R. Shmuley Boteach has made the news, once again, with his book Kosher Jesus. I have not yet read the book and cannot offer an opinion on its merit. The idea, though, of a Jesus figure who is acceptable to traditional Jews is hardly new. However, any Jewish Jesus must be a non-Christian Jesus, and therefore any revisionist attempt to construct such an image will be theologically offensive to most Christians.
A “kosher” Jesus is one who would cringe at the most fundamental claims of Christianity, who would lament the very founding of the religion and his central place within it. That is why defenders of Judaism against Christian missionaries are often quick to accept such “Kosher Jesus” claims and why the Disputation literature advances variations on them. Advocating a “Kosher Jesus” is equivalent to defending Judaism and attacking Christianity.
Conceiving a Jewishly acceptable Jesus requires three steps:
- Rejecting the Gospels and subsequent literature as inaccurate but historically useful. By wiping away the authors’ biases, we can discover the historical truth underlying their writings.
- Accepting that there was a historical Jesus, and not merely a useful fiction or amalgamation of people.
- Reinterpreting Talmudic stories of Jesus as polemic or references to other people.
All of these steps have rabbinic precedent. While some Jewish scholars wishing to discredit Jesus have been happy to accept the Gospel narrative, which describes Jesus as acting ostensibly contrary to Jewish law and making claims offensive to Jewish theology, others have advocated different approaches. R. Shimon Duran (Rashbatz), for example, argues that the Gospels are riddled with errors because they were written by ignorant followers who misunderstood and misrepresented Jesus and his teachings. Rashbatz sees Jesus as an essentially traditional, if not particularly learned and occasionally sinful, Jew (Otzar Vikuchim, p. 118ff.).
R. Yechiel of Paris denied that the Jesus of the Talmud was the Jesus of the Gospels. After all, the name was (and remains) common. Others followed suit, and in a separate essay I make the same argument (link). According to this approach, the denunciations of Jesus in the Talmud have nothing to do with the Jesus of Christianity.
As we discussed two years ago when R. Shlomo Riskin stated that Jesus was a devout Jewish teacher, there is no single image of Jesus in Judaism (link). Dr. David Berger, in a sweeping essay on attitudes to Jesus in Medieval Jewish rabbinic literature (“On the Uses of History in Medieval Jewish Polemic Against Christianity: The Quest for the Historical Jesus” in his Persecution, Polemic, and Dialogue: Essays in Jewish-Christian Relations), described the varying approaches:
Whatever one thinks of the number of Jesuses in antiquity, no one can question the multiplicity of Jesuses in medieval Jewish polemic. Many Jews with no interest at all in history were forced to confront a historical/biographical question that continues to bedevil historians to our own day. Once the issue was joined, it produced a series of analyses that reflect profound differences among varying Jewish centers in different periods…
With the onset of the Rennaissance, as historians began to adopt systematic critical attitudes to history, Jewish scholars treated this and other topics with methodological skepticism. The three steps above became a given, although many rejected step 2 and assume there was no historical Jesus. Most recently, Hyam Maccoby, a Reform historian, published three books (I, II, III) in which he applied radical literary theory to the Gospels. His conclusion was that Jesus was a traditional Jew in the style of the later Bar Kokhba, a Pharisaic rebel who attempted to become a political messiah — a king of a Jewish country — but was discovered and executed by the Romans. In constructing a religion that was politically viable and socially attractive in the Roman empire, Paul rewrote Jesus’ history to incorporate Pagan mythology of salvation and divine incarnation, political passivism and release from religious laws. Maccoby wrote (The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, p. 184:
The truth, however, as we have seen, is that Jesus did not found a new religion at all, but simply sought to play an accepted role in the story of an existing religion, Judaism. It was Paul who founded Christianity, and he did so by creating a new story, one sufficiently powerful and gripping to launch a new world religion. In this new story Jesus was given a leading role, but this does not make him the creator of Christianity, any more than Hamlet wrote the plays of Shakespeare. The Jesus of Paul’s story was a fictional character, just as Shakespeare breathed new imaginative life into the bones of the historical figure of Hamlet the Dane.
This Jesus was kosher. He was a devout Jew who played a respected, if failed, role in Jewish life at the time. Like other Jews in that politically tumultuous period, Jesus tried to foment rebellion among his fellow Jews but did not succeed. He was a failed political messiah, not a successful religious Messiah.
The radical literary deconstruction Maccoby uses does not sit well with me as a methodology. The deconstruction of texts in order to discover the historical Jesus seems to me overly speculative. However, I am happy to remain agnostic over whether Jesus ever existed and whether he remained a devout Jew or founded a new religion because he is simply irrelevant to my life. Kosher or non-kosher, Jesus is not someone important to me since the religion founded on his life, whether accurately or not, is not mine.
However, he plays a central role in the religious lives of so many people that I prefer to refrain from speculating, at least publicly, in a way that they may find offensive. I gain nothing other than the alienation of millions of people across the world. R. Boteach’s book may be communally wise or not, depending on its specific message and delivery. However, I find it hard to accept that his book is somehow heretical if, as he states (link), he follows Maccoby’s approach. If his statements accurately represent his book, then he has conducted an attack on Christianity and, like the Disputants who preceded him, provided defense material for Jewish countermissionaries.
(As a matter of side interest, see here for R. Shalom Carmy’s negative evaluation of Maccoby’s approach: link. And see here for a summary of critiques of Maccoby’s view: link.)
I’m not sure what you mean. I think it is likely that they printed it knowing that he wrote it, since I find it very difficult to believe that his post on what is quite possibly the single most popular frum blog (apart for the blogs that don’t call themselve blogs, like Matzav, etc.) about them escaped their attention. I can’t say if they themselves decided to print it or if they truly did receive it as an email, but my point is that they are not absolved of lifting someone else’s work and printing it without permission. Either they knew or they should have known.
S.: Of course, I agree with you. I was just making a small joke at Gil’s expense.
I’m convinced they didn’t know. They forwarded me the e-mail they received and I can see the trail of forwards, all omitting attribution. You have to be burned once before you start Googling material to check for plagiarism.
This is the third frum publication I’ve found (one did it to a different blog and I caught it and sent the editor a strongly worded e-mail). I’ve never caught the same publication doing it twice.
Gil: OK. We’ll be dan le-kaf zechut.
I’ll say that I am. ;-)
I wonder if proper attribution is a chumra? :)
“Lawrence Kaplan on January 19, 2012 at 6:25 pm
Gil: OK. We’ll be dan le-kaf zechut.”
As IH has pointed out in correcting me in the past- the words are Dan LeCHaf zechut.
like i mentioned in the sun weather post, they are a pretty professional publication. the publisher is a public relations consultant and a board member of the aguda. the staff might not be. so i assume too it was unintentional.
What staff? They don’t have reporters and a printing press. They get their *news* from Yeshiva World and Matzav. They excerpt Divrei Torah from pre-existing books (e.g., Rabbi Reisman’s Pathways of the Prophets). They have a small amount of original content. I assume they have a graphic designer, someone in charge of rounding up the content, someone in charge of booking ads, and Mordy Mehlman. The New York Times this isn’t. Maybe it will grow as local newspapers like the 5TJT did from a small beginning, but it’s not exactly this labyrinthine company.
I’ll read this book, but I think I already know what to expect. I doubt it can approach the distilled scholarship and profundity of David Flusser’s “Jesus”.
Todd
Of course, many of these visions of a “kosher Jesus” are widely accepted by contemporary scholars, and even by Christian theologians and historians of religion. So while it might be polite not to have a stated opinion, it’s not necessarily disrespectful.
Actually another reason I plan to read it is to see how much R. Boteach has likely gleaned from Flusser and if there is any attribution. I do think R. Boteach is a very good communicator.
The book has preview pages up on Amazon, including most of its notes.
Rapidly paging through the pages of notes availibe in Amazon (Thanks IH), I note that the main Jewish author cited is Hyman Maccoby. Flusser is not mentioned. The general approach of R. Boteach seems to be “Jesus good, Paul bad.” So what else is new?
A good reminder to move my unread copy of “What Paul Meant” by Garry Wills back to the pile of books I’d like to read sooner rather than later :-)
Before an author of a book rehashes “Jesus good, Paul bad”, they ought to familiarize themselves at least a bit with the academic development called “the New Perspective on Paul” so they can provide a fully informed view.
Toddv: I want to make it clear that I agree with you. In general, R. Boteach seems out touch with recent (and not so recent) scholarship on the NT.
Mr. Kaplan – I never doubted you. :-)
[...] here for the full [...]
The comments by IH on this post also alerted me to the publication of The Jewish Annotated New Testatment of which I was not aware (although I had read Amy Jill Levine’s “misunderstood jesus”). So I went ahead and ordered on my Kindle. I figured a good sense of their approach/depth could be obtained by going to the annotations of Romans (especially chap 9-11). Based on that read last night, I would say this monograph is going to exceed my expectations. Wow- great job.
Todd
Toddv: I’ve been reading the Jewish Annotated New Iestament and have finished Mark and most of Matthew. It’s good, but I’d appreciate a bit more commentary, and not so many parallels, which most people won’t check anyway. But I haven’t read the Letter to Romans yet, actually one of my favorite New Testament texts. I know that R. Boteach’s view is Jesus good, Paul bad, but personally I’ve always found the letters of Paul much more fascinating than the Gospels.
Lawrence,
Romans is possibly the key book in the new testament canon. A lot of the early theology is there.
I’ve read much of Boteach’s material on the subject, and heard him debate – I’m not sure if he’s clueless because he’s unable to understand it, or his vision is limited because his ego is in his way.
Moshe: As should be clear, I agree with you about Romans.
http://yourphariseefriend.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/kosher-jesus-a-book-review-by-rabbi-eli-cohen/
[...] As for Maimonides’ strident criticism of Jesus as a heretic who led the Jews astray, I explain in Kosher Jesus that the Talmud’s Jesus’, upon whom Maimonides bases himself, is not the Jesus of the gospels, as Rabbi Yechiel of Paris, and other authoritative Jewish sources, have maintained. It is a known fact that the name Jesus had been exceedingly common in Second Temple times. Rabbi Gil Student recently published an informative piece on this issue entitled Three Easy Steps to a Kosher Jesus which is well worth reading. http://torahmusings.com/2012/01/three-easy-steps-to-a-kosher-jesus/. [...]
” he is simply irrelevant to my life. Kosher or non-kosher, Jesus is not someone important to me since the religion founded on his life, whether accurately or not, is not mine.”
Who is “he” that is so irrelevant to your life that you write an article regarding a book about him?
If he (the Jew not the “J”) has simply been maligned for 1800 some odd years then if you are keeping Torah, you are required to trumpet his innocence and clear his name. לֹ֥א תַעֲמֹ֖ד עַל־ דַּ֣ם רֵעֶ֑ךָ אֲנִ֖י הי׃