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175 My assignment for this volume is to produce an essay under the rubric of “Jesus in Jewish-Christian Dialogue.” Since with the exception, perhaps ,of the preposition “in,”all the terms in the title require definition,I shall use each to frame my responses to the contributions on the previous pages. Jesus The idea that Jesus is located in early Judaism does not require defense within the academy, or in Jewish-Christian dialogue.The Christian Scholars’ Group’s 2002 statement “A Sacred Obligation” summarizes the consensus view in its second proposition,“Jesus of Nazareth lived and died as a faithful Jew”; it glosses the statement by explaining, “Christians worship the God of Israel in and through Jesus Christ. Supersessionism, however, prompted Christians over the centuries to speak of Jesus as an opponent of Judaism. This is historically incorrect. Jewish worship, ethics, and practice shaped Jesus’ life and teachings. The scriptures of his people inspired and nurtured him. Christian preaching and teaching today must describe Jesus’earthly life as engaged in the ongoing Jewish quest to live out God’s covenant in everyday life.”1 This is the starting place of much Jewish-Christian dialogue.Those who do not begin here typically do not enter the dialogue.Christians unsympathetic to the proposal are not often found sharing a bagel with members of Hadassah; Jews choosing to believe negative Talmudic comments about CHAPTER ELEVEN Jesus in Jewish-Christian Dialogue Amy-Jill Levine sOuNDINGs IN THE RELIGION OF JEsus 176 Jesus,2 or denying that Jesus never existed, will not be at the dialogue table either, and, if they were, would likely fuss about the hechsher on the bagel. The Christian Scholars saw no need, in their statement, to distinguish the “historical Jesus”from the Gospel portrait.This is,for dialogue,an appropriate omission. Jewish-Christian dialogue is typically not interested in separating tradition from redaction, in drawing out some anterior Jesus who exists behind, and is distinct from, his contextualization in the Gospels.This may be a good thing: Christianity is not based on the “historical Jesus” but on the New Testament and its interpretation. Nor is that anterior Jesus particularly usable in a dialogue setting, since there is no academic consensus, other than the vague “He fits into his Jewish context, more or less,” of who he was. There are about as many Jesuses as there are people who have heard of him. The academic has produced its Jesus the anti-Roman agitator,Cynic-sage,Galilean Hasid,pedagogue of the oppressed, Marxist community organizer, Pharisee, itinerant radical, eschatological prophet, apocalyptic visionary, shamanic healer, mystic, homosexual , celibate, married father, sacerdotal ritualist. For the participants in the dialogue, the starting place on the topic of Jesus is, and should be, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and not the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Thomas, let alone the gospels of Bart, Marcus, John Shelby, and John Dominic, no matter how interesting or historically grounded they are. The “Jesus” of “Jewish-Christian dialogue” is primarily the Jesus of the Gospels and the Church, not the Jesus of the academy. The current Quest, which is more interested in contextualizing Jesus within early Judaism—although much of the work still highlights, for better or worse, where he is dissimilar (more on this below)—is also increasingly less interested in finding the anterior Jesus. Distinguishing tradition from redaction is a compromised if not doomed endeavor. The criteria of authenticity —already problematic, as Professor Theissen points out in his remarks about how “dissimilarity”served often apologetic aims of distinguishing Jesus from Judaism however broadly defined—are proving to be of increasingly less value since they cannot yield a consensus. Multiple attestation fails because we cannot determine what sources are independent: the tide is shifting on John and the Synoptics, with increasing arguments for interdependence; we cannot firmly distinguish Q from Matthean or Lukan redaction; we cannot prove a Q at all. Our construction of early Judaism has moved so far away from the idea of the “normative”—not just to the “formative,”but to an “even this could fit” model, that anything Jesus does coheres with something in his context. Ironically, conservative Evangelical scholars who in the past found the very idea of using such criteria to distinguish between tradition and redaction anathema, are today using the criteria with the (not unexpected) result that everything the Gospels attribute to Jesus has an historical basis.3 [3.135.202.224] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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