Jews for the Resurrection of Jesus?
The Curious Case of Pinchas Lapide
I first heard about David Brooks in high school. Orthodox Jewish role models of mine spoke incredibly highly of him and the Soloveitchik-informed distinction between “resume virtues” and “eulogy virtues” articulated in his TED Talk. Brooks was seen as a secular Jew who began to embrace Orthodox values through his engagement with Rav Soloveitchik’s writings. The next time I heard Brooks’ name mentioned in Jewish spaces was only a few days ago, in reference to his recent theological reflection in the New York Times. Brooks had since converted to Christianity yet continued to engage with Jewish thought. He describes his current religious personality as follows:
Today, I feel more Jewish than ever, but as I once told some friends, I can’t unread Matthew. For me, the Beatitudes are the part of the Bible where the celestial grandeur most dazzlingly shines through. So these days I’m enchanted by both Judaism and Christianity. I assent to the whole shebang. My Jewish friends, who have been universally generous and forbearing, point out that when you believe in both the Old and New Testaments, you’ve crossed over to Team Christian, which is a fair point… These days I go to church more than synagogue. But I’ve learned you can’t take the Jew out of the boy. I’m attracted to Jesus the Jew, not the wispy, ethereal, gentle-faced guy with his two fingers in the air whom Christians have invented and put into centuries of European paintings. The Jewish Jesus emerged amid revolution, violence and strife. He walked into the center of all the clashing authority structures and he overturned them all. The Jewish Jesus was a total badass.
Brooks’ op-ed received much negative pushback, including a thorough rebuttal from Mark Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer pulled no punches in his take-down, especially in his response to Brooks feeling both Christian and Jewish.
It’s not just a “fair point”—it’s the actual truth of what Christianity is. It’s the definition of a Christian: one who believes in the Old and New Testaments. To find a Christian who doesn’t also value the Old Testament is to find a fraud, an ignoramus, an antisemite, or all of the above; worshipping Jesus sans Judaism was, in fact, a Nazi project. Brooks is, by contrast, a thoughtful, humanistic dude, and he should realize how silly it is to depict himself as sort of Christian-ish, sort of Jew-ish.
Notwithstanding liberal Christian theologians’ attempts to soften their faith’s supercessionist message, it’s undeniable that Christianity is meant to complete Judaism, to make it whole; to be Christian is to deny the sufficiency of Judaism as a religion, and to deny the sufficiency of Jews as one’s religious community. It’s also to deny that the Jewish commandments—keeping kosher, observing fast days, celebrating holidays like Sukkot and Passover—are in any way binding. If Christianity is true, then normative Judaism is ancient Near Eastern cosplay.
For the Jew, Christianity is a heresy, an elevation of a false messiah. Which is not to say that the Gospels are not great literature, or don’t have worthwhile teachings; but for the Jew, they are not divine. Brooks says they went, for him, “from beautiful to true,” which suggests that he believes in the resurrection of Jesus. If Jesus was resurrected, then we Jews are in error (maybe even stubborn, or hard-hearted, to use old antisemitic tropes). We keep praying for the coming of the messiah; if He came already, we’re just wrong. Point being: there is no accepting the whole shebang, because the two parts of the shebang contradict each other—for the Jew, anyway. It’s the Christian who believes in their consilience.
Despite Oppenheimer’s point reading as intuitively true, there has lately been a push by certain Jewish thinkers to accept Jesus’ resurrection. Readers may immediately assume I’m referring to “Jews for Jesus” or “Messianic Judaism,” but that is actually not the case. Allow me to introduce you to Pinchas Lapide and his theological legacy.
Lapide (1922-1997) was an Israeli diplomat and theologian, who found himself frequently in dialogue with Christian thinkers. His controversial contribution to Jewish theology is a suggestion that one can both be fully Jewish and assert with confidence that God rose Jesus of Nazareth from the dead three days after his execution by the Romans. According to Lapide,
the resurrection belongs to the category of the truly real and effective occurrences, for without a fact of history there is no act of true faith… In other words: Without the Sinai experience — no Judaism; without the Easter experience — no Christianity. Both were Jewish faith experiences whose radiating power, in a different way, was meant for the world of nations. For inscrutable reasons the resurrection faith of Golgotha was necessary in order to carry the message of Sinai into the world.
While rejecting the Christian concept of the Trinity, Lapide wrote elsewhere that “I accept Jesus as a believing Jew who had a central role to play in God’s plan of salvation and in whose name a worldwide church was founded.” The import of Lapide’s position was summarized well by the Christian thinker Carl E. Braaten in his introduction to Lapide’s The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective:
When an Orthodox Jew writes a book on the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth… It is an event without precedent in the long history of Jewish-Christian relations. But when the author’s main thesis favors the historical facticity of Jesus’ resurrection, based on a critical examination of the documentary evidence, then we are witnessing some kind of ecumenical miracle.
… The result of Lapide’s re-Judaizing of Jesus is to debunk some common misconceptions that die hard in the popular tradition. One is that the people of Israel rejected Jesus, and another is that Jesus rejected his people. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the mother church in Jerusalem, the earliest believers, and all the original apostles were Jews, and “multitudes” in his day gave him an enthusiastic reception; never once did any imagine that their belief in Jesus constituted a break with the Hebrew faith. Nor did Jesus reject his people. As Lapide examines the evidence, he points out that the harshest words of Jesus against the “scribes and pharisees” indicate only that he had opponents among some of the leaders at the time. That Jesus stood in conflict and contrast with his age places him in the great line of Jewish prophets, and rather than it being a sign of his un-Jewishness or rejection of Israel, it stands as the most telling proof of his greatness. Moses was in constant conflict with his own people, and yet there has never been a greater Jew than he.
Lapide’s position, thus, allows for Judaism and Christianity to find a mutual theological narrative and only to differ on the interpretation of a particular moment in history rather than debate the moment itself. Lapide accepted “the resurrection of Easter Sunday not as an invention of the community of disciples, but as a historical event” and thus limited conversation with Christians only to what that event meant for the future of humanity. Responding to this, Braaten asks perhaps the most obvious questions in summarizing Lapide’s full position:
If Lapide believes in the resurrection of Jesus, why is he then not a Christian? What stands in the way of baptism? Lapide’s answer is very simple: Because the resurrection of Jesus does not prove that Jesus is the Messiah, whereas to be a Christian is to believe just that. Yes, the resurrection of Jesus really happened, but not, this doesn’t prove he is the Messiah. This sounds strangely paradoxical to Christians. It is precisely the aim of the book to explain this paradox. When the resurrection of Jesus is viewed from the standpoint of Jewish faith, there is no necessary link to the claim of messiahship. What then does the resurrection mean, if not God’s ratification of the messianic identity and vocation of Jesus? It means, for Lapide, that Jesus belongs to the preparatio messianica - the line of the great patriarchs and prophets of Israel - pioneering the full salvation of the future kingdom which God will establish through the Messiah in the last days.
If Jesus’ resurrection is evidence of his preparatory role in messianic history, why did only a small minority of Jews come to believe in him as the linchpin of the ongoing history of salvation which God was broadening to include all the nations, and not only Israel? An answer is that if the majority of Jews had not said no to the apostolic message about Jesus, Christianity would have remained an intra-Jewish affair. It took a minority of Jews to say yes to Jesus and a majority to say no to drive the history of salvation beyond the particularism of Judaism to the universal horizon of all nations by way of the Gentile mission. According to the “pedagogy of God” the pagan nations could become heirs of Jewish monotheism only on the condition of the Jewish refusal of the gospel.
Lapide’s position thus unifies Jewish and Christian narratives to a degree, but also allows Christians to believe, with Jewish support, that God’s “pedagogy” (Lapide’s formulation) requires Jews to stubbornly ignore the move towards global salvation that Jesus represented in both views.
Based on Lapide’s position, Braaten outlined several principles in “an authentic Christian theology of Judaism:”
The first principle of crucial significance is that the Hebrew Scriptures are part of the biblical canon
…The second principle is that Israel continues to be the chosen people of God post-Christum and to have meaning in the salvation-historical scheme of things…
…The third principle holds that in the end “all Israel will be saved.” (Rom. 11:26). This means that not only those Jews who are now individually converted to the gospel one by one will be saved in the end, namely, the Jewish Christians, but in the context of the parousia there will be a mass conversion of Israel to the Messiah of God.
…The fourth principle is that “salvation is from the Jews,” (John 4:22). This means that God’s promises are mediated to universal history through the particular history of Israel… From the history of Israel’s first election as a special people, the world has received its prophetic insistence on monotheism, the hope for universal salvation, a messianic and eschatological interpretation of history, the doctrine of the world as creation and utterly other than the Creator, and finally the name of Jesus the Jew as the incarnation of the Son of God.
The fifth principle is that the fact of Israel reminds the eschatological community of Christ that it lives “between the times,” between the “already now” and the “not yet” of the history leading from promise to fulfillment. History is not yet the match for the hopes of Israel. There is an overdose of hope in the history of promise that drives both Israel and the church to be moving forward restlessly with an uncurable case of “messianitis.”
Rather than uniting Judaism and Christianity, Lapide’s position is interpreted by his Christian audience as instead situating Judaism within Christianity’s overarching narrative. It gives Christians a way to see Jews as part of their story, and as a group who will eventually be steered rightly towards Christianity rather than maintain Judaism as a truly independent religion. Lapide’s book is currently only available with Braaten’s introduction and is primarily read by Christians (recently the apologist Gary Habermas even cited Lapide as an example of a skeptical scholar who believes in Jesus’ resurrection in an attempt to convince others to believe in it as well). Should Jews be worried by this state of affairs?
Rabbi Mark Gottlieb (unrelated to me as far as I know) made clear in a 2023 article that he believes the opposite. Gottlieb is a well-respected member of the Modern Orthodox Jewish community, previously having served as head of school at Yeshiva University’s High School for Boys and currently heading the Tikvah Fund. He clarifies that Lapide attempted “to empty Jesus’s death and resurrection of any saving grace in their own right, instead placing the emphasis on the events’ historical effects.” He goes on to argue that Orthodox Jews have good reason to accept Lapide’s thinking:
Like all people of faith living in a secular world, Orthodox Jews are familiar with the temptations of a strictly materialist worldview. With science supreme and the reign of quantity dominant, to maintain the possibility of the supernatural is no small task. Therefore, would not an expanded scope for perceiving the possibility of the miraculous be a blessing? This is the field Lapide is plowing—hoping to bring believers of different traditions together in a productive (if inescapably controversial) way. The student who is taught to be skeptical about the possibility of the miraculous in other faiths may very well come to doubt the supernatural as it is taught in his own faith tradition. Conversely, openness to a supernaturalist worldview expansive enough to include instances of the seemingly miraculous in faith traditions outside one’s own may strengthen faith in one’s own tradition’s supernatural claims. To take one concrete example: The rich literature on the phenomena of spiritual possession and exorcism across religious traditions may, for some, point to the reality of a supernaturalist account of man and the world.
Believing in the resurrection of Jesus, Gottlieb argues, can only lead to greater belief in Judaism’s own miraculous claims. Further, as discussed above, Gottlieb supports the grand scale of Lapide’s vision:
Lapide offers a bracing alternative to secular or reductionist understandings of the course of history. Though he is focusing on one particular world-historic event, the underlying logic applies more generally. To paraphrase that logic once again: The resurrection is the event without which the rise of Christianity cannot be explained, and a development of such historical magnitude—in which pagan nations hitherto practicing various forms of mystery religions came slowly but overwhelmingly to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus—must be providentially driven and hence theologically legitimate.
Put more directly, Lapide’s theology of history is narrative in nature: The story of the God of Sinai serves as the master-narrative for the West and, increasingly, the world. By zeroing in on the internal coherence and external sweep of the biblical narrative, Lapide is able to draw more of human history—more characters, more protagonists, Jewish and Gentile alike—into the master story.
Lapide invites Jews to see all of world history, the many nations and peoples shaped by the Christian confession, as part of Jewish history, as part of “our” narrative, driven by both divine providence and human initiative. Too many students of history, some motivated by animus against Jews, others just reading history through a materialist lens, have placed the Jewish people on the periphery of the human drama. (In some accounts, that changed in the twentieth century when Auschwitz—or the state of Israel—became a focal point of Western self-examination.) Lapide, without succumbing to a false triumphalism, reverses the narrative, aligning the divine drama of world history with the Jewish story of salvation. For contemporary Jews living in either an ahistorical mode of reality or one dominated by a secular narrative, Lapide’s rich providentialism offers an antidote to modern and theologically minimalist ways of thinking about history.
Finally, Gottlieb argues that Lapide’s position also allows for unprecedented practical benefits for Jews around the world:
It must be remembered that in Lapide’s lifetime, one-third of the entire Jewish population was exterminated by adherents of a neo-pagan worldview. And as an Israeli diplomat to several European countries as well as the Holy See, Lapide knew how important it was for Jews to feel like a welcome part of Christian civilization. By reading the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus as part of an organic Jewish faith experience, and while acknowledging—together with his faithful Christian neighbors—the historicity of the resurrection, he was trying to draw Jews, a minority, closer to Christians, the majority that invariably held sway, either directly or indirectly, over the lives of then-contemporary and future generations of Jews.
Lapide’s political theology is arguably more significant in a post-Christian world than in the culturally Christian world he worked and lived in. For it’s surely the case that today’s greatest threats to both the state of Israel and the Jewish people living outside Israel emanate from extremes on the political right or left that are radically secular, Islamist, or neo-pagan in origin. Specifically Christian anti-Semitism, though not completely eradicated, is far less of a threat than in previous generations. Indeed, one might plausibly argue that in our post–Vatican II world, the stronger a Gentile’s commitment to traditional Christianity, the greater the likelihood of his support for Israel and, broadly speaking, the Jewish people, a support often rooted in positive theological appraisals of Judaism. Simply put, as Lapide might see it, a strong and traditional Christianity can help to safeguard Jews and Jewish interests in important ways.
For this reason, Jews, while certainly not ascribing to Christianity’s dogma, have good reason to offer real but qualified support for Christian belief in the resurrection. Without that belief, Christianity quickly demythologizes its own narrative and turns into a milquetoast universalist ethic. Not only does the historicity of the resurrection account for the rapid rise of Christianity, but it also preserves the salvational story still being written by Jews and Gentiles alike, together, nearly two millennia after those world-historic events. For Lapide, the ancient Palestinian Jew who was miraculously raised from the dead, instead of being a snare and stumbling block for Jews and Christians, can be a bridge and a shared legacy of theological coherence, fraternity, and mutual care.
While Gottlieb originally published that article on the Christian website First Things, he also published a slightly edited version in 2023’s Emet Le-Ya'akov: Facing the Truths of History: Essays in Honor of Jacob J. Schacter. That festrift was written primarily for a Jewish audience and it is likely that Gottlieb’s use of it was meant to earn him more Orthodox Jewish “converts” to Lapide’s position. I note elsewhere that this second version of Gottlieb’s article argues that if Orthodox Jews see value in the spread of ethical monotheism, believe God moves history towards salvation, and believe that the most plausible cause of Jesus’ disciples having the “strength, courage, and will to spread their Jewish teachings to the world” is the resurrection of Jesus, then “it is at least also plausible for a religious Jew to conclude that the resurrection was a divinely driven miracle.” Furthermore, “one might plausibly argue that the stronger the commitment to traditional Christianity, the greater the likelihood of Christian support of Israel and, broadly speaking, the Jewish people.”
Having examined all of this, and without addressing Michael J. Alters presentation of 217 internal contradictions within the New Testament regarding Jesus’ resurrection, Orthodox readers are left with an important question: Are the benefits of Lapide and Gottlieb’s arguments worth the trade-off of situating Judaism comfortably within a Christian theological narrative? It’s an important conversation that cannot afford to be ignored as we continue to move closer to Mashiach’s coming.
Happy Chanukah and Happy Holidays!