Recommended: three video talks by Professor Daniel Boyarin (gratis post)

Provocative Jewish "Jesus scholarship"

A few posts back, I recommended the work of the late Michael Heiser, a scholar with the gift of making the findings of sophisticated contemporary biblical and theological research accessible to the intelligent layperson. His chief concern was to show the continuity between the Old Testament and the New — that Jesus’ revelation and self-understanding had a context that came directly from Second Temple Jewish tradition. In other words, all the features we associate with Christian orthodox faith and mysticism — the Trinity, the Messianic divine Son of Man, the identification of the Word of God with God’s Son that we find in John, resurrection, the dispensation of the Spirit, and so on — are already present in seminal form in the Hebrew Scriptures and intertestamental literature. In short, all the distinctive aspects of Christianity are Jewish in origin and, throughout the early patristic period, even in formulation.

Long before I had heard of Heiser, I had encountered the late Alan F. Segal’s two important books, Two Powers in Heaven and Paul the Convert. One of the things that makes Segal’s research invaluable is that he was Jewish, and thus his studies contain no Christian bias. Likewise, with great erudition, he argued convincingly (and, I think, irrefutably) that Christianity — including Pauline Christianity — has its roots firmly embedded in the mystical Jewish tradition. The differences between Pharisaic and Christian Jews were, at heart, not initially theological but concerning the identity of Jesus of Nazareth — was he or wasn’t he the divine Son of Man of Daniel 7? (As an aside, I believe that Jesus most definitely identified himself as such.)

Which brings me to Professor Daniel Boyarin, another highly regarded Jewish scholar whose work, like Segal’s, explores this same subject (one can read about Boyarin here and here). Below, I post some fascinating lectures of his that will be, admittedly, demanding for some, but rich in insight if one sticks with them. As an Orthodox Christian, I can’t say that I agree with his opinions on a few matters (e.g., I don’t buy his take on the Nicene Creed), but — as I’ve said before in other contexts — one should eat the fish and pick out the bones.

The first is a lecture entitled “Two Notes on the ‘Jewishness’ of the New Testament: Revelation and Hebrews”:

The second is entitled “Mark, Matthew, and Keeping Kosher”:

I’ve added a final short video, comprising a few clips from a longer lecture presented in Russia some years back, entitled “The Two Thones: One Like a Son of Man, and One God”: