The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ

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Vervolg DB's Jewish Gospels.

You may very well wonder why all these distinctions ~ drawn from a very distant past ~ should (still) matter to anyone in the present day?! ONE difference that I (Daniel Boyarin) expect this discussion to make is that Jews & Christians will need to begin to tell different stories about each other in the future.

On one hand, Christians will no longer be able to claim that Jews willfully, as a body, rejected Yehoshua/Yeshua/Yeshu as God. Such beliefs about Jews have led to a deep, painful, and bloody history of anti-Judaism & anti-Semitism.

Many ancient Jews simply accepted Jesus as God, & they did so because their beliefs & expectations had led them there.

Others, while holding similar ideas about G d, found it hard to believe that this particular, seemingly undistinguished, Jew was the one they were waiting for. On the other hand, Jews will have to stop vilifying Christian ideas about G d as simply a collection of "un-Jewish," perhaps pagan, & in any case bizarre fantasies. G d in a human body indeed! Recognizing these ideas as deeply rooted in the ancient complex of Jewish religious ideas may not lead us Jews to accept them but should certainly help us realize that Christian ideas are not alone to us; they are our own offspring & sometimes, perhaps, among the most ancient of all Israelite-Jewish ideas.

On the other hand, certain kinds of modern "liberal" Christian apologists, (such as Philip Pullman, the author of His Dark Materials), will have
to stop separating out a "good Jesus" from a "bad Christ!"

I (DB) suggest that Yehoshua & 'christ' were ONE from the very beginning of the so-called 'Jesus movement': it won't be possible any longer to think of some ethical religious teacher who was later promoted to divinity under the funny influence of alien Greek notions, with his so-called original message being distorted & lost; the idea of Yeshu as divine-human "Messiah" goes back to the very beginning of the Christian movement, to Yeshua himself, & even before that!

About checklists & families: Christian & non-Christian Jews? These terms "Christian Jews" & "non-Christian Jews" that I distinguish throughout this book ('the story of the Jewish Christ/Jewish Gospels'knipoog might be surprising to people who think of Christians & Jews as opposites. But if we look closely at these first few centuries after Christ, we begin to see that this is precisely the way we ought to view the history of religion of the Jews at that time. Before we get there, however, it may be helpful to challenge some of our closely held assumptions about what religions are ~~~~~

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