But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers and sisters. And call no one your father [Av] on earth, for you have one Av, the one in the heavens. Nor are you to be called leaders [Dabbara, דַּבָּרָא], for you have one guiding leader [καθηγητής, kathēgētēs], who is also the Mashiach.
The Gospel of Matthew | chapter 23.8-10 | Shuva B'rit Translation
Almost nobody from the ancient world left us instructions about what to call them. Scholars often name those people ourselves, centuries later, using whatever words we happen to have on hand.
Yehoshua of Natzrat is an exception. He left instructions.
The three lines above are the clearest ones we have, and they are strange lines. He turns down three titles in a row. He gives a reason each time. Then he moves on as though he has settled something obvious, and the people who wrote his sayings down kept the passage even though it made their own leaders uncomfortable for the next two thousand years.
Read the passage quickly and it sounds like modesty. A humble man waving off praise. Read it slowly, with a pen in your hand, and something harder shows up underneath. He is not declining a compliment. He is issuing a rule about how his people will organize themselves, and the rule has teeth in it.
To see the teeth, we need a way of sorting. So let me hand you the sorting tool first, and then we will use it on everything else.
Make three lists.
The first list holds the things Yehoshua was born into. He belonged to the tribe of Yehudah, through the household of Yosef bar-Yakob, which placed him inside Beit David, the royal line. He grew up in Galilee, in the north, far from the capital, and he stayed there. His campaign started there. Almost every student who walked behind him came from there. And he belonged to Bnei Yisra'el, the inheritors of Israel, which is the widest of the three and the one he perhaps loved best. When Netan'el comes up the road toward him, Yehoshua greets him by calling him a true Israelite, and he means it as high praise. The Dead Sea library shows us communities in the same period who treated that name as the finest thing a person could be called.
The second list holds the things he did for a living, in the plainest sense of the phrase.
He healed people. The Aramaic word for a healer is asya, and readers who know the sound of the Dead Sea communities will notice how close that sits to Asaya, the name behind the group we usually call the Essenes. He taught people. The Hebrew version of Matthew reaches for the word moreh to describe the kind of teaching he did, and moreh is another word with deep roots in that same Qumran milieu. He called himself Bnei Adam, the human inheritor, borrowing a phrase the prophet Ezekiel had used for himself six centuries earlier. And he accepted the title Mashiach, the anointed one, which sounds enormous until you remember what it actually meant. Moshe held that office. David held it. Kurosh of Persia held it while worshipping an entirely different deity, because Isaiah judged him by what he accomplished. The word names an assignment, and the assignment is the restoration of the Covenant.
The third list holds the three names in the passage above. Rabbi. Av. And a third word, which the Greek gives us as kathēgētēs, the one who walks in front and shows the way. In his own language that was probably Dabbara, the leader, or possibly moreh again, which would be the sharpest version of all and we will come back to it.
Now put the lists side by side and look for the difference.
Everything on the first two lists is a non-exclusive quality. Thousands of people were Bnei Yisra'el. Plenty of people were Galilean. Any number of people can heal the sick, in the same village, without any of them needing permission from the others. Even Mashiach had been held before, by several men, in several centuries, under several very different circumstances.
Everything on the third list is a chair. One person sits in it. Rabbi means a chair in a school. Av points at the Av Beit Din, the chief justice of the Sanhedrin, which is a chair in a courtroom. The third word describes the man at the front of the line, and a line has exactly one front.
That is the whole pattern, and it holds everywhere you test it. He accepted every name that described work. He refused every name that turned the work into a rank.
Think of a kitchen where everybody cooks. People move around each other, somebody starts the rice, somebody else tastes the pot and adds salt, and dinner arrives. Now install a head chef. The food might improve. But from that moment forward, nobody salts anything without checking, and a person who wants to cook has to be allowed to. The cooking has not changed at all. The permissions have.
Which brings us to the sentence I actually want to examine, the one you will hear at almost any interfaith gathering, offered gently and with real goodwill.
Jesus was a Jewish rabbi.
That sentence makes the same mistake twice, and it makes it for the kindest possible reason. Christian preaching spent twenty centuries cutting this man away from the people who produced him, and the sentence is an apology for that. The apology was overdue. I want to keep the warmth in it and fix the aim.
Start with the first word. He was Yehudan by tribe, and I am not taking that away from him. But Yehudi is the adjective of Yehudah, a place he did not live, and the English word "Jewish" now carries something else on top of it. It carries an identity that took its present shape in the century after his death, forged out of the burning of the Temple and the rebuilding at Yavneh that followed. Handing him that word hands him something assembled from the wreckage of a disaster he did not live to see. The Archive uses Yahwist instead, which names an orientation toward power and the neighbor rather than a biological membership card. Additionally, it is an orientation that which anybody can take up simply by doing the work.
None of that pries him loose from his own people, and I want to say so plainly, because there is a very old and very ugly habit of doing exactly that. He kept Torah. He read the prophets. He argued from inside the tradition, in the tradition's own vocabulary, about the tradition's own constitution. The correction is about which word we use, and it changes nothing about where he stood.
The second word is the harder one, and it is the reason this essay exists. Rabbi names an office that had not been built yet when he was alive. When we hand it to him we dress him in a garment cut a century after his death. And unlike the first word, which is simply imprecise, this one appears on the third list. He turned it down out loud, in his own voice, in a passage nobody would have invented.
So let us go find out what he was turning down.
An Office With No Building
Here is a fact that surprises almost everyone who hears it for the first time. In the years Yehoshua was alive, nobody was a rabbi.
Not because the word did not exist. It did. But it did not mean what it means now, and the difference matters more than any other single point in this essay.
Start with the word itself, because the word is simple. Rav means great. Add the ending that means "my" and you get rabbi, my great one. That is all it was in his lifetime. A polite way to address someone you looked up to, roughly the way an older American might say sir, or the way a student today might say coach. You could say it to a teacher in the morning and to a landowner in the afternoon. Nobody handed you a document. Nobody checked your training. The word was a courtesy, and courtesies are free.
What the word did not yet name was a job.
Two kinds of evidence show us this, and I want to walk you through both, because the second one is the fun one.
The first kind is silence, and silence has to be handled carefully. Silence can mean a thing did not exist. It can also mean nobody happened to mention it. The way to tell the difference is to look at whether the silence appears exactly where the noise should have been.
So look at Josephus. He wrote thousands of pages about the religious parties of this exact period. He described the Perushim as the most careful interpreters of the ancestral laws. He explained his own training among them in some detail, because he wanted his Roman readers to know he was qualified. A man building his own credentials would reach for the most impressive title available. He never once calls anyone a rabbi. Philo, writing in Alexandria in the same decades, does not use the word either.
Now for the good part. Look at the library from the Dead Sea.
Those communities were obsessed with offices. They wrote job descriptions. They had a Mevaqqer, who inspected the community, handled its money, and settled its disputes. They had a Maskil, who taught. They had a Paqid, who administered. At the foundation of the whole movement stood a Moreh ha-Tzedek, a teacher of justice. Their governing council had a fixed size and a fixed composition, written down, in a document you can read today.
People who catalogue their leadership that thoroughly do not accidentally leave out the most important title in the room. The word rabbi is simply not doing governance work in their world, because in their world it was not yet a governing word.
The second kind of evidence is the machinery, and this is where the timeline does the work.
Think about what a rabbi is today, or in the year 400, or in the year 1200. There is semikhah, the laying on of hands that passes legal authority from a teacher to a student, which means there is a chain and you have to be on it. There is a chain of transmission written down in Avot, running from Moshe forward, which exists precisely to establish who is on it. There is a beit midrash, a study house with a curriculum. There are courts with defined jurisdiction. And there is the title fused permanently to a personal name, so that a man is Rabbi Eliezer the way a Roman is Marcus Tullius, for life, on his tombstone.
Every piece of that machinery shows up after the year 70. Most of it consolidates after 135.
Both of those dates are catastrophes. In 70, Rome burned the Temple. In 135, Rome crushed the Bar Kokhba revolt and renamed the province. The office we call the rabbinate got built in the wreckage, by people doing emergency repair on a shattered world. Yehoshua died before the first catastrophe, roughly forty years before, and the whole structure went up behind him.
Two scholars are worth naming here, and I want to be clear about why I am naming them.
Catherine Hezser studied how the rabbinic movement was actually organized in Roman Palestine. Her conclusion is that for generations it worked as a loose network of scholars who knew each other, rather than as an institution with ranks and offices. Shaye Cohen went through the inscriptions, the tombstones and dedications where the word rabbi appears carved in stone, and concluded that most of those men are not the rabbis we know from the literature at all. The word on a grave tells us less than we would like.
Neither of them wrote a syllable of that to help my argument. Both work inside Jewish studies, on the internal history of the rabbinic movement, and their findings are the ordinary ones in that field. That is exactly why I want them here. A witness who has no stake in your case is worth more than a friendly one, and this project takes that rule seriously enough to apply it against itself later in this essay.
Now let me mark how firm this ground is, because the ground varies and you should know where you are standing.
That the institutional rabbinate came after Yehoshua is bedrock. Serious historians of the period do not argue about it. Back in the 1960s, Hershel Shanks and Solomon Zeitlin went several rounds in the pages of a journal over exactly this question, and even that argument was about how far the point extends rather than whether it holds.
What grows as moss on that rock is any claim about what a particular person meant on a particular day. When a woman in Kfar Nahum called Yehoshua rabbi, she probably meant sir. She may have meant more. We cannot climb inside a two-thousand-year-old greeting and check.
So the situation is this. He lived before the office, in a world where the word was a courtesy. Which raises an obvious question, and the gospels answer it in a way I did not expect the first time I looked.
They do not agree with each other about the word. And the disagreement runs in a direction nobody would have made up.
The Gospels Get Nervous
Four men wrote accounts of his life. They were working from shared material, and in many places you can watch one of them reading another and deciding what to keep.
So, when three of them keep a word and the fourth scrubs it out, that is not an accident.
Watch Mark first, because Mark is the least polished. He lets the word stand wherever it falls. Up on the mountain, when the light changes and Kefa starts talking because he cannot help himself, Kefa says Rabbi. Down by the withered fig tree, Kefa says Rabbi again. Outside Jericho, a blind beggar named Bar-Timai hears the crowd coming and shouts until somebody brings him over, and when Yehoshua asks what he wants, the man says Rabbouni. Mark writes all of it down without a flicker of discomfort.
John keeps the word too, and does something with it worth pausing on. He stops and translates it. He tells his readers that Rabbi means teacher, the way you would gloss a foreign word for an audience that has drifted away from the language. That small editorial courtesy tells us who John expected to be reading him, and it tells us the word was already becoming unfamiliar in the places his book traveled.
Then there is Matthew, and Matthew scrubs it.
Put the passages side by side and you can see him working. Where Mark has Kefa say Rabbi on the mountain, Matthew has him say Kyrie, my commander. Where Mark has Kefa say Rabbi at the fig tree, Matthew has the disciples marvel and say nothing at all. Run the search through the entire gospel and you will find exactly one person who addresses Yehoshua as Rabbi.
It is Yehudah Iskarjuta. He uses it twice. Once at the table, when he asks whether he is the one who will hand him over. Once in the garden, with the kiss.
Sit with how deliberate that is. Matthew is the most Torah-anchored book in the collection, the one that insists not a stroke of a letter has been set aside, the one written by and for people who kept the commandments and had no intention of stopping. That is the gospel that will not let a single disciple call him rabbi, and that arranges its text so the only man who tries is the man who sells him.
The evangelist understood the title as something his movement was supposed to refuse. So he built the refusal into the architecture of his book, and he put the word in the mouth of a traitor.
Which brings me to the passage this whole essay is built on, and to a problem I would rather hand you myself than have you discover on your own.
Matthew 23.8-10 is the best evidence I have.
Those three verses sit inside a long, furious chapter aimed at scribes and Perushim. Most careful scholarship reads that chapter as shaped by a fight the evangelist himself was living through, a generation or more after the crucifixion, when the Temple had already fallen and two communities that had grown up in the same house were separating with the particular bitterness only close family can manage. Anthony Saldarini made the case that Matthew is a document of that quarrel, written from inside the family rather than from outside it. Ulrich Luz worked through the layers of chapter twenty-three with the patience the question deserves.
Their reading is not fringe, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. So, I would love these three verses to be a transcript, taken down in a Jerusalem courtyard in the spring of the year 30.
They will not quite say that.
Now here is what they will say, and I think it is enough to build on.
Within living memory of the man, a community that kept the Covenant, kept the commandments, and understood itself as standing squarely inside Israel wrote down a flat refusal of titles and put it in his mouth. They did this at the exact moment when titles were becoming available and attractive, when the office was being built a few miles away, and when every practical incentive pushed them toward acquiring some rank for their own leaders. They did it anyway, without a word of apology or explanation, as though it were obvious.
That tells us the people closest to the memory understood the refusal as native to him. They did not treat it as an awkward saying they had to work around. They treated it as the point.
Because the more interesting question is not whether we can date the sentence to a particular afternoon. It is what the sentence actually forbids. And once you look at the three refusals closely, they turn out to be one refusal, repeated three times, aimed at a single target.
One Refusal, Three Times
Line the three names up and ask what each one actually installs.
A teacher whose reading becomes the standard. A father whose name confers standing that other people lack. A guide who walks at the front, so that the direction he walks is the direction everyone else walks.
Different words. Same machine.
Each one puts a permanent human being between an ordinary person and the Covenant. Not a helpful person. Not a knowledgeable person. A necessary person, whose absence stops the work. That is the target, and once you see it you can see why all three had to go.
Remember what the Covenant was ratified by. A crowd at the foot of a mountain that included the erev rav, the mixed multitude, people with no lineage and no credentials who became Bnei Yisra'el by walking into the agreement rather than by inheriting a place in it. Six centuries later, Jeremiah promised a Torah written directly onto the lev, the inner seat of a person, and he added a line that gets quoted far less often. Nobody will need to teach his neighbor, because they will all know. Like installing a new operating system on your phone.
The refusal in Matthew 23 sits in that line. It is an anti-monopoly rule, written into the founding documents of a movement, aimed at an office rather than at any man sitting in one.
And you can watch it working in what the movement built. The Didache, issued in the name of the Twelve, tells new assemblies to elect their own overseers from among themselves instead of receiving them from somewhere else. The Jerusalem assembly settles the hardest question of its generation by gathering and arguing it out. One of the Johannine letters is addressed to a household assembly whose overseer appears to be a woman. None of that is decoration. That is what people build when their founding text has told them the chair is closed and the work is open.
A Word for the Men Who Built the Chair Anyway
The chair got built. I want to be careful here, because the temptation to score a point is enormous and the honest account will not allow it.
Picture a man carried out of a burning Jerusalem inside a wooden box, past his own side's guards, through the Roman lines. Yohanan ben Zakkai reaches the general who is destroying his city and gets one request. He asks for a small town on the coast and the scholars in it.
That man was not stealing anything. He was performing triage in the worst hour his people had faced since Babylon. What he built out of that hour carried covenantal life across twenty centuries of statelessness, through expulsions and ghettos and ovens, when nearly every comparable tradition in the Roman world dissolved without a trace. The Samaritans kept their scroll and their priesthood and have sadly dwindled to almost nothing. The rabbis built something that grew to incredible heights.
So the refusal in Matthew 23 is not a verdict on those men. It names a risk that any interpretive office runs, and the rabbis named the same risk themselves, more plainly than any outsider ever has. There is a story in the Talmud about an argument over an oven, in which a voice from the heavens takes one man's side and the assembly overrules the voice by a show of hands. The tradition kept that story. It sits in the canon where anyone can find it, with the divine response reported as laughter and the words my children have defeated me.
A community that writes down its own turning point that clearly has earned a generous reading.
Two things are true at once here, and neither cancels the other. Yehoshua declined a chair that did not yet exist. Men who came after him built it under pressure he never faced, for reasons that were sound, and it saved their people.
The Part I Like Least
Now the piece I would rather you hear from me.
The rule failed. It failed first, and worst, inside his own movement.
Within three centuries the communities carrying his name had fathers everywhere. They had teachers whose readings were the readings. They had guides who walked at the front and told everyone else which way to face. By the fourth century they had assembled an interpretive monopoly harder and more coercive than anything Yavneh ever attempted, with imperial enforcement attached to it, and disagreement had become a crime with penalties.
A man forbade three titles. His successors took all three, made them permanent, made them hereditary in effect, and then made contradicting them dangerous.
If the passage tells us anything about how movements behave, the evidence cuts against the movement that preserved it.
The Kindest Thing
So back to the sentence at the interfaith panel, offered gently, meant well.
Jesus was a Jewish rabbi.
Keep the warmth. Fix the aim.
The first word hands him an identity that took its shape out of a catastrophe he did not live to see. The second hands him a certification that no institution existing in his lifetime could have issued, in a tradition he never joined because there was nothing yet to join.
And the second word is one he turned down out loud. That is the part I cannot get past. Of all the things we could call a man who left almost no instructions about anything, we have chosen one of the three he specifically told us not to use.
Go back to the kitchen. He spent his life cooking, and teaching other people to cook, and insisting that the pot belonged to everyone in the room. He said the greatest among you will be your servant. He said you are all brothers and sisters. He said there is one teacher, and he did not mean himself.
He wanted to be one of you rather than one over you.
The kindest thing we can do with the title is hand it back.
