Judaizing Jesus?

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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Giuseppe
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Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2015 5:37 am
Location: Italy

Judaizing Jesus?

Post by Giuseppe »

So Robert M. Price in an article only for the subscribers and of which I report only the incipit and the conclusion:
Judaizing Jesus
A
Prospectus
Robert M. Price

Description
Recently something of a scholarly
consensus has emerged that Jesus must have been a mainstream (or perhaps some
identifiable sort of sectarian) Jew, and that we must automatically adopt Second
Temple Judaism as the paradigm in which to interpret or reconstruct the
historical Jesus. This consensus view is often presented as self-evident and
unquestionable, a priori and apodictic. This raises serious questions whether
the promotion of the Jewish Jesus is the product of theological and ecumenical
agendas.


I would like to publish this jem in cubital characters:
Chapter Four: An
Old Testament Jesus
It appears that a significant amount of
the Christian concern to “restore” the Jewishness of Jesus comes from the desire
to give proper emphasis to the Jewish scriptures as the Christian Old
Testament
, a kind of “anti-Marcionite anxiety.”

(my large, excuse me for a moment, DCH)


Chapter Five: Son of
Scripture
Second, there is a tendency for scholars to
interpret the historical Jesus as far as possible in conventional Jewish
categories in order to ward off theories of theologically distasteful influences
on Christianity from Hellenistic Mystery Religions and Gnosticism.



Chapter Six:
Alternatives
Here I deal with the question implicit in the
previous chapters: If the previous “Jewish Jesus” models prove tendentious and
unconvincing, what would a possible “non-Jewish” Jesus look like? I will explain
but dismiss the strange doctrine of the racist Christian Identity movement that
Jesus was a Gentile, which is in its way ingenious but perverse nonetheless.
Mainly the point here would be to get this one off the table. That is not the
alternative to a “Judaized Jesus.”


Conclusion
My hypothesis is that
the widespread position that Jesus must be assumed to have been essentially a
devout practitioner of Second Temple Judaism is the product of ecumenical and
apologetical agendas and does not survive close, genuinely critical scrutiny.
While the Cynic Jesus remains a distinctly viable option, the peeling away of
most of the textual evidence for a Jewish Jesus may leave us with an
unsatisfying agnosticism. If we may take apocalyptic to stand for Judaism in
general, we are faced once again with Albert Schweitzer’s dilemma: either
thoroughgoing eschatology or thoroughgoing skepticism, and we may have to choose
the alternative he rejected.

And finally the conclusion:

We
have no hope of identifying the Jesus of history as long as we are unwilling to
discover a Jesus who may defy and disappoint our cherished
assumptions.

But a criticism is necessary, to this point, against Price's Judaizing Jesus.

It's all question of probability.

What escapes Price's attention is that there is the same logic in the following propositions:

A) If Jesus existed, then he was more probably just a ''devout practitioner of Second Temple Judaism''.

B) if a Jew was killed by German soldiers between 40 and 45, it happened more probably in a concentration camp.

C)
if an angel was killed by evil demons, then his death was placed more probably in the outer space, between the earth and the moon.

So my point is that, under a historicist paradigm, the ''judaizing Jesus'' operation is a move as well natural as the sublunary myth theory would be a natural move under a mythicist paradigm.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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