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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
At long last, the book for which I have waited, May 22, 2008
This review is from: Modern Jews Engage the New Testament: Enhancing Jewish Well-Being in a Christian Environment (Hardcover)
Modern Jews Engage the New Testament: Enhancing Jewish Well-being in a Christian Environment
Rabbi Michael Cook's new book, Modern Jews Engage the New Testament is a fantastic introduction to some of the most valuable information in the field. It not only contains some of the basic information in the field of New Testament study, but it also offers an abundance of new ideas and insights. Gospel Dynamics is perhaps the most creative and appropriate term for the approach that Rabbi Cook takes in dealing with this sensitive subject matter.
My 30-year rabbinate has been filled with so many conversations of meaningful and respectful dialogue with people of other faiths that focused on the topics of this book long before it was written. Those conversations would have been so much richer had I had this as a resource then. I am grateful that it will inform future discussions.
This book is intended not only for Jews or for rabbis. Cook makes it easy to use his writings in a variety of settings. The layout and helpful directions makes this accessible for Gentiles as well as Jews, lay readers in addition to scholars, secularists and religionists, young and old. The book has multidirectional reading options. Those for whom this is a first venture into these subjects will find it easy to navigate from the beginning, while those who have ample background can select those chapters that most interest them to read first. My guess is that any reader will eventually read it from cover to cover again and again.
Our synagogue is planning a joint adult education program with a neighboring church. We have done a variety of things with them over the past two decades. Rabbi Cook's writings will enable us to do some serious study and dialogue about a subject that is too often avoided because of fear and anxiety. It is a process that promises ample rewards. Michael Cook has provided a welcoming doorway through which those who enter will be changed forever for the better.
I am purchasing this book two and three at a time. There are many people to whom I want to give it as a gift. But the real gift is the one that Rabbi Cook has provided for all people who care about knowledgeable interfaith dialogue and respect.
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Finally A Jewish Study Of The Christian's New Testament, May 21, 2008
This review is from: Modern Jews Engage the New Testament: Enhancing Jewish Well-Being in a Christian Environment (Hardcover)
Rabbi Michael Cook's book, Modern Jews Engage the New Testament: Enhancing Jewish Well-being in a Christian Environment, is a wonderful, very readable insight into the New Testament. He rightly explains why Jews have shied away from reading the Christian's New Testament, but his book allows all Jews to read it, and understand it from a truly Jewish viewpoint, one of respect for the text of another faith, but that it is not our Holy Scripture. In this day and age, when Jews are asked questions about our faith in comparison with that of Christianity, Jews need to know the issues, and have a familiarity with the Christian's New Testament to be able to discuss those issues intelligently. The Talmud teaches us, "Da mah l'hasheev," to know how to respond to such questions. Rabbi Cook's book enables all Jewish readers to do just that. On the other hand, Christians who read this book will find very interesting how Jews can come to understand Christian Scriptures in light of history, and how it has been used, and misused, through the history of Jewish and Christian relations. Rabbi Cook truly wrote this book in a way that makes all people of all backgrounds and faiths feel welcome to read it.
Rabbi Cook uses plenty of graphs and diagrams to explain the New Testament that help the reader understand how it was constructed. Of equal importance, there are words that both Jews and Christians use that have different meanings to each group. Rabbi Cook goes out of his way to explain the different uses of these words. Jews and Christians cannot really communicate when they use words that they each think the other understands the same way, when we do not understand them in the same way. At the end of each chapter, Rabbi Cook has a summary which he titled, 'The Most Valuable Ideas In This Chapter May Be:' This means that the reader can use this summary to help understand the chapter, and go back and re-read the chapter looking for the original explanation of these main important points. Furthermore, at the end of each chapter is another section which Rabbi Cook titled, 'Loose Ends Worth Tying:' in which he further explains issues raised in the chapter. Finally, Rabbi Cook includes different indexes of his book that are quite useful. They dont appear to be computer generated, and they appear to give every citation of the use of the indexed words or ideas. One is an index of other authors cited or quoted and where they are cited or quoted, an impressive list of scholars. Other indexes are of the Biblical verses used in his book, an index of the subjects covered in his book of course, as well as an index of the concepts he is trying to convey, the core of his book. Each one helps the reader to better understand the Christian's New Testament, and to better and more easily grasp the points Rabbi Cook makes.
This book is an important book because it covers information that all Jews need to live in a world where our paths cross more and more with Christians, and when Christianity influences many things with which we come in contact. And I believe all Christians need this book, too. On the back cover of the book, the text reads, "While written primarily with Jews in mind, this groundbreaking volume will also help Christians understand issues involved in the origin of the New Testament, the portrayal of Judaism in it, and why for centuries their 'Good News' has been a source of fear and mistrust among Jews." I could not agree more, and, frankly, it is about time that a book like this was available.
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a necessary aid, November 14, 2008
This review is from: Modern Jews Engage the New Testament: Enhancing Jewish Well-Being in a Christian Environment (Hardcover)
A Review by Professor Eric L. Friedland
Jewish studies in the New Testament have been going on for some time, whether for polemical purposes or for the sake of interfaith amity. What distinguishes Modern Jews Engage the New Testament by Dr. Michael J. Cook, who is Professor of Intertestamental and Early Christian Literatures, and holds the Sol and Arlene Bronstein Professorship in Judaeo-Christian Studies at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, is threefold. First and foremost, he is a master in the field of modern New Testament scholarship and acknowledged as such by colleagues in the discipline, Catholic and Protestant. He is well-versed in the critical theories that have been in vogue in the past and abreast of the latest developments. Moreover, he has the text itself down cold. So girded, he is able to form fresh, persuasive hypotheses of his own. Secondly, he sees it as essential for informed, committed Jews in today's society to be conversant in the foundational scripture of Christianity, including rabbis and the laity. Thirdly, Cook's approach to that scripture is bracingly candid and blissfully free of the old-time fear of inciting an auto-da-fe or a pogrom. He says it decisively as he sees it. That kind of explicitness and frankness is no doubt in large part due to the remarkable confidence and maturation characterizing a highly-integrated Jewish community in twenty-first century America. American Jews are far less timorous of taking on controversial issues in the public realm than perhaps anywhere else in the Diaspora or at any other time. Cook's brave book is clearly a byproduct of that welcome transformation of Jewish life in this land.
What then is so brave, fresh and explicit about Modern Jews Engage the New Testament? Cook has come up with a handy explanatory designation that sums up the rationale and method of the book: Gospel Dynamics. He has provided Jews of today with a vehicle towards understanding and confronting the pervasive anti-Judaism in the New Testament and the Church's Antisemitism that evolved therefrom. Our author does this by bringing to light the Tendenz, theological agenda and the particular bias of each of the Four Gospels and the mindset of Paul in his letters (Epistles). We are shown how the Evangelists' (Gospel-writers') accounts of Jesus' life and preaching written four to six decades after his death reflect the rivalrous and increasingly hostile attitudes of the Church of their day towards the Synagogue. By examining and comparing the differing reports provided by each of the Four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), but primarily the first three (the Synoptics), one can determine what has been added or modified in the basic narrative line. Cook illustrates for us how the divergent treatments of the life and missionary journeys of Paul in Luke and Acts, on the one hand, and as reflected in Paul's own letters, on the other, help highlight the Evangelist's central theme, namely, that of Christianity as the true legatee of Judaism - thereby dislodging the Jews from their rightful inheritance. Drawing on several notable examples (the Infancy Narratives, the Last Supper, the Sanhedrin Trial, the Empty Tomb, etc.) Cook spells out this Gospel Dynamic in vigorous lawyerly detail with the help of user-friendly charts and indexes. The case he makes is about as watertight as one could make it, and it's admittedly pretty damning. Hence the book can be a valuable resource for the contemporary Jew who is often clueless as to why Christians are so bent on saving his/her soul and why so many denigrating things are said, beyond sense it would seem, in their sacred literature - and in movies based on it, like Mel Gibson`s retrograde but hugely successful Passion of Christ - about her/his faith and people. The volume has the potential of being of no less service to serious Christians in grasping more fully what it is that makes Jews feel so grievously wronged and what historically became the basis for the centuries-long ordeal of Antisemitism. Modern Jews Engage the New Testament is not only packed with vitally important information, but is eminently usable for clearing the air in Jewish-Christian relations.
Indispensable as this literary spadework undeniably is, it must not be taken alone or as the final word on the subject. It can easily be misconstrued as wholly adversarial. A little while back celebrated Jewish scholars of the New Testament - and, indeed, of Christianity as a whole - have shown us there are further steps down the road to be taken towards penetrating, earnest and gainful dialogue between the two faiths - without glossing over real theological differences or forgetting the legacy of Jew-hatred over the last two millennia. The master of the I-thou relationship, Martin Buber was able to engage Christianity at its existential level and reopen a conversation that had tragically been discontinued long ago. His treasured colleague and preeminent ba'al teshuvah Franz Rosenzweig offered the promising view of the inescapable complementarity of Judaism and Christianity in the realization of the Kingdom of God on earth. An Israeli Orthodox Jewish academician who has struck a chord among many Christians, including Evangelicals, David Flusser succeeded to a rare degree in stripping away the layers of Church polemic embedded in the Gospel text and in recovering the Jew Jesus, immersed in his Judaism, manifestly loyal to his people and in love with God, preaching an intensified, all-embracing Jewish ethics. Saintly savant equally at home in the Talmud and in Aristotle and the leading Liberal rabbi during the Third Reich, Leo Baeck made some on-target observations in his trenchant essay "Judaism in the Church" about the perennial tug-of-war between the Jewish ethical mandate (the mitzvah) and faith-centered Paulinism within the soul of Christianity. The late Bishop of Stockholm and Dean of Harvard Divinity School, Krister Stendahl, had this to say about the "Teacher of Theresienstadt": "[T]o him [Baeck] there is always enough of Judaism in Christianity so that he can recognize the church as the child of Judaism. To me this is not arrogance, but love.[...]The Christian is the prodigal son who hopes that our older brother will not be angry with him, but they will meet together at the banquet."
To enhance the at-times fragile but withal imperishable relationship with a kindred faith that began with a visionary fellow Jew two thousand years ago, we will never stop needing the truthful insights and sage guidance of Buber, Rosenzweig, Flusser, Baeck - and Cook.
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