Understanding the Jewish Roots of Christianity: Biblical, Theological, and Historical Essays on the Relationship between Christianity and Judaism

By Lexham Press

How Jewish is Christianity?

The question of how Jesus' followers relate to Judaism has been a matter of debate since Jesus first sparred with the Pharisees. The controversy has not abated, taking many forms over the centuries. In the decades following the Holocaust, scholars and theologians reconsidered the Jewish origins and character of Christianity, finding points of continuity.

Understanding the Jewish Roots of Christianity advances this discussion by freshly reassessing the issues. Did Jesus intend to form a new religion? Did Paul abrogate the Jewish law? Does the New Testament condemn Judaism? How and when did Christianity split from Judaism? How should Jewish believers in Jesus relate to a largely gentile church? What meaning do the Jewish origins of Christianity have for theology and practice today?

In this volume, a variety of leading scholars and theologians explore the relationship of Judaism and Christianity through biblical, historical, theological, and ecclesiological angles. This cutting-edge scholarship will enrich readers' understanding of this centuries-old debate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Release date: Mar 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781683594628

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UNDERSTANDING the JEWISH ROOTS of CHRISTIANITY

Biblical, Theological, and Historical Essays on the Relationship between Christianity and Judaism

EDITED BY GERALD R. MCDERMOTT

STUDIES IN SCRIPTURE & BIBLICAL THEOLOGY

Copyright

Understanding the Jewish Roots of Christianity:

Biblical, Theological, and Historical Essays on the Relationship between Christianity and Judaism

Studies in Scriptural and Biblical Theology

Copyright 2021 Gerald R. McDermott

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

LexhamPress.com

All rights reserved. You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [e-mail].

Scripture quotations marked esv are from ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version. Public domain.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are from the New American Standard Bible®, copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked NET are from the NET Bible®, copyright © 1996–2006 by Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are from the Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Print ISBN 9781683594611

Digital ISBN 9781683594628

Library of Congress Control Number 2020948475

Lexham Editorial Team: Derek Brown, Claire Brubaker, Amy Balogh, Abby Salinger

Cover Design: Brittany Schrock

This book is dedicated to

Mark Graham, a superb pastor,

and to Bob Benne, my theological compatriot.

Both have shared my journey to and from Israel.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

1.Introduction

Gerald R. McDermott

2.Old Testament: How Did the New Testament Authors Use Tanak?

Mark S. Gignilliat

3.Did Jesus Plan to Start a New Religion?

Matthew Thiessen

4.Was Paul Championing a New Freedom from—or End to—Jewish Law?

David Rudolph

5.Jesus’ Sacrifice and the Mosaic Logic of Hebrews’ New-Covenant Theology

David M. Moffitt

6.Missed and Misunderstood Jewish Roots of Christian Worship

Matthew S. C. Olver

7.The Parting of the Ways

When and How Did the Ekklēsia Split from the Synagogue?

Isaac W. Oliver

8.From Constantine to the Holocaust

The Church and the Jews

Eugene Korn

9.Post-Holocaust Jewish-Christian Relations

Challenging Boundaries and Rethinking Theology

Jennifer M. Rosner

10.Anglicans and Israel

The (Largely) Untold Story

Sarah Lebhar Hall

11.Messianic Judaism

Recovering the Jewish Character of the Ekklēsia

Mark S. Kinzer

12.Christian Churches

What Difference Does the Jewishness of Jesus Make?

Archbishop Foley Beach

13.Christian Theology

What Difference Does This Make?

Gerald R. McDermott

Bibliography

List of Contributors

Subject Index

Scripture and Other Ancient Sources Index

Acknowledgments

Every book I write or edit is indebted to my wonderful wife, Jean, who always provides ideas and inspiration.

Timothy George helped me plan this from my first year working under his wise leadership. Val Merrill was indefatigably conscientious in all her planning and delegation for the conference from which this book arose. Kristen Padilla and Rob Willis skillfully publicized and recorded it. Andrew Russell helped in many technical ways behind the scenes.

I am also grateful to Fr. Michael Novotny and Christ the King Anglican Church for their support for the Institute of Anglican Studies. Without their assistance, and much help from St. Peter’s Anglican Church, the Institute would not have been able to produce this conference or book. Jim Pounds at Beeson Divinity School provided assistance at critical points along the way.

Abbreviations

1

Introduction

Gerald R. McDermott

Since the Holocaust there has been a veritable explosion of scholarship on the relationship of Judaism to Christianity. Scholars and church members alike asked how one of the most Christianized countries in history could have attempted a systematic extermination of Jewry. After centuries in which radical discontinuity between the two religions was both assumed and argued, this catastrophe prompted new generations of scholars to look for continuities that might have been missed. Perhaps, it was suggested, our previous assumption of radical discontinuity helped provoke historical anti-Semitism that eventuated in the Holocaust.

Theologians and New Testament scholars such as Karl Barth, Marcus Barth, C. E. B. Cranfield, and Peter Stuhlmacher reread Paul for clues of what might have been missed. Cranfield concluded that an impartial reading of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans demanded a revision of supersessionism: These three chapters [9–11] emphatically forbid us to speak of the church as having once and for all taken the place of the Jewish people.¹ Like Cranfield, scholars began to notice that Paul seemed to believe that Jewish rejection of Jesus as Messiah did not abrogate God’s covenant with them, for in Romans 11 he says explicitly that God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew (11:2 NRSV). As W. D. Davies notes in his landmark work on the biblical concept of land, Paul never calls the Church the New Israel or the Jewish people the Old Israel.²

If Paul research found new startling things, so did research into the historical Jesus. E. P. Sanders, N. T. Wright, John P. Meier, and Ben F. Meyer were among the most important scholars to show that Jesus was far more interested in Israel than scholars had previously imagined.³

In the last three decades these trends have accelerated. Marvin Wilson, for example, summarized in 1989 what had been uncovered to that point: Jesus and the early church had deep roots in Judaism, and neither attempted to break from those roots.⁴ Brad Young produced a pair of studies on Jesus and Paul as theologians whose framework was fundamentally Jewish.⁵

Jewish scholars came to similar conclusions. David Flusser, for example, argued that the Jesus of history was an observant Jew. Pamela Eisenbaum maintained that while Paul was not a Christian as historically understood, he kept Torah and insisted that Jewish followers of Jesus do the same.⁶ In her new When Christians Were Jews (2018), Paula Fredriksen argues similarly, that both Jesus and Paul were observant Jews. One had minimal contact with gentiles (Jesus), and the other thought of gentile destiny in Jewish terms (Paul). The eventual takeover of the church by gentiles has obscured ever since the Jewish identity and practice of the first generation.⁷

More recently scholars have explored the history of supersessionism—the idea that God’s covenant with Jewish Israel has been superseded by God’s new covenant with the gentile church.⁸ Leading mainline Protestants have argued that this is faulty exegesis and bad theology.⁹ Christian historians insist that early Jesus-followers placed Jesus’ divine identity within the unity of the God of Israel.¹⁰ A leading Jewish thinker suggests that Jesus was fully observant, and that his followers’ belief that he was a messiah was not dissimilar from other Jewish messianic expectations.¹¹

Pauline scholars contend that Paul’s use of Jewish law revised that of many Jewish contemporaries or was remarkably similar.¹² Several insist that he saw two communities within his churches—Jewish and gentile—and saw no problem with Jewish Jesus-followers keeping Mosaic law.¹³ Other scholars are now seeing the Letter to the Hebrews—long interpreted as showing a fundamental break between the two religions—as showing more continuity than discontinuity.¹⁴

Jews are using their rabbinic tradition to cast whole new light on this thorny relationship. A leading messianic theologian is proposing a theology of the New Testament that springs from a revised view of Jerusalem’s place within it.¹⁵ A non-Messianic Jewish historian argues that Christian incarnation is not inconsistent with Jewish thinking about God’s multiple bodies.¹⁶ Another Jewish historian contends that the Last Supper did not violate Jewish purity laws concerning blood and was not, as has been routinely alleged, an attack on the temple—and that Paul regarded Jerusalem’s sacrificial worship positively.¹⁷

In this enormous world of scholarship, new findings continue apace. This book provides even more. These essays are by leading scholars who are doing cutting-edge work. They show readers the latest thinking in this exciting field.

Mark Gignilliat uses the most recent biblical scholarship to argue that New Testament authors regarded the Hebrew Scriptures as their grammar for thinking about how the God of Israel could have a divine Son and Spirit. Matthew Thiessen uses new thinking about social memory and obligation to deny the old notion that Jesus intended to start a new religion. Pauline scholar David Rudolph suggests that some passages in Paul’s letters are weightier than others, thus providing a way through the thicket of conflicting interpretations. David Moffitt turns to Hebrews, long thought to prove radical discontinuity, to show that covenantal logic in the letter shows the opposite.

Liturgical scholar Matthew Olver asks whether there are Jewish roots to Christian liturgy and proposes that sacrifice, which is fundamentally Jewish, is at the heart of Christian worship. Jewish historian Isaac Oliver revises long-held views of the historical separation between the church and synagogue, arguing that the parting of the ways did not emerge until Constantine. Eugene Korn, who has long been at the forefront of Jewish-Christian dialogue, reviews the painful history of the church and the Jews between Constantine and the Holocaust. With new insight, he argues a connection between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, and its relation to the Holocaust.

Jen Rosner discusses new theologies of Judaism that arose after the Holocaust, principally the works of Karl Barth and Franz Rosenzweig, two twentieth-century giants. With fresh perspective, she draws connections between these two thinkers and the rise of Messianic Judaism. Sarah Hall unfolds the largely unknown story of how Anglicans participated in the fateful rise of Zionism and the state of Israel.

Foremost messianic theologian Mark Kinzer argues that the parting of the ways in the fourth century was a regrettable tragedy, but suggests that it can be transcended. The Messianic Jewish community can provide the church with a new opportunity to heal wounds and transcend ancient barriers.

The volume closes with an essay by Anglican Archbishop Foley Beach on what these new discoveries mean for Anglican and other Christian churches, and my own chapter on its implications for Christian theology and churches more generally.

2

Old Testament: How Did the New Testament Authors Use Tanak?

Mark S. Gignilliat

A mother in our church stopped me after Sunday school one day to tell me about her son. He has high-functioning autism, she relayed, and, as many with autism, Jeremiah demonstrates a high level of focus and energy on subject matters that interest him. His mom told me about Jeremiah’s passion as of late, the Old Testament. He reads nonstop about it, she reported, and loves this portion of Holy Scripture. I listened carefully because I was sensing with this little boy that we were dealing with someone whose election was sure. So, I was intrigued.

I spent some time with Jeremiah at Beeson Divinity School this past summer. He came to my office, and we looked at books together and talked about the kings of the Old Testament and his other interest, the Neo-Assyrians. Jeremiah was very curious about what the ancient Israelites ate, and I had to hunt around the office for some information to satiate his curiosity. Our conversation in my office was delightful and memorable.

When we went down to our chapel together, I asked Jeremiah to look at the painted panels around the apse. They each depict a scene from the Bible, with the last scene displaying Martin Luther’s tacking up of the Ninety-Five Theses on the Castle Church’s door in Wittenberg. I said, Jeremiah, do you notice something troubling about our panels? There are ten of them, and only one depicts a scene from the Old Testament. Jeremiah was aghast. In the midst of our shared incredulity, one of the chapel attendants overheard me and came to our rescue. The panels are representative of the church calendar, he explained, beginning in Advent (the Isaiah panel) and moving forward through Christmas to Epiphany. Fair enough. But what I meant as good tongue-in-cheek humor, Jeremiah took with all seriousness, and he had a hard time letting it go. For the rest of our time together that morning, Jeremiah kept asking me, Why is there only one Old Testament scene in your chapel?

THE OLD TESTAMENT’S SIGNAL ROLE IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY

Jeremiah’s question is a good one, despite our chapel attendant’s best efforts to minimize it by liturgical means. In fact, it is the kind of question that helps to frame the thesis of this chapter. The church has never operated apart from the Scriptures of Israel as a governing body of authoritative Scriptures. Moreover, the New Testament leans on the Old Testament for its own theological sense making and, perhaps more provocatively, does not even exist apart from its relation to the Old Testament. This chapter will lean into these claims and aim to unpack them in the ensuing material.

Despite the complexities of sifting through the canonical history of the New Testament documents, there was never a time that Jesus Christ, the apostles, or the earliest members of Christ’s church did not recognize the Scriptures of Israel as a constraining authority and privileged source of divine revelation. In other words, the church from its inception did not operate without scriptural authority. The Scriptures of Israel provided much of the substance and language for the earliest of Christians in their coming to terms with the identity of Jesus Christ in that unique moment of God’s eschatological unveiling—In the former days he revealed himself in various and sundry ways but in these latter days in the Son (Heb 1:1–2).¹

In Hans von Campenhausen’s classic work The Formation of the Christian Bible, he puts a point on the matter when he claims that for the early church, the question was never, What do we do with the Scriptures of Israel now that Jesus Christ has appeared? Rather, the question was quite the reverse. What do with do with Jesus Christ in light of the assumed and anterior authority of our canonical inheritance in the Scriptures of Israel?² The canonical logic is plain to see in terms of classic Christian theology. If knowledge of the Triune God is the subject matter of Christian theology, then Holy Scripture is theology’s chief and principal instrument for apprehending that knowledge. Whatever gray area may exist in the early church’s life as it pertains to the New Testament canon’s composition and canonization, such gray area does not exist with what Christians call the Old Testament.

Little wonder that the church’s second-century struggles against the cruelty of heresy sat right on top of the Old Testament’s enduring authority. Brevard Childs describes the onslaught of Marcion’s theological and canonical outlook in the following description:

The first major challenge to the unbroken continuity between the Old Testament and the church was raised when Marcion opposed the traditional view of the canon and sought to introduce a critical principle by which the church could determine its authentic scriptures. He argued that the original Christian tradition had been corrupted and needed not only to cut loose from the Jewish scriptures, but also to be critically recovered by sifting the allegedly authentic sources of the faith.³

The earliest of Christian apologists recognized that to cut the church off from Israel’s Scriptures was to cut us off from the very word of God. Or as I tell my students at Beeson Divinity School, they are called to a ministry of exorcism wherever and whenever Marcion’s lingering ghost might still pester Christ’s church.⁴

THE OLD TESTAMENT IN THE NEW TESTAMENT: BROAD BRUSHSTROKES

Despite Marcion and his progeny’s best efforts to suggest otherwise, it does not take a deep reading of the New Testament to see the Old Testament’s presence from beginning to end. The past forty years of New Testament scholarship has given an inordinate amount of attention to the presence of the Old Testament in the New Testament, stemming from the work of Barnabas Lindars and Earle Ellis, and the catapulting efforts of Richard Hays.⁵ I remember reading Hays’s Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul as a young seminarian and feeling as if the sky of Scripture had opened to me in new ways. Hays’s work spawned a whole generation of New Testament scholars who pursued the quotations, allusions, and echoes of the Old Testament in the New Testament. I often repeat the story of my own doctoral studies. One day while in a seminar, my Doktorvater made a joke about all the dissertations out there on Paul and Isaiah. The whole room laughed. I laughed too and then went back to my desk to work on my dissertation on Paul and Isaiah.

These reflections are no report on the state of research on the subject matter. I only mention these things briefly to highlight the unstated and unintended humor of this chapter’s topic: the influence of Tanak on the New Testament. The influence is so thorough and replete and constitutive of the New Testament’s compositional history that not much argumentation is needed to speak of the Old Testament’s presence and influence on the New. One only need start reading in Matthew 1 and follow the logic of the genealogies, linking Christ’s birth to the redemptive history of Israel. Or the character of the whole history of Israel, played out in Jesus Christ’s historical narrative. Follow Jesus to the mountain in Matthew 5–7 as the new Moses who clarifies the true intent of Torah as directed toward our whole person—act and motive—and not merely outward conformity to the strictures of the law. Sit on the sidelines in the Synoptic Gospels as Jesus hashes it out with the Pharisees over various applications (halakah) of the Torah—the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.⁶

The very logic of the parables, for example, in Luke 8, rests on Isaiah’s portrayal of deafness and hearing as respective metaphors for judgement and redemption. Jesus’ clarion call, Let those who have ears to hear understand, inhabits the redemptive portrayal of Isaiah’s promised future. Follow Luke’s Gospel to its final chapter, where we see the risen Jesus Christ shaping his disciples in the practices that should constitute their very being as followers of him (Luke 24). What does Jesus do in the upper room? He explains all things concerning himself in the Scriptures, beginning with Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms, conjoining the study of Scripture with a eucharistic moment in the breaking of the bread. What is the result of Jesus’ conjoining of Scripture exposition and eucharistic celebration? They see Jesus. Do you want to know who Jesus Christ is, to see his face? Jesus exemplifies for his followers where such encounters are to be had: in the study of Moses, the Prophets, and the Writings in the shared sacramental life of the faith community.

The so-called Noachian laws of Leviticus 17–19 help adjudicate tricky matters on Jew/gentile relations at the Jerusalem counsel in Acts 15.⁷ Do we even need to speak about Paul and Isaiah, given the plethora of studies in this field and my Doktorvater’s good-natured humor?⁸ Readers might engage Paul’s use of Deuteronomy in the 1 Corinthians, where the Torah shapes Paul’s instruction on complicated matters of church discipline and ethics.⁹ They could turn to Hebrews and the Levitical logic of sacrifice and atonement rooted in the life of the blood, or to James’ reception of the wisdom traditions, or to Revelation’s immersion in Old Testament imagery.¹⁰ This litany of suggested paths for the topic at hand only touches the surface: one could continue with the righteous sufferer in the Psalms or the identity of wisdom with God’s actions in Christ or the gospel’s portrayal of Jesus Christ in terms of the divine identity of YHWH—who forgives sins, has the power over death, and demonstrates his lordship over creation other than the Lord? Readers could also turn to the significance of a temple theology for the New Testament’s understanding of cosmogony and cosmology, and the list continues.

An interesting and often unexplored example of the Old Testament pressuring our reading of the New Testament is the scene in Luke 4:14–21. Jesus’ teaching ministry in the Galilean countryside leads to a particular Sabbath moment when he unrolls the Isaiah scroll to chapter 61 and reads the first two verses. The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.¹¹ After Jesus rolls up the scroll, he announces, Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing (Luke 4:21).

The scene is a familiar one, and the textual sense appears clear enough on the literary surface. Isaiah’s promise of good news and liberation for a future day of the Lord’s favor has broken into time by means of Jesus of Nazareth. This reading is straightforward and certainly passes for textual understanding. A second glance, however, at Isaiah’s larger canonical context may allow nuances and hues of understanding that go beyond this surface account to include a fuller understanding of Jesus Christ’s person and work, along with the long-term effects of his ministry in the church. A closer examination of Isaiah 61:1–3 suggests that the first-person speaking voices behind this familiar refrain are the dramatic figures of Isaiah 54–66 referred to as the servants (see Isa 54:17).

Readers of Isaiah may be familiar with these figures. Within Isaiah 40–53, the servant of the Lord is the unique figure by whom the Lord will establish his just order in the world (Isa 42:1–4), and who, in time, suffers on behalf of the guilty in order to secure their righteousness (Isa 53:10–11). After Isaiah 53, the servant (singular noun) appears no more within Isaiah’s oeuvre. Rather, his righteous offspring, the servants (plural noun), now take center redemptive stage. These figures are those who recognize in retrospect the servant’s significance, herald the good news of God’s kingdom established by him, and share in his sufferings while awaiting their future vindication (see Isa 52:7; the singular voice of Isa 53:1, and the servants’ future vindication in Isa 65:13–15).¹² Within Isaiah’s larger canonical landscape, one is on safe ground when identifying the first-person speaking voices of Isaiah 61:1–3 with the servants of the servant who announce the saving arrival of God’s kingdom.¹³

Yet, on the other hand, Jesus in Luke 4 says after reading this text, Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. How exactly is a text whose authorial agency in Isaiah is the servant’s offspring fulfilled in Jesus Christ today? Brevard Childs’s Isaiah commentary provides a helpful answer. "The assumption that only when there is a specific New Testament reference to the death of the servant can the servant be understood as playing a christological role misunderstands the function of biblical intertextuality. Rather, a case can be made that Jesus himself ushers in the acceptable year of the Lord, and thus the citation of Isaiah 61 encompasses the entire mission of the servant, including his life, death, and offspring."¹⁴ Rather than limiting the scope of the Isaiah quotation to the healing and preaching ministry of Jesus, the pressure from Isaiah’s own canonical context suggests the expansion of the text’s scope to include the whole of Jesus’ ministry, including those who follow after him in time and extend his ministry of redemptive proclamation and liberation throughout the world.

So to speak of how the New Testament writers made use of Tanak is perhaps to frame the question in the wrong way. Readers of Holy Scripture in its two-Testament form should ask how the Old Testament made use of the New Testament authors. How did Tanak shape the writing of the New Testament? The facts on the ground of the early church and its writings, that is, appear to tip the scales in this direction.

Put more sharply, the influence of the Scriptures of Israel on the New Testament is so constitutive of its very being that I believe the following claim can be made without much need for rigorous argumentation: the New Testament’s canonical authority is grounded by its relation to the Scriptures of Israel and has no being apart from its relation to the Old Testament. Its hearers and readers recognized the authority of the New Testament because it was shaped by what all believed were the first Scriptures from God.

DOES THE NEW TESTAMENT EXIST WITHOUT THE OLD TESTAMENT?

For some time, I have wished to explore an idea related to this paper topic, and the idea is substantially related to the final claims of the preceding paragraph. My questions is as follows: Are there responsible uses of the Chalcedonian analogy when coming to terms with Scripture’s material existence? Allow me to clarify and explain these thoughts.

A decade or so ago it became fashionable to appeal to the Chalcedonian formula as an analogy for Scripture’s divine and human source(s).¹⁵ The Chalcedonian logic went as follows: if Christ is human and divine in a single subject (hypostasis), so too is Scripture both human and divine in its authorial source and coming to be. Many of these appeals to the Chalcedonian analogy suffered under various theological strains. They were not offered as high-flying theological insights. Rather, they served a more basic claim about Scripture’s human dimension and the importance of higher-critical engagement in light of it. If Scripture is divine and human in origin, so the line of reasoning went, then the engagement of its human dimension via the tools of critical biblical scholarship is not only warranted but responsible, given the analogy’s logic.

Readers can leave aside for the moment whether such use of the analogy is responsible. I was initially discomforted for the simple reason that Scripture is not divine.¹⁶ Yet, on second glance, there does appear to be something of an incarnational analogy in relation to Scripture’s material form in light of the Old Testament’s prophetic witness.¹⁷ Within the prophetic speech of the Old Testament, both in oral and written form, God gives his word—an extension of his own person—in the substance of human language. We have a figural witness to the incarnation within the Old Testament’s own discrete character. God’s word or God’s Logos appears in the servant form of finite human language in the Law and Prophets of the Old Testament.¹⁸ Room exists, therefore, for a responsible use of the Chalcedonian analogy as it pertains to the fixity and potential of human language in canonical dress, though even here one must pause before the analogy because Scripture, as mentioned above, does not refer to itself in terms of personal union but as God’s word in the form of human language.

Another christological avenue is worth exploring as well, and this avenue leads me to the central concern of this paper, with its focus on the relation of the Old Testament and the New Testament in a single Christian canon. I beg the reader’s patience as we enter into the technical reaches of christological discourse.

One feature of Christology made especially prominent in the twentieth century by Karl Barth is the enhypostatic/anhypostatic character of Christ’s humanity in relation to his divinity. Definitions of these terms are forthcoming. These seemingly arcane categories of the enyhypostatic and anhypostatic character of Christ’s humanity speak to both the positive and negative dimensions of the human/divine character of the single subject, Jesus Christ. As is well known, the Chalcedonian formula attests to Jesus Christ as a single subject with two natures, divine and human. Because Jesus Christ is a single subject, Christian discourse is forbidden to attach verbs to only one of the natures (e.g., the humanity of Jesus Christ grew tired) apart from the single subject (e.g., and more fittingly, Jesus Christ grew tired). We might be able to apply these christological categories to the material form of our Christian Bibles as an Old and a New Testament. Before we make this move, however, these christological categories need definition.

The positive affirmation of the enhypostatic character of Christ’s humanity is that it genuinely exists in (en)