Interwoven Destinies: Jews and Christians through the Ages (Stimulus Books) [Paperback]

Eugene J. Fisher (Other Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1992 | ISBN-10: 0809133636 | ISBN-13: 978-0809133635

Traces the history and significance of the ancient relationship between the church and the Jewish people as a history of surprising interdependence as well as enmity and in its later periods even violence.

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Paulist Press (January 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0809133636
• ISBN-13: 978-0809133635
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,636,377 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Jesus's "teaching, where good, was not original, and where original was not Jewish or good", January 11, 2012

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T. Patrick Killough "All about Patrick" (Black Mountain, NC United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Interwoven Destinies: Jews and Christians through the Ages (Stimulus Books) (Paperback)

In 1930 brilliant Anglo-Jewish thinker Claud Goldsmid Montefiore wrote, "His (Jesus's) teaching, where good, was not original, and where original was not Jewish or good." I recently read for the first time that quotation in an essay by American Jesuit professor Daniel J. Harrington called "The Teaching of Jesus in His Context." Harrington's is one of eight papers reproduced in Eugene J. Fisher (editor), INTERWOVEN DESTINIES: JEWS AND CHRISTIANS THROUGH THE AGES (1993). Harrington is also the author of The Synoptic Gospels Set Free: Preaching Without Anti-Judaism (Studies in Judaism and Christianity). All but one of the papers had first been read in May 1986 in Baltimore before the Ninth National Workshop on Christian-Jewish Relations. Those papers, since updated, range selectively and chronologically from the Second Jewish Temple and life and teachings of Jesus through Hitler and the Shoah. Editor Fisher neatly frames and unifies them between an Introduction and an Epilogue.

Who can profit from reading INTERWOVEN DESTINIES?

This little collection is made to order for anyone, Christian, Jew or neither, who wishes that contemporary understanding and empathy were stronger between members of the two Abrahamic faiths. He or she knows that, although inter-confessional relations are now reasonably amicable (though not necessarily among under-informed laypeople who do not know their history), those relations were once hateful, even murderous. How did it happen that a Christianity born in a Jewish womb became so hostile toward its own spiritual mother?

INTERWOVEN DESTINIES makes a good start laying out leading points of controversy between Jews and Christian and the evolving methods that scholars from both faiths have been working on together since the 1940s pondering the fearsome history of "the parting of the ways." Here are some of the issues presented:

-- Did Jesus remain a faithful Jew, obeying the law of Moses till his death or was he an anti-Semitic apostate to Judaism?

-- Were the Gospel writers (70 - 100 CE) influenced by Saint Paul, writing in the 60s before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70?

-- Evangelist Mark is less anti-Jewish than Matthew or Luke. Did the latter make Jesus say things relevant to emerging inter-confessional disputes of their day but not what Jesus actually said 40 or more years earlier? Did Mark himself present Jesus as saying harsh things about Jews that the great Galilean never said in the tradition that Mark received? Many Jewish scholars believe that as we unpeel or sift through the spin and interpretations laid on the historical Jesus by Paul and the evangelists, what emerges is an orthodox believing Jew from beginning to end.

-- Yet was Jesus a totally unoriginal Second Temple Jew? No. He was definitely original within the broad framework of many existing tendencies within Judaism both in Israel and the Diaspora. But were Jesus's novelties thereby wrong simply because not traditionally Jewish? Such was the position of C.G. Montefiore quoted above.

-- After destruction of the Temple in 70, did rabbinic, Pharisaic Judaism sweep the field, emerging victorious over all other competing ways of being Jewish? No, says Martha Himmelfarb in "The Parting of the Ways Reconsidered: Diversity in Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations in the Roman Empire." She argues from the increasingly better known history of the great synagogue at Sardis (and the city's anti-Jewish bishop Melito) in Asia Minor, a colossal building which was used for worship until the 7th Century destruction of Sardis. Himmelfarb also cites various late writings, "Pseudepigrapha," which show strong evidence of interpenetration of Jewish and Christian points of view. Rabbinic, post-Temple Judaism tended strongly to be inward looking and to avoid contact with non-Jews. Not so at Sardis and elsewhere in the Diaspora.

-- Was Luther's Reformation essentially a rebellion against the enlightened, tolerant, free thinking of the Renaissance, a "back to medieval Christendom" movement?

-- What theological beliefs made Luther so passionately anti-Jewish, especially in his 1543 essay "Against the Jews and their Lies." Therein the Reformer concluded with advice repeated three times: burn their synagogues, schools, and houses, and bury all traces of them -- and more. This prompted French Jewish scholar Jules Isaac to write during the misery of the Shoah (his wife and daughter were killed at Auschwitz in 1943): "Patience, Luther. Hitler will come. Your wishes will be granted, and more ... let us place Luther in the place he deserves, in the first row of Christian precursors ... of Auschwitz." This is embedded in an essay, "The Reformation and the Jews" by Alice L. Eckhardt.

For readers taking their first gingerly steps into current Jewish-Christian dialoging, INTERTWINED DESTINIES is an exciting introduction to a complex, very well documented if mostly tragic history. In the second of the eight papers, Rabbi/Professor Michael J. Cook argues that it is high time to bring the emerging agreements among Jewish and Christian scholars down to the daily lives of men and women in the pews, to Christian laypeople, for instance, who think Paul wrote later than the evangelists; to Jews who think Jesus the Galilean was an apostate and father of anti-Semitism.

-OOO-