Chapter 39 of 404

CHAPTER 3 - Jesus and Judaism

CHAPTER 3

Jesus and Judaism

“When the Third Quest was launched, one of the main characteristics that distinguished it from the First Quest of 19th-century German Protestantism and the Second (existentialist) Quest of the students of Rudolf Bultmann in the 1950s and 1960s was its determination to take the Jewishness of Jesus with utter seriousness and to situate him squarely within Palestinian Judaism at the turn of the era.”

JOHN P. MEIER¹

“The chief finding of Jesus the Jew is the recognition of Jesus within the earliest Gospel tradition . . . as a charismatic prophetic preacher and miracle-worker, the outstanding ‘Galilean Hasid.’”

GEZA VERMES²

The discussion of Jesus’ Jewish context is close to the heart of most current Jesus scholarship. A major earlier phase of Jesus research pursued the Gospels’ sources; Bultmann’s phase, more interested in the early church’s preaching than in what could be known historically about Jesus, asked how the traditions were shaped by preaching. By contrast, Jesus’ historical context dominates the present discussion.³ Partly for this reason, Jesus research today is on the whole less skeptical about what we can know about Jesus than mid-twentieth-century scholarship was.⁴

The largest divide today is between the view that Jesus was a Cynic-type wisdom teacher and the view that he was an eschatological prophet.⁵ The latter remains the majority view,⁶ although if one subtracts the specifically Cynic element these categories need not be mutually exclusive. What most unites the majority of Jesus researchers today (including some scholars who deny Jesus’ eschatological approach) is an emphasis on Jesus’ Jewish context.⁷ The pictures of Jesus this scholarship produces are more plausible than other reconstructions because they are more accurately grounded in what we can know historically about Jesus’ setting. Nevertheless, a range of views exist, depending partly on the aspects of Jesus’ Jewish setting selected for attention.

The handful of representative views selected in this chapter each work to build a cohesive picture of Jesus around a key theme or themes. In so doing, they leave out some evidence, but also offer more of a distinctive thesis about Jesus’ mission than one would gather from works focused on methodology, sayings traditions, and so forth. They also overlap on many points despite their distinctive emphases. Thus Borg insists on Jesus as a sage, prophet, and founder of a renewal movement, though not a strictly end-time prophet. Vermes compares the perspectives of Sanders (and Martin Hengel) to his own, suggesting that Jesus was “charismatic healer — teacher — prophet.”⁸ For heuristic purposes, however, I shall highlight some characteristic and relatively distinctive features of each of these portrayals.

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