New Research Blurs Basic Lines Between Judaism and Christianity
Every Jew knows that the resurrected messiah is an entirely Christian idea. As it turns out, every Jew may be wrong.
In July, the popular press delved into the often-dry world of biblical archaeology to report on the rediscovery of an ancient tablet known as “Gabriel’s Revelation.” The 2,100-year-old inscription, discovered and then overlooked for over a decade, has fallen into the hands of some Israeli scholars who are making a startling claim. They suggest that the tablet offers a radically new perspective on ancient Jewish messianism, one that threatens to upend our understanding of the schism between Judaism and Christianity.
As the debate over the research reverberates throughout the ivory tower, some have asked how Jews and Christians will respond to this research that seems to blur the lines between the two faiths at the most basic level.
At the forefront of the scholarship is Hebrew University professor Israel Knohl. Knohl has long argued that the notion of the messiah as a “suffering servant” who died and was later resurrected did not originate with Christianity, but rather has roots in ancient Jewish tradition. “Gabriel’s Revelation,” he says, offers overwhelming evidence for this thesis.
Let’s back up a bit. During Late Antiquity, the concept of Jesus as a resurrected “suffering servant” was central to the arguments of the Jewish and Christian religious elites who defined the boundaries between Christian theology and its parent faith. Jewish polemicists argued that Jesus could not have been the messiah because his tale of suffering and resurrection bore no resemblance to Jewish thought, which rejects the idea of an individual messiah. Now, according to Knohl and others, there may be a scientifically rigorous reason to believe these polemicists were unaware that these supposedly Christian ideas were derived from an esoteric Jewish messianic tradition. According to Knohl’s reading, “Gabriel’s Revelation” is an artifact of ancient Israelite origin that predates Christianity and discusses the expectation of a heroic figure who would redeem the Israelites and later be resurrected.
Academics remain divided over the significance of the findings. At Harvard Divinity School, one professor has stated that the tablet is not “of great interest,” while two others at the school have published a book espousing essentially the same claim as that of Knohl.
Some Christian scholars have argued that the tablet poses very little, if any, difficulty to the presuppositions of Christian dogma. Ben Witherington III, professor of New Testament at the Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ken., is quoted in Christianity Today saying, “It just means that there were more persons in early Judaism, other than Jesus and his followers, who were talking about a dying and rising messiah. That’s not a problem for Christianity, as far as I can see.” In another reaction reported by the Catholic News Agency, Dr. Timothy Gray, a professor of Bible Studies at the Augustine Institute in Denver, argues that the idea put forth in press accounts that the discovery undermined Christianity was evidence that “modern media and modern scholars will use any evidence as disproof of Christianity.”
By and large, the Jewish community has been surprisingly silent. Aside from the Israeli researchers involved with the project and members of the Messianic Jewish community, neither of which are representative of the Jewish population at large, the Jewish community has kept strangely quiet in the immediate wake of the articles about the tablet. Conversations with Jewish students at Harvard Divinity School uncovered a sort of discomfort with the entire conversation. One student went so far as to describe the idea of an embodied Messiah as feeling “unnatural” within Judaism.
“Gabriel’s Revelation” may not be inciting any fundamental changes in the way the larger academic community views religious history, the way Christians feel about their faith or the way we relate to Judaism. Still, it raises questions about the relationship between scholarship and faith. Should faith be rooted in events of the past? Or can modern scientific endeavors challenge the roots of our belief?
