Christianity’s Origins: They Are Jewish!

When I began my doctoral studies at Harvard University in 1989, I was simply eager to learn all that I could and expand my thinking about the Bible. I wasn’t anticipating the profound reshaping I would experience not only in how I read the Bible but in my Christian faith as a whole.

Two professors, James L. Kugel and Jon D. Levenson, introduced me to a world I had scarcely known existed: the rich interpretive world of ancient Judaism, the cradle of the early Christian movement. For this relatively sheltered Protestant, it shook my world—for the better.

The Rock that Followed Israel

One classroom moment has stayed with me ever since: I remember sitting in one of Kugel’s classes discussing Paul’s message to his followers in Corinth, as part of his warning against participating in meals from idolatrous sacrifices:

^{1 Corinthians 10:1} I do not want you to be ignorant, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, ^10:2 and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, ^10:3 and all ate the same spiritual food, ^10:4 and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.

The cloud, the splitting of the Sea, the spiritual food (manna), and the spiritual water produced from the rock Moses struck were all clear, but what does Paul mean by saying that the rock followed them?  I had read that verse many times and never stopped to think about that curious phrase.

Kugel pointed out that Paul was drawing on Jewish tradition, which appears, for example, in the Biblical Antiquities of Pseudo-Philo (1^st cent. C.E.):

^{Biblical Antiquities 10:7} He guided his people in the wilderness for forty years. He rained down for them bread from heaven and brought quail to them from the sea and brought forth a well of water to follow them. With a pillar of cloud he led them by day, and with a pillar of fire he gave them light by night.

Later, the text explains how this began with a vision on Mount Sinai:

^{Biblical Antiquities 11:15} … There he commanded him many things and showed him the tree of life, a piece of which he cut off and took and threw into Marah, and the water of Marah became sweet. It followed them in the wilderness forty years and went up to the mountain with them and went down into the plains....^[1]

By referring to this moving water source, Paul was participating in an ongoing Jewish conversation. His interpretive imagination belonged to the Jewish world that formed him and continued to influence him.

This is where I began to see the importance of close readings. The Torah has three stories about Moses finding water for Israel: in Marah, where he turns bitter waters sweet,^[2] then on Horeb^[3] and finally Meribah,^[4] where he hits the rock and water gushes out. Jewish interpreters in late antiquity explained this repeated reference to a miraculous water source by positing that a single rock or well followed the Israelites on their journey to the Promised Land.

What distinguished Paul’s reading from the other Jewish readings of his time was his assertion that the sustaining presence that accompanied Israel in the wilderness was Christ, his own act of midrashic interpretation. 

Understanding Paul the Jew

To realize that Paul was actually Jewish now seems too obvious to mention, but at the time it changed everything. I walked out of class stunned with the realization that I didn’t really get Paul at all—not because I hadn’t tried, but because I hadn’t known his world.

I began asking different questions. Rather than, “How does Paul get this from the Old Testament?” I asked, “What kind of interpretive world made Paul’s reading possible?” I stopped assuming I understood what Paul and the other New Testament writers were about and started asking how and why they actually read Scripture the way they did.

Sometimes the people who help you understand your own tradition best are those who embody another. Without ever intending to, my Jewish professors taught me that becoming a better Christian scholar required learning to inhabit the Jewish world from which Christianity emerged. The better I understood ancient Judaism, the better I understood Jesus. The better I understood Jewish interpretation, the better I understood Paul.

Intellectual humility is not the enemy of faith but one of its deepest virtues. By becoming aware of the interpretive imagination of ancient Jewish interpreters, I would also come to appreciate the theological integrity and richness of the Hebrew Bible on its own terms. By learning to truly read the Bible in its ancient context rather than my own, the Bible became more ancient, more human, more surprising—and, for those very reasons, more compelling.