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Reviewed by:
  • Jesus Reclaimed: Jewish Perspectives on the Nazarene by Walter Homolka, and: The Case for Bethsaida After Twenty Years of Digging: Understanding the Historical Jesus by Elizabeth McNamer
  • Richard Freund
Walter Homolka, Jesus Reclaimed: Jewish Perspectives on the Nazarene, translated by ingrid shafer, foreword by Leonard Swidler. New York: Berghahn, 2015, 166 pp., bibliography, index. Hardback $39.95. ISBN: 978-1-78238-579-0.
Elizabeth McNamer, The Case for Bethsaida After Twenty Years of Digging: Understanding the Historical Jesus. Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 2016, 155 pp. Hardback £41.99. ISBN-13: 978-1-4438-9086-1.

These two books, The Case for Bethsaida and Jesus Reclaimed, by authors with very different backgrounds, are two sides of the same coin of modern Jewish and religious identity cast in the lens of the historical Jesus debate. One author, Elizabeth McNamer, has used her archaeological experience to determine what can be revealed of an historical Jesus from an archaeological site on the northeast shore of the Sea of Galilee, while the other, Rabbi Walter Homolka, searched Jewish and Christian literature from the Roman to the modern periods to see how Jesus' Jewishness is perceived by each generation. In the end, both tell us how Jesus is used in modern Jewish and Christian religious self-definitions.

Homolka's search is the road most taken by Jews both before and after World War II as a way to engage with Christians and find common topics for discussion as a bulwark against the anti-Judaism and antisemitic canards of the Middle Ages. Discussions about Jesus can either divide or unite Jews and Christians. Israeli, European, and American Jewish scholars have taken up the issue of how Jesus is understood by the Jews. Jewish scholars starting their research on Jesus in the beginning of the Enlightenment period created a scaffolding for discussions that would continue right up until the twentieth century. They were primarily interested in comparing and contrasting the theological ideas of Jesus with Roman-period Jewish ideas and theology, usually from the rabbinic period. This was done often to create common ground with Christians and to enter into serious dialogue with Christian theologians from different denominations. By presenting these ideas, these Jewish scholars [End Page 219] could sometimes show where the paths of Judaism and Christianity had diverged and thereby make a space for rabbinic Jewish life alongside Christian self-definitions. Sometimes these dialogues about Jesus allowed for the diminishing of some medieval anti-Judaism themes, decided claims, and even countered some of the Christian super-secessionist rhetoric. It was a mild corrective. "Jesus the Jew" discussions changed for the most part after the Holocaust, as Christian and Jewish scholars alike struggled to find common ground and "Jesus as a Jew" reemerged as a means for this dialogue.

As a student in the 1970s, I remember reading books by professors David Flusser, Geza Vermes, and Samuel Sandmel, among many others, who were pioneers in the post WWII-era Jewish-Christian dialogue who found a new way of framing the "Jesus the Jew" discussion for modern Jews and Christians. They compared contemporary Jewish works such as Josephus Flavius and Philo Judaeus, and even later rabbinic texts. Some of the best work on the historical Jesus was done by Jewish scholars who read the New Testament through the lens of rabbinic texts. It was a mild corrective to the history of the Christianized Jesus. The studies which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s and which have dominated the field to this day included Jewish scholars that indeed presented a fuller view of the historical Jesus for Jews and Christians.

The final stage, the current period, makes Homolka's and McNamer's books relevant. The new "Jesus the Jew" discussion includes a mysterious theoretical "Q" document (original sayings of Jesus) as well as slightly later Gnostic Gospels (Nag Hammadi, 1945 discovery) that preserve a very different Jesus. Scholars now have a Jesus that does not just rely on canonical Gospel and rabbinic texts. The final unraveling of the Dead Sea Scrolls shows us a pre-Jesus Jewish movement and the archaeological studies that have been done at new and ancient sites in Israel have made Jesus a "real...

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