| INTRODUCTION
In the first part of our roots study, "The Messiah in the Old Testament in the Light of Rabbinical Writings", we attempted to map out an overall view of Jewish Messianic expectation on the basis of the Old Testament. Our aim was to see how the oldest and least censored Jewish source-texts handle their expectation of a coming Messiah. Studies of this kind were suggested in discussions such as that in the conference of representatives of the Evangelical Churches and the Jewish Synagogues in Berlin in October 1976. In a statement made then, support was given to Christians to spread the fundamentals of their faith to Jews, and vice versa. Such questions have also been debated in international conferences of the Lutheran World Federation, and by its committee on "The Church and the Jews" from the 1960's onward. Of many memorable negotiations some of the most important were probably the consultation held in Bossey in August 1982 on "The Significance of the Jews in the Life and Ministry of the Church", which benefited from the presence of a large Jewish contingent. The main theme of the discussion was "The Christian's relationship to his Jewish inheritance". The meeting's final statement avers that the Old Testament knowledge of both ancient and modern Jewish scholars may well "enrich" the church and "give it a deeper understanding of its own Biblical roots". For this reason the church's teachers should "compare" the roots or their faith with the religious inheritance of Israel. When we become aware of the "Jewish roots" of our faith and its "Jewish inheritance", they could effect "new power of faith" in every aspect of church life.1 It is to these challenges that our roots study is addressed. We maintain that to understand the Messianic expectation and the Christology of the Church it is necessary to familiarize oneself with the principles of Jewish thought. For this reason we discussed in the first volume the fundamental difference between Hebrew and Western though. Jewish thought proceeds from particular to general rules, from concrete perceptions to abstract. It will have no truck with anything systematic. It is associative by nature, in the way that every aspect has its place in regard to the whole picture and "everything depends on everything else". "Listening", "action" and "the practical aspect" are typical Hebrew traits, and the verb 'to be' is not used in the same way as in Western languages. Hebrew thought does not represent that which is static but rather that which is dynamically in motion.2 Western theorizing and the type of philosophizing which strives for intrinsic harmony, aiming at logical regularities, is foreign to Biblical thought. In the earlier part we outlined some of the modes of presentation peculiar to the Jewish literature, which, in the light of recent research, are apparent on every page of the New Testament. We will see this in, for example, the discussion of Jesus' teaching.3 The method proves always to be a decisive factor from the point of view of the research results too. It is natural that the New Testament should be studied in the light of the properties on which basis it arose. The historical trustworthiness of the New Testament is further underlined by the fact that the Jews had in their time established an unconditional demand for accuracy in the copying of Scripture and traditional writings. Here and there we can see that if a copyist made a mistake it was not permissible to correct it, so that there would be no corrections of corrections -- and the original message was preserved with the help of tradition. One feature which can be seen in the synagogue's "preaching" or Midrash literature and in the texts from the Middle Ages is the scholars' custom of backing up every argument with quotes from the Old Testament -- in this way internal bridges to the Bible's revelation are formed, and disembodied private philosophising is avoided. The best witness to this method is the New Testament, which in its own words was based on "that which is written". The Targumim or Aramaic paraphrases of the Old Testament, the
Midrash or Synagogue's preaching, and the Zohar, the expository
commentary on the Pentateuch, are all recognised as representing a purely
Jewish way of thinking in their content, in their "associative" approach,
the manner in which they present their arguments, in their concept world
-- in their whole way of thinking in general. Since these same documents
contain the Church's christology in essence, Christian theology should
not project its origins against a backdrop of Greek mythology which to
the Rabbis would have been completely meaningless.
In moving now to the description of New Testament Messianic expectation, we continue, as it were, our "Nahson's leap" and cross over the Sea of Reeds towards the Promised Land. As we remember, Nahson, according to Jewish tradition, was the first to step into the Red Sea at the command of Moses. Our Old Testament study was a "leap of faith" in this same vein. In the New Testament we will meet the fulfilment of the Messianic prophecies we have already described. When taking a "Nahson's leap" there is of course always the danger that the one with the courage to put himself at the mercy of the waves will find himself all alone. It was therefore greatly heartening when an Orthodox Jew read through the first book, "The Messiah in the O.T.", three times and checked all the Rabbinic citations -- only one, he said, he had been unable to locate, until he noticed it in its original Syrian source. That man, bound to the traditions of his own faith, was of the opinion that this book should be translated into German and English. Even more heartwarming was a letter from the archbishop of the "Eastern Church" in Jerusalem, the first-rate Aramaic authority and scholar Mar Jacob, in which he suggests politely that I must be unaware of the potential significance of my book, and that there is an "urgent need for it to be available in English and French, and also in Spanish".5 This serves in some way to redress the balance of a situation in which the appeal to the Judaic roots of the Christian faith has not met with any favourable response in the eyes of liberal scholars. In many sports -- high-diving, for example, or figure-skating -- the extremes of criticism are given no weight. This should also be done in theological contests. I wish, nevertheless, with these remarks only to point out that the authorities on the Semitic roots of our faith value the documents which our roots study presents. Kukkila, Finland
RISTO SANTALA
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