Tag: Daniel Boyarin

An Alternative Understanding of Sin and Salvation

The understanding of salvation that I and maybe the majority were reared on, or the typical Protestant understanding (as in justification theory) is that all people recognize God and his righteousness, and experience the incapacity to keep the law. This inability to keep the law is definitive of both the human problem and the solution of the cross of Christ. We come to Christ, having realized we cannot keep the law and that only Jesus can fulfill the laws righteous demands and pay the penalty for transgression. Much of this understanding is drawn from just a few texts, mainly in Romans (and primarily in the first 4 chapters of Romans). I want to pose a different picture of the human problem and a different soteriology, based on an alternative reading of Romans.

As I have argued (here and here), this common Protestant understanding is a result of fusing the words of the false Teacher, as found in 1:18-32 and scattered through the first three chapters, with the teaching of Paul. The human predicament, judging from the rest of Romans, turns out to be much worse than described in Romans 1:18-32. In this description, people know God and know what they should do (keep the law) but do not do it (implying in the description a means of escape through the law), but in the rest of Romans Paul describes people who are in bondage (8:15-6), who have been deceived and enslaved by a lie (7:7-15), who are hostile to God (8:7) and this hostility is the best they can do. Death reigns (5:14), both in the literal sense and in that life is ordered by this reality (5:12). People attempt to engineer reality, through the law (1:18-2:21), through the flesh (7:5, 25), through the elemental principles of the cosmos (Gal. 4:3, in a parallel passage), such that they can negotiate death but all of their various means of escape are deadly.

Far from the law offering a potential means of escape, either through law-keeping or through Christ’s law-keeping, the law is deadly in the same way that flesh is deadly. Though people imagine they can defeat death (through law or religion) in what is called “the covenant with death,” death reneges on the supposed arrangement (9:32 referencing Isaiah 28). The human arrangement with death, which Paul sums up as the sin condition (the law of sin and death, 8:2), deals only in death – there is no life in the arrangement.

Though 1:18-32 pictures a universal capacity to recognize God and the law from nature, it turns out (at least according to the rest of Romans), Paul is not optimistic about people perceiving the problem let alone coming up with a solution. Far from some sort of deep anthropological insight on the part of humanity, Paul pictures a deluded humanity. A deadly exchange has taken hold universally, corporately (chapter 5) and individually in the human psyche (chapter 7) and Paul spends most of the first 4 chapters of Romans explaining how the perceived solution, the law, is bound up with the problem. The deception in regard to the law, through which death takes hold as the perceived means of escape, is obscuring the singular solution: the gospel. That is, God has provided a resolution to the human predicament, but because the problem has been misunderstood (due, in part, to false teaching) the solution is now misunderstood and obscured.  Thus, Paul is writing this letter.

Paul explains the problem, in light of the solution (7:7-25), as the problem cannot otherwise be grasped. As Douglas Campbell explains, chapter 7 is not simply a psychological portrayal of pre-Christian experience. “Essentially, it supplies a theological analysis of non-Christian ontology, whether that is present in the non-Christian (as seems obvious to the Christian) or in the Christian (as seems at least partly to be the case on this side of the end of the age). Hence, it is fundamentally retrospective—the result of a vantage point available only in Christ, which supplies the key theological categories and insights for constructing it.”[1]

Chapter 7:7-25, referencing Adam, is more complicated than mere legalism. Judaism per se is not the problem, though the law of Moses creates the same sort of problem. The reality of the human predicament may be perceived to revolve around the law, but this perception itself, in Paul’s description, misses how it is that sin has deceived in regard to law. In other words, Christianity as we have it in much of Protestantism (justification theory) is implicated in the problem inasmuch as the problem and solution are thought to be defined by the law.

In Genesis 3, it is not that the command per se is problematic, but due to the lie of sin (as Paul describes the work of the serpent) the presumption is that the command is the means of access to life. “The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me.  For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment deceived me and through it killed me” (Romans 7:10-11). Paul is not describing a slowly dawning awareness in the struggle to keep the law, and then the recognized inability to do so. He is describing the deception as it occurred in Genesis and which continues to reign. This is not someone who has deep cognitive awareness of their sin problem. This person is deceived, controlled by the flesh, and serving the desire of the flesh (7:5, 7, 8, 14). This individual is controlled by death, with chapter 7 providing a detailed account of 5:12-21, of how it is that death came to reign and continues to reign in the human race.

It is not a matter that no one can keep the law, and this is why they are not justified, though this is how verses such as Galatians 3:10 are often read. As Daniel Boyarin notes, a better understanding is not to imagine there is a problem with the doing of the law. Most Jews, like the Pharisee Paul, assumed they kept the law perfectly. The problem is not that it cannot be done, the problem is imagining that the doing is the main thing. “We could rewrite the verse, then, as: ‘Everyone, who [precisely] by doing it does not uphold all that is written in the book of the Law, is under a curse’; i.e., by doing it, by physical performance, works of the Law, one is not upholding all that which is written in the book of the Law, and that is the curse, because ‘all that is written’ implies much more than mere doing!”[2] As Paul, argues in chapter 4, it is faith that precedes the doing of the law. Or as he states it in 3:27, “For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law.” But as he argues (in chapter 4), this is an idea that can be extrapolated from the law. The law points beyond itself to the faith of Christ. As Boyarin maintains, “It follows from this that those who live by faith are the righteous, i.e., the justified. He then argues that those who live by the Law do not live by faith, since the verse in Leviticus explicitly reads ‘He who does them lives by them,’ i.e., one who does the commandments lives by them and not by faith. Since, then, we know from Habakkuk that the righteous live by faith, he who lives by them and not by faith (and, thereby, does not fulfill the Law) is not righteous—is not justified.”[3]

Boyarin maintains Paul is arguing in a manner familiar to the Rabbis and Pharisees: “Paul is using methods of interpretation that would not surprise any Pharisee (I suspect) or Rabbi, although the results he arrives at would, of course, shock them to their depths.”[4] The law is a curse if the doing of it, or the having it, is thought to be adequate. According to Campbell, “The curse’s basis is actually life in Christ—a life of freedom, adulthood, inheritance, and the Spirit. In comparison with this life, Judaism under the law is confined, immature, harsh, and oppressed, and hence also cursed; it is the life from which Christians have been ‘purchased.’”[5]

The law does not produce faith nor resurrection, though it is based on faith (resurrection faith, 4:23). “In short, by acknowledging the crucified and resurrected Christ, and relying on him for deliverance—a deliverance that is already in some sense inaugurated (so vv. 17–20)—Paul observes that Jewish Christians have automatically displaced law observance from a critical saving and transformational role.”[6] There is no room for “works of law” even in the anteroom to faith. One does not progress through works of the law, to despair about keeping the law, to faith. Galatians, like Romans, describes a setting aside of law: “knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law but through faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the Law; since by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified” (Gal. 2:15). “Because transformation comes through the Christ event, works of law have been negated (at least in relation to transformation), along with any subsequent construction of their importance.”[7]

As Louis Martyn argues in regard to Galatians, the false teachers (who seem to be the very one or ones in Rome) are arguing Christians need the law, in particular circumcision, so as to curb the desires of the flesh. But Paul equates this reliance on the law as equivalent to reliance on the flesh. “Abraham, in their estimate, would have defeated the desire of the flesh by keeping the law, beginning with circumcision. So, Paul’s juxtaposition of flesh against Spirit, specifically refers to the foreskin of the penis. Their reliance on the law is literally reliance on this piece of flesh.”[8]

This reliance, as depicted in Galatians, is the equivalent of being a slave to the elementary principles of the cosmos. The widespread notion in the ancient world, which Paul is clearly opposing (in Gal. 3:28 and 6:15), is that the origins or the fundamental building blocks of the universe are based on opposed pairs (earth/air, water/fire). The problem with the law, the problem with the flesh, and the problem with “this present evil age” reduce to the singular problem that the “elements of the cosmos” (στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου) have been made absolute (a divine dialectic) and have not been understood in relationship to God. Whatever Paul might mean by these elements, it seems that the law and the flesh are counted among those things which held all people captive (Gal. 4:3).

The same dynamic is at work in Romans 7. It is not a matter of the law of the mind gaining control of the law of the flesh, as both are part of the dynamic (dialectic) of the law of sin and death . It is not the body over and against the spirit that is the problem, but this dialectic, as in Paul’s pitting of his mind against the body is definitive of the predicament. He sees two laws at work: “I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members” (Rom. 7.23). The point is not that one of these laws is right and the other is wrong; the point is there is a war being waged in which the individual is the victim, and only Christ can end this struggle.

As Martyn notes, the antinomies that served as the building blocks of the universe have disappeared.[9] The cosmos founded on opposed pairs no longer exists. “For when all of you were baptized into Christ, you put on Christ as though he were your clothing. There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; there is no male and female; for all of you are One in Christ Jesus” (3:27–28). Those in Christ have suffered the loss of the cosmos for the unity (the new cosmic order) found in Christ. The cosmic order, in which law versus no law, circumcision versus uncircumcision, or flesh versus spirit is broken open by Christ: “But may it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the cosmos has been crucified to me, and I to the cosmos. For neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation” (Gal. 6:14-15).

As Paul explains in chapter 8, there is an incapacity – but it is not an incapacity of the will or of someone attempting to keep the law and finding they are not able. Rather, there is an incapacity to recognize God, due to an innate hostility in the fleshly mind: “it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so” for “those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (8:8). This hostility arises in conjunction with the flesh and the law. It is not a matter of separating the law from the flesh, but it is a matter of doing away with the law as the basis of understanding the problem (sin) and the solution (salvation).

In chapter 5 of Romans, when Paul turns from the problem of the false Teacher and the law, he provides a picture of the problem and solution (from chapters 5-8) revolving around death and life: “For if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ” (5:17). This pictures “life” in the future age, but it also references a different sort of life now. People are baptized so that they “might walk in newness of life” (6:4).  In this new life the oppressive measure of the law has been set aside in being joined to Christ (7:1-3). Rather than the law serving to define salvation, with its being set aside the reign of death has ended (5:21). Salvation is rescue from death and the reign or rule of death through sin (5:18). This simple observation comes with a host of implications in regard to God, the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and the nature of reality and experience.

In contrast with justification theory, the primary human problem is not God’s anger due to transgression of the law, but captivity, deception, and hostility arising through sin and death. Both chapter 5 and chapter 8 mention an inherent hostility to God. The sons and daughters of Adam are fundamentally God’s enemies (5:10; 8:5–8) as “the sinful mind is hostile to God” (8:7). Romans 7 describes the inner workings of this hostility, which does indeed include the law, but not as a point of recognition and enlightenment but as the place where deception, desire, and death enter in. In 7.7ff the law, which gives rise to forbidden desire, in spite of the life that it seemed to offer and due to the deception of sin, produces death for the ἐγὼ or a life of death described as an agonistic struggle in which the self is split against itself and sin is in control.  Paul sums this up as the “body of death” (7.24) or “the law of sin and death” (8.2).  The law of sin and death is the structuring principle of the Subject in which life is controlled by an orientation to death (a primordial deception and a destructive drive).

While the problem is more tragic and all-encompassing than pictured in justification theory, the good news is that the solution is more all-encompassing (universal) and unconditional. “For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life” (5:10). Here there is no angry deity punishing legal transgression by taking out his wrath on Christ. This salvation speaks of a loving God transforming the cosmos and the very make-up of the human psyche and subject. This salvation is transformational, a passage from death into life, a passage from flesh – law – elementary principles into new life through the Son and the Spirit. The old order of bondage, enslavement to law and flesh has been defeated and the new age is inaugurated. This is an apocalyptic intervention into a bondage in which a right understanding of God and the human situation are impossible. Deliverance, rescue, resurrection and new creation are inaugurated by God through Christ, and this alone allows for salvation and a consequent right understanding (Rom. 8:20–23).

[1] Campbell, Douglas A.. The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (pp. 141-142). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

[2] Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkely: University of California Press, 1994) https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft7w10086w&chunk.id=ch6&toc.id=&brand=ucpress

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Campbell, 425.

[6] Campbell, 844.

[7] Campbell, 846.

[8] J. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Yale University Press, 1997), 294.

[9] Martyn, 570.

Embodied Souls, Ensouled Bodies: Karl Barth as Resolution to Sexual and Body/Soul Dualism

I presume sin impacts humans not only in the experience of alienation but in conceiving all things in an alienated manner. That is, the failure of humanity becomes the singular truth, the only kind of humanity we know, and it is presumed there is no alternative to antagonism and dualism. Soul/body, male/female, or heaven and earth are taken to be, not only the historical understanding, but the singular reality. In psychoanalysis this shows itself in Lacanian psychoanalysis in that the antagonism structuring the Subject is presumed to be a necessity. Alienation and antagonism produce the Subject without possibility of qualification. One might manipulate this antagonism (death drive), but best of all, perhaps through therapy, one will be resolved to living with it. The insight of psychoanalysis, is that the various historical dualisms, centered on soul and body or male and female (but including every aspect of what it means to be human including life and death, language and meaning, heaven and earth) arise from a singular structure within the human psyche.  

Psychoanalysis locates the antagonism within the individual in interpenetrating categories such as ego and superego, but most dualisms have as their goal the presumed capacity to rid oneself of the negative, as is illustrated with male/female. Male is associated with the soulish, the rational, or the spiritual, while female is equated with the body, the natural, and the passions. As the church father Jerome describes it, “As long as woman is for birth and children, she is different from man as body is from soul. But if she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman and will be called man.”[1] Every human must strive for the masculine and the Christ-like and aim to shed the fleshly-feminine, but clearly the female sex starts with a disadvantage. As Ambrose writes: “She who does not believe is a woman and should be designated by the name of her bodily sex, whereas she who believes progresses to complete manhood, to the measure of the adulthood of Christ. She then does without wordly name, gender of body, youthful seductiveness, and garrulousness of old age.”[2] What is at play, in even Christian texts, is the notion that the masculine is abstract, spiritual, soulish, and universal, and the feminine is bound by the body. As Daniel Boyarin lays out the opposed pairs, man is to woman as substance is to accident, form to matter, univocity to division and difference, soul to body, meaning to language, signified to signifier, natural to artificial, and essential to ornamental.[3]

The psychoanalytic insight is to assign what Boyarin and others have concluded is universal to the human sickness. The details and historical permutations of the sickness may vary (Neo-Platonism, Adam and Eve, Judaism, or Christianity, have been blamed) but what Lacanian psychoanalysis attempts is a diagnosis of the human disease which explains how humans are traumatized by death. Death resistance as castration, the Oedipus complex, the focus on human sexuality, the entry and orientation within law and language, may or may not be right in the details, but what it incorporates within its explanation is the shape of male/female or soul/body antagonism and how this constitutes the human Subject and her world. What it does not do is provide any path beyond the problem.

Karl Barth provides a different (simpler?) approach to assessing both the universal human disease and its resolution, in that Christ serves as definition of what it means to be human. Barth does not start with the phenomena of the human as it may present itself to the anthropologist or the psychologist, as this will only lead to one going astray, “especially as they always arouse at this point the burning interest which powerful inner contradictions always bring to light.”[4] What Barth might be referring to specifically is not clear, but he has hit upon the truth of the development of modern psychoanalysis in its focus on contradiction (life versus death, male versus female, body versus soul, or the imaginary against the symbolic) as the primary focus of study and interest. The turn to Jesus Christ as model is simultaneously a turn from the supposed normativity of this antagonism.

Barth is also departing from traditional Christian dogma, which begins with man’s existence in the abstract and then applies this understanding to Christ. As he points out, this has resulted in a “certain one-sidedness,” referring perhaps, to the sort of reflection found in Ambrose and Jerome. The downgrading and oppression of women and the privileging of the soul, represents a majority position in the history of the church. Barth, by making Christ definitive of what it means to be human, is setting theology on a different foundation than the “older dogmatics.” The body/soul, male/female, and mind/body dualism can now be approached and potentially resolved in Jesus Christ. At a minimum, Barth provides a largely untapped point of departure.

The ontological determination of humanity is grounded in the fact that one man among all others is the man Jesus. So long as we select any other starting point for our study, we shall reach only the phenomena of the human. We are condemned to abstractions so long as our attention is riveted as it were on other men, or rather on man in general, as if we could learn about real man from a study of man in general, and in abstraction from the fact that one man among all others is the man Jesus. In this case we miss the one Archimedean point given us beyond humanity, and therefore the one possibility of discovering the ontological determination of man. Theological anthropology has no choice in this matter. It is not yet or no longer theological anthropology if it tries to pose and answer the question of the true being of man from any other angle.[5]

Barth derives his concept of what it means to be human from the singular man, Jesus Christ. In his volume on the doctrine of creation, Christ is the “Archimedean point” for understanding not only humanity but all of creation. Barth, through a more circuitous route, lands close to the Maximian formula, “creation is incarnation.” Or, “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.”[6] Barth’s doctrine of creation, like his doctrine of anthropology, presumes creation by itself is a mere abstraction. The incarnate Christ provides the concrete center and revelation concerning creation: “Because man, living under heaven and on earth, is the creature whose relation to God is revealed to us in the Word of God, he is the central object of the theological doctrine of creation.” Which leads to Barth’s anthropological focus: “As the man Jesus is Himself the revealing Word of God, He is the source of our knowledge of the nature of man as created by God.”[7] Anthropology is not a subset of the study of creation but is its center, and true anthropology is approached only through the truly human one. “As the man Jesus is Himself the revealing Word of God, He is the source of our knowledge of the nature of man as created by God.”[8] Barth concludes: “But this point of departure means nothing more nor less than the founding of anthropology on Christology.”[9]

Barth builds upon this foundation (in section 46) with his opening thesis in which he sets forth the primary terms of body, soul, and Spirit: “Through the Spirit of God, man is the subject, form and life of a substantial organism, the soul of his body – wholly and simultaneously both, in ineffaceable difference, inseparable unity, and indestructible order.”[10] Humans are both body and soul – simultaneously and inseparably. “Man’s being exists, and is therefore soul; and it exists in a certain form, and is therefore body.”[11] In Christ these are not constituent parts. “He is one whole man, embodied soul and besouled body: the one in the other and never merely beside it; the one never without the other but only with it, and in it present, active and significant; the one with all its attributes always to be taken as seriously as the other.”[12]

The death and resurrection of Christ do not alter this order: “The whole man, soul and body, He rises as he died, and sits at the right hand of God and will come again.”[13] This soul and body wholeness is an eternal fact about who he is. “He does not fulfil His office and His work from His miraculous annunciation to His fulfilment in such a way that we can separate His outer from His inner or His inner from His outer.”[14] Everything is simultaneously inner, invisible, and spiritual, and outer, visible, and bodily.

Barth illustrates the point through a series of biblical verses which refer alternatively to Christ “giving himself” (Gal. 1:4), giving his soul (Matt. 20:28), or giving his body (Luke 22:19). “Jesus, He Himself, is His soul, and His body, and it is the one whole man who died on the cross and thus made our sin inoperative and completed our reconciliation.”[15] In turn it is the whole man, body and soul, that is raised. Body and soul are not parallels or two parts or two lines. Their union in him permits no choice but to consider them together. “They cannot be considered independently. In and with one another they are the oneness and wholeness of this life.”[16] Which is not to deny that there is a higher and a lower or a dominating and dominated, but Jesus is both. Barth does not mention a male and female principle, but inasmuch as these might represent the body and soul, or the sensuous and the rational, it can only be said that Jesus is both. “His life of soul and body is really His life. He has full authority over it.”[17]

It is important that Christ accomplished this in his flesh. Flesh may be a neutral term referring to human existence, but it also has an evil connotation. “It indicates the condition of man in contradiction, in disorder and in consequent sickness, man after Adam’s fall, the man who lives a fleeting life in the neighbourhood of death and corruption.”[18] Christ has come in the flesh to condemn sin in sinful flesh (Rom. 8:3). He suffered in the flesh (I Pet. 4:1). He reconciled us “in the body of his flesh” (Col. 1:22). He “abolished in his flesh the enmity” (Eph. 2:15). In his flesh he parted the veil in the Temple and provided entry into God’s presence (Heb. 10:20). Even in his resurrection body he is still in the flesh, and is not pure spirit (Luke 24:39). He provides true food and true drink continually through his flesh (Jn. 6:51). Flesh, which in itself speaks of death, disorder and disobedience, through his flesh takes on life, order and obedience. “The flesh, which in itself profits nothing, becomes a purposeful instrument. The flesh, which in itself is lost, attains a determination and a hope. The flesh, which in itself is illogical and irrational, becomes logical and rational. As the Logos becomes flesh and Jesus is flesh, it is shown that this man has and is spirit and life, and the flesh itself becomes quickening and living and meaningful.”[19]

Barth equates the work of Christ in the flesh with creation itself – with the ordering of chaos into a cosmos. The reconciliation, ordering, rationalizing, of Christ in the flesh “is the triumph of the meaning of the human existence of Jesus.”[20] Chaos in itself offers no explanation no rationale, nor order, but through the ordering of the flesh in Christ the world and humankind are an ordered creation and cosmos. This establishes a new basis for understanding humanity, creation, and the human relationship to God.

The Christian response to dualism is to recognize that most every form of human subjectivity is built upon an antagonistic dualism (between body and soul, between male and female, between the ego and the law, or between life and death) but there is one human to whom this does not apply; namely Jesus Christ. Jesus is the alternative to alienation, antagonism, and dualism and this alternative applies to all and grounds a holistic Christian understanding.

[1][1] Jerome, Commentary on the Letter to the Ephesians, Patrologia cursus completus, series latina, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1841–66), 26:533; translation from Vern Bullough, “Medieval Medical and Scientific Views of Women,” Viator 4 (1973): 499. Cited in Daniel Boyarin, “On the History of the Early Phallus,” in Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 8.

[2] Ambrose, “Exposition of the Gospel of Luke,” in PL 15:1844. Boyarin, Ibid.

[3] Boyarin, 12-13.

[4] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Creation III.2 (Hendrickson Publishers, 1956) 325. All quotes are from III.2 unless otherwise indicated.

[5] Barth, 132.

[6] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1; Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 7.22.

[7] Barth, 3.

[8] Barth, 41.

[9] Barth, 44.

[10] Barth, 325.

[11] Barth, 325. 

[13] Barth, 327.

[14] Barth, 327.

[15] Barth, 328.

[16] Barth, 331.

[17] Barth, 332.

[18] Barth, 335.

[19] Barth, 336.

[20] Barth, 336

Christ as Definitive of Torah and Judaism – Not Their Dissolution

There is a time and space bending aspect to the gospel which is no mere metaphor. The time, space, and place Jesus occupies, according to the writers of the New Testament, is the beginning of all things (John 1:1), the place of Israel, and the Temple and, as Jesus says, before Abraham he is (John 8:58). This present tense presence of Jesus in the ancient past is an interpretive key deployed throughout the New Testament. The 7th day of rest is, according to the writer of Hebrews, an ongoing reality encompassing all of human history (Heb. 4:6). Paul identifies Christ with the rock in the wilderness of Sin: “They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ” (I Cor. 10-2-4). Matthew identifies Christ with Israel, “And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son” (Matt. 2:15). Jesus, in the middle of history, is the beginning, the door to the seventh day, the one present now before Abraham. The early church fathers will continue to identify Christ directly with Adam, Moses, and Joshua, so that Jesus is the subject of the Hebrew Scriptures. Our tendency may be to dismiss this as allegory or metaphor, and in doing so we may cling to a flat consecutive ordering of time and history, and thus miss how it is that the events surrounding Christ fold back to the alpha and forward to the omega of all of history (Rev. 1:8; 21:6; 22:13).

Maximus formula captures the time and space bending nature of the incarnation: “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.”[1] As Maximus explains it: “This is the great and hidden mystery. This is the blessed end for which all things were brought into existence. This is the divine purpose conceived before the beginning of beings, and in defining it we would say that this mystery is the preconceived goal for the sake of which everything exists, but which itself exists on account of nothing, and it was with a view to this end that God created the essences of beings.”[2]

It is of doctrinal significance that the division which develops between Judaism and Christianity is gradual, in that Christianity was originally understood to occupy the same time and space, share the same scriptures, and even accord Torah the same primacy, such that Christians met in synagogues and were probably considered a sect of Jews. Magnus Zetterholm argues that the name, “Christian,” arises in Antioch because there may have been up to twenty to thirty synagogues in the city, and the designation may have come from the Christians or from their fellow Jews as a way of distinguishing their particular synagogue. As Zetterholm writes, “That Christianity eventually became a non-Jewish, separate religion does not mean that this separation must already have taken place by the first time we hear the term ‘Christian.’ The sources actually indicate the opposite.”[3]

But even to describe “Jews” in this fashion may already be anachronistic, if “Jew” is thought to specify a particular religion. Daniel Boyarin raises the question whether Jewish or Christian are categories which existed during the Second Temple period. The Greek term Ἰουδαῖος (Ioudaios) simply means Judean or Jew, and meant something like the ways of the Judeans/Jews as a people. To imagine Jewish designates a religion with a singular and agreed upon essence is anachronistic and mistaken at several levels.

The same sort of development is seen in more recent history with terms like Hinduism (a British designation), which simply refers to the practices of the people on the subcontinent of India and until the British designated the category, did not exist as a singular religion or even a particular set of practices. The same thing is true in Japan. The religion known as Shintoism is a late development (of the Meiji Restoration) imposing the notion that the animistic practices of the various clans fit under a singular umbrella unified by State Shinto. The Meiji government debated whether to designate Shinto a religion or a national identity, and created laws that reflect contradictory conclusions at different points. The central government eventually sent out State Shinto missionaries to enforce unified practices on the variety of animistic “religions” practiced on the Islands of Japan.

 So too “Judaism” is an open-ended term, according to Boyarin, “talking about the complex of rituals and other practices, beliefs and values, history and political loyalties that constituted allegiance to the People of Israel, not a religion called Judaism.”[4] In turn, “Most (if not all) of the ideas and practices of the Jesus movement of the first century and the beginning of the second century—and even later—can be safely understood as part of the ideas and practices that we understand to be ‘Judaism.’”[5] But Judaism, is not a closed set of ideas or a unified understanding, as Jews were broken into ever dividing factions, arguing over what constituted the essence of their religion.

Gregory Knight maintains, “The Pharisees were a kind of reform movement within the Jewish people that was centered on Jerusalem and Judaea. The Pharisees sought to convert other Jews to their way of thinking about God and Torah, a way of thinking that incorporated seeming changes in the written Torah’s practices that were mandated by what the Pharisees called ‘the tradition of the Elders.’” Knight refines the usual understanding of Pharisees and Sadducees: “Traditionally, scholars have portrayed the Sadducees as strict interpretationalists who accepted nothing as binding except the literal language of the Torah. At the other extreme, the Pharisees have been portrayed as the more progressive sect which accepted the whole corpus of traditional law-the ‘Oral Torah’-that had developed around the written Torah.”[6] Knight notes that this is a generalization that will not hold in that “the Sadducees were not completely averse to the traditional law nor were the Pharisees always the more lenient, tradition-bound group.”[7] Sorting out this difference though, will not begin to settle the issue of what is essential to being Jewish. As Boyarin writes, “It is quite plausible, therefore, that other Jews, such as the Galilean Jesus, would reject angrily such ideas as an affront to the Torah and as sacrilege.”[8] The Zealots would, in turn, reject all forms of Judaism but their own.

The Apostle Paul describes Judaism as lacking an essence in the understanding of the Jews. He describes it, in Hegelian fashion, in that the mystery of the Jews is a mystery to the Jews. The essence of Judaism escapes Jews (2 Cor. 3:15).  “But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away” (2 Cor. 3:14). Christ, in Matthew, describes a hollow emptiness (that of a tomb) in the Judaism of the scribes and Pharisees: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness” (Matt. 23:27). Where Christ is the “filling up” or fulness of the law (pleroma), the scribes and Pharisees are “full” (ἀνοµία) of emptiness. Their problem is not legalism but an active negation of the law. Jesus has no problem with law but with its emptying out, which is the mystery around which their Judaism revolves. Their focus on the letter takes the law as its own end but leaves out the doing: “The scribes and the Pharisees have seated themselves in the chair of Moses; therefore all that they tell you, do and observe, but do not do according to their deeds; for they say things and do not do them” (Matt. 23:2–3). Instead of “doing” the law the scribes and Pharisees are caught up in an outward adherence which misses the heart of the law. This absent center though, is the prototypical and universal human problem – culture, religion, or the individual subject revolves around a reified absence. This is the very definition of sin.

On the other hand, Christ is understood not as a disjunction or discontinuation of the law and the Hebrew scriptures, but as the point of mutual illumination. Matthew (chapter 1) depicts Jesus in two origin stories, which duplicate the book of Genesis (but here is the true origin or true Genesis). The word genesis (γένεσις) is used some ten times in the Septuagint version of Genesis and it is probable that by the time of Matthew’s writing “Genesis” had been adopted within Greek-speaking Jewish communities as the formal title of the book. The echo of Genesis is evident in the specific phrase “The record of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah” – which literally reads, “the book of the genesis of Jesus.” (This phrase occurs in Genesis 2:4 and 5:1.)

The birth narrative (Matt. 1:22-23) contains the formula Matthew uses throughout his Gospel to describe Jesus’ relationship to Judaism. “Now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord.” “Fulfilled” can be read as, “to bring to its designed end” or “to bring to its fulness” (pleroma). Jesus is not depicted as challenging Judaism, but as standing within it – fulfilling it and even defining it. That is Judaism is not brought to its designed end apart from Christ.

The point of Matthew’s formula is too simplistically described as prophecy and fulfillment, as many of the passages he sights are not prophecy, but Jesus fills out the Hebrew scriptures. Matthew would say “fulfilled,” as Jesus, the substance, fills up the scriptures of Israel in a substantially new and unexpected way. Jesus is not moving beyond Torah, but embodies Torah. “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill” (Matt 5:17). Jesus is upholding, bringing to life, or bringing Torah to its designed end.

As Richard Hays writes: “Matthew’s language and imagery are from start to finish soaked in Scripture; he constantly presupposes the social and symbolic world rendered by the stories, songs, prophecies, laws, and wisdom teachings of Israel’s sacred texts.”[9] The world of the Hebrew scriptures is precisely the world occupied by Christ. As Roy Fisher describes, “Matthew is envisioned as incorporating Torah into his work, such that we now envision Matthew’s composition to be taking form within a Torah-formed space.”[10] As Zetterholm writes, “A Jew who came to embrace belief in Jesus as the Messiah could not be said to change one symbolic universe for another. To become a Messiah-believing Jew would rather represent a new orientation within the same symbolic universe.”[11]

Jesus is pictured as filling up the righteousness of the law (e.g., as in his baptism). When John objects to baptizing Jesus, he answers, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness (πληρῶσαι πᾶσαν δικαιοσύνην)” (Matt. 3:15). Baptism marks the form, the relinquishing, the self-giving, which accomplishes the fulness of righteousness.  As Fisher notes, “baptism is the form righteousness takes. It is the proper doing necessary to inhabit the shape of δικαιοσύνην” (righteousness).[12] Of course, baptism is a work, or something Jesus does (and in Christian baptism, which all his followers do) but this doing is not over and against the law but is the laws completion. Jesus continually demonstrates his authority through his doing (e.g., baptism, teaching, healing, forgiving, and dying and rising). “This notion of πληρόω neither goes beyond Torah nor does it replace Torah. On the contrary, Matthew’s concept of fulfillment is the inhabiting of Torah through word and deed. This is how Jesus makes Torah complete.”[13]

 The Gospel of Matthew is a case in point of the time bending sense of Christ as the fulfillment (pleroma) and true subject of the Hebrew scriptures and the law, assigning them the definition (the authority and settled meaning) they always were to have. As with the other writers of the New Testament and the church fathers, it is not that Christ is beginning a new epoch in history (from old to new or from Jew to Christian) but Christ occupies and has always occupied the subject position of the Hebrew scriptures.  

[1] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1; Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 7.22.

[2] St. Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties In Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios; Translated by Fr. Maximos Constas, (Washington D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press) 60.3.

[3] Magnus Zetterholm, The Formation of Christianity in Antioch: A Social-Scientific Approach to the Separation of Judaism and Christianity (London: Routledge, 2003), 96. Cited in Roy Allan Fisher, “Locating Matthew in Israel” (Unpublished dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2018) 92.

[4] Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New York: The New Press, 2012) 2. Cited in Fisher, 18.

[5] Boyarin, viii.

[6] Gregory Knight, “The Pharisees and the Sadducees: Rethinking their Respective Outlooks on Jewish Law” 1993 BYU L. Rev. 925 (1993).

[7][7] Ibid, Knight.

[8] Boyarin, xiv.

[9] Richard B Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2016), 109. Cited in Fisher, 56-57.

[10] Fisher, 57.

[11]Zetterholm, 6. Cited in Fisher, 91.

[12] Fisher, 84.

[13] Fisher, 87.