Jon Levenson's Response I must thank Paul M. van Buren for his thoughtful and generous reading of my book and his helpful suggestions about its relevance to the task of reconceiving the relationship of Judaism and Christianity. I agree wholeheartedly with Prof. van Buren's emphasis on the common background of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism in the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, which is the common scripture of both traditions but the sole textual authority of neither. It is gratifying to find a Christian theologian of his stature accepting my claim that the two religions constitute overlapping but competing midrashic systems. In my view, they are better seen not as mother and daughter, but as siblings, for both grew not only out of the Hebrew Bible, but also out of the rich traditions of late Second Temple Judaism (traditions that neither Christianity nor Rabbinic Judaism has been inclined to acknowledge sufficiently). This makes them, however, siblings who have always laid claim to a legacy that, ironically, foregrounds sibling rivalry and insists that a rigorously egalitarian resolution is not consonant with their Father's character. In this, the common foundational story seems to me somewhat (though not necessarily totally) at odds with van Buren's efforts in his last paragraph to soften the edge of biblical chosenness. This idea that the emerging Rabbinic and Christian traditions took shape in and through the interpretation of their common Bible and in the wake of the successor communities of the late Second Temple period is a productive resource for Jewish-Christian dialogue. It is more realistic than the familiar and now shopworn efforts to build a bridge on the historical Jesus, about whom little is known and nothing is certain. The attempt to recast Jesus as one of the prophets of Israel is a case in point. This bridge collapses under the impact of two historical points, first, the fact that this is not how the Church has traditionally conceived him and, second, the fact that according to Rabbinic tradition, authentic prophecy had departed centuries earlier, and authority was in the hands of sages who had collectively inherited an ancient text and an ancient tradition, and emphatically NOT in the hands of charismatics. Similar obstacles lie in the way of other conceptions of Jesus that have more historical probability than the notion of Jesus as prophet--e.g., Jesus as incarnate Wisdom/Torah, Jesus as Galilean wonder-worker, Jesus as Jewish patriot and apocalypticist in a time of Roman domination. From the Jewish point of view, one must point out again that none of these reconstructions builds much of a bridge to the Rabbinic concept of normative tradition. And I should venture to say that from a Christian point of view, any account of Jesus that omits or downplays the reports of his sacrificial death and world-transforming resurrection is deeply flawed. Many Christian moves in the direction of dialogue with the Jews have thus entailed both a misperception of historic Judaism and a surrender of core kerygmata of the early Church. Different factors lead to the well-intentioned but misconceived erection on the part of Christians and Jews of a bridge between the two communities with its foundations in some reconstruction of the figure of Jesus. On the Christian side (or, I should say, the liberal Christian side) is a chronic tendency to identify Judaism with the Hebrew Bible, and especially its ethical and universal tendencies, severed unnaturally and a-historically from its ritual and particularistic tendencies (both of which are amply attested even in the prophets). On the Jewish side is a discomfort with theology in general and with the mythopoetic and sacrificial dimensions of the Hebrew Bible in particular and a corollary eagerness to present Judaism as liberal and enlightened, as the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century understood the term. The persistence and reemergence of the story of the death and resurrection of the beloved son is a major embarrassment to many Jews of all sorts. Finding Christians who take one form of this story with radical seriousness may help Jews reclaim the forms the story has taken in their own tradition. In the process, we must guard against undue harmonization, and here I have another bone to pick with van Buren. The story of the death and resurrection of the beloved son is indeed foundational for both communities, but the structures that are built on it are different. In the Jewish case, the story is not told simply as a profound insight into the human condition and human destiny, or even as the supreme disclosure of God. Rather, it serves in part to undergird the continuing relationship between God and his chosen people, Israel, especially when the latter's deeds are not deserving, as is too often the case. The relationship that continues is one that involves Israel's obligation to observe the Torah and all its commandments, including both the demands of scrupulous ethical behavior and the demands relating to daily prayer, sabbaths, festivals, diet, family purity, and the like. The Christian telling of the story--indeed, the very Christian adoption of the story--has a very different focus and a very different goal, one that has usually been set against the Jewish reading. In my view, this begins as early as Paul. I also have the sense that van Buren overconcentrates on the aqedah, trying to make it more central in the New Testament than it really is. I see no logical coherence in the move he reconstructs from "son of David, to son of God, to the son par excellence, Isaac." Together with the enigmatic title, "Son of Man," these elements from older Jewish tradition had long circulated independently of each other or perhaps in some combinations, but there is no reason to see all son-language as inevitably pointing to Isaac and the aqedah, whether through the putative "moves of Jewish messianic exegesis" or otherwise. Similarly, Rabbinic Judaism includes many elements that are independent of the aqedah, which, in different ways is a major influence on both traditions but the generating origin of neither of them. That said, Genesis 22 and its elaboration and interpretation in Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism and in Christianity remain a fertile area for Jewish-Christian dialogue, and Paul van Buren is to be thanked for helping all of us see why. Jon D. Levenson is the author of The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983). Paperback, $12.95

R. Kendall Soulen's response