The Historical Jesus Through Catholic And Jewish Eyes

A collection of essays that examines the Galilean peasant named Jesus—the historical understanding of him and what difference that makes—from the perspective of Catholic and Jewish scholars.

Publisher description

No matter what we would make of Jesus, says Schalom Ben-Chorin, he was first a Jewish man in a Jewish land. Brother Jesus leads us through the twists and turns of history to reveal the figure who extends a "brotherly hand" to the author as a fellow Jew. Ben-Chorin's reach is astounding as he moves easily between literature, law, etymology, psychology, and theology to recover "Jesus' picture from the Christian overpainting." A commanding scholar of the historical Jesus who also devoted his life to widening Jewish-Christian dialogue, Ben-Chorin ranges across such events as the wedding at Cana, the Last Supper, and the crucifixion to reveal, in contemporary Christianity, traces of the Jewish codes and customs in which Jesus was immersed. Not only do we see how and why these events also resonate with Jews, but we are brought closer to Christianity in its primitive state: radical, directionless, even pagan. Early in his book, Ben-Chorin writes, "the belief of Jesus unifies us, but the belief in Jesus divides us." It is the kind of paradox from which arise endless questions or, as Ben-Chorin would have it, endless opportunities for Jews and Christians to come together for meaningful, mutual discovery.

With ca. 120 articles from ca. 100 writers from ca. 20 countries, this publication forms a repository where students and scholars can readily get to know their way around the breadth of recent research on the historical Jesus.

Teaching the Historical Jesus in his Jewish context to students of varied religious backgrounds presents instructors with not only challenges, but also opportunities to sustain interfaith dialogue and foster mutual understanding and respect. This new collection explores these challenges and opportunities, gathering together experiential lessons drawn from teaching Jesus in a wide variety of settings—from the public, secular two- or four-year college, to the Jesuit university, to the Rabbinic school or seminary, to the orthodox, religious Israeli university. A diverse group of Jewish and Christian scholars reflect on their own classroom experiences and explicates crucial issues for teaching Jesus in a way that encourages students at every level to enter into an encounter with the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament without paternalism, parochialism, or prejudice. This volume is a valuable resource for instructors and graduate students interested in an interfaith approach in the classroom, and provides practical case studies for scholars working on Jewish-Christian relations.

"Jesus and the Gospels" is one of the most popular religion courses at colleges, and it is required at many seminaries and divinity schools. This textbook, written by an award-winning educator, is designed for a semester-long course in both these settings. Moreover, it could be used as a supplementary text in courses on christology, the historical Jesus, New Testament literature, and the Bible. Murphy will provide an introduction to the gospels that does justice to the full range of modern critical methods and insights. He will discuss the implications of these methods for how we understand the nature of the gospels and how we can read them today. The chapters will sketch the portrait of Jesus that emerges from each gospel, and then examine the "canonical" view of Jesus by comparing and contrasting these pictures, as well as the ones that emerge from the non-canonical gospels and from the modern quest for the historical Jesus. Chapter list: Introduction, Theological and Historical Backgrounds; Chapter 1, What is a Gospel? Chapter 2, History of Critical Methods for Gospel Study; Chapter 3, The Gospel of Mark; Chapter 4, Q; Chapter 5, Matthew; Chapter 6, Luke; Chapter 7, John; Chapter 8, Other Gospels (Gospel of Thomas, Infancy Gospels, other Apocryphal Gospels); Chapter 8, Christian Interpretations of Jesus; Chapter 9, The Historical Jesus; Chapter 10, Conclusion; Glossary; Further Reading; Notes; Subject Index. (Charts, sidebars, illustrations, and maps.)

The Quests for the Historical Jesus resulted in a move “back to the Jewish roots!” Jewish Jesus research positioned Jewry within a dominantly Christian culture and permitted Jews to feel more at ease with Jesus the Jew. Christians are challenged to respond now with a new Christology.