4Hear, O Israel: The
LORD our God is one LORD:
5And thou shalt love
the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and
with all thy might.
18Thou shalt not
avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but
thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD.
1And the LORD spake
unto Moses, saying,
2Speak unto all the
congregation of the children of Israel, and say unto them, Ye shall
be holy: for I the LORD your God am holy.
3Ye shall fear every
man his mother, and his father, and keep my sabbaths: I am the LORD
your God.
4Turn ye not unto
idols, nor make to yourselves molten gods: I am the LORD your
God.
And the reason I made such unexamined assumptions was because I
recognised Jesus's life described in the Gospels. I even felt
immediately comfortable with the oh-so-Jewish, unselfconscious
telling of the same story in four different gospels, from four
different contradictory angles - as a tiny fraction, a glimpse into
the world of the Talmud, snatched out and wondered over, a brief
second in the span of time.
I easily recognised the Last Supper as most probably a Passover
Seder (especially since Easter coincides with Pesakh), but had to
wonder how come Jesus was welcomed into Jerusalem, according to the
Gospels, about six days earlier, but with all the crowd behaviour
of six months earlier, the festival of Sukkot - Tabernacles - when
we wave palm branches and sing Hoshana - Save us?
I was even more puzzled by why everyone seemed to get so heated
about whether or not Jesus thought he was the Son of God - aren't
we all? - or even the Messiah - might not anyone be? And each
gospel had its own angle, its own story. I could see, even at 17,
what Matthew was doing. He was proving that all the prophecies
relating to the Messiah were manifest in Jesus. Virgin birth? Tick.
White donkey? Tick. Hanged on a tree? Tick. But I'd never been
taught as a Jew to pay much attention to these details of messianic
credential. How will we know the Messiah? Easy. The world will be
at peace. Cross.
I could see Luke floundering in Jewish preoccupations he
couldn't fathom. What were they all squabbling about? But with Mark
and John, I felt more at home.
But I can't see Jesus as the Messiah we Jews are waiting for.
And nor, as the Gospel accounts themselves make clear, could the
disciples who knew him once he was executed. After the crucifixion,
the disciples did not sit around calmly and reassure each other
that all was going according to plan. They were instead
understandably devastated. This was not the messianic plan. Nothing
in Jewish teaching had suggested the execution of the Messiah. Not
one of them was able to come up with the idea that this was all as
it should be. It wasn't. They had invested their faith in this man
and he was now dead.