Customer Reviews

Matthew's Christian-Jewish Community (Chicago Studies in the History of Judaism)

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This book is written from a liberal Theological perspective. It is very useful in supplying an authorial perspective to the message of the Gospel of Matthew [it does make assumptions for its unsupported historical-critical view]. It is very useful to the person with a desire to know the historical-cultural roots of the message in Matthew. Read wisely!

I have found this book very helpful in preparing sermons. It puts a historical perspective on the Biblical text.

I am not officially a biblical scholar but it is a hobby of mine and I can say categorically how disappointing a book this is. It is clear to anyone not blinded by religious orthodoxy that the Matthew Gospel is both very Jewish and very hostile to pharisaic Judaism, what later would become rabbinic Judaism. Saldarini tries to show that the thrust of Matthew's venom is not directed against Jews and Judaism but only against a certain kind of Jewish leadership, the one that was becoming in the post 80 AD period increasingly less and less friendly towards Jews who revered Jesus in some way. But he really has no evidence for his chief assertion, he only says ad nauseum that Matthew's animus does not necessarily make him anti-Jewish and that it could also show how must tied up he and his groups were still with Judaism. This is not scholarship, only testing a theory to show that one can be just as critical of a religion from within as from without, in fact perhaps more so from within. This contributes nothing because the fact remains that Matthew and John both demonstrate that Christianity was moving in the last decades of the first century AD and thereafter increasingly towards an anti-Judaism which will become in short order mainstream Christian anti-semitism, a fundamental core of historic Christianity.
I bought this book to learn something new, I have learned nothing. It reads like a Ph.D. thesis which shows only that the author has studied hard and read a great deal. It demonstrates that the author has mastered the field and merits perhaps the Ph.D. but hardly that it gives a readership beyond his professors something to chew on.