The Jewish Jesus
Revelation, Reflection, Reclamation
(Purdue University Press: 2011)
Part I: Introduction
Part II: The Jewish Jesus: A Partisan’s
Imagination
My Jewish reading of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels puts him in history and not in divinity. The Jesus of different Christologies could never find support in Judaism, since the God-man of the “hypostatic union” is foreign to Judaism’s teaching on absolute monotheism. As the promised Messiah, he did not meet the conditions which the prophetic-rabbinic tradition associated with the coming of the Messiah. Indeed, there was no harmony, freedom, peace and unity in the land of Israel—signs of the messianic age—and enmity and strife abounded everywhere. Not a false but failed Redeemer of the Jews, as witnessed by the words of the “King of the Jews” at the cross: Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani (“My God, my God, why have You forsaken me”)?
By Zev Garber
Professor Emeritus and Chair of Jewish Studies,
Los Angeles Valley College
June 2011
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