Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries
Editors: Oskar Skarsaune and Reidar Hvalvik
Hardcover: 930 pages
Publisher: Hendrickson
ISBN: 9781565637634

Buy: Hendrickson; Amazon

Though it is a bit overdue, I would like to extend my gratitude to Hendrickson Publishers for sending me a review copy of Jewish Believers in Jesus, edited by Oskar Skarsaune and Reidar Hvalvik. This weighty volume came out shortly before SBL 2007 and was the subject of a standing room only discussion (Session S19-116) at that meeting. Of particular interest to me at that time was Mark Nanos’ scathing review of Don Hagner’s contribution in this work. For anyone in the room at the time of its reading, the tension was palpable. An audio version of the session is available, as is a PDF of Nanos’ paper (which was not read in its entirety), and I have transcribed Don Hagner’s response to Nanos here. My friend Matt Barnes also did a few blog posts about the Nanos paper. Having said that, my interests in this topic have since expanded further.

I attended this session after having taken a course on “Paul and the Law” from Hagner (winter 2007). This past quarter (fall 2008), I was part of a seminar with Ra’anan Boustan at UCLA on “Jews, Gentiles, and Christians in the Roman World.” On the heals of this last course, I am excited to tackle some pieces of this massive work. After the Hagner course, I was interested especially in the issue of the New Perspective on Paul (which I found more helpful than did Hagner). After the Boustan seminar, I have a somewhat wider interest in this scholarship.

In his preface to the work, Skarsaune notes the challenges to the idea that there ever was a “parting of the ways” between “Jews” and “Christians”–he names Boyarin’s Dying for God and the edited work, The Ways that Never Parted. He says, “[T]his has meant that while we were at work, a paradigm shift was going on around us” (xii). That paradigm shift moves away from the idea that there was a clean break between something called “Judaism” and something called “Christianity.” That there was such a break is the traditional view. The idea that there was no such break is at the heart of newer scholarship, such as the recent publication of Paula Fredriksen’s Augustine and the Jews (I hope to do a review of that work on this blog as well). This idea that there was no such break was also at the heart of Boustan’s seminar. The work edited by Skarsaune and Hvalvik contains multiple viewpoints on this and other topics:

“Neither authors nor editors think of this volume as a definitive history of Jewish believers in Jesus during the early centuries (first to fifth centuries C.E.). Nor have the editors made any attempt at unifying and streamlining the points of view expressed in the different contributions. We have regarded it an advantage that the book contains more than one opinion on some of the problems treated. There is, at present, no established scholarly consensus on the different themes treated in this volume. This goes for the many large as well as many of the smaller questions. In this way it is hoped that this volume, rather than summing up current scholarship, may in some measure contribute to it.” (xii-xiii)

It seems important to begin this multi-post review with definitions. That is where the book begins and it seems to be the cause of some confusion for two unhelpful reviews on Amazon (reviews that are based more on assumptions of what the term “Jewish believers in Jesus” must mean rather than actual readings of the book itself!). Unfortunately, this book is not one that can be searched inside on Amazon nor on Google Books–so, it is difficult for those interested to check things out without a copy of the book in hand. That said, you can find the table of contents, the preface and Skarsaune’s chapter on definitions at Hendrickson’s site. You can also find a very lengthy review by Elizabeth Boddens Hosang and Bart J. Koet in RBL. I hope my own review can be a helpful contribution for those interested.

Skarsaune notes that their project seeks to consider “Jews” as something closer to an ethnic category than an ideological category. If we consider, say, “Jewish Christians” as those who “believed in Jesus, and at the same time continued a wholly Jewish way of life” (4), then we abandon an important group: that is, “Jews who believed in Jesus, and at the same time abandoned their Jewish way of life and were assimilated among the Gentile Christians” (4). Skarsaune would like to discuss a wide range of Jews who confessed Christ and thus the term, “Jewish believers in Jesus.” These are people who were born Jews and also believe in Jesus, whether or not they practiced the “Jewish way of life” (however that is defined).

The term “Jewish Christian” is unfavorable because of its (potentially offensive) connotations: “It has become a term denoting something by nature Gentile, and by implication, non-Jewish” (4). I appreciate their category of “Jewish believers in Jesus,” though it would be nice if we could have a term that not only focused on “belief.” I suppose this gets to a foundational issue in the book: once a Jew becomes a believer in Jesus, how does this affect his or her way of life? The issue is more complicated than whether the “Jewish way of life” is abandoned or retained. Even if we could define what a “Jewish way of life” means, certainly there must be middle ground between total abandonment or total retainment (or simple discontinuity vs. simple continuity–see Hagner’s remarks). The benefit of this term is that it encompasses any number of responses to the paradigm shift of belief in Jesus.

In response to the question of whether this term is merely a modern construction, Skarsaune offers a few relevant ancient examples (5-6). I would like to close this first post by sharing them here because I find them so interesting:

(1) “Jesus said to those Ἰουδαῖοι who believed in him . . .” (John 8:31).

(2) “. . . those of the Jewish people who have believed in Jesus [οἱ ἀπὸ τοῦ λαοῦ τῶν Ἰουδαίων εἰς τὸν Ἰησοῦν πιστεύσαντες]” (Origen, Cels. 2.1).7

(3) “Why . . . did he not represent the Jew as addressing Gentile instead of Jewish believers? [οἱ ἀπὸ Ἰουδαίων . . . πιστεύοντες]” (Cels. 2.1).

(4) “Notice, then, what Celsus says to Jewish believers [οἱ ἀπὸ Ἰουδαίων πιστεύοντες]” (Cels. 2.1).

(5) “. . . He failed to notice that Jewish believers in Jesus [οἱ ἀπὸ Ἰουδαίων εἰς τὸν Ἰησοῦν πιστεύοντες] have not left the law of their fathers . . .” (Cels. 2.1).

(6) “[Matthew published his gospel first] for those who from Judaism came to believe [τοῖς ἀπὸ Ιουδαϊσμοῦ πιστεύσασιν]” (Origen, Comm. Matt., in Eusebius, Hist. eccl., 6.25.4).

(7) “It is said that their whole church at that time consisted of believing Jews [ἐξ Ἑβραίων πιστῶν]” (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 4.5.2).

(8) “[Hegesippus] was a believer from among the Jews [ἐξ Ἑβραίων]” (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 4.22.8).

More to come!