Teaching the Historical Jesus: Issues and Exegesis (Routledge Studies in Religion)
Language: English
Pages: 284
ISBN: 1138794619
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
of Nazareth is one of these. Zeffirelli’s Jesus frequents the synagogue, where he has an almost filial devotion to the rabbi. However, when Jesus begins to give voice to his own thoughts, he is driven from the synagogue as a “blasphemer” not by the rabbi, but by prickly congregants. Philip and Andrew—up until now followers of John the Baptist—are present at the synagogue that day. They too are observant Jews. Upon Jesus’ ouster from the synagogue, they present themselves to him and accompany him
best of current academic discussions results in a flimsy Jewish self-understanding. The course begins by problematizing the basic categories of analysis generally used in courses like this, that is, I have students explore differences between studying “religion” compared with studying the history of a “people.” Thus I ask them to compare what it means to study the history of Judaism, the history of the Jews or Jewish history. I do this not only because it is critical for all courses to make clear
Jews and Judaism or that the Jews misunderstood Jesus’s mission, betrayed his cause and that of his disciples and thus brought upon themselves the misery that ensued throughout the next millennia. Augustine and other Fathers of the Church needed to have a miserable remnant of “abject” Judaism in order to provide living proof of the success from Old to New Israel and conformation of their allegorical readings of what they called the Old Testament. Although not superficially like most narratives of
tradition embedded in biblical Judaism. 4) In New Testament times, religious and mystical trends were not narrowly defined. It is possible to reconstruct a Jewish-Christian theology that is aligned with mainstream Judaism during the Second Temple period. 5) The process by which the Jewish Jesus movement ultimately evolved into Christianity as it is known today is both complex and uncertain. Indeed, there does not seem to have been a precise moment in time when it can be said the changeover took
ruling given. By Jesus’ time, it had already been replaced by monetary substitution or reparations for injuries. In later rabbinic tradition the death penalty itself was rejected and replaced with the ḥerem, ritual excommunication. The Catholic Church only in the latter part of the twentieth century followed the rabbis in rejecting capital punishment. The mandate to love one’s enemies (Matt 5:43–48) comes straight from the book of Leviticus, again Chapter 19: “You shall not hate your brother