In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been
made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the
darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. (John 1:1-5)
John’s gospel begins with an astounding prologue. It is very clear that John has in mind the opening verses of the Tanakh at the start of Genesis (known as Barashit in the Hebrew to the people of Israel):
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth… And God said, "Let there
be light," and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and He separated the
light from the darkness. God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night."
And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. (Genesis 1:1; 3-5)
Our focus is on this opening verse of Genesis, and the opening word which lends itself to the name of the book: ‘Barashit’ – ‘In the beginning’. P.S.Alexander explains another aspect of the significance of this word for Jews and for Christians:
The majority on both sides agree that this has a strictly temporal sense—‘in the
beginning,’ but a significant minority on both sides argue that this temporal meaning
does not do justice to the unusual word reshit: rather reshit here points to an agent or
instrument through whom God created the world. This initial agreement is astonishing,
because its basis is far from obvious, but then they crucially diverge: the Christian
exegetes claim that the reshit is the pre-incarnate Christ, the Rabbinic exegetes that
it is the Torah. (Anderson 2009, p3).
This sense of Barashit indicating an agent with God in the beginning is not expounded to be indicative of another apart from God. Yet it stands as a subtle theme embedded in the Hebrew and recognised by Jewish, as well as Christian, interpreters.
The common exegetical move comes from Proverbs 8 which personifies the wisdom of YHWH:
I, wisdom, dwell together with prudence;
I possess knowledge and discretion. (Proverbs 8:12)
…
The LORD brought me forth as the first of his works,
before his deeds of old;
I was appointed from eternity,
from the beginning, before the worlds began. (Proverbs 8:22-23)
Rabbinic midrash (a genre of interpretation) identified wisdom, this agent of God through whom all things were made, as Torah:
Thus the Holy One, blessed be he, was looking into the Torah…and creating the
world, and this is why Torah declares, ‘In the beginning God created’ (Gen 1:1)—
‘beginning (reshit)’ referring to the Torah, as in the verse, ‘The Lord made me as the
beginning (reshit) of his way’ (Prov 8:22).
(Genesis Rabbah 1:1)
Torah is God’s guiding presence for Israel: like the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night which led them out of Egypt at Passover and on to Sinai, Torah is YHWH’s revelatory instruction as given to Moses and the people of Israel through the calling of the patriarchs – Abraham Isaac and Jacob. This same presence and wisdom is the foundation of all creation.
Christians have reciprocated by associating YHWH’s wisdom with His profound giving of Himself to Israel for the blessing of all mankind as Jesus of Nazareth – believing Him to be Immanuel (God-with-us). This distinction is the difference at the heart of Christianity and Judaism. But we genuinely worship the same Holy One and a Christian perspective, it would seem, can only endorse the Jewish interpretation. If an opposition emerges between Jesus Christ and Torah, then all has been lost because this would set the Son against the Father, destroying their unity and denying the core message of the Christian Gospel. For the Christian, Jesus is the Word – the Torah of YHWH to Israel; beautiful and eternal – made flesh.
Many Christians will point to Paul’s teaching regarding the Law, or ‘nomos’ in the Greek: that it is a curse, it pertains toward death and has been set aside in Jesus Christ. For example, he writes:
So, my brothers, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might
belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear
fruit to God. For when we were controlled by the sinful nature, the sinful passions
aroused by the law were at work in our bodies, so that we bore fruit for death. But
now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that
we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.
(Romans 7:4-6)
Yet we must take extreme care in reading Paul’s argument here if we are to avoid profoundly misunderstanding him. In his translation of ‘Torah’ (Hebrew) into ‘nomos’ (Greek) he transverses not only a language barrier, but also a conceptual barrier. It is not to discredit Paul’s teaching, authority or commission to remember (as he too was presumably aware) that the inequivalence between ‘nomos’ and ‘Torah’ at least as important as the equivalence between them.
The Hebrew expression contains something which is lost in translation – namely that it is embedded in a language, a culture, and a people. For this people, the Jewish people, Torah does not entail a legalistic dogma. It has a dynamic application and it requires rigorous interpretation. Only read as part of the Tanakh as a whole is it able to be applicable in new contexts as the guiding presence of YHWH. As such Torah is freedom to live in a covenant relationship with God, as has been shown over the centuries by the intensive Rabbinic reflection upon Torah: in the Talmud, mishnah, and midrashim. These modes of interpretation and commentary ‘turn’ the verses and look at them carefully from various angles to find the depths of meaning within them. Paul is perhaps arguing less against 'Torah' than against what it changes to mean if it is translated into Greek ‘nomos’; Latin ‘lex’, and eventually English, ‘Law’. In short, he is rejecting what Torah appears to be when looked at from a Gentile perspective, not from a Jewish perspective. Paul seems to advocate that through the work of His Holy Spirit, received in the Name of Jesus, God has provided a ‘new’ way of keeping Torah which would also mean that a person need not keep some of the specific stipulations under different circumstances. On the basis of Jesus’ teaching (e.g. in Mark 12:29-30), this would most likely mean prioritising the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-9) above all else.
For this reason, where Paul’s words portray the ‘Law’ in negative terms, he almost certainly means that Gentiles need not, and moreover should not, allow the ‘Law’ to become a barrier: something which prevents them from being ‘grafted in’ (Romans 11:17) to share in God’s covenant relationship with Israel. For example, “Mark my words! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all.” (Galatians 5:2) – Paul is clearly addressing the uncircumcised on this point! But the point is that the stipulations are set aside only insofar as specific stipulations may at times contravene Torah itself, which is an issue Jews have grappled with too. For example, as prominent Jewish biblical scholar Jon Levenson explains,
No rabbi has ever cited the biblical principle of “an eye for an eye,” for example, in
order to clear away the rabbinic law that corporal damages must be compensated
monetarily and not in kind, as the peshat [straight forward or ‘plain’ sense] of
scripture might be thought to suggest. (Levenson 1993, p46)
But Torah itself, properly understood, can never be obsolete. It commands what Jewish people call mitzvot, which are positive acts of obedience. Mitzvot exercise their freedom tolive in accordance with God’s covenant relationship. This is recognised by James:
Was not our ancestor Abraham considered righteous for what he did [emphasis mine]
when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see that his faith and his actions
were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did. And the
scripture was fulfilled that says, "Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him
as righteousness," and he was called God's friend. You see that a person is justified
by what he does [emphasis mine] and not by faith alone. (James 2:21-24)
Faith is not merely abstract belief, but also active obedience, and Torah is therefore faith-in-practice. It is the gift which came from YHWH leading His people out of Egypt at Passover. Like the Lamb’s blood on the doorframes of the Israelites ensured that death ‘passed over’, the words of the Shema are placed on the doorframes as a reminder that God’s presence and wisdom – life-giving Torah – is with them.
The point for Christians remains that if Jesus endorses Torah (Matthew 5:17), the accusation that Jewish people in their observance of Torah have rejected God or converted to legalism is utterly unfounded. If Jesus had undermined Torah, He would also have undermined His own identity as the ‘Word of God’ and the One who was there ‘in the beginning’ and through whom ‘all things were made’. If we, as Christians, recognise the identity of Torah, it is only fitting that we recognise the content of Torah and the covenant which God made for His people:
I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. The whole land of Canaan, where you are now an alien, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God." (Genesis 17:7-9)
_______
NOTES:
Alexander.P.S. (2009) “‘In the Beginning’: Rabbinic and Patristic Exegesis of Genesis 1:1” The Exegetical Encounter between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity. eds. Grypeou.E. & Spurling.H. Brill: Leiden-Boston.
Levenson.J.D. (1993) The Hebrew Bible, The Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies. Westminster/John Knox Press: Louisville, Kentucky.
He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been
made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the
darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. (John 1:1-5)
John’s gospel begins with an astounding prologue. It is very clear that John has in mind the opening verses of the Tanakh at the start of Genesis (known as Barashit in the Hebrew to the people of Israel):
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth… And God said, "Let there
be light," and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and He separated the
light from the darkness. God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night."
And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. (Genesis 1:1; 3-5)
Our focus is on this opening verse of Genesis, and the opening word which lends itself to the name of the book: ‘Barashit’ – ‘In the beginning’. P.S.Alexander explains another aspect of the significance of this word for Jews and for Christians:
The majority on both sides agree that this has a strictly temporal sense—‘in the
beginning,’ but a significant minority on both sides argue that this temporal meaning
does not do justice to the unusual word reshit: rather reshit here points to an agent or
instrument through whom God created the world. This initial agreement is astonishing,
because its basis is far from obvious, but then they crucially diverge: the Christian
exegetes claim that the reshit is the pre-incarnate Christ, the Rabbinic exegetes that
it is the Torah. (Anderson 2009, p3).
This sense of Barashit indicating an agent with God in the beginning is not expounded to be indicative of another apart from God. Yet it stands as a subtle theme embedded in the Hebrew and recognised by Jewish, as well as Christian, interpreters.
The common exegetical move comes from Proverbs 8 which personifies the wisdom of YHWH:
I, wisdom, dwell together with prudence;
I possess knowledge and discretion. (Proverbs 8:12)
…
The LORD brought me forth as the first of his works,
before his deeds of old;
I was appointed from eternity,
from the beginning, before the worlds began. (Proverbs 8:22-23)
Rabbinic midrash (a genre of interpretation) identified wisdom, this agent of God through whom all things were made, as Torah:
Thus the Holy One, blessed be he, was looking into the Torah…and creating the
world, and this is why Torah declares, ‘In the beginning God created’ (Gen 1:1)—
‘beginning (reshit)’ referring to the Torah, as in the verse, ‘The Lord made me as the
beginning (reshit) of his way’ (Prov 8:22).
(Genesis Rabbah 1:1)
Torah is God’s guiding presence for Israel: like the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night which led them out of Egypt at Passover and on to Sinai, Torah is YHWH’s revelatory instruction as given to Moses and the people of Israel through the calling of the patriarchs – Abraham Isaac and Jacob. This same presence and wisdom is the foundation of all creation.
Christians have reciprocated by associating YHWH’s wisdom with His profound giving of Himself to Israel for the blessing of all mankind as Jesus of Nazareth – believing Him to be Immanuel (God-with-us). This distinction is the difference at the heart of Christianity and Judaism. But we genuinely worship the same Holy One and a Christian perspective, it would seem, can only endorse the Jewish interpretation. If an opposition emerges between Jesus Christ and Torah, then all has been lost because this would set the Son against the Father, destroying their unity and denying the core message of the Christian Gospel. For the Christian, Jesus is the Word – the Torah of YHWH to Israel; beautiful and eternal – made flesh.
Many Christians will point to Paul’s teaching regarding the Law, or ‘nomos’ in the Greek: that it is a curse, it pertains toward death and has been set aside in Jesus Christ. For example, he writes:
So, my brothers, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might
belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear
fruit to God. For when we were controlled by the sinful nature, the sinful passions
aroused by the law were at work in our bodies, so that we bore fruit for death. But
now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that
we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.
(Romans 7:4-6)
Yet we must take extreme care in reading Paul’s argument here if we are to avoid profoundly misunderstanding him. In his translation of ‘Torah’ (Hebrew) into ‘nomos’ (Greek) he transverses not only a language barrier, but also a conceptual barrier. It is not to discredit Paul’s teaching, authority or commission to remember (as he too was presumably aware) that the inequivalence between ‘nomos’ and ‘Torah’ at least as important as the equivalence between them.
The Hebrew expression contains something which is lost in translation – namely that it is embedded in a language, a culture, and a people. For this people, the Jewish people, Torah does not entail a legalistic dogma. It has a dynamic application and it requires rigorous interpretation. Only read as part of the Tanakh as a whole is it able to be applicable in new contexts as the guiding presence of YHWH. As such Torah is freedom to live in a covenant relationship with God, as has been shown over the centuries by the intensive Rabbinic reflection upon Torah: in the Talmud, mishnah, and midrashim. These modes of interpretation and commentary ‘turn’ the verses and look at them carefully from various angles to find the depths of meaning within them. Paul is perhaps arguing less against 'Torah' than against what it changes to mean if it is translated into Greek ‘nomos’; Latin ‘lex’, and eventually English, ‘Law’. In short, he is rejecting what Torah appears to be when looked at from a Gentile perspective, not from a Jewish perspective. Paul seems to advocate that through the work of His Holy Spirit, received in the Name of Jesus, God has provided a ‘new’ way of keeping Torah which would also mean that a person need not keep some of the specific stipulations under different circumstances. On the basis of Jesus’ teaching (e.g. in Mark 12:29-30), this would most likely mean prioritising the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-9) above all else.
For this reason, where Paul’s words portray the ‘Law’ in negative terms, he almost certainly means that Gentiles need not, and moreover should not, allow the ‘Law’ to become a barrier: something which prevents them from being ‘grafted in’ (Romans 11:17) to share in God’s covenant relationship with Israel. For example, “Mark my words! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all.” (Galatians 5:2) – Paul is clearly addressing the uncircumcised on this point! But the point is that the stipulations are set aside only insofar as specific stipulations may at times contravene Torah itself, which is an issue Jews have grappled with too. For example, as prominent Jewish biblical scholar Jon Levenson explains,
No rabbi has ever cited the biblical principle of “an eye for an eye,” for example, in
order to clear away the rabbinic law that corporal damages must be compensated
monetarily and not in kind, as the peshat [straight forward or ‘plain’ sense] of
scripture might be thought to suggest. (Levenson 1993, p46)
But Torah itself, properly understood, can never be obsolete. It commands what Jewish people call mitzvot, which are positive acts of obedience. Mitzvot exercise their freedom tolive in accordance with God’s covenant relationship. This is recognised by James:
Was not our ancestor Abraham considered righteous for what he did [emphasis mine]
when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see that his faith and his actions
were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did. And the
scripture was fulfilled that says, "Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him
as righteousness," and he was called God's friend. You see that a person is justified
by what he does [emphasis mine] and not by faith alone. (James 2:21-24)
Faith is not merely abstract belief, but also active obedience, and Torah is therefore faith-in-practice. It is the gift which came from YHWH leading His people out of Egypt at Passover. Like the Lamb’s blood on the doorframes of the Israelites ensured that death ‘passed over’, the words of the Shema are placed on the doorframes as a reminder that God’s presence and wisdom – life-giving Torah – is with them.
The point for Christians remains that if Jesus endorses Torah (Matthew 5:17), the accusation that Jewish people in their observance of Torah have rejected God or converted to legalism is utterly unfounded. If Jesus had undermined Torah, He would also have undermined His own identity as the ‘Word of God’ and the One who was there ‘in the beginning’ and through whom ‘all things were made’. If we, as Christians, recognise the identity of Torah, it is only fitting that we recognise the content of Torah and the covenant which God made for His people:
I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. The whole land of Canaan, where you are now an alien, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God." (Genesis 17:7-9)
_______
NOTES:
Alexander.P.S. (2009) “‘In the Beginning’: Rabbinic and Patristic Exegesis of Genesis 1:1” The Exegetical Encounter between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity. eds. Grypeou.E. & Spurling.H. Brill: Leiden-Boston.
Levenson.J.D. (1993) The Hebrew Bible, The Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies. Westminster/John Knox Press: Louisville, Kentucky.
