Jeremy L. Berg

Here’s a small portion of my first doctoral research essay exploring Jesus and Rabbi-pupil dynamics in the ancient world. Warning: Academic essay.

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There’s no denying the fact that at the center of Jesus’ earthly ministry was a group of pupils called disciples (Gk. mathetes; Heb. talmudhim), and that Jesus was called a ‘rabbi’ on numerous occasions.  Mathetes, is the term used to denote the followers of Jesus no less than 262 times in the Gospels and Acts. 

Jesus then left his followers with the task of “making disciples of all nations” which included passing down his teaching to others (“teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you”).  Jesus, it would seem safe to conclude, was therefore the quintessential Jewish rabbi surrounded by eager students, pouring over and living by his teachings.

Burned into the imagination of many a faithful Christian is a quaint scene of Rabbi Jesus on the grassy slope of the Mount of Beatitudes delivering his spell-binding halaka—the Sermon on the Mount—to wide eyed pupils. R. Bultmann lays down the gauntlet asserting confidently that

If the the gospel record is worthy of credence, it is at least clear that Jesus actually lived as a Jewish rabbi. As such he takes his place as a teacher in the synagogue. As such he gathers around him a circle of pupils. As such he disputes over questions of the Law with pupils and opponents or with people seeking knowledge who turn to him as the celebrated rabbi. He disputes along the same lines as Jewish rabbis, uses the same methods of argument, the same turns of speech; like them he coins proverbs and teaches in parables. Jesus’ teaching shows in content also a close relationship with that of the rabbis.

Yet, Martin Hengel refuses Bultmann’s invitation to dance with Rabbi Jesus and offers up a different tune mincing no words in asserting that “to his contemporaries Jesus was not at all like a scribe of the rabbinical stamp” and “to use the term ‘rabbi’ to give anything like a precise characterization of Jesus is extremely misleading.” Hengel suggests that Jesus’ dynamic teaching ministry and loyal following places him closer to the charismatic prophet figures also quite commonplace in the first century milieu.

Nevertheless, Jesus was indeed called ‘rabbi’ and the fact that his followers were called ‘disciples’ begs for a more detailed understanding of what rabbi-disciple relationships looked like in Jesus’ world. So, where did Jesus fit into the broader milieu if popular teachers, sages, prophets, and leaders of various charismatic movements? How flexible and broad were terms such as mathetes and talmudhim at this time?  To what degree did Jesus adapt and veer from the typical rabbinic relationships and practices of his day? If we know anything of Jesus of Nazareth, its that he did not shrink from stretching and bursting well-worn Jewish teachings and customs (“wineskins”) while importing his own new or expanded ideas and practices (“wine”) into the world of first century Judaism …

[Some of the practical questions I was asking in my research were:]

Of what significance is the teacher’s personality, charisma and authority in the rabbi-pupil relationship and teaching process? Are disciples merely students of a rabbi’s teaching? Or are they in some way adherents to the teacher? Is the teacher’s personality, charm and charisma a dangerous distraction from the main business of passing along the content of the curriculum?

[skipping ahead now, leaving out many pages of research and driving toward my point…]

…. Jesus sets himself apart from other rabbis of his day in many striking ways. First, the absoluteness and authority behind Jesus’ call went beyond that of a typical rabbi. Hengel examines Jesus’ radical call to follow him, as evidenced by Mt 8:21-22 (“Let the dead bury their dead”), concluding that “this hardness on Jesus’ part as to the unconditional nature of following him “can no longer primarily be understood from the standpoint of the effectiveness of Jesus as a ‘teacher’, but it is to be explained only on the basis of his unique authority as the proclaimer of the imminent Kingdom of God.”

While its tempting to cast Jesus somewhat anachronistically in post-AD70 rabbinic garb surrounded by scribes-in-training, mastering his halakha, Culpepper instead suggests “The devotion of the disciples to the person of Jesus and the services they rendered him surpassed the customary relationship between master and disciple in the Pharisaic-Rabbinic tradition.”

Or, Rengstorf: “His [Jesus’] concern is not to impart information, nor to deepen an existing attitude, but to awaken unconditional commitment to Himself.”  Jesus’ Great Commission was to “make disciples”, yes, but his disciples served a mission far beyond Torah study. Thus, C. G. Montefiore concludes:

Discipleship such as Jesus demanded and inspired (a following, not for study but for service — to help the Master in his mission, to carry out his instructions and so on) was apparently a new thing, at all events, something which did not fit in, or was not on all-fours, with usual Rabbinic customs or with customary Rabbinic phenomena.

Jesus’ primary concern was the announcement of the eschatological kingdom, and gathering adherents to help carry forward his cause.  Martin Hengel gathers several other lines of evidence against Jesus-as-typical-Rabbi such as:

Despite the occasional use of exegetical argumentation by Jesus the basic inadequacy of the designation ‘scribe’ for Jesus, is, finally, shown by the fact that the Old Testament is no longer the central focus of his message; and this distinguishes him both from the ‘prophets’ of his day and from the scribes.

With [Jesus] the parables never, in the rabbinic fashion, serve the purpose of expounding Torah, but are for the explanation of his eschatological  message.

It remains an indemonstrable supposition to suggest that he at any time attended a rabbinical school.

Jesus deliberately cut across the gap between the scribal theologian and the ignorant (‘people of the earth’), a gap which was a distinguishing mark of Palestinian Judaism in his day.

Whether we describe Jesus as a rabbi or as a wisdom teacher and prophet we shall equally fail to do justice to this unheard of self-confidence which cuts across all the analogies in the field of Religionsgeschichte which are known to us from contemporary Judaism.

Hengel thereby concludes: “Thus, basically, Jesus stood outside any discoverable uniform teaching tradition of Judaism.”

Another jumping off point for comparing Jesus to what became the primary focus of Rabbinic Judaism is the oft quoted m. Abot 1:1 and other Mishnaic sayings. We again see Jesus’ “unheard of self-confidence”:

 Moses received the Torah from Sinai and gave it over to Joshua. Joshua gave it over to the Elders, the Elders to the Prophets, and the Prophets gave it over to the Men of the Great Assembly. They [the Men of the Great Assembly] would always say these three things: 1) Be cautious in [the administration of] justice. 3) Establish many disciples. And 3) make a safety fence around the Torah. (Mishnah Abot 1:1)

Jesus steps into this great chain of tradition, looks the Great Assembly in the eyes, and boldly offers an entirely new Law by which the justice of His Kingdom would be administered, at times upending and transcending the Law of Moses (Matt 5). He was anything but cautious in confronting other Jewish leaders with their misguided or corrupt administration justice (“They sit in Moses’ seat…but they do not practice what they preach,” Matt 23:1-3ff). While he established many disciples, he both challenged the “safety fence” of the Oral Law and boiled the 613 Laws down to his two Greatest Commandments as the essence of his new Torah or creed.

Comparing Jesus to other Mishnaic wisdom, we see him replacing Torah at the center of rabbinic discipleship with his own presence and authority.

• While the rabbis taught, “If he has gotten teachings of Torah, he has gotten himself life eternal” (m. Avot 2:7D).  Jesus suggested eternal life was found in him: “You examine the Scriptures carefully because you suppose that in them you have eternal life. Yet they testify about me” (John 5:39).
• Or, again in m. Avot 3:2 we read that wherever “two sit and exchange words of Torah, the Divine Presence rests amongst them;” while for Jesus “where two or three people gather in [his] name” Jesus’ (divine?) presence “dwells among them” (Matt 18:20)!
• Or, when Rabbi Ben Zoma says, “Who is a sage? He who learns from everybody” (m. Avot 4:1), Rabbi Jesus counters with, “You only have one Teacher” (Matt 23).

Again, reverence for the Teacher and not merely his teachings is of primary focus for discipleship to Jesus. On at least one point he is similar to the Mishnaic wisdom: “The reverence owing to your master should be like the awe owing to Heaven” (m. Avot 4:12). This leads to a primary point of this study: the personal embodiment of Torah as the authoritative element in the relationship between Jesus and his students.

JESUS & THE EMBODIMENT OF TORAH

If the heart of Pharasaic-Rabbinic discipleship was ‘passing on’ to their pupils their interpretation of oral and written Law, what did Jesus hope to pass along to his?  And what were the disciples to do with it in turn?

In his discussion of the characteristics of talmidhim (Hebrew equivalent of mathetes), Wilkins introduces the concept of Shimmush, which is “the secondary qualification of the Talmudhim, and means “attending upon and coming under the personal influence of the teacher and learning form his deportment. But shimmush itself was a study of Torah,” Wilkins continues, “because the rabbi’s life was to be an embodiment of Torah.”

The Jewish notion, shummush, that the rabbi was not only a commentator, teacher or interpreter of Torah, but called to be a living embodiment of the true Torah is the golden thread that connects Jesus’ unique teaching ministry and authority to the broader rabbinic tradition before and after him. Jesus and the apostles would then take this concept to new and greater heights of wisdom.

Rabbis were first and foremost tradents passing something on to their pupils.  While Davies notes that “the milieu within which Jesus appeared was conditioned for the faithful reception and transmission of tradition,” Jesus instead chose to pass on his very ‘Way’ of life, and called his disciples to model their lives after his embodied cruciform ethic.

By definition, the ‘embodiment’ of some teaching or Torah requires a teacher’s ‘body’, or unique person, to be an essential part of the teaching process. The naked Word must be clothed with human flesh. In the fullest sense, the Written Torah became the Torah-incarnate in Rabbi Jesus.

This is a key difference between Jesus and the Pharisaic-Rabbinic Judaism. For the latter, Wilkins notes, “the emphasis was upon the acquisition of oral Torah so that written Torah might be fully understood.” For Jesus, the emphasis is upon the acquisition of Him and his embodied Kingdom-shaped Torah so that the true heart of written Torah might be fully grasped and obeyed.

Yet, the tradent cannot “pass on” a teaching/Torah/wisdom to students unwilling to “receive.” In John’s Prologue we marvel that the written Torah has become embodied (incarnate) in the person of Jesus (1:14), but also lament that “his own people did not receive him” (1:11). “But to all who did receive him…he gave the right to become children of God” (1:12). Note the shift away from common rabbinic focus on passing on and receiving the rabbi’s teaching; now it is Jesus himself as the embodiment of Torah (the enfleshed Word) who is either received or rejected.

Just as young Jewish boys who openly received Torah instruction became “children of the commandment” (Bar Mitzvah) at age 13, so the one who receives Jesus as embodied Torah are given the honor of becoming “children of God’ (Jn 1:12). Moreover, Jesus raises the stakes warning that those who reject his embodied Torah are actually rejecting the entire chain of tradition going all the way back to Moses:

“These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life….But do not think I will accuse you before the Father. Your accuser is Moses, on whom your hopes are set. If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me” (John 5:39-40, 45-46).

This concept of embodied Torah dovetails nicely with the embodied Wisdom tradition that Jesus and then Paul and the early church embraced and taught. Scot McKnight connects these dots:

Jewish wisdom begins with substance, namely, the fear of YHWH. That fear of YHWH was expressed paradigmatically if not quintessentially in Torah-observance so that wisdom gets firmly connected to Torah in the Jewish tradition. But the earliest followers of Jesus reframed wisdom from Torah to Christ and Spirit. Hence, for them wisdom is Christ, Christ is Wisdom, the crucified and resurrected Jesus is the Wisdom of God. This is the kind of wisdom that provides insight into a specific situation in Paul’s pastoral work just as Torah opened the world to the 1st Century rabbi and the halakhic wisdom of Talmud and Tosefta opened the gates to new life for the later Hasidic masters. Wisdom then is not a free for all discernment but a substance-based discernment…The substance of Paul’s sense of wisdom, I now repeat yet again, is Christ and Christ reconstitutes the essence of wisdom. (forthcoming book ‘Pastor Paul’)

Likewise, I’m suggesting the substance of Rabbi Jesus’ Torah is Christ himself and his cruciform Kingdom ethic. What McKnight calls a “substance-based” wisdom I am calling a “Person-based”, or embodied, Torah. Perhaps its best to combine them and call it embodied Torah-Wisdom.

What then happens to the interpersonal dynamics between Rabbi and students when we embrace the idea—even necessity—of an embodied Torah-Wisdom? What does this mean for today’s teachers in the church? In what way is our teaching ’embodied’ or ‘disembodied’? Does this approach offer a challenge to the trend of satellite preaching via a screen, those of us who get much of our teaching digitally through a sermon podcast entering into our earbuds while we walk on a treadmill or drive in our car?

This are some of the questions and territory I explored in my research…