Free The Jewish Gospels by Daniel Boyarin Page A

how Jews should relate to their God and to the Gentile majority of the human race. Before the destruction of the Temple, there were various contending schools of thought about this core question.After the catastrophic destruction, the two schools that survived were the Rabbinical and the Christian. Theologically, they had their differences, but they were both Jewish as surely as Josh and Ben are both brothers in the same family. Their differences were, as we say, all in the family, and they remained all in the family not just for a few decades but, Boyarin boldly asserts, for the first few centuries of the common era. It took that long for gradually escalating mutual polemics to overcome an underlying sense of fraternity on either side and to create two reciprocally settled identities where before there had been just one identity, albeit unsettled. What Boyarin regrets is that these two identities were polemically simplified and coarsened as each side learned to repudiate, as if on deepest principle, practices and beliefs that, at an earlier stage, either side would have admitted as unproblematically its own. It is as if Ben’s great-grandchildren should be taught to believe as a matter of core identity that “we never touch the guitar, they play the guitar, that’s what they’re like,” while Josh’s offspring, by the same token, should be taught to stake their lives on the self-evident truth that “we never touch a football, they play football, that’s what they’re like.”
    Did Jesus keep kosher? Would that have been un-Christian of him? In chapter 3 of the book you are about to read, titled “Jesus Kept Kosher,” Boyarin writes:
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.”. . . The ideas of Trinity and incarnation, or certainly the germs of those ideas, were already present among Jewish believers well before Jesus came on the scene to incarnate in himself, as it were, those theological notions and take up his messianic calling.
    However, the Jewish background of the ideas of the Jesus movement are only one piece of the new picture I’m sketching here. Much of the most compelling evidence for the Jewishness of the early Jesus communities comes from the Gospels themselves. . . . Counter to most views of the matter, according to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus kept kosher, which is to say that he saw himself not as abrogating the Torah but as defending it. There was controversy with some other Jewish leaders as to how best to observe the Law, but none, I will argue, about whether to observe it. According to Mark (and Matthew even more so), far from abandoning the laws and practices of the Torah, Jesus was a staunch defender of the Torah against what he perceived to be threats to it from the Pharisees.
    The Pharisees were a kind of reform movement within the Jewish people that was centered on Jerusalem and Judaea. The Pharisees sought to convertother 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.”. . . 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.
    Boyarin’s reading of Mark 7, in which he turns what Christianity has traditionally interpreted as an attack on Jewish dietary and purity laws into a distinct kind of defense of them, is one of many stunningly persuasive but utterly surprising readings of what in his hands does indeed become “compelling evidence for the Jewishness of the early Jesus communities . . . from the Gospels themselves.” There is no denying, and