It's 'Kosher' To Accept Real Jesus?I've not seen the book, but if the review is accurate, it has a lot of problems.
Boteach Book Seeks To Strip Away Distortions of Christ
By Adam Gregerman
Published February 09, 2012, issue of February 17, 2012.
Kosher Jesus
By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
Gefen Publishing House, 263 pages, $26
Despite Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s best efforts in “Kosher Jesus,” some Jewish teachers and their messages are not worth reclaiming. Whether because of their fanciful interpretations of the Bible or their odd religious agendas, they are best ignored. I have in mind not Jesus but Hyam Maccoby, the late, idiosyncratic religion scholar. Boteach says that his writings were, “more than any other works of scholarship,” his most trustworthy guide to early Christianity and essential to his efforts to construct a portrait of Jesus the Jew.
Maccoby, in works from the 1980s and ’90s, claimed that Paul — a conniving gentile pretending to be a Jew — distorted Jesus’ starkly political message. Boteach seems not to know that this strange, conspiratorial reading has been almost universally rejected by scholars since it appeared. Indeed, Boteach, relying on Maccoby’s speculations, goes further. He presents this questionable historical reconstruction to buttress a religious argument that modern Jews and Christians should embrace Jesus as a model of devotion to both God and the people of Israel.
A “kosher” Jesus, Boteach argues, is the “authentic” Jesus: a Torah-observant Jew and an active opponent of Rome. Sadly, he notes, New Testament authors falsely presented him as an antagonist of his own people and of the Torah. Also falsely, they saw him as divine. Once these distortions are removed, Jews need not shun him, and he even can serve as a bridge between Jews and Christians.
Boteach’s work depends on retrieving the historical Jesus from the character portrayed in Christian tradition. One commonplace is that such reconstructions usually end up resembling the people doing the reconstruction. Liberal Christians find a liberal Jesus; conservative Christians find a conservative Jesus. While Jews historically ignored or lampooned Jesus, modern Jewish scholars sympathetic to him (such as Abraham Geiger and Martin Buber) also fit this model, praising or criticizing qualities with which they agreed or disagreed. Boteach sees a Jesus in his own image, but his reconstruction is nevertheless distinctive.
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The last paragraph quoted above highlights a central weakness of Historical Jesus studies, as I have noted before. And, of course, the sources themselves seem to present rather different pictures of Jesus, which does not help matters. Back in 1988 John Dominic Crossan wrote a very perceptive article* that took up this problem and asked "What did Jesus say and do that led, if not necessarily at least immediately, to such diverse understandings?" Some such attempt to jump out of the system and produce a meta-reconstruction of the Historical Jesus with this as guiding principle has always seemed to me to be a promising way forward, but I haven't kept up with Historical Jesus studies enough to know if anyone has run with it. What I have seen over the last couple of decades shows no sign of such an approach.
*"Divine Immediacy and Human Immediacy: Towards a New First Principle in Historical Jesus Research," The Historical Jesus and the Rejected Gospels, Semeia 44: 121-140, quotation from p. 125.
UPDATE: Bad link now fixed. Sorry about that.
