Hearing Jesus through the Ears of Israel (Part 3)
Coming to Jesus Through Torah: A Convert’s Reading of Covenant, Authority, and the Jewish Shape of Grace
This essay is Part Three of a three-part study. Please read Parts One and Two before proceeding.
The most honest way to approach Jesus is to approach him as his first hearers did: not as a founder of a new religion, not as a liberator from Judaism, and not as an abstraction in later theological systems, but as a Jew speaking within the covenantal world of other Jews. Parts One and Two attempted to reconstruct that world: the lived authority of Torah, the centrality of halakhah, the symbolic power of purity, the communal rhythm of prayer, the gravity of the Sabbath, and the absolute devotion to the God who spoke at Sinai. But this third part proceeds from a different vantage point, not from within Judaism, and not from the assumptions of Christian tradition, but from the perspective of one who arrived at the biblical story from the outside. This outsider is not a critic but a convert, one who first encountered the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob through the Hebrew Scriptures and only then discovered Jesus standing inside that same covenant.
This vantage point is neither Jewish nor Christian in the inherited sense. It is a place between, or perhaps before, the division, before Christianity and Judaism hardened into separate communal identities, before later polemics reframed their sacred texts as oppositional. It is the vantage point of someone who read Torah, Psalms, and Prophets without the inherited Christian habit of reading them as foreshadowings or prooftexts, and without the inherited Jewish habit of viewing Jesus through centuries of Christian misrepresentation. It is therefore a vantage point that can, paradoxically, hear Jesus both as a Jew among Jews and as the one who intensified the covenantal logic of Israel in unexpected ways.