Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

QUARTERLY REVIEW, WINTER 1984
applying the "criterion of dissimilarity" to the figure of the historical
Jesus.
Last, Jewish guilt in the death of Jesus is the theme in which the
anti-Jewish reading of the New Testament reaches its zenith. Klein
cites Karl Rahner as stating that "the crucified Lord is betrayed and
abandoned by his friends, rejected by his people, repudiated by the
Church of the Old Testament." Jeremias claims: "It was an act of
unparalleled risk which Jesus performed when, from the full power of
his consciousness of sovereignty, he openly and fearlessly called . . .
[the Pharisees] to repentance, and this act brought him to the cross."
In the last analysis, the religious leaders of Judaism have Jesus killed,
because of his teaching. He "is eventually condemned because of his
conception of God" (Christology at the Crossroads, p. 206).
More than sixty years ago, George Foot Moore pointed out the
distorting nature of this anti-Jewish frame of reference. 6
He showed
that the interpretation of Judaism given by Ferdinand Weber in his
System der altsynagogalen Theologie aus Targum, Midrasch, und Talmud
had for forty years "been the chief resource of Christian writers who
have dealt ex professo or incidentally with Judaism at the beginning of
the Christian era" ("Christian Writers," p. 228). Weber's collection of
Jewish source-material reflected his view of Judaism: antithetical to
Christianity, based on the belief that works earn salvation, denying
the grace of God, a works-righteousness that was uncertain of its own
salvation. Moore also demonstrated that Weber's interpretation was
continued by Emil Schurer and Wilhelm Bousset, two highly
influential scholars. On their use of Weber, he comments that "a
delectus of quotations made for a polemic purpose is the last kind of a
source to which a historian should go to get a just notion of what a
religion really was to its adherents" ("Christian Writers," pp. 221-22).
Fifty-six years after Moore's classic essay, E. P. Sanders published his
Paul and Palestinian Judaism, in which he delineates the historical course
of this "Weber/Schurer/Bousset description of Judaism." 7
Sanders
corroborates Klein's demonstration that numerous biblical scholars
have persisted in using this model to interpret Judaism. His own fresh
and penetrating depiction of Second Temple Judaism leads him to
conclude that "the Judaism of before 70 kept grace and works in the
right perspective, did not trivialize the commandments of God, and was
not especially marked by hypocrisy." Sanders proceeds to note:
The frequent Christian charge against Judaism ... is not that some
individual Jews misunderstood, misapplied and abused their
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