Martin Buber: Jesus, Emunah, and the Faith That Became a Formula

A Jewish Philosopher Facing Jesus

Martin Buber was born in Vienna in 1878 and died in Jerusalem in 1965. He was not a Christian theologian, nor a convert, nor an apologist for anything resembling Christianity. He was a Jewish philosopher — arguably the most influential of the twentieth century outside strictly rabbinic tradition — shaped from childhood in the household of his grandfather, Salomon Buber, one of the great editors of midrashic texts of his generation. That formation marked everything Buber wrote afterward: a deep fidelity to Jewish sources, read not as archaeology but as something alive.

And yet, within that fidelity, Buber reserved an extraordinary place for Jesus. Not the place traditional Christianity reserves for him — incarnate Messiah, second person of the Trinity, object of worship — but a real, serious, almost fraternal place. Buber called Jesus "my great brother" (mein grosser Bruder). The phrase is documented and tends to surprise Christians and Jews alike: a Jewish thinker, writing after the Shoah, after centuries of persecution carried out in Christ's name, still claiming Jesus as part of Israel's own spiritual history — without thereby accepting the christology the church built upon him.

That combination is what makes Buber indispensable to this series. He does not need to make Jesus a Christian in the later sense of the word to consider him great. And he does not need to stop being Jewish — or soften what that means — to recognize the force of Jesus's figure within Jewish history.

The Philosophy of Encounter: I-Thou and I-It

To understand why Buber reads Jesus the way he does, one must first pass through the work that made him world-famous: I and Thou (Ich und Du), published in 1923. There Buber proposes that there are two fundamentally different ways a person relates to the world, and he names them through two word-pairs: I-Thou (Ich-Du) and I-It (Ich-Es).

In the I-It relation, the other is treated as an object: something to be observed, categorized, used, analyzed. This is the necessary mode for much of practical life, and it is not, in itself, something bad. But when this mode becomes the only mode, a person loses the capacity for genuine encounter. In the I-Thou relation, by contrast, the other ceases to be an object and becomes presence: there is reciprocity, an encounter that cannot be fully described, measured, or possessed. For Buber, it is in this kind of encounter — not in the accumulation of information about the other — that authentic spiritual life happens. And it is also in this kind of encounter, he argues, that God is revealed: not as an object of theological study, but as an eternal Thou who is met, lost, and sought again.

This philosophy of dialogue is not an appendix to Buber's reading of Jesus — it is its key. If the true relationship with God is relational, alive, made of trust and presence, then the natural question Buber puts to the Christian tradition is: at what point did that living relationship begin to be replaced by something else? By a set of propositions about God, rather than an encounter with God?

Illustration generated for this article. It represents the I-Thou relation Buber describes; it is a conceptual image.

Two Types of Faith: Emunah and Pistis

That is the question Buber develops most rigorously in the work most directly relevant to the Christian theme: Two Types of Faith (Zwei Glaubensweisen, 1950). The book builds a distinction that has become a required reference point — even among those who disagree with it.

On one side stands emunah, the Hebrew word that appears repeatedly throughout the Tanakh and that Buber translates as trust, faithfulness, a state of relation. Emunah is not, in the first place, assent to a list of true statements about God. It is the posture of one who trusts — the way one trusts a person, not the way one accepts a thesis. It is a verb before it is a noun: a way of standing in relationship, sustained over time, tested through mutual faithfulness.

On the other side stands pistis, the Greek word usually translated as "faith" in the New Testament, but which Buber reads as something structurally different: believing-that. Pistis, for Buber, tends to organize itself around propositional content — believing that Jesus is the Messiah, believing that he rose from the dead, believing that certain christological statements are true. It is not that Buber denies trust exists within Pauline pistis; rather, he sees a shift in emphasis, a change in the very structure of what "having faith" means.

For Buber, the problem appears when "trusting God" turns primarily into "accepting that certain statements about Christ are true." Emunah asks for a relationship; pistis, as he describes it, asks for assent.

Buber associated emunah with Jesus and with the Jewish religiosity in which Jesus was embedded, and he saw in Paul the decisive figure in the turn toward pistis — the moment when early Christian faith increasingly organized itself around propositions about the person and work of Christ, and decreasingly around the relational trust that characterized the Jewish piety Jesus himself practiced.

Habakkuk 2:4: The Text at the Center of the Debate

The exegetical heart of this discussion is not a philosophical abstraction — it is a single line from the prophet Habakkuk, written amid crisis and waiting: "the righteous shall live by his faith" (Habakkuk 2:4). In Hebrew, the word there is, precisely, a form of emunah — faithfulness, steadfastness, a trust that holds even when circumstances do not immediately confirm God's promise. In its original context, Habakkuk speaks to a people awaiting God's judgment against violence and injustice; "living by emunah" means remaining faithful, steady, trusting, while the answer has not yet come.

That same phrase is quoted twice by Paul in the New Testament — in Romans 1:17 and in Galatians 3:11 — and in both cases it becomes the textual foundation for the argument that justification before God happens "by faith," in contrast to "works of the law." This is precisely where Buber's thesis gains weight: the same Hebrew word that, in the prophet, described a relational posture of trust and ongoing faithfulness is taken up by Paul within a theological architecture organized around pistis — and, on Buber's reading, the original relational sense risks being replaced by a more juridical, propositional one: faith as the act, almost punctual, of believing correctly what saves.

One need not accept this reading in full to recognize its force. The very fact that Paul reaches back to Habakkuk shows he does not abandon Hebrew emunah — he claims it, cites it, builds upon it. The question Buber raises is whether, in doing so within a theological structure oriented toward Christ as the content of belief, something in the relational texture of the original word is lost or transformed. It is a legitimate question even for those who disagree with the answer Buber gives it.

The Shema and the Trust Jesus Practiced

There is another biblical thread that helps situate emunah within Jesus's own religious life: the Shema. "Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength" (Deuteronomy 6:4-5) is the central prayer of Jewish faith, recited daily, and Jesus quotes it explicitly when asked which is the greatest commandment (Mark 12:28-34). In that episode, Jesus does not introduce a new faith: he reaffirms the heart of the Jewish faith he already practiced, a faith structured around love, trust, and relationship — not around a formal creed about his own identity.

It is precisely this kind of episode that supports Buber's reading of Jesus "within Israel": the Jesus of the Gospels, as Buber reads him, lives and teaches a recognizable Jewish emunah, anchored in the Shema, in the Torah, in prophetic piety. The distance Buber draws is not between Jesus and Judaism, but between this emunah practiced by Jesus and the pistis that, on his account, would come to consolidate itself as the structure of later Christian faith — above all through Paul.

Jesus Within Israel, Not Outside It

Buber's most lasting contribution to this series lies in refusing two simplifications that remain tempting. The first is the traditional Christian simplification, which can only see greatness in Jesus if he is extracted from Judaism and relocated into an entirely new category. The second is the opposite simplification, also common, which can only preserve Jesus's Jewish identity by diminishing his importance or treating him as a lesser figure, one among many teachers of the period.

Buber refuses both. He does not need to make Jesus a Christian, in the later ecclesial sense, to recognize in him a figure of extraordinary weight. And he does not need to deny or minimize Jesus's Jewishness to say so — on the contrary, it is precisely because he reads Jesus as profoundly Jewish that he can name with precision what, in his view, changed afterward.

This also puts Paul back at the right center of the debate. Buber does not ask the naive question "Did Paul agree with Jesus?", as if it were enough to compare isolated sentences. The question he asks is structural: was the very architecture of faith transformed? Did it cease to be, in its predominant form, an existential and relational trust — the emunah of the Shema, of the prophets, of Habakkuk — and become instead a faith whose central, organizing content is the affirmation of who Christ is?

Even those who reject Buber's conclusion — and many serious scholars do, or at least relativize it — tend to acknowledge that the question remains excellent. It forces the reader to distinguish, within the Christian notion of faith itself, what is living trust and what is propositional assent; and to ask whether these two things always went together, or whether at some point one came to replace the other.

A Contested Thesis — as a Thesis, Not a Fact

It is important to state clearly: the rigid opposition Buber draws between a "Jewish world" of emunah and a "Greek world" of pistis is seen by many scholars as excessively schematic. An influential article in the Scottish Journal of Theology revisits Two Types of Faith decades after its publication and argues that the boundary Buber draws is sharper on paper than in historical reality: there is relational trust within Pauline pistis, and there are elements of propositional assent within Old Testament emunah. Another study, published by the University of Chicago, situates Buber's book within the Protestant context in which it was received and debated, showing how Christian theologians of the time engaged with — and disputed — his thesis point by point.

None of this invalidates Buber's contribution. He identified something real: there is, in fact, a perceptible difference between a faith lived primarily as an ongoing relationship of trust and a faith organized primarily around correct propositions to be affirmed. The problem is not in noting that difference, but in turning it into a rigid ethnic boundary — Jews on one side, with emunah; Greeks and Christians on the other, with pistis — when the textual evidence shows both dimensions intertwined on both sides. Reading Buber with that care is to treat him as he deserves: a thinker who saw something profound, but whose thesis, like every good thesis, needs to be tested and tempered, not simply accepted or discarded wholesale.

The Legacy of a Translator and Teacher

Buber was not only an armchair philosopher. Alongside Franz Rosenzweig, he devoted decades to a translation of the Hebrew Bible into German that tried to preserve the oral rhythm, repetition, and Semitic texture of the original — a translation project that was itself a way of defending emunah against abstraction. In 1938, as Nazism rose, Buber emigrated to Mandate Palestine, where he became professor of social philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He lived there until his death in 1965, continuing to write on Hasidism, interfaith dialogue, and communal life.

This biography matters for understanding why his reading of Jesus carries the weight it does. It is not the reading of an outsider, curious or hostile. It is the reading of a Jew who devoted his life to recovering, translating, and inhabiting Hebrew sources — and who, from that very place, still found in Jesus something worthy of the name "great brother."

Recommended Reading

Two Types of Faith — the central book for understanding the distinction between emunah and pistis, and Buber's reading of Jesus and Paul.

I and Thou (Ich und Du) — the work that grounds his relational philosophy and his understanding of encounter with the other and with God.

Tales of the Hasidim — a short, accessible entry point into Buber's Jewish spirituality, especially his reading of Hasidic tradition.

Sources and Further Reading

1. •Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Martin Buber
2. •Cambridge University Press, Scottish Journal of Theology — "Knowing God and Knowing About God: Martin Buber's Two Types of Faith Revisited"
3. •University of Chicago Press Journals — "Martin Buber's Two Types of Faith in Its Protestant Context"