Mind the Gap: How the Jewish Writings between the Old and New Testament Help Us Understand Jesus

by Matthias Henze

Jesus’s reply is remarkably similar to the list in the Messianic Apocalypse from Qumran. The first and last element in Jesus’s response, “to give sight to the blind” and “to proclaim good news to the poor,” are also found in the text from Qumran.

And there is a third element shared by both texts, the raising of the dead. There is no resurrection language in Isaiah 61. The Messianic Apocalypse and the Gospel of Luke draw heavily on the prophecies found in the book of Isaiah in their respective descriptions of the messiah, and yet, they both go a step further and ...

Luke leaves no doubt that Jesus is the anointed of Isaiah. But he also makes clear that there is more. He adds the resurrection of the dead. That addition, we now know from the Messianic Apocalypse, was not Luke’s invention, but had become a fixed part of the messianic expectations in early Judaism by the time Luke wrote his Gospel. By including it in Jesus’s response, Luke not only draws on the prophet Isaiah, h...

The text, 4Q246, is written in Aramaic and, like the Messianic Apocalypse, dates from the first century BCE. This brief composition is known among scholars by various names, including the Apocryphon of Daniel or the Aramaic Apocalypse, though mostly it is referred to as the “Son of God” text, because of the figure of the “Son of God” who is mentioned in column 2.

An unnamed individual falls before a throne. The individual then goes on to address the king directly and to calm him down, because the king is troubled by a vision he has had. This sort of scene is well known from the book of Daniel, where it is Daniel who appears before the throne of King Nebuchadnezzar to interpret the king’s dreams for him (Daniel 2 and 4); hence, the title for this text from Qumran, the Apocryphon (or “hidden,” in the sense of “lesser known text”) of Daniel. The seer offers an interpretation that involves “oppression” and “great slaughter in the provinces,” and it also mentions the king of Assyria and Egypt. This period will come to an end, the seer goes on to explain, with the rise of one who will rule over the earth and who will be called great. This is where column 1 ends and column 2 begins.

He will be called Son of God, they will call him Son of the Most High. But like sparks 2 that you saw, so will be their kingdom. They will reign only a few years over 3 the land, and all will trample. People will trample people and nation on nation, [. . .] 4 until the people of God arise; then all will have rest from warfare. 5 His kingdom will be an everlasting kingdom, and all his ways truth. He will judge 6 the land justly, and all will make peace. Warfare will cease from the land, 7 and all the nations shall do homage to him. The great God will be his strength. 8 He will fight for him, giving nations into his hand and 9 cast them all down before him. God’s rule will be an everlasting rule, and all the depths . . . (Son of God text; 4Q246 II, 1–9; my trans.)

The biblical origins of these two messianic titles, they point out, are Psalm 2, the royal psalm in which God says to the king, “You are my son,” and Nathan’s prophecy to the house of David in 2 Samuel 7, in which God says about David’s royal offspring, “I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me” (the title “Son of the Most High” does not have a biblical origin). According to this interpretation, the calamities of lines 2–3 are simultaneous with the Advent of the messiah; they are happening at the time when the messiah will appear. There will be much social unrest and oppression. In line 4, God raises up his own people, the people of Israel, and gives them peace. The remainder of the text in lines 5–9 describes an everlasting messianic kingdom. The precise nature of the messianic figure remains elusive, but a few details are clear: he will act as judge of the earth (lines 5–6), all cities will pay him homage (line 7), and no hostile nation can overcome him (lines 8–9). Again, the similarities with Psalm 2 are striking.

One of the reasons why the second interpretation of the Son of God text, which argues that the “Son of God” and the “Son of the Most High” are the messiah, is more plausible than the first is that this passage has an astonishing parallel in the infancy narrative in the Gospel of Luke.

Gabriel is sent to Mary to announce the birth of Jesus. 26 In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, 27 to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. 28 And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” 29 But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. 30 The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. 31 And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. 32 He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. 33 He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” 34 Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” 35 The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.” (Luke 1:26–35)

The similarities between the expectations of the messiah in the Son of God text from Qumran and Gabriel’s brief characterization of Jesus in the famous annunciation scene in Luke 1 are remarkable.

Four phrases in particular are closely aligned: “he will be great” (at the end of column 1 of the “Son of God” text and in Luke 1:32); “he will be called Son of God” (line 1 of column 2 and Luke 1:35); he “will be called the Son of the Most High” (line 1 of column 2 and Luke 1:32); and his...

What is clear, however, is that when Luke uses these messianic titles and puts them into the mouth of Gabriel, he knows that his audience would have made the connection between Gabriel’s annunciation and the contemporary Jewish expectations of the coming messiah, as they are spelled out in the Son of God text.

That connection would have been lost on the modern reader of the Gospel, but because of the text from Qumran, we now know that there is nothing arbitrary about Luke’s choice of words and that his characterization of Jesus is carefully chosen to answer the Jewish messianic expectations of his time.

The concept of a messiah is not a Christian innovation. It has deep roots in the Old Testament and was fully developed in Judaism during the late Second Temple period. The early Christians inherited the belief in a messiah from their Jewish ancestors. By the time of Jesus and his first followers, messianic expectations had fully formed, even though the specific expectations varied from group to group.

Some groups, for example, were expecting a royal messiah of the line of David who would restore the house of David, defeat Israel’s enemies, and reign supremely in an eternal messianic kingdom. Others were hoping for a prophetic messiah who would heal the sick, release the prisoners, and proclaim good news to the poor. Others, still, were longing for a priestly messiah, the heavenly high priest. We find expressions of all of these forms of messianism applied to Jesus throughout the New Testament.

Jesus and the early Jesus movement did not emerge from the Old Testament; they emerged from the Judaism of their time, that is, from ...

The recognition that Jesus emerged from contemporary Judaism and needs to be understood in that context has direct consequences for the way in which we read the New Testament. Luke’s descriptions of Jesus in chapters 1 an...

Let’s consider the following two, rather different modern ways of reading the Gospel of Luke. Old Testament → New Testament Ol...

Once we allow for the possibility that Luke knew the scrolls or the messianic traditions expressed in them, then he would not have been the first who interpreted these passages in Isaiah as predictions of the messiah. The question is whether there is a difference between these two modern ways of understanding the Gospel of Luke. Does our interpretation of the Gospel have to change, now that we know of the Dead Sea Scrolls? Do the scrolls make a difference for our understanding of Luke’s Christology (his portrayal of Jesus)? The answer, I submit, has to be yes.

If all we had were the Old and the New Testament and no other Jewish literature, the fact that Gabriel calls Jesus “the Son of the Most High” and “Son of God” would seem incidental. We might think that these epithets are allusions to Psalm 2 or to the promise to the house of David in 2 Samuel 7. But there would be no reason to assume that these are specific titles that have any particular significance beyond these references to the Old Testament.

Similarly, Luke’s choice of Isaiah 61 as the Old Testament passage Luke has Jesus read in the synagogue in Nazareth would seem somewhat arbitrary; surely there are many other passages in the...

This modern interpretation of the Gospel of Luke, and by extension of the entire New Testament, is predicated on the traditional view that Jesus emerged straight out of the Old Testament.

This understanding of Luke is deeply misleading and fails on several grounds.

First, it overlooks the many elements in Luke’s Gospel that demonstrate how deeply Jesus was immersed in the Judaism of his time, elem...

Jesus goes to the synagogue, an institution that does not exist i...

He reads from the prophets. If Jesus’s reading is part of worship (Luke does not say this explicitly), then this would have been the public recitation of the Haftarah, the reading from the prophets that accompanies the Torah reading in Jewish services every Sabbath morning to this day. No Haftarah reading is ever mentioned in the Old Testament. In other words, this interpretation treats Luke’s Gospel without any regard for its historical...

Second, thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls and other early Jewish texts, we are now much better informed abou...

Because of the Messianic Apocalypse and the Son of God text from Qumran, we can say with certainty that there was nothing arbitrary about Luke’s choice of messianic titles and proof texts from the Old Testament. “Son of the Most High” and “Son of God” were used as titles for the me...

The astonishing similarities between the two texts from Qumran and the Gospel of Luke cannot be accidental.

is, in fact, deeply cultural, in that Luke skillfully positions his own use of Isaiah within the broader history of interpretation of the same passage in contemporary Judaism. There is, in other words, a layer of intentionality in Luke’s Gospel that we are bound to miss if we insist, erroneously, that the Old Testament is the only Jewish context of the New Testament.

Third, it is a common feature of ancient Jewish biblical interpretation that certain biblical texts came to be interpreted in certain ways.

Once a given passage from the Bible came to be linked to a particular interpretation, text and interpretation often merged and became inseparable. Above we looked at a number of passages from the Old Testament that were interpreted as predictions of the messiah. The same texts then came to be read as messianic prop...

It also rests on a deep misunderstanding of how the text of the Old Testament was copied, interpreted, and handed down from generation to generation in Jewish antiquity. Texts were inextricably bound to their particular traditions of interpretation. Luke was well aware of the messianic reading of Isaiah 61 and skillfully employed it in his portrayal of Jesus, the Messiah of Israel.

When I ask my audiences to compare Judaism and Christianity today, typically they will highlight the divisions that exist between the two religions. And the first difference that is commonly brought up is the belief in Jesus: whereas Christians confess that Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Mary and Joseph, is the Messiah, Jews do not believe that the messianic promises expressed in the Old Testament have been fulfilled. It is undoubtedly true that Jews and Christians are divided by what unites them, the belief in a messiah. But it is equally true that Christians inherited the idea of a messiah from Second Temple Judaism. And it is also true that even the ways in which Jesus is described in the New Testament, as we have seen in the case of the Gospel of Luke, are deeply Jewish, much more so than we would recognize if all we read was the Old and New Testament. Perhaps the divisions between Jews and Christians are not as deep as they appear.

Jesus and his followers lived in a world, the world of ancient Judaism, that was densely populated with demons and unclean spirits.

According to the evangelists, unclean spirits could cause the inability to speak, hear, or see; they could induce epilepsy-like symptoms; and they could lead humans to insanity and even to self-destruction. Demons were a constant threat. It is therefore no surprise to find that in the Gospels, exorcisms are a central part of Jesus’s ministry. The book of Acts relates how the apostles continued to heal the sick and cure those who were tormented by unclean spirits.

For today’s progressive Christians, the fact that Jesus conversed with demons and spirits is a source of embarrassment. “That’s what people thought back then” is the modern response of those for whom stories about demons and unclean spirits merely reflect a naïve misunderstanding of what actually are physical disabilities and mental illnesses. But there is more to these stories than a primitive, premodern misperception of human diseases.

The belief in the existence of demons and unclean spirits is predicated on the assumption—offensive to many modern believers and nonbelievers alike, no doubt— that human beings are not the center of all things.

Humans are part of a larger reality that consists of more than just themselves. It includes other powers and forces as well as spiritual beings, ...

Initially, the hostile spirits reside outside of the human body, but in an instant they can take possession of it, live in it, and cause significant damage, not unlike a parasite, or cancer. The demon resides inside the human body and lives off of it—but it does not belong there, it remains a foreign intruder. That means that the demon can be expelled again...

The focus in the New Testament stories is never on the possessed person, who hardly ever plays much of a role in the exorcism accounts and who always remains anonymous. Rather, the focus is on the encounter of the demons with Jesus their complete powerlessness, and their instantaneous surrender.

When Jesus casts out demons, the evangelists make clear that this act of exorcism manifests the superiority of the kingdom of God as it breaks into the present world order. To the Gospel writers, Jesus’s exorcisms are not incidental acts of kindness or random stories of healing. What Jesus is confronting is nothing less than an opposing power of a different kind, a well-organized kingdom of demons and unclean spirits.

This powerful realm is ruled by Beelzebub, “the ruler of the demons” (Luke 11:15), whom Jesus calls Satan. When Jesus drives out the demons, he takes on the enemy of humankind. The ruler of the demons proves powerless against Jesus and the kingdom of God. Once a person has been freed of the invader spirit and liberated from Satan’s oppression, Satan is defeated, at le...

Early Jews and Christians never questioned the existence of demons and unclean spirits they simply took their existence for granted. To them, there was nothing extraordinary about this, a...

There are no texts in the Old or New Testament that explain the origin and nature of demons and unclean spirits or that elaborate on thei...

Useful as such information might be for the modern reader, we find none of it in the Bible. To understand who these demons are, where they come from, and what they represent, we therefore need to look beyond the cano...

There we find a wealth of information about demons, with elaborate descriptions about their origins, the damage they can cause, how they relate to God and the angels, their names, and how they can be warded off. The silence in the New Testament is not the r...

Early Christian writers lived in a world in which such knowledge was widespread, so there was simply no need for them to rehearse what they could have ...

To appreciate what exactly is happening when Jesus meets the demons, what is at stake in their encounter, and why these stories are so significant, it is imperative that we turn to the books of the Jewish world of Jesus.

We need to read the exorcism accounts in the New Testament within their proper literary and historical context, the world of late Second Temple Judaism.