What happened to Jesus' haftarah?
Excerpt:
The earliest source we have on that custom is the New Testament. According to the narrative in Luke (4:16-21), Jesus returns to his hometown, Nazareth and, on the Sabbath, he goes to the synagogue where he reads from the Torah. He is then given the Book of Isaiah. Jesus opens the book and reads the passage that begins "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me" (Isaiah 61:1). Following the haftarah, he delivers a sermon in which he argues that in that reading, the verse was fulfilled in the ears of the congregants in other words, the prophet's words about a mortal anointed by God are realized in the person of Jesus.
It is unclear from this Christian source why the book is opened at this particular passage: Does Jesus open it at that specific point or does the hazan (cantor), who was in charge at the synagogue, deliberately open it at this chapter? Devout Christians are of course free to interpret this incident as a miracle whereas scholars interested in the Jewish tradition of haftarot will conclude that the reading of a passage from the Prophets after the Torah portion on the Sabbath was an accepted custom in Nazareth several decades before the destruction of the Second Temple, and that it's thus possible that the custom also existed elsewhere. Similar evidence can be found in Acts (13:15) where the narrative refers to a Jewish community in Asia Minor (in the vicinity of Antalya in Turkey).
The evidence in Luke is interesting, but we should be cautious about drawing very many conclusions based on a text written between forty and eighty years after the event by a gentile with his own agenda. The passage doesn't appear in any of the other gospels and we have no idea what its historical basis was, if any, or whether Luke got the praxis right.
The article has lots of other interesting material and is worth a read.
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