IN
THIS ISSUE
|
JEWISH PERSPECTIVES ON CHRISTIANITY |
Back in Issue 5 of Grace & Knowledge, we reprinted a 1997 First
Things article entitled "The Jews as the
Christians Saw Them," written by eminent Church historian Robert Louis
Wilken. In this article, Professor Wilken points out that there is a tremendous amount of
common ground between Judaism and Christianity. Most notably, both Jews and
Christians worship the one God of Israel, and both hold the Hebrew Scriptures
to be divinely inspired.
Jews
and Christians also have some fundamental disagreements, centering especially around the identity and authority of Jesus of Nazareth.
These disagreements too often have resulted in antagonism and strife. As Wilken reports, many Christians came to believe that God
had rejected the Jewish people, viewing the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and
the Temple as evidence of divine punishment. (Those Christians had forgotten
Romans 11:29, which describes God's covenant relationship with Israel as
"irrevocable.") Sadly, such attitudes eventually led to severe
Christian persecution of Jews.
One
of our readers, after seeing the Wilken article,
wrote to me that it would be very interesting to learn more about "The
Christians as the Jews Saw Them." Keeping that reader's comment in mind, I
have kept my eyes open for information on Jewish views of Christians and
Christianity. The current issue of Grace & Knowledge includes two
articles on this topic.
Historically,
it has not always been safe for Jews to criticize Christianity openly,
especially in places where Jews were a minority living under Christian rule.
However, the rabbis who compiled the Babylonian Talmud enjoyed a great deal of
freedom, and the Talmud contains a number of comments about Jesus, his
teachings, and his disciples. (For more information on these comments, see
Peter Schäfer's Jesus in the Talmud,
Princeton University Press, 2007.) In this issue, we present a detailed
discussion of one example, a clever joke made at the expense of any
Christian who believes that God's commandments and covenant with Israel are
obsolete.
Since
the time of the Holocaust, there has been widespread repentance among
Christians of past anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. (This Christian change of
heart is another focus of the Wilken article.) In
today's more positive and open climate, an increasing amount of productive
dialogue takes place between Jews and Christians. In this issue I report on a challenging lecture
given by Dr. Michael J. Cook, a Jewish scholar of the New Testament, on the
subject of how Jews view Jesus and the Gospels. As a Christian, I did not find
this lecture easy to hear, and my report includes my Christian responses to the
Jewish perspectives presented in the lecture. I hope that you find this report,
along with the
rest of Issue 26, to be stimulating and helpful.
--Doug Ward
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