The Symbolic Jesus: Historical Scholarship, Judaism and the Construction of Contemporary Identity

This volume addresses the current scholarly controversies that have crupted in the last 20 or so years over the implications of the judaism of Jesus. Since the early 1970s, a number of historical Jesus scholars have claimed that Jesus was a Jew, and that this fact has significant implications for how one reconstructs the figure of Jesus from the portraits in ancient Christian literature. This book explores the anti-Jewish legacy of past scholarship, shows that the Judaism of Jesus is a more complex issue than sometimes acknowledged, and explores the subterranean cultural implications of the recent insistence on the Judaism of Jesus.