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  • Jewish Jesus Research and Its Challenge to Christology Today by Walter Homolka
  • Zev Garber
Jewish Jesus Research and Its Challenge to Christology Today By Walter Homolka. Jewish and Christian Perspective Series 30. Leiden: Brill, 2016. xi + 180 pp.

Walter Homolka adequately addresses the effects and defects of academic scholarship on the role of the Jewish Jesus in Second Temple Judaism; also, in two millennia of Jewish-Christian New Testament near-existence, medieval/Enlightenment/Shoah/anti-Judaism/Semitism dubious existence, and contemporary coexistence. Homolka's chapters are grounded in standard Quests for Jesus methodology in pursuit of the Nazarene purposely grafted in Jewish clime and time. His probe of European sources, particularly German, is refreshing.

In my "Reflections on Jesus" (Shofar 27.2), and particularly my critique of The Historical Jesus in Context (Edited by Amy-Jill Levine, Dale C. Allison Jr., and John Dominic Crossan, 2006), I offered an overview of the Quest of the historical Jesus. Academia prefers historical-critical methodology in the quest for the historical Jesus contra the creedal authority of the Gospel narratives as believed and preached in the Ecclesia. The "Quest" favors Reason (objectively [End Page 136] setting Jesus in a historical and cultural context) over Revelation (creedal statements molding a dogmatic Christ). The history of the Quest is parsed into the old and the new. The "Old Quest" established a distinction between rational ethical religion and historical religion that emerged in a given culture at a particular period of time and whose claims of truth are not necessarily rational. Many in the original quest deconstructed the Gospel miracles, myths, and legends and reconstructed Jesus into an advocate of late-nineteenth-century enlightened rational religion.

Early twentieth-century Form Criticism (structural study of literary units) raised questions about the nature, origin, and transmission of the Synoptic Gospels. It dismissed outright any kernel of historicity in the Gospels and suggested that many of the traditions about Jesus in the Scriptures were created later than this historical period to fulfill the liturgical, preaching, and teaching needs of nascent church communities. Each tradition has a Sitz im Leben (setting in life) which is interpreted in its own right, independent of historical validity. Kerygma (teachings about Jesus) has replaced history as the central core for the Christian faith. Indeed, Rudolf Bultman, the leading kerygmatic theologian, argued the only essential historical teaching is the crucifixion of Jesus: all else is conjecture and interpretation.

The "New Quest" began after World War II. Like the "Old Quest," it questioned the Gospels as they are but also considered the input of a flesh and blood Jesus. It embraced a variety of approaches (anthropological, sociological, theological) to understand the New Testament Jesus. These included viewing his eschatological message of the Kingdom of God in terms of existentialist philosophy to seeing him as a Mediterranean Jewish peasant or a wandering cynic-sage. For all the myriad views of Jesus, there is close consensus that he lived and died a faithful Jew, and theologians and biblical scholars explore the ramifications of that for Jews and Christians then and now.

From the beginning, Jewish scholars have contributed to historical Jesus scholarship. On the whole their scholarship comments on historical, social, political, and religious ideology related to the teacher from Galilee. More recent writings focus on New Testament commentary, pedagogy, and theology. Walter Homolka's encyclopedic laden volume covers by notation or discussion most of the published works on the topic and multiple other books and articles. His four chapters address the Quests of the historical Jesus and their problematic "Jewishness" to Christology with a twist. The introduction and chapters 1 and 2 deal with postcolonial Jewish context in the historical Jesus and opine a serious [End Page 137] exercise in religioethnic acceptance in the European Enlightenment. Thus, the Jewish Jesus historical quest in the era of Wissenschaft des Judentums shows that Jews can do academic research and scholarship and this assuredly beckons their acceptance in Western civilization. Chapter 3 delves into reception histories related to Jesus to assess his Wirkengeschichte (influence) in real and in realistic terms. Chapter 4 highlights teachings extracted from reception history which reject Jewish stereotypes and in Homolko's view offer...

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