Confronting Jesus (eBook)

1

Jesus the Jew

The 2017 movie The Zookeeper’s Wife begins with a mother watching her young son nap. Two animals lie with him. At first, I thought they must be piglets. But as the camera moved from soft focus to clarity, I realized that they were baby lions. The early scenes depict an almost literally Edenic life. This woman, Antonina, walks fearlessly into the elephant enclosure to resuscitate a newborn calf. With one hand, she clears the baby’s airways. With the other, she calms its anxious mother, who could have trampled her at any time. The love that binds her to her husband, Jan, flows out into their love for their creatures. But from the first, we know this scene is set in Warsaw and the date is 1939. When Jan has no choice but to help some little Jewish kids to board a train, we know where they are going. As he pulls Jews out of the ghetto and hides them in the basement of their zoo, we know what fate awaits them if they’re found.1 The film is arrestingly beautiful, but the horror of the Holocaust is continually pressing in. I had to pause it multiple times to weep.

Likewise, when it comes to the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s life, the story of the Jewish people saturates the text. But for many of us, the contours of that story are unknown. We know what happened after Jesus’s life on earth, but not before. We’re so used to Jesus’s unrivaled impact on the world that it’s hard for us to see him as he first stepped onto the stage of human history. We’re so used to the dominance of Christianity—which is now the largest and most diverse belief system in the world—that it’s hard for us to imagine Jesus as a member of a subjugated ethnic group. We’re so used to Jesus’s influence on Western culture that it’s hard for us to remember his profoundly Middle Eastern roots. We’re so used to Christianity that we forget how deeply Jewish Jesus is.

In this chapter, we’ll glimpse where Jesus came from: literally, politically, and theologically. We’ll ask whether Jesus was a real man, who worked and walked and wept two thousand years ago, and whether we should see the Gospels as historical accounts that can truly give us access to Jesus the Jew. But first, we’ll excavate the ancient history of the Jewish people. When Jesus walked onto the stage, it wasn’t act one. It was the first scene after the intermission. So we’ll begin with a whirlwind, snatch-and-grab tour of the plot of the Bible up to that point, and we’ll start to notice the ways in which Jesus’s story is best understood in light of Jewish history.

In the Beginning

For many in the West today, believing that there is one true Creator God who made the universe can seem implausible. Not believing that there is a God at all is seen by many as the default setting. You’d need real evidence to believe in a Creator. In the ancient Near East, the Jewish belief in only one Creator God was also highly countercultural. But the alternative wasn’t atheism or agnosticism; it was polytheism. Most people believed in many gods. Against this majority view, the Bible’s first chapter boldly proclaims that there is only one Creator God, who made all things, and who made human beings in his image (Gen. 1:26–27).

The global success of Christianity has made belief in one Creator God the most widespread view across the world today. (The proportion of people who don’t believe in a Creator is actually much smaller than many in the West assume, and the proportion is shrinking globally, not growing!) But both at the time when Genesis was written and at the time when Jesus was born, monotheism would not have seemed plausible. To make the claim still more preposterous, the Gospels insist that Jesus is this one Creator God: not a demigod, or another god, but the one true God made flesh. So why would this Creator God become a man? The first three chapters of the Bible’s first book set a scene that makes us long for a solution.

Genesis 2 paints a picture like the opening of The Zookeeper’s Wife: human beings in loving relationship with each other, charged with caring for the rest of God’s creation. But while for Jan and Antonina, hatred, sin, and death invaded from outside, in Genesis 3 the rot comes from within. God’s prototypic people break God’s prototypic law. This ruins their relationship with God and with each other. Like an asteroid strike ravaging the atmosphere, their turn away from God spoils everything. But just as the The Zookeeper’s Wife takes us from Eden through pain and death and heartache to redemption, so God was working in the darkness to unfold his life-restoring plan—a plan to bring human beings back into intimate relationship with God and with one another, a plan that hinged on Jesus.

God’s plan began with a promise to a quite unpromising man who came from a city that in modern-day terms is in Iraq. Abraham was old and childless. But God promised to make him into a great nation and to bless all the families of the earth through his family (Gen. 12:1–3). And Abraham believed God. Well, eventually. Like many figures in the Bible’s cast, Abraham hit some spectacular fails. But in the end, he believed. His wife Sarah got pregnant and their son Isaac was the seed from which the Jewish people grew. Both Matthew and Luke offer genealogies to show that Jesus was descended from Abraham (Matt. 1:1–17; Luke 3:23–38). Jesus’s Jewish identity is vital to his mission in the world.

Isaac married Rebekah (which is a brilliant name), and they had two sons: Jacob and Esau. Jacob was renamed Israel, and his twelve sons started Israel’s twelve tribes. In another stunning fail, one of the twelve sons, Joseph, was sold into slavery by his brothers. But as Joseph later explained to them, what they intended for evil, God intended for good (Gen. 50:20). Joseph became overseer of Egypt under Pharoah and saved both Egypt and his family from famine. He married an Egyptian woman, and their two half-Egyptian sons became founders of the half-tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. So from the beginning of the twelve tribes of Israel, people from different ethnicities were spliced into God’s covenant people. These are the first murmurings of the fulfillment of God’s promise to bless all the families of the earth through Abraham’s family. But after four hundred years in Egypt, the Israelites had gone from being honored immigrants to subjugated slaves.

The Birthing of a Nation

After helping hundreds of African Americans escape slavery, Harriet Tubman was nicknamed “Moses.” It was a fitting moniker. Tubman had experienced slavery herself before leading others out of it, and the original Moses had experienced oppression as a baby—when Pharoah had ordered the death of all the Israelite baby boys—but went on to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Moses only escaped by being hidden in a basket that was floated on the Nile and found by Pharaoh’s daughter, who raised him. But when God called Moses from a supernaturally burning bush, he’d been living away from Egypt for years. Moses made every excuse he could think of as to why he shouldn’t go back and demand that Pharoah let God’s people go. But the God of the universe didn’t take no for an answer.

When Moses asked for God’s name, he replied, “I am who I am. . . . Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I am has sent me to you’” (Ex. 3:14). The God of the Bible is the one who simply is. But he also identifies himself with his people: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (3:6). The one who is, is Israel’s promise-making God. The enigmatic divine name, Yahweh, that appears in the Old Testament is a form of the Hebrew verb “to be” used in the expression “I am.” For Jews, the name Yahweh was so holy that it was never read aloud. They substituted “Adonai,” which means “my Lord.” This was later carried over into the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which rendered Yahweh with the Greek word kurios—that is, “Lord.” Following this practice, most English translations of the Bible substitute “the Lord,” using small capital letters, for Yahweh. But as we’ll see in chapter 2, Jesus does an utterly outrageous thing: he takes this divine name—“I am”—upon himself.

When Moses told Pharoah to let God’s people go, Pharaoh refused. So God sent ten horrific plagues. Pharoah kept agreeing to let the Israelites go but then changing his mind. The last plague echoes the slaughter of the Israelite boys from which Moses himself had escaped. Moses warned Pharaoh that if he still refused, the firstborn child in every house would die. The Israelites were told to daub the blood of a lamb on their doorposts so that death would pass over their homes. Here, as in many Old Testament moments, we have a foreshadowing of Jesus, who (as we’ll see in chapter 8) is hailed in the Gospels as the Lamb of God: the one who’s sacrificed like a...