[First posted in 2014. We know from reading the “Old Testament” of the Christian Bible, that Israel was clearly the chosen people/nation of the “OT God”. Christian teaching claims that not only did the ‘new’ supersede the ‘old’ but believers in Jesus Christ have collectively taken the place of Israel, hence, the virtual Church is the New Israel. Why? Because Israel failed to fulfill its preordained destiny; read Paul’s Epistle to the Romans to understand the original divine plan that Israel was kept in the dark about (according to him anyway) , and this switching or shifting from one select nation to elected individuals from all nations comprising a major world religion.
This is from chapter 4 of MUST READ/MUST OWN: Who are the REAL Chosen People? – by Reuven Firestone. Reformatted and highlighted for this post.—Admin 1.]
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Chosenness and Covenant in the New Testament
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The New Testament represents God’s message to the world as conveyed by the acts and words of Jesus. No ordinary prophet, Jesus was God incarnate, so his words and deeds—and the accompanying explanations of their meaning recorded in scripture—are no less than the direct message of God.
The original texts of the New Testament were written in Greek and date from about 45 CE to about 145 CE, but the decision as to which of these should be included in the canon of official scripture took centuries to become finalized. This was a process that reflected the particulars of the historical context in which it occurred. That context was the Near East of Late Antiquity.
Christianity and the Religious Context of Roman Palestine
The late antique Near East was quite different from the ancient Near East discussed in the previous chapters. Divided between the two great empires of Persia and Rome, religion was much less tribal, more universal both in physical range and worldview. The national religion of Persia was a form of Zoroastrianism, while the national religion of Rome was a kind of paganism that had been profoundly influenced by Greek and Roman pantheism, Greek philosophy, Roman administrative and political interest, and ideas and notions that had been current in the old indigenous Near Eastern religions.
As noted earlier, the Jesus movement emerged in an environment in which established religions were under strain. The old Roman system was not meeting the spiritual and religious needs of many Greco-Romans. Similarly, the old biblical system, centered around the Jerusalem Temple, which had been weakened by the loss of Judean political independence, was profoundly challenged by the new ideas represented by Greece and Rome, and somewhat less so by Persian religion and culture. By the year of Jesus’s birth, the religion of biblical Israel had lost much of its luster. New religious movements were springing up from within the pagan and monotheistic religious worlds, and their leaders naturally competed for influence and support. In the cosmopolitan culture of Roman Judea, they discussed and argued with one another about the tenets and assumptions of their faith.
One of these movements coalesced around the person of Jesus. It is now quite clear that Jesus lived his life as a Jew, and his followers were also Jews. But exactly what kind of Jews Jesus and his community represented is not at all clear.
Just as the ancient religion of Israel was not monolithic (recall the many religious customs and practices that were uprooted by Josiah’s reforms mentioned in 2 Kings 23), neither was the Judaism at the time of Jesus monolithic. Various movements that are identified as sometimes political and sometimes religious—remember the intimate connection between religion and peoplehood or polity in the Near East—were battling one another in words and deeds over dominance over the Jews of Judea.
These were battles about Jewish identity and meaning in a world in which so many of the old assumptions could no longer be certain. Where was God in a world of Roman oppression and weak Jewish leadership? Uncertainty about the future of Israel was endemic. Changes were weakening the unity of the community and the meaning and efficacy of Temple ritual. The resulting insecurity and malaise were shaking the very foundations of Judaism. Many considered an end time immanent, the possibility of an apocalypse that would entirely change the world order.
A number of popular movements emerged during this period that intended to bring the Judean community back on track. These included popular prophetic movements and others that we now refer to as messianic movements—groups that expected a political or military redeemer, a descendant of King David, to restore the Davidic monarchy of old. Under Roman occupation, some groups seem to have expected the arrival of a more miraculous figure who would redeem Israel both physically and spiritually, and they attracted followings during Jesus’s lifetime.
Jesus’s messianic identity was thus tied intimately to his religious and political context. He preached and ministered in the Galilee, a region in what is today northern Israel, and his association with miracles and compassionate, charismatic leadership gained him disciples and followers.
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Jesus was known as a healer who would make things right again. He cast out demons (Mark 1:32-34) and even brought the dead back to life (Matt. 9:18-26), an act that certainly awed his witnesses but was not considered unbelievable (Elijah had done the same in 1 Kings 17:17-24). He argued with his Jewish compatriots over the meaning of God’s will, and like many other Jews, he reminded all who would listen of the immanent coming of God’s kingdom (Mark 1:14-15).
Jesus lived at a time and in a place of political and religious instability, a historical period rife with intense argument and polemic. All four Gospels depict Jesus in repeated controversy with Jews, especially scribes and Pharisees, who are portrayed as representing a rigid Jewish establishment perspective that lacked real spirituality (Matt. 23, Mark 12, Luke 20, and John 7).
The issues around which Jesus and other Jewish leaders of his time preached and argued with their fellows were never resolved during his lifetime. The controversy and polemic that would become so emblematic of the relationship between the religions of Christianity and Judaism thus actually began as internal arguments among Jews.
Jesus had many enemies, both Roman and Jewish, and they are depicted in New Testament sources as conspiring to bring about his demise and death. He was humiliated, physically abused, and then crucified. His ignominious end was a great shock for his followers, who were shattered by the brutal dashing of their highest hopes. But the story did not end with Jesus humiliation. What occurred next was the extraordinary event of the resurrection, not witnessed but nevertheless proven to many, first tentatively by an empty tomb, and then by Jesus’s personal appearance before several of his followers (Matthew 28, Luke 24). And it was the resurrection that proved his redemptive, messianic status, confirmed by Jesus himself, who appeared unrecognized before two of his followers and said,
“’Was not the Messiah bound to suffer in this way before entering upon his glory?’ “Then, starting from Moses and all the prophets, he explained to them in the whole of scripture the things that referred to himself” (Luke 24:26-27).
Eventually, and in common with what academics refer to as a process of sect formation and then transition from sect to new religion, the Jesus movement evolved into a separate religious institution. It came to be recognized both by its own adherents and by those outside the community as discrete faith called Christianity, the religion of Christ or “the anointed one” (in Greek, Christos).
As this happened, some of the earlier internal Jewish arguments were recast as arguments among believers representing separate faith communities. Because the Gospels were not canonized until at least the third and perhaps even the fourth century, this transition from internal Jewish argument to Jewish-Christian polemic is reflected even in the texts of scripture. And the followers of Jesus did indeed become a separate faith community that stood outside the broadest margins of the movements that we identify as the Jewish movements of Late Antiquity.
The process of separation and differentiation is popularly referred to in academic discourse as the “parting of the ways.” It is complex, and scholars are not in agreement over many of its details. But it is clear that when the two communities recognized their distinct identities as unique and mutually exclusive, the polemic that was built up around the old Near Eastern notion of chosenness reached a high level of intensity.
One of the signature differences between the separating faith communities was their notion of covenantal relationship with God.
- In the Jewish system, which retained the biblical notion of religious peoplehood as it evolved into Judaism, covenantal membership derived from birth of a Jewish mother or formal religious study and conversion. It required circumcision, acknowledgement of the divine origin and eternal validity of Torah, and personal loyalty to the required ritual, civic, and moral-ethical behaviors set down in the Torah and its interpretation. Although Gentiles could be rewarded by God on this earth and even in the world to come, they could not be a part of God’s covenanted people without these.
- Among Christians, on the other hand, after passing through the early period when virtually all followers of Jesus were Jews of one form or another, the overwhelming majority of believers were Gentiles, and circumcision was no longer a requirement for covenant membership. Neither was obedience to what came to be considered by Christians to be an outmoded system of law that had been superseded by God’s grace. Gentiles became part of God’s new covenant through personal faith in the saving power of Jesus as Christ-Messiah. Not only were they welcomed into the new covenantal community, but they also became the exclusive holders of a new covenantal relationship in Christ that excluded all Jews who either would not or could not accept his transcendent status.
This position was of course strongly opposed by the Jewish establishment. The Jews were well-established monotheists who were generally deeply respected in Greco-Roman society, even if rather resented. The burden was on the new Christian community to authenticate the new movement in terms that would demonstrate the truth of its claims.
Those who followed Jesus naturally found support for the truth of his mission in the world around them, and like the Jesus of Luke 24:27 who explained to his disciples how references in “the whole of scripture”—meaning the Hebrew Bible—pointed to his messiahship, they look to the Hebrew Bible for support as well. Those who believed in Jesus saw clear scriptural proofs and prophecies of his birth, mission, death, and resurrection. They also saw that the chosen, covenantal relationship between God and Abraham depicted in scripture was actually a proof of the new chosen status of those who had faith in Christ.
Chosen through Faith
Romans 4 are devoted to making sense of the mystery of God having chosen Abraham.
“What does scripture say? ‘Abraham put his faith in God, and that faith was counted to him as righteousness” (4:3).
Abraham was chosen by God for his faith rather than for his obedience, for his relationship with God began even before he was asked to prove his obedience to God through circumcision and the establishment of the covenants (4:4-12).
“It was not through law that Abraham and his descendants were given the promise that the world should be their inheritance but through righteousness that came from faith” (4:13).
The following few verses make the case that obedience to the law, which was the cornerstone of emerging rabbinic Judaism, was not the real purpose of God’s chosen relationship with Abraham. Abraham’s is having been chosen by God was, rather, on account of his faith, and that faith includes, by extension, faith in resurrection and salvation through Jesus.
If the heirs are those who hold by the law, then faith becomes pointless and the promise goes for nothing. . .The promise was made on the ground of faith in order that it might be a matter of sheer grace, and that it might be valid for all Abraham’s descendants, not only for those who hold by the law, but also for those who have Abraham’s faith , for he is father of us all. . . His faith did not weaken. . . And that is why Abraham faith was “counted to him as righteousness.” The words, “counted to him” were meant to apply not only to Abraham but to us; our faith too is to be “counted,” the faith in the God who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead; for he was given up to death for our misdeeds, and raised to life for our justification. (Rom.4:14-25)
The letter of James argues the same point and concludes by connecting God’s special designation of Abraham as “loving friend” with Abraham absolute faith.
“Was it not by his action, in offering his son Isaac upon the altar, that our father Abraham was justified? Surely, you can see faith was at work in his actions, and by these actions, his faith was perfected? Here was fulfillment of the words of scripture: ‘Abraham put his faith in God, and that faith was counted to him as righteousness,’ and he was called ‘God’s friend’” (James 2:21-23).
As important as Abraham is to Christianity, however, the new symbol of God’s most intimate relationship with humanity is Jesus. Jesus represents the quintessence of intimacy, and God’s love for Jesus, God’s own son, becomes transferred through Jesus’s sacrifice to all those who would have faith in him. At one level, then, the chosen is Jesus, described in the New Testament as the divinely chosen descendent of David identified as the Messiah:
Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of his kingdom, there will be no end. (Luke1:30-33)
The subtext for this passage is 2 Samuel 7:12-13, when God tells David,
“When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, one of your own issue, and I will establish his kingship. He shall build a house for My name, and I will establish his royal throne forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to Me …Your house and your kingship shall ever be secure before you; your throne shall be established forever.”
In a later passage in the same Gospel, the actual words used by God to confirm Jesus’ authoritative status includes the idiom of chosenness:
“There came a cloud which cast its shadow over them; they were afraid as they entered the cloud, and from it a voice spoke: ‘This is My son, My Chosen; listen to him’” (Luke 9:35).
Other passages also single our Jesus as symbolic of the chosen relationship with God.
- Not only is Jesus God’s chosen son (consider the subtext of Isaac as the one chosen for Abraham’s unfulfilled sacrifice in Gen. 22),
- but he also becomes the actual sacrifice whose blood becomes “the blood of the covenant, shed for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:38; Mark 14:24).
- He is the” good shepherd” who will lead his flock directly to God:
- “I am the door; anyone who comes into the fold through me will be safe. He will go in and out and find pasture…
- I am the good shepherd;
- I know my own and my own knows me, as the Father knows me and I know the Father: (John 10:9-15).
Those who follow the extraordinary and divinely chosen Jesus gain a part of Jesus’s extraordinary blessing. Their faith in Jesus’s incomparable merit actually brings a certain merit upon them, and that merit includes a kind of personal election. Many Greco-Romans and a few Jews, indeed, entered into the fold through Jesus.
Most Jews, however, seem not to have followed him, yet they nevertheless claimed to have the chosen status of Abraham’s descendants without following Jesus. They represent the establishment religion in the New Testament, and whether or not some Jews actually intended to kill Jesus, there can be no doubt that they opposed him vigorously.
The Gospel of John accuses them of plotting Jesus’s death, and notes how they would cite their genealogical relationship with Abraham to prove their elect status. Jesus turns the idiom of kinship relationship on its head by accusing them, metaphorically, of acting as if they were children of the devil rather than of Abraham.
“I know that you are descended from Abraham, yet you are bent on killing me because my teaching makes no headway with you. I tell what I have seen in my Father’s presence; you do what you have learned from your father.”
They retorted, “Abraham is our father, ”“If you were Abraham’s children,” Jesus replied, “you would do as Abraham did. As it is, you are bent on killing me, because I have told you the truth, which I heard from God. That is not how Abraham acted. You are doing your own father’s work”. They said, “We are not illegitimate; God is our father, and God alone.” Jesus said to them, “If God were your father, you would love me, for God is the source of my being, and from him I come. I have not come of my own accord; He sent me. Why do you not understand what I am saying? It is because my teaching is beyond your grasp. Your father is the devil and you choose to carry out your father’s desires. He was murderer from the beginning, and is not rooted in the truth; there is no truth in him. When he tells a lie he is speaking his own language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” (John 8:37-44).
By Jesus’ day, conversion was both a possibility and a reality. In fact, many Greco-Romans who were neither Jewish nor Christian “shopped the market” during the first century CE and later in search of more personally relevant religion. This was the largest potential pool of religious consumers, and some early church fathers noted in their writings how Greco-Romans listened to both Jewish and Christian leaders and attended various worship services.
Both rabbinic Judaism and Christianity represented newly emerging religious movements during the period, but because Judaism insisted that it was carrying the banner of biblical religion, Jews were also represented in the New Testament as the religious establishment, though the most powerful religious establishment was actually represented by the Roman state through worship of the emperor.
Primogeniture and Promise
If a new religious movement attacks the establishment head-on and aggressively, the polemical assault may not only cause it to suffer more from the results of direct confrontation, but it may also alienate potential followers who are considering their religious options before joining any movement. Successful new religious movements sometimes work subtly with authenticating symbols, therefore, and in ways that will accomplish the opposite of the desire of the establishment to denigrate them.
In the following passage in Romans 11, for example, Paul starts off as if affirming the unique chosen status of Israel but then subverts that notion through a brilliant argument based on well-known biblical symbols and motifs:
I ask then: Has God rejected his people? Of course not! I am an Israelite myself, of the stock of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected the people he acknowledged of old as his own. Surely you know what scripture says in the story of Elijah—how he pleads with God against Israel: “Lord, they have killed your prophets, they have torn down your altars, and I alone am left, and they are seeking my life.” But what was the divine word to him? “I have left myself seven thousand men who have not knelt to Baal.” In just the same way at the present time a “remnant” has come into being, chosen by the graced of God. But if it is by grace, then it does not rest on deeds, or grace would cease to be grace. What follows? What Israel sought, Israel has not attained, but the chosen few have attained it. The rest were hardened. . . I ask, then: When they stumbled, was their fall final? Far from it! Through a false step on their part salvation has come to the Gentiles, and this in turn will stir them to envy… It is to you Gentiles that I am speaking. As an apostle to the Gentiles, I make much of that ministry, yet always in the hope of stirring those of my own race to envy, and so saving some of them. For it their rejection has meant the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean? Nothing less than life from the dead! (Rom. 11:1-15)
A similar reworking of earlier symbols may be found in it same epistle:
Not all descendants of Israel are truly Israel, nor, because they are Abraham’s offspring, are they all his true children; but in the words of Scripture, “Through the line of Isaac your descendants shall be traced” [Gen. 21:21]. That is to say, it is not those born in the course of natures who are children of God; it is the children born through God’s promise who are reckoned as Abraham’s descendants. (Rom. 9:7-8)
The critical subtext for this passage is Genesis 21:10-13:
She said to Abraham, “Cast out that slave-woman and her son, for the son of that slave shall not share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.”
The matter distressed Abraham greatly, for it concerned a son of his. But God said to Abraham, “Do not be distressed over the boy or your slave; whatever Sarah tells you, do as she says, for it is through the line of Isaac that your descendants shall be traced. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him too, for he is your seed.”
This is a critique of the Jewish claim of chosenness based lineage. Paul’s argument is that God’s mysterious choice of Isaac over Ishmael for the covenantal chosen relationship is explained by the fact that earlier in the narrative, God promised that Abraham would have a second child, who would be named Isaac through Sarah. Therefore, while Ishmael was indeed Abraham’s firstborn son, he was simply a normal child, whereas Isaac was divinely promised and thus attained a preferred, chosen status.
In the biblical system of primogeniture, a father’s firstborn son served as the primary inheritor. Ishmael thus should have attained higher status than his younger brother, Isaac. Yet Isaac, who was born miraculously in Abraham and Sarah’s old age and according to God’s promise, was accorded higher status by God.
According to this reading, simple genealogy is trumped by divine intent. In the same way, says Paul, the Jewish prior claim to chosenness based on direct blood-kinship with Abraham in trumped by the divine promise to those who follow Jesus as Christ- Messiah.
The same analogy is made in an extremely powerful way in Galatians 4:21-31:
Tell me now, you who are so anxious who are so anxious to be under the law will you not listen to what the law says? It is written there that Abraham had two sons, one by his slave and the other by his free-born wife. The slave-woman’s son was born in the course of nature, the free woman’s through God’s promise. This is an allegory. The two women stand for two covenants. The women stand for two covenants. The one bearing children into slavery is the covenant. The one bearing children into slavery is the covenants. The one bearing children into slavery is the covenant that come from Mount Sinai: that is Hagar. Sinai is a mountain in Arabia and it represents the Jerusalem of today, for she and her children are in slavery. But the heavenly Jerusalem is the free woman; she is our mother!… Now you, my friends, like Isaac, are children of God’s promise, but just as in those days the natural-born son persecuted the spiritual son, so it is today. Yet what does scripture say? “Drive out the slave and her son, for the son of the slave shall not share the inheritance with the son of the free woman.” [cf. Gen 21:10] You see, then, my friends, we are no slave’s children; our mother is the free woman. It is for freedom that Christ set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and refuse to submit again to the yoke of slavery.
The inheritance in this passage is the blessing of God through Jesus as Christ-Messiah. Inheritance is not simply attained by kinship relationship. It must be acquired through God’s intentionally, and that intentionality is expressed through the very personhood of Jesus.
Many other New Testament passages could be cited to show how important the competition was for being the real chosen of God. One of the most powerful and famous is the anonymous letter to the Hebrews 8:6-13, referenced above:
In fact, the ministry, which has fallen to Jesus, is as far superior to [Israel’s] as are the covenant he mediates and the promises upon which it is legally secured. Had the first covenant been faultless, there would have been no need to look for a second in its place. But God, finding fault with them, says,
“The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will conclude a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt; because they did not abide by the terms of the covenant, and I abandoned them, says the Lord. For the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord, is this: I will set My laws in their understanding and write them on their hearts ; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. And they shall not teach one another, saying to brother and fellow-citizen.’ Know the Lord!’ For all of them, high and low, shall know Me; I will be merciful to their wicked deeds, and I will remember their sins no more.”
By speaking of a new covenant, He has pronounced the first one old; and anything that is growing old and aging will shortly disappear.
The bulk of this passage is a citation of Jeremiah 31:31-34 Biblical scholars consider the Jeremiah passage to be part of a larger prophecy of consolation and restoration directed to the northern kingdom of Israel that had been destroyed by the Assyrians years earlier. The interpretation of the letter to the Hebrews is that the “new covenant “refers to one to one established between God and a new religious community that will replace the old.
This is one of the powerful texts that claim the supersession of Christianity as the “true Israel” (the Latin phrase is verus Israel). In this passage, the subtext of Jeremiah 31 is brought right into the text to demonstrate and strengthen the point. In this view expressed there, the new covenant represents a new dispensation, a new relationship between God and a replacement “chosen.” The old claim to chosenness has no meaning because God has ended that relationship. The new chosen reflects the most perfect articulation of the divine will.
Chosenness as a Zero- sum situation
The arguments that we have been reading reveal the view that the role of covenanted community was possible for one side only. In the language of game theory, the competition for divine election is depicted in these texts as a “zero-sum” situation:
- there can be only one elected,
- only one chosen at any time.
- If the Israelites are chosen,
- the Christians cannot be, and vice versa.
- Only one form of monotheism is valid.
The assumption was born in a period when the Israelites were the only community to arrive at the notion of monotheism. There was only one form of monotheism in the world of ancient Israel, or at least only one that could be known to them. The other expressions of monotheism or proto-monotheism mentioned above never survived. All other human communities and nations known to Israel were polytheists. Because the one Great was ”none of the above,” meaning that God was not limited to being like a tribal god of any of the nations—and only Israel realized this—then only Israel could be chosen by the true God. There was only one chosen, and that chosen was Israel.
The notion of a single chosen is deeply embedded in the chosenness texts of the Hebrew Bible:
Exodus 19:5-6: “You Shall be My treasured possession among all the peoples, for all the earth is Mine.”
Leviticus 20:26: “I have set you apart from other peoples to be Mine.”
Deuteronomy 7:6: “The Lord your God chose you to be His treasured people.”
Deuteronomy 14:2: “The Lord your God chose you from among all other peoples on earth to be His treasured people.”
Isaiah 42:1: ”This is My servant, whom I uphold, My chosen one, in whom I delight.”
The notion of a single chosen became a dominant theme of Christianity as well, but the difference was that rather than being a religious peopledhood as in ancient Israel, and then rabbinic Judaism, the chosen in Christianity was a voluntary religious community, one of voluntary believers. But only those within that clearly defined community benefit from the new expression of divine election:
”He who believers and is baptized shall be saved but he who does not believe shall be condemned” (Mark 16:16).
Given the repeated statements of unique status, it is not surprising that the first two monotheistic religious system to emerge out of the fall of the Jerusalem Temple agreed that there could only be one true monotheism.
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