What effect does not seeing Jesus as a Jew have upon one’s encounter with New Testament texts?
Too often Christian readers divorce Jesus from Judaism: he becomes the only Jew who ever proclaimed love of G-d and love of neighbor, the only Jew ever to show compassion to women, the only Jew ever to counsel non-violent resistance. Yet the love commands, already in Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19, are at the heart of Judaism; Jesus is no more, and no less, progressive on women’s issues than the vast majority of his contemporaries; Jews in the first century were known for nonviolent protests—actually early versions of “sit-ins”—against various Roman injustices. At the very least, seeing Jesus as a Jew prevents the creation of anti-Jewish stereotypes. More, recognizing in Jesus’ words the Jewish concerns for the poor, for social justice, for compassion, as already stated in the Torah and the Prophets and as central to Judaism as they are to the Jewish Jesus, helps Christians recover the Scriptures of Israel—what the Church calls the “Old Testament”—as something much more than a collecti
