Emptying Ourselves Through A Second Naïveté

Every story is set in its own cultural, historical, and literary context. If we do not understand this, then we will read into it what we think that it should mean, and we will miss the intended meaning of the original story. In order to understand a story we need to forget the larger systems of meaning into which we have been enculturated and to which we each adhere today. These systems simply reflect our own cultural values. Understanding others outside of our time and culture means that we need to acquire a second naïveté, entering into the world of the story teller as best we are able. By doing this we not only come to understand and appreciate others' lives, but also enable ourselves to broaden our own understanding of ourselves and our own place within a more complex understanding of the world as it actually exists.

When it comes to Christianity, both Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus were born into the language, culture, and historical background of their day, whose self-understanding was significantly different than our own today. And while they were critical of some of the Jewish ordinances of their contemporaries, they were themselves first century Jews and saw the world through Jewish culture of the first century C.E.. All of what Paul wrote is a direct product of the Judaism of his time, albeit modified by a particularized Jewish messianism; Paul did not create a new order of knowledge.

Foundational to both Jesus and Paul was the conviction that the Hebrew language itself not only was the language of the Torah, but that it had something inherent in its very structure which inherently said something distinct about God. By the time that they lived Hebrew was no longer in every day usage. Aramaic had been adopted throughout the region as the trade language since the time of the Persian empire. Both Jesus and Paul spoke Aramaic in daily life; the Gospels record that Jesus used Aramaic to teach and spoke Aramaic from the cross. And while Hebrew was reserved for formal readings of the Torah and in the temple, Aramaic was used to explain the Hebrew text in synagogues to the average layman. These Aramaic explanations are known as targums and have survived down through the millennia and been added to and make up the rabbinic tradition in Judaism (cf. the philosophical and mystical traditions of Judaism). And while both Jesus and Paul would have been raised on these explanations of the text, the Torah itself provided the foundational literary context for Jewish life in the first century C.E., and hence formed these men's foundational world-views. Therefore, for us to better understand early Christian faith, it is essential for us to try and see understand the conceptual lenses through which both of these men made sense of the world. Doing so will distinctly help our own faith to be open to the nature and presence of God as it was to them, as well as to guard against our imposing upon God our own modern concepts, and in doing so, make God in our own image.