First encounters
Jesus through Jewish eyes
My first encounter with Jesus was in primary school Nativity plays. Teachers desperately - kindly - tried to find me theologically uncontroversial roles - a sheep or a donkey perhaps - but, in the end, they all had to face up to the limits of Jewish-Christian togetherness, I helped with make-up or costume, and the line was drawn.
A few years later, my second encounter was furtive, clandestine. Officially withdrawn from my school assemblies, which were all of a mainly Christian character, I was fascinated by the only thing that seemed to enliven my peers as they poured out of the school hall. "We had a parallel today." Years later, I found out that the word was 'parable', but they might have been right in the first place, even so.
So I snuk in in the hope of 'having a parallel' too. And sure enough, I struck lucky. I don’t remember which it was, but I do remember huge disappointment. It was just another of the commonplace midrashim or hasidic tales I'd been brought up on - "There was once a king..." or "A rich man had two sons..." The only difference was the tedious, pedestrian insistence with which the headmistress explained us all to death after telling it.
Then a slightly more organised encounter - the back page of the Eagle comic. For a long time, the back page serialised great lives - Gordon of Khartoum, Nelson, Henry the Fifth, Jesus. Jesus in this comic strip story glowed amongst the glowering Semitic throng. Though I didn't recognise myself or any of my family in the crowd, I knew enough to recognise that anyone who didn't follow this blond, hunky but gentle, apotheosis was obtuse, stupid or, like the Mekon from Mars on the front page of the Eagle, simply committed to evil. However, having been nurtured in the business of living in two worlds, none of this impacted on the warm, coherent, joyous, Pharisaic inheritance than I was living in mid-20th century Britain.
Years later, I was at secondary school. My dearest friends were a Baptist and a Christadelphian. Somehow I felt I owed them the respect of reading the New Testament so that I'd know what moved them. So one weekend, going at the same pace as an orthodox Jew says his prayers or anyone might read a light novel on holiday, I whizzed through the Book. It was so Jewish! The arguments, the examples, the proofs, the preoccupations - I recognised them all as belonging more to my world than anything I had yet identified as Christian.
While reporting back to my friends about my impressions, I speculated on what might have happened to Jesus's children. "He didn’t have any. He was unmarried," they chorused. "Of course he was," I said. "I've just read it." But they were convinced - and so I had to reread and, sure enough, nothing.
It took me some years to realise that I was so convinced Jesus was married because it didn't explicitly say he wasn't. From my point of view, from the Jewish point of view, to get to 30 and not be married requires comment and explanation!
Jesus in the Gospels
And the reason I made such unexamined assumptions was because I recognised Jesus's life described in the Gospels. I even felt immediately comfortable with the oh-so-Jewish, unselfconscious telling of the same story in four different gospels, from four different contradictory angles - as a tiny fraction, a glimpse into the world of the Talmud, snatched out and wondered over, a brief second in the span of time.
I easily recognised the Last Supper as most probably a Passover Seder (especially since Easter coincides with Pesakh), but had to wonder how come Jesus was welcomed into Jerusalem, according to the Gospels, about six days earlier, but with all the crowd behaviour of six months earlier, the festival of Sukkot - Tabernacles - when we wave palm branches and sing Hoshana - Save us?
I was even more puzzled by why everyone seemed to get so heated about whether or not Jesus thought he was the Son of God - aren't we all? - or even the Messiah - might not anyone be? And each gospel had its own angle, its own story. I could see, even at 17, what Matthew was doing. He was proving that all the prophecies relating to the Messiah were manifest in Jesus. Virgin birth? Tick. White donkey? Tick. Hanged on a tree? Tick. But I'd never been taught as a Jew to pay much attention to these details of messianic credential. How will we know the Messiah? Easy. The world will be at peace. Cross.
I could see Luke floundering in Jewish preoccupations he couldn't fathom. What were they all squabbling about? But with Mark and John, I felt more at home.
The world Mark describes sounds not dissimilar from the world I know from the Talmud and the Midrash, those compendia of rabbinic debate, quoting about 1000 rabbis, spanning nearly a 1000 years.
I recognised the pleasure in argument and verbal honing, the clever use of prooftexts, the camaraderie and generosity underlying disagreements, as the rabbis call them, for the sake of Heaven. I couldn't detect anything much Jesus says in the Gospel of Mark which couldn't also be found in the mouth of some rabbi - I want to say, some other Rabbi - in these great treasure stores of the Jewish relationship with revelation.
John's worldview is different. But I recognised it too. It carries all the cheerful anachronism of Midrash to prove its point. Just like John's contemporaries, the Rabbis of the Midrash, could have the twins, Jacob and Esau, struggle in Rebecca's womb as they respectively passed Houses of Study and gambling houses, despite the fact that they didn't - couldn't - have existed back then, mere historical precision is not the point. It's not so much the story of Jesus but a commentary, a didactic, a polemic on the story of Jesus.
By the time John writes, decades later, nuances are resolved into simple clarities. Them and us. 'The Jews' are now clearly the villains of the piece. Pilate - vicious, nasty, oppressive Pilate - nearly qualifies as a proto-Saint. In Mark, 'the Jews' includes Jesus and the disciples and just about everybody else. In John, they become the enemy.