Jesus vs. Judaism...AgainBy Eva Mroczekhttp://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/archives/5740Book Review (excerpt):David A. deSilva’s The Jewish Teachers of Jesus, James, and Jude: What Earliest Christianity Learned from the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha...The book’s methodology — one-by-one comparison of particular early Jewish texts to trace linear relationships of influence and discontinuity — undercuts deSilva’s own stated purpose and reinscribes the dichotomy of “Jesus vs. Judaism.”Lost in such a structure are the ways in which the Jewish materials overlap with and diverge from one another. 1 Enoch might be just as different from 2 Maccabees as it is from the putative sayings of Jesus. But comparing Jesus with each text individually, looking at a different theme for each, necessarily flattens the comparanda, while making Jesus three-dimensional.For example, deSilva’s Tobit is particularist while the message of his Jesus is universal; Ben Sira is a misogynist while Jesus is open to women. How does this read to someone without any knowledge of the living world of first century Jewish traditions? Simple: the Jewish texts are exclusive and misogynist, and Jesus is not. Specific, atomized comparisons are universalized — Ben Sira for women, Tobit for ethnicity. The fact that Ben Sira is the great treasure trove of misogynist sound-bytes in the context of the early Jewish corpus is elided, since the comparisons are binary — Jesus vs. everything else.Take, for instance, other aspects of the Jesus/Ben Sira comparison. DeSilva notes a few points of contact in their ethical teachings and presents their many differences, which read like a classic laundry list of replacement theology. Jesus critiques the temple cult while Ben Sira supports it. Jesus includes and values women while Ben Sira derides them. Jesus also comes out on top in his attitudes about God’s forgiving nature, democracy/populism vs. elitism, the evil of divorce, and the inclusion of marginalized groups like Samaritans.In a book for non-specialists, this coalesces into a picture of Judaism — ritualistic, exclusionist, and spiritually staid — that is alarmingly familiar and does the opposite of what deSilva wants to do.***
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