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Is The God of Judaism Incarnate?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Jacob Neusner
Jacob Neusner
Affiliation:
Brown University, Rhode Island, U.S.A.
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Extract

The issue of incarnation in the formative centuries of the Judaism of the dual Torah concerns not the invention of an essentially new conception of God but the recovery of what was among other Judaisms an entirely conventional one. What concerns us is not so much why in light of the prior Judaic systems and their statements, the Judaism of the dual Torah represented God inincarnate form. It is how the incarnation of God attained realization. For in the earlier stages of the unfolding of the canon of the Judaism of the dual Torah, e.g. in the Mishnah, Tosefta, and related exegetical writings, we have no hint of an incarnation of God, and it is only in the final and complete statement of that Judaism that we confront, in full and whole realization, the notion of God with an individuality, a personality, a corporeal character. The answer to that question requires us to pursue two distinct lines of inquiry. The first concerns incarnation – treating as human and fleshly and corporeal what is to begin with either an object or an abstraction – as a mode of thought, not with special reference to God. Here we want to know the point at which, in the unfolding of the canon of the Judaism of the dual Torah, the conception of incarnation serves as a mode of presenting as a human person or personality some thing or some idea. Within this inquiry, further, we want to know precisely how the conception of incarnation comes to expression. The second addresses the issue why is it that in the pages of the Bavli in particular the process of incarnation reaches the person of God?

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , June 1988 , pp. 213 - 238
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

page 213 note 1 This is the argument of my The Incarnation of God. The Character of Divinity in Formative Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988).I here summarize only part of the results of that extended survey.

page 220 note 1 I review the argument of my Judaism and Story: The Evidenceof the Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). while meaning to provide a good example of how one should behave, the teller of a story always deals with a concrete person and a particular incident.

page 236 note 1 I have presented the main facts of the matter in my summary ofearlier findings, reprinted as Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianismin Talmudic Babylonia (Lanham, 1986: University Press of America Studies in Judaism series).

page 236 note 2 The reason that Christianity in the fourth century, but not earlier, struck sages as a serious challenge is spelled out in my Judaism and Christianity in the Age of Constantine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

page 237 note 1 I have reprinted my translation, from the Pazend, of the pertinent chapters of the Shkand in Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism, pp. 175–198.

page 237 note 2 But in so stating, I seem to have wandered back from the sixthand seventh centuries in Iranian Babylonia to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe and America, where the same exchange repeated itself. With Christians affirming God's incarnation, Jews denied that incarnation found a place in the Judaic portrait of the character of divinity. They moreover claimed that such a conception of God was incompatible with the heritage of the Hebrew Scriptures, and that all representations of God as a human being in those Scriptures were ‘merely figurative’ or otherwise spiritual, whatever these things can have meant. With Christians condemning the Jews' God as vindictive and (merely) just, Judaic apologists (both Jewish and Christian) restated the obvious fact that the character of divinity in Judaism, like that in Christianity, portrayed God as loving and compassionate. The requirements of inter–religious dialogue therefore appear to play a more considerable role in the inner logic of religious reflection than may have been fully appreciated.