UPDATE: Welcome, readers of Theolog! I have responded to Jason Byassee’s comments here.

Lutheran Zephyr and Derek the Ænglican already have good comments on this article by Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish New Testament scholar at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Professor Levine argues for a stronger recognition of the essential Jewishness of Jesus by the Christian community, and sharply criticizes practices and rhetoric that define Jesus over against Judaism.

She is certainly right, I think, that a lot of Christian talk still lapses into a lazy caricature of “Judaism” as Jesus’ foil. And, as Prof. Levine points out, progressives, feminists, and liberation theologians aren’t exempt from this. It’s obscene, for instance, when extreme anti-Israel rhetoric, which at times borders on the anti-Semitic, is served up in the name of Jesus.

However, I also think LZ and Derek are both right that she seems to focus on the “Jesus of history” as normative for Christian faith in ways that are far from problem free. For instance, what are we to make of the claim that “preserving the fact that Jesus wore fringes [symbolizing the 613 commandmetns of the Torah], the New Testament mandates that respect for Jewish custom be maintained and that Jesus’ own Jewish practices be honored, even by the gentile church, which does not follow those customs”? Early on the church decided, for better or for worse, that keeping the Torah was not mandatory for Christians. So, it’s not clear what “mandting respect” for that practice would entail within the Christian community, apart from respecting the practices of our Jewish elder brothers and sisters in the faith.

Or take Prof. Levine’s contention that “as for Jesus’ Jewish identity, neither he nor his Jewish associates would have mourned the loss of a herd of hogs—animals that are not kosher and that represent conspicuous consumption in that they cost more to raise than they produce in meat”? Does this mean that Christians, to take one of my personal hobbyhorses, are free to treat pigs and other un-kosher animals as having no dignity as creatures of God?

What all of this gets at – and Derek, following Luke Timothy Johnson, highlights this point – is how difficult it is for Christians to simply take the “Jesus of history” (itself a problematic notion) as normative for their faith and practice in any straightforward way. First, as Derek also points out, the church has never confined Jesus’ influence to the example set by a historical figure 2,000 years ago, much less to the latest scholarly reconstruction. For Christian faith Jesus is first and foremost the living Lord whose Spirit continues to guide the church. Of course, that faith would be a mirage if the Jesus of history didn’t do and say the kinds of things recorded in the gospel accounts. But Christians aren’t committed to slavishly imitating all the details of Jesus’ life, even the religious details. That much was made clear at the Council of Jerusalem.

This doesn’t mean that Jesus’ Jewishness is unimportant, and Prof. Levine is correct to warn against the kind of crypto-Marcionism that seems to be a recurrent temptation in the church. The Jewish tradition and the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament constitute the matrix out of which Jesus came and out of which our faith comes. But the ongoing tradition and experience of the church isn’t necessarily bound by the details of the Judaism of Jesus’ day, anymore than contemporary Rabbinic Judaism has to ape the Judaism of the 1st century.

But, to say this also presents a challenge for contemporary Christians. Often the imitatio Christi is thought of in terms of simply copying the lifestyle of the historical Jesus (usually one favorite particular version), and this is sometimes presented as a superior alternative to the life of the institutional church. Or the Jesus of the gospels is treated as having ready-made answers to all of our moral dilemmas. If Christians believe in a risen Lord, though, attempting to mimic a 1st century Jewish rabbi, or wonder-working sage, or cynic philosopher, or whatever the Jesus du jour is, rather misses the point. One follows Jesus precisely by being incorporated into his body through partaking of the holy mysteries and hearing the Lord’s word. By being part of that body, we believe that we gradually, if haltingly, come to be formed according the pattern of Jesus, his life of self-giving service and love (again, I think L.T. Johnson is very good on this – see The Real Jesus and Living Jesus; both of these books had a big impact on me). In other words, why chase after a historical reconstruction when the living Jesus makes himself available to us here and now?