Understanding The New Testament: A Jewish Book

It is a common misconception, both in the Jewish world and the Christian world, that the New Testament belongs to the Church and not to the Jewish people, and that Yeshua established a new religion, a new faith. Although that is a very old and widespread notion, it is not valid. Any concept that speaks about "the new Israel" or "the spiritual Israel" reflects this idea. It is very prevalent in the Christian world to say that the Church has taken the place of Israel, and that if the Jews want to be saved, they need to become Christians, and by implication to leave Judaism behind.

When we examine the biblical material and the post-biblical material in Judaism, we see that the New Testament — its teaching, its person, and its message — is deeply rooted in the world of the first century, in the Land of Israel, and in the Jewish heritage: both the biblical heritage of the Hebrew Scriptures, and, of course, the rabbinical heritage of the contemporaries of Yeshua in the first century.

What Is the "New Testament"?

There are a number of terms we need to define and clarify before we actually get into a deeper discussion on the subject. The first is: what is the New Testament? Is the New Testament the document of the Church, or is it a historical document of the Jewish people? Let us first deal with the term "New Testament." In Christianity, it has been ingrained that there is a New Testament and there is an Old Testament.

The term "New Testament," as the name of a body of literature, is of course not found anywhere in Scripture. The term comes for the first time from the mouth of Jeremiah the prophet. In Jeremiah chapter 31 verse 31, the prophet says, in the name of the Lord, that God will make a new covenant, a new contract, with the people of Judea and with the people of Israel. The term there certainly does not imply a book. It refers to the covenant — just like the covenant that was made with Israel at Sinai, or the covenant that was made with Abraham on Mount Moriah.

Calling these books "Old Testament" and "New Testament" is a misnomer. The books are really libraries, containing material that was written over a period of a thousand years by, some might say, over forty different writers, and that were compiled to make up the Bible. We must consider the vast span of time and the many cultural settings in which the Bible was written — during the period of wilderness wandering with Moses; the beginning of the house of David in the kingdom of Israel; then under the divided kingdom, influenced strongly by Assyria, and later Babylon; then during the return from exile under Ezra and Nehemiah. Each of these periods spanned hundreds of years, and different cultures made their impression upon the people of Israel. These differences are reflected in the documents of the Bible.

The New Testament is the same way. It was written over a period of many decades, from the time that Yeshua was crucified until the end of the century. Of the New Testament writers, some were natives of the Land of Israel; some were immigrants to Israel, or foreign students, like the apostle Paul, who was originally from Tarsus but came to Jerusalem to study in the school of Gamaliel; and one was a Gentile doctor, Luke. For the whole of Scripture, we have a library of books inspired by the Holy Spirit, written over a thousand years. It would be a great oversimplification to refer to these compilations simply as "the Old Testament" and "the New Testament."

Many Kinds of Literature

Yes — the book that we call the Old Testament, or in Hebrew the Tanakh, includes Torah, Nevi'im, and Ketuvim, which means Torah, Prophets, and Writings. These are the three major divisions of the book that in English we call the Old Testament, and within them there are many different kinds of literature. It is not only a matter of a legal, covenantal document; it also has poetry, like the Song of Songs, beautiful love poems. It has the Song of Deborah, which is a war monument to the victory of Deborah and Barak over the Canaanites. It has the psalms of David, which are deeply devotional and emotional hymns of praise, or requests for help from God. It includes historical documents, like portions of the books of Samuel, and First and Second Kings, and First and Second Chronicles. There are prophecies, like those of the classical prophets — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Micah, Amos, and Habakkuk. This book is a very broad body of literature that deals with everything from legal documents to stories told around the campfire, poetry, and history.

One cannot just lump the whole thing together and say, "This is all the Old Testament," and then, "Well, this is the Law." In the New Testament, too, we have a very similar spread of literary types. Some New Testament passages are legal. Yes, there are laws in the New Testament. Paul speaks of laws a number of times, and the apostles, in Acts chapter 15, actually make legal requirements — laws that are binding upon the Church and upon the followers of Yeshua, whether they be Jews or Gentiles, each having their specific requirements, which the apostles gave as they spoke by the power of the Holy Spirit. So one cannot say, as traditional Christianity has said, that the Old Testament is law and the New Testament is grace. No! There is grace in the law, and there is law in the grace that we receive from Yeshua. Lumping these things together and saying "Old Testament" and "New Testament" misses the point. These terms as names for parts of the Bible, are not biblical terminology; rather, this terminology stems from Christian tradition.

A Book of Christianity, or a Jewish Book?

Now, when we talk about the New Testament, the question that needs to be asked is: is it a book of Christianity, or is it a Jewish book? When one examines Christianity, whether in the second century or in the twentieth, one immediately sees that the issues the New Testament deals with are not Christian issues. It doesn't deal with ecclesiastical problems; it doesn't deal with the issues of the Holy See, or the Pope, or archbishops, or cardinals — none of these things, which are all the marks of Christianity. Neither the holidays, nor the politics, nor the basic tenets of Christianity are really addressed in the New Testament. All the issues it raises are issues that arise within the Jewish world of the first century. For example, one of the main issues that Paul discusses in a number of his letters is what to do with the Gentiles. Should the Gentiles keep the law of Moses, or not? Should they be circumcised, or not? This is not a problem of the Church. Jews asked these questions, and Jews gave the answers to them, by the inspiration of God and the Holy Spirit.

The framework of the New Testament is the framework of Judaism. The early church is a Jewish church. God had to convince the apostle Peter, with a supernatural vision, that he should go and preach to Gentiles — to go to Cornelius and his household in Caesarea. God had not made it clear to the apostles, before that vision, that the Gentiles were part of their mission. The first directive came only at the end of Yeshua's ministry, after his resurrection and before he ascends to heaven, when he sends the apostles to all the nations.

In other words, during the three years that he taught the apostles, he preached only to the people of Israel, and argued with the Pharisees and with the Sadducees. We do have the very different story of a Syrophoenician woman who comes to Yeshua requesting healing for her daughter. He tells her that one doesn't give the children's food to the little puppy dogs; and only after she presses him, and impresses him with her humility and her hunger to be healed in the name of the God of Israel, does Yeshua heal her daughter. There is no impression from his ministry that the Gentiles have a part in the domain of salvation. And that domain of salvation, for Yeshua and the apostles, is the Jewish world, the Torah world, the world of the Land of Israel in the first century. Yeshua never left the Land of Israel. He never went to school in Rome, and he didn't graduate from Harvard.

Reading It in Its Own Context

The issue is: is the New Testament a Jewish book, yes or no? If it is a Jewish book, then in order to understand it, we need to put it back in its place in life — back into its historical, linguistic, cultural, and religious background. I believe that this is the only way we can understand the New Testament and what its real meaning is for us today. We must take it back into its first-century context, and the first-century context is the Jewish context. You could say it touches on Hellenistic Judaism — but not on Hellenism in itself, only on Hellenistic Judaism. These were some of the cultural strains in which the Land of Israel was immersed at that time. But still, it is a Jewish book, a Jewish message.

It starts with the words:

This verse alone puts the whole context of the Gospel squarely within Judaism. In the first place, the writer says, "This is the book of the generations." If one checks the terminology, one finds something very interesting: there is only one other place in the Bible where this phrase is used, and that is in Genesis chapter 5 verse 1, "This is the book of the generations of Adam." The writer of Matthew, under inspiration, began the Gospel with these words in order to remind the reader that God created man. He created him out of the dust of the earth. He breathed into him the breath of life — and the God who created man has no problem supernaturally causing a woman to conceive, and bringing His Son into the world in the flesh, as he promised he would. The Messiah had to be a descendant of King David and of Abraham.

King David and Abraham are two prominent figures in the history of Israel who received a covenant of grant from God — an unconditional covenant that included salvation for the people of Israel and a blessing for all the nations. And therefore these two figures, Abraham and David, are mentioned in the first verse of the Gospel of Matthew to remind the reader that what we are about to read, the story of the Messiah Yeshua, is the story of Israel's history.

It is not the story of Rome, not the story of Protestantism, not the story of Calvin or Luther; it is the story of the Jewish people, and Yeshua is the very Messiah for whom our forefathers waited. And that waiting, that anticipation of the Messiah, is, has been, and always will be the hope of Israel. This is not the hope of the world — because the world, at that time and still today, is largely idol-worshipping. Most of the world worships a multiplicity of gods, not the one and only God, of whom we say, "Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad" — "Hear, O Israel, the LORD is our God, the LORD is One." The majority of the world still does not worship that God. But Yeshua, the Messiah, came into the world to bring Israel into what the prophets anticipated: to make Israel a light to the nations, through the seed of Abraham.

Therefore it is most important, if we really want to know the truth and to understand what the will of God is, that we understand we are dealing here with a Jewish book — a book that in its depth, in its language, in its theology, and in its conceptual world is a Jewish book. To understand it, we have to go back to the first century, and try to understand what these teachings, these parables, these statements of Yeshua, and the stories and conflicts with the Pharisees and the Sadducees really mean in the historical context of the Jewish people during the first century. Only then can we be sure that we really have a biblical concept of faith, grace, hope, eternal life, and salvation.

The Tools at Our Disposal: The Hebrew Scriptures

Now, what tools do we have that can help us see the world of Yeshua, the Jewish world of the first century? What do we have at our disposal to enable us to do this? First and foremost, we have what we mentioned earlier — the Hebrew Scriptures. This was the holy book that Yeshua read from in the synagogue in Nazareth, the book he quoted over and over again before his opponents. It is the book of which the apostle Paul says,

It is this book that Paul used to show, in the synagogues of Thessalonica, Berea, and Corinth, that the Messiah was to come. When Paul went to teach, he quoted from the Hebrew Scriptures, from the Torah, that the Messiah was to suffer, to be buried, to rise from the dead, and to sit at the right hand of God. He did not have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John at his disposal. He did not even have the letter to the Galatians, since he hadn't written it yet. And he didn't have the book of Romans when he was going around Lystra and Perga, Iconium and Ephesus and Colossae, teaching both Jews and Gentiles that Yeshua is the Messiah. What he had was the five books of Moses, and perhaps some of the prophets — that is what he had.

Other Sources for the First-Century World

So the first source for understanding the New Testament is, of course, what we call the Hebrew Scriptures — but there are other sources. In the New Testament itself, we have quotations from many of the most popular books of the time of Yeshua. We have quotations from Enoch; we have quotations from the book of Ecclesiasticus, or Ben Sira in Hebrew. We have quotations from rabbinical material, and a number of sources quoted clearly from the Jewish world of that period that show that Yeshua is the Messiah.

In addition to these materials from the intertestamental period, which are partly quoted in the New Testament by the apostles and in the Gospels themselves, we have Josephus — Josephus Flavius, Yosef ben Mattityahu in Hebrew. He was a general of the resistance army against the Romans, but he was captured, taken into captivity, and adopted by the house of Flavius, the house of the emperors. Titus and Vespasian adopted Josephus, and he became a kind of house historian for them. As part of his response to the Roman war, he wrote the two most important books for understanding the first century: the Antiquities of the Jews and the Jewish War.

After Josephus we have a lull in time; but Judah ha-Nasi, a rabbi from the Land of Israel who lived in the Galilee, collected, at the end of the second century, the deliberations and discussions of the rabbis from the first century BC, the first century AD, and into the second century. He collected them in order to preserve the deliberations, the discussions, and the explanations of how the rabbis came to their conclusions about the practical aspects of keeping the law in the post-Temple reality. As you know, the Temple was destroyed in 70 AD in Jerusalem, and has never been rebuilt since. After the destruction of the Temple, the Bar Kochba revolt took place, and the Jewish people were badly sacked by the Romans. For that reason, Rabbi Judah thought it important to collect these legal deliberations, which he put into a collection called the Mishnah.

The Mishnah, the Gemara, and the Talmud

The word Mishnah comes from the Hebrew "lishnot," which means "to study." It is comprised of the discussions, or studies, of the rabbis concerning the laws. Many of these legal deliberations go back to the first century BC and are recorded from rabbis who lived in the time of Yeshua, in the Land of Israel, during the first century AD. We have records of rabbinical discussions on legal matters belonging to that period.

To learn more about the Mishna and the development of the Talmud click here.

Additionally we have what is called Baraita — a passage not included in the Mishnah, preserved in Jewish tradition mostly orally, but sometimes in written form.

Altogether, in the Talmud, we have many passages that belong to the time of Yeshua. They are not all one hundred percent reliable, but we have critical methods of distinguishing, by language and by content, whether these passages really do belong to the time of Yeshua and the first century AD, or whether they were fabricated later and attributed to earlier writers and earlier rabbis. This should not disturb us, or our use of the Talmud as a valued document for understanding the background of the New Testament — provided, of course, that we take into account the different usages and interrelationships of the rabbis of the Talmud. So, in the Talmud, we find relevant passages and discussions describing realities that were contemporary with the apostle Paul and with the world of Yeshua in the first century.

That is why, if we want to understand the New Testament, we need to look into all these materials and try to understand the New Testament in its historical context. The historical context that we have is the Jewish literature of that period — the Jewish literature that sheds light on what was going on in the world of the New Testament. I will give just one short example before concluding this article.

An Example: Why Paul Felt Such Guilt

Take the apostle Paul. We are told in the book of Acts that Paul participated in the death of the deacon Stephen by holding the coats of the people who condemned him and then took him out of the city and stoned him. The impression left on the reader of Acts is that Paul was a kind of hat-check boy — the people checked their coats and their hats into his hands, laid them at his feet, and then went out to stone Stephen. Yet later on we read that Paul called himself the chief of sinners. He recalls the stoning of Stephen as a deeply traumatic event, one that filled him with a guilt that was never fully alleviated from his own conscience; years later, he still mentions it. But simply being a hat-check boy should not make a person feel that guilty. To understand what this means, we need to look at the Talmud, which tells us how a person was taken out of the city to be stoned, the procedure involved, and the job that this "hat-check boy" really had during the prosecution and execution.

The Babylonian Talmud, in the tractate Sanhedrin p. 42a–b, and also p. 43a–b, describes the process of execution. It tells us that when they took a person out to be stoned — to the place of execution outside the walls of Jerusalem — a man was sent on a horse, or stationed on a high hill, between the place of execution (usually somewhere low, down in a valley, presumably where a person could be thrown off a cliff) and the courthouse. This man on the horse, or the one stationed on the height, was given, the Talmud says, a sudar — the word from which, through the Greek sudarus, we get the English word "sweater." He was given this scarf, this cloth, and stationed on a horse between the place of execution and the courthouse, and he was usually the prosecutor of the case. The reason he was stationed this way is that they didn't have cell phones in those days, and this was the quickest way to communicate in case some new witness or new evidence arrived at the courthouse before the execution took place. In other words, the Jewish court was sensitive to the fact that at the last minute a witness might come and admit perjury — "Listen, I lied, you are executing this person unjustly" — or someone might come and bring a new defense for the person being executed. The Talmud describes in detail how this prosecutor could stand there on the horse, or on a high place, and wave the cloth, and stop the execution instantly, before it actually took place.

That was Paul's job. That is why he felt so guilty — because he was actually the prosecuting attorney; he was the prosecutor of the case. He knew in his heart that Stephen was being executed not for a crime against the Temple, nor for a crime against the Jewish people, but because he believed that Yeshua of Nazareth had risen from the dead, that he is the Messiah of whom the prophets spoke — the Messiah who is the only hope of salvation for the Jewish people, and indeed for the world. That guilt — that Paul could have stopped the execution, that Paul knew it was a false accusation brought by false witnesses, and yet did not stop it — is what made him feel like the chief of all sinners. Without knowing these small details, revealed to us in the Talmud, we would be left in the dark as to the real reason Paul felt so guilty. There are many other such details that, in our material on Yeshua in the Talmud, and the Messiah in Jewish Thought, we use to clarify the texts, and to try to understand the background and the setting of the Gospel, the Good News recorded for us in the book we call the New Covenant.