Many persons could find it paradoxical, but we can say that to understand the world within which the first Gospel announcement was born and developed, we should put aside the couple “Hebrews and Christians”. The reason is very simple: in the first century it was not relevant. Therefore, to deepen the dialogue between the Church and the people of Israel, developed in the light of the revealed Books of the Tanak (the Scripture of Israel including the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings) and of the Christian Bible (Old and New Testament), we need to re-dimension the constitutive capacity of that couple. In other words, we must catch the invitation to give up the pre-comprehension  by which,  from the origin, the Hebrews where not all Christian and the Christians were not all Hebrew….it is not this alternative that has been constituted, consolidated  and that has reached us as if it were obvious; however, the historical, theological and spiritual re-thinking, that took place during the last decenniums, has highlighted the deep inadequacy of this approach. This consideration is valid also when, once abandoned the contra-positive attitude, we set on the dialogical way.

Of course, the Hebrew Bible does not know the existence of the Christians. However, those writings establish a very clear distinction between the people of Israel and the other peoples. It is the matter of the election, often difficult to understand. We could expose the matter in various ways, among which the most synthetic one is the reference to a passage of the Exodus, in which the three peculiar characteristics of Israel are listed: a holy people (that is distinct), a kingdom of priests and a particular propriety for the Lord of the whole world (See Exodus 19, 5 – 6). 

In virtue of the Sinai Covenant, in the horizon of universality, there is the creation of an articulation that distinguishes Israel from the Gentiles (gojim). Sure, also Hebraism  attributes a role to the Covenant stipulated with Abraham. However, we should not forget that, near other meanings taken and developed, mainly in the diaspora, the Covenant individuates, for the Hebrew people, the centrality of the theme in the genealogical descent as well as that in the land of Israel (See Gen 15,18).

Though, with reference to Abraham, a blessing extended to all peoples is expressed, (Gen 12,3), the reference to the patriarch and his stock can be called to cause also to the end of establishing the Hebrew particularity.

Hebrew: living witnesses

It can appear even more singular the fact that the new-testamentary texts also, though stating the truth of Jesus Christ, continue to reason according to the previous horizon. It is, anyhow, incontestable that in them the word “Christian” is of a very rare use –it appears only thrice: Acts 11,26; 26,28; 1 Pt 4,16 – and always connected with an implicit reference to a definition coming from outside.

To state, as it is reiterated officially by the churches, that the covenant with Israel has never been revoked (Rom 11, 29) means making one’s own the fundamental presupposition, repeated by the New Testament, according to which humanity articulates in two great parts: Israel and the Gentiles.  

It is obvious to see that, to be Jew or Gentile assumes a different aspect if we read it in a cultural-religious way, or if it is understood in a theological manner. For both approaches it remains true that we misunderstand the world and the message of the New Testament, if we present them on the basis of a dual articulation, inexistent at that time, for which we are either Hebrew or Christian. It would, therefore, be a noteworthy step forward, for the comprehension of the Church as well as for the dialogue with the Hebrew people, to understand that the talk should be disentangled in a quadruple way.

The neo-testamentary optics looks at the world by using a prism that knows Hebrews believing in Jesus Christ and a more numerous number of Hebrews who do not have faith in Him; a maniple of gentiles with faith in Christ and a great mass of Gentiles who go on following their old cults.

However, this division into four, substantially valid at theological and ecclesiological level, results brief and inadequate at the level of the historical re-construction: in those days, the boundary lines, indicated here as exact, were in reality very mobile.

Though the importance of the changed direction indicated by Vatican II is out of discussion, we could state that the heart of the re-discovery of those years was centred on the fact that the Hebrews were considered living witnesses of the Biblical faith. The great merit and the objective limit of tits lay out is to be found in this. The adjective “living” collides with a millinery orientation that confines the Hebrew people to the past or to the future, but denies a positive value to its present. 

For a long time the Christians have been thinking more or less like this: the Hebrews were once the chosen people of God to take his Word to the world; by refusing the Messiah to the point of having killed, they lost their election, which passed on to the Church, self-defined as new Israel: however, at the end of times, the Hebrews will be converted to the faith in Jesus Christ, welcoming the Baptism. 

This scheme, called “theology of the substitution”, has dominated the Christian vision of the Hebrews for such an extended time as to keep on leaving behind evident after-effects. In this picture, a positive function was reserved to the Hebrews in the past and the future, while in the present they were accredited with a witnessing capacity only in virtue of their presumed hardness of heart, of their attachment to the letter of the Scripture and their punishment  manifested in a wandering existence. To state that the Hebrews are witnesses of a faith, without which Christianity would not exist, is an unprecedented qualitative jump forward. It causes the  relation between Christians and Hebrews to aim at the positive pole. 

Orthodoxy and religious systems

There is no doubt that to state the existence of the intrinsic relations between Christians and Hebrews was a consequence of the return to the Bible, that prepared and supported Vatican II. However, this push to a renewal had, among others, the consequence of making the  ecclesial areas to realise that the inalienable Christian love for the pages of the Old (or first) Testament is not enough to understand the living Hebraism, to listen to the Hebrews or to dialogue with them. Though an upside-down sign, the statement according to which we are in front of living witnesses of the Biblical faith, remained entangled in the prejudice, on whose basis the Hebrews have remained in the Old Testament..

The historical investigation has opened once again a scenario in which the Christian origins cease to be simply so, in order to become always more an event rooted within a polyphonic Hebraism of the first century. To state the Hebrew character of Jesus and of the primitive Church implies to handle once again enormous and complex questions related to the birth of the Gospel announcement, as well as to the comprehension of Judaism.. In virtue of the deepening of these studies, the self-rabbinic-presentation, speaking of an oral tradition that goes back, along an uninterrupted chain, up to Sinai, cannot be accredited with reliable historical correspondence. 

The investigations on the construction of the two “orthodoxies”: Judaic and Christian, have made clear that, a historical approach “orthodoxy” is a reaching point not a starting point. It has gone on being formed along a journey that, in a historical perspective, does not correspond to that in which the Hebrews and Christians self-define themselves, starting from their religious reality. Though the areas were still relatively restricted, the echo of those studies is spreading quite speedily, up to become one of the factors, which induced some official Christian and Hebrew components to reiterate firmly some traditional visions.

This new situation has had repercussions also in the area of dialogue. We have reached the complex modern situation in which, while being far from deactivating the residuals of secular scum, we already face widely inedited problems, linked to a re-definition of historically very much uneven and mobile boundaries, if compared to those proposed by  the Hebrew and Christian official visions. The challenge of dialogue, today, passes also along these frontiers. The times demand that both the parties take courageously new and original ways, also in the area of theological reflection.    

A very solid and indiscussable point is that the people of Israel may catch the covenant with the Lord as everlasting an indefectible. It is a peculiar characteristic  of the last decenniums for the Church to state the perpetuation of that covenant. It has always been evident for the Hebrew people that the covenant produces the distinction between Israel and the Gentiles. The community of the believers in Christ also start to observe this statement in a new way. This must imply a deep re-thinking, by both of them, on the opportunity of putting  the “identitary” couple, Christian-Hebrew, at the centre of the dialogue.

Piero Stefani
Via Borgo di Sotto, 17 - 44100 Ferrara