assumed among Jews and some Christians at that time) and Delitzsch held that they were originally written in Greek, Delitzsch readily acknowledged that Hebrew and Aramaic were the languages that the authors of the Gospels likely thought in, and thus his translation tried to replicate that as much as possible. Delitzsch’s translation was appreciated by Jewish scholars of his time. In a memorial to him, David Kaufmann of the Rabbinical Seminary in Budapest noted: “Delitzsch’s New Testament is a priceless enrichment of Jewish literature.”52 In addition, when the first Hebrew-Greek concordance was published in Tiberias in 1974, the authors based their concordance on Delitzsch’s translation.53
I have not found evidence that Soloveitchik was familiar with Delitzsch’s work; but given their shared interests in Judaism and Christianity, as well as Delitzsch’s stellar reputation among many Jewish scholars, it is likely that he was familiar with it.54 Delitzsch received his doctorate at the Leipzig University in 1842 in philology and theology and, working with Leopold Zunz, created an inventory of Hebrew manuscripts in the Leipzig city library. His work with Zunz continued, producing a version of The Tree of Life, by the Karaite Aaron ben Eliyahu; later, he worked on a translation of the Psalms with Rabbi Issacher Ber.55 Delitzsch was sometimes viewed as an apologist for Judaism in Christian circles, and he was considered philosemitic, even as he remained a missionary. As Alan Levenson notes, he retained certain anti-Semitic beliefs.56
Delitzsch emerged on the scene in 1836, in his twenties, with the publication of A History of Jewish Poetry (here one can see the affinity to Zunz, whose work focused on Hebrew liturgy). His book Jewish Artisan Life in the Time of Jesus (published in London in 1906) offered a positive rendering of Jews in the time of Jesus and placed Jesus solidly in his Jewish context. Finally, in the early 1870s, around the time Soloveitchik completed his commentary, Delitzsch published a novella, A Day in Capernaeum, which depicted a day in the life of Jesus. Important for our concerns is that the endnotes to the novella are replete with rabbinic sources to verify his reconstruction of a day in the life of Jesus, something that Soloveitchik would certainly have enjoyed.57 In fact, Levenson’s assessment of Delitzsch squares well with Soloveitchik, with a few caveats, when he writes: “Delitzsch saw no gap between the two testaments. In fact, in an extraordinary image, Delitzsch portrayed the old covenant and the new covenant standing side-by-side in the three days between Jesus’ crucifixion and his resurrection.”58 Soloveitchik, of course, would extend that symmetry much further. Yet Delitzsch never quite overcame his devotion to keeping Judaism and Christianity apart.
The exact date of the publication of Delitzsch’s full Hebrew translation is not known; but we have evidence that he published the work as Eine neue hebräische Übersetzung des Neuen Testaments (A new Hebrew translation of the New Testament) in 1864 (some online references have it as 1877). It was published by the British and Foreign Bible Society in London, where Soloveitchik was living at the time. If the first date is correct, Soloveitchik, who likely wrote his original Hebrew commentary between 1863 and 1868, could easily have used it as his base text. Even if the correct date is 1877, Soloveitchik could have used it, as he continued to revise his Hebrew text until its publication. Delitzsch was said to have spent over forty years on this translation, consulting and correcting all previous translations and separately publishing a Hebrew translation of some of Paul’s epistles beforehand. Given his stature in the field of biblical scholarship, his attention to biblical and rabbinic Hebrew—which would have attracted Soloveitchik—and the fact that it appeared at a time and in a place where Soloveitchik could have easily consulted it, we chose to use Delitzsch’s The Delitzsch Hebrew Gospels: A Hebrew English Translation as the base text of the New Testament. We made some small changes—for example, we substituted YHWH (referring to God) for Delitzsch’s “Ha-Shem.” Delitzsch tried to replicate what he thought was the language of the time, as best he could. Even if Soloveitchik did not use Delitzsch, or did not use him exclusively, Delitzsch’s attention to Mishnaic and early rabbinic Hebrew, including Aramaic, coheres with Soloveitchik’s project better than any other New Testament text that we consulted.
I conclude this section with a few observations on the state of Christian attitudes toward Jews and Judaism of this period and with observations regarding the Jewish roots of the Gospels. Much of the modern Christian assessment of Judaism and its role in Christianity comes from the Tübingen School, founded by Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), a Hegelian by training, who viewed Christianity as an interweaving of two forms of early Christianity; what later became known as Jewish-Christianity (also known as Petrine Christianity) and Gentile Christianity (also known as Pauline Christianity).59 This school took many forms, some leading to more positive assessments of Judaism, and some to more negative ones.60 Jewish scholars interested in Christianity, such as Abraham Geiger, in many ways were responding critically to various elements of the Tübingen School.61 One element worth noting is how Jewish sources were used to separate the two religions and how Christian scholars and missionaries became Hebraists in order to assess the value of rabbinic Judaism to the Gospels. In his study of Delitzsch and Strack, Alan Levenson introduces what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called “allosemitism” to describe at least some of these Hebraist missionaries. Allosemitism is the Christian idea that we should offer positive appraisals of Judaism while maintaining a strict separation between the two religions. Allosemitism took both positive and negative forms in the modern Christian West, sometimes even in the work of one thinker.62 A classic example of this general approach can be found in the seminal essay by George Foot Moore, “Christian Writers on Judaism,” published in 1921.63 Another striking example of the phenomenon of Christian Hebraism of this period, even more relevant to us, was published only one year after Moore’s essay. The multivolume Strack-Billerbeck Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch, published in 1922, was the most comprehensive collection of rabbinic sources structured as annotations to the Gospels to date.
Strack, a student of Delitzsch, began the work but only finished Matthew before he died. The remainder of the work was produced by Paul Billerbeck. Strack-Billerbeck offers extensive source data of rabbinic literature on the Gospels, verse by verse. Strack’s other work on rabbinics, Einleitung in Talmud und Midrasch (Introduction to Talmud and midrash), published in 1921, is one of the standard Christian renderings of rabbinic Judaism in a positive and even laudatory light and is still used today.64 Taken together, these works constitute perhaps the most important intervention of Christian scholarship on rabbinic Judaism in the early twentieth century. Citing thousands of rabbinic sources on New Testament scripture, this work was not treated merely as an anthology. Jewish scholar of Christianity Samuel Sandmel published a systematic critique of Strack-Billerbeck, arguing that even as it ostensibly offered a positive assessment of Judaism, in most cases the underlying claim was that Jesus’ teaching offered a better reading of the cited rabbinic texts.65 Thus while rabbinic Judaism may be necessary to fully understand the Gospels, once they are introduced what we find is that the Gospel are superior. As Levenson put it, according to Strack-Billerbeck, “the only thing wrong with Judaism was that it was not Christianity.”66
Of course, this all takes place after Soloveitchik’s time. He likely knew little or nothing about F. C. Bauer and the Tübingen School and predated Strack-Billerbeck and the conversation that ensued. The fact that Soloveitchik wrote a Hebrew commentary to the Synoptics replete with rabbinic sources—that was also published in French, German, and Polish translations four decades before Strack-Billerbeck and that seems to have been unknown to them—makes his work even more significant. The almost total eclipse of Soloveitchik’s commentary fills an important lacuna in understanding the trajectory from the Tübingen School to Strack-Billerbeck. We can say that Soloveitchik’s project and Strack-Billerbeck, while similar in some ways, are quite different. Strack-Billerbeck set out to cite as many relevant rabbinic passages as they could find, what Samuel Sandmel called the “piling up of rabbinic passages.” In this sense, the work attempts to be a kind of collection even as Sandmel argues that it was not unbiased in its choices, contextualization, and interpretations.
Soloveitchik never claimed to be objective, nor was he interested in simply
