Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus: How a Jewish Perspective Can Transform Your Understanding

by Lois Tverberg

Jesus was engaging at a high level with scholars of his day.

Westerners do their serious thinking and communication in concepts.

concept is always primary, not the illustration. Middle Easterners, in contrast, often use parables, metaphors, and proverbs as sophisticated forms of communication.

Middle East, from the beggar to the king, the primary method of creating meaning is through the creative use of metaphor and story,” Bailey writes.7 What does this look like? When John the Baptist confronted the religious leaders, he didn’t lecture them about the flaws in their theology by saying, Your externalized, merit-based observance assumes a soteriology based on ethnocentric nationalism that will ultimately prove erroneous and ineffective. Rather, he bellowed: You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, “We have Abraham as our father.” For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. (Luke 3:7–9 NIV)

John vented his fury at the religious leaders with vigorous, concrete, real-world images. They were slithering snakes, fruitless deadwood t...

Our Western instinct is to boil a story down to a concept. But when we do this with Isaiah 53:7, we lose the depth and complexity of the multilayered imagery. The Jewish authors of the New Testament realized this. Over and over they spoke of Christ as the “Lamb who was slain,” referring to the entire scene in Isaiah rather than reducing it to a theological label (see Acts 8:32; 1 Cor. 5:7; 1 Pet. 1:19; Rev. 5:6, 12).

Believe it or not, the Old Testament is usually much easier to translate than the New, because its concrete language makes more sense to the non-Western world. The Greek language’s propensity for abstraction often makes translating

the New Testament quite difficult. Bible translator Dave Brunn points out

even the simple word love can create problems.10 In English and Greek, we’re used to talking about love as an abstraction, without anyone actually doing it. But in the New Guinean language he studies, love is always a verb, an action between two people. God loves you. You love your neighbor. Love can’t be used in a sentence without specifying who is doing the loving and who is being loved. In the Hebrew Bible, love can be a noun but it is always attached...

“Love is patient, love is kind . . .” (1 Cor. 13:4 NIV) was a head-scratche...

say who is loving whom. Paul was doing a very Greek thing by talking about the idea of love, all by itself. In order to render this line so that the New Guineans might understand it, Brunn needed to convert “love” back into a verb and supply a lover and a beloved, translating ...

For instance, when Westerners read Genesis 2:7, “The LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (NIV), they often focus only on the physical details.

Genesis 2:7 in a more Hebraic way, being sensitive to the meaning of the concrete imagery within the ancient world: [This] image simultaneously expresses both the glory and the insignificance of man. Man occupies a special place in the hierarchy of Creation and enjoys a unique relationship with God by virtue of his being the work of God’s own hands and being directly animated by God’s own breath. At the same time, he is but dust taken from the earth, mere clay in the hands of the divine Potter, who exercises absolute mastery over His Creation.

Throughout the Bible, “dust” signified insignificance or finiteness. When Abraham spoke to God, he humbly declared that he was “but dust and ashes” (Gen. 18:27). God “raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap” (Ps. 113:7), but he “tramples kings underfoot; he makes them like dust with his sword, like driven stubble with his bow” (Isa. 41:2). When you read the Old Testament, it’s important not to underestimate the amount of meaning that the physical imagery is trying to convey.

The Bible narrative (especially the Old Testament) is typically quite succinct, and when it goes into descriptive detail, it’s often for a reason.

Jesus often based his reasoning on experience rather than if-then logic.

Jesus frequently used observations about nature and daily life to shed light on spiritual realities.

Western reasoning often attempts to systematize theology by reducing and affixing God’s thoughts onto a logical grid, flattening and straightening them so that they fit into predictable patterns. Jesus’ parables, however, embraced the fact that our material world is multifaceted and complex. If God’s creation surprises and perplexes us, shouldn’t its Creator do so even more?

A farmer finds tares growing in his wheat fields. Wouldn’t the logical response be to pull them out? Knowing that the valuable wheat crop would be damaged in the process, the farmer instead decides to let the tares grow. In the same way, God allows evildoers to live alongside the righteous.

Jesus was doing theology through storytelling. He was addressing a conundrum that has perplexed philosophers down through the ages: How can a good God let evil seemingly go unchecked? Jesus’ answer was to share a parallel situation, an experience where a human farmer would make that decision. God knows the wider situation and, for the ultimate good, puts off judgment until the end. What seems illogical at first is not, in God’s greater wisdom.

Often Israel is the tree, and the image is of God’s judgment of the nation.

John is convinced that the end is close at hand. Jesus disagrees but preaches that now is the time to repent. Both are using metonyms from the Bible to preach eschatology, where “trees” are nations and “axes” are God’s judgment.

John’s calling was to announce the coming of the messianic King and to reform his people’s conduct in preparation for his arrival. John’s ministry did just that, but he often spoke as if the Messiah himself would bring God’s judgment.

While Jesus affirmed John’s ministry, he challenged this idea, pointing out God’s promises of coming with healing and forgiveness.14

His parables often focused on God’s mercy toward sinners and preached that judgment would...

Greek-thinkers often fall into Galileo’s trap—they tend to be so easily swayed by an elegant theological proof that they forget to check the biblical “data.”

What if we look in the New Testament? Throughout the Gospels Jesus sends out disciples two by two to preach the gospel. At Pentecost the first thing Peter does after being filled with the Spirit is preach to a large crowd of worshipers in the temple, and three thousand come to faith. And, of course, Paul travels far and wide to take the gospel to the Gentiles. If you’re looking for evidence that Jesus would have seen evangelism as obnoxious, you simply won’t find it. The whole New Testament records the history of the explosive growth of the church that was founded on Jesus’ command to “make disciples of all nations” in Matthew 28:19.

When Paul and Silas brought their amazing claims that Jesus was God’s promised Messiah, the Bereans got out their Scriptures and did their research. Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. Many of them therefore believed, with not a few Greek women of high standing as well as men. (Acts 17:11–12)

We can easily concoct a whole new theology this way. If it sounds logical, Westerners will find it persuasive. But if the Bible speaks through history, we should check our theology in the wider record of the biblical text.

The people there were believers who had heard Jesus firsthand. No time had elapsed for his words to be reinterpreted, and his followers were passionate about living them out. It’s not unreasonable to conclude that what the early believers did (or at least tried to do) was what Jesus taught.

Here’s another example. In my last book, Walking in the Dust of Rabbi Jesus, I quoted a radio program in which I heard a pastor say, When Jesus came, everything changed, everything changed. . . . He didn’t just want to clean up the people’s attitudes as they gave their sacrifices, He obliterated the sacrificial system because He brought an end to Judaism with all its ceremonies, all its rituals, all its sacrifices, all of its external trappings, the Temple, the Holy of Holies, all of it.17

In Acts, do we find any evidence of Jesus’ first disciples jumping for joy at being done with the law? Once again we find the opposite. Jewish believers in Jesus were careful to observe the Torah, and were known for their avid observance (Acts 21:20, 25). They even asked Paul to sponsor a sacrifice in order to show his commitment to living by the law (v. 24).

and even usurped the gods themselves. The Hebrew attitude toward God was starkly different. You can see it when you compare the Scriptures of Israel to those of surrounding nations. All the polytheists had concocted elaborate mythologies and stories about their gods’ origins, like the Greeks. The Scriptures of Israel contain no such tales. Genesis simply starts with the presumption that God exists, not bothering to prove his reality in any way. The creation account has no bloody battles to form the elements of the earth and sky, simply one mysterious Supreme Being who speaks creation into existence with a few majestic words.

Through God’s name he was proclaiming how he would reveal himself: “I will be known by what I do.”

He instructed them with his laws and rebuked them through the prophets.

Theologian Karl Barth puts it this way: No attempt is made in the Bible to define God—that is, to grasp God in our concepts. . . . The Bible tells the story of God; it narrates His deeds and the history of this God as it takes place on earth in the human sphere. The Bible proclaims the significance and the importance of this working and acting, this story of God, and in this way it proves God’s existence, describes His being and His nature. The Bible is not a philosophical book, but a history book, the book of God’s mighty acts, in which God becomes knowable to us.19

What exactly did Jews believe, and how did it compare to Christianity? I wished that someone would spell it all out in a simple statement, a basic creed of some type. Then one day my instructor started handing out copies of the Shema (pronounced “shmah”), a profession of faith that pious Jews have recited daily since before the first century. Eagerly, I scanned down the page of what I assumed was their Apostles’ Creed. I wasn’t too surprised that it started off in a theological way, with God’s command to love and worship him alone (Deut. 6:4–9).20 But the next section, from Deuteronomy 11:13–21, stopped me in my tracks. I absolutely couldn’t believe my eyes:

I will send rain on your land in its season, both autumn and spring rains, so that you may gather in your grain, new wine and olive oil. I will provide grass in the fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied. (vv. 14–15 NIV)

The Shema, however, is a recollection of history, a reminder of the oath that established Israel’s relationship with God.

Theology is a wonderful tool for helping us understand the God who revealed himself in the Bible. But having your doctrinal ducks in a row is not what accomplishes salvation. If it were, wouldn’t Satan be fully qualified?

Believe it or not, Jesus himself gave us instructions. On his last evening with his disciples, he was celebrating Passover. This was an important religious feast, a covenantal meal that was a formal celebration of God’s relationship with his people. It recounted the night God freed Israel from Egypt, reminded them of their current relationship, and recalled the promise of the Messiah, God’s final redeemer. When Jesus broke bread and shared wine with his disciples, he told them to do this in remembrance of his coming death. Through his sacrifice, Christ was inaugurating the long-awaited “new covenant” for the forgiveness of sin that God had promised his people in Jeremiah 31.

what brings us into relationship with God is not a creed but the covenant Christ enacted that night.

We are sitting down to enjoy a meal together, an act that denotes intimate fellowship with God and all others at the table.21 And we are actually, physically replaying the event in history that made possible our relationship with God through Christ.

You may be surprised at how many biblical subplots expect the reader to be aware of the Bible’s family-centered logic and the assumptions surrounding it.

When Jesus is described as the “Son of David,” it tells us that he is a descendant in the line of David, and like David he is a powerful king. You can hear Jesus using this same logic in his preaching about being “sons of your Father.” Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. (Matt. 5:44–45)

Our Father graciously sustains both the good and the evil with sunshine and rain. Of course, as his children, we aim to emulate him.

In biblical times, our ears would have pricked up at the scandalous fact that Ruth was a Moabite. We would recall that when the weary Israelites were journeying to the promised land, the people of Moab lured them into sexual immorality and idol worship (Num. 25:1).

Then we’d recall their origins in Genesis 19:30–38, in the not-so-nice story of Lot and his daughters. After escaping the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, they got their father drunk so that they could become pregnant by him, since their husbands had refused to leave the city and had died. One gave birth to a son named Moab, and he became the father of the Moabite people. In ancient thinking, this made sense. If your ancestors were immoral, you’d likely be the same way too. Look at the story of Ruth with this in mind. Not only was Ruth a Moabite but she was even in the same situation as Lot’s daughters:

To an ancient reader, it would have been shocking that not only did the God of Israel accept Ruth and cleanse her from her family history but he also gave her a key role in his supreme act of salvation. Those of us who struggle with an embarrassing family history or an immoral past should rejoice to see how God redeemed Ruth and used her for his wonderful purposes.

Because of this, the Bible has a very different recurring emotional subplot—the “redemption story of barrenness.” We see it over and over: Abraham and Sarah. Isaac and Rebekah. Jacob