Review of William Arnal,The Symbolic Jesus: Historical Scholarship, Judaism and the Construction of Identity

Abstract

Arnal challenges the recent accusations that the historical Jesuses of scholars like Mack, Crossan, Horsley, Vaage, and the Jesus Seminar are un-Jewish and, therefore, at least implicitly complicit with anti-Semitism. Arnal readily acknowledges the presence of anti-Semitism today (e.g., in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ) and in the past in New Testament scholarship (e.g., in the work of Walter Grundmann). Arnal also finds tendencies toward anti-Semitism in Christian antiJudaism and in the apologetic scholarship that asserts Jesus’ uniqueness and accordingly distinguishes him from his environment. Despite this ‘bad karma,’ however, he argues that scholarship has improved in the last thirty years, particularly by making Jesus’ Jewishness central to historical reconstruction and by thereby normalizing Jesus as a part of his world, rather than distinguishing him from it. Today, the Jewish Jesus is simply no longer a matter of academic debate. Instead, the debate is now about what kind of Jew the historical Jesus was. In this context, the accusation that some scholars produce un-Jewish Jesuses is a ‘straw man,’ which dismisses the accused scholars’ hypothesis without discussion. Moreover, the accusation ignores debates about the ethnic and religious character of the Galilee, the fluidity of ancient markers of Judaism (see Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion), and, in particular, the comparative nature of Mack’s Cynic hypothesis. For Arnal, however, the real issue is not these historical debates, but a moral (or political) divide. Despite the accusations against them, scholars like Mack and Crossan are actually demonstrably opposed to anti-Semitism and their work deliberately strives to compensate for Christian anti-Judaism (see Mack’s Myth of Innocence and Crossan’s Who Killed Jesus?). By contrast, those who reject their work peremptorily are guilty of assuming that all kinds of ancient Judaism must be the same and of an anachronistically modern view of religion. This rhetoric BOOK REVIEWS