Using the work of Krister Stendahl, Mary Boys explains the need to study the New Testament so that we understand our relationship with Judaism better

“Turn it (Torah) and turn it again, for everything is in it, and contemplate it and grow grey and old over it and stir not from it, for thou canst have no better rule.” Pirke Avot 5.25

My title borrows a saying from the Mishnah, a third-century compendium of rabbinic commentary and law. The turning I have in mind focuses on our need as Christians to seek new meanings in biblical texts that on the surface seem to justify the Church’s superiority to the synagogue — and by implication, to other faith traditions. As we turn and turn our texts again and again, we engage in the holy work of seeking understanding.

A good example of a scholar whose turning and turning of problematic New Testament texts has contributed significantly to interreligious understanding is the late Swedish Lutheran priest and later bishop Krister Stendahl.

He upended Martin Luther’s reading of Paul — and he did this precisely as a Lutheran. His profound pastoral awareness complemented his enormous erudition and influence on the field of New Testament scholarship.

Stendahl had an ability to express significant theological insights in fresh and memorable ways. His passion lay in working in what he termed the “Public Health Department of biblical studies” — seeking alternate ways to interpret texts that have caused “harmful fallout”.

Asked by someone who had studied his bibliography why he wrote so much about women and Jews, he replied that these were “two rather striking issues on which the Christian tradition, and in the case of women, the whole scriptural tradition, has clearly had a detrimental and dangerous effect.”

I think the late Bishop of Stockholm would feel great empathy with Pope Francis’s experience: “I see the Church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds.”

Stendahl’s contribution has been significant in healing the wounds Christians over the millennia have inflicted on Jews — wounds that have resulted in part from readings of biblical texts that simplify and distort Judaism. Four examples from his work show this.

Bible Is Not about Me

Stendahl said that in his early life he thought of the biblical stories as being his story: “I had begun to feed on the mysteries of God. And it was intellectually a most stimulating awakening . . . I felt like Peter and I felt like Paul — especially when they had negative feelings. I felt like all the disciples.” But he learned ways of reading that were “so much less ego centred”:

“The Bible was really not about me. It was about many other things — in the long run, much more interesting things. It was about many things in many distant lands, from many distant ages … Now it spoke to me from a great distance, of centuries and cultures deeply different from my own. And it began to be, just by its difference, that the fascination grew, that it had a way of saying to me, there are other ways of seeing and thinking and feeling and believing that you have taken for granted. And it just added to my love.”

Stendahl said that realising that the Bible was “not about me” was the watershed of his love story with the Bible which encompasses his revolutionary rereading of Paul. Much of the Western Church interpreted Paul as being preoccupied by the same existential question that had gripped Luther: “How can I find a gracious God?” In the traditional Lutheran interpretation, because human beings could never live up to the demands of the Torah —simplistically equated with Jewish law — their efforts to save themselves were fruitless. Following the Law entailed a futile attempt to earn divine love through good works. Christ alone saved us from sin and meaninglessness.

But just six years after finishing his doctorate, Stendahl challenged this fundamental Augustinian-Lutheran way of reading the Letter to the Romans. He claimed that Paul possessed a “robust” conscience, unlike Luther, and was not preoccupied with questions of forgiveness. Nor was Paul concerned with Jewish observance of the dietary laws and the rite of circumcision — it was the Gentile observance of these Jewish boundary markers that he criticised. Further, Paul’s mystical encounter on the Damascus Road was a “call” rather than a “conversion”, a new mission rather than a change of religion from Jew to Christian.

He said: “We must somehow recognise … that Paul’s message was related not to some conversion from the hopeless righteousness of Judaism into a happy justified status as a Christian. Rather, the centre of gravity in Paul’s theological work is related to the fact that he knew himself to be called to be the Apostle to the Gentiles, an Apostle of the one God who is Creator of both Jews and Gentiles” (cf. Rom 3:30).

New Testament Texts Studied

In a lecture in the early 1990s, Stendahl explored the idea of religious pluralism. He identified three biblical texts that would seem to argue against pluralism — Acts 4:15, John 14:6 and Matthew 28:19. He warned that “words like that grow legs and walk out of their context,” describing the difficulty posed by New Testament texts that give rise to negative views of Jews and Judaism.

For example, in the Gospel of John “the Jews” are aligned with virtually everything negative in that Gospel: fear, murmuring, murderous intent, diabolical origins, blindness, darkness and death.

And of all the words that “grew legs”, the ones that grew the largest and most destructive was: “Crucify him!” Christian interpretations of the death of Jesus that blamed Jews have done unspeakable harm to Jews — and to the Church’s moral integrity.

We are shamed to discover the depth and breadth of the violence against Jews, both rhetorical and physical, that has shadowed preaching and teaching about the death of Jesus.

Christians must take responsibility for those words that developed the capacity to inspire and sustain violence — and we must grieve for the “detrimental and dangerous effect” such words had on the lives of Jewish people over the centuries.

Christianity as a Construct

Stendahl said that we need to “stress again and again” that Christianity is a “construct … that had not yet been formed — especially in New Testament times — and that the Jesus movement existed once as a Jewish ‘way’ in Palestine and in the Diaspora.”

This emphasis is largely absent in the Church today. Consider, for example, how casually we speak of Jesus’s followers as “Christians”, as if with his death and resurrection the ways between Judaism and Christianity had parted like the waters of the Red Sea. Stendahl said: “I always felt that to speak about the uniqueness of Christianity or the uniqueness of Christ does more for the ego of the believer than it does for God.” He challenges us to be more reflective about our need to be superior as the “one true faith”.

Embrace Holy Envy

One of Stendahl’s sayings has particular resonance today: “Leave room for holy envy.”

“Holy envy,” he explained, is “when we recognise something in another tradition that is beautiful but is not in ours, nor should we just grab it or claim it. We … in our imperialism think that if we like something we just incorporate it and we think that we honour others by doing so. But that is not the way. Holy envy rejoices in the beauty of others.”

He saw this as a ground rule for interreligious exchange. Allow others to define themselves. Compare the best of their tradition with the best of yours. Leave room for holy envy. Holy envy, he suggested, is the preeminent sign that we are beginning to understand the tradition of another — to recognise its power and beauty, yet refrain from taking it as our own.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 242 October 2019: 6-7