12/27/2022 0 Comments Hays rich eggy hanukkah![]() ![]() As a trained and published scholar in another field (Shakespeare), with both creative impulses and cautious practices, I am careful to offer my essay, not as a work of scholarship, but as a reasoned inquiry into long-standing religious beliefs and more recently emerging scholarly interpretations. I am not a trained scholar, only a self-informed student, in the religious history of the first century of the Common Era. I repeat some questions because of their pertinence to distinct topics in different sections. Section 5, “Judaism and Jesus,” suggests what Jesus might mean to Jews if they choose to recover him as one of their own. Section 4, “Christianity and Jesus,” explores the relationship between the pre-Easter man and the post-Easter messiah, and examines Christianity more in a Hellenic than in a Hebraic context. Section 3, “Jesus: History and Myth,” assesses the Synoptic Gospel accounts of the “historical” Jesus and suggests a myth-based account of Jesus’ last days. Section 2, “The Quest for the Historical Jesus,” analyzes its purposes, contributions, and prejudices. I develop the many arguments embedded in these approaches by a progressive presentation of partly overlapping topics. But, implicit in his ministry, messages, and stances vis-à-vis religious and social norms, Jesus as a Jew, activist and critic, models what living Jewishly is at its best. To that end, they structured their narratives to parallel common pagan religious myths featuring the birth and death of a demi-god, and his resurrection as a god. Their contribution to Christianity has been advancing the faith through narratives created for the purpose of educating the faithful and converting the pagan. ![]() Thus, whatever the historical value of the Gospels is, they have little or no bearing on the theological significance of Jesus. No figure of a historical Jesus prepares for, is linked to, or is reflected by the crucified Christ. No scholarly analysis of the Synoptic Gospels has depicted a historical Jesus as a Jew identifiable as the messiah by contemporary Jews or free of Hellenic influences. I offer the following as an abstract of what follows. Christianity may be Judaism’s younger sibling, but it is no longer a young child it is mature adult and should believe and act like one. The other portrait shows a Christianity that can and should detach itself from the Gospel-inspired canards of Jews as hostile to Jesus, hateful to Christians, and Christ-killers, and the doctrine of supersessionism which has enabled anti-Semitism and embedded it within Christianity. And of this Jewish Jesus, it might be said, “dayenu.” He was always there, just layered over by Christologizing. Thus cleansed, one portrait depicts a Jewish Jesus consistent with Jewish law, principles, and values and committed to the equality and wellbeing of all, and to the obligations to strive for social and political reform, and to speak truth to power. For this reason, Christianity has never needed a historical Jesus and no longer needs polemical Gospels for Christianity to survive and thrive. These two miracles, articulated in the earliest, essential Christian creeds, Nicene and Apostles’, comprise the central narrative of birth, death, and resurrection, with its promises of salvation and everlasting life, which has inspired billions worldwide for two millennia. The other approach identifies narrative structures and religious components derived, not from Hebraic sources, but from Hellenic ones, and shaping the central events of Christian belief: a miraculously born and miraculously resurrected god. (These Gospels are those of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, but not John, which, with rare exceptions, most scholars deem the least historically reliable.) The process involves discounting, countering, or correcting elements of these narratives written to educate the faithful and proselytize the pagans outside Palestine, in the Levant and the Mediterranean basin. One approach reconsiders the main difficulties in the Synoptic Gospels presumably relating the events, words, and deeds of Jesus’ life and death, to identify, not the “historical Jesus” of Christian scholars, but a truly Jewish Jesus in Jewish terms. This revision involves two cleansing approaches. The last part is the careful renewal of the original portrait with duplicate colors and strokes. The first, hardest, and longest part is the meticulous cleaning to remove layers of dust, varnish, and paint poorly applied in previous efforts. This effort resembles the restoration of an old painting. This article offers a revisualization of Jesus, not as a Christian diptych representing Jesus and Christ, the before-and-after-the-Crucifixion figures of conventional historical and theological thinking, but as two portraits, one of Jesus as a Jew who can be a model for living Jewishly today, the other as the demi-god Jesus who became the god Christ. ![]()
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