Comparisons

I always have to be reading something. During my lunch hour from work, I walk ten minutes to the main branch of the Boise Public Library and spend the time in a quiet corner (when I can find one) reading. A few days ago, I was looking for some books for my wife (she gave me a list) and I came across Bruce Chilton's Rabbi Paul: An Intellectual Biography. Apparently, Chilton has written enough that he's gotten his own wee page at Wikipedia, so I won't go over his bio in any detail here. I always find it interesting when non-Jewish Christian (I guess that's an assumption, because Chilton's bio doesn't actually say he's a believer) authors take on the Jewishness of New Testament figures and not attempt to remove the Jewishness replacing the Jew with a Gentile figure.

I'm only a couple of chapters into the book and may write a full review later, but so far, Chilton paints Paul as an intriguing young man and opens up the world of first century Judaism to his audience. However, his continual references to Paul's "conversion" on the road to Damascus makes my spider-sense tingle. How can you acknowledge the Jewishness of Paul, have written a book called Rabbi Jesus, apparently affirming the Jewishness of the Messiah, and still say that a Jewish man had to "convert" in order to worship the Jewish Messiah?

Compare that picture to the book I started reading last night, Postmissionary Messianic Judaism: Redefining Christian Engagement with the Jewish People  by Mark Kinzer, which says, in part, that Judaism and Christianity are not two separate religions and further says Christianity is an extension of Israel's worship of God. I'm only into Chapter 1 of the Kinzer book and plan to read both works in parallel, Chilton's book at the library and Kinzer's book at home. In order to crystallize the points of the Kinzer book for my review, I am finding it necessary to write copious notes as I read, which is easier in front of a computer in my home office, since I keyboard much faster than I can write with pencil and paper.

My first impression of the Kinzer book is that it's not as automatically Gentile despising as I had been lead to believe and actually says its purpose is to heal the schism between Messianic Judaism and the Christian church. I was frankly amazed by that statement since the proponents of Messianic Judaism/Bilateral Ecclesiology (MJ/BE), who seem to claim Kinzer's book as the template for their theology, strive to convince me that I must completely divorce myself from any Jewish or Hebraic context and thought and return forthwith to the Christian church, maintaining a polite and discrete distance from all things MJ/BE.

I'm putting all this in rather blunt language and there are subtleties that somewhat modify the reality of the MJ/BE representatives I've encountered, making the transactions not quite as hostile as you might imagine, but Kinzer's message (so far), seems to be one where he's talking to me, not at me.

Keep in mind, I can make no assumptions about Kinzer personally. All I have is his book and I've only read the Introduction and part of the first chapter, so I've much more material to cover. So far though, it doesn't seem as if he is trying to push Gentile believers away from him, his ideas, and his perspective.

In reading both Chilton's and Kinzer's books together, I do get two different pictures of my faith. Chilton seems to affirm that somewhere in Paul's experience as a Jewish Rabbi, he creates a new, separate religion that eventually is called Christianity. While Chilton works to present a picture of Paul's life as a Jew, raised in the diaspora, educated in Jerusalem under Gamaliel, and eventually pursuing the Messianic community under the authority of Caiaphas, he takes the traditional Christian view. Paul becomes something else besides a Jewish Rabbi, though built on top of his Jewish foundation, when he actually encounters the Messiah and proceeds in his later life as the Messiah's emissary to the Gentile pagans in the world around him.

Compare that to Kinzer's stated purpose in the book he's written specifically for Christians, as showing a Judaism growing from its chosen status by God and the church, growing as an extension of that Jewish faith, as a branch growing from a tree. Paul wouldn't be converting to Christianity at all, would remain wholly and completely Jewish in his faith and relationship to the Messiah, and would be introducing the God of the Jews to the Gentile nations.

I'll keep reading and render my reports periodically, but one thing that this comparison shows me so far is that Chilton's work promotes a separation between church and (Messianic) synagogue far more effectively than does Kinzer. If anything, at least as of part way through chapter 1 of his book, Kinzer seems to actually be trying to get Gentiles to learn more about how Messianic Jews see Yeshua/Jesus.