What Sort of Jew Was Jesus?

By Richard N. Ostling

Many Jews and Christians trace 2,000 years of anti-Jewish persecution directly back to certain pronouncements of Jesus. In Matthew 23:37, for example, Jesus exclaims, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you . . . Behold, your house is forsaken and desolate." While dialogue aiming at better understanding has taken place between the two religions, some Jews and Christians have felt frustrated that New Testament passages have been used to support anti-Semitism.

Orthodox Rabbi Harvey Falk of Brooklyn believes that much interreligious tension need never have existed at all. His current book, Jesus the Pharisee: A New Look at the Jewishness of Jesus, just issued by a Roman Catholic publisher (Paulist Press; 175 pages; $8.95), contends that Jews and Christians alike fail to grasp Jesus' ties to the competing Jewish factions of his time. Christians, says Falk, have misunderstood some of the teachings of Jesus, while Jews have been needlessly hostile toward "Yeshua ha Notzri" (Jesus of Nazareth). Falk's book offers a provocative and controversial theory on Christian origins.

Falk examines two factions of the Pharisees, a group of pious Jews who believed in the resurrection of the dead, rewards and punishments for this life in the next and rabbinic authority to interpret Jewish law. These two parties, the School of Hillel and the School of Shammai, clashed shortly before Jesus' birth. Jewish tradition records that the rigid Shammaites held religious control throughout Jesus' life and during the founding decades of the Christian Church. But by A.D. 70 the more flexible Hillel school had become pre-eminent and the predecessor of today's traditional Judaism. In Falk's theory, Jesus was a Pharisee of the Hillel school, so that his denunciations ("Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!") were aimed at the Shammai school, not Jews in general, and not even at all Pharisees.

Falk holds that a central issue between the schools was Jewish-Gentile relations. The School of Shammai taught that non-Jews had no hope of eternal life. One of the faction's first acts upon gaining power in the Sanhedrin, the supreme council of the Jews, was to pass a series of sweeping measures that limited contacts with Gentiles. The School of Hillel, however, taught that righteous Gentiles merited a share in the world to come if they observed the seven so-called Noahide commandments, basic moral directives addressed to Adam and Noah in the Bible and binding all humanity. The usual Noahide list includes the obligation to help establish a system of justice, plus prohibitions against idolatry, blasphemy, theft, murder, sexual sins and cruelty to animals. According to Falk, the authoritative compendium of Jewish oral law and commentary, the Talmud, says that Moses called upon Israelites to spread knowledge of the Noahide commandments to all people. The Jews never undertook such a mission, says Falk, but Jesus and Paul the Apostle did, motivated "by love of God and fellow man."

To support his thesis of Jesus as a follower of Hillel, Falk draws conclusions from familiar New Testament passages. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus criticizes the "eye for an eye" view of justice emphasized by a leader of the Shammai school. Shammaite criticism of Jesus for socializing with Gentile sinners or healing on the Sabbath reflected specific debates between the schools. When Jesus attacked the money changers in the Temple, he declared that it was a "house of prayer for all the nations," but had become a "den of robbers." The author suggests that the money changers were corrupt Shammaites who were pocketing donations from Gentile converts to Judaism. Falk even proposes that the Golden Rule of Jesus is just a positive rephrasing of statement by Rabbi Hillel, who once told a pagan inquirer, "What is hateful unto thee, do not do unto thy neighbor. This is the entire Torah. The rest is commentary."

Although Orthodox Judaism shuns doctrinal discussions with Christianity, Falk points out that the great medieval sage Maimonides declared that Christians "will not find in their Torah [the New Testament] anything that conflicts with our Torah." Falk also refers to the commentary of the renowned Polish sage Rabbi Jacob Emden. In a 1757 letter to Polish rabbis, Emden discussed Jesus and Paul as Torah-true missionaries to the Gentiles. Falk, 53, who had studied at the Academy for Higher Learning and Research in Monsey, N.Y., was intrigued when he came across this document in 1974, and it led to his decade of research on Jesus. It is Falk's belief that Orthodox Jews will slowly enter interreligious discussions, in part because the "Christian world is asking us."

Jesus the Pharisee has significant omissions: it does not touch on such salient matters as the Resurrection, the messiahship of Jesus, or the belief that his death atoned for the sins of all humanity. Lawrence Schiffman, a critic of the book who is a professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University, says that Falk "has bought a stereotype of the School of Shammai, who in reality were good Jews and good Pharisees." Schiffman believes that there will not be a scholarly acceptance of the book's thesis. He maintains that anti-Judaism in early Christian writings is "really there. It had a tremendously pernicious influence over the centuries. There's something dangerous about believing that it's not there, because then you don't have to deal with the problem. It's a much better solution to admit that it is there and then come to terms with it." But Falk hopes, "If my thesis is adopted, Jews will be better Jews and Christians will be better Christians." --By Richard N. Ostling. Reported by Michael P. Harris/New York

With reporting by Reported by Michael P. Harris/New York