Ki a főpap: Ábrahám vagy Jézus?
Who is the high priest: Abraham or Jesus?

A hidden polemical struggle between Jews and Christians concerning the future of the priesthood

Summary/Abstract: This paper presents a case study of the emerging new paradigm describing the ‘parting of the ways’ between the evolving Jewish and Christian centers (later called ‘orthodoxies’) as a slow evolution process. The point of departure for my analysis is a short passage in Genesis Rabbah, a well-known narrative Midrash, edited in Palestine in the 4th/5th century CE. The short text sample aims to characterise Abraham, the legendary founding father of the Jewish community, as a legitimate heir of Melchizedek, a mythical figure of the Hebrew Bible and at the same time the symbolic representative of the eternal priesthood. In this paper, I try to demonstrate that in order to fully appreciate the encoded message of the rabbis in Genesis Rabbah we have to contextualise the text in the history of Late Antique Jewish-Christian polemical encounters. In my analysis, the rabbis’ effort to present Abraham as a legitimate High Priest of Israel is best characterised as a covert response to the earlier Christian demand, articulated first in the Epistle to the Hebrews, to introduce Jesus as a new and legitimate representative of the priesthood, whose redemptive death on the cross once and for all eliminated the need for sacrifices.

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