Dusted or Busted? Lois Tverberg and Rabbi Jesus

The limits of interpreting Jesus through a rabbinic context

Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash

The image of Jesus as a classically trained rabbi is one I remember being taught as a teenager through the sermons of latter-day sci fi writer Rob Bell and the video lectures of Ray Vander Laan (who I’ve already taken to task for his reconstruction of Caesarea Philippi). The idea that Jesus is best understood as a rabbi and that a “rabbi” is best understood by the norms and patterns of rabbinic Judaism is also all over the television show The Chosen, where Jesus wears a tallit and preaches from a bema in a synagogue in many episodes. The image is, to be fair, not inherently inaccurate. Jesus is called “rabbi” in the first century and much bad scholarship has been produced by ignoring the Jewish context of the Gospels. But in the popular imagination, can this image be stretched too far?

This brought me to the books of Lois Tverberg, a former biologist who wrote the series of books Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus, Walking in the Dust of Rabbi Jesus, and Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus. For Lois Tverberg, going to Israel (with, you guessed it, Ray Vander Laan!) dramatically changed the way she saw the Bible, and she has since endeavored to understand the Bible in its Jewish context, following Jesus the Rabbi.

Now, let me be very clear about this: I empathize with Tverberg in that her hunt for the Rabbinic Jew Jesus is clearly motivated from a desire to step away from the relentless eisegesis of much American Protestant interpretation. As many have noted, it is impossible to “just read the scriptures” without bringing your own cultural context and your own assumptions to the text. We bring many assumptions to the text that are simply foreign to the world of the Gospels, simply because they’re what we know. So the fact that Tverberg wanted to resist these impulses is frankly commendable. Understanding that Jesus and the Gospels are not a product of our culture is an important part of learning to read them carefully.

What is less commendable is that, despite the fact that Tverberg is not a historian, she has written, published, and extensively taught history anyway. Tverberg has a Ph.D. in biology and surely knows the difference between someone who has a hobbyist’s interest in biology and someone who works in a lab. The difference between kinds of expertise does not only apply to the hard sciences. History, like biology, is a discipline. Anyone can learn it, but not everyone is ready to teach it. While Tverberg does read (some) good historians and does have (some) good insights into the New Testament, she also makes a lot of claims and mistakes that more experienced historians wouldn’t make. Most of these surround the idea of Jesus as a Hebrew-speaking, classically trained rabbi who used Hebrew concepts and thought from a Hebrew perspective over against Greek (by which Tverberg sometimes seems to mean “modern” and “western”) impulses.

I want to look at three historically dubious claims in the work of Lois Tverberg, which, I think, have steered a lot of later readers and churchgoers wrong when thinking about the New Testament and the life of Jesus. The first is the idea that Jesus and his contemporaries had “Hebrew” minds, not “Greek” ones, which has consequences for how they communicate and argue. The second is that Jesus was a rabbi with a classical rabbinic training, in the tradition recounted in the Mishnah and Talmud. The third is that the Hebrew language was, as Tverberg puts it, Jesus’s “heart language,” and that learning the Hebrew definitions of words can help us better understand Jesus’s teachings.

1. “Greek Brain vs. Hebrew Brain”

The idea that Jesus needs to be read as a Jewish figure is, to be clear, uncontroversial. The “third quest” for the historical Jesus, as it’s been commonly known, rejected identifying Jesus with more Greco-Roman models of the itinerant religious figure (e.g., the Cynic) and centered on the motifs and ideas that undergirded Jewish apocalypticism and the “common Judaism” of the Second Temple era. Emphasizing that Jesus was closer to a “common Jew” or apocalyptic prophet than he was to a neo-Pythagorean makes sense.

What gets dicier is when we try to overdefine this to insist on a kind of Judaism that is opposed to Hellenism per se. These are categories that overlap considerably in the Second Temple era, owing to the Hellenization campaign of Alexander the Great and its long legs in the regions he conquered. To be fair, Tverberg does not insist on some non-Greek purified form of Judaism that Jesus must have practiced. This is in ch. 5 of Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus. But, her understanding of the “Greek brain” which she characterizes as more abstract, rational, and similar to modern thought, as opposed to the “Jewish brain” which is more practical and communal, is oversimplified to the point of being wrong. 

As an example of “Greek brain,” Tverberg appeals to the idea of the syllogism, or the if-then statement – which she names as being characteristic of Greek thought. Jews, on the other hand, favored metaphor, story, and emotion. The example she gives is John the Baptist calling the Pharisees a “brood of vipers.” Rather than naming and concretely explaining their wrongdoing, he opts for visually graphic and suggestive invective. 

I personally don’t really think it’s true that that angry, emotional, graphic language is more characteristic of early Jewish thought than clear, detached debate. It’s characteristic of some apocalyptic Jewish thought, but not Jewish thought across the board. Josephus appealed to the model of the Greek philosophical school when explaining what Pharisees, Essenes, and Sadducees are, seeming to believe they all defend competing theological and philosophical positions, and those schools did (according to Josephus) disagree about fairly abstract theological issuess – the contents of the canon, the reality of the bodily resurrection, and predeterminism. 

But also: pretend with me for a second that these are the exact words of Jesus. Look at this:

“Woe to you, blind guides! You say, ‘If anyone swears by the Temple, it means nothing; but anyone who swears by the gold of the Temple is bound by that oath.’ You blind fools! Which is greater: the gold, or the Temple that makes the gold sacred? You also say, ‘If anyone swears by the altar, it means nothing; but anyone who swears by the gift on the altar is bound by that oath.’ You blind men! Which is greater: the gift, or the altar that makes the gift sacred? Therefore, anyone who swears by the altar swears by it and by everything on it. And anyone who swears by the Temple swears by it and by the one who dwells in it. And anyone who swears by heaven swears by God’s throne and by the one who sits on it. (Matthew 23:16-22)

That’s both invective and an argument. Jesus argues that the Pharisees are blind guides because they say that swearing by the gold of the Temple is binding in a way that swearing by the Temple is not. Jesus argues that this is nonsense because the gold is not a higher thing to swear by than the Temple, because the Temple is the thing that gives the gold sacred standing, not the other way around. Furthermore, to swear by the Temple is to swear by the gold in the Temple, because the gold is part of the Temple, and by that logic (to swear by the Temple is to swear by the whole Temple, including everything in it) then to swear by the Temple is to swear by God, who is also in the Temple. Therefore, anyone who would say “to swear by the Temple is not binding” is a blind guide. 

We should also note that rabbinic interpretation, like Greek logic, involved rules and norms of arguments – for example, from the lesser to the greater (if a law applies to the lesser thing, it applies to the greater thing) and the other way around. You can actually see a prototype of this thinking in Matthew’s argument in Matthew 7:9-11 regarding prayer:

Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! 

The argument assumes that humans are a relevant analogy for the God-person relationship. Human fathers do not give monstrous gifts to their children when their children ask for food. But, humans are sinful and wicked, whereas God is neither of those things. Therefore, the much greater father, God, will also give good gifts to his children – from the lesser to the greater.

The idea of using rules of reasoning, and concrete examples that help them to make sense, is characteristic of both Jewish and Greek writing, depending on the audience. Polemicists will use invective, but most people understand that this in itself is not persuasive. Rabbinic thought is also structured and logical – it is practical, but so is a lot of Greek thought and philosophy. Plato engages big practical questions like “how to run a government” and Seneca has a whole book on how to be married. Likewise, a lot of Jewish speculative cosmology (look at the pseudepigrapha if you don’t believe me) is also not practical. Judaism is not a tradition that favors the earthy and visceral over the logical as a matter of course – not today (there have been a lot of Jews on the Supreme Court!), and not then. 

It’s true that John the Baptist was not a philosopher, and Jesus was not classically trained in the art of rhetoric. The fact that they didn’t use a lot of abstract reasoning and Platonism in their teaching wasn’t because they were Jewish, it was because they didn’t have that kind of education and they weren’t teaching that kind of audience. But even still, if we’re going to take the Gospels at their word, Jesus still knew his way around an argument. There are many, many stories of Jesus using textual examples to defend a theological position (i.e., defending the concept of the resurrection against the Pharisees), or using reasoning principles (God feeds and watches over sparrows, sparrows are the cheapest bird in the store, a human is worth more than a sparrow, therefore God watches over humans). These are not in conflict with Jesus’s Jewish identity. 

It’s true that the words of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels in particular do not reflect the same sustained argumentation style that we see in Paul. But let’s not sell the Gospels short. The Gospels circulated widely and rapidly, in Greek, for gentile Christian audiences. They were written for Greek-speaking patrons (look at the prologue of Luke), and were read by philosophers like Justin Martyr (Matthew). Greeks got it.

2. Rabbinic Traditions and Jesus 

The motif of reading Jesus as at home among the rabbis of the Mishnaic and Talmudic eras is shot through Lois Tverberg’s entire corpus. This is particularly important for the significant number of arguments Tverberg makes that depend on Jesus having had an extensive literary education, including synagogue-based teaching in Torah.

Tverberg argues in Ch 9 of Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus and in chapter 11 of Walking in the Dust of Rabbi Jesus that during the first century or possibly before, Jewish boys were learning to read in the synagogue and learning to memorize scriptures.  The source for this is historian Shmuel Safrai and Menahem Stern, who wrote The Jewish People in the First Century (953). This idea also appears in the writings of Ray Vander Laan.

So let’s look at that source as they’re listed in the book. Mishnah Aboth 5:21 argues that boys should start studying Torah at age five and Mishnah at age ten. After this point a child would go to bet midrash if he was gifted, at a school that was connected with the synagogue per P. T Megillah II, 73d (Palestinian Talmud). 

The saying that Tverberg leans on to argue that Jesus would have been memorizing Torah and attending bet midrash comes from the Mishnah quote from Judah ben Tema. Judah ben Tema is difficult to date, but he was probably towards the end of the tannaitic period, which stretched from 10-220 CE. In other words, even assuming this quote did go back directly to the actual ben Tema, ben Tema would need to be recalling a tradition that was already in force in the earliest part of the tannaitic period for this to have been relevant for Jesus. But, there’s a hint in the tractate that ben Tema is, in fact, not from the earliest days of the Tannaim. Just before the section where ben Tema sets the ages for study, ben Tema prays for the reconstruction of the destroyed Jerusalem. That means that ben Tema lived after the destruction of the Temple, in 70 CE, and therefore after the relevant period for Jesus. In other words, there is no reason to suppose that ben Tema’s ideas about education would have been practiced in 10-20 CE or earlier when Jesus was a child. Ben Tema lived after Jesus. Not before. 

The origins of the synagogue and the bet midrash, and Torah education for boys, are probably much later, and there’s not much we can know about them. It looks to me like Tverberg’s claims about Jesus’s education can’t really be substantiated with texts we have. The earliest source we have that indicates that young Jewish boys would have necessarily gone to synagogue school as a matter of course is too late to apply to Jesus – and, of course, also expresses the expectations of rabbis. The am ha’eretz, the ordinary people of Israel, may not have shared their beliefs with the rabbis, especially in the early days after the Temple and after Jamnia when rabbinic control of synagogues was far from fixed. Philo and Josephus are much more reserved in their claims, arguing that children learned Torah by hearing it read at synagogue and – when synagogues were available – to read some themselves. We don’t know exactly how much access Jesus would have had to such training in his small hometown of 2,000. Jesus knew his way around the scriptures well enough to argue with Pharisees and Sadducees, but whether he got this from hearing the Torah read regularly at services or from actually learning to read himself is difficult to determine (Meier, A Marginal Jew, 271-78). We also don’t know whether Jesus would have primarily learned it from Hebrew scrolls or from Targums, the extent to which Jesus would have learned by reading directly or hearing recitation, what age this would have started at, or how long he would have had access to such education. Ben Hema’s standards, though, should not be uncritically applied to his circumstances.

The rabbis who convened at Jamnia had strong incentive to insist on their continuity of teaching with the sages who lived before the Temple was destroyed. This should call into question any claims we see in rabbinic sources about how things were done before the Temple was destroyed. It does not mean they are wrong, but we should definitely be cautious. As it stands, there is very little confirmable first century evidence that suggests that the patterns of training rabbis – as they existed in the periods of the Mishnah and the Talmud – went back before the Temple and would have been in force when Jesus was alive. This scholarship here does not handle the sources as critically as they need to be handled, and these assumptions are not characteristic of modern scholarship regarding rabbinic traditions. Some of the arguments here are in fact faith-based claims that agree with the Mishnah’s own claims that these traditions preserve continuity with the era before the Temple. That does not make them inherently wrong, but they need to be taken on board cautiously. These claims that the traditions of the Tannaim do in fact stretch to the beginning of the first century are not taken at face value by modern critical scholarship.

I don’t blame Tverberg for failing to discount something she read in an academic text. Safrai and Stern were real scholars – no one is denying their education and credentials. But the tack Safrai et. al. take with the beginning of the bet midrash and Torah study for young boys is a fringe position, was harshly criticized when the book was released, and is not widely represented in the academy today for the reasons I have mentioned. When this book was first published, the problems I’ve named – essentially, claiming that traditions from the Mishnah and Talmud can tell us about theology and practice in the first century – were problems that other experts in rabbinic scholarship were already pointing out. This is the concern voiced in the Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenic, and Roman Period and the Journal of Biblical Literature, the latter of which recounts that the book has been strongly criticized by a number of New Testament scholars and (perhaps most importantly on this front) Jacob Neusner. In other words, this series, The Jewish People in the First Century, should absolutely not be used as a major source for a book about the life of Jesus if one wishes to make historical claims about Jesus’s life.  These books do not pass historical muster. 

3. The Hebrew Language and Jesus 

A consequence of Tverberg’s (I have argued, unfounded) assumption that Jesus had extensive training in Hebrew literature is that Tverberg often tries to explain Jesus’s teaching by back-translating words from the Gospels into Hebrew. This is usually confined to words from the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament that Jesus quotes. In these cases, looking back at the Hebrew to study the original language and meaning makes sense. But it’s still worth noting that Jesus’s teaching was probably mostly in Aramaic, not Hebrew, and that at any rate the words of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels are in Greek with only some exceptions in Mark. By the time of Jesus, Hebrew use had declined significantly even in Palestine (Meier, A Marginal Jew, 262), and post-exilic texts favor more Aramaic and Greek. Many of the quotes of the Hebrew Bible in the Gospels are from Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible. Matthew’s text types are more mixed, suggesting direct translations from Aramaic and Hebrew texts. But generally speaking in the New Testament, the writers follow the Septuagint, because this is the translation they knew in the language they spoke.

In light of this, and in light of the fact that the earliest Christians would have been encountering the words of Jesus through these Greek texts, it’s surprising that there are virtually no Greek word studies in Tverberg’s books. When the early church read the Gospels, they weren’t reading words like chesed, emet, and shalom. They were reading words like dikaiasune, alethea, and eirene. These are the earliest versions of the words of Jesus we actually have. 

The justification for this focus on Hebrew over Greek is that, per Tverberg, Jesus’s “heart language” would have been Hebrew after his studies. I’ve already argued that this is unfounded, but for argument’s sake, let’s roll with it. If the words like “hear” and “way” and “love” and other abstract words Jesus used find their origins in Hebrew over Greek, where does this get us?

There are cases where Tverberg’s work is probably better at conveying the meaning than the average English translation on its own. For instance, Tverberg spends a lot of time on the word “hear” in Walking in the Dust of Rabbi Jesus, where she correctly notes that “hear” in the shema (Deut 6:4-9) means something closer to “heed” (hear and pay attention, hear and obey, hearken to, etc.). While these are all distinct concepts in English (you can “hear” your teacher without listening to them, or you can “hear” your mom without obeying her) the valance in Hebrew is different. This is probably pretty close to how people like Paul and Jesus heard the words of the shema, and this is useful for Tverberg to clarify.

But there are a lot of places where Tverberg seems to be somewhat unintentionally hyping Hebrew up and suggesting that without Hebrew the New Testament is difficult to understand. This is at odds with what the New Testament actually is (a bunch of Greek texts!) and also implies things about translation that I think are simply wrong. Describing Hebrew as the “heart language” of the Bible runs the risk of downplaying the extent to which literary language can be translated – and this is at odds with the way Christians have understood their Bible for most of our history. The New Testament has existed in translation from the time before there was a canon, it circulated in Latin for centuries, and the development and publication of vernacular translations was a major innovation that people literally died to defend. Today, if you’re an English speaker, you can read the Bible at a fourth-grade reading level in your own home. Without vernacular translations, you’d need to go to university to read the Gospels at all. You don’t need to know Greek, much less Hebrew, to read and understand the Gospels or the rest of the New Testament. That’s good.

The reason why is because literary English is not nearly as abstruse is Tverberg seems to think it is. For instance:

Did you really need Hebrew to get that? I understand the value of accessibility, but some of these definitions lurch towards the obvious and perhaps the over-explained. Is this idea that a “house” can mean something non-literal, like a family and descendents, something that really needs to be explained? This definition of “house” is a feudal idea which means it shows up in popular media like Dune and A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones/House of the Dragon. No one, to my knowledge, struggled with the fact that House Atreides or House Stark are not actual buildings zoned for single family residence. 

Or this passage where we have a definition of “way” or “path.”

Here Tverberg explains that roads in the ancient world were footpaths and not paved. One possible read of this definition is obvious – no, roads in the ancient world were not made of asphalt for cars to drive on. Jesus did not drive a fifteen passenger van. All readers know this. The second way of reading this definition is incorrect – the word for “way” or “path,” as in “path of God in Mark 12:14, is odos in Greek, which absolutely could refer to a paved road. The Romans had paved roads, and you can literally go visit them today. The third issue is that the “way” in Hebrews 12:13 is actually not a Greek equivalent of orach or derek. It’s the Greek word agon which specifically refers to an athletic event — in this case, a foot race. This wouldn’t have been a path that someone walked and someone else would follow later. It was a marked course designed and built for athletic contests.

You are not really missing anything if you read that the first followers of Jesus in Acts called themselves followers of “The Way” without knowing the Hebrew word for “a way.” “The way” means exactly what you think it means – a path you can travel on. The path can be a footpath, a game trail, a paved road, a sidewalk, or a six-lane highway. Either way the salient meaning is the same. It’s a path you follow that has been laid out by someone else that gets you to a certain destination. You don’t need an M.Div. to figure that out.

The literary meanings of words like “remember,” “forget,” “hear,” “follow,” and “love” are not nearly as inaccessible as Tverberg makes them sound. Reading the Bible in English with even the tinnest of ears for non-literalism will probably make most of these clear on their own. Do you really need a Hebrew glossary to understand that when Jesus asked people to “follow him,” he meant something beyond “walk directly behind me?” Or that when God remembered Noah on the arc he didn’t suddenly recollect that Noah existed? No. 

Learning biblical languages is worth doing, but it doesn’t serve anyone to overly mystify them. English translations of the Bible are written with these literary, multi-layered meanings in mind. And frankly, the Hebrew is too. You don’t need to read “remember” in Hebrew to realize that for God, “remembering” Noah is not a purely cognitive act. It’s right there in Genesis 8:1: God remembers Noah and causes a wind to go over the water to dry it. You don’t need to know the word “love” in Hebrew to know that to love God is an act of obedience and action and not simply fuzzy feelings; Deuteronomy tells Israel to love God “with all their heart, soul, and strength” (Deut 6:5) and it’s tied directly into the teaching and doing of the commandments (6:6-8). Action is implied by the entire passage, not by any single word. 

Walking in the Dust of Jesus: Dusted or Busted? 

I am sympathetic to Tverberg’s desire to not read Scripture through American eyes. But I think there are problems here. The first is that the Gospels are more “Greek” and more dependent on logic and argumentation than Tverberg lets on – not because they are not “Jewish” but because there is no contradiction between abstract reasoning/argumentation and Jewish thought. The second is that the portrait of Jesus as a rabbi is not historical – we just don’t know very much at all about Jesus’s education and should not be too quick to make claims about it. The third is that Hebrew is not the most proximate choice of language with which one should read the New Testament. Jesus’s native language was not classical Hebrew, it was Aramaic. When Jesus taught, it was not in classical Hebrew. When his words were recorded, they were in Greek. And when the earliest Christians read about Jesus, they also read him in Greek.

It is incredibly valuable and important to try to understand the Jewish world from which the New Testament emerged. But this should not be overly defined. Judaism in the world of the New Testament was not confined to the world of Israel. It was a Diaspora religion. Jews preserved their traditions, their Temple, and their law – and they read Greek philosophy, they spoke Greek, and they interacted with their Greek neighbors. When the Gospels spread in Greek the words were understandable to a Greek-speaking audience, without the assistance of Hebrew. When Paul went on his missionary journeys, he didn’t teach his converts to read Hebrew – he taught them the gospel in Greek. To study the world of Judaism in the first century is not to set up an alternative to Greek-ness but to see how these cultural identities interacted. And, to learn about the world of Second Temple Judaism is not the same thing as learning about the world of the classical rabbis, who lived in a very different context and had very different ideas about what it meant to be Jewish in a post-revolutionary world.

The sharp binaries between Jew and Greek do not serve us when we study the New Testament, and they have largely fallen out of favor in modern scholarship. That is not to deny the Jewishness of the New Testament authors and the figures these authors portray – far from it. But we cannot say that Jews resisted the abstract and favored the concrete, or eschewed argument in favor of storytelling. They literally did not. All the Gospels portray Jesus making arguments and using reasoning principles, and Paul presumably did not learn to make arguments once he stopped being a Pharisee and started being an itinerant tent maker. We cannot say that Jesus was a rabbi in the same way that, say, Judah the Patriarch was. We don’t know enough about his education or the educational norms of first century Galilee. And, we cannot say that Jesus’s words are best understood in Hebrew, a language in which they were never recorded.