Category:Intertestamental Judaism (subject)

Intertestamental Judaism is one of the traditional terms for Second Temple Judaism.

Overview

The concept of "intertestamental" Judaism has been one of most successful Christian models of interpretation of Second Temple Judaism. From the Christian point of view the period between the Babylonian Exile and the Jewish War appeared to be the connecting age between the Old Testament and the New Testament.

It was the British scholar Humprey Prideaux who in 1716-18 published the first introduction to "intertestamental" Judaism, which could serve both as a epilogue to the Old Testament and a prologue to the New. Christian scholars and theologians enthusiastically accepted the category, which allowed them to give sense to a previously insignificant period. There were discussion weather this period was a mere intermission (a period of silence between the ancient prophecies and their fulfillment in Christ), or a time of religious decadence, or on the contrary a period of creativity that "helped" the emergence of Christianity, but the teleological approach provided a comfortable framework in which Christian theology did not feel challenged by scholarly research. At the end it was the rise of anti-semitism that at the turn of the 20th century largely overshadowed the term and concept. "Intertestamental" appeared too a neutral and soft term to denote an "uncivilized" and obsolete religion (Late Judaism), which at the conclusion of its providential task of being the (hostile) cradle of Christianity deserved only to die with contempt.

The concept of "Intertestamental Judaism" knew a remarkable recovery and revival after War World II, when it appeared as a less derogatory and more neutral category for scholarly research (Russell, Gowan, Paul). It gave scholars and Christian theologians the time out they needed to cope with the guilt of the Holocaust and absorb the profound impact of the discoveries of Nag Hammadi and Qumran. In the 1980s and 1990s, the theological implications of the term came to be openly criticized by a growing number of scholars (James H. Charlesworth, Gabriele Boccaccini), who pointed at the many ideological and chronological inconsistencies of the concept of "Intertestament". New terms emerged, such as Early Judaism or Middle Judaism, which emphasized that the period was not the end of Judaism before the emergence of Christianity but a time of great creativeness as well as the beginning of new developments in the Rabbinic tradition. In addition, Jesus and his movement could not be taken away from their environment and located at the conclusion of a period of which they were major actors and components.

Today, after almost three centuries of glorious service, the concept of intertestamental Judaism has been virtually abandoned by contemporary scholarship. More and more rarely used, it survives only in the theological language of some conservative Christian circles.