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Christian Writers on Judaism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2011

George Foot Moore
George Foot Moore
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

Christian interest in Jewish literature has always been apologetic or polemic rather than historical. The writers of the New Testament set themselves to demonstrate from the Scriptures that Jesus was the expected Messiah by showing that his nativity, his teaching and miracles, the rejection of him by his people, his death, resurrection, and ascension, were minutely foretold in prophecy, the exact fulfilment of which in so many particulars was conclusive proof of the truth of his claims, and left no room to doubt that his own prediction would be fulfilled in the speedy coming of the Son of Man to judgment, as Daniel had seen him in his vision. In the Pauline Epistles and Hebrews and in the Gospel according to John the aim is not so much to prove that Jesus was the Messiah of Jewish expectation as that the Lord Jesus Christ, in whom Christians believed that they had salvation from their sins and the assurance of a blessed immortality, was a divine being, the Son of God, the Word of God incarnate; and this higher faith also sought its evidence in the Scriptures. The apologetic of the following centuries, especially that which addresses itself to Jewish objections, has the same chief topics: Jesus was the Christ (Messiah), and Christ is a divine being. Others, which also have their antecedents in the New Testament, are accessory to these, particularly the emancipation of Christians from the Mosaic law, or the annulment of the dispensation of law altogether, or the substitution of the new law of Christ; the repudiation of the Jewish people by God for their rejection of Christ, and the succession of the church, the true Israel, the people of God, to all the prerogatives and promises once given to the Jews.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , July 1921 , pp. 197 - 254
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1921

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References

* The following pages are not meant to be a history of the literature or even an introduction to it. The author's aim has been to show the influences which have determined its character in successive periods and to illustrate these stages by certain outstanding works, laying thus the foundation for a critical examination of modern representations of Judaism to which the second part of this study is devoted.

1 The most recent conspectus of this branch of Christian apologetic down to the fifth century, with the modern literature, will be found in Juster, , Les Juifs dans l'Empire Romain (1914), i, 53–76Google Scholar. For a general survey of the whole field reference may be made to Blau, L., ‘Polemics and Polemical Literature,’ Jewish Encyclopedia, x, 102–109Google Scholar.

2 Joseph Scaliger's estimate of these apologies is not unfair: Judaei hodie cum disputant, sunt subtiles. Justinus Martyr quam misere contra Tryphonem scripsit, et Tertullianus! Debet esse valde peritus Judaismi, qui Judaeos volet reprehendere et refutare. (Quoted by Wagenseil, p. 89.)

3 Some illustrations are given by Blau in the Jewish Encyclopedia, x, 103; see also Bacher, , Die Agada der Palästinensischen Amoräer, i, 555 fGoogle Scholar. (Simlai); ii, 115–118 (Abahu); and the indexes under ‘Christen, Christenthum.’.

4 See below, note 21.

5 An account of this discussion, written by R. Moses ben Nahman, may be found in Wagenseil, Tela ignea Satanae. The three subjects appointed to be debated were: Whether the Messiah has already appeared; Whether the Messiah of the prophets was divine or human; Whether Judaism or Christianity is the true religion. In the report we have, the controversy ends with the Trinity.

6 The year 1278 is often given inexactly as the year of the completion of the whole work.

7 The texts as Martini quotes them sometimes differ materially from the manuscripts and printed editions in our hands, and his good faith has consequently been called in question. Where the text has really been tampered with in Christian interest, it is more likely that the copies he used had been interpolated by Jewish converts than that he falsified them himself. The judgment of recent Jewish critics is in general favorable to his honesty.

8 On the pronunciation Johouah in Porchetus, see my Notes in The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures, xxviii (October 1912), pp. 55–57Google Scholar, and on Luther's use of Porchetus, ibid., pp. 60 f.

9 See Appendix, p. 254.

10 See Appendix, p. 254.

11 The Dominicans, instigated by a baptized Jew named Pfefferkorn, had got from the emperor in 1508 an edict that the Jews should deliver all their books to be examined, and that such as contained things injurious to the Christian religion should be burned. The emperor was induced to reconsider this action, and called upon Reuchlin for an expert opinion as a Hebraist and a jurist. In his report Reuchlin distinguished sevenclasses of Jewish books, of which at the outside only one, such scandalous writings as the Toledoth Jeshua, and direct attacks on Christianity like the Niṣṣaḥon, merited destruction. Thereupon he himself became the object of a venomous attack.

12 E.g. by Morin, Jean, Exercitationes Biblicae, lib. i, exerc. 1, c. 1 (p. 9 f.), 1660Google Scholar.

13 In letters to Casaubon, August, 1603, May, 1604; see Carpzov's edition of the Pugio, pp. 106 f. Scaliger erroneously supposed that the author was Raymundus Sebon.

14 Morin broadly hints as much; and a half century earlier the elder Buxtorf wrote: Galatino saepissime hic liber laudatus et citatus, de cujus fide multi dubitant.

15 A note on Heredia's fabrications will appear in another number of the Review.

16–17 See Appendix, p. 254.

18 See Ginzberg, L., ‘Cabala,’ Jewish Encyclopedia, ii, 456–479Google Scholar.

19 De hominis dignitate (ed. Basel 1592), pp. 329 f.

20 Notably Tholuck and Hengstenberg.

21 The most prominent of the Spanish converts were Abner of Burgos (Alfonso of Valladolid, or of Burgos), died ca. 1350; Solomon ha-Levi of Burgos (Paul de Santa Maria, or Paul of Burgos), died 1345; Joshua ben Joseph ha-Lorki (Geronimo de Santa Fe), body physician of Pope Benedict XIII.

22 Commonly cited as Nizzachon Vetus, to distinguish it from the work of Lipmann-Mühlhausen. Printed in Wagenseil.

23 Troki's work is also in Wagenseil.

24 On the complaint of the Jews, this first edition of Eisenmenger's book was suppressed by the emperor as prejudicial to public order (see Wolf, ii, 1024). It was reprinted under the auspices of Frederick I, King of Prussia, and published in 1711, at Königsberg (or Berlin; see Wolf as above), in two volumes quarto, together nearly 2200 pages. A facsimile of the title page and other information about the work will be found in the Jewish Encyclopedia, v, 80 f.

25 Vol. ii, pp. 220 ff.

26 Christopher Cartwright (1602–1658) is the author also of Electa Thargumico-Rabbinica, sive Annotationes in Exodum ex triplici Thargum seu Chaldaica paraphrasi, 1658. The Mellificium Hebraicum, seu Observationes Diversimodae ex Hebraeorum, praesertim antiquiorum, monumentis desumptae, unde plurima cum Veteris turn Novi Testamenti loca vel explicantur, vel illustrantur etc., was printed in the Critici Sacri, (London, 1660), ix, cols. 2943–3128.

27 The parts of Lightfoot's Horae were published separately, Matthew 1658, Mark 1663, 1 Corinthians 1664, John 1671, Luke 1674, Acts and Romans, posthumously, 1678, by Richard Kidder.

28 See Schmiedel, , Encyclopaedia Biblica, iv, col. 4041 f., cf. 4072Google Scholar; and on the passage, Moore, in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, xxvi (1906), 323–329.Google Scholar

29 A slip of Schoettgen's in the first paragraph of the Dissertatio de Regno Coelorum (i, 1147) is probably the origin of a misstatement which runs through a whole procession of New Testament lexicons and commentaries, namely that ὴ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν in Matthew corresponds to מרבוח השמים in rabbinical Hebrew. Schoettgen expressly says so; but if the scholars who took his word for it had looked at the examples he quotes in the following pages and elsewhere (on Matt. 11, 19, p. 115 f.), or at those collected by Lightfoot on Matt. 3, 2, they would have discovered that the rabbinical phrase is always מרבוח שמים, which Lightfoot correctly explained as by metonymy for God. The solitary instance of השמים in Schoettgen (p. 116), ‘Mechilta in Yalkut Rubeni fol. 176, 4,’ is an error either in Yalkut Rubeni (1660) or more probably inSchoettgen himself; the Mekilta (Jethro, Par. 5, init. on Exod. 20, 2) has correctly שמים.

30 See my note in Journal of Biblical Literature, xvi (1897), 158–161Google Scholar; Schiele, Fr., Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Theologie xlii (1899), 20 ff.Google Scholar

31 August Friedrich Gfroerer (1803–1861) studied theology in Tübingen, 1821–1825, and was Repetent there in 1828. In 1830 he became librarian in Stuttgart, and from 1846 was professor of history in the university of Freiburg in Baden.

32 Zunz, Leopold, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden historisch entwickelt. 1832Google Scholar.

33 The Ethiopic text of the Ascension was edited, with Latin and English translations, by Richard Laurence in 1819; the Latin translation was reprinted by Gfroerer in Prophetae veteres pseudepigraphi, 1840; Enoch in English translation by Laurence in 1821; the Ethiopic text in 1838.

34 Das Jahrhundert des Heils, ii, 289–444Google Scholar.

35 The Targums on the Pentateuch and the Historical Books, which (with the exception of the so-called Pseudo-Jonathan on the Pentateuch) he makes older than the destruction of Jerusalem, are among his chief witnesses to the early prevalence of Alexandrian mystical theology in Palestine.

36 Recall also the subtitle of his Philo (above, p. 223), ‘vom Einflusse der jüdischaegyptischen Schule auf die Lehre des Neuen Testaments.’.

37 Edited and published after the author's death by Franz Delitsch and Georg Schnedermann; reissued with an extra title-page, ‘Die Lehren des Talmuds’ (1886), and in a second, ‘improved’ edition by Schnedermann under a third title, ‘Jüdische Theologie auf Grand des Talmud und verwandte Schriften,’ 1897. The improvements consist in an (incomplete) verification of the references by J. J. Kahan and occasional slight revision by the editor, not always for the better. (See, for example, the absurd Metatron-Crown Prince, 2d ed., p. 178.)

38 In the second edition Schnedermann transforms this opposition in the points of view (‘wir sagen’) into an antithesis in the proposition itself. The Jewish idea is that, ‘Religion das rechte Verhalten des Menschen vor Gott ist, nicht aber Gemeinschaft des Menschen mit Gott.’.

39 System, u. s. w., p. 145.

40 As with equal obtuseness to the meaning of words he makes ‘monism’ equivalent to ‘abstract monotheism.’.

41 It does not inspire confidence in the author's rabbinical erudition to read (p. xx) that according to Sanhedrin 86a the anonymous utterances in Sifra are to be taken as sayings of R. Judah the Holy, ‘from which it follows that the Talmud regards R. Judah the Holy as the author of Sifra.’ The Talmud says R. Judah, by which name not ‘Judah the Holy,’ but Judah ben Ilai (in the preceding generation) is regularly designated. In the second edition ‘the Holy’ disappears; but with the consequence that in the sequel Rab is said to have been a disciple in the school of Judah, which would seem to give Rab an extraordinarily long life.

42 The contrary of a transcendent God, is not, as historically and logically it should be, an immanent God, but what may be called a sociable God.

43 Dibbūr is ‘speech, utterance’; specifically one of the Ten Utterances (debarim, rabbinical, debaroth), which the Greek version (Exod. 34, 28) and Philo call δέκα λόγοι and we after them the Decalogue.

44 The quotation of these catch-words must be understood to call to mind the sequel, ‘that the Lord, he is God; there is none beside him. Out of heaven he made thee to hear his voice that he might instruct thee,’ etc.

45 Religion and Worship of the Synagogue, p. 182 f.

46 Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte, § 27; especially pp. 483 f., 510 f.; Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes, u. s. w., § 28; 3d edit, ii, 464 ff., 469, 495, etc.

47 It is not without significance that all these authors — Schürer, Baldensperger, Weiss, Bousset — were New Testament scholars, the oldest of them scarcely past thirty years old. Schürer was the only one who thought it necessary to know anything about the rabbinical sources, and he found in Surenhusius' Mishna just the right material for the demonstration of ‘legalism.’ Beyond this he never went; the others did not go so far.

48 This parallel must often have occurred to critics. Perles (Boussets Religion des Judentums, p. 23) quotes Chwolson, Das letzte Passamahl Christi (1892), p. 71: So wenig man das Wesen des Christenthums aus der Apokalypse Johannis oder aus apokryphischen Evangelien kennen lernen kann, ebensowenig kann man das Judenthum zur Zeit Christi aus dem Buche Enoch, dem Buche der Jubiläen und ähnlichen Schriften erforschen.

49 He thinks, for example, that the language of the Talmuds is Aramaic. Even in Biblical Hebrew he was ill-grounded, as is convincingly shown by the remark: ‘Die alttestamentliche Sprache hat noch kein Wort fur Schöpfer, und muss den Mangel durch Fartizipialkonstruktionen ersetzen’ (p. 412).

50 Bousset, , Jesu Predigt in ihrem Gegensatz zum Judentum (1892), p. 43Google Scholar; Religion des Judentums (1903), p. 355; 2d edition (1906), pp. 432 f.

51 See above, pp. 235 f.