This chapter is the first of several wherein Wright will
discuss the world in which Jesus and the nascent Jesus movement was born. His
goal is laudable – in order to understand anything about Jesus in his own day, it
is necessary to understand carefully his world in first-century Palestine. To
accomplish this, Wright focuses upon Judaism in the first century as a unified
worldview and uses that as a filter through which he discusses all other
aspects of first century life (Hellenistic culture, Roman imperialism,
political change and challenge). This becomes Wright’s most interesting element
to his approach, but it also causes many of his biggest mistakes – both those
of commission and omission.
Wright rightly argues that our understanding of Judaism in
the first century has increased dramatically in the past 60 years. He points
out that in the aftermath of World War II, there was an interest among scholars
of religion to take Judaism more seriously as its own religion rather than a
mere cipher for theological arguments in Christianity. Further, more recent
archaeological finds have produced far more sources, making us aware of Judaism
far more on its own terms rather than through later sources.
Wright, while valuing the work on Judaism in the past
several decades, also is concerned that scholarship has gone too far. He argues
that scholars are hypersensitive to the problem of caricaturizing Jews in the
first century and are instead attempting to make an alternate argument. Wright
makes a bold caricature of these scholars:
The problem is all the more acute
when Western Christian scholarship is in the middle of a long-drawn-out process
of repentance for having cherished false views about Judaism. Scholars and
preachers tumble over one another to say that they were misguided, that they
misjudged the Pharisees, that Jesus and his followers had no quarrel with the
Jews, that it was only later that the evangelists, under pressure, produced the
caricatures of Jesus’ opponents that we find in the gospels. How long it will
be before things settle down again is difficult to say.[1]
His tone is nearly sarcastic. He argues that scholars are
allowing their modern sensibilities to get in the way of good historical
argument. He says this quite directly calling upon scholars to move beyond
their feelings of guilt over the horrors of the holocaust:
The historical task cannot be
accomplished by the back-projection of modern guilt-feelings, any more than it
was advanced by the back-projection of later theological controversy and
prejudice.[2]
Here Wright calls out scholarship and arguing that it is
time to do fair historical reconstruction rather than a theologically driven
argument (as either apologists for Judaism or opponents of it).
The problem, of course, is that Wright has stacked the deck
to make his argument. There certainly are some modern scholars of Christianity
who do want to exonerate the collective guilt of Christianity for its treatment
of Jews over the past two thousand years; however, this group is not the
majority. Most scholars who have presented a new understanding of Judaism are
not doing this out of genocidal guilt, they are doing it out of good
observation of new pieces of data that are available now that simply were not
in previous generations. In short, they are trying to be good historians. The
fact that much of the research presents a Judaism that is far more sympathetic
with Jesus is not because modern scholars have “softened” the data – it is
because many scholars think Judaism frankly
was more sympathetic with Jesus than later Christianity was (quite frankly
it would be difficult for Jesus to be less sympathetic with Jews than later
Christianity was).
With this as his sensibility and major argument, Wright moves
forward to his goal of providing the context for Jesus by discussing Judaism at
this time period. Wright rightly considers “Judaism” as not limited to
particular actions but instead is a true “worldview” in the modern sense:
The main feature of first-century
Judaism, within Palestine at least, was neither a static sense of a religion to
which one adhered, nor a private sphere of religion into which one escaped, but
a total worldview, embracing all aspects of reality, and coming to sharp focus
in a sense of longing and expectation, of recognition that the present state of
affairs had not yet (to put it mildly) seen the full realization of the
purposes of the covenant god for his people.[3]
Here Wright develops a concept of a “worldview” – that he
has discussed in earlier chapters and argues that such a worldview was based
upon the relationship between the people and their covenant God. Here, Wright
does a good job showing some of the basic ideas of Judaism at the time of
Jesus.
The concept of “Judaism” as a worldview is Wright’s
strength. This idea is one that tries to take seriously the issue of the
diversity of differing opinions among Jews while at the same time recognizing
some kind of commonality – it seemed that most Jews did not think that the sectarian
differences that divided them actually divided them so much that they would not
call each other “Jews” any longer (with perhaps a few exceptions). Rather than
using anachronistic terms like “religion” or “race,” Wright uses the concept of
a worldview to express this idea.
The weakness of this “worldview” approach is that it too is
an anachronism – though it should be noted that just because something is new
does not necessarily make it wrong. The problem with the “worldview” is that it
locks Wright into a few ideas that are less defensible. Most importantly, a
worldview is unified. Wright argues
that Judaism was a single thing at the time of Jesus:
I shall argue later that
Christianity’s link with Judaism is not with one particular sub-group and set of
literary remains, but with Judaism as a
whole, whether in reaffirmation, confrontation or redefinition. And Judaism
as a whole is seen as much if not more in its symbolic world and political
movements as in its (possibly idiosyncratic) literary remains.[4]
Here Wright expresses his clear opinion – Judaism was an
essential thing as a whole at the time of Jesus (probably in the way that he
considers modern Christianity a single thing despite denominational
differences). Here is where Wright makes his largest mistake. I completely
agree that a Pharisee did not probably see a Sadducee as someone who was no
longer a Jew, but that did not mean they had the same worldview. There certainly were major differences of opinion
among them and it is difficult to argue that they even held the same symbolic
world.
Wright’s emphasis on “story” seems to be why he feels it is
acceptable to consider a single worldview for all of the different Jews at the
time of Jesus. Wright’s implicit argument (though he leaves it to the reader to
infer) is that because all Jewish groups shared a common history as expressed
in the Hebrew Bible, then it is logical that they ought to have the same
worldview. He shows that he holds this view by arguing that even the Jesus
movement has the same worldview because, after all, it claims the story as
well:
In fact (this is the fourth point),
first-century Judaism and Christianity have a central worldview-feature in
common: the sense of a story now reaching its climax. And, most importantly, it is the same story.[5]
Wright has now gone too far – he has suggested
monolithically, that if one shares a common mythos,
then one shares the same worldview. In the early to mid (and maybe even late)
first century, there is some argument that Jewish Christianity shared a
worldview with different Jewish groups. However, in the second century – when
Christians continued to share the same “story” and thus should share the same
“worldview,” the differences between Jews and Christians were astounding. The
idea that these two religions (and by that time they were clearly two different
religions) held the same worldview either is laughable or it dilutes the
concept of a worldview to a point that there is little reason in using the
term.
After presenting this idea of worldview, then he continues
into the Roman society of Jews in the first century. Wright does point out many
key points that were challenges for Jews in Palestine. He rightly discusses the
challenge of the monotheism of the Jews and its struggle to fit in with a
polytheistic culture.[6] He further
argues that for Jews the challenge was one of self-identity – how is it that
Jews would adapt to this changing world around them. Wright presents the point
well:
The self-understanding of Jews at
this time was determined by the pressing question as to whether they should
attempt to be distinct from this alien culture, and if so how. Pressure to
assimilate was strong in many quarters, as is suggested by the evidence for
Jews attempting to remove the marks of circumcision.[7]
Here, I completely agree with Wright that the challenge for
most Jews was the measured response to this culture that was thrust upon them.
Some embraced Hellenistic culture, others avoided it, and others found a place
in between. Here Wright is correct.
What Wright does not do is explain the main cause of some
Jews Hellenizing – the Babylonian Exile. In 586 B.C.E. the vast majority of the
citizenry of the country Israel were taken from the land into exile having been
conquered by the Babylonian empire. In 539 B.C.E., Cyrus the Great of Persia –
for reasons completely separate from anything dealing with Israel – conquered
the Babylonians and issued the Edict of Cyrus allowing all conquered people to
go back home. Where this becomes difficult for Jews in antiquity is that many
Jews did not go home – they continued living in diaspora – away from the land
of Israel. These Jews (and it is at this time of 539 that it is appropriate to
call them “Jews”), the ones living throughout the empire, still considered
themselves fully Jewish and continued practicing standard Torah procedures.
However, they also very often accommodated to culture around them – at least to
some extent.
Wright is formally only interested in Judaism in Palestine in the first century. However, to consider Jews in Palestine without considering Jews in diaspora is a modern rather than ancient dichotomy. The reason that the management of how much they should accommodate to culture around them was so difficult is that many Jews – still remaining Jews – living throughout the world had accommodated quite a lot and were very frequently prospering. Jews in Palestine were aware of this situation and it caused a variety of different ideas – hardly “one worldview.”
Wright is formally only interested in Judaism in Palestine in the first century. However, to consider Jews in Palestine without considering Jews in diaspora is a modern rather than ancient dichotomy. The reason that the management of how much they should accommodate to culture around them was so difficult is that many Jews – still remaining Jews – living throughout the world had accommodated quite a lot and were very frequently prospering. Jews in Palestine were aware of this situation and it caused a variety of different ideas – hardly “one worldview.”
On the whole, Wright’s analysis is an example of many
depictions of Judaism in the first century that have been presented in the past
30 years by Christian authors. It attempts to manage the data about Judaism and
then simplify it to a key point about what “the Jews” believed. In point of
fact, Jews had a widely varied religion in the first century. There certainly
were some points of continuity between them, but it is more important to see
their differences than their similarities in some ways. It seems that Wright
has done this for one particular reason – it is easier to understand
Christianity if it is paired with a clear “Judaism” that is one thing for an
easy counterpoint. In the coming chapters, Wright will discuss Judaism’s
complexities more carefully, but throughout the discussion, it will be
constrained by this idea of “worldview.”
