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284 NOTES TO PAGES 26–28
27. Charlesworth, Jesus within Judaism, 32, 47; we would err badly if we did not acknowledge
that several generations of scholars have sought to dispel these
stereotypes, yet the last quarter century has been a watershed. The paradigmatic
shift that has occurred in the study of Christian origins can be followed in Susannah
Heschel’s brilliant Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1998). Geiger (1810–1874) was a rabbi, theologian,
historian, and leader of the Reform Judaism movement. He effected a Copernican
revolution in the approach to our subject by insisting that: Jesus was and remained
a Jew and a Pharisee; Christianity (and Islam) originated in and owe
much to Judaism; Judaism was a vital and dynamic faith in the first century;
Pharisaism manifested a rich ethical heritage and the exact opposite of the notorious
stereotype; Christianity is not the religion of Jesus but a religion about
Jesus founded by Paul; the execution of Jesus was a Roman matter; mastery of
the Mishnah, Talmud, Midrashim, Targunim, and so on is as essential for an understanding
of these questions as is the New and Old Testaments, Philo, Josephus
and classical sources; Judaism remained a vigorous and creative force at the
heart of Western civilization—Geiger did not get much of a hearing from
Christian scholars in his native Germany but has been thoroughly vindicated in
this ecumenical age.
28. This assertion holds, even though some Jews, as Josephus relates, turned over
Zealots and other rebels to the Romans in attempts to avoid danger and upheaval—to
no avail obviously.
29. S. G. F. Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots (New York: Scribner’s, 1967), 262.
30. Bruce Vawter, “Are the Gospels Anti-Semitic?” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 5
(Summer 1968): 483; Winter, On the Trial of Jesus, 33–34, in reference to Mark,
although generally it applies to the other synoptic gospels, but not really to John.
31. Lawrence Schiffman, Who Was a Jew? Rabbinic and Halakhic Perspectives on the
Jewish-Christian Schism (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV, 1985), 75–78, and not because of
the claim to be a messiah.
32. Crossan, Who Killed Jesus?, 36, 219.
33. It is worth noting that as late as 62, according to the Jewish historian Josephus
and the Christian bishop and historian Eusebius, as cited by Winter, On the Trial
of Jesus, 171, 186, Pharisees sided with Jesus’ later followers against a Sadducean
high priest, suggesting that Jesus’ affinities with Pharisaism were quite close.
34. “Notes for the Correct Way,” Catholic Jewish Relations: Documents from the Holy
See, IV, 21, A, p. 43. Vatican II’s dogmatic constitution Dei Verbum anticipated
the 1985 Notes in accepting the findings of modern biblical scholarship: It differentiates
three phases and explains that the gospels were written after the authors
gained a different and clearer understanding: “after they had been
instructed by the events of Christ’s risen life. ... The sacred authors wrote the
four gospels, selecting some things from the many which had been handed
down by word of mouth or in writing, reducing some of them to a synthesis, explicating
some things in view of the situation of their churches, and preserving
the form of proclamation [kerygma].” For additional documents, Catholic and
non-Catholic, see Helga Croner, compiler, Stepping Stones to Further Jewish-
Christian Relations (New York: Stimulus Books, 1977), and idem, More Stepping
Stones to Jewish-Christian Relations (New York: Paulist Press, 1983).
35. Stephen Patterson, “The End of Apocalypse: Rethinking the Eschatological
Jesus,” Theology Today 52 (April 1995): 43–46.