A few years ago, a Time Magazine article identified "Re-Judaizing Jesus"---especially, embracing the principle that Jesus can't be properly understood apart from his first-century Jewish context---as a major trend.
On the level of scholarship, this trend means that the "Quest for the Historical Jesus" is at long last fully living up to its name.
Originally, the "quest" was about skeptics describing a Jesus they could believe in. The goal was to separate the "Jesus of history" from the "Christ of faith". For example, American President Thomas Jefferson admired Jesus as a moral teacher but didn't believe in the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, or Jesus' healing miracles. He produced an edited version of the gospels, removing all traces of the miraculous.
Such efforts failed to pay sufficient attention to the historical background of the gospels. As a result, their authors created Jesuses in their own image. While critical of the gospel text, they uncritically passed along false negative stereotypes about first-century Judaism. These defects persist right up through the work of the modern Jesus Seminar.
But in the recent "Third Quest", the emphasis has been on the Jewishness of Jesus. There's been a great deal of fruitful interaction between Christian and Jewish scholars. Scholarly commentaries from the last 30 years or more pay a great deal of attention to the historical setting of the gospels.
Interestingly, this trend has served to highlight much evidence supporting the authenticity of the gospel accounts, thus narrowing the alleged gap between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. In her new book Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus: How the Jewishness of Jesus Can Transform Your Faith, Dr. Lois Tverberg explains that this kind of information was one of the things that led her to a deeper study of the gospels (see p. 15). Three examples:
- Some writers--e.g., Dan Brown in The DaVinci Code--have claimed that Jesus must have been married, since marriage was expected in his culture. But it turns out that itinerant teachers like Jesus sometimes postponed marriage because they were on the road so much of the time (pp. 27-28).
- Liberal scholar John Dominic Crossan has said that Jesus must have been an illiterate peasant and couldn't have been the sage portrayed in the gospels. However, closer study supports a picture of first-century Judaism in which literacy and knowledge of the scriptures were widespread enough to back up the gospel accounts.
- It is often asserted that Jesus made no messianic claims for himself. But a closer look at the sayings attributed to him shows that he repeatedly made such claims in an indirect way through references to scripture (pp. 45-49). Such indirect messianic claims are so pervasive in the gospels that if one were to edit them out, few sayings of Jesus would remain. (On this point, see also the article "Who Did Jesus Say He Was?" in Issue 9 of Grace & Knowledge.)
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lois tverberg, rabbi jesus
Posted at: 04:18 PM | Add Comment
