Whose Messiah? - Overcoming Binaries in Comparative Literature, Part 2
In part two on “Overcoming Binaries in Comparative Literature,” I review Matthew Novenson’s recent book on the history of what he calls an “ancient Jewish political idiom.” Novenson’s The Grammar of Messianism seeks to complicate a binary logic that has predominated in scholarship on the word ‘messiah’ (from the Hebrew for “anointed”).
Until recently, Novenson says, “the prevailing view had been that ancient Jewish messianism was more or less one thing, and that Jesus himself was the cause of a radical conceptual innovation resulting in the rise of Christianity” (p. 163). After the Shoah, however, Christian scholarship went a long way in recognizing the Jewishness of Jesus, on the one hand, and the anti-Jewishness of modern biblical criticism on the other. However, Novenson traces a lingering tendency to think of “Christian messianism” in terms of its distinctiveness vis-à-vis “Jewish messianism.”
Novenson refers to the influential historian Gershom Scholem as a trendsetter. Scholem wrote that for Judaism redemption “takes place publicly, on the stage of history,” whereas, for Christianity redemption takes place “in the spiritual and unseen realm … in the soul, in the private world of each individual” (p. 189). Deconstructing this logic, Novenson says Scholem over-relies on “the contrasts political versus spiritual, outward versus inward, public versus private, ...” (p. 192). This binary logic makes Scholem’s reading reductive. Judaism is public, historical, political; Christianity private, inward, spiritual. In turn, modern biblical critics have also oversimplified ancient Jewish ideas of what a messiah is. Novenson demonstrates in each chapter that references to the messiah in Second Temple Jewish sources, as well as rabbinic sources, reflect a wide range of messianic criteria over time, and not one unified “messianic idea.”
The earliest reference to the messiah refers to the ritual anointing of a king, but the various elements of this image get shuffled around and emphasized to greater and lesser extents over hundreds of years of midrashim. In one place, a man is called messiah because he is made king; in another, someone not-a-king is called messiah because he is anointed with oil. In the one, kingship makes the messiah; in the other, the oil makes the messiah. Summarizing the complexity of ancient messianic ideas, Novenson says: “not all Jewish leaders are messiahs, not all messiahs are royal, not all royal messiahs are Davidic, and not all Davidic messiahs are sons of David” (p. 111).
What Novenson demonstrates is that messianic status was negotiated and attributed differently over time, in ways that do not settle into neat dichotomies. Those looking to buttress a given messiah figure could emphasize certain criteria to the eclipse of others, while those looking to disconfirm messianic status could change the goal posts to serve their purposes.
Novenson underscores a corresponding diversity in the ways the New Testament and other early Christian sources conceived of the messiah. For example, the Synoptic gospels attest to the Davidic ancestry of Jesus, while the gospel of John is not so clear. According to this gospel, Jesus was accepted as the messiah despite being from Galilee. Someone quotes scripture against him: “the Messiah is descended from David and comes from Bethlehem” (John 7:41-42, see p. 88). John offers no correction to this view, but states “there was division in the crowd because of him” (v. 43). According to Novenson, John believed Jesus was the messiah on other grounds (cf. 10:25).
Distinguishing between Jewish and Christian messianism turns out to be too steep a climb. Ideas that were thought to make Christian messianism exceptional turn out to have precedent in pre-Christian Palestine, while Jewish messianic movements bewilder scholars by their theological inconsistencies. Novenson’s purpose is to highlight the diversity and slipperiness of messianic ideas even at their inception.
Yet Novenson also naturalizes early Christian exegesis. Christian messianic texts, he says, do “what all ancient messiah texts do—namely, reinterpret scripture in light of their own historical circumstances” (p. 185). The Christian messianic tradition is simply “an exceptionally well-documented instance” of a messianic scripture-history negotiation (p. 207).
I take Novenson’s point against essentializing messiah texts into a reductive Jewish v. Christian binary. At the same time, I wonder whether his framing also obscures the power dynamics at play in early Christian biblical interpretation. The messianism of Paul and Revelation might make sense as midrash, but can the same be said of Justin Martyr? Is it not one of the peculiarities of Christian messianism that it was so largely conceived by Gentiles? The second century fathers were dealing mostly with the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the sacred texts of a foreign people. In Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho, he, a Gentile from Samaria based in Rome, tells a Jewish refugee from Jerusalem, “[the Jewish scriptures] are not yours, but ours” (29.2). If we cannot draw a line between “Jewish” and “Christian” ideas of the messiah, should we not at least draw one at the point where midrash becomes cultural appropriation?
Jack Holloway
