Jesus the Jew in Christian Memory: Theological and Philosophical Explorations

Description

Jesus the Jew is the primary signifier of Christianity's indebtedness to Judaism. This connection is both historical and continuous. In this book, Barbara Meyer shows how Christian memory, as largely intertwined with Jewish memory, provides a framework to examine the theological dimensions of historical Jesus research. She explores the topics that are central to the Jewishness of Jesus, such as the Christian relationship to law, and otherness as a Christological category. Through the lenses of the otherness of the Jewish Jesus for contemporary Christians, she also discusses circumcision, natality, vulnerability, and suffering in dialogue with thinkers seldom drawn into Jewish-Christian discourse, notably Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva, Martha Nussbaum and Adi Ophir. Meyer demonstrates how the memory of Jesus' Jewishness is a key to reconfiguring contemporary challenges to Christian thought, such as particularity and otherness, law and ethics after the Shoah, human responsibility, and divine vulnerability.

Barbara U. Meyer teaches Religious Studies at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of Christologie Im Schatten Der Shoah - Im Lichte Israels (2005) and numerous articles on contemporary interreligious dynamics and changing Christian approaches to Law.

'Almost magically, some of the hardest and most calcified knots of Christian anti-Jewish polemics resolve into affirmative positions that not only sustain the distinctiveness of Judaism but provide resources to expand this central difference to interreligious dialogue and pluralism.' Katharina Von Kellenbach, St. Mary's College of Maryland 'This is a thoughtful, erudite, and well-argued book, which treats of fundamental questions about Christian faith and about the relationship between Christianity and Judaism.' W. Zeev Harvey, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 'Jesus the Jew in Christian Memory is an extraordinary conversation with Jewish thought and life. [This book] ... invites us to open our eyes to the halakhic Christ so that we will in turn walk our talk.' Mary C. Boys, Modern Theology