early Jewish Christian relations” who want to claim a place in the study of ancient Judaism even if their training is really in Christian interpretive traditions.

However, I think it is rarely possible to be an expert in “early Judaism and Christianity” if we are including the rabbis in that category of expertise. You cannot pick up the Mishnah, or later rabbinic texts, without serious training. One of the clearest examples of this is when a scholar of Christianity cites the Babylonian Talmud as evidence for things in the Roman empire or pre-5th century, with no qualification. It demonstrates that they do not understand the redaction of rabbinic texts, the fraught relationship that it has with precise dating, or even how proof texting one rabbinic statement in no way signifies the “rabbinic” or “Jewish” stance on anything. This is to say nothing of the fact that these scholars betray that they are unfamiliar with the state of the field, for instance by treating rabbinic literature as indicative of Second Temple Judaism, or assuming that the rabbis were the dominant stream of Judaism in late antiquity, an opinion held now by only a few reactionary scholars.

A similar issue is the widespread habit of seamlessly equating Jews to Christians, or even the nebulous “Jewish-Christians,” as if they lived more or less similar lives. But for those of us who study ancient Jews, we know that is hardly the case. The remaking of Judea and its surrounding districts into an independent Roman province had profound effects upon Jewish life in the region. More than imperial administrative reshuffling, Hannah Cotton describes the change as “suppressing the Jewish identity of the province.”[2] When the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 C.E. and refused to allow Jews to rebuild, the Jerusalem cult with its institutions of temple and priesthood ceased to exist as an organizing principle. While Christians would eventually attain imperial power, most Jews did not. Rabbis were never the same as bishops, nor were synagogues the easy equivalent to churches. In this way, knowledge about Christians does not necessarily equate to a natural knowledge about Jews because their bodies existed in different frameworks of power. Now I’m slipping us further into late antiquity, but therein also lies the problem. The chronology of early Judaism and early Christianity does not fit seamlessly onto one another; thus, it is unclear what exactly is signified by an expert in the singular category of “early Judaism and Christianity.”

2. “Early Judaism” is often a placeholder for everything non-rabbinic  

So what happens when we leave the rabbis out of the category? My second point is that “early Judaism” has more or less become a placeholder for everything non-rabbinic. This is not without some sense. In his Introduction to Early Judaism, James VanderKam explains that the chronology for early Judaism begins with the rebuilding of the Temple under the Persians in 516 BCE and ends with the Temple’s destruction in 70 CE.[3] The rabbis were a small professional class of men, composed of a remnant of Judaean intelligentsia (priests, scribes, and Pharisees) who fled to Galilee following the destruction and restructuring of the province under Rome at the latter end of that period. Thus, their writings fall outside of the boundary deftly sketched by VanderKam. Similarly, Ross Kraemer’s impressive new book on The Mediterranean Diaspora in Late Antiquity in some ways explicitly defines its geographic horizons so as to eliminate the rabbis from consideration.

Such a boundary also serves as a means of accessibility. Scholars of Christianity who want to incorporate the perspectives and voices of Jews will have an easier time if they are not expected to become experts in rabbinic literature. To attain even basic fluency in rabbinic texts would require knowledge of Aramaic and rabbinic Hebrew, awareness of fundamental midrashic principles, and facility with the logic of rabbis as grammarians of Torah. In short, the ability to read and understand rabbinic literature takes a serious investment of time and requires close study with an expert.

However, I think leaving the rabbis out of the conversation of early Judaism is a problem in and of itself. I have seen scholars paint a portrait of early Judaism using only the New Testament and those Jewish-authored texts found in the Christian apocrypha. But the problem that I see is that we have not really grappled with the fact that most of the texts that fall under “early Judaism” as a “pre-rabbinic” category are texts that were preserved by Christians. What does that selection do to our perception of what constitutes early Judaism? I wonder if the manner of selection and preservation is itself a historical artifact we must reckon with. If we construct early Judaism only from these sources, we end up with distorted narratives. Sometimes these texts are used in a gleeful attempt to downplay the significance of “legalistic” rabbinic Judaism, reinforcing a supersessionism scholars initially hoped to problematize. Declarations that “the Torah wasn’t really fundamental to early Jews” are starting to appear in an alarming rate in publications using precisely these texts as evidence. Or in other cases, early Jewish-Christians are made out to be better at “doing Judaism” than later Jews, which is really a nefarious use of these texts and the category of early Judaism.

3. The category “early Judaism” as a field of study has not fully reckoned with lingering supersessionist aspects of its existence.

This brings me to my final point. We have not reckoned with the supersessionist uses of “Early Judaism” as a category. By which I mean the notion that if Jesus is a Jew, then he’s the best Jew. Recently a blog circulated on Twitter where the author made this statement: 

“Unlike many of his contemporaries, Jesus actually read Scripture in a ‘Hebraic,’ Torah-sensitive way. His approach wasn’t novel—it was a retrieval. The Jerusalem elite had adopted new ways of interpreting law writings learned from the Greeks. Jesus reasserted the Law’s ancient function.” 

Of course, late antiquity Twitter decried this statement immediately as supersessionist, but what is remarkable to me is not that a Christian thinks Jesus is the best. I actually think Christians are entitled to think that way. While the supersessionist aspects of Christianity might make me personally uncomfortable, scholars should not denounce people for believing in their religion. What’s interesting to me is that we have given this author, and others like him, the scholarly tools to make this kind of statement.

More and more scholars of Christianity have sought to remedy the imbalance of late antique history by incorporating Jews into their purview. Most notably the “Jewishness” of Jesus has become essential to his identity and the identity of his earliest followers. But by insisting upon the Jewishness of the early Jesus movement have we gone too far? By creating the category of early Judaism and arguing that the early Jesus movement must be situated there, we have made Jewishness an essential part of the early Christianity conversation without thinking about the way such ideas may be weaponized when combined with supersessionist claims that are foundational to Christian thought.

For one, and now we circle back to where I began, how many scholars of the New Testament or early Christianity are also an expert of early Judaism to the extent required to do the work of situating that Jewishness? It is still entirely possible to train in the study of Christianity and never learn how to read Jewish sources. The inverse is not quite the same for Jewish studies. A student of ancient Judaism is expected to learn languages, and even take coursework, associated with Christian traditions, whether of the East or West. One of the reasons for this is that scholars of Christianity do not have to think about Jews if they do not want to because centuries of discourses and disparities of power have positioned Christians as the neutral party. As a result, an early Christianity scholar who may want to incorporate Jews into their analysis, often does so without the necessary training. In doing so, this scholarship reinforces a hegemonic Christian perspective that assumes that scholars of Christianity can speak on behalf of Jews because they are peripheral or secondary aids to the study of Christianity. It is a different but just as pernicious form of Jewish erasure that must be reckoned with. “Early Judaism,” when used as a placeholder for non-rabbinic Jewish things, has enabled scholars without thorough training in ancient Jewish sources to situate themselves within the field by virtue of mentioning Jews rather than exhibiting a robust methodology.

Concluding Thoughts: Do the Rabbis Belong?

While I’ve raised concerns related to the framing of early Judaism and Christianity as a singular category of knowledge, I want to end by making the case for why the rabbis matter to this category. The rabbis did not arise in a vacuum. Judaism may have “shattered” following the Great Revolt (66-74 CE), as Seth Schwartz famously argued, and the rabbis may have initiated a new kind of grammarian piety using their ancestral texts, but they did so with the tools that they already possessed.

The rabbis had a following. Maybe not a huge one at first. The material evidence has shown overwhelmingly that ancient Jews did not follow rabbinic halakhah fully, if even at all at times, and the extent to which they were widely recognized as Jewish religious experts was limited. This insight was initially revelatory to the field. Scholarship built on the idea of the rabbi as the sole arbiter of ancient Jewish religion could no longer claim that rabbinic texts attested to the lived religious experiences of Jews. “Early Judaism” as a category responded, in part, to this challenge of disrupting rabbinic hegemony. A shift to read rabbinic literature not as the historical record but as rhetorically inflected aspirations introduced a “discursive turn” to the field. Attempts to unearth the “lived religion” of ordinary Jews further yielded a timely corrective to a narrative of ancient Jewish history written from the sole vantage of rabbinic men.[4]

However, the discovery that ancient Jewish practice did not mirror rabbinic tradition is also not surprising. Take me to a synagogue in modern day America where congregants believe and do everything prescribed by the same normative system as another synagogue. Even among halakhically oriented Jews today who abide by strict conceptions of religious observance, such practice is inflected by family custom, geographic locale, and varied interpretive streams. Adiel Schremer has argued convincingly that scholars who are quick to demonstrate that ancient Jews were not rabbinic have a strange conception of observance, where: “’observance’ is a virtue demanding totality. Any sort of failure to follow the law completely is automatically deemed a severe crime.”[5] Certainly many ancient Jews did not observe the totality of rabbinic halakhah, but that does not mean they lived lives completely foreign to the orientation of rabbinic piety.

When I think of what should constitute “early Judaism,” I imagine Jews living within their ancestral land and outside it, navigating unique imperial constraints as well as the ordinary limits of being an ancient person trying to eat and survive, interacting with religious experts of various stripes, but also cultivating piety in a variety of forms. But if we take seriously the notion that many Jews found value in their ancestral traditions, thought of God as a real agent in the world, and felt inclined toward pious practices to whatever degree, then that requires us to acknowledge that the rabbis were not so unlike their Jewish neighbors. Once rabbis enter the period we call “early Judaism,” they were participating in an already existent and recognizable form of Jewish piety. As a scholar, I am the first to point to breaks between Qumran and the rabbis. Yet from the perspective of later Christianity, the two have more in common than what separates them. We should not be afraid to appreciate both the continuities and discontinuities of ancient Jewish ancestral piety, even if our modern category of religion has been thoroughly dismantled.

In naming some of these problems, I am not in any way discrediting or invalidating the truly significant work that has been done in early Jewish Christian relations. The scholars working in this subfield have changed forever the way we think about the Jesus movement, sectarian Judaism, and the lived experiences of ancient people who in no ways walked neatly alongside the boundaries of Judaism and Christianity. But I think we are at a moment where we might pause and reflect upon some of the consequences of this category of knowledge and think about what it means to work in this subfield, especially as it appears to be growing and gaining a following in public fora and social media sites. I am of the mind that rabbinics has to be part of the conversation of early Judaism because it offers invaluable perspective of the ancient Jewish interpretive tradition, as well as representing the largest body of literature from a Roman imperial province. But if we situate rabbinic literature firmly within “early Jewish Christian relations,” how would knowledge have to change? What training is required? What kind of expertise do we envision is necessary to do this kind of scholarship? Is it even possible with our current structure of departments and graduate programs and how we organize knowledge therein? That is, how can institutions be built to accommodate that? Is it actually desirable to preserve this category in its current form?

I want graduate programs to train scholars of the ancient Mediterranean to be aware of and conversant with Jews, Christians, and the many others in their respective geographic areas. But I do not think we need experts in “early Judaism and Christianity” as a singular category, as much as we need experts in different kinds of literature and different locales to work together. The fields need not be separate, but perhaps they also need not be collapsed. I think a real honesty about the limits of what we are experts of could be useful at this moment because the stakes of how we define expertise, and what knowledge and methodologies get left out, has significant consequences to how we write our narratives of Jewish, Christian, and even Jewish-Christian history.

Krista Dalton is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Kenyon College.

[1] On rabbis and grammarian piety, see my extended treatment in "Rabbis as Recipients of Charity and the Logic of Grammarian Piety" Journal for the Study of Judaism 53, no. 1 (2021): 94-130.

[2] Hannah Cotton, "Some Aspects of the Roman Administration of Judaea/Syria-Palaestina" in Lokale Autonomie und Ordnungsmacht in den kaiserzeitlichen Provinzen vom 1. bis 3. Jahrhundert, (Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2009), 81.

[3] James VanderKam, An Introduction to Early Judaism (Eerdmans, 2022), xii.

[4] Nicola Denzey Lewis, “Ordinary Religion in the Late Roman Empire: Principles of a New Approach” Studies in Late Antiquity 5, no. 1 (2021): 104-118. Jörg Rüpke, “Lived Ancient Religions” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion (2019).

[5] Adiel Schremer, “The Religious Orientation of Non-Rabbis in Second-Century Palestine” in Follow the Wise: Studies in Jewish History and Culture in Honor of Lee I. Levine (2010): 325.