Clergy and Educators

What -- and Who -- is Israel?

Janis L. Koch,
ICJS Associate Scholar

Israel, as everyone knows, is never out of the news. Feelings about what is happening in Israel are never neutral: Our conversation partners are usually quick to identify themselves as pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian so that we can argue together with the boundaries clearly marked. When Christians and Jews are engaged in the discussion, the stakes become much greater because, on the basis of their respective religious histories, both claim to be "Israel." Jews may be made uncomfortable by current events, but they are probably less conflicted by them than Christians are -- especially Christians who identify themselves as being both "Israel" and "pro-Palestinian." For such people, the political issues are clouded by theological differences that have been unresolved for two millennia. Their discomfort will not
be eased until those differences are resolved, and their resolution depends on Jews' and Christians' reaching some sort of agreement about what -- and, more importantly, who -- "Israel" actually is.

In Jewish tradition, "Israel" signifies three distinct but closely related entities: a people descended from the patriarchs and matriarchs; a covenant originally established between God and the first of the patriarchs that was renewed and extended to the whole people at Sinai; and a land given by God to this people so that they would have a place in which to live in relationship with God and in accordance with the terms of the covenant as spelled out in Torah. God elected the people Israel, established the covenant with them, and gave them the land for a specific purpose, namely, to reveal God to the rest of humanity and to serve as a model of faithfulness so that all human beings would be inspired to partner with God in completing the work of redeeming God's creation.

"Israel" as people, covenant, and land is also an important part of Christian tradition, but each of its constitutive elements is understood by most Christians in ways that differ significantly from the Jewish under-standing outlined above. That Jews and Christians would think of Israel in different terms was inevitable, since the movement that became Christianity existed from its very inception in tension with the Second Temple Judaism from which it sprang.

Within a generation after the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, his followers were predominantly gentiles, but the roots of their faith were undeniably Jewish: They worshiped the God of Israel, believed in Jesus as Israel's Messiah, lived in some sort of relation to the Jewish people and tradition, and assumed that they shared in God's promises to the people of Israel. The problem for Jesus' followers was that the people of Israel did not accept Jesus as their Messiah, and they did not believe that the promises made to them by the God of Israel had been extended to gentiles through Jesus' death and resurrection.

As the Jesus movement -- later called Christianity -- spread through the ancient world, it produced writings, chiefly the letters of Paul and the Gospels, that were pressed into service to help believers define themselves over against the Jews, who were simultaneously working out their own self-definition in the aftermath of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E. Paul's letters were the earliest pieces of "Christian" writing. They were unsystematic, complicated, often ambiguous, and very much open to misunderstanding when removed from the contexts in which they had originally been written. Paul, it appeared, denied the efficacy of Torah observance for salvation, insisting instead that salvation depended on faith in Jesus Christ. Furthermore, he seemed to advance the position that, since the Jews had been unfaithful to God by rejecting Jesus as their Messiah, the church was now the "new" or "true" Israel and had inherited all the promises of God. This inter-pretation of the Apostle and his letters was reinforced by Luke's portrayal of him in the Acts of the Apostles.

The Gospels, written in the language of religious polemic, carried this erroneous interpretation of Paul's theology to its logical conclusion. The story of Jesus Christ as told in the Gospel of Luke and the purported history of the early church outlined in the Acts of the Apostles -- both written by the same author -- served to disconnect Christianity from Judaism. The Gospel of Matthew, with its pervasive theme of Jesus as the fulfillment of Israel's Scriptures, which Christians took as their own, convinced the early church that it had become the sole possessor of the covenant and could therefore identify itself with confidence as "the new Israel." Jesus Christ was indeed, as Paul had written, "the end of the Law" (the traditional way of reading Rom. 10:4). The Israel of God was now constituted not by the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but by everyone who came to the God of Israel through belief
in Jesus Christ.

The church's self-definition as "Israel" was problematic at best in view of the fact that the Jewish community continued to thrive and to read the "Old Testament" in the original Hebrew without finding Israel's fulfillment in Christ. In defense of their beliefs, Christians claimed that the Jews did not read their Scriptures properly and, consequently, did not understand them. In 135 C.E., when the Romans leveled Jerusalem, renamed it Capitolina, and dispersed the Jewish people, Christians interpreted the events of history as incontrovertible proof that God had forsaken God's loyalty to the Jewish people. Constantine's acceptance of Christianity in 312 C.E. and its eventual establishment as the official religion of the Holy Roman Empire shifted the balance decisively as far as Christians were concerned: The covenant between God and the Jewish people had been abrogated, the "new Israel" (the church) had superseded the old Israel (Judaism) as God's covenant partner, and Christians had assumed the status of God's Chosen People. Throughout the past two thousand years, most of the church accepted the notion that Christianity had replaced Judaism. This replacement -- or triumphalist -- theology had dire consequences for the Jewish people. Forced baptisms, crusades, and pogroms became persistent features of Jewish existence in those countries where the Christian majority fell in thrall to the church's teaching that the Jews had rejected Jesus Christ as the Messiah and so had been rejected by God. In the last century, Christianity's historical treatment of the Jews was adopted by the Nazis and twisted into the murderous evil of the Shoah.

Christian attitudes toward the land of Israel have been as problematic as their attitudes toward the people of Israel. The New Testament, primarily in the Gospel of John and the Acts of the Apostles, began the process of loosening the bonds that held together people, cove-nant, and land. After the destruction of the Temple in
70 C.E. and the concomitant termination of the sacrificial cult, Christians took great pains to break the connections between holiness and the Temple, holiness and the land. Christians forsook earthly attachment to the land of Israel and the Temple in favor of a "heavenly country" (Heb. 11:16) and a spiritual temple. Thus many Christians today, particularly Protestants, deny any theological significance or aura of sanctity to the land
of Israel.

Yet Christians cannot deny that their foundational narratives are connected to this land. Before the political situation in Israel became so dangerous, great numbers of Christians traveled to Israel every year to visit Christian holy sites built through the centuries by pilgrims and to participate in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus by walking in his footsteps. The presence of the church in the Holy Land has been far more significant than most Jews and Christians in the West realize, although its continuing existence is gravely threatened in the current political climate.

While Christianity substantially redefined Israel in terms of people, covenant, and land, Judaism retained the original definition of Israel in its essential elements: a people descended from Abraham, blessed with the giving of the covenant at Sinai, and chosen to live in a particular geographical place. We may perhaps suggest that the full meaning of "Israel" was restored in 1948 with the founding of the modern State of Israel, but the reality is more complicated.

Specific details differ from one group to another, but traditional Judaism in its various forms holds that at some time in the future God will restore the kingdom of Israel; at that time all Jews will return to live in Israel, the Temple will be rebuilt, and the Messiah will come. In the meantime, however, religious attitudes among Jews toward the State of Israel are mixed. Some view the founding of the State as the beginning of the final redemption of creation, so for them the State of Israel has a religious significance. Others deny any theological or religious significance to the State because it was founded as a secular state by Jews who were not Torah-observant. In the wake of the horrendous loss of Jewish lives in the Shoah, support for a modern Jewish homeland registers as a sacred obligation for Jews; but as the generation of Jews who suffered in the Holocaust dies off, the relationship to Israel of Jews living in the Diaspora is changing.

Christian attitudes toward the modern State of Israel
are complex and confused because of a monumental shift in Christian theology in the wake of the Holocaust. Discovering traditional Christian patterns of thought and behavior deeply implicated in the ideology that under-girded the Nazi program to exterminate European Jewry, Christians have begun to reconsider seriously their historical claims about God and about Israel as people, covenant, and land. Many Christian denominations have formally and officially acknowledged God's unbroken and continuing covenant with the Jewish people and accepted the notion that Jews and Christians are both included in the people of God.

A question of major importance that remains to be explored now by Jews and Christians engaged in Jewish-Christian dialogue is whether Christians have a dwelling place along with Jews in the house of Israel. From a Christian perspective, it is humbling but entirely proper for the church to relinquish its claim to be the "true Israel." It is another thing altogether to relinquish any and all connection to Israel. From a Jewish perspective, however, Christians do not fit the traditional definition of Israel: a people descended from Abraham and given a special covenant and a particular land by the God of Israel.

The future resolution of this issue may in fact depend
on Jews and Christians both coming to a much clearer understanding and acceptance in principle of the theology of Paul, the Jewish Apostle to the gentiles. Many people are aware that an enormous amount of scholarship has been devoted to rediscovering Jesus' first-century Jewish roots. What they may not know is that similar efforts are being put forth to locate Paul in his own first-century Hellenistic-Jewish context, and that these efforts have borne remarkable fruit. For the first time in nearly two thousand years, Christian exegetes have begun to question the traditional reading of Paul and his letters and have discovered that Paul's thinking is actually in direct opposition to the under-standings imposed upon him by classical Christian interpretation. The misreading of Paul still predominates in the scholarly literature and a continual stream of new publications provides the latest upgrade to it; but, at the same time, emerging scholarship is posing a serious challenge to the traditional interpretation by focusing on its numerous internal inconsistencies. For the sake of Jewish-Christian relations, one can only hope that the old reading of Paul's letters will soon be completely discarded. A thoroughgoing presentation of the newly emerging interpretation of Paul is far beyond the scope of this essay, but a few remarks that will serve to correct the statements made about Paul earlier in the essay are warranted.

Paul, according to his own version of events as outlined in the Letter to the Galatians, was called to be an apostle to the gentiles, and gentiles were his one and only concern. What he had to say about the "law," i.e., Torah, reflected his understanding of how gentiles were related to Torah and what obligations they had, if any, to observe it. Paul's "gospel" -- which differs in significant respects from the "gospels" of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John -- is the core of both his theology and his christology. Paul's gospel proclaims that, just as God made the Jewish people right with Godself ("righteous") on the basis of the faithfulness of Abraham, so God made the gentiles righteous on the basis of the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. That is, Paul does not insist on "faith in" Christ for salvation but on Christ's "faithfulness" as the key to God's power to save the gentiles from God's wrath. Furthermore, since Jesus was physically descended from Abraham, Paul concludes that gentiles had become children of Abraham and, therefore, children of the God of Israel, by virtue of their "adoption" into Christ. Paul bases his convictions about all these things on God's promise to make Abraham the father of many nations (gentiles). Paul's line of reasoning may be an imaginative piece of exegetical footwork, but he works it out with amazing consistency.

Because Paul was convinced that the Day of Judgment and the final establishment of God's kingdom were not far off, he expected God to resolve the "mystery" that was Israel in short order. In chapters 9-11 of the Letter to the Romans, Paul lays out with extraordinary care his understanding of the unfolding of God's plan to show justice and mercy to Jews and gentiles in the time between the resurrection of Christ and the coming of the new age. As far as Paul was concerned, God had already accomplished the part of the plan that had to do with God's accepting the gentiles, whether or not the Jews could see that this was so. What broke Paul's heart was not that his people had rejected Jesus as Israel's Messiah, but that they had rejected Paul's gospel; they had rejected the possibility that the God of Israel would do for the gentiles what God had done so long before for the Jews. An extremely important part of Paul's rhetoric at this point in the letter is his warning to gentiles to guard against considering themselves as God's only people simply because the Jewish people had rejected [Paul's] gospel. God had not, nor would God ever, reject God's people, "for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable" (Rom. 11:29).

Despite what has been said about him for the past two thousand years, a close reading of Paul's letters reveals that he never used the word "Israel" to refer to anything or anyone other than the Jewish people. Near the end of Romans 11 Paul states that "all Israel will be saved" [on the Day of Judgment]; he does not say that Israel will accept Jesus Christ. Paul was a Jew, and he was proud of his Jewish heritage. It would have been impossible for him to conceive of any mending of creation that resulted in the dissolution of Israel or the Jewish people.

Paul saw Jews and gentiles as descended, through the mercy of God, from a single ancestor, the patriarch Abraham. He considered both peoples to be in covenant relationship with the God of Israel. He had no opinion about the gentiles' relationship to the land of Israel because he did not expect one specific piece of land to matter for very much longer. We might conjecture, therefore, that if Paul were able to return and write about the present circumstances of two twenty-first-century peoples covenanted to the God of Israel and commissioned still to work for the redemption of creation, he might be inclined to stretch his own use of the term and ask his fellow Jews to agree that Christians (formerly "gentiles") do in fact fit the traditional Jewish definition of "Israel." To mix a biblical metaphor, he might suggest to us that there are many rooms in the house of Israel, and Jews and Christians should dwell in them together in mutual respect, rejoicing and praising God.

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If you would like to read more about the subject of this essay, you may be interested in two books published as part of the National Jewish Scholars Project. Both of these books can be purchased through this Web site. Click here for information about Christianity in Jewish Terms. Click here for information about Irreconcilable Differences: A Learning Resource for Jews and Christians.

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