Voices In My Head Podcast Episode 317: Dr. Julie Galambush - Luke-Acts and the Creation of Christian

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Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer, a songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is where I discuss music, movies, books, pop culture, theology, and more with friends, colleagues, and sometimes just by myself. Now make sure to let me know what you think of today's episode by leaving me a review on iTunes or by tweeting at me @RickLeeJames. RickLeeJames on Twitter. And please join my mailing list at RickLeeJames.com where you can receive an email every time a new episode is released. By the way, in case you're interested in a daily dose of kindness and encouragement beyond this podcast, I also run the Twitter account @MrRogersSay where I post daily quotes from Fred Rogers, one of the voices in my head. Well, I guess that's it for the intro, so sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of Voices in My Head.

Welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I'm your host, Rick Lee James, and I'm very glad that you could be here with me again this week. This week is a different kind of episode because it is a lecture that I was privileged to be a part of here in Springfield, Ohio, by Dr. Julie Gallenbush. Dr. Julie Gallenbush is the Associate Professor Emerita of Religious Studies at the College of William and Mary. She's the author of a book called The Reluctant Parting: How the New Testament's Jewish Writers Created a Christian Book. And here on April 30th, 2019, at Temple Shalom in Springfield, Ohio, she did a wonderful lecture on Luke, Acts, and the creation of Christianity. I asked her if I would be able to record her lecture so that I could include it on the Voices in My Head podcast, and she graciously said yes. Now, this lecture will begin, and it's a little over an hour long from start to finish, and I hope you'll be able be able to hear everything because I was using my handheld recorder and she moved on and off mic a couple of times. But I think for the most part you're going to be able to catch all of this. But the beginning of it is my friend, which you've heard on the show a few times before, Rabbi Carrie Kosberg, introducing Dr. Gallenbush. And then after his introduction, which is excellent of itself— I could almost use that as a podcast— Dr. Gallenbush got up and gave her presentation. Let me give a quick description of what the presentation was about. The author of Luke-Acts created a now-familiar worldview in which Christianity is simultaneously the fulfillment and the rejection of the Jewish community. In a sad irony, the New Testament narrative that begins by saying God has remembered his people Israel ends with the announcement that God has turned away from the Jews. And that is the topic that she talked about for a little over an hour tonight at the time of my recording this. So I hope you will enjoy the conversation— well, not really a conversation, but the lecture. I had a good conversation with her before and after. But if you get a chance, check out her book. She is a former Baptist minister that is converted to Judaism, so she has an interesting story anyway. But the book, The Reluctant Parting: How the New Testament's Jewish Writers Created a Christian Book— no matter what faith you were a part of, the This book is an excellent resource for studying the Jewish roots of the New Testament and why it makes so much more sense if you will approach it from the Jewish perspective when you are reading it. You will really get a lot more out of your Bible study, I believe. So without any further ado, here is Dr. Julie Callenbush, uh, and she is being introduced first by Rabbi Cary Kosberg. Thanks for listening to Voices in My Head.

We are still in a holy season. To paraphrase the words which we usually hear in December, "God is the reason for the season." This is a season which Jews and Christians focus on a shared belief that the God of Israel and the world wants his children to be free to fully respond to his revelations. And of course, for Jews, that revelation is embodied in the Torah. For Christians, it is embodied in the person of Jesus. And for Muslims, it's embodied in the teachings of Muhammad. For Jews, Passover marks the redemption of, uh, slavery from Egypt. After Passover, we mark the 6 weeks up to Shavuot, marking the revelation of God's Torah at Sinai. For Christians, Holy Week remembers the passion and resurrection of Jesus, looking forward to Pentecost, which commemorates the Holy Spirit descending upon the apostles. We Jews and Christians share so much, and yet Throughout history, so much has divided us. We are older and younger siblings of the same family, but our bickering has been going on for centuries. But thankfully, that bickering in recent years has been changing into a better mutual understanding and even reconciliation. Christians are more seriously appreciating the Jewish roots of their faith. And we Jews are coming to understand that not all Christians are anti-Semites. Many are genuinely philo-Semites and are committed to supporting the Jewish community, as we have certainly seen this past weekend. In a world challenged by secularism that seems to be committed to removing God's presence from every venue of the human endeavor, Committed Jews and Christians understand that despite what may still divide us, we are still God's walking commercials in this world. Through her writing and teaching, our guest tonight, Dr. Julie Gallenbush, has contributed substantially to increasing and enriching that understanding and reconciliation. As someone who has read and studied the New Testament since I was 9 years old, I've always been fascinated and curious about how a Jewish sect evolved into a completely different religion, and one that came to be not just different, but antagonistic to its origin. And this is why I was simply blown away when I read Dr. Gallenbush's book, The Reluctant How Jewish Writers of the New Testament Created a Christian Book. Now this is not a paid commercial. I wasn't asked to hawk the book, but I'm hawking it anyway because it is an extremely important book for anyone who is interested in the beginnings of Christianity and how real was the religious diversity in the Jewish community in the first century. Thankfully, Dr. Gallenbush has brought some copies for sale, and for those of you who are not able to purchase because we've run out, she's happy to take orders. We're very privileged to have her as our guest over these past— these next two days, rather, and just let me give you a little bit of an introduction to her. She is Associate Professor Emerita of Religious Studies at the College of William and Mary. She holds a PhD in Old Testament Studies from Emory University and a Master of Divinity from Yale Divinity School. She was formerly an ordained American Baptist minister, but converted to Judaism and is now a member of Temple Rosh Hashanah in Falls Church, Virginia. Besides her book, The Reluctant Parting, Dr. Gallenbush has written extensively, contributing to the book, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, and is also the author of numerous other scholarly works. This evening, her talk is going to focus on the book, the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts. Tomorrow evening, she'll be talking about why translators intentionally mistranslate the Bible. And tomorrow at noon for our Lunch and Learn session, she will be talking about her own journey from being a believing Christian to becoming a believing Jew, and also how a professor of critical biblical scholarship can also be a person of religious faith. Let me say also that, um, Lunch reservations for tomorrow are really no longer available, but if you're still interested in attending the discussion, you are more than welcome to come. Our program tonight and tomorrow is co-sponsored by Temple Shalom, Christ Episcopal Church, High Street Methodist, United Methodist Church, and Wittenberg Campus Ministries, and has been made possible through a generous bequest from the late Florence Pennebaum. This is our second scholar-in-residence, and we hope it's going to be the second of many more to come. And with that, I want to introduce our guest speaker tonight, Dr. Julie Gombusch.

Thank you, Carrie. Let me know if you can— am I loud enough? Am I too loud? Okay, good. Well, I of course want to start by thanking Carrie and the churches for inviting me. It's honestly, it's just a lot of fun to be here, particularly having just taken early retirement. But it's like I get to do this for pleasure. It doesn't feel like work anymore, you know, to the extent it ever did. And it's also great to be in Ohio. I'm a native Clevelander, and my brother is an alumnus of Wittenberg College, and so, you know, there are things I recognize here from when my kid brother was in school. It's nice. One rule. Please do, you can interrupt me to ask questions anytime you want. I may say, "We'll get to that later," so don't be offended if I do that. But especially if you're not tracking me, if I said something that doesn't make sense to you or used a word that you're not familiar with, don't be embarrassed. Someone else here also is thinking, "What the heck does that mean?" And so please, it will help me as well as other people if if you ask for clarification when you want it. We're good?

Good.

And feel free to come farther forward, just like in the church. Everybody's in the back, oh well. Okay, my premise for this talk is that the author of Luke and Acts, the two volumes known as Luke-Acts, we'll call him Luke, my premise is that Luke created Christianity. Now that's a big kind of pompous claim, and obviously Luke didn't create the whole shebang. But what I really mean by that is that I think it is Luke who articulated Christianity as a belief system that is different from and often opposed to Judaism. It's not Jesus following Jews anymore. Anymore. It is something different in Luke's system ultimately. And that Christianity in Luke's hands is not only a different entity from Judaism, Luke has created a system that can be not Judaism but can still claim to be the heir to God's promises to Israel. Is that making sense? That it's not Judaism, Judaism, and yet somehow it is this non-Jewish Israel that he comes up with. And of course Luke makes his argument by way of a narrative. It's not really an argument per se. It's a narrative, an origin narrative that I think really has funded Christianity ever since. I really do think without Luke's narrative Christianity would look very different by now. It's so compelling. But before we get to Luke and Acts, I need to do two things. First, I want to talk a little bit about why I think Jesus' followers on the one hand and the rest of the Jews on the other disavowed one another. So I want to be talking about— we're working towards that parting between Judaism and Christianity, and I'm mostly going to be working us through Luke, but I want to give you one paradigm. To think about so that it's in your head as we go through this process. So why did the Jesus followers and the rest of the Jews split? This, of course, will be an oversimplification, but I think it's useful. I'm going to start from the Christian or Jesus following perspective. Jesus' initial followers are Jews, as you know, who had just witnessed the arrival of the Messiah. Messiah and the beginning of the end times, right? God's decisive intervention in history. If you are a first-century Jew— anybody? Yeah, no? Okay. If you are a first-century Jew and you become convinced that the Messiah has arrived, starting a new and different religion is not on your to-do list, right? I mean, if the Messiah has finally is interested in going out and starting some other religion. This is the right time to be Jewish, yeah? I mean, what else would you want to be at that point? So Jesus' early followers had zero interest in being anything other than Jews. On the contrary, they were clearly eager to spread the news about the Messiah to other Jews. Not surprisingly, for reasons we'll talk about in a minute, about in a second, the vast majority of the Jewish world could not have cared less about this Messiah. It makes me laugh even to think about it, right?

Yeah.

If the Messiah shows up and the Jewish world says, you have got to be kidding, that's a problem. So the disinterest in the Messiah on Israel's part apart really posed a very, very serious problem for Jesus' followers. I can't walk around with this, that's too bad. I'm a compulsive walker-arounder. One of my old professors, Luke Johnson, once wrote that Christianity suffered a primal injury from the Jewish community not accepting it. Accepting Jesus as Messiah. Christianity suffered this primal injury and Christian payback has extended over the centuries. That was, I think, he kind of encapsulated it, that it was a deep injury to Jesus followers not to have the rest of the Jewish community on board. So essentially, Somebody had to be wrong here, right? If Jesus' followers are right and this is the Messiah, then the whole rest of the Jewish community is wrong. And as scary as it might be to claim that, saying that the rest of the Jewish community is right and we're wrong would have been even harder. These are people who have had profound experiences convincing them that Jesus is present and powerful in their lives in ways that he never was during his mortal life. And so that's not something they can walk away from, and so they reach a theological conclusion that the rest of the Jews are simply wrong. And they have to try and explain away what's going on there. Now the Jewish side of this issue would have been quite different. Christian authors also describe the Jews' objections to them, but they explain this in a theological manner, right? Christian authors tended to claim that the Jews took offense at the Jesus group's theological claims, right? So we're still in a theological argument. We're saying Jesus is the Messiah, this is what God's up to, they are offended at what we claim about God, and so they are effectively against God. So it's still a theological explanation from the Christian side. In fact, it's highly unlikely that the larger Jewish community cared what Jesus' followers did or did not believe. Should I repeat that? I think the larger Jewish community really did not care what these people believed, first century Judaism was exceptionally diverse both in theology and in practice. Jews were often critical of one another's positions, but they were not into persecuting other Jews on the basis of their beliefs. They just— there was not a unified Judaism in this period, and so persecuting these people because of what they believed would not have— it doesn't make sense. Makes sense in context. So if religious belief was not a big deal to most Jews when it came to what these other folks believed, what was their problem with Jesus' followers? Guesses? I'm thinking of one word, begins with R. The Romans, okay? The problem was the Romans. The practices of the Jesus Jesus' following community were, in a word, not good for the Jews. And that's something that the Jewish community had to deal with. You can believe whatever you want, but if it endangers the Jewish community, we want to get as far as we can from you. Okay, so why is it not good for the Jews? Well, Jesus' followers were venerating somebody who had been crucified. Crucified as an insurrectionist against Rome, okay? Or they are recruiting other people to join this movement of following this guy who, from the Roman perspective, is an insurrectionist. Okay, you're in the Jewish community. I don't know how many of you are and how many of you aren't, but, um, what does this mean to you as a Jewish community living under Roman the rule. If you've got a group of Jews presenting themselves as Jews, revering someone crucified for insurrection, and recruiting other people to join this movement, I'm going to wait. How do you feel about that? What's the problem with it? They can commit suicide if they want to? I've got a no out there. That means you've got to explain.

Oh, that's nothing but trouble.

Go on, it's nothing but trouble. Yep.

Yeah, you got administrative headaches. I mean, you don't—

you got enough trouble with these people who want to be your rulers. Who wants them to be against you because of this small minority group? Right, exactly. That's encouraging terrorists. This is how the Romans saw it. Do you want these guys in your synagogue? No, no, no, no, no, because when the Romans come in, they're not going to just pick the few people, right, who are involved in this, they're going to do some more wholesale destruction. So Christianity already in that sense, in a very political pragmatic sense, is not good for the Jews. Because this group are primarily ethnic Jews and understand that they're ethnic Jews. So that's number one. And as if that weren't bad enough, you also have Jesus followers is going to non-Jews, to Gentiles, and convincing them to join this group. Well, that's no worse on the face of it than convincing other Jews to join this group. You've got the seditionist problem. The problem with the non-Jews is that they are taking these pagans, we'll call them faithful pagans who are faithful to all of their family and civic pagan gods, and they are telling them they can no longer worship their native gods. Even worse, they are not converting these pagans to Judaism. Okay, why does that matter? Can you all hear me when I'm downstairs, or is the mic really helpful? People want me keeping to the mic. Okay, I'll keep to the mic, good. That's what I needed to know. The problem is that people understood that the Jews had this, they only worshiped one God, and he was a very cranky God and did not like his people to worship other gods, right? They got that. They thought it was dumb, but the Romans understood this. So if they took somebody, converted them to Judaism, they might roll their eyes a little, But it's not a disaster. However, if you take someone who actually has a responsibility to worship their native gods, tell them to stop worshiping all of their family and city gods, but you don't make them into Jews, okay, what's our problem here? Terrifies me to even think about it. How are all those other gods going to feel? Yeah? I mean, in a world where you've got lots of gods, and from the Roman pagan perspective, they're out there, now you've got all these, not just the Romans who are going to be mad at you, right? All those gods are going to be mad, and like the Romans, they don't just pick out one person, they send things like earthquakes, right? So these people are They are disrespecting their families and they are causing danger to the community. And once again, you do not want those folks associated with your synagogue. And so I think the Jewish community increasingly simply has to disavow any connection to this Jesus-following group. They are not good for the Jews. So I think it's become really even still the tradition tradition today to think of the Jewish-Christian divide in Christian terms. They wrote a lot more about it as a theological divide. But I think although it probably was a theological issue for the Christians, the Jewish community was more likely to have seen it in terms of politics and survival, a much more pragmatic outlook. Yes, sure. politics of the Romans. And I would think that the Jewish hierarchy and the Jewish people would see this as a schism, that they were like Rome or whatever. You just can't go off and say, well, I'm just going to start this. I don't agree. You take yourself away from the community. The central zone, my impression was that it affected the Jewish community and beliefs in a serious way. And I didn't get the impression from what I, you know, read that it was a Roman problem. Ah, well, I'll start with the relationship between the Jewish leadership, the high priests and such, and the Romans. In this period, the high priests were appointed by the Romans, served at the pleasure of the Romans, and were the intermediaries between the Jewish community and the Roman rulership. That means that one of the most important roles of these folks, other than maybe offering a sacrifice, right, is making sure that the Jewish community does not have troublemakers who will bring down the wrath of Rome. That makes sense, that is one of their primary roles in this period. So for that reason, the leadership would have been very concerned because if these people look bad to Rome, we're in trouble. In terms of orthodoxy, you really, it's the most fun thing to read about, In the first century, there is not a Judaism. People, starting with Jacob Neusner, we were talking about Neusner earlier this evening, people have now begun to talk about first century Judaism because there were so many different sects and subsects that had a huge range of both beliefs and practice. We have records of Jews Gosh, Jews who intermarried, Jews who did not circumcise their sons, Jews, oh, Jews whose jobs required that they offer sacrifice to the Roman gods as part of that. And we have no evidence of people running them down or getting upset about that. But orthodoxy and centralized authority really was not yet part of the landscape. State, not yet or not anymore. It's in this period of reformation that this Jewish sect comes up. It also starts out very small, and people didn't have time to run down every renegade sect. So I think the heresy side probably is fairly small from the larger community side, whereas for the Jesus followers, followers for whom Jesus' resurrection is the whole reorganizing of the entire universe, for the Jewish people to reject that, that's a theological disaster. And so that's what they're focused on primarily. That's, or at least that's their easiest explanation for this unthinkable thing that's happening. Oh, if I go on, I'll never get out, so. I'll move forward. Okay, we're going to hold on to those different perspectives and now we get to do some history.

Yay! Yay, history!

It'll be quick. I need to give you, get you a little oriented to first century CE Jewish apocalypticism, that is Jews getting ready for the end times. First century Judaism had inherited several ideas that developed during an earlier period of persecution, namely under the Seleucids in the second century BCE, think Hanukkah, and these beliefs are just essential to the Jesus-following group. They would not have gone the directions they went without these beliefs. First and foremost, In light of the Jewish people's suffering, both first in the 2nd century BCE and then again under the Romans, the last days were at hand. There was such a thing as the last days, and they're at hand. Okay, what does that mean? It means that the worse the persecution gets, the more we need God to intervene. Right? Because we're not able to get ourselves out of this. So any time now, any minute, God is about to intervene in human history and bring about God's just rule, God's kingdom on earth. The end of the world as we know it is near. And this apocalyptic or eschatological thinking was very hot in, oh gosh, most of the first century. Among Jews. God's agent, this is number 2, God's agent in this intervention will be somebody called the Messiah, which means the anointed one, whose arrival will both signal and initiate those end times, right? Now again, depending on which group you're part of, the Messiah will be either human or divine. The Qumran folks, the Dead Sea Scrolls scrolls folks actually expected two messiahs, sort of a religious one and a military one. But no matter how you construe the messiah, the messiah's job is to liberate the Jews from their oppressors, and in the first century that means Rome. That's number 2. Number 3, and you have this lined out on your outlines in case, you know, that helps you keep it organized Third, God's establishment of his kingdom would include the resurrection of the dead. The resurrection had not actually been a part of, say, most of biblical Judaism. It seems to have been a response to persecution specifically. I keep saying, "Don't go there, Julie, get to Luke-Acts," but I have to tell you, okay. Resurrection is the response to persecution.

Why?

Because when the Seleucids in the 2nd century BCE are persecuting Jews, they are persecuting them for Jewish religious praxis. That means when the Seleucids kill people, are they going to kill the worst Jews or the best Jews? They're going to kill the best Jews, of course. So that suddenly people are being killed not in spite of being good, but because they're good. And this seems to have been just a horribly intolerable situation. And so the belief develops that when God comes to put everything right, doggone it, those people will be resurrected and rewarded, that they cannot have died in vain, and therefore there will be a resurrection when God intervenes. The resurrection also takes different forms. Some groups believe that everybody gets resurrected and then God judges them, rewards the righteous, punishes the wicked. The other kind of major stream of belief in this is that only the good people get resurrected and the bad people have to stay dead. So that, you know, it works, you get the same outcome with different means. Either way, when the Messiah comes, God will resurrect great masses of people in order to reward the righteous and punish the wicked. So as Roman abuses continued and worsened, messiahs start showing up. We know by name of several messiahs in the first century. They come, they teach, they work miracles. Rome notices, and they get and crucified. Crucifixion was the standard Roman punishment for insurrection against the state. It was public, it was slow, it was grisly, and so it taught everybody a lesson. The Romans were very in favor of crucifixion. So preachers, healers, revolutionaries were regularly hailed as the hoped-for Messiah and routinely killed by Rome, usually by crucifixion from what we can tell. In the midst of this messianic expectation and disappointment, Jesus shows up. He teaches, he preaches, he performs miracles, he gets hailed as the Messiah, therefore he gets crucified as an insurrectionist, right? So the minute he comes to Roman attention it's like, fine, Another one. So this is not part of the Messiah's job description. He's supposed to be liberating all the Jews. If you did get crucified, clearly you weren't the Messiah. It's like a hint, yeah? So Jesus is crucified and his followers, you have to see this at the end of the book of Luke, say, you know, we thought he was the one. Next, I mean, it's just, you can just see them kind of saying, okay. But then something happens. Jesus' followers have experiences that profoundly convince them that he has been raised from the dead and is present in a spiritual and extremely powerful way. Now this is not the global resurrection people had been expecting, but You know, it's a start, right? You gotta start somewhere. And if the resurrection has begun, even if it's just one person, then Jesus was the Messiah. The game's on, right? It's back, right? He was crucified, he wasn't the Messiah, he's resurrected, the end times are getting started. So Jesus' followers begin to go out and spread the word in the Jewish Jewish community that the Messiah has come. As it came to pass, before long Jesus' followers spread the news not only in Judea and Galilee, but also in the synagogues of the Diaspora, that is, places other than Israel where Jews are living. What happens there? As it turns out, not many Jews were interested just as it had been in Judea. But these diaspora synagogues also included many Gentiles. They get called God-fearers or God-lovers in different situations, but it seems that particularly among well-off Gentiles, including women, folks were very drawn to Judaism. They loved its antiquity, they liked its moral teachings, and they would come, they would participate in services and often became major donors to synagogues. What they didn't do was convert. Why not? Well, two reasons. One, circumcision. The Romans considered circumcision to be mutilation, even castration, They found it disgusting. And so for a high-standing Roman citizen to willingly become circumcised, it was not only painful and dangerous without effective antiseptic, it also cut you off from your social and professional connections. The same problem with promising to worship other gods. These Gentiles, the God-fearers, could come to the synagogue participate in various events, including the liturgy, and then go home and worship their family gods as well. If they were to stop worshiping the family gods, again, they would be isolating themselves from their entire community and effectively become outcasts. So actual conversion of these God-fearers was not a substantial part of the experience. So many of these God-fearers who had been informally associated with synagogues were attracted to the Jesus sect. No one knows exactly what was so attractive about it, but it seemed to be— part of it is probably that you had a divine patron, a personal divine patron who guaranteed could do personal spiritual transformation and could intercede for you to get you eternal life. This was a very good deal. It also parallels what was going on in many of the mystery cults that were being practiced in Rome, and so this idea of a divine patron who could help you in— well, it's actually part of the Roman social system too, but it was part of the mystery cults, and so this kind of more spiritually, I almost want to say profitable, offering eternal life, this version of Judaism, which also had admission on easy terms, no circumcision, became very attractive to the Gentiles who were already in the synagogues. So from a contemporary Jewish perspective, The Jesus group goes out, they say Jesus is alive, I don't know what about that, right? But I am noticing that very few Jews are signing on and before very long more Gentiles than Jews are joining. From a Jewish perspective, particularly I say a contemporary Jewish perspective, the question The obvious question is, didn't they notice this? Right? Did they not notice that only the Gentiles were actually interested? I mean, I think it's from a contemporary perspective, it's just like, well, duh, what were they thinking? But here's the thing. If you were to look up all the prophetic texts that talk about the end times, Old Testament times, and I've done it, you would find that most or all of them, depending on how you're reading it, say that in the end times, which is what we're hoping it is, right? The Gentiles will come to the God of Israel. You find it, if you're looking for it, you see it over and over. I'm looking at Isaiah 2 right now. 'in the days to come the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established as the highest of the mountains.' You all heard this. 'And shall be raised above the hills. All the nations shall stream to it.' The nations is 'goyim,' right? All the Gentiles shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, 'Come, let us go up to the mountain of Adonai, to the house of the God of Jacob.' that he can teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths. Okay, the Gentiles are coming. I'm looking at Isaiah 49 for a second where God says, "I'll give you as a light to the nations that my salvation may reach the end of the earth." And we'll leave it there for now. I have to get it in a couple of different, several different versions. Okay, so what does this mean for Jesus' followers that more Gentiles than Jews are joining? It's the end time, duh, right? This is not disconfirmation at all for them, it's a very strong confirmation that the Gentiles are coming just the way they're supposed to come in the last days. So This means that even as the sect moves toward becoming majority Gentile, which it does fairly quickly, Jesus' Jewish followers can very reasonably believe they are fulfilling God's will for the Jews as well as the Gentiles, okay? There's no cognitive dissonance in this. So, So here come the Gentiles. That's nice, but at this point the community is going to face a big problem, namely, now that we've got them, what do we do with them? Specifically, do we convert them to Judaism, circumcise the males, go through, you know, teach them the way of the God of Jacob like it says in Isaiah, though it doesn't say that everywhere. Make them Jews, or do we start serving BLTs at the coffee hour, right? I mean, what is it going to be? Are they still Gentiles, or are they actually joining? So— Is that the origin of the BLT? No, it's all just one animal. They just didn't have mayonnaise on it then. That's the only difference. So the question of whether Gentiles needed to undergo full conversion actually results as, if you've read the New Testament you see it, a widespread and lasting schism, not between Jews and Jesus-following Jews and other Jews, but within the Jesus-following movement, all right? Now the group who insists on full conversion, as you can imagine, does not grow as quickly as the group that allows Gentiles on easy terms, yeah? I know there are probably other reasons, but that group of Jesus followers remains till at least the 5th century, we have mention of them, but they never become a major force. And the New Testament, of course, was written by the group that favored including Gentiles without circumcision. Okay, now we get to talk. About Luke-Acts, at last. Luke-Acts is two volumes of the New Testament, a quarter of the New Testament is taken up by stuff written by this one guy, and I believe Luke intended it as volumes 2 and 3 of a 3-volume history of the Jews. Volume 1 would be the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, which tells the story of early Jewish history. Volume 2, the Gospel of Luke, tells the story of the life of the Messiah and goes through his resurrection. Volume 3, the Acts of the Apostles, is effectively describing Israel in the Messianic age, right? Because as Luke understands it, the Messiah has come, and so now we get we get to see what happens to Jesus, to the Messiah's followers, and how does that go forward. Together, taken together, if you take the 3 volumes together, or even the 2 New Testament volumes, together I think these volumes form the master narrative of Christian origins. Luke explains and justifies Christianity's self-identity as the new or even the true Israel. And I think that's part of Christian identity that's very, very hard for Jews to get their heads around. You know, folks who aren't Jews ethnically, religiously, anything, can define themselves and historically probably more than today have defined themselves as Israel. And I could start singing hymns to you if you want, but I'll just go through the first verse and I won't sing it. I'll spare you. Listen up, and particularly if you're Jewish, you're going to have to tell me what this hymn is about. And it goes: Come, ye faithful, raise the strain of triumphant gladness. God has brought his Israel into joy from sadness. It's Timely too. "Loosed from Pharaoh's bitter yoke, Jacob's sons and daughters, led them with unmoistened foot, led them with unmoistened foot through the Red Sea waters." Okay, what's this hymn about? It's the Exodus. Anybody want to explain when this hymn is sung and what it goes on to be about? It's an Easter hymn. Okay? So the— and I mean, again, having been raised Christian, I just— there's no question as a Christian when I would have been singing this, I was— I knew that I was one of Jacob's sons and daughters and I was celebrating having been rescued from Pharaoh because that's what we were doing on that day. So that identity is, I think, part of what I'm trying to get at. Trying to work with tonight, how Luke really I think made that plausible within the Jesus following movement. By the time that Luke is writing, and he's writing toward the end of the first century CE or AD, no one knows exactly, toward the end, the group of Jesus followers who require non-Jewish Jews to get circumcised has already dwindled. The group admitting Jews on easy terms has grown. Sometime around the year 100, we believe that the Jesus movement becomes majority Gentile, and that figure, that percentage, just continues to grow. This means that the Gentile group's status as a Jewish sect starts to be questioned by Jews and Gentiles alike, right? It's just not obvious that an essentially non-Jewish group can be the true continuation of biblical Israel. That, I think, is the question that underlies Luke's work. And luckily for us, he actually begins by explaining his reasons for writing. And I will apologize, the things I'm reading I had on a PowerPoint, we've had trouble getting the PowerPoint to work. I'm also making sure I didn't just knock over the water that's down there. But the PowerPoint is not necessary. Tomorrow night it'll work because it will be necessary. But for now, I will read to you Luke's reason for writing the book. I'm so glad he put that there. Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. Notice that Luke tells you he was not an eyewitness to Jesus' lifetime. It was handed on to us by reliable eyewitnesses. I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth, and know the truth is a lousy translation, so that you may have security is what the verb actually means, so that you may have security about the things about which you have already been instructed. Okay, he's writing for some guy named Theophilus. Theophilus though means god lover. So Theophilus may have been a person, it may also be the whole category of these God fearers whom Luke was trying to address. We really don't have an answer to that one. This Theophilus has already been instructed about the whole Jesus thing, but has worries. Luke needs to put this all in order so that Theophilus will have security about about this whole Jesus thing. So at that point, the natural question I think is, what's Theophilus worried about, right? If Luke is writing to address his worries, what was he worried about? And as I read Luke's work, I see him answering 3 questions that a Gentile might reasonably or even inevitably have about the Jesus sect's status as a Jewish community. First, is this group really Jewish? All right? It doesn't look very Jewish. Is it really Jewish? Second, if it's really Jewish, why am I allowed in without converting to Judaism? What's that all about? And third, if this group is so Jewish— oh, you know what's coming. If this group is so Jewish, Where are all the Jews? Right? These are problems. And Luke goes about, just as he said he would, answering this in a very orderly way. First, is it really Jewish? I'm going to start reading down there because I cannot do this all from on high, but if I'm not loud enough, any one of you can wave and send me back up here, okay? Alright. So he tells Theophilus, he tells Theophilus he's going to give him security, and he goes on in the next verse with the story. In the days of King Herod of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah who belonged to the priestly order of Abijah. His wife was a descendant of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. Both of them were righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord. These are good Jews. But they had no children because Elizabeth was barren, and both were getting on in years. Okay, I want you to answer this question only if you've never read Luke's Gospel, okay? What's going to happen What's going to happen next?

Pardon?

An angel's going to come and? She's going to have a child. How did you know that? Family prongs. There is precedent one way or another. There's precedent. Boy child or girl child?

Boy.

How did you know? Right? Look, it's even written in a kind of archaic Greek to make it sound like the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Genius. He's showing you a new Abraham and Sarah, right? The elderly, pious Jewish couple keeping all the commandments. She's barren, so they have no children. Of course God is going to intervene, she's going to get pregnant. Yes, so she does. That was enough for you down there. Keep moving, keeps you awake, you know? So Elizabeth gets pregnant, and we then hear, see, here's where I need my PowerPoint to keep me in line. Mary then, Elizabeth's cousin, hears that she's also going to have a baby, and she's a virgin. The angel comes to Mary and says, oh, you're going to conceive this baby because nothing is impossible with God. And Mary said, if she were speaking Hebrew, hineni. In English it's here am I, in Greek it's eueni. She says, okay, why is here am I, hineni, an important thing for somebody to say in this text? It's what— first, it's what Abraham says, it's what Moses says, it's what Samuel says. This is the way faithful Israel responds. And so Luke is beginning the story of effectively God is reinvigorating his work with Israel. He's giving it a new beginning through these faithful Jews, humble, faithful Jews are responding to God's work. He very carefully structures this section. And Mary says, goes on, my soul magnifies the Lord. Yitgadal veyitze'ah. I mean, she is exactly, it's a classic Jewish prayer opening here. He's helped his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy. According to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and his descendants forever. She immediately says, oh my gosh, this is God fulfilling the promises to Abraham. In Luke's Gospel, Jesus is circumcised. In Luke's Gospel, his parents perform "tejon haben," which I never knew what it was growing up, but they take him to to the temple as the firstborn to redeem him. Luke is very careful to tell you that these are observant Jews. They're doing it the right way. When Zechariah becomes the father of, turns out to be John the Baptist, the old guy whose wife was barren, he immediately says, Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, he has looked looked favorably on his people and redeemed them. He has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors. He's remembered his holy covenant. Okay, what we know is going to become Christianity is God remembering his holy covenant, the oath he swore to our ancestor Abraham. Jesus gets taken to the temple, we'll go back to the pigeon haben for this. Redemption ceremony, and there is an old prophet, righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit rested upon him, and it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Messiah. Jesus comes in, and Simeon says, now I can die in peace. My eyes have seen your salvation which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel. So scene after scene after scene is structured to show you this new miracle. Things are happening just like in the Bible. Luke didn't know he was writing what would be Bible to somebody someday, but he is creating this world in which stuff happens just like in the Bible. So that's number 1, is it Jewish? You better believe it's Jewish. He has, you know, he's lined up quite a bit of story to show that, that this is the culmination of the story of Israel. Question number 2 from Theopolis, if it's so Jewish, Why am I allowed in? Oh, well, Luke explains this in the book of Acts. I'm going to try and go through this quickly because I realize we don't have all night. I mean, I do, you may not, but I'll try and get through this quickly. Luke, again, gives a narrative explanation for why Gentiles are allowed into this fulfillment of Israel without circumcision, and he takes most— it's pretty much 6 chapters that he takes in Acts to explain this. I promise I won't read it all. But we start out in Caesarea. There's a man named Cornelius who was a centurion of the Italian cohort, so this is a Roman officer. He was a devout man who feared God. He is a God-fearer, he has an association with the synagogue. He gave alms generously to the people, prayed constantly to God, and then one day he has a vision in which an angel says, your prayers and alms have ascended to God, send men to Joppa to a certain Simeon called, or Simon called Peter, okay, the apostle Peter. Cornelius, the Roman centurion, is he was told to send to Peter. Fine, so Cornelius says, oh, there's an angel, I'll send to this Peter guy, see what he has to say. Well, about noon the next day, as they were on their journey and approaching the city, the servants of Cornelius, Peter the apostle went up on the roof to pray. He became hungry and wanted something to eat. And while it was being prepared, he fell into a trance. Really hungry. He saw the heavens open and something like a large sheet coming down, lowered to the ground by its corners, and in it were all kinds of four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air. And he heard a voice saying, get up, Peter, kill and eat. And Peter said, by no means, Lord, I've never eaten anything this is unclean animals all in this sheet. And he's like, no, I'm not going to eat these things, I'm religious. This happened 3 times, and Peter was greatly puzzled, and suddenly the men sent by Cornelius appeared. Ta-da-dum, right? He's there saying, what does this mean? I'm supposed to be eating unclean food, and all of a sudden, And duh, the unclean people are there at the door. So Peter, luckily the Spirit comes and tells him, although these men are looking for you, go talk to them and go with them without hesitation. So Peter invites them in and goes with them to see Cornelius. He gets to Cornelius and says, how are you? House and gives a talk and says, "I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him." Okay, just the Gentiles are acceptable, right? And he goes on and tells the story of Jesus. But while Peter was still speaking, the Holy Holy Spirit, the presence of God, fell upon all who heard the word. The circumcised believers, okay, so this is, we don't know if they're Jews or converted Gentiles. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God. Then Peter said, 'Can anyone withhold the water from baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?' So he ordered them to be baptized. Okay, the argument here is baptism is a conversion ritual, and he's saying, well, we don't have to think about circumcision or anything else. God has already filled them with the kind of spirit that we are all hoping God will to fill us with, what's not to baptize, right? I mean, God has already done this work for us. So Peter goes, he baptizes them, he starts telling other people about it. In his next description of this event he says, "The Spirit told me to go with these people and not to make a distinction between them and us." biblical scholar, I've got to have the lights going on all over with this, right? God told us not to make a distinction between them and us. If late at night when you can't sleep you read Leviticus, you will know that one of the most important commandments in the formation of Israel is you shall make a distinction between the holy and the profane, between Israel and the nations, Making a distinction is what identifies Israel as Israel, and now all of a sudden he says God is not making a distinction. This is, I said, a huge claim. Just amazing to me anyway. So he then describes the Holy Spirit coming on these people and says if God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord, Lord Jesus, who was I that I could hinder God? Well, okay. Interestingly, Luke doesn't really make an argument for the inclusion of the Gentiles as such. His argument is God said so, right? That really is the whole argument is God said so, there's nothing I can do about it. Now we get an interlude in which we are watching Paul bringing in Gentiles and deciding whether to circumcise them or not. And eventually people are challenging Paul's actions, and they bring him to Jerusalem before the elders so that the elders can make a decision about how we're going to handle these Gentiles. So they get there, tell them that— they were praising all that God had done with them, but some believers who belonged to the sect of the Pharisees, who obviously the reader is not supposed to like, stood up and said, "It is necessary for them to be circumcised in order to keep the law of Moses." After much debate, Peter stood up and said to them, "My brothers, I am, was sent to the Gentiles, and God who knows the the human heart testified to them by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us— this is the third time we're hearing it, of course— in cleansing their hearts by faith, he has made no distinction. Why are you putting God to the test? So the community reaches the decision that Gentile converts do not need to be circumcised. Why? Because God God said so. Now if you're reading Paul, you will get the idea that this fight went on and on and there was a very ugly schism in the Jesus-following group. When you read Paul, for the most part everybody has just decided, oh, well God said so, so we won't circumcise Gentiles anymore. Luke is kind of carving out a little turf here, right, saying his version of the Jesus movement is the one that God actually wanted. Which, I mean, if it isn't, why would you be following it? So it makes some sense. Finally, Luke addresses that last, and I think far more faithful question, if this is so Jewish, so where are all the Jews? At this point, Luke introduces a theme that also shows up in Paul, namely that with the arrival of the Messiah, Israel has been divided. Okay? In Luke and Acts, there are several little places where he shows you hints of this happening. So that, for example, Jesus at the beginning of his ministry is talking about John the Baptist, And he says, I tell you, among those born of women no one is greater than John, yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. And all the people who heard this, that is the regular Jewish people, right? All the people who heard this, including the tax collectors, acknowledged the justice of God because they had been baptized with John's baptism. But by refusing to be baptized, be by him, the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected God's purpose for themselves.

Wow!

I mean, this is not a case of John came and said, "Do you want to get baptized?" and they said, "No thanks." Uh-uh. Doesn't work that way. They have refused John's baptism and rejected the will of God for themselves. And so Israel is being divided. Between faithful Israel which follows Jesus and failed Israel, and he does use the word failed regularly, that has rejected God. It's not just they didn't notice anymore. We've got to understand the difference between what we're doing and what they're doing, and they have rejected God. Oh, I'm going to resist the temptation No, I won't resist this temptation. I have several more of those I wanted to go through, but I won't. I'll give you two more, one more fateful than the other. At the crucifixion, you see the first time this is really sort of acted out. Jesus is crucified together with two criminals, one on either side. And one of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding Jesus and saying, 'Hey, aren't you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!' But the other rebuked him, saying, 'Do you not fear God, since you're under the same sentence of condemnation? And we've been condemned justly, but this man has done nothing wrong.' And then he said, 'Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.' And he replied, 'Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.' And so you've got 3 Jews on crosses, bad Israel rejects him, faithful Israel accepts him and is brought into paradise. It's right there on the cross, the division of Israel. So Luke ends up answering the question of why are the Jews not joining with this division of Israel Israel into the good Jews and the bad Jews. And unfortunately, that is a strategy that has had—

ah!

—unspeakably horrible consequences over the centuries. At the very end of Acts, the Apostle Paul has been out preaching, he gets into trouble, trouble in lots of places, he finally says, "I don't like these local courts, I want to be tried by Rome." So he gets sent with many adventures off to Rome, and in the last scene Paul is under house arrest in Rome awaiting his trial. And in Acts 28 it says, "He called together the local leaders of the Jews," and explains why he's there. And the leaders say, um, we would like to hear from you what you think, for with regard to this sect, the Jesus sect, we know that everywhere it is spoken against. So they set a day and came to him at his lodgings, and from morning until evening he explained the matter to them, testifying to the kingdom of God and trying to convince them about Jesus from both the Law of Moses and from the prophets. So we're all the way back to the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, right? He's saying this is exactly what's there in the text. Some were convinced by what he said, while others refused to believe. So they disagreed with each other. But as they were leaving, Paul made one more statement. The Holy Spirit was right in saying to your ancestors through the prophet Isaiah, "Go to this people and say, 'You will listen and listen and never understand, and you will look and look and never see. For this people's heart has grown dull and their ears are hard of hearing, and they shut their eyes so that they might not look with their eyes and listen with their ears and understand with their heart.'" 'and turn and I would heal them. Let it be known to you then that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles. They will listen.' So Luke has moved, I think, sort of breathtakingly from those beautiful scenes of the new Abraham and Sarah and this lovely community welcoming God to an outright rejection of the Jews. It's mind-boggling that he so effectively says this is Israel, this is Israel, this is really Israel, and then by the end what he has done is he's In his narrative world and in his community ultimately, he has created a world in which true Israel can exist without any Jews. And I think it's 8:36. Rather than taking any more time than I'm officially allotted, we can talk about that. I think the consequences of— cannot be overestimated. And I say that as someone who— I was like Luke's ideal reader as a young person. I mean, I had this deep sentimental attachment to what I thought was Judaism based on what I read in Luke's Gospel, and had no problem though reading that through to the conclusion in which in which the bad Jews get left out and the good ones, which included me, got this message. I think it's a powerful and very troubling thing. I feel so ambivalent about Luke because I love the good part so much. And I guess, I'll take a stab for a second to these assumptions at the beginning about why the Jews cannot incorporate the Christians, that they're dangerous for the Jewish community, and why the Christians feel this sting of rejection and cognitive dissonance and have to come up with some paradigm that will explain why the Jews don't want this beautiful gift of God that they have been given. I think it really does sort of play out, play out that problem.

Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com where you can find out more about me, get my music on vinyl and CD, follow my blog, and even schedule me for a concert or a speaking engagement. Better yet, even a book signing in your neighborhood. You can find all that and more at rickleejames.com. Also, it would mean a great deal to me if you could write a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews that we receive, the more visible this podcast will be online. And now for the benediction: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. God bless you, and thank you for listening to Voices in My Head. This is Rick Lee James, and the music you are hearing is from my new album, Thunder. The title track, Thunder, is a never-before-released song by the late Rich Mullins. There are also 12 other tracks made up of original music, hymns, and readings to guide the listener on a journey. You can buy Thunder today It today on clear vinyl and CD, or stream it on Spotify, Apple Music, and almost every other music streaming service. Thunder. Hear it today at rickleejames.com.