Recent books by Daniel Boyarin and Peter Schafer delve into the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in their formative period (the first centuries of the Common Era).
Daniel Boyarin’s The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ comes from the pen of a seasoned academic with a long-term interest in the origins of Christianity and Judaism. The publishers of The Jewish Gospels write
The Jewish Gospels makes the powerful case that our conventional understandings of Jesus and of the origins of Christianity are wrong. In Boyarin’s scrupulously illustrated account, the coming of the Messiah was fully imagined in the ancient Jewish texts. Jesus, moreover, was embraced by many Jews as this person, and his core teachings were not at all a break from Jewish beliefs and teachings. Jesus and his followers, Boyarin shows, were simply Jewish. What came to be known as Christianity came much later, as religious and political leaders sought to impose a new religious orthodoxy that was not present at the time of Jesus’s life.
Here are reviews by a Derek Leman, a prominent Messianic Jewish blogger and Pamela Eisenbaum, a Jewish scholar of the New Testament.
I also want to call your attention to a lengthy and sharply critical review by Peter Schafer, Chair of the Jewish Studies department at Princeton. Schafer’s recent book – The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other – covers some of the same territory as Boyarin’s and much more. The publisher writes
In late antiquity, as Christianity emerged from Judaism, it was not only the new religion that was being influenced by the old. The rise and revolutionary challenge of Christianity also had a profound influence on rabbinic Judaism, which was itself just emerging and, like Christianity, trying to shape its own identity. In The Jewish Jesus, Peter Schäfer reveals the crucial ways in which various Jewish heresies, including Christianity, affected the development of rabbinic Judaism. He even shows that some of the ideas that the rabbis appropriated from Christianity were actually reappropriated Jewish ideas. The result is a demonstration of the deep mutual influence between the sister religions, one that calls into question hard and fast distinctions between orthodoxy and heresy, and even Judaism and Christianity, during the first centuries CE.
The Introduction to The Jewish Jesus is available here.
