I’ve been having an online conversation that relates to a book I’m writing. 

Why is it important to understand that in mortality, Jesus was devoutly Jewish?

When we study the Old Testament in Come Follow Me next year, think about that question. In the Old Testament, we are reading the story of Jesus’ personal religion, which was Second Temple Judaism. The OT has a reputation for being confusing and sometimes shocking. The Law of Moses (the legal system that Jesus adhered to) has elements that we in modern times would find very upsetting. Jesus’ religion was full of irony, contradictions, paradoxes, awful historical events, and all of the other things that we sometimes find difficult to process. When we look at our faith as Latter-day Saints, we can look at literally all of the things about our faith that we find difficult, and recognize that they were also part of Jesus’ personal religion.

However, it is simultaneously true that Jesus’ religion contained some of the most sublime and transcendent revelations of the character of God that we can find anywhere. When we take the book of Jonah’s message as intended, it is powerful beyond words. Psalm 23 is impossibly beautiful. Think of:

• Hagar in the wilderness being visited by the angel of God’s presence
• The reconciliation of Jacob and Esau
• Joseph’s cry in Egypt “I am Joseph; doth my father yet live?”
• Moses’ plea to God on behalf of the children of Israel “Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written⁠”

All of these Old Testament passages are among the best in scripture. They reveal the loving heart of God.

…And they exist alongside all of the passages in the Old Testament that are sad, confusing, shocking, and disappointing.

So how did Jesus process all of this? I ask that question because I think being a Christian Latter-day Saint involves striving to process my religion in the way Jesus processed His religion. And here are some things we can say definitively that Jesus did not do:

• He did not deny or negate any of the things about second temple Judaism that we, with our modern sensibilities, find upsetting
• He did not engage in activism to change scripture or change the form of temple worship that was practiced in His day
• He did not relativize questions of true or false religion; instead, He pronounced judgment on entire cities of people for their rejection of His message

The Law of Moses was central in Jesus’ religion, and He did not abandon it; his disputes with religious authorities (whom He told His followers to obey BTW) were over how to interpret and apply the law of Moses. Even in the story of the woman taken in adultery, Jesus did not make any general pronouncement about penalties for adultery. In the words of biblical scholar Daniel Boyarin,

“Jesus’ Judaism was a conservative reaction against some radical innovations in the Law stemming from the Pharisees and Scribes of Jerusalem.”

In a recent talk at BYU, Elder Uchtdorf articulated what I think is the way Jesus processed his own religion:

He continued,

We tend to think of joy as the absence of sorrow.

But what if joy is not the absence of sorrow?

What if joy and sorrow can coexist?

What if they have to coexist?

In the heart and mind of Christ, things that we might think cannot coexist do in fact coexist. In a recent presentation I asked the question “Are Latter-day Saint Missions Traumatic?” and I pointed out that my own mission had a combination of both horrible and amazingly beautiful, faith-validating experiences. All of those things coexist. When I tell stories of miracles and revelation on my mission, that does not require me to deny all of my failures and screwups. Those are equally true. I have a choice about what to value, and what kind of narrative to create of my mission experience.

In His experience of second temple Judaism, Christ held all of His religion’s historical and other difficulties, and within Him those things coexisted along with all of His religion’s goodness, truth, joy, and divinity.

Sometimes we think as soon as this historical issue is resolved, or the church apologizes for that problem, or this scriptural issue is adequately explained, or that question is finally answered, I can thrive in my faith. But every difficult element of our religion also existed in second temple Judaism, and Jesus thrived in that religion, working all kinds of healing and wonders and mighty miracles.

So no, our ability to thrive and to experience all of our privileges with God does not depend on any particular thing changing in our religion. As I wrote some time ago,

To illustrate this point more specifically, Jesus met Moses on the Mount of Transfiguration without having accounted for questions raised by the Documentary Hypothesis. Mary Magdalene was visited by the resurrected Christ without having viable theoretical models for intertextual borrowing among the Hebrew prophets. Mary Whitmer was visited by an angel and shown plates without having a thorough grasp of the relationship between prophets and their surrounding culture. Emmeline B. Wells experienced a temple theophany without understanding competing theories for the provenance of the Book of Abraham.

And more recently, I think of Darius Gray hearing the voice of the Lord telling him to join the church before 1978:

Direct revelation from God coexisted along with a policy that was excluding brother Gray from some important blessings. Both were simultaneously true. This situation and other paradoxes, many times over, were common in the religion of Jesus. In His experience of religion, He held them all.

More resources:

Jeroslav Pelikan: Jesus as Rabbi

Daniel Boyarin: The Jewish Gospels

Amy-Jill Levine on Jewish Jesus:

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