Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §5.5
eral quest at this point only by its argument that the influence of Hellenization,
which in Harnack's view marked out the difference of the early church from Jesus,
is already to be found in Jesus' own teaching; despite the acknowledgment
of Jesus' Jewishness, the Tendenz is to play up the similarities between Jesus'
teaching and Hellenistic culture and the differences from his native Jewish culture.
113 In the history of Jesus research nothing has evidenced the flight from history
more devastatingly than the persistent refusal to give any significance to the
Jewishness of Jesus.
Of course a Jewish perspective on Jesus was by no means unknown before
the 1980s, 114 though these earlier studies proved curiously ineffective in regard
to the mainstreams of Jesus research. And the contribution of Geza Vermes in
particular has had a subtle and significant influence; 115 he has been in effect the
John the Baptist of the third quest. But what has proved decisive in the new shift
of perspective has been the growing groundswell of reaction, in NT scholarship
as in Christian scholarship generally, against the denigration of Judaism which
has been such a deeply rooted and longstanding feature of Christian theology.
The repentance and penitence required by the Shoah/Holocaust, though in some
circumstances in danger of being overplayed, have still to be fully worked
through at this point. The mindset which figures Judaism as the religion of law to
be set over against Christianity as the gospel, with the chief task being to show
how Jesus belongs with the latter rather than the former, still seems to operate at
a deep subconscious level. The portrayal of the Pharisees as archetypal legalists
111; Stuttgart: KBW, 1983) argues that for the Baptist and Jesus Israel had lost its prerogative
of being the chosen people of God and had become 'a community deprived of salvation
(Unheilskollektiv)', but he removes the talk of 'Unheilskollektiv' in the later edition ( 3 1989).
113. So, particularly, Mack: 'One seeks in vain [in original Jesus' teaching] a direct engagement
of specifically Jewish concerns' (Myth 73); the Jewish apocalyptic prophet is replaced
by the Hellenized Cynic teacher. See also the critique of Horsley and Draper, Whoever
Hears 4-5, 9; Meier, Marginal Jew 3.3-4.
114. For the nineteenth century note particularly Abraham Geiger and further Heschel,
Abraham Geiger 130-37, 148-50, 235-38. For the twentieth century note particularly
J. Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times and Teaching (London: George Allen and
Unwin, 1925); R. Meyer, Der Prophet aus Galiläa. Studie zum Jesusbild der drei ersten
Evangelien (1940; reissued Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1970); S. Ben-
Chorin, Brüder Jesus: Der Nazarener in jüdischer Sicht (Munich, 1967); D. Flusser, Jesus
(1969; revised Jerusalem: Magnes, 1998). D. A. Hagner, The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus: An
Analysis and Critique of the Modern Jewish Study of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984)
describes the various attempts to evaluate Jesus from a Jewish perspective (ch. 1), claiming that
'the Jewish reclamation of Jesus has been possible only by being unfair to the Gospels' (14); 'it
is always Jesus the Jew they are interested in and not the Jesus of Christianity' (38). See also
Moxnes, 'Jesus the Jew' 89-96, 98-101.
115. G. Vermes, Jesus the Jew (London: Collins, 1973).