Seeing Jesus Through Different Windows

There are even methods to help decipher all the hidden meanings in the text. One is called the principle of first mention. Whenever you come across a significant word in the passage, find out where this word first appears in the Bible. John does this in his gospel. This first mention of the word love in 3:16 - "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son." We then discover that love is first mentioned in Genesis 22 when God tells Abraham to take "your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love" and offer him as a sacrifice. John is doing something intentional in his gospel: He wants his readers to see a connection between Abraham and his son, and God and God's son. John's readers who know the Torah would have seen the parallels right away.

-Rob Bell
Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith

I don't know if Bell is completely accurate in what he says in his book (Pastors of "megachurches" aren't necessarily also scholars or researchers), but it is a compelling image. Many scholars and even "ordinary" believers, have a tendency to read the Bible from a purely literal and historical vantage point. In extreme cases, people read the Bible in English and believe that the surface meaning is the meaning of what the author (and God) is trying to say (and here, we aren't even sure that the author of John's Gospel was the "John the Apostle" who walked with Jesus...in fact, it probably wasn't).

Derek Leman in his book Yeshua in Context, paints a picture of the Gospels as "stories" which communicate something about the Jewish Messiah that the Gospel writers wanted their audience to especially understand. These are viewpoints, perspectives, and interpretations about the Messiah that are being presented, rather than literal facts and events you'd expect in history books or (presumably) as reported on CNN (and I've just started Leman's book yesterday, so a full review will be forthcoming).

I'm tempted to say that Paul Philip Levertoff in his book Love and the Messianic Age, takes his interpretation one step further, but Levertoff's step is more sideways and represents a difference not so much in degree as in identity.

One of the things that's been impressed upon me as I've read these (and other) different authors, is how they each see Jesus (Yeshua), his context, his lived experience, and what we are supposed to understand about him, in almost fundamentally dissimilar ways. Sure, there's some overlap, but when reading all of the different books on the issues of Christ's deity, mission, and teachings, it's like I'm reading about different people rather than a single individual.

So far, I've been most impressed with Levertoff's perspective (and a full review of his book and the Vine of David commentary on Levertoff is also forthcoming) on the Jewish Messiah and the writings that describe him and what he did (and does).

He read the Gospels in German. Then he obtained a Hebrew version and reread them. Though he was in the midst of a Gentile, Christian city where Jesus was worshiped in churches and honored in every home, Feivel felt the Gospels belonged more to him and the Chasidic world than they did to the Gentiles who revered them. He found the Gospels to be thoroughly Jewish and conceptually similar to Chasidic Judaism. He wondered how Gentile Christians could hope to comprehend Yeshua (Jesus) and His words without the benefit of a classical Jewish education or experience with the esoteric works of the Chasidim.

Taken from Jorge Quinonez:
"Paul Philip Levertoff: Pioneering Hebrew-Christian Scholar and Leader"
Mishkan 37 (2002): 21-34
as quoted from Love and the Messianic Age

We all interpret Jesus from our own perspective; not just our educational or even our own faith perspectives, but from who we are as childhoods, personalities, and lived experiences. It's always bothered me that most of the people writing about the Jewish Messiah aren't Jewish and particularly, they aren't people who have the benefit of a completely lived Jewish identity, background, and education starting from childhood (there are a few exceptions). Even Christians who are well educated NT scholars, come from an essentially Gentile background and they are people who were born, raised, and who identify with a non-Jewish world view; people who did not take upon themselves an educational experience that included the Jewish writings until adulthood.

Even many Jews in the Messianic movement, previously identified with Christianity and worshiped in a church context before shifting into a Messianic Jewish worship style and becoming educated in a Jewish faith perspective (which includes Talmud study, among other things).

Levertoff, having been born, raised, and educated in a Chasidic Jewish environment and context from childhood, applies a seamless Jewish experience across the entire Bible, looking at the Gospels from a Talmudic and Chasidic vantage point, and is able to see what most of us would miss. This isn't just a viewpoint that illustrates heretofore "hidden" messages in the text, but a fundamental shift in understanding that allows us to read the Gospels in the tradition of mystic Jewish writings rather than history, literature, or "the Christian sayings of Jesus".

I'm not denigrating any of these other assessments or studies, but I do believe they all lack something critical that, in its absence, leaves us with questions that Levertoff's Chasidic presentation are more equipped to answer.

As I mentioned, I'll write individual book reviews (in the case of Bowman's and Komoszewski's evangelical view of Putting Jesus in His Place, I already have) on each of the works I've cited, but I had the need this morning, to write a sort of summary of my investigations into the deity of Jesus and how my journey of exploration into an understanding of the Jewish Messiah has been proceeding.

I must say that my level of "anxiety" over my faith and understanding has been reduced significantly, I'm learning a lot of things that were simply invisible to me before this...

...and I'm having fun.

Chag Sameach Purim.

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.