What Happened to the Hebrew Scriptures?
The Hebrew scriptures ended up playing a role in Christianity almost no one could have foreseen when the Apostle Paul was interpreting them. In retrospect; though, some of the interpretations could have been expected.
For Paul, the Hebrew Bible (his Bible) was still the story of the Israelite people. For nearly every Jew before Paul, and nearly every Jew after Paul, the Hebrew scriptures told the story of God creating a land for a group of tribes and entering into a contract (covenant) with them whereby he would protect and nurture them in return for their unconditional obedience to the laws he set down. These people would be his mouthpiece to the world so he required absolute trust. As long as they committed entirely to his trust he would ensure their prosperity. The Hebrew Bible is essentially the story of this group failing time and again to live up to the level of trust God demanded of them. Every failure brought collective punishment upon them and following this, God would provide a lifeline, someone God knew trusted him implicitly to be a new agent. If the covenantal group fell in line with this "anointed one" they would once again reap God's benefits.
| One almost never sees a Christian scholar debate a rabbi about the Old Testament even though they would have a lot to gain by winning a convert. Invariably, their cherry-picking of materials out of context and poor understanding of the original Hebrew produces a level of foolishness that even the best Christian scholar wishes to avoid. Rabbis typically have very humorous stories of these encounters, although Christians of the past had brutal ways of ensuring victory. |
During the periods of collective punishment most Jews searched for and desired to find this agent. The theory was that when he showed himself having God's blessing all the Jews would rally behind him, accept his message, and allow him to lead them once again to do God's work unconditionally. Their reward would be the prosperity God always promised.
Jesus may have shown promise as the anointed one and that could have attracted some hopeful followers. Jesus; however, showed himself to be all talk and no action, at least the type of action the scriptures said would occur. Consequently, he was discarded among all the others as just another false hope.
Paul's (and the other Apostles') initial message to the Jews was that Jesus' mission was not yet finished and they should not abandon ship so quickly. He would return to finish the job they expected of him. (In fact, many Jews even today, claim that if Jesus does return to do what a messiah is supposed to do, they will follow him). For some unknown reason Paul took the step of including non-Jews into the equation, at which point the Hebrew scriptures stopped making any sense. The story would never again be read the same way.
| This first view was held by many in the Catholic Church as well as Martin Luther. It is also the dominant view of most anti-semitic groups. Paradoxically Adolf Hitler, who would end up being the catalyst for Jews return to Israel never believed the Jews had a covenant. He just wanted them out of Germany. |
The early Christians took three approaches to dealing with these texts. Some argued that since the Jews failed to recognize Jesus as the anointed one they had permanently broken their covenant with God and would never again fall under God's graceful umbrella (the 1948 founding of the modern state of Israel seems to have finally negated this view). Others argued that while the Jews had broken their covenant there was still time for them to regain it if they would only see that Jesus was the anointed one and begin following his lead. (This is the view held by many fundamentalist Christians to this day as they still hold out hope for a flourishing of the Jews for Jesus movement). A third group argued that the Jews never had a covenant with God and simply misread their Hebrew scriptures. For this group the Hebrew scriptures are merely the prequel to Christianity and the text is really just a hidden code about Jesus, to be ferreted out by people who know how to read "between the lines." This last view is the one Jews have the most problem with although the first view is the one that caused them the most suffering.
The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible has been problematic because this is the only version read by most Christians and they have frequently drawn conclusions about texts based on some odd readings of the Greek. Because the Greek letter Tau is written like a Cross may Christians have read a lot into the text that is not there in the original Hebrew.
(See the Lighter Side of Defending the faith for some humorous examples). |
Christians could never accept that the Hebrew scriptures were what the Hebrews claimed as this put Jesus into the category of false messiah. This left them employing initially one of the three approached noted above and later blending them all together to produce an interpretation of the "Old Testament" that is equivalent to telling Shakespeare that although he wrote Hamlet, the story is really about an Irish farmer and not a Danish prince. In some sense the early Christian heretical theologian Marcion was correct in entirely leaving out the Hebrew Bible from his canon. He recognized that it was the story of the Jewish people and not Christian in any way. The proto-Orthodox that would eventually become the universal Church (Catholic) held onto the Hebrew texts. In so doing; though, they have been forced into some extraordinarily implausible explanations for why everything that is written in those texts has a different meaning and why you cannot trust a rabbi to give you an interpretation of his own Bible. This is Christian theology.
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