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MOVEMENT FIVE Dust

At the center of the Christian faith is this man named Jesus who actually lived. If there wasn’t a Bible, there are still lots of historians, some from the first century, who talked about this Jewish man who lived and had followers and died and then, according to his first followers, was alive again.

As his movement gathered steam, this Jewish man came to be talked about more and more as God, fully divine as well as fully human. As his followers talked about him and did what he said and told and retold his stories, the significance of his life began to take on all sorts of cosmic dimensions. They realized that something much bigger was going on here, involving them and the people around them and all of creation. Something involving God making peace with the world and creation being reclaimed and everything in heaven and earth being brought back into harmony with its Creator.

But before all the big language and grand claims, the story of Jesus was about a Jewish man, living in a Jewish region among Jewish people, calling people back to the way of the Jewish God.

When I first began to realize that Jesus was Jewish, I thought, No way; he was a Christian.

But as I have learned more about Jesus, the Jewish rabbi, I have come to better understand what it means to follow him. So in this section of the book, I want to take you deep into the first century world of Jesus.

Torah

Jesus grew up in Israel, in an orthodox Jewish region of Israel called Galilee. Now the Jewish people who lived in Galilee believed that at a specific moment in human history, God had spoken directly to their ancestors. They believed this happened soon after their people had been freed from slavery in Egypt and were traveling in the wilderness south of Israel. Their tradition said that while their ancestors were camped at the base of Mount Sinai, their leader, a man named Moses, went up the mountain and received words from God.

They believed not only that God had spoken to Moses but that God had actually given Moses a copy of what he said.

They believed that the first five books of the Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—were a copy of what God had said.

They called these five books the Torah.

Torah can mean teachings or instructions or simply “way.”

They believed the Torah was the way, the truth, and the life.

They believed the best way to live was to live how the Torah said to live.

And so the central passion of the people of Jesus’s world was teaching, living, and obeying the Torah.

Now the question among the rabbis, the teachers, of Jesus’s day was, how young do you begin teaching the Bible, the Torah, to kids? One rabbi said, “Under the age of six we do not receive a child as a pupil; from six upwards accept him and stuff him [with Torah] like an ox.”1

Education wasn’t seen as a luxury or even as an option; education was the key to survival. The Torah was seen as so central to life that if you lost it, you lost everything. The first century Jewish historian Josephus said, “Above all else, we pride ourselves on the education of our children.”2

So around six years old many Jewish kids would have gone to school for the first time.3 It would probably have been held in the local synagogue and taught by the local rabbi. This first level of education was called Bet Sefer (which means “House of the Book”) and lasted until the student was about ten years old.

Sometimes the rabbi would take honey and place it on the students’ fingers and then have them taste the honey, reminding them that God’s words taste like honey on the tongue. The rabbi wanted the students to associate the words of God with the most delicious, exquisite thing they could possibly imagine.

The students would begin memorizing the Torah and by the age of ten would generally know the whole thing by heart.

Genesis.

Exodus.

Leviticus.

Numbers.

Deuteronomy.

Memorized.

Remember, the text was central to life for a Jew living in Galilee in Jesus’s day. If you have read the accounts of Jesus’s life, have you ever noticed how everybody seems to know the Bible? Jesus quotes a verse, or a phrase from a verse, and everybody seems to know the text. This is because from an early age Jewish people were taking in the words, and they were becoming a part of them.

This memorization was also necessary because if you lived during that time, you didn’t have your own copy of the text. The printing press wasn’t invented until 1,400 years later. (When you stayed at a hotel in Jesus’s day, the Gideons hadn’t gotten there first.) Probably your entire village could only afford one copy, which would have been kept in the synagogue in a closet called the Torah ark. There is a good chance you would only see the scriptures once a week, and that was when they were brought out of the Torah ark to be read publicly.

Rabbis who taught the Torah were the most respected members of the community. They were the best of the best, the smartest students who knew the text inside and out. Not everybody could be a rabbi.

By age ten, students had begun to sort themselves out. Some would demonstrate natural abilities with the scriptures and distance themselves from the others. These students went on to the next level of education, which was called Bet Talmud (“House of Learning”) and lasted until sometime around the age of fourteen.

Students who didn’t continue their education would continue learning the family trade. If your family made sandals or wine or were farmers, you would apprentice with your parents and extended family as you learned the family trade in anticipation of carrying it on someday and passing it down to the next generation.

Meanwhile, the best of the best, continuing their education in Bet Talmud, would then memorize the rest of the Hebrew scriptures. By age thirteen or fourteen the top students had the entire Bible memorized.

Genesis through Malachi . . . thirty-nine books . . . memorized.

A friend of mine studied in the mid-1980s at a yeshiva (Jewish seminary) in Manhattan. He claims he was the only student in the entire school who didn’t have the entire Old Testament memorized.

Students in this second step of education would also study the art of questions and the oral tradition surrounding the text. For thousands of years, brilliant minds had been discussing the words of God, wrestling with what they meant and what it meant to live them out. This developed into a massive oral tradition. You had a verse, but then you had all the things that had been said about that verse from all of the different people who had discussed it and wrestled with it and commented on it. A mountain of oral tradition. So as a student, you would be learning the text, but you would also be learning who had said what in the name of whom about it.

Now when the rabbi would ask a student a question, he would seldom give an answer. Have you noticed how rarely Jesus answers questions, but how often he responds with another question?

Rabbis had no interest in having the student spit back information just for information’s sake. They wanted to know if the student understood it, if he had wrestled with it. This notion is difficult for the modern mind to grasp because we generally think of education as the transmission of information. The better a student is, the better she is able to produce the right information at the right time.

In the world of rabbinic education, the focus was on questions, which demonstrated that the student not only understood the information but could then take the subject a step further.

By the way, when Jesus’s parents found him in the temple area, how old was he? Twelve. Notice what the text says here: “They found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers.”4

Jesus later says to his disciples, “Remember, everything I learned I passed on to you.”5

Did Jesus go to school and learn like the other Jewish kids his age?

Disciples

Around the age of fourteen or fifteen, at the end of Bet Talmud, only the best of the best of the best were still studying. Most students by now were learning the family business and starting families of their own.

Those remaining would now apply to a well known rabbi to become one of that rabbi’s talmidim (disciples). We often think of a disciple as a student, but being a disciple was far more than just being a student. The goal of a disciple wasn’t just to know what the rabbi knew, but to be just like the rabbi.

This level of education was called Bet Midrash (“House of Study”). A student would present himself to a well known rabbi and say, “Rabbi, I want to become one of your disciples.”

When a student applied to a rabbi to be one his talmidim, he was desiring to take that rabbi’s yoke upon him. He wanted to learn to do what the rabbi did.

So when this student came to the rabbi and said, “I want to follow you,” the rabbi wanted to know a few things: Can this student do what I do? Can this kid spread my yoke? Can this kid be like me? Does this kid have what it takes?

The rabbi would then question the student. Questions about Torah, about tradition, about other rabbis. Questions about the prophets and the sages and the oral law. Questions about interpretation and legislation. Questions about words and phrases and passages.

The rabbi would grill this teenage kid because he wanted to know if this kid could do what he did. The rabbi did not have time to train a kid who wouldn’t ultimately be able to do what he did.

If the rabbi decided that this kid did not have what it took, if this student was not the best of the best, then he would send the student home. He might say, “You obviously love God and know the Torah, but you do not have what it takes to be one of my talmidim.” And then he might add, “Go home and continue learning the family business.”

But if the rabbi believed that this kid did have what it took, he would say, “Come, follow me.”

The student would probably leave his father and mother, leave his synagogue, leave his village and his friends, and devote his life to learning how to do what his rabbi did.6

He would follow the rabbi everywhere. He would learn to apply the oral and written law to situations. He gave up his whole life to be just like his rabbi.

A friend of mine was in Israel a few years ago and saw a rabbi go into a bathroom and his talmidim followed him. They didn’t want to miss anything the rabbi might say or do.

This kind of devotion is what it means to be a disciple.

One of the earliest sages of the Mishnah, Yose ben Yoezer, said to disciples, “Cover yourself with the dust of [your rabbi’s] feet.”

This idea of being covered in the dust of your rabbi came from something everybody had seen. A rabbi would come to town, and right behind him would be this group of students, doing their best to keep up with the rabbi as he went about teaching his yoke from one place to another. By the end of a day of walking in the dirt directly behind their rabbi, the students would have the dust from his feet all over them.

And that was a good thing.

So at the age of thirty, when a rabbi generally began his public teaching and training of disciples, we find Jesus walking along the Sea of Galilee.7

“He saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen.”

Why are they fishermen?

Because they aren’t disciples. They weren’t good enough; they didn’t make the cut.

Jesus calls the not-good-enoughs.

The story continues: “At once they left their nets and followed him.”

This is strange, isn’t it? Why do they just drop their nets? Why would they quit their jobs for some rabbi they had never met? And those Christian movies don’t help. Jesus is usually wearing a white bathrobe with a light blue beauty pageant sash, and his hair is blow-dried and his eyes are glazed over . . .

and he’s Swedish.

But given the first century context, it’s clear what is going on here. Can you imagine what this must have been like—to have a rabbi say, “Come, follow me”?

To have a rabbi say, “You can be like me”?

Of course you would drop your net. The rabbi believes you can do what he does. He thinks you can be like him.

Jesus then comes upon James and John, who are fishing with their father, Zebedee. They are apprentices, learning the family business, which in this case happens to be fishing.

If they are still with their father, then how old are they? Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen? Twenty?

Jesus took some boys who didn’t make the cut and changed the course of human history.

Now being a disciple was terrifying and exhilarating and demanding—they never knew what the rabbi would do next. One account in the book of Matthew says that Jesus was talking to his disciples at Caesarea Philippi. This is one of those details that is easy to skip, but it is significant. Caesarea Philippi was the world center of the goat god, Pan. People came from all over the world to worship this god. There is a cliff with a giant crack in it that the followers of Pan believed was the place where the spirits from hell would come and go from the earth. The crack was called the Gates of Hell. They built a temple for Pan there and then a court next to it where people would engage in sexual acts with goats during the Pan worship festivals.8

And Jesus is there with his disciples. As good Jewish boys, they never would have gone to this place before. It is twenty-six miles from Galilee, where Jesus and his disciples are from. What was that walk like? Did Jesus even tell his disciples where they were going? Can you imagine them talking to each other behind his back? “When our parents find out about this, we are so busted!” The whole experience would have been riveting. Where are we going? What are we doing? What is our rabbi going to do next?

He tells them at Caesarea Philippi that upon this rock he is going to build his new witnessing community, and the Gates of Hell won’t be able to stop it. He is essentially saying that those kinds of people—the ones with the goats—are going to join the Jesus movement and it will be unstoppable. How would you as a disciple even begin to process this statement?

Rabbis were passionate and funny and quirky and unpredictable. They told stories and laughed and went to a lot of parties and never stopped asking questions and pushing their students and keeping them guessing. Rabbis devoted their energies to their students to help them learn to do what they did, and they used every opportunity they had to prepare their students.

“I Chose You”

At one point, Jesus’s disciples are riding in a boat and Jesus comes walking by on the water. And one of the disciples says, “If it’s you, let me come to you on the water.”

It’s a weird story, isn’t it?

And it gets even weirder when the disciple Peter jumps out of the boat because he wants to walk on water like Jesus.

But it makes sense—maybe not the water part, but the disciple part.

If you are a disciple, you have committed your entire life to being like your rabbi. If you see your rabbi walk on water, what do you immediately want to do? Walk on water.

So this disciple gets out on the water and he starts to sink, so he yells, “Jesus save me!”

And Jesus says, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”

Who does Peter lose faith in?

Not Jesus; Jesus is doing fine.

Peter loses faith in himself.

Peter loses faith that he can do what his rabbi is doing.

If the rabbi calls you to be his disciple, then he believes you can actually be like him. As we read the stories of Jesus’s life with his talmidim, his disciples, what do we find frustrates him to no end? When his disciples lose faith in themselves.

He even says to them at one point, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.”9

The entire rabbinical system was based on the rabbi having faith in his disciples.

Let’s spend some time here, because the implications of this truth are astounding. A rabbi would only pick a disciple who he thought could actually do what he was doing. Notice how many places in the accounts of Jesus’s life he gets frustrated with his disciples.10 Because they are incapable? No, because of how capable they are. He sees what they could be and could do, and when they fall short, it provokes him to no end. It isn’t their failure that’s the problem; it’s their greatness. They don’t realize what they are capable of.

So at the end of his time with his disciples, Jesus has some final words for them. He tells them to go to the ends of the earth and make more disciples.11 And then he leaves. He promises to send his Spirit to guide them and give them power, but Jesus himself leaves the future of the movement in their hands. And he doesn’t stick around to make sure they don’t screw it up. He’s gone. He trusts that they can actually do it.

God has an incredibly high view of people. God believes that people are capable of amazing things.

I have been told that I need to believe in Jesus. Which is a good thing. But what I am learning is that Jesus believes in me.

I have been told that I need to have faith in God. Which is a good thing. But what I am learning is that God has faith in me.

The rabbi thinks we can be like him.