1. Introduction
In a recent issue of New Testament Studies, Anders Runesson provided a concise and insightful discussion about what it means to approach the New Testament (NT) texts ‘within Judaism’.Footnote 1 Runesson outlines the philosophical and epistemological developments that facilitated the emergence of this nascent paradigm. Post-Enlightenment conceptions of rationality led to a historical reconsideration of the separation of Judaism and Christianity into discrete religions, fostering a historical reclamation of the NT texts as Second Temple Jewish literature. Unifying this burgeoning school of scholarship amid its diversity in approach and arguments is the idea that, ‘While the canonisation of these texts within the Christian church certainly was and is a Christian project, resulting in Christian readings of Matthew, Acts and Paul, these scholars suggest that, historically, they, too, belong among the literary treasures of the Jewish people.’ Consequently, these texts should be interpreted not ‘against the background of Judaism and Jewish life, but as expressions of Judaism’, as modes of ‘the diverse ways of embodying Jewish ancestral customs in the pre-Rabbinic Second Temple period’.Footnote 2 As Christianity had not developed into a distinct religion, the authors who composed the texts comprising the corpus now known as the NT were enculturated in the diverse, malleable and porous matrix of Second Temple Judaism. They lived in allegiance to the Jewish ancestral civilisation and tradition. Their patterns of life, assumptions and views were invariably shaped by the first-century Jewish world, as well as their belief that Jesus is Israel’s Messiah. Jewish presuppositions and perspectives are thus embedded in the texts they composed and, therefore, indispensable for interpretation.Footnote 3
As someone who also argues for reading the NT writings within Judaism, I am grateful to Runesson for this article and his many contributions to this ever-growing body of scholarship. He highlights the historical, religious and philosophical distance that lies between present interpreters and the thought-world of the NT texts. Epistemological developments reshaped conceptions of the reasonable, disrupting traditionally binary modes of thinking (i.e. Jewish vs Christian; Judaism vs Christianity; Synagogue vs Church), and led to the possibility of (re)claiming the NT texts as first-century Jewish literature. Runesson shares vital insights for NT studies, including ethical and theological ones. Recontextualising the NT within Judaism contributes perhaps most significantly to the re-evaluation of supersessionism, the idea that God’s covenant with the Jewish people has ended and that Christians supplant Jews as God’s people. This, in turn, can aid Jewish-Christian dialogue.Footnote 4 Runesson reminds interpreters of the ethical imperative of listening to the Other (e.g. religious, ethnic and historical), challenging readers to consider what (and whose) future good might result from reframing the NT texts as ancient Jewish literature.Footnote 5 The academy is enriched by his work.
Yet, as someone who practices theological interpretation – that is, I read the NT as Scripture – I want to challenge the notion that approaching the NT within Judaism means examining these texts ‘as ancient and historical rather than religious and normative’.Footnote 6 While a strict separation between historical and ecclesial readings has been the presumption and posture of many scholars who read the NT within Judaism insofar as it has tended to be a historical critical project, it is not a necessary corollary that one cannot simultaneously approach the NT texts as Jewish literature and as Scripture, that is, as religiously normative texts. I suggest that they can be held together. Theological interpretation is not a discrete, alternative interpretive method. It is a posture and practice of reading the Bible as divine revelation wherein the reader is formed ‘by certain sensibilities and aims’.Footnote 7 Historically sensitive theological readers employ historical critical tools to allow the authors and writings to speak in their original generative contexts. Runesson’s strict separation of historical and ecclesial reading practices, his placing history’s voice before theology’s, unduly limits the potential impact this recent development has for confessional interpreters. Because Runesson and those who seek to recontextualise NT texts within early Judaism make a truth-claim about the fundamental nature of these writings, they have a unique opportunity to speak into theological interpretation. Their historical claim that the NT writings belong within early Judaism exerts theological pressure on confessional readers who read these texts as Scripture, since Christians canonised first-century Jewish writings as holy writ. Theological interpreters must reckon with the innate Jewish ‘otherness’ of the canonical, scriptural anthology that is the NT. Specifically, it calls for the development of a non- or post-supersessionist form of theological interpretation of the NT.Footnote 8
To make this case, I briefly summarise Runesson’s article. Then in conversation with Runesson, I offer some reflections on the relationship between the historical critical and theological interpretive projects to show ways in which Runesson and others who reframe the NT texts within Judaism can inform theological interpretation. I highlight how, while both historical and theological interpreters seek to interpret these writings according to their socio-historical matrices, all interpreters dance between the reader’s subjectivity and the socio-historical situatedness of the ancient texts. Theological readers acknowledge their ecclesial locations and intentions and privilege theological questions, even as they situate NT writings in their historical milieus. On the flip side, those attempting to read NT texts within Judaism do not shed their social context, concerns and interests. They privilege certain historical judgements and inquiries about the NT writings, and they are motivated by their own ethical – even theological – aims to influence contemporary conversations. History is pursued in hopes that it will help address Christian supersessionism and/or common caricatures of ancient (and modern) Jews.Footnote 9 Engaging contemporary concerns are nigh unavoidable because these ancient texts have been canonised by Christians as Scripture. They refuse to stay in the past. Therefore, this recent movement to understand the NT writings as Second Temple Jewish texts presents historical, ethical and theological challenges to those who approach these works as Scripture. Integrating these insights would help develop a non- or post-supersessionist theological interpretation of the NT.
In the spirit of recognising one’s social location and its import for interpretation, it is worth noting that the present author is a Jewish follower of Jesus. I participate in a contemporary ‘reading collective identifying as Jewish’ that approaches the NT as Scripture even as I view it as Second Temple Jewish literature.Footnote 10 Runesson is correct, of course, that most Jews and Christians would identify themselves and their religions in mutually exclusive terms. Even so, I am one among many who sit at the borderlines and trouble these neat social boundaries by identifying with both communities. For Christians and theological exegetes, people like me are embodied reminders that some semblance of Jewishness remains in the church. There remains a presence of the ecclesia ex circumcisione.Footnote 11 Moreover, my academic training comes from Protestant institutions. My social context shapes how I approach this topic, obviously. It makes it easier for me to see the NT as early Jewish texts and as Christian Scripture simultaneously.
Before I begin, let me clarify what I am not doing in this paper. I am not advocating for some naïve reclamation of first-century forms of Jewish Jesus-following, as if this were attainable or desirable. Nor am I asking Christianity and Judaism to renegotiate their boundaries in relationship to one another.Footnote 12 Moreover, I am not suggesting that historical critical scholars must pursue theological questions, or that theological interpreters must reconstruct history behind the biblical texts. I still consider these to be categorically different interpretive pursuits. Lastly, I do not intend to rehash or engage in debates about the validity of theological interpretation as an academic discipline vis-à-vis historical criticism. Others have taken up tasks like these.Footnote 13 Simply, I contend that it is historically correct to (re)frame the NT writings within Second Temple Judaism and that doing so can – even should – inform theological interpretation of Scripture.
2. Runesson on Reading NT texts within Judaism
In his essay, Runesson gives a concise overview of what it means to read NT writings within Judaism. First-century Judaism was flexible, variegated and contended. There was no singular, ideal form that can be cast as a negative other for Christianity, as has often been done in NT exegesis, historical and theological.Footnote 14 Christianity, in fact, did not exist in the first century as a discrete religion. Post-Enlightenment recognition of this point opened new opportunities to reconsider the formative matrix of the NT writings. Scholars came to argue that the nascent Jesus movement and the texts it produced reflect a self-consciously Jewish subgroup that proclaimed Jesus as Israel’s Messiah. The initial adherents were Jews who lived according to the Jewish ancestral tradition, now configured around Jesus, and continued to participate in Jewish associations and institutions. When the movement came to incorporate Gentiles, they began to navigate the complexities this introduced without moving beyond the boundaries of Judaism or detaching from the Jewish people. The texts that comprise the NT, then, were developed by an identifiably Jewish messianic renewal movement. Therefore, engaging the NT within Judaism entails resituating these figures, their practices, outlooks and texts in the pluriform, contended, flexible and porous matrix of first- and early second-century Judaism.Footnote 15
Runesson offers four conclusions in light of his survey. First, NT interpreters should privilege ‘pre-rabbinic, Second Temple period Jewish and Graeco-Roman comparanda when constructing the [NT’s] discursive matrix’.Footnote 16 Second, different points of comparison raise new interpretive possibilities and perspectives for evaluating what readings are historically plausible and contextually reasonable. Third, resituating the NT texts in ancient historical context is done by ‘removing their discursive relevance from normative reading collectives and searching for their historical otherness’, and this removal ‘constitutes the very real parting of the ways between academia and church’.Footnote 17 Fourth, the epistemological separation between academy and church allowed for the plausibility and reasonability of reframing the NT within Judaism. Those who interpret the NT within Judaism resituate the NT’s authors, texts and their aims historically, returning them to the first century ‘beyond religious narratives and their ways of arguing theo-historical truths’, due to the epistemological split between ‘academia and the religiously normative’.Footnote 18 Runesson thus separates reading NT texts within Judaism from approaches that engage NT writings as Scripture. He states that, ‘the aim of history is, many would claim, regardless of any methodological caveats, to affix meaning(s) to specific time periods through a process aiming at contextual plausibility, i.e. to remove the texts and those who wrote them from whatever relevance they may have today and seek their identity as the Other; the ones no longer among us but whose thoughts and practices are interesting to us’.Footnote 19 Reading the NT writings within Judaism, he argues, is an academic, historical project, clearly distinct from the pursuit of theological claims and aims. While these ancient voices have ‘a place in contemporary theological discussions’, they must be engaged as ‘the historical Other’.Footnote 20 When it comes to the NT writings, history must speak before theology.
3. Reading the NT within Judaism and Theologically
Runesson describes the genealogy of ideas well. Whether engaging the NT historically as Jewish literature necessarily stands apart from or prior to reading it confessionally as Scripture is questionable. To be sure, historical criticism, under whose label attempts to read the NT writings within Judaism tend to be classified, and theological interpretation are different enough in posture and intention to be considered divergent interpretive games.Footnote 21 As Runesson argues in greater depth elsewhere, historical study and theological discourse generally serve as their own discursive focal points and generate distinct types of discussions.Footnote 22 However, these are not incommensurable in practice, at least not as far as theological interpretation is concerned. What is often seen as an unbridgeable divide between historical criticism and theological exegesis derives, at least in part, from the frequent collapsing of multiple aims, concerns and interpretive tools into a single label of historical criticism. Historical criticism can refer to anything ranging from post-Enlightenment historicist paradigms, more ‘archaeological’ projects of historical reconstruction of events or sources that lie behind the texts, contextualising biblical texts in their historical and cultural world, and/or attempts to read the texts within their ancient matrices.Footnote 23 Both theological interpreters and those reading the NT within Judaism, from their respective postures and locations, attempt to interpret the NT writings within their generative conceptual worlds, using comparable tools and interpretive strategies toward this aim. Jonathan Rowlands’ analogy likening the different interpretive games played by theological interpreters and historical critics to rugby and football (what Americans call ‘soccer’) is thus better conceived as comparing rugby and American football. Though they are different games, there are some striking resemblances.Footnote 24
Runesson acknowledges the variety in approaches and interpretive aims among those who seek to resituate the NT writing within Judaism. Nevertheless, he flattens them under the rubric of ‘history’. By this, Runesson seemingly means historical reconstruction, whether lives, worldviews, and perspectives of the early Jesus Movement and NT authors. These are quite different types of reconstruction, however. Reframing the NT writings within Judaism has expanded from arguing that the figures, events and historical reality that lie behind and are depicted in these texts emerged from and remained within the diversity of early Judaism to reframing and understanding the texts themselves as reflective of perspectives emic to Second Temple Judaism.Footnote 25 An increasing number of scholars engage in literary or narrative interpretation of NT texts recontextualised as Second Temple Jewish writings. Some forms of historical criticism are indeed inimical to theological readings; situating and interpreting texts within their generative contexts is not.Footnote 26
For example, Matthew Thiessen’s examination of Jesus’ relationship to ritual purity according to the Gospels in his Jesus and the Forces of Death illustrates three ways in which historical and theological approaches can overlap.Footnote 27 First, Thiessen engages the canonical texts of the Gospels, reading them on their own enculturated terms. His book is not an attempt at reconstructing events, figures or sources behind the text. It is an exercise in interpreting writings according to their social and historical milieu. Historical work serves literary interpretation. Second, Thiessen respects the mythological or supernatural assumptions espoused by the Gospels to illumine how purity informs their understanding of God. He refrains from criticising their presumptions about what is true. He reconstructs a robust framework of ancient Mediterranean ideas and rituals, focusing on early Jewish literature, Leviticus especially, regarding holiness and purity, ceremonial washing, skin diseases, unclean spirits and demons, in order to examine their relationship with death and the God of Israel in the Gospels. Third, then, Thiessen attends to the theological perspectives of the Gospel texts. The socio-cultural matrix informs his analysis of how these texts understand who Israel’s God is and how Israel’s God is overcoming death and its compatriots through Jesus. Historical work facilitates consideration of the texts’ theology.
Constructing a robust historical and cultural frame for interpreting the NT writings and their theology like this is, for most confessional readers, necessary to interpret the texts well. They are ‘cultural products’ that are to be understood according to their own cultural encyclopaedia, the body of knowledge these writings presuppose.Footnote 28 A text’s historical, social, cultural and linguistic embeddedness limits the range of viable interpretations to what is reasonable according to this framework. Many theological exegetes, then, do aim ‘at contextual plausibility’. They often do so by adopting the role of the implied or model reader – the reader assumed by the text (implied reader), or the one best equipped to understand the text according to its historical, cultural and linguistic values and presuppositions (model reader). Discerning the implied or model reader derives from recognising the historical, cultural and linguistic features and assumptions signalled by the text.Footnote 29 Adopting a first-century posture aids theological interpreters in keeping their voice distinct from the voice of a text, which confessional readers seek to hear on its own enculturated terms. Generally, the difference between most theological interpreters and historical critics lies not in the interpretive tools and concern to read the texts within their historical and cultural contexts. Rather, it lies in the assumptions about truth, and interpretive postures, sensibilities and goals. Confessional interpreters add that the ideal or model reader has an existential stake in the text’s truth-claims, and they seek to read for a community of faith. They and their conceptions about truth are open to be formed by these writings.Footnote 30
Still, the pursuit of reading the NT writings theologically and the attempt to understand them historically within Judaism alike dance between the reader’s situatedness and the text’s situatedness. Different contexts motivate different questions. On the one hand, theological interpretation is an explicitly ‘contextual’ or ‘interested’ interpretive approach, consciously located within the confessing community. Confessional readers, therefore, ask theological and ecclesial questions. They consider the theological perspectives of the texts, bring ethical issues to bear and draw from reception history to understand the texts as Scripture and hear their voices as pertinent for contemporary faith. This does not come at the expense of reading a text in the context from which it emerged, however. As Joel Green puts it, ‘Biblical texts have ongoing significance in part because of their capacity to speak beyond the limitations of their own historical particularity. Yet, as “cultural products,” the fullness of their voice is determined by that very particularity.’Footnote 31 In my estimation, theological interpreters in general have not reckoned sufficiently with how the Jewish particularity of the texts should inform their theological readings. Scholars like Runesson who argue NT texts should be read within early Judaism have much to say to confessional interpreters about what kind of implied or model reader they need to become to read these writings well.
On the other hand, even the most historically oriented reader cannot fully remove themselves and their aims from the interpretive project. Everyone reads with a historically effected consciousness (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein).Footnote 32 This is inevitable. There is no neutral or disinterested interpreter, void of presuppositions, prejudices or objectives. The reader’s context inevitably informs the questions they ask, their mode of interpreting the data and how they pursue their respective intentions. Everyone, in other words, is participating in the process of and engages with reception history from their particular situatedness and posture. Any attempt to delineate interpretation of past data from understanding its present significance, that is, disentangling the historical other from the interpreter’s subjectivity, in any historical and exegetical project, is difficult and tenuous, to say the least. Recognising this dynamic between the ancient and contemporary horizons, Runesson elsewhere defines history ‘as a conversation between the past and the present’.Footnote 33 Along these lines, then, the attempt to affix the meaning of NT texts historically within Judaism is often done, at least in part, to influence contemporary – dare I say, theological – conversations. Many who read the NT within Judaism are motivated by ethical concerns to disarm Christian supersessionist interpretations of the NT and to challenge readings rooted in anti-Judaism.Footnote 34
Nevertheless, in their subjectivity and driven by their respective motivations – their non-neutrality – readers have the capacity to try to comprehend voices outside themselves in pursuit of understanding the other on the other’s own terms. Interpreters can still, to the best of their abilities, consider other viewpoints articulated from different contexts and modes of reasoning.Footnote 35 Historical critics and theological interpreters alike recognise this possibility and pursue this intention. The embodied reader respects the text’s ‘embodied’ social location. Using historical critical tools, historical critical scholars and historically attuned theological interpreters strive to mitigate ‘hermeneutical ventriloquism’ by attending to the text’s contextual, historically situated voice.Footnote 36 Admittedly, theological exegesis has long practised ‘hermeneutical ventriloquism’, as Runesson and others, including myself, bemoan. Of course, theological interpreters are not alone in the proclivity toward ‘hermeneutical ventriloquism’.Footnote 37 Framing the NT writings within their ancient contexts, notably Second Temple Judaism, allows the text to be foreign or ‘weird,’ that is, unlike us. They differ historically, culturally and theologically from what contemporary readers assume about and impose on ancient biblical authors. Respecting these differences pushes interpreters to reckon with what ramifications, epistemological, ethical and theological, their interpretations have for the present.Footnote 38 This dialectic, albeit perhaps framed as between ‘text and reader’ or ‘text and readerly community’ more than ‘past and present’, is sought by confessional readers. Theological interpreters want to allow the scriptural texts to correct them, their perceptions and assertions of truth, their ecclesial practices and belief, and the problematic dimensions of their theological tradition.
Elsewhere, Runesson gestures toward the ethical challenge posed by resituating the NT within Judaism to contemporary readers in a piece with Karin Zetterholm. They state that reading ‘the Gospels as Jewish texts invites us to ponder the possibility that these authors, like Paul, were engaged in promoting alternative forms of Judaism and that their sometimes hard and even supersessionist claims in relation to other Jews became anti-Jewish arguments against Judaism itself only when these texts were taken over by individuals or groups who did not identify as Jews’.Footnote 39 Given the desire of theological interpreters to hear the NT voices on their own terms, recontextualising NT texts within Judaism should necessarily challenge those who seek to hear Scripture speak in the present to reconsider their interpretive practices, conclusions and traditions, and reflect on reception history. Christianity bears the legacy of ‘those individuals and groups who did not identify as Jews’, yet identified these Jewish texts as their scriptures and subsequently wielded them against Jewish people. Theological exegetes purport to reflect on the ethical implications of exegesis. Reconsidering the relationship between the NT texts and Jews and Judaism is a moral imperative.Footnote 40
Furthermore, the very categories of the conversation invite theological reflection on historical claims about the NT texts. To speak specifically of ‘New Testament writings’ is to enter a discourse that results from ecclesial determinations about canonicity. This remains true regardless of whether one uses ‘New Testament’ simply because it is popular parlance yet treats individual texts independent from the canonical collective as Runesson does.Footnote 41 Canonisation is why ‘New Testament’ is a common shorthand for what is otherwise a somewhat arbitrary collection of texts. It is why these writings are treated as an anthology. The NT’s ‘thoughts and practices are [especially] interesting’ to interpreters and historians precisely because Christians consider the NT to be Scripture. This is why the NT receives disproportionate scholarly attention.Footnote 42 To be sure, Runesson is careful to speak about specific texts or authors being framed within Judaism rather than the canonical whole, and he does not suggest that the canon should inform interpretation of its constituent parts. Still, the category of ‘New Testament’ exists due to the determinations of the confessing Christian community and their assessment that these writings are Scripture.
What is unique about the work of those who reframe the NT within Judaism among historical critical projects is that they make historical truth-claims about the nature of the NT texts themselves, not merely the events and figures that lie behind them. The historical argument that the texts that now comprise the Christian scriptural anthology called ‘the New Testament’ are intrinsically and indelibly Jewish in origin and orientation exerts theological pressure on confessional interpreters.Footnote 43 Recontextualising the NT writings within Judaism effectually demands that theological readers consider the significance that Christians canonised Second Temple Jewish texts as holy writ.Footnote 44 As John C. Poirer writes, ‘Scripture has preserved for us the voice of the apostles, on whose authority the church is founded.’Footnote 45 The inscripturated voice is that of Jewish apostles who self-identified as Jews and participated in the Jewish ancestral tradition even as they proclaimed Jesus as Israel’s Messiah. Canonisation is not apostolic epispasm. It does not remove the marks of Jewishness by erasing the need to read the NT texts in their early Jewish generative contexts or fundamentally altering the implied or model reader assumed by these works. Simply, canonisation introduces interpretive possibilities within the anthology and ecclesial community beyond the authorial imagination. Recognising this should prompt development of a non- or post-supersessionist form of theological interpretation. Such an approach would engage the NT writings simultaneously as Second Temple Jewish texts and as Christian Scripture.Footnote 46 Reading the NT writings well theologically, not only historically, would entail allowing them to be strange and foreign, letting them speak ‘Jewishly’.Footnote 47
4. Conclusion
My primary contention has been that the historical truth-claim about the Jewish nature of the NT exerts theological pressure on readers who call these texts Scripture. I think Runesson and others are correct that it is historically preferable to consider the NT writings as Second Temple Jewish texts. And I fully affirm Runesson’s ethical concern to distinguish the perspectives readers bring to the text by allowing the texts to speak with their ancient, enculturated voices. Nevertheless, I suggest that Runesson, by emphasising a strict separation between historical work and theology, unintentionally weakens the significance of this emerging paradigm. Runesson and the paradigm he represents have much to teach confessional interpreters when approaching the NT writings that they consider Scripture. Without a doubt, theological readings of the NT have often been guilty of hermeneutical ventriloquism, anachronisms and failure to reckon with the ethical and theological implications of their readings for the present. Interpreters, of course, read from their embodied, socially embedded particularities. Nevertheless, confessional interpreters, who are typically non-Jews, must attend closer to the NT’s social embeddedness in early Judaism, its Jewish particularity.Footnote 48
This, I suggest, should encourage the development of non- or post-supersessionist forms of theological interpretation of Scripture. Such an approach would retool the postures, practices, sensibilities and aims of theological interpretation with a greater attentiveness towards Second Temple Judaism as the NT writings’ generative milieu. Runesson’s first two proposals – the privileging of first-century comparanda, specifically early Jewish ones, and considering how these enlighten interpretive conclusions – would be valuable points to adopt in non-/post-supersesssionist theological interpretation. Second Temple Judaism can no longer be relegated to ‘background.’ It is part and parcel of the NT’s social context and theological thought-world. While theological readers may privilege canonical intertextuality, the literature of early Judaism reflects the NT writings’ world that informed and dialogued with their interpretation of Israel’s sacred texts. The NT inherits and develops early Jewish interpretive practices, reorienting them toward their belief that God had acted in Jesus and offering their own articulation of the Jewish ancestral tradition. They engage in debates about what entailed faithfulness to Israel’s God, which they centre around Israel’s Messiah, Jesus. This coexists with their ongoing identification with and participation in the Jewish civilisation committed to the covenant relationship between God and Israel as expressed in the Torah. In ecclesial language, greater attention to Second Temple texts entails expanding the interpretive community. Widening the interpretive community to include first-century Jewish writings can coincide with consulting patristic perspectives. Both are Wirkungsgeschichte. As to Runesson’s ethical concerns, confessional interpreters must also grapple with patristic reception history and beyond. There needs to be consideration of how their theological forebears built no inconsequential portion of their readings and theology on virulent repudiations of Judaism and deplorable caricatures of Jews. A non-/post-supersessionist theological interpretation must attend to such issues.
Douglas Campbell says that theological engagement with the Bible ‘begins with God-talk’.Footnote 49 To reframe my points in explicitly theological language, then, the arguments for framing the NT texts within Judaism require confessional interpreters to consider Orthodox Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod’s point that ‘God appears in history as the God of Israel and there can therefore be no thought about God that is not also thought about Israel.’Footnote 50 Or to draw from the words of pre-eminent Paul within Judaism scholar Paula Fredriksen, confessional readers must consider the significance that the NT texts speak about ‘the Jewish god’.Footnote 51 Theological interpreters often appeal to Karl Barth’s notion of the need to enter ‘the strange world within the Bible’ to discuss its formative potential.Footnote 52 Yet, the biblical world is strange not only because of how it claims to interpret reality theologically but also because it is strange historically, culturally and religiously. It is a historical and theological other. Like their historical counterparts, theological readings that attend to the early Jewish particularity of the NT texts will prove ripe with possibility.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
