A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Volume IV: Law and Love (The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library) by John P. Meier (PDF)

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A leading scholar of the historical Jesus clarifies and illuminates Jesus’ teachings on Jewish law John Meier’s previous volumes in the acclaimed series A Marginal Jew are founded upon the notion that while solid historical information about Jesus is quite limited, people of different faiths can nevertheless arrive at a consensus on fundamental historical facts of his life. In this eagerly anticipated fourth volume in the series, Meier approaches a fresh topic—the teachings of the historical Jesus concerning Mosaic Law and morality—with the same rigor, thoroughness, accuracy, and insightfulness on display in his earlier works.After correcting misconceptions about Mosaic Law in Jesus’ time, this volume addresses the teachings of Jesus on major legal topics like divorce, oaths, the Sabbath, purity rules, and the various love commandments in the Gospels. What emerges from Meier’s research is a profile of a complicated first-century Palestinian Jew who, far from seeking to abolish the Law, was deeply engaged in debates about its observance. Only by embracing this portrait of the historical Jesus grappling with questions of the Torah do we avoid the common mistake of constructing Christian moral theology under the guise of studying “Jesus and the Law,” the author concludes.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “John Meier is the most distinguished Roman Catholic biographer of Jesus.”―Harold Bloom — Harold Bloom”John Meier demonstrates, through rigorous textual analysis, Jesus’ intimate and profound involvement with Halakhah. This work will profoundly affect the ways Judaism and Christianity understand each other and themselves.”―Hindy Najman, Director of the Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Toronto — Hindy Najman”This definitive work on Jesus and the law displays mastery of the legal heritage of Judaism in clarifying critical issues. Meier’s monumental research illuminates long debated issues and resolves a century of debate.”―Jacob Neusner, Institute of Advanced Theology, Bard College — Jacob Neusner”As he turns to the complex, disputed subject of Jesus and the law, John Meier moves systematically, comprehensively, and judiciously through the relevant texts and topics, ever faithful to the criteria that have guided his entire project. All readers stand to benefit from his vast accumulation of material pertinent to the halakhic Jesus and Meier’s astonishing control of it.”―James VanderKam, University of Notre Dame — James VanderKam”The quest for the historical Jesus requires the quest for his historical context, late Second Temple Judaism in the land of Israel. With learning both broad and deep, John Meier constructs this context and uncovers therein a prophet and healer and teacher of the Law―an historical Jesus fully incarnate within the Judaism of his time. This is a masterful study and an enduring contribution to scholarship.”―Paula Fredriksen, author of From Jesus to Christ,, and Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews — Paula Fredriksen“Monumental . . . staggering erudition and thoroughness.”–Commonweal ― Commonweal“Meier’s book contains a wealth of useful information, acute observations, and penetrating argument . . . the breadth and depth of Meier’s scholarship call for high admiration.”–Robert H. Gundry, Books & Culture — Robert H. Gundry ― Books & Culture”There is plenty to be gained from the scholarly quest for the historical Jesus, and John Meier’s Law and Love is a masterful guide.”—Jonathan Klawans, Interpretation — Jonathan Klawans ― Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology”This engaging study will be of interest to scholars, preachers, and all others interested not only in the historical Jesus but also in Second Temple Jerusalem, the NT, rabbinic literature, and the Church Fathers.”–Adele Reinhartz, Catholic Biblical Quarterly — Adele Reinhartz ― Catholic Biblical Quarterly”The fourth volume of John P. Meier’s A Marginal Jew is, possibly, the most exciting in this excellent series. Meier breaks new ground for understanding first century Palestinian Judaism.”—Russell Morton, Ashland Theological Journal 2010 — Russell Morton ― Ashland Theological Journal 2010″Meier, of course, is a giant in historical Jesus studies. The depth and meticulous nature of his historical research causes him to stand head and shoulders over nearly everyone in the field.”—Dennis Ingolfsland, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society — Dennis Ingolfsland ― Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society About the Author John P. Meier is William K. Warren Chair Professor of Theology (New Testament), Theology Department, University of Notre Dame. He lives in South Bend, IN.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Catholic priest and biblical scholar John P. Meier wrote in the Introduction to this 2009 book, “Having examined in the second half of Volume Three the legal positions that distinguished the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes from one another and from Jesus, I think it logical to take up as the first enigma the question of Jesus and the Law. This will be the focus of Volume Four, while the other three enigmas will be treated in Volume Five.” (Pg. 1) He continues, “Here we touch of the real enigma in Jesus’ teaching on the Law: … his approach seems to be neither total rejection of the Law, nor a dialectic that embraces yet in effect rejects the Law, nor a total affirmation of the Law that simply involves legitimate though debatable interpretations of individual practices. The real enigma is how Jesus can at one and the same time affirm the Law as the given, as the normative expression of God’s will for Israel, and yet in a few individual cases or legal areas (e.g., divorce and oaths) teach and enjoin what is contrary to the Law, simply on his own authority.” (Pg. 3)Of divorce, he comments, “Since both Matthew and Luke.. agree word for word on … ‘everyone who divorces his wife,’ that almost surely is the original Q wording. Immediately following this initial phrase, Matthew has his famous ‘exceptive clause’… ‘except on grounds of unchastity. A number of considerations argue strongly for ah exceptive clause being an addition that Matthew (or his special tradition) makes to the original Q version… only Matthew has this exceptive clause.” (Pg. 104)He observes, “Perhaps the most obvious difference between the Mark 10:11-12 and all the other versions of the prohibition in the Synoptics is that here alone the married women has apparently the same right and power as her husband to divorce… Since… ordinary Jewish women in the Palestine of Jesus’ day did not have the right or power to divorce their Jewish husbands, Mark 10:12 almost automatically falls out of consideration as a saying coming from the historical Jesus. In other words, if ordinary Jewish women in Palestine did not have the power to divorce their husbands, what would be the point of Jesus going out of his way to prohibit it?” (Pg. 110)He explains, “By completely forbidding divorce, Jesus dares to forbid what the Law allows… in one of the most important legal institutions in society. He dares to say that a man who duly follows the Law in properly divorcing his wife and marrying anther woman is in effect committing adultery… Jesus’ prohibition of divorce is nothing short of astounding. Jesus presumes to teach that what the Law permits and regulates is actually the sin of adultery… Here as perhaps nowhere else in his halakic teaching… Jesus the Jew clashes with the Mosaic Torah as it was understood and practiced by mainstream Judaism before, during, and after his lifetime.” (Pg. 113-114)He states, “the three Synoptic narratives of Jesus’ healing on the sabbath pose too many problems for us to accept them as recording sabbath disputes that actually go back to the ministry of the historical Jesus. Examined simply as miracle stories, they all yield the verdict of [‘not clear’]. When one adds to this judgment the further difficulty that the documents of pre-70 Judaism do not witness to a prohibition of healing on the sabbath, the obstacles standing in the way of declaring any one of these narratives to be authentic seem insurmountable.” (Pg. 257)He points out, “It i amusing to see how past commentators have searched high and low for any and every exegetical escape hatch to save themselves from having to admit that Jesus, at least as Mark presents hi in 2:26, makes a flagrant error about what the text of 1 Sam 21:2-10 says. Alas, none of the escape hatches is convincing… The conclusion we must draw … is simple and obvious: the recounting of the … incident shows both an egregious ignorance of what the OT text actually says and a striking inability to construct a convincing argument from the story… I think that these glaring errors in Jesus’ scriptural argument offer a reason for assigning the story to early Christians rather than to Jesus… If there is anything certain about the ministry of the historical Jesus and its denouement, it is that Jesus was an impressive teacher and debater… This basic picture of the historical Jesus seems incompatible with the Jesus Mark unwittingly portrays.” (Pg. 277-278)He asserts, “The idea of Jesus consciously or unconsciously attacking, subverting, or annulling the sabbath… is too ludicrous to be taken seriously, despite the fact that it has been taken seriously by many a critic. All questers for the historical Jesus should repeat the following mantra even in their sleep: the historical Jesus is the halakic Jesus. This … we must never forget.” (Pg. 297)He comments on Mark 7:1-23: “the same sort of polemical generalization occurs at the end of Jesus’ second reply to his opponents… Jesus in v13 concludes his indictment with a generalization … ‘And you do many such things like this.’ The same sort of sweeping, polemical generalization about the Pharisees, first in the mouth of Mark and then in the mouth of Jesus, reminds us that the redactor’s voice may be resonating in the words of Jesus.” (Pg. 365) He adds, “The only probable conclusion from all that we have seen is that the scriptural debate presented by Mark 7:6-8 is not conceivable as an event in the life of the historical Jesus… we are dealing with a Christian composition drawing upon Christian scribal activity.” (Pg. 376)Of Jesus’ ‘Great Commandment,’ he observes, “modern Americans need to pause for a moment to remind themselves that ‘love’ in this text does not mean first of all strong emotions, which, of their nature, ebb and flow. In OT references to love for God, loving is above all a matter of willing and then doing… What comes first, what is basic and most important, what makes sense of all the rest is the faith and love (obedience) proclaimed in the Shema.” (Pg. 490-491)He acknowledges, “The Golden Rule certainly did not originate with Jesus. One of another form of the maxim circulated far and wide in ancient Greek culture, long before it was taken up by Jewish and then Christian literature…. Granted the popularity of he Golden Rule in Judaism around the turn of the era, it is not surprising that it was taken over by the rabbis.” (Pg. 552, 555) He adds, “since the Golden Rule can meet neither the criterion of discontinuity nor the criterion of multiple attestation, and since even the criterion of coherence does not argue clearly in its favor, I incline to the view that the Golden Rule was not taught by the historical Jesus.” (Pg. 557)He concludes, “Whatever the errors of [this book]… this volume at least rejects a major academic failure of Jesus research: mouthing respect for Jesus’ Jewishness while avoiding the plague the beating heart of that Jewishness: the Torah in all its complexity. However bewildering the positions Jesus sometimes takes, he emerges… as a Palestinian Jew engaged in the legal discussions and debates proper to his time and place. It is Torah and Torah alone that puts flesh and bones on the spectral figure of ‘Jesus the Jew.’ No halakic Jesus, no historical Jesus.” (Pg. 648)He adds, “Even seeking refuge in the double command of love raises problems for the enlightened—if one insists on appealing to the historical Jesus. As we have seen, there is no reason to think that, when Jesus cited Lev 19:18b… he meant anything other than what the Hebrew text means by [‘love’], namely, a fellow Israelite who belongs to the social and cultic community that worships Yahweh alone… Judged from the standpoint of today’s openness to world religions…the historical Jesus who teaches the double command of love may appear distressingly provincial… In the end, a rigorous quest for the Torah-teaching of the historical Jesus renders the Enlightenment program of surgically extracting Jesus the ethicist from the redactional overlay of the Gospels untenable.” (PG. 651)This book will be “must reading” for anyone seriously studying the historical Jesus.

⭐I have given five stars to Volumes One, Two and Three because Professor Meier always carefully, clearly and logically leads the reader through the scanty evidence that there is on Jesus, to what can most likely be attributed to what the historical Jesus actually said and did.Mr. Meier does not disappoint the reader in that regard in this volume either. However, and perhaps this is due to the nature of the material he is covering, (Jesus and his relation to the Torah, specifically, divorce, oaths, the Sabbath, purity laws and the love commandments) but I found this book rather dry when compared to the other three volumes.Perhaps it is due to the breadth of his surveys and the nature of historical criteria he is using. For example, in order to determine the historicity of a tradition such as “love your enemies”, using the criterion of discontinuity (those words and deeds of Jesus that are not similar to (discontinuous with) the Old Testament (OT) and Judaism before him and Christianity after him are likely to be historical), requires him to survey the OT, the Dead Sea Scrolls of the Qumran Essene community, the OT Pseudepigrapha, Philo and Josephus, Greco-Roman philosophers, and the New Testament. And this is just for “love your enemies.”Of course, to be fair, Mr. Meier is only writing The definitive collection of books on the historical Jesus for our time, and maybe the next generation as well. Given that, well, he should and must survey all the evidence. The length of this process in this particular volume, however, did not leave as much room as he has devoted in his other volumes to discussions of the meaning his findings; in other words, a presentation and discussion of the portrait of the Jesus that emerges from his survey’s results.That said, this is another marvel of investigation, research and clear thinking. But I must admit I am looking forward to Volume Five, in which he will treat Jesus’ parables, his self-designations, and his death.I append here an excerpt from a review by scholar Susan Graham of Wesley College in Bristol, England because, after a thoroughly positive review she ends with some “unresolved issues” that will give you more to think about as you read or consider buying Volume 4.”There remain some unresolved issues, which Meier considers negative insights, in hiswork. First is the fragmentary and sparse nature of the materials that can be traced back to the historical Jesus. In this volume, as in the others, he relies solely on literary evidence from a limited number of texts, primarily the canonical Gospels, and he determines the historicity of his evidence based on criteria of authenticity without acknowledging the critical discussion that questions his method. If one accepts his critical presuppositions and method, it is difficult to argue with his conclusions, but it is not surprising that the historical source material is sparse. If one wishes to explore Jesus’ context using the tools of sociology and anthropology, this is not the place to look.The second unresolved issue is the lack of an organizing principle that makes sense of Jesus’ views and particularly the lack of a link between the love commandment and Jesus’ other pronouncements on the law. Meier suggests that Jesus saw himself as “the Elijah-like prophet of the end-time” (656), an interpretation that comes out of the analysis of all four volumes of A Marginal Jew. This allows him to characterize Jesus’ teaching on Torah as “eschatological morality … that is, the life that conforms to the coming of God’s kingdom in the end time” (657).In the first four volumes, Meier has raised a number of issues and questions regarding Jesus’ social and economic context. These deserve the same careful treatment that he gives to the material he has treated so far. It is to be hoped that he will allow himself to consider these questions in the rest of his work and to provide scholars with a portrait of a Jewish Jesus thoroughly embedded in his socioeconomic setting.”

⭐This is the 4th of a projected 5-volume series investigating who Jesus was and how he was perceived as he walked this earth some 2000 years ago. This volume provides an exhaustive evaluation of what is known currently about the Mosaic Law and Judaism in the 1st centure of the Christian era, and how well Jesus followed that law. Like the previous volumes, Fr. Meier provides exhaustive scholarship. The footnotes are as long and fact-filled as the main text. Thus, reading is not for the beginner or faint-of-heart. But for those of us who are avid students of christology, it is an invaluable source of material for understanding the historic Jesus, and the relevance of this understanding to modern problems facing us. The 5th (and last??) volume is eagerly awaited.

⭐Among several, the greatest merit of the “historian” John Paul Maier in his contribution to the “third” (the latest in time) quest for the historical Jesus is the effort, methodologically irreproachable, to critically retrieve, from whatever is offered by the “documents”, the figure of a Jew among the Jews of his time in Palestine. The fourth volume is exclusively devoted to that particular phase of the internal debate on the “interpretation” (one might say “adaptation to time”) of the Laws inscribed in the first five books of the Bible. The pharisees were at the time the masters recognized by the lay community,at least in Jerusalem and in the land of Judaea (which helps explaining why in the Gospel they are depicted as Jesus main adversaries, while his true enemies lie with the power held by the Suddeceans under Roman rules). The stand of the “outsider” Jesus on various legal items, such as divorce, is analysed with the “scientific” care needed to show the part played by him in that context. Of special significance (thence the subtitle of this book) is the analysis of how Jesus did recover the foundations of the whole Law in terms of the love due the Lord linked to that due to the neighbour, by joining “literally” two quotes, the first from Deut 6, 4-5, the second curiously buried within the Leviticus (Lev 19, 11-18). The two quotes together then become the “first” commandment of all (Mark 12, 28-34). JPM devotes a paragraph (meant for modern Americans, but overdue for modern Europeans as well) to point out that to a Jew of those times the translational word “love” meant not an “emotion” but “above all a matter of willing and then doing” (p. 490).The “reader friendly” style reflects the willingness to keep, at every step, the window open for the reader to judge and make up his mind (in historical terms). The rich notes to each one of the 36 Chapters and to the Conclusions as well contain “almost” all the instruments needed for further investigation and, above all, for getting acquainted with the views and opinions of other Scholars.

⭐none

⭐I must say that I resisted very much before to engage in the reading of one of the 4 volume work of J. P. Meier, not being so interested in historical Jesus, but eventuallly I wanted to try with this 4th one, and I must say I am pretty satisfied (although at times I have the impression that the autor is clutching at straws); so much that I carried on also with the previous ones. The most useful thing (for me) are the enormous amount of information about the period overlapping the time of Jesus

⭐Esta es una obra complejo y densa, pero para mi es de lo mejor escrito sobre el tema. Aquí el autor afronta el tema de Jesús y la Ley, con seriedad y rigor comparando con las fuentes de la época. Aunque las conclusiones son restringidas y muchas veces los argumentos no son tan sólidos como gustarían (por la escasez de evidencias), el trabajo realizado por el autor es impresionante.

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