jesus reclaimed · 2015-04-14 · [jesus von nazareth. english] jesus reclaimed : jewish...

Jesus Reclaimed

JESUS RECLAIMEDJewish Perspectives

on the Nazarene

Walter Homolka

Translated byIngrid Shafer

Published byBerghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

Revised and enlarged English-language edition © 2015 Walter Homolka

German-language edition © 2009–2011 Hentrich & Hentrich Gbr

Jesus von Nazareth im Spiegel jüdischer Forschung

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passagesfor the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book

may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic ormechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any

information storage and retrieval system now known or to be in-vented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Homolka, Walter, author. [Jesus von Nazareth. English] Jesus reclaimed : Jewish perspectives on the Nazarene / Walter Homolka ; translated by Ingrid Shafer. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-78238-579-0 (hardback : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-1-78238-580-6 (ebook) 1. Jesus Christ—Jewishness. 2. Judaism—Relations—Christianity. 3. Christianity and other religions—Judaism. 4. Jesus Christ— History of doctrines—Early church, 30–600. I. Title. BM620.H66 201513 232.9’06—dc23

2014029071

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed on acid-free paper.

ISBN: 978-1-78238-579-0 hardback ISBN: 978-1-78238-580-6 ebook

For Otto Kaiser, teacher and friend

Shakespeare’s Maidens and Women

Contents

Foreword xiLeonard Swidler

Translator’s Preface xvIngrid Shafer

Preface xix

Introduction. When a Jew Looks at the Sources: Th e Jesus of History 1

Chapter 1. Jesus and His Impact on Jewish Antiquity and the Middle Ages 13

Toledot Yeshu

Chapter 2. Th e Historical Jesus: A Jewish and a Christian Quest 29

Chapter 3. Jesus the Jew and Joseph Ratzinger’s Christ: A Th eological U-Turn 101

Conclusion 111

Bibliography 117

Index 135

x • Contents

Foreword Leonard Swidler

can dissimilarity

xii • Foreword

multiple attestation

coherence linguistic

suitability

other

nowhere

Foreword • xiii

NotesAgainst Apion,

Women in Judaism: The Status of Women in Formative Judaism

Biblical Affi rmations of Woman

Jesus Was a FeministThe Historical Jesus

Yeshua: A Model for Moderns

Translator’s PrefaceIngrid Shafer

Jesus of Nazareth,

im Spiegel jüdischer Forschung

xvi • Translator’s Preface

Ju-denstein

Realgymnasium ,

Translator’s Preface • xvii

xviii • Translator’s Preface

As an Austrian Catholic, I had countless opportunities to view and experience Christian attitudes toward Jews, simply by carefully looking at stained-glass windows and frescoes in churches (such as the Stations of the Cross) or listening to New Testament passages and homilies, es-pecially around Easter. Even before I came to the United States in 1960, I was appalled at the way Passion plays continued to incite anti-Jewish sentiments. US versions seemed no less biased than their European counterparts, without necessarily going to the extremes of Mel Gibson’s Anna Katharina Emmerick–inspired The Passion of the Christ (2004). Hence, when I was offered the opportunity to translate the Oberammergau 2000 and 2010 textbooks and work with Jewish-Christian advisory groups collabo-rating with directors and producers in an attempt to show Yeshua accurately in the context of his milieu, I was happy to do so.1 But I still wished there were scholarly books, ac-cessible to the educated general public, apart from Géza Vermes’ works (such as The Religion of Jesus the Jew from 1993), which deal with Jesus from a Jewish perspective. For me, Walter Homolka’s book fills that void, and I am delighted to have been given the opportunity to introduce it to the world of English speakers.

NotesThis book was one of the last projects of Ingrid Shafer (1939–2014) who died 5 March 2014 at the age of 74. 1. James Shapiro, Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of

the World’s Most Famous Passion Play (New York: Ran-dom House, 2000), 29ff.

Preface

Zealot,

xx • Preface

Preface • xxi

Christ before the High Priest

xxii • Preface

Notes 1. See John Williams. “The Life of Jesus: Reza Aslan Talks

about Zealot.” New York Times, 2 August 2013. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/02/the-life-of-jesus-reza-aslan-talks-about-zealot/. Accessed 24 July 2014.

2. Jonathan Magonet, Talking to the Other: Jewish Interfaith Dialogue with Christians and Muslims (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 125.

3. Walter Homolka, Jewish Identity in Modern Times: Leo Baeck and German Protestantism (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1995).

Introduction

When a Jew L ooks at the SourcesTh e Jesus of History

Th e Sources

Jewish Antiquities

2 • Jesus Reclaimed

Th e Early Years

Beit Lehem Ha’glilit

τέκτων

Public Appearance

Introduction • 3


tevilah,

Introduction • 5

constructed. Indeed, many locations listed in the Gospels were later additions and reflected the spread of Christian-ity at the time of their editorial revisions.

Jesus’s Message

Based on the historical evidence and the scriptural sources available, one may very well ask just how can we summa-rize Jesus’s teachings succinctly. Theissen attempts just this when he argues:

At the centre of Jesus’s message stood Jewish be-lief in God: for Jesus, God was a tremendous ethi-cal energy which would soon change the world to bring deliverance to the poor, the weak and the sick. However, it could become the “hell-fire” of judgment for all those who did not allow them-selves to be grasped by it. Everyone had a choice. Everyone had a chance, particularly those who by religious standards were failures and losers. Jesus sought fellowship with them.9

Jesus’s style of preaching and argumentation was es-sentially rabbinic; his parables10 (Hebrew: meshalim) fol-lowed biblical figurative language and the imagery was taken from the everyday lives of farmers and fishermen: the sower, the mustard seed, the fisher of men, the “calm-ing” of the storm. His first disciples called him “Rabbi” (e.g., Mk 9:5, 11:21, 14:45; Jn 1:38, 1:49, 3:2, 4:31) or “Rab-bouni” (Jn 20:16). This Aramaic title means “my master” and corresponded to the Greek διδασκαλς, or “teacher.” It expressed respect and accorded Jesus the same rank as the Pharisaic scribes (Mt 13:52, 23:2, 23:7). According to Mark 6:1–6, Jesus’s teachings were rejected in his home-town and he was said never to have returned there. But ac-

Introduction • 7

Arrest and Trial

Introduction • 9

Death


Notes

The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide

“If This Be from Heaven …”: Jesus and the New Testament Authors in Their Relationship to Judaism

Jesus und seine Zeit

Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart,

Judentum von A bis Z: Glauben, Ge-schichte, Kultur

Jewish Antiquities: Books XVIII–XIX,

The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apoc-rypha,

Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times and Teachings

Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche,

Historical Jesus,

The Historical Jesus in Context,

Introduction • 11

Encyclopae-dia Judaica

Historical Jesus in Context,

Historical Jesus in Context,

The New Testa-ment in Its Social Environment

Paulini-sche Christologie,

Historical Jesus,Neues Le-

xikon des Judentums,

The Sage from Galilee: Rediscovering Je-sus’ Genius

On the Trial of Jesus,

Historical Jesus,The Trial of Jesus: A Study

in the Gospels and Jewish Historiography from 1777 to the Present Day

The Trial and Death of Jesus

Fritz Bauer: Die Hu-manität der Rechtsordnung; Ausgewählte Schriften,

Historical Jesus,

Chapter 1

Jesus and His Impact on Jewish Antiquity and the Middle Ages

min minim

min

Ha’minim Birkat,


Tannaim

Jesus in the Mishnah and Talmud

Jesus and His Impact on Jewish Antiquity • 15


hiddiakh

Toledot Yeshu.


Th e Toledot Yeshu

Toledot Yeshu,


Judas and is then handed over to the wise repre-sentatives of righteousness. The disciples steal his body and claim he had risen from the dead.10

This folk literature, with all its malice, is evidence of the suffering of the Jews in the Middle Ages. Schalom Ben-Chorin cites the words of the Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz in relation to this: “The Christians shed our blood, we merely shed ink.”11 For the various versions of the To-ledot, which is also known under the name Maasse Talui (ha’talui means “the hanged”), the Berlin Encyclopaedia Judaica of 1932 lists the following characteristic features:

1. Jesus is begotten and conceived in sin.2. He forces himself into the synagogue and preaches

as a disrespectful student in the presence of his teachers.

3. Through cunning, he acquires the name of God by writing it down on parchment and concealing it in a wound in his hip.

4. He gathers disciples around him, is summoned before the queen (anachronistically: Helena), and convinces her, and later the people, with miracles.

5. Judas, called to expose Jesus, is also granted pos-session of God’s name and vanquishes Jesus. Both rise into the air by the power of God’s name.

6. Jesus returns to Jerusalem a second time to acquire God’s name again; he is betrayed and captured.

7. He asks all the trees that none of them serve as his gallows; he forgets the cabbage stalk and is hanged.

8. A gardener, Judah, steals Jesus’s body and secretly buries it in a different place.

In his article in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, Jehoshua Gutt-mann12 draws attention to the fact that different represen-tations can be found in the Genizah fragments: Jesus rises


Toledot Yeshu

Toledot YeshuFalsitates Judeorum

Toledot Yeshu

Toledot Yeshu

Toledot Yeshu

Rabbinic Polemics against Jesus

Toledot Yeshu


Sefer Ha’Berit

ma’amin min

Sefer Ha’Berit

Kalimmat Ha’Gojim

Bitul Ikkarei Ha’Nozerim Dat

Sefer Nizzachon

Hizzuk Emunah


Sefer Nizzahon Yashan Nizzahon Vetus;

Sefer Nizzahon Yashan

Te DeumAleinu:rex gloriae


Aleinu

Christian Talmud Criticism and Censorship

veritas christiana


Sha’ali Serufah Ba’Esh


NotesDer jüdische Gottesdienst: Gestalt und Ent-

wicklung


Jüdisches Leben in Bayern: Mit-teilungsblatt des Landesverbandes der israelitischen Kul -tusgemeinden in Bayern,

Jesus Then & Now: Images of Jesus in History and Chris-tology,

Origenes: Contra Celsum

Theologia Judaica: Gesammelte Aufsätze,

Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times and Teaching

Jesus von Nazareth in der talmudischen Überlieferung,

Jesus in the Talmud

Judentum von A bis Z: Glauben, Ge-schichte, Kultur

Theologia Judaica,

Encyclopaedia Judaica

Das jüdische Leben Jesu, Toldot Jeschu: Die älteste lateinische Übersetzung in den Fal-sitates Judeorum von Thomas Ebendorfer

Das Leben Jesu nach jüdischen Quellen

Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums


Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wis-senschaft des Judentums


Jüdische Geschichte,

Sefer Ha’BeritIst das nicht Josephs Sohn?

Jesus im heutigen Judentum

Ist das nicht Josephs Sohn?,Origins of the Kabbalah

Kelimat ha-GoyimHebrew in the Church:

The Foundations of Jewish-Christian Dialogue

The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the Nizahon Vetus

Two Nations in Your Womb: Per-ception of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages

Theologische Realenzyklopädie,

Ist das nicht Josephs Sohn?,Vikuah R. Yehiel mi-Pariz

Seder ha-Qinot le-Tish’ah be’Av


Die christlich-jüdische Zwangsdisputation zu Barcelona,

Encyclopaedia Judaica

Neue Zürcher Zeitung,

Chapter 2

Th e Historical JesusA Jewish and a Christian Quest

Jesus and the Jewish Enlightenment


cused on heaven they will not be deprived of their reward.1

There were two other Jewish voices who had already dis-cussed Jesus before Jacob Emden: the Lithuanian Karaite Isaac ben Abraham of Troki (1533–1594) and the Venetian rabbi Leon de Modena (1571–1648).

In response to Catholic missionary activity, the scholar Isaac of Troki authored a two-volume manuscript titled Hizzuk Emunah in 1593 (Affirmation of the Faith), which also contained early criticism of the Gospels. The work was completed by a student and includes fifty chapters in defense of the Jewish faith and another fifty chapters on contradictions and errors in the New Testament. Isaac of Troki criticized the fact that the author of the Gospels ac-cused the Jews of Jesus’s death even though Jesus himself had wished to fulfill his God’s will by dying. He also noted that the Gospels offer no clear evidence for the Trinity, the virgin birth, and the supposed divinity of the Son of Man.

The Gentile Christian dogmas of the Trinity, original sin, and redemption were also concerns of Leon de Modena who, in Magen wa-Hereb (Sword and Trowel), described Jesus as a liberal Pharisee who considered himself one of the ones chosen by God; a Torah teacher superior to the prophets but not a divine being who had fallen into dis-repute among other Pharisees because of his disregard for halakhic rules, such as the washing of the hands.2

These writings, which had been largely ignored by Christians, were rediscovered to scholarship in the nine-teenth century thanks to Abraham Geiger’s Issak Troki: Ein Apologet des Judenthums am Ende des 16. Jahrhun-derts (An Apologist for Judaism at the End of the Six-teenth Century, Breslau, 1853). Three years later, in 1856, Geiger published Leon da Modena: Rabbiner zu Venedig und seine Stellung zur Kabbalah, zum Thalmud und zum Christentume (Rabbi to Venice and His Position on the

Toledot Yeshu

Volkslehrer Allgemeine Ge-schichte des Israelitischen Volkes

Th e Christian Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Departure from Dogma

Th e Historical Jesus • 31


own context and as he understood himself…The under-standings of the man from Nazareth vary according to the investigator’s personal interests and also vary depending on the method used, the aspects of Jesus’ life highlighted, the construal of Jesus’ social situation, even the investiga-tor’s theological worldview.”8

Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) and David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) were the first to embark on the Christian quest of the historical Jesus proper. Rei-marus, who was appointed professor of Hebrew and Ori-ental languages at the Hamburg Gymnasium, never made his views on Christianity public. Fragments of his work were posthumously published by Gotthold Ephraim Less-ing in 1774 and 1778 and included Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Jünger (The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples).9 Reimarus speculated that there was a profound difference between what Jesus really taught “in accordance with the Jewish way of speaking” and what his disciples preached about him: “I find great cause to separate completely what the apostles say in their own writings from that which Je-sus himself actually said and taught.”10 According to Rei-marus, Jesus considered himself the Jewish Messiah, a politically motivated candidate for kingship who had an-nounced the deliverance of the Jews from the Romans as the beginning of the Kingdom of God. In opposition to Ju-daism, his disciples subsequently made him into the sav-ior of people, delivering them from sin, and made him the founder of Christianity. And how did they do it? Reimarus explains that the apostles stole the body (cf. Mt 28:11–15) in order to deceive themselves and the public and to over-come Jesus’s failure. After fifty days they proclaimed his resurrection and imminent return.

The quest of the historical Jesus was continued by Da-vid Friedrich Strauss, who, at the age of only twenty-eight, had already published his monumental work The Life of Je-sus: Critically Examined.11 He also distinguished between


Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk bearbeitet

Tübinger Schule


The Life and Morals of Jesus of Naza-reth: Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French and English,

Philosophical Fragments,


Concluding Unscientifi c Postscript,

On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power:

accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.


ally fade, but that his timeless message would remain: “Ei-ther the Gospel is in all respects identical with its earliest form, in which case it came with its time and has departed with it; or else it contains something which, under differ-ing historical forms, is of permanent validity. The latter is the true view. The history of the church shows us in its very commencement that ‘primitive Christianity’ had to disappear in order that ‘Christianity’ might remain.”21

Concerning the effect the quest of the historical Jesus had on Christian faith, Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) ar-gued that each new generation would project its own ideal of humanity onto Jesus:

The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious his-tory. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus, be-lieving that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Saviour. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of ecclesiastical doc-trine, and rejoiced to see life and movement coming into the figure once more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed, to meet it. But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own. … Jesus means something to our world because a mighty spiritual force streams forth from Him and flows through our time also. This fact can neither be shaken nor confirmed by any historical discovery. It is the solid foundation of Christianity. The mistake was to suppose that Jesus could come to mean more to our time by entering into it as a man like ourselves. That is not possible. First because such a Jesus never existed. Secondly because, although historical knowledge can no doubt introduce greater clearness into an existing spiritual life, it cannot call spiritual life into existence. History can destroy the present; it can reconcile the present with the past; can even


Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes

Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition


ing the composition of the Synoptic Gospels. He finally dissociated himself from liberal theology in 1924. In his classic treatment of the historical Jesus, Jesus and the Word,29 Bultmann asserts that “we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus, since the early Christian sources show no interest in either, are moreover fragmentary and often legendary.”30 What can be discovered, on the basis of critical assessment of the earliest Palestinian level of tradition, are the essentials of Jesus’s message, his “word.” This “word” is connected with the coming of the Kingdom of God, a “miraculous eschatological event,” but one that has to be interpreted existentially: “The Kingdom of God is a power which, al-though it is entirely future, wholly determines the present because it now compels man to decision.”31 For Bultmann, no path leads back to the historical Jesus. “The message of Jesus is a presupposition for the theology of the New Tes-tament rather than a part of that theology itself.”32 What is significant for the Christian faith is the “kerygmatic” Christ alone, that is, not what Jesus said and did but what God said and did through Jesus on the cross and in the res-urrection. One should not inquire beyond this, because in faith, by definition, there is no objective certainty. And so Bultmann holds the view that any scholarly “quest of the historical Jesus” is not only impossible, but theologically illegitimate because it substitutes worldly proof for faith. However, just as many in the field believed the quest had, once again, reached a dead end, scholars picked up the ba-ton and embarked on what is now termed the New Quest.

It was in fact Bultmann’s own student Ernst Käsemann (1906–1998),33 who first brought Jesus’s Jewish prove-nance back into the fold when he taught that the historical “that” of the existence of Jesus indeed has meaning for the Christian faith and that it is also inextricably linked with the question of “how.”34 As the Lord of the church cannot be viewed entirely as a mythological being, unconnected


peritus

locateddated.


arecontain based

cannot provide reasons for faith


the


Jesus the Christ

The Historical Jesus • 43

doctrine of the Trinity was based on incarnational Chris-tology, and the miracle was the human nature of Jesus. In the modern era, the divine nature of Jesus is the subject of inquiry. So there are two conflicting modes of view-ing Jesus within Christianity: while the so-called Chris-tology from below concerns itself with the figure of Jesus and his historical context, Christology from above focuses on the incarnation—how God as God turned toward hu-manity. This Christology already assumes the divinity of Jesus in order to achieve a reconciliation of God and humanity, a reconciliation that according to Judaism has always been granted by God. Wolfhart Pannenberg (b. 1928), for example, begins with the resurrection as a his-torical event, thus emphasizing that Jesus only received his authority for Christianity through his redeeming ac-tion.53 In Jesus: God and Man,54 he constructs a Christol-ogy “from below,” deriving his dogmatic claims from a critical examination of the life and particularly the res-urrection of Jesus of Nazareth. This is his programmatic statement of the notion of “history as revelation.”55 He rejects the traditional Chalcedonian “two natures” Chris-tology, preferring to view the person of Christ in light of the resurrection dynamically. The effect of the history of this event continuously reveals its role for humanity. This focus on the resurrection as the key to Christ’s identity has led Pannenberg to defend its historicity, stressing the experience of the risen Christ in the history of the early church rather than the empty tomb. Thus, history receives its significance only proleptically as the historical facts are given their actual meaning. One would have to assume God’s perspective in order to comprehend the path of Je-sus in the world. Humans, in their limitations, are unable to do so.56 This position also seems an apt description of Pope Benedict XVI’s image of Jesus, although he does admit that the historical-critical approach can neverthe-less illuminate the context of Jesus’s earthly existence.57


However, the significance of Jesus as the Christ and the true interpretation of the Bible in its two parts can only be assessed retrospectively—by faith. This approach, which conceals the historical Jesus completely behind the cur-tain of Christ, is proclaimed by the church. In this manner, the person is permanently separated from the function: as the ideal human type, pleasing to God (Immanuel Kant58), as incarnation of the idea of the unity of divine and hu-man nature (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel59), as assur-ance and sensuous perceptibility of the unity of God and humanity (David Friedrich Strauss60), as an example of unifying effect (Falk Wagner [1939–1998]61), or as the new being, for the being needs the example that the alienation of humanity from God can in principle be overcome (Paul Tillich62). According to the speculative theology of Alois Emanuel Biedermann (1819–1885), Jesus is the historical revelation of the savior principle.63 Such a view of Jesus, however, consigns the message which seeks to change human actions to the background. This tendency can be found in almost every theology from the two great Chris-tian traditions. The origin of the nineteenth-century quest of the historical Jesus was shaped throughout by emergent Enlightenment rationalism; where getting close to the his-torical Jesus was a central aim. Over time this initial effort was increasingly pushed into the background by the ques-tion of the events and the significance of salvation. This logically led to underestimating the value of the Christian quest of the historical Jesus to central Christian theology. This became particularly apparent in the churches’ stance during the Third Reich and the Shoah. After World War II, the debate about the person of Jesus must be understood as part of a strategy to cope with the churches’ assumption of guilt for the Holocaust. In this regard, interest in Jesus as a historical person was primarily aimed at improving the relationship between the churches and Judaism.


Th e Jewish Quest as Repatriating Jesus to Judaism

Jesus Christ in the Perspective of Judaism.


Das Judenthum und seine Geschichte


Judaism Out of Place: Th e Berlin Anti-Semitism Debate and Max Liebermann’s “Jesus”

Preußische Jahrbücher

German History in the Nineteenth Century,



Geschichte der Juden

History of the Jews

History of the Jews


Jüdische Presse,

Berliner TageblattKladderadatsch


vine mission. Unheeding of the pithy maxim of the Lord Jesus that “thou canst not serve both God and Mammon,” the Jews ran after the golden calf, leaving off the ways of God. … Israel must give up the desire to be master in Germany. It must renounce the presumption that Judaism will be the religion of the future, since it is so completely of the past. And may foolish Christians no lon-ger strengthen the nation in its darkness. Jewish orthodoxy with its circumcision has outlived it-self. Reform Judaism is not even a Jewish religion. When Israel has recognized this, it will properly give up its so-called mission and cease trying to rob the nations that have given it domicile and citizenship of their Christianity.79

Shortly after this, Heinrich von Treitschke wrote his 1879 review that already viewed anti-Semitism as a “movement” that touched all levels of society. Although he distanced himself from the crude brutality of some anti-Semites (he explicitly supported emancipation), he nevertheless seized on Stoecker’s charges of arrogance when he wrote the following:

I think, however, some of my Jewish friends will tell me with deep regret that they agree with me when I say that in recent times a dangerous spirit of arrogance has awakened in Jewish circles, and that the influence of Judaism that in the past had created a fair amount of good in our national life has recently been the source of considerable dam-age. Just read the History of the Jews by Graetz. What fanatical rage against the—arch-enemy, Christianity. What lethal hatred against the purest and mightiest representatives of the Germanic es-sence from Luther right up to Goethe and Fichte!


National-Zeitung

The Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple.


Leo Baeck and Adolf von Harnack: Controversy and Clashes between the Jewish and Christian Quests

What Is Christianity?,


found expression in mercy and love, and not in the Old Testament reckoning of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”99

Because of his prominent position within Protestant theology and also because of his engagement in science pol-icy, Adolf von Harnack was, in the eyes of many Jews, the ambassador of German academic culture par excellence. His controversial position in the battle for the “freedom of science” made him particularly interesting as a historian and as a critic of Christian dogma for modern Jewish the-ology until the first decades of the twentieth century. The anti-Jewish polemic in Harnack’s “Essence of Christian-ity” was intensified—from the Jewish perspective—by the fact that the lecture series was conceived and promoted as open “to students of all schools and departments.”100 The location of the event added further concern—Berlin, the city in which academic anti-Semitism had its roots, the city with the largest Jewish community, and also, next to Frankfurt, the main center for liberal Judaism and the Wis-senschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism). The Jewish confrontation with Harnack’s “Essence of Christianity” was of a very public nature. There were numerous lectures at various venues—congregations, learned societies, and so forth—on this issue; a number of these lectures were also published. Public discussions of Harnack’s lectures were not limited to professional theological journals such as the Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums (Monthly for History and Study of Judaism), but occurred even more frequently in newspapers, such as the principal organ of liberal Judaism, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, (General Newspaper of Judaism; founded by Ludwig Philippson and subtitled “a non-par-tisan organ for all Jewish interests”). Joseph Eschelbacher began his editorial with the following sentence: “We very frequently hear the opinions of Christians about Judaism and the Jewish religion, while opinions of Jews and in


Ost und West

Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums

Liberaler Verein für die Angelegenheiten der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin

Tageblatt

Was lehrt uns Harnack?

Die jüngsten Urteile über das Judentum

Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums

Das Judentum und


das Wesen des Christentums (Judaism and the Essence of Christianity, 1904) and Das Judentum im Urteil der mod-ernen protestantischen Theologie (Judaism in the Judg-ments of Modern Protestant Theology, 1907).103

The main target for Jewish criticism was Harnack’s thesis, borrowed from Julius Wellhausen, of a religious degeneration process in postexilic Judaism. As a result, it was claimed, Christianity’s origins in Judaism were played down. This meant a twofold negation of Judaism, that is, of historical as well as modern Judaism because modern Judaism should only be understood as part of the continuum of the history of Judaism.104

The reasons for this judgment from a Jewish perspec-tive were as follows:105

1. Disregard of research from the science of Judaism,above all regarding the relation between Jesus orearly Christianity and the Judaism of the time (Jü-dische Leben-Jesu-Forschung).106

2. The lack of awareness of rabbinic literature (e.g.,Harnack’s equating of halakha and aggadah wascriticized). Jewish authors invariably accused Har-nack of not differentiating between ritual and ethi-cal provisions in the Talmud.107

Against the background of the particular historical situa-tion of the Jews at the turn of the twentieth century, Har-nack’s theses, with their anti-Jewish polemics, could only be understood as a serious threat by the Jewish community.

From Harnack’s perspective it was irrelevant if Je-sus taught something new. Important to him was the fact that Jesus proclaimed his teachings in a unique fashion, “pure” and “powerful.”108 One must not believe in Jesus, but believe as he believed, in the paternal love of God and the infinite value of the human soul. A contemporary of Har nack’s, Paul Wernle (1872–1939), put it as follows:


Das Evangelium als Urkunde der jüdischen


Glaubensgeschichte (The Gospel as a Document of the History of Jewish Faith), in which he tried to prove that, throughout his life, Jesus remained a devout Jew to whom it would never have occurred to found a new religion, let alone to have himself worshiped as a god: “In this old tra-dition we behold a man who is Jewish in every feature and trait of his character, manifesting in every particular what is pure and good in Judaism. This man could only have developed on the soil of Judaism; and only on this soil, too, could he find his disciples and followers as they were. Here alone, in this Jewish sphere, in a Jewish atmo-sphere of trust and longing, could this man live his life and meet his death—a Jew among Jews.”114 Baeck made his intentions clear in the preface:

The question how the Gospels in the New Tes-tament could have developed out of the ancient message of Jesus the messiah has been much dis-puted. But like the question of the original mean-ing of these tidings, it can really be approached in one way only by way of the sphere in which all these events took shape. Only in terms of its own space and time will everything become clear to us. We must understand the nature of oral tradition as it was then alive in Palestinian Judaism. We must penetrate its very soul and grasp the essentially poetic manner in which tradition in those days was handed down and apprehended. Only then will harmony and discrepancy in our Gospels be grasped, too. For the Gospels must be understood, not in terms of textual sources out of which they might have been composed, but in terms of the tradition out of which they originated. … A life of Jesus can be written, if at all, only after one has determined what the first generation after Jesus related and handed down. … Our conclusion was


draw near.”116 A man can freely choose between good and evil during his lifetime. If he errs, he is free to correct this. And because he can, he should. This view is diametrically opposed to the Pauline doctrine of grace within Christian-ity and its insistence on humanity’s need for redemption. And it is here, in the area of morals and ethics, that the actual gap between Judaism and Christianity can be seen. At the center of the dispute was the question of the messi-ahship of Jesus. Time and again in this context, Harnack’s claim was cited that there was “nothing new” in the Gos-pel of Jesus.

Regarding this statement, Jewish theologians and scholars emphasized that the elements dividing Judaism and Christianity were only introduced into Christianity by Paul. From the Jewish perspective, that meant (1) the Christian acceptance of Jesus through the dogmatic inter-pretation of his teachings in terms of Logos Christology, (2) the emptying of the concept of monotheism by the doctrine of the Trinity, and (3) the limiting of the ethical content of Jesus’s message by dogmatizing it. The develop-ment of the dogma was traced to the repression of Judaism, that is, of Jewish Christianity, by the universal Christian-ity of Paul’s grace, and the process set into motion by this formation. This not only refers to an irrefutable link be-tween the Jewish position and arguments presented by Harnack’s critique of dogma. But it also infers that this Jewish critique of Pauline Christianity and liberal Prot-estant theology unite in their opposition to the estab-lished, authoritative interpretation of Christianity found in Catholicism and conservative Protestantism. Basically, Judaism is uncomfortable with the emphasis on central founders in religions.

While for Harnack Christianity’s uniqueness lay in the power of the personality of Jesus himself, Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) asked if religion needed founding figures at all. At the Weltkongress für Freies Christentum und Re-


ligiösen Fortschritt


Jesus’s rabbinic Jewish heritage—his profound knowledge in this field—served at the same time as an argument for the existence of a modern Judaism in Christian-dominated contemporary culture. Another goal was to ascertain the right to equality with the Christian denominations and the proof that Judaism represented an enrichment of the “national spirit” and consequently constituted a genuine asset for Germany.

Outside of Germany too, liberal Jews attempted to build bridges of understanding with Christianity across the confrontation with the Jewish Jesus. The British scholar Claude G. Montefiore (1858–1938), who later be-came president of the World Union for Progressive Juda-ism, wrote a positive study on the Gospels in 1909, and in his two-volume work The Synoptic Gospels (1909) he attempted to include Jesus in the series of the great prophets of Israel.119 Ten years earlier, Kaufmann Kohler (1843–1926), a leading German-born representative of the American Reform movement, treated Jesus of Nazareth as a reformer in his time.120 Kohler understood Jesus as one of many messiahs, whose death could not be accepted by “the excited imagination” of his followers. Paul was pri-marily responsible for the negative development of Chris-tianity by introducing a pagan mythology into Christian doctrine with his interpretation of the Crucifixion of Jesus as God’s Son’s atoning sacrifice.121

The exemplary arguments presented here are by no means passé. Even modern Christian theologians face the challenge of explaining how Jesus could found something new when everything he said and did had Jewish paral-lels. In The First Followers of Jesus: A Sociological Analy-sis of the Earliest Christianity,122 the Heidelberg Protestant theologian Gerd Theissen describes Jesus’s innovation as “the revitalization of the Jewish religion by Jesus.” In A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion he expands this. The originality of Jesus lay in the fact that the old was


revitalized from a central tenet, the belief in the one and only God.123

What we can observe is a revitalizing of the Jewish sign language. In other words: Jesus lived, thought, worked and died as a Jew. One of the most impor-tant results of 200 years of modern research into Je-sus is that he belongs to two religions: to Judaism, to which he was attached with all his heart, and to Christianity, whose central point of reference he be-came after his death—on the basis of interpretations of his person which his Jewish followers gave.124

As we have seen, this was the same view taken by Har-nack and others in the nineteenth century, and this in turn provides evidence for Christian-Jewish agreement when it remains beyond the dogmatic claim of a kerygmatic Christ. This is not altogether without risk; if one ascribes more vitality to Jesus, do you not, then, deny any vital-ity to the very Jewish environment which later developed into modern Judaism?

The Jewish Quest from Joseph Klausner to Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich

I will now turn to some more recent Jewish efforts to ac-knowledge and identify the historical Jesus. What is re-markable is the variety of German Jewish scholars within the wider concert of international voices.

After three waves of the quest, some Christian schol-ars today tend to emphasize the limitations of an his-torical approach toward Jesus. As we have seen, this tendency was epitomized in the twentieth century by examples such as the Protestant New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann’s. In the following chapter


we shall see that Joseph Ratzinger took a similar approach in the twenty-first century when he addressed the topic from a Catholic perspective in his Jesus trilogy (published in 2007, 2011, and 2012). Analogously, the Jewish side is growing more and more interested in the historical Jesus.

Joseph Klausner’s (1874–1958) Hebrew Jesus mono-graph Yeshu ha-Notsri appeared in 1922 in Jerusalem; it created a sensation and was sharply attacked. The Ger-man translation was published in 1930 and it was quickly acknowledged as “the first large-scale scholarly represen-tation of the life and teachings of Jesus from the Jewish perspective.”125 In his summary to the six-hundred-page book, Klausner argued that the differences between Juda-ism and the teachings of Jesus “Ex nihilo nihil fit.” If the teachings of Jesus did not contain the opposite to Juda-ism, it would have been impossible for Paul to use them to justify abolishing the ceremonial laws and to break through the barriers of particularistic Judaism. His con-clusion: “On the one hand, this doctrine led, even though it was influenced by the spirit of prophetic and partly also of Pharisaic Judaism, to the denial of all practical and re-ligious Jewish necessities of life, and on the other hand, it also increased spiritual Judaism to such an extreme that it flipped almost dialectically into its own opposite. So before us arises the strange picture: Judaism gave birth to Christianity in its original form (as a teaching of Jesus), but it disowned the daughter, as she attempted to smother her mother in a deadly embrace.”126 Nevertheless, “Jesus is, for the Jewish nation, a great teacher of morality and an artist in parable. He is the moralist for whom, in the religious life, morality counts as—everything.”127

By 1931 more than four hundred critical essays had appeared in twelve languages about Klausner’s book. It was the first time that all the then-known material about Jesus, including previously unacknowledged sources, had been compiled. The attempt to reconstruct, or rather to


Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus

Der JudeDie Kreatur


Bruder Jesus: Der Nazarener in jüdischer Sicht

for like


Jewish brother.

no divine hand. human

with


one another

Der Rabbi von Nazaret: Wandlungen des jüdischen Jesusbildes

Midstream,The Death of Jesus


Der Jude Je-sus: Thesen eines Juden; Antworten eines Christen


Auferstehung: Ein jüdisches Glaubenser-lebnis


from the quest of the historical Jesus which attribute uniqueness and incomparability, and peerlessness to Je-sus (e.g., David Flusser, 1917–2000160), Sandmel empha-sizes that, for a religious Jew, these characteristics can only be attributed to God, never a human being. A human being, according to Jewish understanding, can at best be “great.”161 Such “greatness” Sandmel willingly attributes to Jesus: “Only a Jew whose unique combination of quali-ties was extraordinary could have been thought by other Jews to have been accorded a special resurrection.”162

A position close to Samuel Sandmel can be found in the work of the Judaic scholar and theologian Ernst Lud-wig Ehrlich (1921–2007) from Basel, Switzerland. He ar-gued that the New Testament sources did not say enough about the man and Jew Jesus because their authors saw only the Christ of faith. Thus, the historical Jesus could not be identified by searching behind the kerygma of the New Testament. “Despite intensive scientific research we will probably never succeed in regaining a full picture of the ‘historical Jesus.’”163 In contrast to many other Jew-ish interpreters of Jesus, Ehrlich sees only two certain results: the truisms that Jesus was a Jew and that Jesus died on the cross.164 The real challenge of Jesus’s life con-sists in his proclamation of the nearness of the Kingdom of God and his claim to fulfill the will of God as he un-derstood it. “As a result of this apocalyptic mind-set,” Ehrlich says, “Jesus was critical of the law,”165 probably more in the prophetic tradition, and therefore distin-guished himself radically from his Pharisaic environment. Here Ehrlich conforms with Erlangen historian of religion Hans-Joachim Schoeps (1909–1980), who saw in Jesus “sharp criticism and condemnation of certain Jewish practices.”166 Schoeps sees the cause of Jesus’s conflict with the Pharisees as rooted in his alternative assessment “of the Old Testament Law.”167 With this perception both Ehrlich and Schoeps differ radically from a vast majority


The Jewish-Christian Argument: A History of Theologies in Confl ict,

yet to come,


Guardian

Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels

Jesus and the World of Judaism,The Religion of Jesus the Jew.

The Changing Faces of Jesus.

The Authentic Gospel of Jesus.

Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea (AD 30–325).


Hasidim Rishonim

son of man,

Jesus of Nazareth

Jesus of Nazareth


NotesEz Awot

A Translation of the Magen Wa-Herebby Leon Modena, 1571–1648: Christianity through a Rab-bi’s Eyes

Leon da Modena: Rabbiner zu Venedigund seine Stellung zur Kabbalah, zum Thalmud undzum Christentume

Jerusalem; or, On Religious Powerand Judaism,

Jésus-Christ et sa doctrine

Allgemeine Geschichte des Israeliti-schen Volkes, Zweiter Teil

The Histori-cal Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide




Theologische Realenzy-klopädie,

The-ologische Realenzyklopädie,

The Historical Jesus in Con-text,

Von dem Zwecke Jesu undseiner Jünger: Noch ein Fragment des WolfenbüttelschenUngenannten

The Goal of Jesus and His DisciplesFragments from Rei-

marus: Brief Critical Remarks on the Object of Jesus andHis Disciples as Seen in the New Testament,

Reimarus: Fragments,

The Life of Jesus: Critically Ex-amined

Streitschriften zur Vertheidigungmeiner Schrift ueber das Leben Jesu und zur Charakte-ristik der gegenwaertigen Theologie

Der Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der


Geschichte: Eine Kritik des Schleiermacher’schen Leben Jesu

Historical Jesus,Protestantische Theologie der Neuzeit

Ideology and Utopia

Religion in History

Systematic Theology,

Philosophical Fragments; or, A Frag-ment of Philosophy

Gesammelte Werke,

Das Christus-bild Søren Kierkegaards verglichen mit der ChristologieHegels und Schleiermachers

Abschließende unwissenschaftlicheNachschrift zu den Philosophischen Brocken

Concluding Unscientifi c Postscript to Philo-sophical Fragments,

Lessing’s Theological Writings,



The Quest of the Historical Jesus: ACritical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede,


Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God,

The Christian Doctrine of Justifi cation and Reconcilia-tion,

Systematic Theology (Dogmatik)

The Communion of the Christian with God

The So-Called Historical Jesus and the His-toric Biblical Christ

JesusDas Verhältnis der urchristli-

chen Christusbotschaft zum historischen Jesus,

Jesus Christ and Mythology

Jesus andthe Word Jesus von Nazareth

Jesus ofNazareth

The History of the Synoptic Tradition

Jesus and the Word,

Jesus


Theology of the New Testament,

Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The HistoricalJesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith,

Jesus Means Freedom: A Polemical Sur-vey of the New Testament

Essays in New Testament Themes

A New Quest of the Historical Je-sus,

Zeitschrift für Theol-ogie und Kirche

Justifi cation: The Doctrine of Karl Barth anda Catholic Refl ection

On Being a Christian,

Brother or Lord? A Jewand a Christian Talk Together

On Being a Christian,


Brother or Lord?,Perspectives on Paul

On Being a Christian,Sämt-

liche Werke,

Documents of the Christian Church

On Being a Christian,Jesus the Christ

Grundzüge der Christologie

Jesus: God and Man

Revelation as History

Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism inthe Jordan to the Transfi guration

Religion within the Limits of ReasonAlone

Phenomenology of Spirit,

Phenomenol-ogy of Spirit,


Theological Studies

Die christliche Glaubenslehrein ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung und im Kampfeder modernen Wissenschaft

Die Realisierung der Frei-heit: Beiträge zur Kritik der Theologie Karl Barths,

The New Being

Gesammelte Werke, Der Widerstreit von Raumund Zeit: Schriften zur Geschichtsphilosophie

Christliche Dogmatik,

Jesus Christ Liberator: A CriticalChristology for Our Time

Jesus of Nazareth

The Quest ofthe Historical Jesus

a “New Quest”

).


Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus

The HistoricalReligion in Ge-

schichte und Gegenwart,

Historical Jesus,Jüdische Jesusinterpretationen in christli-

cher Sicht

Einleitung in die drei Evangelien


Das Judentum und seine Geschichte

Abraham Geiger and the Jew-ish Jesus

Das Judentum,Jewish Identity in Modern Times:

Leo Baeck and German Protestantism

Great Debate on Antisemitism: Jewish Reaction to NewHostility in Germany, 1879–1881

Preußi-sche Jahrbücher

Geschichte der Juden,


German History in Documents and Images, Forging an Empire: Bismarckian Germany, 1866–1890,

Das moderne Judenthum in Deutschland,besonders in Berlin: Zwei Reden in der christlich-socialen Arbeiterpartei,

Antisemitism in theModern World: An Anthology of Texts

Antisemitism in the ModernWorld,

Der “Berliner Antisemitismus-streit” 1879–1881: Eine Kontroverse um die Zugehörig-keit der deutschen Juden zur Nation,

Sulamith

Abraham Geiger’s NachgelasseneSchriften,

Der Jesus-Skandal: Ein Liebermann-Bild imKreuzfeuer der Kritik,


The Gospeland the Church



Adolf von Har-nack als Lehrer Dietrich Bonhoeffers,


Redenund Aufsätze

What Is Christianity?,History of Dogma

What Is Chris-tianity?

Das Wesen des Chris-tentums

Das Judentum und das Wesen des Christentums: Vergleichende Schriften,


Ost und West: Illustrierte Monatsschrift für mod-ernes Judentum,

Das Judentum und das We-sen des Christentums: Vergleichende Studien,

Die jüngsten Urteile über das Judentum kritisch untersucht

Das Juden-tum und das Wesen des Christentums: Vergleichende Schriften, Das Judentum im Urteile der modernen protestantischen Theologie,

Theologische Lit-eraturzeitung

Was lehrt uns Harnack?

Die jüngsten Urteile,

Die Jesusfrage im neuzeitlichen Ju-dentum: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung

Was lehrt uns Harnack?, Das Judentum und das Wesen des Chris-

tentums: Vergleichende Schriften,Das Judentum und seine Umwelt


JesusFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,


Jesus


Absprechend über Gegen-stände zu urtheilen, zu deren selbständiger Erforschung es an den nöthigen Voraussetzungen und Fähigkeiten gebricht, würde man sich wahrlich auf jedem anderen Gebiete doppelt und dreifach bedenken; nur dem Ju-denthum gegenüber glaubt man mit souveräner Willkür zu Werke gehen zu dürfen.

Judaism and Christianity: Essays by Leo Baeck,

Wort und Ant-wort


Die Lehren des Judentums nach den Quellen, Fünfter Teil (Judentum und Umwelt)


Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen

Goleh ve-nekhar

The Synoptic Gospels

Leo Baeck: Zwischen Geheimnis und Gebot; Auf dem Weg zu einem progressiven Judentum der Mod-erne,

Jesus from Nazareth from a Jewish Point of View

Jewish Theology, Systematically and Historically Considered

The First Followers of Jesus: A Socio-logical Analysis of the Earliest Christianity,

A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion

Menorah,

Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times and Teachings

Menorah,

Der Jude

Der Jude


Two Types of Faith

Zwiesprache mit Martin Buber

Pfade in Utopia

Freiburger Rundbriefe: Zeitschrift für christlich-jüdische Begegnung,

Brother Jesus: The Nazarene through Jewish Eyes


Brother Jesus,Das Judentum im Ringen um die

Gegenwart

Jüdische Jesusinterpretationen in christ-licher Sicht

mitzvoth,

Brother Jesus,

Brother or Lord? A Jew and a Christian Talk Together

Der Rabbi von Nazareth: Wandlungen des jüdischen Jesusbildes


The Death of Jesus

Brother or Lord?,

Brother or Lord?,

Der Jude Jesus: Thesen eines Juden; Antworten eines Christen

Brother or Lord?,

Auferstehung: Ein jüdisches Glauben-serlebnis

The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective

Brother or Lord?,A Jewish Understanding of the New

Testament,

The Sage from Galilee: Rediscovering Jesus’ Genius

A Jewish Understanding of the New Testa-ment,

“Was uns trennt, ist die Geschichte”: Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich—Vermittler zwischen Juden und Chris-


ten,

Die großen Religionsstifter und ihre Lehren,

Studien zur unbekannten Religions und Geis-tesgeschichte,

Jüdisch-christliches Religionsgespräch in neunzehn Jahrhunderten: Geschichte einer theologischen Ausei-nandersetzung

The Jewish-Christian Argu-ment: A History of Theologies in Confl ict

Die großen Religionsstifter und ihre Lehren,

Christian Beginnings,Guardian,Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of

the GospelsJesus and the World of Judaism

The Religion of Jesus the Jew

The Changing Faces of Jesus

The Authentic Gospel of Jesus

Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea (AD 3–325)


Jesus in the Jewish WorldJesus the Jew,

Jesus in the Jewish World,

Jesus the Jew A Historian’s Reading of the Gos-pels,

Jesus’ Jewish-ness: Exploring the Place of Judaism in Early Judaism,

Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gos-pels,

Jesus of Nazareth, Holy Week, Guardian,

Chapter 3

Jesus the Jew and Joseph Ratzinger’s ChristA Th eological U-Turn

Jesus Was a Jew: A Cultural Coincidence?

Dabru Emet


Gestalt

A Rabbi Talks with Jesus

Introduction to Christianity

Jesus the Jew and Joseph Ratzinger’s Christ • 103


Th e “Rabbi Jesus”: For Christians Only Important as Christ?

man

Introduction to Christianity :


“Reading the Whole Bible in the Light of Christ”: Joseph Ratzinger’s Hermeneutics

The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible.


Christian Faith and “Historical Reason”

Spe Salvi


NotesJesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the

Jordan to the Transfi guration

Jerusalem Post,


Introduction to Christianity,

Jesus Then & Now: Images of Jesus in History and Christology

Die Kirchen und das Judentum, Dokumente von 1986–2000,

Jesus of Nazareth,

Introduction to Christianity,Jesus of Nazareth,

The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible,

Jesus of Nazareth,


Jesus of Nazareth,Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi of the Supreme Pon-

tiff, Benedict XVI, to the Bishops, Priests and Deacons, Men and Women Religious and All the Lay Faithful on Christian Hope

New Perspectives on Abraham GeigerAbraham

Geiger: Durch Wissen zum Glauben

Conclusion


Jesus the Jew

Conclusion • 113


Notes

Christology

Jesus Remembered; Christianity in the Mak-ing Vol. 1

Conclusion • 115

Modern Judaism

Journal of Law and Religion

Journal of Law and Religion

Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch

Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History

Max Brod – Ausgewählte Werke

Other and Brother: Jesus in the 20th-century Jewish literary landscape.

Der Messias, Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift

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Die Kirchen und das Judentum,Dokumente von 1986–2000,


Die Lehren des Judentums nach den Quellen, Fünfter Teil (Judentum und Umwelt).


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Jesus in the Talmud

Jüdisch-christliches Religionsge-spräch in neunzehn Jahrhunderten: Geschichte einer theologischen Auseinandersetzung.

Die großen Religionsstifter und ihre Lehren

Studien zur un-bekannten Religions und Geistesgeschichte.

The Jewish-Christian Argument: A History of The-ologies in Confl ict

Origins of the Kabbalah

Die jüngsten Urteile über das Judentum kritisch untersucht


Jüdische Geschichte.

The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede


Jour-nal of Law and Religion

Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus Then & Now: Images of Jesus in History and Chris-tology,

Other and Brother: Jesus in the 20th-century Jewish literary landscape

Jesus und seine Zeit

Das moderne Judenthum in Deutschland, besonders in Berlin: Zwei Reden in der christlich-socialen Arbeiterpartei

Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch

Streitschriften zur Vertheidigung meiner Schrift ueber das Leben Jesu und zur Charak-teristik der gegenwaertigen Theologie

Die christliche Glaubenslehre in ihrer geschichtli-chen Entwicklung und im Kampfe der modernen Wis-senschaft.

Der Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der Ges-chichte: Eine Kritik des Schleiermacher’schen Leben Jesu

The Life of Jesus: Critically Examined.


Der Jude

Der Jude

The First Followers of Jesus: A Sociologi-cal Analysis of the Earliest Christianity.

A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion

The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide

Freiburger Rundbriefe: Zeitschrift für christlich-jüdische Begegnung,

Systematic Theology

The New BeingGesam-

melte Werke, Der Widerstreit von Raum und Zeit: Schriften zur Geschichtsphilosophie

“If This Be from Heaven . . . ”: Jesus and the New Testament Authors in Their Relationship to Judaism

Preußi-sche Jahrbücher

Der jüdische Gottesdienst: Gestalt und En-twicklung

Religion in History


Jesus and the World of Judaism.


Jesus’ Jewishness: Exploring the Place of Judaism in Early Judaism,

.

The Religion of Jesus the Jew

The Changing Faces of Jesus

The Authentic Gospel of Jesus

Jesus in the Jewish World

Jesus of Nazareth Holy WeekGuardian,

Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea (AD 30–325).

Jüdische Jesusinterpretationen in christ-licher Sicht.


Die Realisierung der Freiheit: Beiträge zur Kritik der Theologie Karl Barths,

ProoftextsDie Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes


Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God.

Einleitung in die drei Evangelien

Jesus

New York Times,

Christian BeginningsGuardian,

On the Trial of Jesus.

Two Nations in Your Womb: Perception of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages

Index

AleinuAllgemeine Geschichte

des Israelitischen Volkes

See also

See also

see

Auferstehung: Ein jüdisches Glaubenserlebnis

See


136 • Index

Christ before the High Priest

See

Concluding Unscientifi c Postscript to Philosophical Fragments

The Death of Jesus

Encyclopaedia Judaica,

Das Evangelium als Urkunde der jüdischen Glaubensgeschichte

The First Followers of Jesus: Sociological Analysis of

the Earliest Christianity

Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition

Index • 137

138 • Index

See also

Ha’minim Birkat

Hasidim Rishonim,

History of the Jews

Hizzuk Emunah


Index • 139

Issak Troki: Ein Apologet des Judenthums am Ende des 16 Jahrhunderts

Jesus the Christ

Jesus: God and Man


Jesus of Nazareth

Jesus and the Word

The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the

Christian Bible

The Jewish-Christian Argument: A History of Theologies in Confl ict

140 • Index

John the Baptist, 3–4, 58John Paul II (pope), 104–105John’s Gospel, 1, 9Josephus, Flavius, xii, 1–2Joshua ben Perahyah, 23Jost, Isaak Markus, 31Judaism, 13

Christian views of, 57–58, 62–66

Christianity originating from, 61, 65, 69, 75, 80, 107

ethics/essence of, 58–59, 60, 62, 104

messiahship in, 113 and teachings of Jesus,

5–7, 69, 70–71, 75–76, 79, 113

Judas Iscariot, 8, 18Der Jude Jesus: Thesen eines

Juden; Antworten eines Christen (Jesus the Jew: Theses of a Jew; Answers from a Christian, Lapide), 75

Judenstein (Jewstone) story, xviDas Judenthum und seine

Geschichte (Judaism and its History, Geiger), 48

Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes (Jesus’s Proclamation of the Kingdom of God, Ritschl), 37

Kabbalists, Jesus and his disciples as, 21

Kähler, Martin, 37Kärkkäinen, Veli-Matti,

111–112Käsemann, Ernst, xi–xii,

38–39, 41

Kasper, Walter, 42Kaufmann, Yehezkel, 66kerygma theology, 40Kierkegaard, Søren, 34–35Kimchi, David, 20Kimchi, Joseph, 19–20Kingdom of God, 32, 37, 38Klausner, Joseph, 2, 6, 16,

69–70Kohler, Kaufmann, 67Krauss, Samuel, 19Krochmalnik, Daniel, 14Küng, Hans, 39–41, 42,

97n148

Lapide, Pinchas E., 73–77, 80, 97n148

Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk bearbeitet (The Life of Jesus for the German People, Strauss), 33

Leon da Modena: Rabbiner zu Venedig und seine Stellung zur Kabbalah, zum Thalmud und zum Christentume (Rabbi to Venice and His Position on the Kabbalah, the Talmud and Christianity, Geiger), 30–31

Leon de Modena, 30Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim,

32, 35Levine, Amy-Jill, 31–32liberal Christian theology,

37, 38Liberaler Verein für die

Angelegenheiten der jüdischen Gemeinde zu

Index • 141

Berlin (Liberal Association for the Affairs of the Berlin Jewish Community), 60

liberation theology, 45Liebermann, Max, 55–56The Life of Jesus: Critically

Examined (Strauss), 32–33The Life and Morals of Jesus

of Nazareth: Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French and English (Jefferson), 34

Limor, Ora, 22linguistic suitability

criterion, xiiliteracy, of Jesus, 3liturgy, Ashkenazi, 23Louis IX (king of France), 23love thy neighbor

commandment, 6Luke’s Gospel, 3, 4, 7, 9

Magen wa-Hereb (Sword and Trowel, Leon de Modena), 30

Magonet, Jonathan, xix–xxMaier, Johann, 1, 14, 15, 16,

17–18Mark’s Gospel, 1, 2, 5, 9Matthew’s Gospel, 2Meir ben Baruch of

Rothenburg, 23Menachem Ha-Meiri of

Perpignan, 14Mendelssohn, Moses, 31Merz, Annette, 47messiahship

of Jesus, Jewish denial of, 71, 73, 114

in Judaism, 113Meyer, Seligmann, 52Middle Ages

anti-Christian Jewish texts/attitudes in, 14, 16–22

anti-Jewish polemics in, 19, 22–24

censorship of Jewish literature in, 22–23, 24

minim (antirabbinic Jews, heretics), 13

miracles, 35Mishnah, 13, 15Mommsen, Theodor, 54Montefiore, Claude G., 67multiple attestation criterion,

xiiMurmelstein, Benjamin, 70myths

anti-Semitic, xvi–xvii and historical Jesus, 33,

34, 39 and personification, 66

Nachmanides, 23–24naiveté in faith, 41Nascher, Sinai Simon, 52Neusner, Jacob, 102–103,

104New Testament see GospelsNostra Ætate declaration

(Second Vatican Council), 45

Old Testament, 106–107, 109n18, 19. See also Torah

On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power (Lessing), 35

142 • Index

The Passion of the Christ

Philosophical Fragments



The Quest of the Historical Jesus

Der Rabbi von Nazaret: Wandlungen des jüdischen Jesusbildes

Index • 143

Sefer Ha’Berit

Sefer Nizzahon Yashan

Sha’ali Serufah Ba’Esh

Spe Salvi

The Synoptic Gospels

Te Deum

tevilah

Theory of Primitive Christian Religion

Toledot Yeshu,

144 • Index

obligations of (mitzvoth), 96n140

See also Old Testamenttranslations, of the Gospels, 75Treitschke, Heinrich von,

49–50, 53–55trial of Jesus, 8–9Trinity doctrine, 43Troeltsch, Ernst, 34, 62truth, xv, 35Tübinger Schule (Tübingen

School), 33The Twelve-Year-Old Jesus

in the Temple (painting, Liebermann), 55–56

‘Unsere Aussichten’ (essay, Our Prospects, von Treitschke), 49–50, 53–54

Vatican Colloquium on the Roots of Anti-Judaism in Christianity, 104–105

Vatican Council, Second, 45Vermes, Géza, xviii, 81–83

Vögtle, Anton, 3Von dem Zwecke Jesu und

seiner Jünger (The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples, Reimarus), 32

Weiss, Johannes, 37Wellhausen, Julius, 47, 57,

61Wernle, Paul, 61–62What Is Christianity? (von

Harnack), 56–59, 92n93Williams, Rowan, 81Winter, Paul, 8women, religious statements

on, xii

Yehiel ben Joseph, 23Yeshu ha-Notsri (Jesus of

Nazareth, Klausner), 69–70

youth of Jesus, 2–3Yuval, Israel, 21

Zealot (Aslan), xviii