The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ. By DANIEL BOYARIN. Foreword by JACK MILES

Abstract

G race , humour, and accessibility mark this book. Jack Miles in his foreword notes its challenge to readers who think of Christology as a new Christian phenomenon. Boyarin argues, by contrast, for a Jewish Jesus who kept the laws of diet and purity, but was also seen by some of his Jewish contemporaries to fit pre-Christian Jewish expectation of a divine yet also suffering messiah. ‘The job description—Required: one Christ, will be divine, will be called Son of Man, will be sovereign and savior of the Jews and the world—was there already’ (p.73); ‘the idea of Jesus as divine-human Messiah goes back … to Jesus himself, and even before that’ (p.7). Assessments of pre-Christian expectation on these lines hardly form a majority position in critical scholarship, but sponsors of broadly similar views have included J. A. Emerton, J. C. O’Neill, J. J. Collins, and Joel Marcus. In antiquity and the Middle Ages related views marked Christian apologetic exposition of the Old Testament and rabbinic literature. The piquancy of this book lies in endorsement of a view of this kind by an heir of Jewish tradition and a rabbinic scholar, who presents Jesus himself as a fully observant Jew with a mastery of halakhah. ‘Jesus kept kosher’, to quote the title of chapter 3—but it was not, as in older apologetic for Judaism and in some ‘liberal Protestant’ histories, through a paganizing Christian error that Jesus was called divine. This Christology of divine status is here presented as one trend of authentically Jewish thinking, pursued within the intermingling rather than separation of Christians and Jews which Boyarin emphasized for the whole period down to the fourth century in his Border Lines (2004). He is close to M. Idel’s book Ben: Sonship and Jewish Mysticism (2007) in willingness to view Christian doctrinal developments within the long-term context of a manifold Jewish mysticism. The argument of The Jewish Gospels , however, is based firmly on earlier rather than later mystical and apocalyptic texts.