HOW JEWISH WAS JESUS?
WAS JESUS JEWISH? Maybe you’ll reply, “Is the Pope a Catholic?” Well, yes, I think the Pope’s a Catholic. But the Jewishness of Jesus isn’t quite so simple. He was an Israelite, of course. There’s no denying that. But perhaps it’s not 100% accurate to call him Jewish. Let me explain.
The word ‘Jewish’, if we use it accurately, means a member of the tribe of Judah, that is, a Judahite, a descendant of the patriarch Judah. Strictly speaking, people from the other tribes of Israel, like the tribes of Benjamin, or Levi, or Ephraim, are not Jewish since they are not descendants of Judah or his tribe.
Now there are two ways one can be reckoned as Judahite (or Jewish). One can be a descendant of Judah through one’s father, that is, patrilineally. That’s how they reckoned it in Bible times. Or one can be a descendant of Judah through one’s mother, that is, matrilineally. From the time of Ezra’s reform, patrilineal and matrilineal were both important. And, since the fall of the Jerusalem temple in AD 70, the rabbis have reckoned Jewish descent only matrilineally. “If your mother’s Jewish, you’re Jewish.”
So by which reckoning was Jesus Jewish?
Was he patrilineally Jewish? Well, Joseph of Nazareth was absolutely a Judahite. But everyone – Christians and Jews – says Joseph was not Jesus’s father. The Christian view is that Jesus was the Son of God, begotten in Mary the Virgin by the Holy Spirit, and adopted by Joseph. Meanwhile, the rabbis normally reckon he was the son of someone else, neither Joseph nor God. So, either way, he wasn’t Jewish via Joseph. And it’s hard to demonstrate that he could be patrilineally Jewish any other way.
Was he matrilineally Jewish, through his mother Mariam? Well, the evidence we have for Mariam’s descent is that her father was Judahite but her mother was a Zadokite Levite. Therefore Mariam’s matrilineal line, and Jesus’s, was not Judahite but Levite. Therefore he was not matrilineally Judahite.
So Jesus was neither patrilineally nor matrilineally Judahite. It’s true that his maternal grandfather was Judahite. That would qualify him as Jewish enough to become a citizen of modern Israel. (That will be convenient when he becomes king in Jerusalem.) But he is still not a Judahite in Bible terms.
Now you may say to me, “But nowadays people call anyone of Israelite descent ‘Jewish’.” And I realize that. But that is not how it was in Jesus’s time. Back then, “Jewish/Judahite” meant “descending from the tribe of Judah”, or, at very least, “a native of Judea” (the traditional tribal area of Judah). It’s a bit like saying Robert Louis Stevenson was English, and defending it by saying, “Well, when I say English, I include the Scots.” But that’s just incorrect. Stevenson would not have accepted that.
It’s obvious that the Judean Jews of Jesus’s own time did not think Jesus was Jewish. They called him a Samaritan (John 8:48), that is, a spurious descendant of the tribes of Joseph. But actually he came from further north, from Galilee, the territory of the tribes of Zebulun and Naphtali. In Galilee, they spoke Aramaic, not Hebrew like the Jews of Jerusalem. More, the New Testament evidence is that although Jesus kept the biblical feasts of Israel (Passover, Weeks, Sukkoth), he did not keep the Judahite feasts, like the Feast of Purim. Nor did he observe the Pharisaic Jewish calendar. He and his disciples observed another calendar, current in Galilee. (That’s why John’s gospel and the synoptics place the crucifixion on different days of the Passover Feast.)
In fact, we can go even further.
Jesus claims, in John 8.56-58, that he is not a son of Abraham. That means that he did not see himself either as Jewish or, frankly, as Israelite.
So, as you can see, it’s far from simple. By any normal reckoning Jesus was an Israelite. His mother was an Israelite. But to call him simply “Jewish” is inaccurate. He was, more precisely, a matrilineal descendant of the tribes of Judah, Joseph, and Levi; he also had non-Jewish Shemite, Japhethite, and Hamite women in his ancestry. And he was the Son of God by conception. Thus he was qualified to be the Saviour of all mankind.
If you want to know more about this, I discuss it in Chapters 2, 6, 7, 8, and 12 of Jesus: The Incarnation of the Word.