IC XC
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NI KA
τότε διήνοιξεν αὐτῶν τὸν νοῦν τοῦ συνιέναι τὰς γραφάς.
Luke 24:45,27
Then He opened their minds to understand the scriptures…
And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.
THERE’S THIS CURIOUS – and shameful – event that happens in the reign of King St Louis IX. The King puts the Talmud – a Jewish text – on trial. There is ample evidence of this in both Jewish and Christian sources from the period. What confuses me is the antecedents, but it seems that there was a general sense that Jews just didn’t understand their scriptures – or they would accept Jesus as the Messiah. So they must have some defect in their understanding. The Wiki has this great introduction:
As part of its evangelistic efforts, the Catholic Church sought to win the beliefs of the Jews through debate. Western Christianity in the 13th century was developing its intellectual acumen and had assimilated the challenges of Aristotle through the works of Thomas Aquinas. In order to flex its intellectual muscle, the Church sought to engage the Jews in debate, hoping that the Jews would see what they considered the intellectual superiority of Christianity.
Paul Johnson cites a significant difference between the Jewish and Christian sides of the debate. Christianity had developed a detailed theological system; the teachings were clear and therefore vulnerable to attack. Judaism had a relative absence of dogmatic theology; it did have many negative dogmas to combat idolatry but did not have a developed positive theology. “The Jews had a way of concentrating on life and pushing death—and its dogmas—into the background.”
Wiki, ret’vd on 6/14/23
Remember the phrase “clear and therefore vulnerable to attack” as it’s important not only for the event but our understanding of the event.
The issues get described as Christians squashing blasphemy (or thinking that they were). I understand that sentiment. There is an element running through Yiddish – and on into Modern Israeli Hebrew – that pokes fun at Christianity. Sometimes the pokes are gentle. Sometimes they are so pedestrian as to pass unnoticed (“Wreath of Thorns“? Really?). Sometimes the pokes are not at all gentle at all. Sometimes they are coded as blasphemy.
But they coded precisely the same way all oppressed people make fun of their oppressors. Truth be told, at many points in the last 2,000 years, Christians have oppressed Jews. Full stop. If a group of Jewish serfs in 19th Century Russia or 13th Century France – or even 21st Century Israel – made fun of the Church it was probably because she deserved it for acting in such unChristlike ways that Christ, himself, was brought into disrepute in their eyes. That’s on us.
But the Talmud tracks something else: not just anti-Christian cringe. It’s the something else that is important. To get to the heart of this, we need to return to the Second Temple era. At this time folks were breaking into camps – we see evidence of this in the New Testament with different factions mentioned – Scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, Zealots, etc – and we know of others – Essenes, Samaritans, and so forth. These factions overlap sometimes. Sometimes they are only “major headers” in lists. For example, some scholars consider Jesus to be one of the Pharisees. Hillel and Shammai each have their own “house” of students. (In certain questions Jesus sides with Hillel, in others, with Shammai.)
The seeds of some that follows were planted by a series of videos from Fr John Behr. Some came from Pope Benedict XVI’s methodology in his Jesus of Nazareth.
Eventually, regardless of where he fit earlier, Jesus and his students constitute a faction of their own. They are just a Jewish sect for a while but, after a time, they are no longer considered such by either the Romans or the Jews. But during the time they are a Jewish sect, they function like any other of these factions: they have rabbinical debates, they comment on the scriptures, and they teach their students to do likewise.
We begin to see the change, though, in the Post-Resurrention appearances: Jesus teaches his disciples how to read the scriptures correctly. From this point on we can see a divergence: there are some Jews who think that Jesus is the Messiah. There are some Jews who do not agree. These two groups read the scriptures (that is, the Tanakh) differently.
The Jesus group interprets everything as pointing to him. As the Bible Project puts it now, “We believe the Bible is a unified book that leads to Jesus.” Reading the Bible in this way begins with the two passages of Scripture I quoted above – Jesus explains the whole Bible to them in a certain way. Jesus becomes the key to understanding anything written in the Law, the Prophets, or the Writings. This is why the Psalms, in the Orthodox Church, are considered prophecy. Everything in the Bible points to Jesus – or is otherwise meaningless. Jesus is the logos – the very meaning in the universe. All things point to him.
For the other group (which is actually many groups, and the majority of Jews at the time) this is not the case. Jesus is not the key to understanding the scriptures. It needs to be noted that “the scriptures” here means only what we would call the “Old Testament”. Everything else is commentary. It’s the commentary about which we are fighting.
Both groups have their Rabbis. Both groups have their on-going discussion and meditation on the Tanakh. And both groups write their commentaries and share them with their people. Both groups are engaged in what later scholars would call “Talmudic Discourse”. Time for an excursus on terms. This is condensed from the the Encyclopaedia Britannica‘s article on Talmud and Midrash (retv’d on 15 June 2023). The parts of the ancient scripture are: Torah, Prophets, and Writings. This latter group contains histories as well as poetical or wisdom books such as the Psalms. From this arises a series of discussions in the Jewish world.
“The Hebrew term Talmud (“study” or “learning”) commonly refers to a compilation of ancient teachings regarded as sacred and normative by Jews from the time it was compiled until modern times and still so regarded by traditional religious Jews. In its broadest sense, the Talmud is a set of books consisting of the Mishna (“repeated study”), the Gemara (“completion”), and certain auxiliary materials. The Mishna is a collection of originally oral laws supplementing scriptural laws. The Gemara is a collection of commentaries on and elaborations of the Mishna, which in “the Talmud” is reproduced in juxtaposition to the Gemara. For present-day scholarship, however, Talmud in the precise sense refers only to the materials customarily called Gemara—an Aramaic term prevalent in medieval rabbinic literature that was used by the church censor to replace the term Talmud within the Talmudic discourse in the Basel edition of the Talmud, published 1578–81. This practice continued in all later editions.”
In addition to the Talmud, there is Midrash. “The term Midrash (“exposition” or “investigation”; plural, Midrashim) is also used in two senses. On the one hand, it refers to a mode of biblical interpretation prominent in the Talmudic literature; on the other, it refers to a separate body of commentaries on Scripture using this interpretative mode.”
The Pharisees eventually win out on the Non-Jesus side of the conversation. Their codification and writing down of the conversation, as they continue it, becomes known as the Talmud.
This is not the only Talmud though. And this is the parallel I’d like to highlight.
The pro-Jesus side of the conversation encodes their Mishna – conversation on the meanings of the Tanach and on the moral teachings – as what we know today as the New Testament. The Christian Talmud is the entire text of the Patristic Era and, I would suggest, the dogmatic statements of the era ending at the 7th Ecumenical Council. After this it gets complicated.
But although I used the term “conversation” these two groups stopped talking to each other around AD 135. After that point, they were – largely – talking about each other in far from flattering terms. The Synagogue wins with prayer language, inserting the imprecation against traitors into the daily prayers of the Synagogue. But the Church follows soon after. When the balance of power shifts, the language of the Jewish community changes to the coded blasphemy I mentioned above.
It’s this coded language of protest that gets called out by King Saint Louis IX.
It seems that the Church was rather shocked to learn that there was another way to read the Bible. The Church had forgotten that her way of reading the text was not the “clear sense” of the scripture except in the sense that she (and this writer) take Jesus himself to be the Clear Sense of the Scripture. It’s possible to start someplace else and arrive at different conclusions. AND both camps (Jewish and Christian) claim to have the clear sense of the scriptures. Yet the scriptures on both sides are being interpreted. Neither side is 100% willing to admit this.
There are many implications of this idea.
First and foremost is that while these two readings of the Scriptures did not begin as mutually exclusive: they hung out together for a hundred years or so. In the 1st Century after Jesus, at the Council of Jerusalem, for example, the Church (as a group of pious Jews) asked Gentile converts to Messianic Judaism to follow the Noahide laws, described by Judaism as revealed by God to Adam and then to Noah. These are still suggested by Rabbis to Gentiles who want to be pious without being – actually – Jewish. And they seemed to have some sense of tolerance for each other even as recently as the 4th Century. But, eventually, they drifted apart and thus, for the last 1600 years, they have continued to get further and further apart. Now they speak entirely different languages. They have so codified their two Talmuds that they are both “vulnerable to attack” but – precisely because they use the same words to mean different things – this “attack” is limited to saying “that’s not what that means”.
But each also fails to understand the chronological development of the other.
Christians tend to think that anything Jewish is more ancient than anything Christian. But, for example, the Kosher laws as we now have them are largely not only post-Jesus but also post-Apostolic. None of the first Christians could have eaten shrimp. But all of them could have had cheeseburgers. The way Passover is calculated now is only from the 3rd or 4th Century AD. And, ironically, the earliest printed text of a Passover Haggadah (Table ritual) we have is a Christian one from the Jewish Christian community led by St Melitos of Sardis, the Peri Pascha. Even modern Jewish scholars refer to this to see what was going on after the destruction of the Temple. Christians also forget that their own sacred text is an unpacking of the Torah. We like to read as if the Torah was one point in history and Jesus another. We’re at a third point. However, as Rabbi Jacob Neusner said, Jesus added himself to the Torah. Christians would say Jesus is the only authorized interpreter of the Torah and is, himself, the living Torah. For the Apostles Jesus was – in his person – the meaning of the Torah, and also the Divine person who spoke the Torah to Moses. Jesus is the Torah incarnate.
How should Christians consider things that arose in another tradition after the rejection of Jesus? I mean, there was a time when Islam was considered only a Christian heresy.
From the other direction, Jews tend to fall into the trap of Fundamentalism, reading the New Testament as if it were 100% literal and standing on its own rather than reading it as our Mishnaic commentary on the Torah. And then many Jews ignore the Talmud of the Church Fathers and Ecumenical Councils as if it were unimportant – when it is exactly parallel. The Gospels, including Luke/Acts and John/Apocalypse (Mishna) unpack the Torah, the Epistles unpack the Gospels, begin the discussion that parallels the Gemura. Then the Fathers and Councils take up the conversation with our own Talmud. What John Chrysostom says about (eg) the Gospel of Matthew is exactly as important to Christians as what Hillel says about (eg) the book of Leviticus is to Jews. What Gregory of Nyssa says about the Life of Moses needs to be classed exactly the same as what the Rabbis say about the life of the same man.
All sides of the conversation are meditating on the same text. In both cases the meditation is seen as nearly as inspired as the text itself. Older parts of the conversation are, essentially, identical. (As in the Council of Jerusalem.) We are two communities having two versions of the same conversation about the same text. But we do not talk to each other at all. It is not surprising that we reach different conclusions since we use different conversations as our root – even whiles meditating on the same text.
This is where the Greek text of St Luke’s Gospel is so interesting. Jesus “opened their minds” it says, to “understand” the scriptures. The Greek used for “opened” is διήνοιξεν dienoizen and it means to open fully or definitively, as when the male child opens the womb. Jesus opens their minds as the heavens opened up to receive the ascending Messiah (the same word is used). The word rendered as “understand” is συνιέναι synenai which comes from the words meaning to send together: to synthesize.
King Saint Louis IX falls into the Christian trap of assuming that our reading is 100% self-evident when, really, it’s not. We need faith to assume that Jesus is the Messiah long-promised to Israel and, having that faith, all of the Torah falls in line. But without that faith, it’s possible to read the Torah entirely differently. It’s possible to send-together, to synthesize in a different way.
Orthoparadoxy 
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