This past Monday through Wednesday (9/15-17) the Enoch Seminar held its second part of the virtual seminar Reading the New Testament within Judaism. The first one was originally held back in the summer and was a wonderful experience with some of the most respected and prolific scholars within the “within-Judaism” school of thought and along its boundaries (if boundaries have been established). Differing from part one, last week’s explored Matthew (session one) and James and 1 Peter (session two) on the first day; Luke and Acts (session one) and Hebrews (session two) on the second day; and John and other literature on the third day. Headed by Drs. Gabriele Boccaccini and Isaac W. Oliver, the entire three-day exploration included numerous speakers of which there were too many to name, and certainly too many to recount all of their fascinating points, arguments, and insights. One is free and encouraged to go check out the seminar which is uploaded on Enoch Seminar’s YouTube page here.
As one would expect, the seminar was full of information pertaining to the Jewish background, influence, and interaction throughout the NT corpus, particularly with questions like “Is there discontinuity with Judaism here?” or “Is this an anti-Jewish text?” and “How can our understanding(s) and interpretation(s) evolve here with this perspective in mind?” The seminar even began on a refreshing foot, with John Kampen beginning the Matthew section with seeing halakhic disputes at play, Andrew Bowden with the importance of fasting and meals backgrounds at play, and Celia Deutsch bringing up antisemitism and her own experience with Christian interpretive tradition on these points (an important thing to discuss). Once the discussion arrived at Matthew A. Jackson-McCabe, who began the second session beginning at James, where he began to ask the important questions of “Judaisms” and defining something as a “Jewish text.” While there was so much discussed throughout the seminar, it is interesting how this question began to come up over and over, with multiple people taking a swing at the underlying ideas and ideologies which form something to be a “Jewish” text, and therefore how we are to properly define (if we are to at all) what it is to read “within-Judaism.”
My goal here is not to reiterate everything that was shared during the conference. Again, that would be far too much. But the questions expressed above are really what the seminar (in my mind, at least) was about, and it illustrates the recent movement within the guild and larger scholarly world of reexamining the NT corpus by applying it to a rigorous, yet holistic, filtering through the original cultural world in which it was not only written but received. And this movement has been cemented by numerous recent titles, even ones of similar names. For example, the recent(ish) collection of essays edited by Mark Nanos and Magnus Zetterholm titled, aptly, Paul within Judaism: Restoring the First-Century Context to the Apostle (Fortress, 2015) and the similarly titled essays edited by Michael Bird, Ruben A. Buhner, Jorg Frey, and Brian Rosner Paul within Judaism: Perspectives on Paul and Jewish Identity (Mohr Siebeck, 2023). We also have the fascinating recent contribution edited by Karin Hedner Zetterholm and Anders Runesson, Within Judaism? Interpretive Trajectories in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam from the First to the Twenty-First Century (Fortress, 2023) and one would be remiss, especially since Gurtner was the fourth contributor to the seminar, to not mention Anders Runesson and Daniel M. Gurtner’s edited volume Matthew within Judaism: Israel and the Nations in the First Gospel (SBL, 2020). One of the newest, but not as “wide-reaching” as the first three, is Jason F. Moraff’s (another contributor in the seminar) Reading the Way, Paul and “The Jews” in Acts within Judaism: “Among My Own Nation” (T&T Clark, 2025). Another good reading companion for Moraff’s work would be Joshua Paul Smith’s Luke Was Not a Christian: Reading the Third Gospel and Acts within Judaism (Brill, 2023), and of course John Kampen’s Matthew within Sectarian Judaism (Yale, 2019) to accompany Runesson and Gurtner. But this post isn’t a bibliography; rather, we are indeed seeing a huge momentum towards taking new and exciting views towards the NT literature from, as many indeed contend, its original context.
There is much to be said on this, and while one is tremendously excited over seeing this movement of sorts take further and further ground up the mountain, there remains simultaneously the question: Why are we just now coming to understand this? And as a Messianic Jew, I’ve always found it to be, on the one hand, completely refreshing but, on the other, perplexing as to why the scholarly world has just now begun to seriously ask these types of questions. Moreover, it is a bit interesting to see some of the greatest minds within biblical scholarship finding revolutionary and remarkable certain ideas, perspectives, and shifts in interpretation that the every-day, untrained Messianic layperson has been understanding for years, by just reading their bibles with an open mind, and with one that hasn’t affixed to its side dogmatic blinders. Several times throughout the conference some mentioned that what we find is a very intramural discussion within Judaism, and that what can often be perceived of as antiJudaism or anti-Jewish notions is, in reality, something like a family argument. This is a good step forward, too. When reading R. Alan Culpepper and Paul N. Anderson’s edited volume John and Judaism: A Contested Relationship in Context (SBL, 2016) it dawned upon me how central this discussion was (“is John antiJewish?”) and I had the opportunity to share with Dr. Anderson that, as a Jew approaching John, I never considered there to be a smidgen of anti-Jewishness in the gospel but, for a lack of a better term (or is there a better?), just a family argument.
These types of questions and speculations need to be brought up and there will be only a future full of promise by entreating them, and I celebrate Enoch Seminar’s recent virtual seminar as we are seeing these ideas be bounced around amongst one another and leading scholars in the field. The only thing that concerns me is if we have walls up that prevent these ideas to snowball into larger ones and simultaneously tear down old dogmatic structures that come not from the first century, but the sixteenth century, and even from the second-third and on, picking up dogmatic interpretive baggage all along the way. This is why, for those interested in the Jewish background and influence of the NT, the ‘New Paul Perspective’ (NPP) has left people wanting, for one really wonders if new is the best adjective, rather than restored (or restorative) or original or holistic or what have you. Because what “within-Judaism” ideas do is basically take the question of Judaism in the NT beyond the confines of Protestant thought, or Western in general, and seek to ask how best to understand the text. That is something that the NPP has proven time and time again to not be willing to do. In my mind, the future of NT scholarship is what sprouts out of the “within-Judaism” seedbed that is currently developing and is indeed being tilled by seminars like this one.
What I pray to see is for these ideas and this momentum to produce reworkings and full and total reevaluations of critical points and ideas within the NT, particularly with the implications for Christian practice if none of the NT authors ever “left” “Judaism”. If we do not do so, and merely stop at the borderlines drawn by Protestant and evangelical minds, especially when it comes to the Torah (the Law), I think we will just watch scholars either (a) remain committed to beliefs, ideas and methodologies they have been raised or trained in, and/or (b) continuously be found to be merely catching up with Messianic laypeople who, though not trained or educated, have arrived at these types of conclusions for some time now and with no real difficulty. As huge parts of Christendom become more and more interested with the Jewish origins of the NT rather than the later illustrations of it, we will begin to see numerous strands of thought, and it is an exciting time to be alive.
So, it was a great seminar. And this blog post certainly doesn’t summarize it, nor did I intend to, but it is just sharing some thoughts from reflecting on this fascinating seminar last week and the trajectory we see the academy moving within. One can only be excited for what is to come, but I hope we do so genuinely and objectively, seeking to carve new paths, not merely enlarge the current ones. I’d strongly recommend every person interested in the Jewish background of the NT to check out both seminars, and I look forward to future seminars from Enoch, and, lastly but not least, I am deeply grateful and appreciative of the hard organizing efforts by the wonderful curators of the seminar, Dr. Boccaccini and Dr. Oliver. They put on a beautiful show and really put together a wonderful experience, while also contributing richly to the discussions!