The Christianity that eventually emerged from the tradition of Paul, Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas had strong Judaic elements. It spoke of faith, hope, charity, righteousness, love, forgiveness, the dignity of the human person and the sanctity of life. It valued humility and compassion. It spoke of a God who loves his creatures. But it also contained strands that were undeniably Greek and in striking contrast with the way Jews read the Hebrew Bible. The following are some of them.
The first and most obvious is universality. Judaism is a principled and unusual combination of universality and particularity: the universality of God, and the particularity of the ways in which we relate to God. The God of Israel is the God of all humanity, but the religion of Israel is not, and is not intented to be, the religion of all humanity. You do not have to be part of the Sinai covenant, or even the covenant of Abraham, to reach heaven and achieve salvation.
Pauline Christianity rejected this. The upside of this is its inclusivity, expressed most famously in Paulâs striking statement, âThere is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and femaleâ (Galatians 3:28). The downside is its denial of any other route of salvation. Extra ecclesiam non est salus: âOutside the Church there is no salvation.â Universality is supremely characteristic of Greek thought in the classic age between the sixth and third pre-Christian centuries (though of course it was not applied in their religious understanding). Above all it is the legacy of Plato, who utterly devalued particulars in favour of the universal form of all things. For Plato truth is universal and eternal or it is not truth at all. In that sense, Paul and Plato are soulmates.
The second is dualism. To a far greater extent that Judaism, Christianity after Paul develops a series of dualisms, between body and soul, the physical and the spiritual, earth and heaven, this life and the next, with the emphasis on the second of each pair. The body, says Paul in Romans, is recalcitrant. âWhat I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I doâ (Romans 7:15). There is nothing like this in Jewish literature. To be sure there is the âevil inclinationâ, but no suggestion that because of our embodied condition we are slaves to sin. The entire set of contrasts â soul as against body, the afterlife as against this life â is massively Greek with much debt to Plato and traces of Gnosticism. Paulâs occasionally ambivalent remarks about sexuality and marriage also have no counterpart in mainstream Judaism.
Third is the Pauline reinterpretation, one of the most radical in the history of religion, of the story of Adam and Eve and âthe Fallâ, and the consequent tragic view of the human condition. There is no such interpretation of the passage in the Hebrew Bible. According to Judaism we are not destined to sin. In the very next chapter, before Cain murders his brother Abel, God reminds him of his essential freedom: âSin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you can dominate itâ (Genesis 4:7). The collective forgiveness of humankind occurs, in the Hebrew Bible, after the Flood. âNever again,â says God, âwill I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhoodâ (Genesis 8:21).
The human tragedy as described by Paul is more Greek than Jewish, and as for the idea of inherited sin, it is already negated in the sixth pre-Christian century by both Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Of course, in Christianity, tragedy is avoided by salvation: but salvation in this sense, the existential delivrance of the human person from the grip of sin, does not exist in Judaism. We choose. Sometimes we choose wrongly. We atone (in biblical times through the Temple service, post-biblically by repentance) and God forgives.
Fourth is the potential for the separation, unknown in Judaism, between âfaithâ and âworksâ. In Judaism the two go hand in hand, Faithfulness is a matter of how you behave, not what your believe. Believing and doing are part of a single continuum, and both are a measure of a living relationship characterised by loyalty. In general one of the great differences between classical Greek and Hebraic thought thought is the immense emphasis in the latter on the will. We are, on a Jewish view, what we choose to be, and it is in the realm of choice, decision and action that the religious drama takes place. The Greek view emphasises far more the role of fate and the futility of fighting against it. Under its influence Christianity became more a religion of acceptance than protest â the characteristic stance of the Hebrew prophets.
The fifth and most profound difference lies in the way the two traditions understood the key phrase in which God identifies himself to Moses at the burning bush. âWho are you? asks Moses. God replies, cryptically, Ehyeh asher ehyeh. This was translated into Greek as ego eimi ho on, and into Latin as ego sum qui sum, meaning âI am who I amâ or âI am he who isâ. The early and medieval Christian theologians all understood the phrase to be speaking about ontology, the metaphysical nature of Godâs existence. It meant that he was âBeing-itself, timeless, immutable, incorporeal, understood as the subsiding act of all existingâ. Augustine defines God as that which does not change and cannot change. Aquinas, continuing the same tradition, reads the Exodus formula as saying that God is âtrue being, that is being that is eternal, immutable, simple, self-sufficient, and the cause and principal of every creatureâ.
But this is the God of Aristotle and the philosophers, not the God of Abraham and the prophets. Ehyeh asher ehyeh means none of these things. It means âI will be what, where, or how I will beâ. The essential element of the phrase is the dimension omitted by all the early Christian translations, namely the future tense. God is defining himself as the Lord of history who is about to intervene in an unprecedented way to liberate a group of slaves from the mightiest empire of the ancient world and lead them on a journey towards liberty. Already in the eleventh century, reacting against the neo-Aristotelianisn that he saw creeping into Judaism, Judah Halevi made the point that God introduces himself at the beginning of the Ten Commandments not as God who created heaven and earth, but by saying, âI am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.â
Far from being timeless and immutable, God in the Hebrew Bible is active, engaged, in constant dialogue with his people, calling, urging, warning, challenging and forgiving. When Malachi says in the name of God, âI the Lord do not changeâ (Malachi 3:6), he is not speaking about his essence as pure being, the unmoved mover, but about his moral commitments. God keeps his promises even when his children break theirs. What does not change about God are the covenants he makes with Noah, Abraham and the Israelites at Sinai.
So remote is the God of pure being â the legacy of Plato and Aristotle, that the distance is bridged in Christianity by a figure that has no counterpart in Judaism, the Son of God, a person who is both human and divine. In Judaism we are all both human and divine, dust of the earth yet breathing Godâs breath and bearing Godâs image. These are profoundly different theologies.
  â Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks ztâl, in The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning
