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Can Jews and Christians share the same Bible stories without abandoning the core truth claims of their respective religions?
Paul M. van Buren

Professor van Buren's essay builds on a reading of The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son

Is there a necessity, growing out of our deepest convictions, for Christians and Jews to talk with each other on the deepest level? My answer is yes, and the reason, as I shall try to show, is that we are bound together by being two communities of interpretation of the story of ancient Israel, an unsettling item of which is the wrenching little tale of the binding of Isaac, the aqedah, found in Genesis 22. Therein lies our unity, and just here is where we find the root of our real difficulty with each other, for out of the depth of that story we have each drawn the substance of our different identities.

Professor Jon Levenson, a major biblical scholar and (I would judge) theologian, currently at Harvard, has put his finger on the common source of our different identities in his recent book, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: the transformation of child sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983). The theme, signaled by that provocative title and subtitle, is elaborated in his compelling exegesis of the aqedah. In that story, we are told that Abraham was promised abundant descendants, who in turn would prosper, all because and precisely because Abraham obeyed God in offering up his beloved son (Gen 22:16).

Having heard so many liberal assurances over the years that this story is not at all about child-sacrifice but about its abolition, it is interesting to hear the contrary, and to hear that the Rabbis read it accordingly. Indeed, we are led, by way of the explicit command of Exodus 22:29b, "The first born of your sons you shall give to Me," to see that child sacrifice was not practiced only by Israel's neighbors and that it is a major theme underlying the Joseph story and the Exodus itself. But Levenson also argues that even when little practiced, it remained an ideal, for ideally, devotion to God could go so far as to offer up that which was most precious: that which is most precious belongs to God.

This ideal, Levenson argues, lies at the heart of the deepest Jewish spirituality, for it undergirds just those stories--not only the aqedah, but that of Jacob's willingness to give up Benjamin, and the designation of the Passover lamb in place of Israel's first-born in Egypt, indeed the story of the Exodus itself ("Israel is my first-born son... Let my son go that he may worship me")--which in turn ground Israel's conviction that it is God's special people. The weight of the Exodus story lies just where it lies in the Genesis stories: in the mystery of God's utterly special relationship to and claim upon the beloved son of a beloved son of a beloved son, each and all conceived in the face of human infertility by the inscrutable will of God.

The story of the binding of Isaac has had a strange history. It lay dormant during the whole biblical period, not being mentioned once in the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures. But then, in the post-biblical period, and especially during the time of the Roman occupation of the Land, according to Levenson, it stimulated a new Jewish exegetical tradition, thereby transforming rather than eliminating the idea of child sacrifice. Instead of being centered on the faithful obedience of Abraham, the story began to be retold with the emphasis falling increasingly on Isaac and his readiness, even his joyful eagerness, to throw himself on the altar as a sacrifice for the sake of his descendants. In contradiction to the biblical tale, Isaac's sacrifice came to be presented as having in some sense taken place, with Isaac then restored to life once more by the power of God. "Like a martyr," writes Levenson, "his choice was seen as effecting atonement for the many."

This new exegetical development of the aqedah forms an important part of the interpretative context and climate within which those Jews, whom we call the earliest Church, came up with their first interpretation of the death of Jesus. One can hear its echoes in the emphasis in the New Testament writings on Jesus' violent death at Roman hands as a voluntary self-sacrifice. One example is that of the author of the so-called letter to the Hebrews wrote that Jesus "for the joy that was set before him endured the cross" (Hebrews 12:2).

It was an important aspect of this Jewish exegetical tradition that God was expected to act, measure for measure, in response to Abraham's and Isaac's actions. If that father and son were willing to make this sacrifice for their descendants, so God should remember what they did and act to redeem their descendants. Those Jews who interpreted the death of Jesus in this context were exceptional only in taking this exegetical line to its limits, as when John wrote (3:16) that God gave his only son for the sake of the world.

In the few years that followed the death of Jesus, but before Paul joined the Jesus-movement, what was to become the Christian church came into being. It was founded neither by Jesus, being a post-Easter construction, nor by Paul, for in telling us what he learned as a new member of the community, Paul recites the basic core of the full Christian story. What Paul received, he tells us in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, what had developed in those few years before he joined the movement, was the "gospel" or teaching "that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to The Twelve." The motif that Levenson has identified is conspicuous: the death and resurrection of the beloved son.

The last verse of Mark's Gospel, whatever its historical value, may be a clue to understanding the origins of the gospel that was taught: "and they [followers of Jesus] went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had come upon them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid." Period. End of Mark's Gospel. And so it may well have been. But if so, as the rest of the Gospel shows, those terrified disciples were in fact rescued from their speechlessness precisely by their Jewish Scriptures (of course as read and interpreted in that time), to which in their confusion we can be sure they turned, not for proof-texts to support what they already understood, but to seek some understanding, any understanding, of events so shocking as to be beyond comprehension. And there, as we know, they found what they needed, an understanding of that death "according to the scriptures."

Did Judas receive thirty pieces of silver to betray Jesus? (See Zechariah 11:12-13.) Was Jesus actually crucified between criminals and buried in the tomb of a wealthy man? (See Isaiah 53:9.) Did soldiers really cast lots for his clothes? (See Psalm 22:18.) I doubt we shall ever know. What we can surely know is that all these and many other details were told of him in words taken from the Scriptures of the Jewish people. And Levenson has drawn our attention to the deep scriptural motif that was absolutely basic to the gospel that Paul learned on joining the movement, the underlying skeleton on which it then became possible and natural to hang all the bits of flesh and sinew to make a full story of the Passion. The shocking connection made by Pilate--Jesus of Nazareth/King of the Jews--could then have lead them on, by current moves of Jewish messianic exegesis, to son of David, to son of God, to the son par excellence, Isaac. Knowing the Scripture as we may assume those Jews did, how could they not begin the story of the death and resurrection of the beloved son with a heavenly voice speaking at Jesus' baptism, "This is my beloved son," knowing full well what lay in wait for beloved sons?

One of the merits of this conjectural reconstruction, which I cannot blame on Professor Levenson, but which was stimulated by his book, is that it makes sense of some of the most puzzling aspects of the early Christian tradition. For example, it no longer seems a puzzle that Paul had so little to say about the historical Jesus, nor why the historical Jesus as presently understood, be it the Galilean Jewish holy man and healer, the eschatological enthusiast, or the prophet of Jewish restoration, seems to be so disconnected from the Jesus of the gospel that Paul received and passed on. It is in the Scriptures, not the historical Jesus, that the shape of the original gospel emerges, which is why it was from the first the gospel of the death and resurrection of the beloved son. That deep myth, grounded in the ideal of such utter devotion to the Lord as to be willing not to withhold the only son, is what shaped the gospel that Paul learned and then preached. It is certainly what Christians have celebrated from the beginning in their Eucharist; it is what shaped the Gospels; and it is what shapes Christian identity to this day.

It would be counter-productive for either Jews or Christians to tell the other that the founding story on which they base their identity is only an interpretation, for this cuts both ways. And it is foolishness to ask either tradition to go find another foundation, such as the 20th century historian's Jesus or the 20th century historian's Moses. The Rabbis who built up what was to become Rabbinic Judaism, and the Jews who formulated "the gospel" of 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, were building on the highly creative interpretation of ancient stories by post-biblical Jewish exegetes. Both Jews and Christians are heirs of that interpretation. Therein lies our problem, but therein may lie also the possibility for mutual appreciation and respect.

The liberal voice within us is superficially right, but that voice is so superficial as to be fundamentally wrong. Yes of course it is true: we do believe in the same one God. Only that is no solace; that is precisely our problem. It ignores what really matters to each of us: the God we trust in is one whom we believe to have a quite special relationship with us, as we have to that God. Our problem is that, at the deep level, each of our two communities believes itself to have been caught up in and bound by this relationship, a relationship defined for both of our traditions, whether we like it or not, by an interpretation of the aqedah, the story that dramatizes how thoroughly the beloved son belongs to God.

Our hope is that the ways of this God are higher than our ways (Isaiah 55), so it may be that this God operates on the principle of superabundance, not scarcity. It may be that, precisely in the matter of divine election, this God does not play zero-sum games, in which one community's gain must be the other's loss. Both our traditions contain hints of and pointers in this direction, although these are often drowned out by our traditional readings of the stories of Isaac, of Jacob and of Joseph. To learn to read them otherwise would call for almost as much creativity on our part as was shown by those who developed the post-biblical reading of the aqedah.

Jon Levenson's Response

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