The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament. Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik

assessment of Delitzsch squares well with Soloveitchik, with a few caveats, when he writes: “Delitzsch saw no gap between the two testaments. In fact, in an extraordinary image, Delitzsch portrayed the old covenant and the new covenant standing side-by-side in the three days between Jesus’ crucifixion and his resurrection.”⁵⁸ Soloveitchik, of course, would extend that symmetry much further. Yet Delitzsch never quite overcame his devotion to keeping Judaism and Christianity apart.

      The exact date of the publication of Delitzsch’s full Hebrew translation is not known; but we have evidence that he published the work as Eine neue hebräische Übersetzung des Neuen Testaments (A new Hebrew translation of the New Testament) in 1864 (some online references have it as 1877). It was published by the British and Foreign Bible Society in London, where Soloveitchik was living at the time. If the first date is correct, Soloveitchik, who likely wrote his original Hebrew commentary between 1863 and 1868, could easily have used it as his base text. Even if the correct date is 1877, Soloveitchik could have used it, as he continued to revise his Hebrew text until its publication. Delitzsch was said to have spent over forty years on this translation, consulting and correcting all previous translations and separately publishing a Hebrew translation of some of Paul’s epistles beforehand. Given his stature in the field of biblical scholarship, his attention to biblical and rabbinic Hebrew—which would have attracted Soloveitchik—and the fact that it appeared at a time and in a place where Soloveitchik could have easily consulted it, we chose to use Delitzsch’s The Delitzsch Hebrew Gospels: A Hebrew English Translation as the base text of the New Testament. We made some small changes—for example, we substituted YHWH (referring to God) for Delitzsch’s “Ha-Shem.” Delitzsch tried to replicate what he thought was the language of the time, as best he could. Even if Soloveitchik did not use Delitzsch, or did not use him exclusively, Delitzsch’s attention to Mishnaic and early rabbinic Hebrew, including Aramaic, coheres with Soloveitchik’s project better than any other New Testament text that we consulted.

      I conclude this section with a few observations on the state of Christian attitudes toward Jews and Judaism of this period and with observations regarding the Jewish roots of the Gospels. Much of the modern Christian assessment of Judaism and its role in Christianity comes from the Tübingen School, founded by Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), a Hegelian by training, who viewed Christianity as an interweaving of two forms of early Christianity; what later became known as Jewish-Christianity (also known as Petrine Christianity) and Gentile Christianity (also known as Pauline Christianity).⁵⁹ This school took many forms, some leading to more positive assessments of Judaism, and some to more negative ones.⁶⁰ Jewish scholars interested in Christianity, such as Abraham Geiger, in many ways were responding critically to various elements of the Tübingen School.⁶¹ One element worth noting is how Jewish sources were used to separate the two religions and how Christian scholars and missionaries became Hebraists in order to assess the value of rabbinic Judaism to the Gospels. In his study of Delitzsch and Strack, Alan Levenson introduces what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called “allosemitism” to describe at least some of these Hebraist missionaries. Allosemitism is the Christian idea that we should offer positive appraisals of Judaism while maintaining a strict separation between the two religions. Allosemitism took both positive and negative forms in the modern Christian West, sometimes even in the work of one thinker.⁶² A classic example of this general approach can be found in the seminal essay by George Foot Moore, “Christian Writers on Judaism,” published in 1921.⁶³ Another striking example of the phenomenon of Christian Hebraism of this period, even more relevant to us, was published only one year after Moore’s essay. The multivolume Strack-Billerbeck Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch, published in 1922, was the most comprehensive collection of rabbinic sources structured as annotations to the Gospels to date.

      Strack, a student of Delitzsch, began the work but only finished Matthew before he died. The remainder of the work was produced by Paul Billerbeck. Strack-Billerbeck offers extensive source data of rabbinic literature on the Gospels, verse by verse. Strack’s other work on rabbinics, Einleitung in Talmud und Midrasch (Introduction to Talmud and midrash), published in 1921, is one of the standard Christian renderings of rabbinic Judaism in a positive and even laudatory light and is still used today.⁶⁴ Taken together, these works constitute perhaps the most important intervention of Christian scholarship on rabbinic Judaism in the early twentieth century. Citing thousands of rabbinic sources on New Testament scripture, this work was not treated merely as an anthology. Jewish scholar of Christianity Samuel Sandmel published a systematic critique of Strack-Billerbeck, arguing that even as it ostensibly offered a positive assessment of Judaism, in most cases the underlying claim was that Jesus’ teaching offered a better reading of the cited rabbinic texts.⁶⁵ Thus while rabbinic Judaism may be necessary to fully understand the Gospels, once they are introduced what we find is that the Gospel are superior. As Levenson put it, according to Strack-Billerbeck, “the only thing wrong with Judaism was that it was not Christianity.”⁶⁶

      Of course, this all takes place after Soloveitchik’s time. He likely knew little or nothing about F. C. Bauer and the Tübingen School and predated Strack-Billerbeck and the conversation that ensued. The fact that Soloveitchik wrote a Hebrew commentary to the Synoptics replete with rabbinic sources—that was also published in French, German, and Polish translations four decades before Strack-Billerbeck and that seems to have been unknown to them—makes his work even more significant. The almost total eclipse of Soloveitchik’s commentary fills an important lacuna in understanding the trajectory from the Tübingen School to Strack-Billerbeck. We can say that Soloveitchik’s project and Strack-Billerbeck, while similar in some ways, are quite different. Strack-Billerbeck set out to cite as many relevant rabbinic passages as they could find, what Samuel Sandmel called the “piling up of rabbinic passages.” In this sense, the work attempts to be a kind of collection even as Sandmel argues that it was not unbiased in its choices, contextualization, and interpretations.

      Soloveitchik never claimed to be objective, nor was he interested in simply collecting rabbinic sources. He begins his project with a very open agenda: to prove the symmetry of Judaism and Christianity on theological grounds that he hoped would diminish anti-Semitism. Therefore, he cites a rabbinic or Jewish medieval teaching only if he feels the verse needs such an interpretation to cohere with normative Judaism. Or, in some cases, he offers a rabbinic teaching as a way to clarify an ambiguity in the Gospel text itself. In this sense, he begins with an assumption in concert with many in the Tübingen School about Jesus’ Jewish context. There are, however, two important differences. First, Soloveitchik does not see Jesus as deviating from the basic Jewish teachings of his time; and second, Soloveitchik believed that the Talmud and midrash, and even Maimonides, faithfully transmit normative Jewish life and law that was operative in the time of Jesus. While we now know that such an assumption is no longer viable, Soloveitchik’s rabbinic training in Volozhin trained him to think in such terms and thus he used an ahistorical assumption to make his historical argument, not only about Jesus’ Jewishness (this was assumed) but his fidelity to Judaism.⁶⁷

      While both Soloveitchik and Strack-Billerbeck had an agenda in the sense that both wanted us to read the New Testament in a new way, Soloveitchik was more focused on using rabbinic texts selectively to solve a problem in the text of the Gospel, while Strack-Billerbeck may have been more interested in offering the reader a wide plethora of rabbinic sources to show their influence on Jesus and perhaps the way Jesus moves beyond them. In this sense, their agendas stand in opposition: Strack-Billerbeck expressed a certain form of allosemitism while Soloveitchik sought to bring the two testaments, and both religions, closer together. In this, he makes a significant contribution to the larger discussion of Judaism and Christianity, especially coming from a traditionally trained and observant rabbinic Jew.

      Before moving to the question of conversion, a few comments are in order about George Foot Moore’s seminal 1922 essay “Christian Writers on Judaism.” Moore is important here because he may be one of the first Christian scholars to argue that thorough research into rabbinic Judaism is essential to understand not only the historical context but the theological message of the Gospels. He resisted the tendency of Christian scholars to focus on Apocryphal rather than rabbinic materials, claiming that the latter, even if redacted long after Jesus’ time, better represent the lives of Jews than