35 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential Biblical Scholarship, March 15, 2009
I heartily second the glowing reviews Jesus and the Talmud has received from the scholarly community across the board. This is an important book, ably described by many scholars in the "Editorial Reviews" section. I would like to add, in particular, to the praise toward the book's clear and very accessible style. I teach and write history for a living, and not all academics make things so easy on their readers.
I suppose the David Dukes of the world will find ammunition in Schaefer's work as long as the people they appeal to don't read it. I suppose also that some Jewish readers who do not understand the world of the distant past or the Middle Ages might have bruised feelings. Such are the dangers when entering into waters that spill onto some very ugly history of the last hundred years.
I find Schaefer's argument completely convincing. Considering the rapid spread of the "Jesus movement" in the 1st century (and especially when considering that Jesus' earliest followers, like Paul, came to the synagogues spread throughout the ancient Mediterranean,) it strikes me as naive to believe that many, perhaps most, Jews of the era never heard anything of the "good news" and that what they did hear they simply ignored. It also certainly makes sense that Jews in and around what is now Israel, whose rabbis compiled the Jerusalem Talmud, would have been much more circumspect when dealing with the new Christians than those living in the Mideast whose leaders created the Babylonian Talmud. It would be interesting to know what Jews thought of the early Christians during the Temple period, but other events were much closer and important. After the Jewish revolts against Rome in Judea (66-135 CE)Jews remaining in Roman territory had good reason to keep their heads down. Jews in the Fertile Crescent, however, were either at the fringe of the Roman Empire or, before Constantine, living under Sassanid Persian rule, a friendlier environment. There rabbis could write what they believed.
And as Schaefer shows, the leaders of Rabbinic Judiasm, displayed no affection for the increasingly powerful Christian movement. How could they? Political and cultural pluralism were not commonly found outside the contemporary world. the Christians claimed that a Jew was the revealed son of God. With an issue like this it is hard to find grounds for polite disagreement. If the Christians were right, the foundations of Rabbinic Judaism were built on sand. In the event, the Christian message was rejected by most Jews. (And, although Schaefer's book by necessity deals with the writings of the Jewish religious elites, I think it a fair assumption that ordinary Jews understood their leaders and agreed with them.) It would be likewise difficult to believe that as Christianity became the biggest religion in the world that the guardians of the Torah and Talmud would or could ignore it. So, in disparate pieces, rabbis constructed an alternate narrative that struck not at Christianity itself but upon the figure of Christ. This narrative represented literal history no more than did the Gospels and like the Christian writings were filled with symbolism. No doubt this reflected deeply held and sincere feelings. It was also important to discourage Jews in Christian lands to solve a lot of problems and simply convert. So, what developed, according to Schaefer was a kind of counter-narrative to the Gospels that portrayed Jesus as illegitimate, a trickster, a monumental liar and a betrayer of his people. Naturally this implied Christians were, at best, dupes. So, if this led some rabbis to picture Jesus as sharing a particularly grisly corner of hell with Titus, destroyer of the Temple, it all made sense.
In the long run, of course, this situation developed an ugly chemistry. Christians often viewed Jews as particularly nasty infidels and Jews responded with quiet contempt. Indeed, the segregation of the Jewish from the Christian communities in Europe was a reciprocal relationship. Jews lived in an often hostile environment. However, if isolation was not enforced inside the community, its leaders feared (with good reason I'd guess) that conversion would eat away at the heart of Judaism itself.
This is the kind of subject that must be addressed if we are to understand fully the relationship that existed over nearly 2,000 years between Christians and Jews. As it stands the shadow of the 3rd Reich makes it very difficult to describe the full and complex web that made up this relationship over time. It has done so to the extent that recent accounts that have emphasized a series of outrages committed by Christians against the Jews have, in my view, obscured the superstitious, parochial and violent atmosphere that existed throughout Christian lands until the French Revolution. For instance, much has been made understandably about the murder of Jews along the Rhine and in Jerusalem during the First Crusade. However, it is almost certain that far more Christian Cathar "heretics" were killed during the Albigensian Crusade. And if Jews suffered pogroms and discrimination in Early Modern Europe, they were better off than eccentric women in rural Europe some 30,000 of which were killed as witches. I am not trying to compare horror stories here. But at some point and at some level we have to accept the past as it was, a fascinating but often crude and brutal place. And we should realize that this brutality was apportioned with a kind of ugly equality.
The point to remember is that we do not live in the world of antiquity or the Middle Ages. And Hitler is dead and disgraced. Scholars of all stripes should continue "full steam ahead" in studying the intersection between the forces that shape history and religious faith as it played out in the past.
Eric Bergerud
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16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
stretched thesis, but interesting, September 21, 2010
Kudos to Dr. Schaefer for taking on a very thorny topic.
There's an old bit by the Jewish comedian Lenny Bruce on the charge against his people for the crime of deicide:
"Alright, I'll clear the air once and for all, and confess. Yes, we did it [killed Jesus]. I did it, my family. I found a note in my basement. It said: 'We killed him, signed, Morty.'"
Turns out that, at least from the Babylonian Talmud's point of view, he wasn't joking. Not only does the Bavli claim full responsibility for the Crucifixion, but it short-shrifts Roman involvement in an anti-historical twist that leaves the reader thinking that the Sanhedrin had the power to execute heretics. It didn't, at least not according to standard sources. Under Roman rule, capital punishment was reserved to the secular, not the religious, courts.
The rise of the Internet saw a concomitant increase in 10 cent, non-Jewish Talmud scholars with a penchant for quoting the steamier passages thought to concern Jesus. Web pages are easily found in which Jesus is said to be boiling in hot excrement for all eternity, then offered as evidence of long standing Jewish perfidy.
Schaefer provides a scholarly context for these offending passages, claiming that they reflect an intimate knowledge of the Gospels. In fact, one cannot rightly make sense of the oblique references in the Talmud to the founder of Christianity without having the New Testament serving as the Rosetta Stone guide.
The professor's thesis is that the rabbinical rejection of Jesus as messiah amounts to a point-by-point denial of key beliefs that uniquely identified Christians in late antiquity. Thus, Jesus is not born of an immaculate maiden through the power of God, but is rather the bastard offspring of a Roman soldier named Pantheras. Moreover, Jesus did not come back from the dead after freeing the souls of captive sinners in hell, but is condemned to punishment for all eternity as an idolater and deceiver of Israel. The rabbis go over the checklist of Christian claims, crossing each out as they go. The general Talmudic formulas against Jesus take the form of "X is claimed about Jesus; not only not X, but Y," where Y is something shockingly shameful.
Talmudic narratives sometimes incorporate characters as stand-ins for actual persons who were of interest to the Jewish people for one reason or another, but could not be identified because of political climate. Names are changed, making it difficult sometimes to determine who or what exactly is being discussed in a given midrash. Professor Schaefer tries to distill the identities of these figures (Rabbi Eliezer being one example) to show how they correlate with Jesus. (Sometimes though, R. Eliezer is just R. Eliezer.) Again, the New Testament stories are assumed to provide the needed clues about the structure, correlates and reasoning behind Talmudic equivalents.
Probably the great weakness of the book is that it rests on quite a few deductions by the writer in the absence of hard evidence. The leap from boiling excrement to the Eucharist is probably one of the more glaring examples of scholarly imagination setting itself to solving a non-problem.
I suspect that much of the Talmud contains obscure topics dressed up in oblique language, such that their meaning and significance have been lost even to earlier rabbis. Among the mythological bric-a-brac of the Talmud is the claim that a male relative of Nero converted to Judaism. Lilith even gets a passing mention in one of the quotes in this book, proving that myth and folktales play a pedagogical role in rabbinical thought. Extricating this influence from fact seems to lead to a lot of suppositions on the part of scholars like Professor Schaefer.
The criticism is made stronger by Schaefer's own repeated admissions that the Talmudic Jesus is ahistorical, a prosaic figure confabbed together from sources like the New Testament, but with important details omitted or altered to suit the needs of rabbinical authorities. This is to say that solving the identity of R. Eliezer, Bunin, or any of the other alleged guises of Jesus assumes that the many volumes comprising the Talmud were edited so as to yield clear subnarratives. Yet it seems that the opposite case can be made, namely, that the Talmud has a lot of unredacted material that was never properly sorted and clarified. The Jesus passages are spread out as well. Schaefer is trying to solve a puzzle that isn't really a puzzle at all.
A blurb on the back of the book makes the claim that this volume will improve Christian and Jewish understanding. This is probably the stupidest thing you can say about it since if anything, the book's equating of the Eucharist to dung will only make a bad quote even worse. If the professor is right, then Judaism says little about Jesus, but what it does say is filled with incredible venom and hate.
Dr. Schaefer has written an interesting book that delves into history and other topics that make it worth reading, but I think the general thesis is stretched. I'm not sure many practicing Christians will care to sift through the arguments since much of the subject matter is scatological in nature.
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