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Triennial Reading List: Reading The Bible With Rabbi Jesus

The document provides a triennial reading list from the Torah and Haftarah that was used in ancient synagogues from the 3rd to 7th centuries CE. It notes that while this list gives insight into how Jews studied scripture in Jesus' time, an exact universal lectionary did not exist. The list comes from a scholarly 1988 source and aims to present original data, not modified versions. It explains that some Messianic groups have published their own triennial lists but these may not accurately reflect ancient practice.

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78 views4 pages

Triennial Reading List: Reading The Bible With Rabbi Jesus

The document provides a triennial reading list from the Torah and Haftarah that was used in ancient synagogues from the 3rd to 7th centuries CE. It notes that while this list gives insight into how Jews studied scripture in Jesus' time, an exact universal lectionary did not exist. The list comes from a scholarly 1988 source and aims to present original data, not modified versions. It explains that some Messianic groups have published their own triennial lists but these may not accurately reflect ancient practice.

Uploaded by

miguelangelo1981
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Triennial Reading List

(referenced in chapter 10, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus)

Lois Tverberg, OurRabbiJesus.com, January 2018

The following pages contain the list of triennial Torah/Haftarah readings directly from
Reading of the Bible in the Ancient Synagogue by Charles Perrot, p 137-159, in Mikra
(Compendia Rerum Iudiacarum ad Novum Testamentum), (Van Gorcum) 1988. It is a bit
difficult to read, but it’s one of the best scholarly sources available. It represents the scholarly
consensus of triennial liturgical texts found from the 3rd to 7th centuries. You'll see that it is
rough and incomplete in places, because some haftarot are simply unknown.

Curious readers may Google things like "triennial lectionary" and find reading lists that look
nothing like this. This is because of a number of things:

First, many Conservative Jewish congregations have decided to adopt a triennial calendar
which is based on the annual reading cycle. Genesis through Deuteronomy are still read
every year, but only a third of a lesson is read each week, alternating by year.

Second, various Messianic groups have published lectionaries for worshippers, some that
have scholarly data behind them, some that don’t. I wanted to share an untouched scholarly
source so that you can see the original data, not somebody’s guesses at what an ancient
messianic lectionary would look like.

A little history: A big problem is that a lot of shoddy, speculative research was published
early on about the discovery of a triennial lectionary," which caused scholars to avoid the
topic as a whole. What you find online often reflects theories that careful scholars have
discarded, like…

...that the readings took exactly three years and coordinated with calendar
months and seasons

...that the three-and-a-half-year ministry of Jesus in the Gospel of John


corresponds to a triennial cycle

...that we can guess what lesson Jesus was preaching on each week

Remember, a universal, synchronized lectionary did not exist in the first century, but the
tradition of reading the Torah and Prophets together was very ancient. While we cannot say
that the readings below were what Jesus knew, the list is quite suggestive of how Jews were
studying the Scriptures in the synagogue in his day.

Besides the Perrot chapter, see also,


Intertextuality and the Haftarot, Michael Fishbane, JPS Bible Commentary: Haftarot (New
York: Jewish Publication Society), xix–xxxii.
Notes for reading:

For many readings you’ll see two or three possible traditional haftarot, because multiple
traditions existed. Often you will just see a beginning reference with an f after it. Scholars
simply don’t know how long some readings were. Likely they were two to ten lines, with
some skipping allowed to put a happy ending on the reading. Each Torah portion (a seder,
rather than a parashah, ) is numbered and the starting verse is noted.
Looking below, the first reading ( seder ) is Genesis 1:1-2:3. The most common haftarah for
that reading is Isaiah 65:17-25., but some traditions also included Isaiah 66:1.

Verse references are to the Jewish Tanakh, which occasionally varies with Christian texts.

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