I know a good Hamburg Christian who can never reconcile himself to the fact that our Lord and Saviour was by birth a Jew. A deep dissatisfaction seizes him when he must admit to himself that the man who, as the pattern of perfection, deserves the highest honour, was still of kin to those snuffling, long-nosed fellows who go running about the streets selling old clothes, whom he so utterly despises, and who are even more desperately detestable when they—like himself—apply themselves to the wholesale business of spices and dye-stuffs, and encroach upon his interests.~ Heinrich Heine, Shakespeare's Maidens and Women
JESUS RECLAIMED
Jewish Perspectives on the Nazarene
Rabbi Walter Homolka carefully lays out the contributions
Jewish scholars have been making to the ever-fuller
historical understanding of the most influential Jew—or
perhaps the most influential human being—ever, Jesus of
Nazareth. It is built on solid scholarship but written in
terms that make it accessible to the educated layperson.
Now in the early twenty-first century, we are still
learning more about Jesus of Nazareth as a result of the
“third quest of the historical Jesus.” The first quest was
launched during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment
by scholars like Hermann Reimarus and gained momentum
in the nineteenth century with the development of
“scientific history” under scholars such as Leopold von Ranke. The quest ground to a halt early in the twentieth
century with the declaration by Albert Schweitzer and
Rudolf Bultmann that it was impossible. All we had to go
on were several faith statements about Jesus and, therefore,
it was impossible to discern the human face of Jesus
beneath all the projections.
The second quest was started by Bultmann’s prize
student, Ernst Käsemann, with his inaugural address at
the University of Göttingen in 1954—he later became
professor at my alma mater, the University of Tübingen.
He argued that despite the “faith statement” nature of the
Gospels, we can attain a historical picture of the real Jesus
by using tools such as (1) dissimilarity (if a statement was contrary to the aims of early Judaism or the early Christians,
it likely came from Jesus), (2) multiple attestation
(if a statement is found in more than one source), and (3)
coherence (if a statement cohered with already accepted
Jesus statements), to which was later added (4) linguistic
suitability (if a statement made sense in Jesus’ Aramaic).
How did these criteria work? Let me give just one example.
The New Testament writings are full of negative
statements about women by persons other than Jesus—for
example, “Women should keep silence in the church” (1
Cor 14:33); “I suffer no woman to have authority over a
man” (1 Tm 2:11); “Wives, be subject to your husbands”
(1 Pt 3:1). Moreover, Jesus’s younger Jewish contemporary
Josephus wrote, “The woman, says the Law, is in all
things inferior to the man.”1
In contrast, in all four of the
Gospels, nowhere does Jesus say or do anything negative
regarding women; on the contrary, he says and does many,
many positive things. Conclusion: those “feminist” remarks
and actions attributed in the Gospels to Jesus could
not stem from the frequently misogynist Jewish or Christian
sources, but had to go back to Jesus himself.2
As helpful as the “principle of dissimilarity” was, at
the same time it tended to alienate Jesus from his natural
Jewish context—which did not make any sense. Hence,
starting in the late 1970s, researchers focused on the
broader background of the New Testament, and most especially
its Jewish background. This approach drew the
interest of many excellent scholars, including many of the
most respected contemporary biblical scholars, resulting
in what has been named the “third quest of the historical
Jesus”:
In the ‘third quest,’ which first emerged predominantly in the English-speaking world, a sociological interest replaced a theological interest, and the concern to find Jesus a place in Judaism replaced the demarcation of Jesus from Judaism; an openness to non-canonical (sometimes heretical) sources also replaced the preference for canonical sources.3
Jewish scholars were on this “third quest for the historical
Jesus” long before we Christian scholars took up the quest.
At one point we Christians finally realized that it is absolutely
essential to view Jesus as Rabbi Yeshua Ha-Notzri,
Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, and to recognize all his relatives
(Mary, Joseph, James, and so on) and first followers as
fellow Jews if we are ever going to understand who the
“founder” of Christianity was and what he was all about.4
Hence, it is with deep gratitude that I welcome this latest
book in a glorious tradition of Jewish scholarship that
is of immense help to its sibling, Christian scholarship.
But it is much more than that. It is a handy handbook, a
veritable vade mecum on the growing deeper historical
understanding of Jesus among Jewish scholars and thus an
important source for Christian and Islamic scholars alike.
Notes
1. Josephus, Against Apion, II, 201, cited in Leonard Swidler,
Women in Judaism: The Status of Women in Formative
Judaism (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1976), 2.
2. See Leonard Swidler, Biblical Affirmations of Woman
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1988); Leonard Swidler,
Jesus Was a Feminist (Lanham, MD: Sheed & Ward, 2007).
3. Gerd Theissen, Annette Merz. The Historical Jesus (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1996), 10.
4. I too, belatedly, joined the pioneer Christian scholars in
this “third quest”: Leonard Swidler, Yeshua: A Model
for Moderns (Kansas City: Sheed & Ward, 1988; 2nd expanded
ed., 1993).
Translator’s Preface
Translator’s Preface
Ingrid Shafer
While reading Walter Homolka’s 2009 German book Jesus
of Nazareth, I became convinced that it deserved to be
broadly distributed beyond a German-speaking public,
both academic and lay. I was especially fascinated by the
second part of the title: im Spiegel jüdischer Forschung (in
the Mirror of Jewish Scholarship). The title happened to
coincide with one of my lifelong personal and academic
passions—my conviction that all of us perceive what we
consider reality through what I have called “hermeneutical
lenses,” spectacles or mirrors that determine what we
“see” and what we consider “the truth.” I spent forty-one
years teaching interdisciplinary global history of ideas at a
liberal arts college, and I never quite ceased being amazed
at the extent to which my students, often unwilling captives
in required courses, were threatened by having their
preconscious assumptions challenged, especially concerning
their religious or ideological convictions. Simply
saying, “Jesus was a Jew” or “Jesus was not a Christian”
raised a chorus of objections. Yet, this was precisely what
I had hoped to communicate to others ever since I was in
my late teens in the 1950s.
I was born in Innsbruck, Austria, one month before
Hitler marched into Poland, and have been haunted by
images of the Shoah ever since I was old enough to read
magazines and question adults. Eventually, I began to
seek a rational explanation for what seemed the unconscious, knee-jerk anti-Jewish prejudices of so many “good
people” I knew—teachers, classmates, even my father.
No one, for example, seemed to question what to me appeared
an absurd and hate-fomenting local story of the Judenstein
(Jewstone), the shrine of the Blessed Andrew of Rinn [Anderl], the final resting place of a small boy whose
throat, the teacher told us during a class outing, had been
slit centuries before by a group of Jewish merchants. In the
chapel, we saw the gray boulder on which the toddler had
reportedly been slaughtered. We marveled at the imprint
of the tiny body miraculously left behind, a silent witness
to a crime so heinous it softened the very stone. We were
encouraged to ponder the pictures on the chapel walls of
the heinous act being committed, to kneel for prayer in
the pews, and to imagine the child’s agony and his mother’s
despair when she discovered her son’s exsanguinated
corpse hanging from a birch tree.
In the months and years following that class outing, in
the recesses of my mind, doubts began to stir. Initially, I
had been sickened by the teacher’s story and the gruesome
pictures of the murder. Eventually, the entire tradition, especially
the miraculously imprinted stone, began to make
no sense and seemed fabricated in order to terrify Christian
children, malign Jews, and attract pilgrim business.
This suspicion was reinforced by a fine priest, Professor
Anton Egger, my religion teacher at the Realgymnasium
[Secondary School], who was clearly unimpressed by the
cult and who told me years later that he had doubted the
legitimacy of the devotion all along. Especially when I
discovered that a folk drama version of the Anderl murder
by a Norbertine canon, Gottfried Schöpf, was still regularly
performed, I began to connect the ways Jews of the
past were depicted in pious tales with the ways ordinary
Christians continued to view their Jewish contemporaries.
Between 1985 and 1994, due to the efforts of Bishop
Reinhold Stecher, the blood libel story was officially debunked, little Anderl was debeatified and the shrine was
turned into a memorial to the victims of anti-Semitism,
with the following inscription, here cited in translation,
on a plaque: “This stone reminds us of a dark deed of
blood as well as, by its very name, of the many sins Christians
have committed against Jews. In the future it shall
serve as a sign of our reconciliation with the people who
have borne us the savior.” However, this did not neutralize
the extent to which the shrine attracted pilgrims and,
with its graphic depictions of the murder, the extent to
which it helped shape the ways countless visitors, especially
children in their most formative years, viewed Jews,
even after World War II, as it had for centuries before.
The power of image to shape one’s understanding of
reality and especially one’s preconscious, intuitive assumptions
cannot be overemphasized, and it affects people
of all traditions as it grinds the hermeneutical lenses
and shapes the mirrors through and in which we view/
create the “other”—whether the “other” is Jew, Christian,
Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, atheist, Republican,
Democrat, conservative, liberal, and so forth ad infinitum. As long as they are not presented as the “one and
only” privileged truth, these differing perspectives can
serve as valuable steps toward a balanced, multifaceted,
dynamically evolving understanding of whatever one
seeks to comprehend. By absolutizing any one position,
truth is reduced to dogma, which is, concerning the quest
for the historical Jesus, precisely the position taken by Joseph Ratzinger when he insists that seeking to know Jesus
cannot be legitimate unless it is done through the lens of
the kerygmatic Christ of faith, which is clearly impossible
for any non-Christian (and even some who consider themselves
Christians). In this book, Homolka convincingly
engages Ratzinger and makes a case for the importance of
understanding how Jesus has been viewed in close to two
millennia of Jewish tradition.
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, especially
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 collaborating
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, accessible
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.
Notes
This 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: Random
House, 2000), 29ff.
Preface
Preface
When Reza Aslan published his academic study on the
life of Jesus, he pursued his passionate interest in the person
of Jesus as a historical figure. In Zealot, Aslan paints a
picture of a zealous revolutionary from ignorant and poor
Galilee, a man whose aim was not so much a heavenly
kingdom as a Palestine liberated from Roman occupation.
Did Jesus understand the concept of a God who became
human? According to Aslan: no. Aslan’s Jesus is fully and
completely Jewish, animated by the messianic thought
that King David’s Israel must be resurrected as a state under
God’s authority. Readers’ reactions were extremely divided.
As it turns out, however, many were more troubled
by the author rather than the content itself.1
Reza Aslan is
Muslim.
Aslan’s book belongs to a genre that goes back to Hermann
Samuel Reimarus in the eighteenth century. Research
on the life of Jesus has experienced three major
waves since that time. Aslan is probably the first Muslim
author in this field, although he has always insisted that
he writes from an impartial scholarly perspective.
The question whether he—a Muslim—has the right to
do so is not new either; similar questions have been asked
over the past two centuries as Jewish scholars became increasingly
interested in the topic. But why might Jews be
interested in Jesus? At first glance, one could surmise that
research on Jesus through Jewish eyes does not exactly
promise success. In the words of the British rabbi Jonathan Magonet, “The question of who Jesus was or might
have been is actually of interest to very few Jews. Or to be even more precise, among most Jews he has no significance whatsoever.”2
This book attempts to do justice to Jesus of Nazareth
in his Jewish setting and to depict the Jewish perception
of Jesus throughout the centuries. It goes without saying
that an unbiased view of Jesus by Jews is a difficult task.
His historical impact represents a dramatic threat not only
to Judaism as a whole, but also existentially to each individual
Jew. Centuries of persecution, oppression, forced
migration, and exclusion in the name of Jesus imprinted
themselves deeply into the memory of a people whose fate
in the “Christian West” has been anything but easy. This
realization, however, also raises the question of whether
Jewish scholars can engage in a meaningful discussion of
Jesus as a person considering their concern with Christianity
as a rival religion.
This book would not have been possible without my
twenty-five years of academic engagement with Christianity
from a Jewish perspective. My special thanks go to
the faculty members who respectfully welcomed me and
served as my intellectual inspiration between 1983 and
1986 while I was a Jewish guest student at the School of
Protestant Theology at the University of Munich and the
Munich School of Philosophy of the Jesuits in Germany.
My dissertation, supervised by Christoph Schwöbel at
King’s College London,3
drew on knowledge and experience
from that time. Those insights proved valuable
during the years of my practical rabbinate; which too were
shaped by the manifold interest many Christian communities
have in Judaism.
These experiences were further augmented in the committee
for Jewish-Christian dialogue hosted by the Central
Committee of German Catholics. In addition, I supplement
these diverse experiences with the insight that knowledge
gained from Judeo-Christian dialogue must be mediated
for each generation anew. I am very grateful that I had the opportunity to personally encounter outstanding Jewish
philosophers of religion such as Schalom Ben-Chorin,
Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich, and Pinchas Lapide. It is imperative
for me to continuously recall the findings of previous generations
of Jewish thinkers in order to preserve the ways
Jews and Christians understand one another. This volume
is an attempt to carry out this commission.
I am particularly grateful for Leonard Swidler’s initiative
to translate the German original into English. I am
honored to have received his reverence for my work and,
thanks to him, a thoroughly revised and much enhanced
English version is now available. All of this would not
have been possible without Ingrid Shafer’s immense effort
in taking it upon herself to translate the original book.
Translation is always creation and so I would like to express
my deep gratitude for her collaboration. I also wish
to give special thanks to Hartmut Bomhoff whose extensive
assistance helped this work achieve its present form.
Thanks also to Marie-Luise Schmidt who revised the book
for the English edition. And of course many thanks to
the copy editors who combed through the final versions:
Debra Corman, Caitlin Mahon, and David Heywood-Jones,
as well as Caroline Diepeveen for creating the index.
Finally, we must give thanks to the National Gallery
of London for giving us the rights to use one of Gerrit van Honthorst’s (1592–1656) most famous paintings for the
cover: Christ before the High Priest. Honthorst painted it
in Rome around 1617; the work shows the powerful influence
of Caravaggio. The scene is focused on the burning
candle in the center of the composition and the arm and
raised finger of the High Priest beside it. The book on the
table in front of the High Priest contains the proscriptions
of Mosaic Law. The painting is concentrated in theme: the
relationship of Jesus the Jew and his message within his
Jewish context.
Notes
1. See John Williams. “The Life of Jesus: Reza Aslan Talks
about Zealot.” New York Times, 2 August 2013. https://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).
3. Walter Homolka, Jewish Identity in Modern Times: Leo Baeck and German Protestantism (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1995).
When a Jew Looks
at the Sources
The Jesus of History
The Sources
The early Christian Gospels are considered the most important sources for the life of the historical Jesus.1 The Passion is of course the best documented episode. The earliest of the three Synoptic Gospels, the Gospel of Mark, dates to around 70 CE and is based on earlier sources. The source with the highest degree of authenticity is the socalled Q source where we can read Jesus’s words. John’s Gospel—the latest of the four Gospels, dated around the end of the first century—has limited historical value because of its post-Easter faith perspective. The non-Christian testimonials (Flavius Josephus, Suetonius, Tacitus) offer us little on Jesus’s biography.2 According to Johann Maier, the first but rather insignificant Jewish reference to Jesus is in the so-called Testimony Flavianum in Josephus Jewish Antiquities XVIII, pp. 63f. (cf. XX, pp. 199–203, the martyrdom of James), the wording of which was probably edited much later by Christians.3 According to Josephus:
The Early Years
The early Christian Gospels are considered the most important sources for the life of the historical Jesus.1 The Passion is of course the best documented episode. The earliest of the three Synoptic Gospels, the Gospel of Mark, dates to around 70 CE and is based on earlier sources. The source with the highest degree of authenticity is the socalled Q source where we can read Jesus’s words. John’s Gospel—the latest of the four Gospels, dated around the end of the first century—has limited historical value because of its post-Easter faith perspective. The non-Christian testimonials (Flavius Josephus, Suetonius, Tacitus) offer us little on Jesus’s biography.2 According to Johann Maier, the first but rather insignificant Jewish reference to Jesus is in the so-called Testimony Flavianum in Josephus Jewish Antiquities XVIII, pp. 63f. (cf. XX, pp. 199–203, the martyrdom of James), the wording of which was probably edited much later by Christians.3 According to Josephus:
Now about this time arose an occasion for new disturbances a certain Jesus, a wizard of a man, if indeed he may be called a man who was the most monstrous of all men, whom his disciples call a son of God, as having done wonders such as no man hath ever done… He was in fact a teacher of astonishing tricks to such men as accept the abnormal with delight… And when, on the indictment of the principal men among us, Pilate had sentenced him to the cross, still those who before had admired him did not cease to rave.4
There can be little learned from the Gospels about Jesus’s
youth. He came from Nazareth in Lower Galilee and, according
to Matthew 1:18,5
he was the first child of Mary
(Miriam), born before the end of the reign of Herod the
Great in 4 BCE (Mt 2:1) (presumably a few years earlier).
His name, “Jesus,” is the Greek translation of the Hebrew
“Yeshua” (God helps). The Evangelist Mark writes of at
least six children: James, Joses, Judas, Simon, and the
sisters of Jesus, who remain nameless (Mk 6:3). Two fictional
lists of ancestors (Mt 1–17 and Lk 3:23–38) make
Jesus of Nazareth the descendant of Abraham and King
David, but like the topic of the virgin birth, they are not
intended as historical statements, instead carrying theological
significance.
It remains questionable whether Bethlehem near Jerusalem
is in fact the birthplace of Jesus or was just associated
with him because of God’s promise to King David.
The hypothesis that Jesus was born in the Galilean Bethlehem
(Beit Lehem Ha’glilit) near Nazareth rather than in
front of the gates of Jerusalem was argued as early as 1922
by Joseph Klausner (1874–1958).6
He pointed out that the
Galilean Bethlehem can be found in the Talmud and in
Midrashic literature and excavations prove that it was a
significant settlement at the time of Jesus; there is no such
evidence from the Herodian period for a Bethlehem in Judea.
The sentence “After eight days had passed, it was
time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the
name given by the angel before he was conceived in the
womb” (Lk 2:21) makes it clear that the family lived as
Jews among Jews. As the firstborn son of a Jewish family,
Jesus was redeemed in the Temple; later, Jesus learned his
father’s trade (Mk 6:3; Mt 13:55). Joseph was a craftsman
(Greek τέκτων, often misleadingly translated as “carpenter”),
probably involving working with wood, clay, or
stones. According to Luke 2:42–48, at the age of twelve,
Jesus impressed the scribes in the Jerusalem Temple with
his knowledge of the Torah, which points to the possibility
that he attended school, but might also be a fictional
insertion to identify him as an outstanding teacher of the
Torah. Although Jesus’s mother tongue was Galilean Western
Aramaic he must also have mastered Hebrew as according
to Luke 4:16–17 Jesus read from the Torah before
interpreting the text. His frequent question to his listeners
“Have you never [/not] read … ?” (e.g., Mk 2:25, 12:10,
12:26; Mt 12:5, 19:4) implies reading competence.
Public Appearance
Public Appearance
Based on the only clearly indicated date in the Gospels,
the appearance of John the Baptist, it is most reasonable,
according to biblical scholar Anton Vögtle, to assume a
public ministry of around two years, an assumption that is
consistent with a probable date of death during Passover
30 CE.7
According to Luke 3:1 and 3:23, Jesus was about
thirty years old when he began his public ministry: “In
the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when
Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea.” In the twenties of
the first century CE, Jesus belonged temporarily to the circle
around John the Baptist, who emerged as an ascetic prophet in Perea, a Transjordanian region near the Dead
Sea, and who called for repentance in light of the imminent
coming of the Lord and the Last Judgment. “Here
John offered the forgiveness of sins in ritual form—independently
of the possibilities of the temple in providing
atonement. This was a vote of no confidence in the central
religious institution of Judaism, which had become ineffective.”8
According to Luke 1:5, John was the son of the
priest Zechariah, of the priestly class Abijah, and Elizabeth,
from the family of Aaron.
Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan River complies with the
standard practice of the tevilah, the traditional full-body
immersion for ritual purification. The meeting with John
marked a decisive turning point. Jesus returned to Galilee
to follow his own calling and in the spring of 28 or 29 CE
he began his work as an independent charismatic itinerant
preacher. He resided at Capernaum on the northeast
end of Lake Gennesaret [Sea of Galilee] where his sphere
of influence included the Jewish area north and east of
the lake. At the time Galilee was considered an unruly
region. The local Jewish population was isolated from the
religious center in Judea and was threatened by pagan influence. Capernaum was right on the border between the
territories of Herod Antipas and Philippus.
Jesus apparently found little support in Capernaum
itself. From there, he moved on to the surrounding area
with his first companions, Shimon, Andrew, Levi, and
Mary Magdalene. He ordered his disciples to abandon
parents, children, and the usual daily activities and to
follow him: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father
and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters,
yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:26).
The Evangelist John writes of three years in which Jesus
appeared in public, while the three Synoptic Evangelists
mention only one year and also only one journey to Jerusalem.
His specific itineraries cannot be definitively reconstructed. Indeed, many locations listed in the Gospels
were later additions and reflected the spread of Christianity
at the time of their editorial revisions.
Jesus’s Message
Jesus’s Message
Based on the historical evidence and the scriptural sources
available, one may very well ask just how can we summarize
Jesus’s teachings succinctly. Theissen attempts just
this when he argues:
At the centre of Jesus’s message stood Jewish belief in God: for Jesus, God was a tremendous ethical 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 themselves 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 essentially
rabbinic; his parables10 (Hebrew: meshalim) followed
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 “calming”
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 “Rabbouni”
(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 hometown
and he was said never to have returned there. But according to Luke 8:2–3, Mark 1:31, and Mark 15:40, women
from around Jesus’s home supported him and his disciples.
According to Mark 15:41, they remained with him
to his death.
Like Hillel (30 BCE–9 CE), Jesus accorded the commandment
“love thy neighbor” the same importance as fear of
God and consequently placed them above all other Torah
commandments (Mk 12:28–34). Based on a Christian lack
of knowledge or misunderstanding of Judaism at Jesus’s
time, many believed, for a long time, Jesus represented an
interpretation of halakha which could not be derived from
Judaism. However, acknowledging the pluralist nature of
Judaism at that time, this passage is now read as an inner
Jewish interpretation of the Torah. For Joseph Klausner,
the Gospels describe Jesus as an observant Jew:
Arrest and Trial
As much as the Synoptic Gospels are filled with hostility toward the Pharisees, they cannot avoid describing Jesus as a Pharisaic Jew in his attitude toward the law. Accordingly, he demands that sacrifices be offered at various occasions (Mk 1:44; Mt 5:23–24), he also does not object to fasting and prayer, if it is done without arrogance (Mt 6:5–7, 6:16, 6:18). He himself follows all ceremonial laws, wears tassels (Mk 6:56 and parallels), pays the half shekel for the temple, makes the pilgrimages to Jerusalem for Passover, says the blessing over wine and bread, etc. He warns his students against contact with Gentiles and the Samaritans; he answers the request to heal a pagan child in a spirit of ultra-nationalism.11The “beatitudes” attributed to the Q source (Lk 6:20– 22; Mt 5:3–11) assure the poor, the mourners, the powerless, and the persecuted that for them the kingdom is already present and certain for their future as a just turn to compensate them for their suffering. They were the first and most important recipients of the words of Jesus. According to Luke 4:18–21, his “inaugural sermon” consisted only of the sentence “Today, this Scripture [Is 61:1–3] has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Thus, the biblical promise of a “Jubilee year” of forgiveness of debt and redistribution of land (Lv 25) was actualized for the contemporary poor. According to sociohistorical studies, the rural Jewish population suffered from exploitation, tax levies for Rome and the Temple, constant Roman military presence, debt slavery, hunger, epidemics, and social uprooting.12 Jesus’s relief for the poor, healing, and the coincidence of prayer and almsgiving were similar to that of the later charismatic miracle worker Hanina ben Dosa (ca. 40–75 CE), a representative of Galilean Hasidim.13 This is another reason why contemporary scholars of religion, unlike their predecessors, place Jesus of Nazareth entirely within the Judaism of his time and emphasize the similarity of his message to the teachings of the Pharisees.14
Arrest and Trial
Even if we combine all four Gospels, they still only really
talk about Jesus’s final years. The sequence of his entry
into Jerusalem, the cleansing of the Temple, arrest, interrogation
in the house of the High Priest, delivery to Pilate,
interrogation by the Romans, scourging, mockery, his execution
by Roman soldiers, and his burial are fairly consistent
in many details across all the Synoptic Gospels. The
question of who was originally responsible for his arrest,
however, is more controversial. For example, David Flusser
questions whether the High Council meeting which supposedly
condemned Jesus to death ever occurred.15
Jesus and his disciples spent the night at the foot of the Mount of Olives in Gethsemane, a rest area for Passover pilgrims. On the night following the final meal shared by Jesus and his disciples, Judas Iscariot reportedly led a crowd armed with “swords and clubs” (Mk 14:43) or a “detachment of soldiers” (Jn 18:3) to arrest them. Paul Winter, therefore, assumed that Jesus was arrested and sentenced not by the Jewish High Council, the Sanhedrin, but by the Romans, accompanied by the armed Jews of the Temple Guard. In this scenario, the occupiers sought to suppress the potential political-revolutionary tendencies that existed among Jesus’s followers or could have been stirred up by his message and deeds.16
Jesus and his disciples spent the night at the foot of the Mount of Olives in Gethsemane, a rest area for Passover pilgrims. On the night following the final meal shared by Jesus and his disciples, Judas Iscariot reportedly led a crowd armed with “swords and clubs” (Mk 14:43) or a “detachment of soldiers” (Jn 18:3) to arrest them. Paul Winter, therefore, assumed that Jesus was arrested and sentenced not by the Jewish High Council, the Sanhedrin, but by the Romans, accompanied by the armed Jews of the Temple Guard. In this scenario, the occupiers sought to suppress the potential political-revolutionary tendencies that existed among Jesus’s followers or could have been stirred up by his message and deeds.16
Historians holding both positions assume that both
the Romans and the Sadducee ruling class were interested
in Jesus’s arrest. The “Temple conflict” threatened both
the Jewish elites’ position of power as well as signifying
unpredictable consequences for the autonomy of the Jewish
community as a whole. In short, it could have caused
long-term political instability.17 According to this interpretation,
Caiaphas’s statement, recorded in John 11:50,
that “it is better for you to have one man die for the people
than to have the whole nation destroyed” is plausible.
Two contemporary Jewish legal experts have examined
Jesus’s trial.18 Haim Cohn (1911–2002), Supreme
Court judge of the state of Israel and legal historian, examined
the trial extensively and provided a detailed picture
of the most likely events surrounding the Crucifixion.19
His book was published in 1968 in Hebrew and in 1980
in English. Justice Cohn presents a search for forensic and
historical analysis to create a legal, political, and religious
context for the events as they might really have happened.
Cohn’s readers are encouraged to give their own verdict
on whether we can actually speak of Jewish responsibility
for the death of Jesus.
The Hessian attorney general Fritz Bauer (1903–1968) is best known for his legal processing of a number of Nazi war crimes. His essay “The Trial of Jesus” (1965)20 is essentially a plea for a more humane legal system. He writes, “Pilate’s verdict reflects the human shortcomings of all judgment, the misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the actual events, the excessive demands on the judge by public opinion and its pressure on his verdict.”21 Bauer reminds us that from the religious Christian point of view, the “trial of Jesus culminating in the Crucifixion represented God’s judgment and will; it was part of the Almighty’s plan for the world; without it there would be no Christianity.”22
The Hessian attorney general Fritz Bauer (1903–1968) is best known for his legal processing of a number of Nazi war crimes. His essay “The Trial of Jesus” (1965)20 is essentially a plea for a more humane legal system. He writes, “Pilate’s verdict reflects the human shortcomings of all judgment, the misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the actual events, the excessive demands on the judge by public opinion and its pressure on his verdict.”21 Bauer reminds us that from the religious Christian point of view, the “trial of Jesus culminating in the Crucifixion represented God’s judgment and will; it was part of the Almighty’s plan for the world; without it there would be no Christianity.”22
Death
All four Gospels are unanimous that the execution sanctioned by Pontius Pilate as governor of Judea (26–36 CE) took place the day before the Sabbath, thus on a Friday. This was the main Passover holy day for the Synoptics as it followed the Seder and so, according to the Jewish calendar, it must have been the fifteenth of Nisan. In the Gospel of John, however, it was just before Passover— the fourteenth of Nisan. This dating, which attests to the strong narrative and fictional character of this late Gospel, has theological significance: Jesus would have died at the time of the slaughter of the Passover lamb.
All four Gospels are unanimous that the execution sanctioned by Pontius Pilate as governor of Judea (26–36 CE) took place the day before the Sabbath, thus on a Friday. This was the main Passover holy day for the Synoptics as it followed the Seder and so, according to the Jewish calendar, it must have been the fifteenth of Nisan. In the Gospel of John, however, it was just before Passover— the fourteenth of Nisan. This dating, which attests to the strong narrative and fictional character of this late Gospel, has theological significance: Jesus would have died at the time of the slaughter of the Passover lamb.
According to Mark 15:27, Jesus was crucified along
with two bandits on the hill of Golgotha (place of the
skull) outside Jerusalem’s walls and, according to Luke
23:35–37, it was accompanied by the scorn and derision
of those present. The pre-Markian Passion narrative provides
no additional details and only indicates that Jesus
was “crucified at the third hour” and “died at the ninth
hour.” Calendric and astronomical calculations suggest 30
CE as the most likely year of death.23
________
________
Notes
1. For a more thorough analysis, see Gerd Theissen and
Annette Merz, The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive
Guide (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1998), 17–
124; Peter J. Tomson, “If This Be from Heaven …”: Jesus
and the New Testament Authors in Their Relationship
to Judaism (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press,
2001).
2. Cf. Wolfgang Stegemann, Jesus und seine Zeit (Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, 2009); Jürgen Roloff, “Jesus von Nazareth,”
in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Hans Dieter
Betz, 4th ed. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), vol. 4,
col. 463f.
3. Johann Maier, Judentum von A bis Z: Glauben, Geschichte,
Kultur (Freiburg: Herder, 2001), 231.
4. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities: Books XVIII–XIX, tr. Louis
H. Feldman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1965), 48.
5. Unless otherwise specified all biblical references are
from The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha,
edited by Bruce M. Metzger and Roland Murphy,
copyright 1991.
6. Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times and
Teachings trans. Herbert Danby (New York: Bloch, 1989;
Hebrew ed., 1922), 231f.
7. Anton Vögtle, “Jesus Christus nach den geschichtlichen
Quellen,” in Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, ed. Josef
Höfer and Karl Rahner, 2nd ed. (Freiburg: Herder, 1986),
vol. 5, col. 922ff.
8. Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus, 569.
9. Ibid., 570.
10. Gary G. Porton, “The Parable in the Hebrew Bible and
Rabbinic Literature,” in The Historical Jesus in Context,
ed. Amy-Jill Levine, Dale C. Allison Jr., and John Dominic
Crossan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2006), 206–221.
11. Joseph Klausner, “Jesus von Nazareth,” in Encyclopaedia
Judaica (Berlin: Eschkol, 1932), vol. 9, col. 69f. See
also Herbert W. Basser, “Gospel and Talmud,” in Levine,
Allison, and Crossan, Historical Jesus in Context, 285–
295; Bruce Chilton, “Targum, Jesus, and the Gospels,” in
Levine, Allison, and Crossan, Historical Jesus in Context,
238–255.
12. David L. Balch and John E. Stambaugh, The New Testament
in Its Social Environment (Philadelphia: Westminster
Press, 1986), 102.
13. Bernd Kollmann, “Paulus als Wundertäter,” in Paulinische
Christologie, ed. Udo Schnelle and Thomas Söding
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 95f.
14. Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus, 571. See also Schalom
Ben-Chorin, “Judentum und Jesusbild,” in Neues Lexikon
des Judentums, ed. Julius H. Schoeps (Gütersloh:
Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2000), 400–402.
15. David Flusser, The Sage from Galilee: Rediscovering Jesus’
Genius (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans,
2007), 138–142.
16. Paul Winter, On the Trial of Jesus, ed. T. A. Burkill and
Géza Vermes, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1974),
44–48, 136ff.
17. Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus, 468, 571.
18. See also David R. Catchpole, The Trial of Jesus: A Study
in the Gospels and Jewish Historiography from 1777 to
the Present Day (Leiden: Brill, 1971).
19. Haim Cohn, The Trial and Death of Jesus (New York:
Ktav, 1980).
20. Fritz Bauer, “Der Prozeß Jesu,” in Fritz Bauer: Die Humanität
der Rechtsordnung; Ausgewählte Schriften, ed.
Joachim Perels and Irmtrud Wojak (Frankfurt: Campus,
1998), 411–426.
21. Ibid., 424.
22. Ibid., 411.
23. Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus, 572; Roloff, “Jesus
von Nazareth,” vol. 4, col. 466.
[...]
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☞ These are the...
Foreword
Leonard Swidler
[...]
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☞ These are the...
CONTENTS
Foreword
Leonard Swidler
Translator’s Preface
Ingrid Shafer
Ingrid Shafer
Preface
Introduction: The Life of Jesus according to the Sources
- The Sources
- The Early Years
- Public Appearance
- Jesus’s Message
- Arrest and Trial
- Death
Chapter 1. Jewish Images of Jesus prior to the Early Modern Period
- Jesus in the Mishnah and Talmud
- The Toldot Yeshu
- Rabbinic Polemics against Jesus
- Christian Talmud Criticism and Censorship
Chapter 2. The Historical Jesus since the Early Modern Period
- Jesus and the Jewish Enlightenment
- The Christian Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Departure from Dogma
- The Jewish Quest of the Historical Jesus as Repatriation of Jesus to Judaism
- The Berlin Anti-Semitism Debate
- The “Jesus Scandal” around Max Liebermann
- Leo Baeck and Adolf von Harnack: The Controversy
Chapter 3. The Jewish Quest of Jesus
- From Joseph Klausner to Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich
Chapter 4. Joseph Ratzinger and the Jewish Jesus
- That Jesus Was a Jew: A Cultural Coincidence?
- The “Rabbi Jesus”: For Christians Only as Important as Christ?
- “Reading the Whole Bible in the Light of Christ”: Joseph Ratzinger’s Hermeneutics
- Christian Faith and “Historical Reason”
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Index