The Jewish Annotated New Testament (155 page)

Although official rabbinic theology sought to suppress all talk of the
Memra
or
Logos
by naming it the heresy of “Two Powers in Heaven” (
b. Hag
. 15a), before the rabbis, contemporaneously with them, and even among them, there were many Jews in both Palestine and the Diaspora who held on to a version of monotheistic theology that could accommodate this divine figure linking heaven and earth. Whereas Maimonides and his followers until today understood the
Memra
, along with the
Shekhinah
(“Presence”), as a means of avoiding anthropomorphisms in speaking of God, historical investigation suggests that in the first two centuries CE, the
Memra
was not a mere name, but an actual divine entity functioning as a mediator.

The following examples from the Targumim suggest that the
Memra
has many of the same roles as the
Logos
:

Creating:
Gen 1.3: “And the
Memra
of H’ (a form of abbreviation for the Divine Name, the Tetragrammaton) said ‘Let there be light’ and there was light by his
Memra
.” In each of the following verses, it is the
Memra
—intimated by the expression “and he said”—that performs all of the creative actions.

Speaking to humans
: Gen 3.8ff.: “And they heard the voice of the
Memra
of H’… And the
Memra
of H’ called out to the Man.”

Revealing the Divine Self
: Gen 18.1: “And was revealed to him the
Memra
of H’.”

Punishing the wicked
: Gen 19.24: “And the
Memra
of H’ rained down on Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Saving
: Ex 17.21: “And the
Memra
of H’ was leading them during the day in a pillar of cloud.”

Redeeming
: Deut 32.39: “When the
Memra
of H’ shall be revealed to redeem his people.”

These examples show that the
Memra
performs many, if not all, of the functions of the
Logos
of Christian theology (as well as of Wisdom).

In the Targumic tradition, the translation of Exodus 3.12–14, the theophany of the burning bush, offers an instructive illustration of the essence of the
Memra
. The Hebrew text reads, “God said to Moses: ‘I am that I am,’ and he said: ‘Thus shall you say unto them, I am has sent me to you.’” “I am” is here a name of God. The
Palestinian Targum
translates: “And the
Memra
of H’ said to Moses: He who said to the world from the beginning, Be there, and it was there, and who is to say [to it Be there, and it will be there]; and he said, Thus shall you say to the Israelites, He has sent me to you.” In other words, the name “I am” is glossed in the Targumim by a reference to Genesis 1.3, “And God said: Let there be”: the Word by which God brought the universe into being is the
Memra
.

In the next verse in the
Palestinian Targum
, this name for God, “He who said to the world ‘Be there,’” becomes transformed into a divine being in its own right: “I, My
Memra
, will be with you: I, My
Memra
, will be a support for you.”

Targum Neofiti
(Ms. 1) confirms this connection between the divine being and the word. In Exodus 3.13, in answer to Moses’ apprehension that he will not be up to the task of going to Pharaoh and persuading or forcing him to allow Moses to bring out the Israelites, God answers: “I will be with you.”
Neofiti
reads: “I, My
Memra
, will be with you.” The other Targumim maintain this interpretation but add the element of the
Memra
as supporter, thus: “And he said: Because my
Memra
will be for your support.” From here we see how this
Memra
, revealed to Moses in the declaration “I am,” supports him, redeems the Israelites, and all the rest of the saving activities. In the Targum, as in the
Logos
theology, this Word has been hypostasized, turned into an actual divine being.

The conclusive evidence for the connection of the Targumic
Memra
and the
Logos
of John appears in the Palestinian Targumic poetic homily on the “Four Nights,” probably a liturgical text in which four special nights in sacred history are delineated:

Four nights are written in the Book of Memories: The first night: when the Lord was revealed above the world to create it. The world was unformed and void and darkness was spread over the surface of the deep;
and through his
Memra
there was light and illumination
[italics added], and he called it the first night.

This text matches the first verses of John’s Prologue, with its association of
Logos
, the Word, and light. The midrash of the “four nights” culminates in the coming of the Messiah, drawing even closer the connections between the Targum heard in the synagogue and John’s Gospel. Moreover, the midrash of the “four nights” is most likely a fragment of Paschal liturgy, suggesting even more palpably its appropriateness as a text for comparison with John’s Gospel, where Jesus is compared to the Paschal offering. In order to see this, however, we must pay attention to the formal characteristics of Midrash as a mode of reading Scripture (see “Midrash and Parables in the New Testament,” p.
565
). One of the most characteristic forms of Midrash is a homily on a scriptural passage or extract from the Pentateuch that invokes, explicitly or implicitly, texts from either the Prophets or the Hagiographa (Gk “holy writings”: specifically, very frequently Psalms, Song of Songs, or Wisdom literature) as the framework of ideas and language that is used to interpret and expand the Pentateuchal text being preached. This interpretive practice is founded on a theological notion of the oneness of Scripture as a self-interpreting text, especially on the notion that the latter books are a form of interpretation of the Five Books of Moses. Gaps are not filled with philosophical ideas but with allusions to or citations of other texts.

The first five verses of the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel fit this form nearly perfectly. The verses being preached are the opening verses of Genesis, and the text that lies in the background as interpretive framework is Proverbs 8.22–31. The primacy of Genesis as text being interpreted explains why we have here
Logos
and not “Wisdom.” In an intertextual interpretive practice such as a midrash, imagery and language may be drawn from a text other than the one under interpretation, but the controlling language of the discourse is naturally the text that is being interpreted and preached. The preacher of the Prologue to John had to speak of
Logos
here, because his homiletical effort is directed at the opening verses of Genesis, with their majestic: “And God said: Let there be light, and there was light.” It is the “saying” of God that produces the light, and indeed through this saying, everything was made that was made.

Philo, like others, identifies Sophia and the
Logos
as a single entity. Consequently, nothing could be more natural than for a preacher, such as the composer of John 1, to draw from the book of Proverbs the figure, epithets, and qualities of the second God (second person), the companion of God and agent of God in creation; for the purposes of interpreting Genesis, however, the preacher would need to focus on the linguistic side of the coin, the
Logos
, which is alone mentioned explicitly in that text. In other words, the text being interpreted is Genesis, therefore the Word; the text from which the interpretive material is drawn is Proverbs, hence the characteristics of Wisdom:

1. In the beginning was the Word,
          And the Word was with God,

2. And the Word was God.
          He was in the beginning with God.

3. All things were made through him,
          and without him was not anything made that
               was made.

4. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

5. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness
             did not receive it.

The assertion that the Word was with God is easily related to Proverbs 8.30, “Then I [wisdom] was beside him,” and even to Wisdom of Solomon 9.9, “With thee is wisdom.” As is frequently the case in rabbinic midrash, the gloss on the verse being interpreted is dependent on a later biblical text that is alluded to but not explicitly cited. The Wisdom texts, especially Proverbs 8, had become commonplaces in the Jewish interpretive tradition of Genesis 1. Although, paradoxically, John 1.1–5 is our earliest example of this, the form is so abundant in late antique Jewish writing that it can best be read as the product of a common tradition shared by (some) messianic Jews and (some) non-messianic Jews. Thus the operation of John 1.1 can be compared with the Palestinian Targum to this very verse, which translates “In the beginning” by “With Wisdom God created,” clearly also alluding to the Proverbs passage. “Beginning” is read in the Targumim sometimes as Wisdom, and sometimes as the
Logos
,
Memra
: By a Beginning—Wisdom—God created.

In light of this evidence, the Fourth Gospel is not a new departure in the history of Judaism in its use of
Logos
theology, but only, if even this, in its incarnational Christology. John 1.1–5 is not a hymn, but a midrash, that is, it is not a poem but a homily on Genesis 1.1–5. The very phrase that opens the Gospel, “In the beginning,” shows that creation is the focus of the text. The rest of the Prologue shows that the midrash of the
Logos
is applied to the appearance of Jesus. Only from John 1.14, which announces that the “Word became flesh,” does the Christian narrative begins to diverge from synagogue teaching. Until v. 14, the Johannine prologue is a piece of perfectly unexceptional non-Christian Jewish thought that has been seamlessly woven into the Christological narrative of the Johannine community.

AFTERLIFE AND RESURRECTION

Martha Himmelfarb

Writing toward the end of the first century CE, the Jewish historian Josephus tells us that of the three Jewish “philosophies,” two, the Essenes and the Pharisees, embraced the idea of the immortality of the soul and an afterlife involving reward and punishment (
J.W
. 2.154–58,163;
Ant
. 18.14,18). Josephus does not mention a belief in resurrection, perhaps because immortality of the soul was a concept more familiar to his Roman audience, but some ancient Jews believed that the soul would be returned to its body at the time of the last judgment. Josephus’s claim that the Pharisees believed in reincarnation (
J. W
. 2.163) may be an attempt to present this idea in a form more accessible to his audience.

According to Josephus, the Sadducees were the only Jewish group to reject the idea of the immortality of the soul and postmortem reward and punishment (
J. W
. 2.165;
Ant
. 18.16). Though they were in the minority, the Sadducees would have been right to remind other Jews that most of the writings that eventually became part of the Tanakh say nothing about reward and punishment after death. Rather, they envision the dead, righteous and wicked together, enduring a shadowy existence in Sheol, an inhospitable place often described as a miry pit (e.g., Isa 38.18), a widespread idea in the ancient Near East, similar to Hades in the Homeric poems. The blessings and curses that attach to Israel’s covenant with God play a central role in the Torah and prophetic writings, but they are typically experienced collectively by the people of Israel as a group, and they take place in this world.

The only strand of the Tanakh to emphasize the reward and punishment of the individual is Wisdom literature, but these texts locate rewards and punishments in this life. The book of Proverbs, which may contain ancient material but probably reached its final form early in the Second Temple period, presents the optimistic side of the Wisdom tradition: “Long life is in [Wisdom’s] right hand; in her left hand are riches and honor” (Prov 3.16). Human experience has always offered observers abundant evidence to the contrary, however, and other Wisdom works criticize the view that wise and righteous behavior leads to reward. The book of Job launches a frontal attack as the pious Job demands to know why God has inflicted so much suffering on him. The divine response appears in the final chapters of the book, where the LORD answers Job from a whirlwind with a poetic invocation of his awesome creative powers and rejects the message of the friends who insist that Job must have done something wrong to merit the evils that have befallen him. Ecclesiastes (Qohelet), likely written around the fourth century BCE, takes a less direct but perhaps even more subversive approach to the problem of why the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper: it juxtaposes sayings that describe the rewards of wisdom to sayings that claim that the wicked and righteous share a single fate.