Is early Christianity simply Judaism in a foreign accent? Do we have evidence from the Jewish side concerning which biblical verses Jews and Christians bickered over in their interpretations? What did Jesus and Pharisees really argue about? By closely examining the exegetical underpinnings of the controversies between Jews and Christians, Herbert Basser discovers the Jewish side to a debate that he feels has not had adequate scholarly treatment. He goes behind the words of the gospels and behind the words of the rabbis to decipher the sources upon which both are based in order to make sense of them. Baser shows that the strife between Jews and Christians developed primarily after the death of Jesus when the early Christian traditions were recast by church writers into bitter controversies between Jesus and Pharisees and between Christian and Jew - controversies that have widened and increased with the passage of centuries.
Author(s): Herbert W. Basser
Series: The Brill Refernce Library of Ancient Judaism 2
Publisher: Brill Academic Publishers
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 162
STUDIES IN EXEGESIS: CHRISTIAN CRITIQUES OF JEWISH LAW AND RABBINIC RESPONSES 70-300 C.E.......Page 4
Contents......Page 8
Acknowledgments......Page 10
To the Reader......Page 12
Introduction......Page 16
PART I: The Jesus and Pharisee Debates......Page 30
PART II: The Neighbor You Love and the Decalogue: Speculations on Some Textual Evidence for Early Jewish Polemics......Page 66
PART III: Encounters between Rabbinic and Christian Texts......Page 122
Appendix A: On the Antiquity of Some Rabbinic Ideas......Page 144
Appendix B: Hebrew Original Sources for Some Texts Cited in PART III......Page 148
Bibliography of Sources Cited......Page 150
TANAK......Page 156
RABBINIC LITERATURE......Page 157
INDEX TO THE NEW TESTAMENT......Page 160
EARLY JEWISH AUTHORS......Page 161
F......Page 162
Z......Page 163
Back Matter......Page 164
