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Who Was Jesus?
A Jewish-Christian Dialogue
Paul Copan and Craig Evans, editors
Westminster John Knox, 205 pages, $24.95

Hidden Gospels:
How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way
Philip Jenkins
Oxford University Press, 260 pages, $25

From the first century (A.D.) to the present, Christian-Jewish relations have been a tender, often explosive, subject. This is never more pronounced than when the historical Jesus is the issue. Case in point: In the most incendiary chapter of Who Was Jesus?: A Jewish-Christian Dialogue, Queens University professor Herb Basser writes that "a central goal of the Gospel writers was to instill contempt, an odium against Judaism."

Basser dismisses the idea that any Jew might become a Christian and "remain a Jew in good religious standing." The two, he says, "are mutually exclusive." In fact, "a Jew who converts to Christianity out of conviction has lost any right in being part of the Jewish community." If the whole of Who Was Jesus? were in a similar vein, the only possible response would be to throw up one's hands.

Yet even Basser is not as dismissive as he might be. Though he doubts the historical reliability of the Gospels, he uses his expertise in the Talmud to argue that, rather than being a heretic, Jesus was a messianic rabbi who kept the law, albeit creatively. The title of Basser's chapter is telling: "The Gospel Would Have Been Greek to Jesus." The goal is to separate the Jesus of history (an admirable, pious, law-affirming Jew) from the Christ of faith (who was created by the early and later church from whole cloth).

Another interesting dustup in Who Was Jesus? occurs between Trinity Western University's Craig Evans and the world's foremost rabbinical scholar, Jacob Neusner. Neusner maintains that there is in fact no meeting point between Judaism and Christianity, because "the Torah and the Bible form two utterly distinct statements of the knowledge of God." Neusner explains that Jews keep the Law and Christians don't and that this has been so since the beginning.

Evans responds by pointing to the myriad forms of Judaism in the first century (e.g. Pharisees, Saducees, Essenes, Zealots, and others) and saying that these all claimed, in their own ways, to be true to the covenant established with Moses. Therefore, the much later, much more uniform rabbinic mutation of Judaism should not be given a monopoly on determining if Jesus' vision was true to the revelation delivered at Sinai.

As Philip Jenkins observes in his Hidden Gospels, Basser's approach is neither new nor rare. Since well before Albert Schweitzer saw in Jesus a failed, if admirable, prophet, people have been remaking Jesus in their own image.

The most recent example is the Jesus Seminar, a group of skeptical American academicians, many of them from conservative or fundamentalist backgrounds. (Some of the Christian contributors to Who Was Jesus? also aim fire at the Jesus Seminar.) Looking at the canonical Gospels, many of these scholars see a Jesus who looks like themselves: nonjudgmental and anti-authoritarian, with dashes of socialism and cynicism.

One stubborn detail stands in the way of the Seminar's interpretation: The four canonical Gospels themselves, wherein Jesus is very judgmental (e.g., "you brood of vipers"), often speaks of hell, talks of himself as the only way to the Father, and is executed for claiming prerogatives reserved only to God.

Jenkins situates these scholars firmly within a long tradition of American critics who don't like the biblical picture of Jesus and so look for other sources to validate their ideas. The Seminar's vehicle is the Gospel of Thomas, a late, probably Gnostic-influenced text that the participants have judged more reliable than the canonical Gospels as a source of what the "real Jesus" said.

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April 22 2002, Vol. 46, No. 5