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The Jewish Gospels (2012)

by Daniel Boyarin(Favorite Author)

4.09 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1595584684 (ISBN13: 9781595584687)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

New Press, The

review 1: Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, along comes Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Talmudic Culture and Rhetoric at the University of California.You think Christianity’s unique contribution to Judaism was the introduction of a god-man? Wrong. Could it be the idea of a suffering savior? Wrong again. Maybe that Jesus rejected Jewish dietary laws and Sabbath restrictions, freeing us from the Law? Hardly; Boyarin paints a very Jewish Jesus in his reading of the Gospels, certainly a Jesus who keeps kosher.Christianity’s one claim to fame may be the insistence that the Messiah had already arrived, but that’s about the extent of its uniqueness. Otherwise, Christianity is a very Jewish offshoot of a Jewish religion. Boyarin draws from texts like the Book of Dani... moreel and 1st Enoch to explain the title Son of Man (which, it turns out, is a much more exalted title than Son of God) and in turn to expose the expectation of many first-century Jews of just such a divine savior.This is a fascinating, controversial book presenting a very different look at Jesus as one who defended Torah from wayward Judaic sects (the Pharisees), rather than vice versa. I don’t think the arguments are fully developed yet, but certainly Boyarin introduces “reasonable doubt” against traditional scholarship. Let the arguing begin.
review 2: Christians and Jews have been misreading the Gospels as signaling a definite break between the two religions for centuries. Jews claim that the Gospels advocate heretical ideas about a divine messiah—a bi-theism— alien to Israelite religion; Christians have been reading Jesus as a radical innovator leaving his Jewish context and hostile to Jewish Law. Both readings, Boyarin argues, are wrong. Boyarin helped spread the framework that Christianity was a version of Judaism for its first few centuries, not a new religion--that the ways didn’t “part” so definitively. Here he shows how passages in Daniel, Mark and Enoch explain each other—an Israelite tradition of a divine “Son of Man” and suffering Messiah. Some Jews thought Jesus was that divine Messiah. Going against much received scholarship and tradition, he shows that Jesus’s arguments against the Pharisee in Mark’s Gospel are conservative, defending Torah Law and Kosher practices against the innovating Elders. A category-bending book! less

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