The Jewish Annotated New Testament (162 page)

When Matthew quotes the passage from Isaiah, he takes the term
parthenos
literally as meaning that Mary’s conception of Jesus occurred without human sexual intercourse and therefore was miraculous. Thus a word choice by the LXX translators led to an assertion of one of Christianity’s teachings and a fundamental difference between Christians and Jews. It has also meant that until the twentieth century, with the publication of the Revised Standard Version Old Testament in 1952 (which used “young woman”), the translation of Isaiah 7.14 (“Behold, a virgin shall conceive” in the King James Version) has been influenced not by the meaning of the Hebrew words but by a New Testament quotation of the Septuagint. Thus do translations bring about far-reaching consequences.

MIDRASH AND PARABLES IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

David Stern

No topic touches more directly on the “Jewishness” of the New Testament than the place of midrash—classical Jewish biblical interpretation—in its pages, and few topics are more fraught with complications. These begin with the word “midrash” itself. Midrash refers to the activity of biblical study as pursued specifically by rabbinic sages in the first five centuries CE. It is derived from the root
d-r-sh
, which carries the primary meaning of “inquire, investigate,” and by extension came to mean both “explicate” and “study.” In more contemporary usage, the word is often used in the sense of an “imaginative interpretation,” but readers should know that the rabbis did not have just one way of “studying” scripture, in addition to which they “did” midrash. Midrashic interpretation was part and parcel of biblical study.

By further extension, midrash also refers to the specific interpretations produced by that activity (thus, a “midrash” of a specific verse), and thus to the collections of rabbinic literature in which those originally orally transmitted interpretations were recorded. Those collections—our earliest actual documentation for midrash—first began to be compiled near the end of the third century, that is, two centuries after the Gospels were composed. The earliest collections were the
Mekhilta
(on Exodus),
Sifra
(on Leviticus) and
Sifre
(on Numbers and Deuteronomy). During the fourth through sixth centuries, other collections were compiled, some of which were later included in the sixteenth-century edition of
Midrash Rabbah
(e.g.,
Ber. Rab
. and
Lev. Rab
.).

In the development of biblical criticism during the second half of the twentieth century, the term “midrash” came to be used to describe a method of reading the Bible, whether exemplified in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament writings, or the rabbinic collections. This usage coincided with a wider recognition that biblical interpretation was among the most pervasive activities pursued by all Jews, including the followers of Jesus, throughout the Second Temple period and well into Late Antiquity.

These Jews, as well as most early Gentile Christians, accepted the core of the Hebrew Bible—or its Greek versions—as we know it today (even if the precise text remained in flux); further, they believed that the Bible was a sacred, authoritative text, without inconsistency, contradiction, and superfluity, which could reveal the will of God for their present time through close and intense study of its words and verses. That specific meaning, however, and so the text’s true significance, was believed to be by definition
cryptic
, that is, not immediately evident or obvious. The biblical text may have an obvious or plain sense, but its deeper meaning was there to be discovered beneath the surface of its words.

That all biblical readers shared these assumptions by no means meant that their interpretations were identical. All readers
also
read the biblical text through the lens of their times, using their own theological beliefs and ideological tenets, and typically all utilized their own literary forms to convey those interpretations. Nonetheless, there is often a strong resemblance among these interpretations, partly due to the fact that many of these readers also shared a common fund of extra-biblical legends (like the story of Abraham exemplifying his belief in one God by smashing the images in his father’s idol shop) that had independently developed in the Hellenistic and Late Antique periods. The New Testament scholars who used the term “midrash” to describe their biblical interpretations correctly recognized this family resemblance even if they did not always account for the profound differences.

Consider, for example, the following New Testament passages and rabbinic midrash that contain a form of interpretation called a “fulfillment narrative,” because a verse from scripture, typically a prophecy, is represented as having been “fulfilled,” or realized, in a specific occurrence. Thus, Matthew regularly recounts unusual episodes in Jesus’ life, which are said to have “fulfilled” scriptural prophecies. For example, after describing how Joseph is told in a dream that Herod will attempt to kill the baby Jesus, and that he should take Mary and the child and flee to Egypt until Herod dies, Mt. 2.15 announces that this happened “to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I have called my son.’” The citation is to Hos 11.1. In other words, the reason the family fled to Egypt was not solely out of fear of Herod but so that Hosea’s prophecy could be fulfilled (thereby also confirming, in the process, that Jesus was God’s son). Similarly, Mt 1.22–23 states that the virginal conception of Jesus by Mary through the Holy Spirit “took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call him Emmanuel, which means “God is with us.”’” (Here, the quotation seems to be based on the Septuagint [LXX] which translates the Hebrew
’almah
[“unmarried young woman”] as Greek
parthenos
, a word meaning either “unmarried young woman” or “virgin.”) In both examples, the scripture quoted does double if not triple duty. On the one hand, the verse reads the episode in Jesus’ life as a realization of the scriptural prophecy whose meaning is thereby completely exemplified or exhausted. At the same time, those events interpret the verse in an almost literal fashion, thus confirming the validity of the prophecy and showing every detail in Jesus’ life to be part of the divine plan.

Rabbinic midrash uses the same literary-exegetical form but for somewhat different purposes. The following passage is from a collection of interpretations of the Scroll of Lamentations compiled in the fourth or fifth century CE, in reference to Lam 2.12, a verse describing the children of Zion as “they cry to their mothers, ‘Where is bread and wine?,’ as they faint like the wounded in the streets of the city, as their life is poured out on their mothers’ bosom”:

It happened to a certain woman who told her husband: This money is not doing me any good. Take it, and go to the marketplace and buy me something to eat so that we won’t die. He did this. He took money from her and went to the market and tried to buy something, but he could not find anything to buy, and he fainted and died. They came and said to her elder son: Aren’t you going to see what happened to your father? The son went, and he found his father dead in the marketplace. He began to weep over him, and then he too fainted and died. The youngest child wished to be suckled, but he found nothing in his mother’s breast, and he too fainted and died.

[All this happened] in order to fulfill what is said, “…‘as they faint like the wounded in the streets of the city, as their life is poured out in their mothers’ bosom.’” (
Midr. Lam. Rab
.)

Even though Lamentations was compiled in the aftermath of the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE, the rabbis viewed the text as a prophecy of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. As in Matthew, the rabbinic anecdote reads the verse hyperliterally (with part of the novelty of the midrashic reading being to see each separate phrase referring to a different type of death suffered by each member of the hapless family). And, as in Matthew, the biblical prophecy is both fulfilled and exhausted in the historical event, in this case a series of tragic deaths. The verse, far from being read as a mainly rhetorical expression of despair, is shown to have been a lethally precise prophecy.

Yet this example of rabbinic interpretation also points to the exact difference between New Testament fulfillment-narratives and rabbinic midrash. In Matthew the form is used to authorize Jesus as the prophesied Messiah and divine Son. For Matthew’s audience, living while the church was still struggling to establish its identity, the fulfillment-narrative served to authorize their theology and their understanding of scripture. In contrast, by the time the midrash was composed, the Temple’s destruction was a historical catastrophe of the distant past whose painful memory may still have been alive but whose political charge had long since expired. The function of the midrash is both belated and apologetic: it shows that the catastrophes suffered by the Jews were neither arbitrary nor meaningless but, as prophesied, part of a larger divine plan that continues to govern Israel’s destiny.

Of the four Gospels, Matthew is the one most suffused with interpretations that resemble rabbinic midrash (and other modes of early Jewish exegesis). In addition to the fulfillment-narratives, the Gospel’s genealogy (Mt 1.1–17) is reminiscent of other “pseudo-genealogies” found in late biblical and early postbiblical documents (for example, Mordecai’s ancestry as given in Esth 2.5) seeking to establish their biblical pedigree. The stories of the Magi (2.1–6) and Jesus’ infancy (2.7–12) are reminiscent of pseudepigraphic and rabbinic tales about the birth of figures like Noah and Moses, which also contain miraculous and supernatural details. The escape to Egypt (2.13–23) re-enacts in midrashic fashion the descent and exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. Jesus’ temptation in the desert (4.1–11) is a virtual exegetical battle, with Jesus’ parrying each of Satan’s challenges with a scriptural verse, often in its interpreted sense. Comparable exegetical duels between rabbis and heretics are found throughout rabbinic literature.

Of all the New Testament literary forms with rabbinic parallels, none has been more controversial than the narrative parables that Jesus delivers in the Synoptic Gospels. Virtually since the beginnings of modern New Testament scholarship in the nineteenth century, scholars have heatedly debated the relationship between the New Testament parables and the more than a thousand examples of the parable or
mashal
(pl.
meshalim
) found in rabbinic midrash. One reason behind the fervor of the debate is that the Gospel parables have long been considered by New Testament scholars as the parts of the Gospels closest to Jesus’ own words, in which he disclosed to his disciples his teachings of salvation and his sense of his divine mission. But part of the debate has also been semantic. “Parable” (Gk
parabolē
, “thrown or placed alongside,” and by extension “talking about one thing in terms of another”) is the usual translation in the Septuagint of the Hebrew
mashal
. But that word and its verbal root have a wide range of meaning in the Hebrew Bible from “proverb” (as in the plural form
mishlei shlomo
, “proverbs of Solomon”) to “byword” (Deut 28.37), allegory (Ezek 24.3), simile (Ps 49.13), and fable (Ezek 17.2). In rabbinic literature, the word continues to carry nearly all these senses, but it also comes to be a generic marker for the narrative parable. Curiously, the one narrative parable in the Bible that actually anticipates the parabolic narratives found in both the Gospels and rabbinic literature, Nathan’s parable in 2 Sam 12.1–6, is not called a
mashal
.

What today seems clear to nearly all scholars is that neither Jesus nor the rabbis invented the parable. Both drew upon a widespread genre of oral traditional literature that goes back to the Bible (see, for example, Nathan’s parable in 2 Sam 12.1–14 and that of the woman of Tekoa in 2 Sam 14.1–20) and in even earlier Near Eastern literature. Because of their common roots it is not surprising that both New Testament and rabbinic parables share common language-patterns and diction, narrative motifs, character types, and rhetorical strategies, albeit with important differences between them. These differences are especially evident in the way the parabolic narratives are used and interpreted in their respective literary contexts.

No New Testament parable exemplifies these similarities and differences better than that of the wicked tenants (Mk 12.1–12; Mt 21.33; Lk 20.9–19). This parable describes a man who plants a vineyard and then lets it out to tenants; the owner sends his servants and, finally, his own beloved son to collect fruit from the vineyard, but the tenants beat and kill the messengers and the son. “What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants, and give the vineyard to others” (Mk 22.9), which is clearly a reworking of the “Song of the Vineyard” in Isa 5.1–6 and its application in vv. 7–10.

Jesus tells the parable against the “chief priests, the scribes, and the elders” (Mk 11.27), who accost him and ask by what authority he acts as he does. To this question, Jesus responds with his own question: “Did the baptism of John”—who had been executed by Herod Antipas (Mk 6.17–29)—“come from heaven, or was it of human origin?” (Mk 11.30). The authorities refuse to answer—they understand that the question is loaded—and Jesus responds, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things” (Mk 11.33). Instead, he tells them the parable.