Jews And Christians

A compelling account of Christianity’s Jewish beginnings, from one of the world’s leading scholars of ancient religion How did a group of charismatic, apocalyptic Jewish missionaries, working to prepare their world for the impending realization of God's promises to Israel, end up inaugurating a movement that would grow into the gentile church? Committed to Jesus’s prophecy—“The Kingdom of God is at hand!”—they were, in their own eyes, history's last generation. But in history's eyes, they became the first Christians. In this electrifying social and intellectual history, Paula Fredriksen answers this question by reconstructing the life of the earliest Jerusalem community. As her account arcs from this group’s hopeful celebration of Passover with Jesus, through their bitter controversies that fragmented the movement’s midcentury missions, to the city’s fiery end in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, she brings this vibrant apostolic community to life. Fredriksen offers a vivid portrait both of this temple-centered messianic movement and of the bedrock convictions that animated and sustained it.

Jews among Christians explores a corpus of illuminated Hebrew manuscripts of the Lake Constance region produced in the first decades of the fourteenth century. The author Sarit Shalev-Eyni, Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, provides a detailed and insightful study of the content, design, and iconography of the illustrations and decorations of a group of Ashkenahzi codices, thereby uncovering a surprising interface between Jews and Christians in the urban workshops of the time. Here, Christian artists would include midrashic components required by their Jewish instructor while drawing on the iconographic traditions of their Christian education, and artists of both religions were able to represent their own theological attitudes as well as profane tendencies and parody - in short, the various aspects of late medieval culture.A close comparison with the well-known Gradual of St. Katharinenthal, now in Zurich, and manuscripts such as the Schocken Bible, formerly in Jerusalem, and the Tripartite Mahzor -- originally bound as two volumes, but now split between Budapest, London and Oxford -- places the corpus firmly in the Lake Constance region and all but confirms the instructor to be one Hayyim, the scribe. The author's discussion of Hayyim's life and work and her historical overview of the relations between Jews and Christians in the final chapters of the book deepens our understanding of the religious and cultural dialogue between the two faiths not only in the production of this group of manuscripts but in the course of every-day life in the Middle Ages.

While Christians and Jews have always been aware of their religious connections -- historical continuity, overlapping theology, shared scriptures -- that awareness has traditionally been infected by centuries of mutual suspicion and hostility. As this important volume shows, however, theologians and scholars of Judaism and Christianity alike are now radically rethinking the relation between their two covenant communities. "Jews and Christians" presents the best of this work, introducing readers to current attempts to construct a coherent Jewish theology of Christianity and a Christian theology of Judaism. Here are leading Christian and Jewish thinkers who have engaged in extensive conversation, who take each other's work seriously, and who avoid the pitfall common to Jewish-Christian dialogue -- watering down distinctive beliefs to accommodate both partners. Indeed, these pages show how the new theological exchange goes to the roots of that olive tree of which both Judaism and Christianity are branches, and the book as a whole represents post-Holocaust Jewish-Christian dialogue at the highest theological level. In addition to eight major chapters, "Jews and Christians" includes a moving testimony by Reidar Dittmann on his experience of the Holocaust and reprints the 2000 manifesto "Dabru Emet: A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity," followed by incisive Christian and Jewish responses. Contributors: Carl E. Braaten David B. Burrell Barry Cytron Reidar Dittmann David Bentley Hart Robert W. Jenson Jon D. Levenson George Lindbeck Richard John Neuhaus David Novak Peter Ochs Wolfhart Pannenberg R. Kendall Soulen Marvin R. Wilson

This volume discusses crucial aspects of the period between the two revolts against Rome in Judaea. This period saw the rise of rabbinic Judaism and the beginning of the split between Judaism and Christianity.

When Christians Were Jews tells the story of identity rediscovered. Narrating recent biblical scholarship as a story of family strife, Berard recounts how early Christians dissociated from their Jewish origins and reflects on the spiritual loss suffered by Christianity because of this division. He calls Christians to explore “with open mind and heart . . . the Jewishness not only of Jesus but of themselves.”

In this volume, Jacob Lassner examines the triangular relationship that during the Middle Ages defined - and continues to define today - the political and cultural interaction among the three Abrahamic faiths.

The papers in this volume are organized around the ambition to reboot the writing of history about Jews and Christians in the first two centuries CE. There are three focal points: (1) the varieties of Jewish and Christian expression in late Second Temple times, (2) the socio-economic, military, and ideological processes during the period of the revolts, and (3) the post-revolt Jewish and Christian identities that emerged. As such, the volume is part of a larger project that is to result in a source book and a history of Jews and Christians in the first and second centuries.