This document provides an overview of Judaism's views on Jesus and early Christianity. It discusses how most Jews have little knowledge about Jesus due to discomfort around his name. However, learning more about the historical Jesus can help understand the origins of Christian anti-Semitism. The document then shares the author's personal experience learning about Jesus from a Christian neighbor who believed baptism guarantees entry to heaven, which confused the author. It examines the lack of reliable historical sources on Jesus from the first century and analyzes what the gospels say about his life and teachings.

1. Winter 2010
Judaism and Christianity
George R. Honig
M
ost Jews possess scant knowledge about Jesus, and for many of us the mere mention
of his name is enough to provoke deep feelings of discomfort. But there is still much
to be said for our becoming better acquainted with the history of this profoundly
enigmatic figure. Of course, gaining greater familiarity with the New Testament accounts of
Jesus’ life and death can help us better understand the origins of the Christian anti‐Semitic
hatred that had such tragic consequences for the Jewish people. But we also should be aware
that a now quite extensive body of scholarly analysis, accumulated mainly over the last few
decades, from both Jewish and Christian sources, has produced a considerably altered picture
of Jesus, one that contrasts strikingly from how he was depicted in the New Testament. And
that reconceived understanding of Jesus has considerable relevance for Jews.
My own introduction to Jesus took place under the most unexpected of circumstances.
It happened late one evening, soon after the death of my wife that had ended her long and
heart‐rending battle with cancer. The last of the shiva visitors had departed, and I was home
alone when the telephone rang. The call was from a neighbor. I was aware that “Jack” was a
Christian, which at that time was rather an oddity in Skokie, Illinois, where I lived, where
almost everyone, it seemed, was Jewish.
“Are you by yourself?’ he asked. I told him that I was. “Would it be all right for me to
come over so we could talk for a while?” That was very kind, I said to him, perhaps naively,
and a few minutes later, Jack and I were sitting together in my living room. He quickly got to
the point he wanted to discuss: “At such a time in your life as this,” he said, “you ought to
think about accepting Jesus.” With my mind still in a fog, grieving the terrible loss of my wife
of 32 years, I could at first barely comprehend what Jack was saying. Why would I want to do
that? I finally said. His reply left me even more puzzled: “It’s to guarantee that you’ll go to

2. heaven when you die. If you accept Jesus, if you’re baptized, then you’ll go to heaven; if not,
you won’t – it’s as simple as that.”
I had never heard of any such idea. I did, however, have enough presence of mind to
challenge what he had told me: Hitler was a Catholic, I said, and presumably he was baptized,
so are you telling me that Hitler went to heaven?
“Yes,” he answered without hesitation, “but he would have barely gotten in. And that’s
the point: Baptism is like fire insurance – it guarantees you’ll go to heaven no matter what.”
So, if I were to go to heaven, I replied, I could expect to find Hitler there, but none of the
people I most care about – such as my beloved wife who had just died. It’s an easy choice, I
said, if that’s what heaven is, I don’t want to go there. Jack found my reply to be
incomprehensible. I, in turn, came away from our conversation with the impression that my
neighbor was a religious crackpot. But later, after a good deal of reading, I arrived at the
surprising realization that Jack’s beliefs are not only widely held by his coreligionists, but that
they are drawn from fundamental principles of Christian theology that go all the way back to
the writings of St. Paul, from the mid‐first century.
I also came to learn that anyone wishing to find an objective historical account of Jesus’
life will be faced with a major obstacle: virtually everything known to have been recorded
about Jesus during the century in which he lived comes from religious texts, which are a
notoriously unreliable source of historical information. Flavius Josephus, who lived in the 1st
century and was undoubtedly the greatest chronicler of that era of Judean history, included
only one paragraph about Jesus in his extensive writings, and even that short entry appears to
be of dubious accuracy. Its syntax and writing style demonstrate notable differences from
those of Josephus’ other works, and most scholars who have studied the passage have
concluded that Christian scribes must have inserted much or all of it many years later.
I
n the New Testament, the earliest written accounts of Jesus are found in the epistles
(letters) of Paul, which are believed to date from a period some 20 to 40 years after Jesus’
death. Interestingly, Paul readily admits that he had never known Jesus during his
lifetime, and that Jesus revealed himself to him only through visions and dreams. It was from
those apparitions that Paul established much of the scriptural bedrock upon which
Christianity was eventually built. Paul’s writings relate very little about Jesus’ life, and that is
certainly understandable.
The gospel stories of the New Testament (there are four of them: Matthew, Luke, Mark,
and John) all written in Greek apparently some 40 to 60 years after Jesus’ crucifixion, provide
detailed accounts of Jesus’ life, his ministry, and his death. From scholarly analyses of these
writings, there is general agreement that the Mark gospel was written first, followed by Luke
and then Matthew, with John following some years later. The gospels all date some years later
than Paul’s letters, and they clearly were heavily influenced by Paul’s theological ideas and
pronouncements. The first three of the gospel stories present remarkably similar narratives,
and the few differences that exist among them provide important windows of understanding
into how successive versions of the Jesus story were modified to meet the religious and
political needs of the developing Church.

3.
A central figure in all four of the gospel stories is a Galilean Jew who comes to be
known as John the Baptist (a Greek word meaning “immerser”). John is portrayed in the New
Testament as a committed proponent of the Pharisee beliefs that in the end of days, and with
the coming of the Messiah, the dead will be resurrected from their graves, and all who are
truly righteous will enter into God’s kingdom; he also emphasized that when that day of
reckoning comes, all unrepentant sinners will be destroyed. John (who was a well‐
documented historical figure, described at length by Josephus) traveled about in Galilee,
preaching a traditional Jewish message of charity: “He that hath two coats, let him impart to
him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise.” But John’s most passionate
mission was to urge his countrymen to ready themselves for the coming day of judgment: to
repent and make atonement, and then to join him at the Jordan to confess their sins and be
immersed in the flowing water of the river.
Immersion in a natural body of water, or in a mikva containing rainwater, had long been part
of the traditional Jewish practice of achieving ritual purity, and in ancient days, all Jews were
required to immerse themselves prior to entering the courtyards of the Temple. Accordingly, John’s
immersions would have been an entirely understandable step in preparation for entering into God’s
kingdom at the start of the messianic age. Amongst those who came with John to be immersed in
the Jordan, the gospels tell us, was Jesus, and from other indications in the New Testament, Jesus
also may well have later become John’s disciple. From all of that, it might seem that John could
well have been a religious figure of greater importance than Jesus, but the gospels take great pains
to emphasize that John was mainly a messenger, who proclaimed events that were to come.
In the gospel accounts of his travels and his ministry in Galilee, Jesus is portrayed as a
learned teacher of the Hebrew Scriptures. Numerous miracles are also ascribed to him, many
of which involve his healing the sick by driving out evil spirits. In addressing his followers
and his disciples, Jesus is frequently quoted in the New Testament referring to God as “my
father,” suggesting that he had a unique and literally filial relationship to God, and implying, as
well, his own dietyship. But in spite of that, when a scribe in one of the gospel stories asks
him: “Which is the first commandment of all?” Jesus answers: “Hear, O Israel; The Lord our
God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul,
and with all thy mind,” i.e. with the shema, the supreme Jewish declaration of monotheism.
As presented in the New Testament, the principal message Jesus conveyed to his disciples
and to his countrymen was basically the same as that of John the Baptist: Turn away from sin and
follow the path of righteousness, and that will help assure you a place in God’s kingdom. A large
number of Jesus’ quotations in the gospels are in the form of highly engaging parables, a device
said to have helped him attract listeners. Most of Jesus’ parables touch on righteous and/or non-
righteous behavior, and a large number of them serve as metaphors of the Kingdom. Some of
Jesus’ parables, such as the familiar story of the Good Samaritan, provide a clear moral message
that is easily understood by anyone. But in many of the others, the meaning is obscure, defying
any ready interpretation.
According to his portrayal in the New Testament, Jesus believed in the resurrection of the
dead and the coming of the messiah, and often, but not always, in a tolerant, compassionate

4. interpretation of the law. To that extent, he shared common ground with Hillel and Gamaliel, the
pre-eminent Pharisee sages of his era. He apparently was also inclined toward pacifism: “And unto
him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloak
forbid not to take thy coat also.”
In the gospel accounts, Jesus comes across as a tireless champion of those on the lowest
rungs of the ladder in Jewish society. The teachings attributed to him strongly emphasize the
commandments from the Torah to care for the orphan and the widow and to be generous to the
poor. At every opportunity, it appears, he admonished his followers to take pity and help those in
need, even when doing so required extreme personal sacrifice.
But in spite of Jesus’ untiring beneficence, there was one group of people for whom the New
Testament depicts him as having only disdain and contempt. One might suppose that that would
have been the Romans, who ruled Jesus’ country of Judea with an iron hand and who savaged its
people with ruinous taxes, so severe as to leave much of its populace in a state of near-starvation.
But the gospel stories scarcely mention the Romans; and when they do, they most often come off as
being benign, rather kindly folk.
Strangely, Jesus’ disaffection, we are told, was reserved for his own Jewish brethren,
particularly the Pharisees, who shared so many of his values and beliefs, and who presumably
would have been among his strongest supporters. According to the gospel accounts, Jesus,
and also John the Baptist, loosed venomous fury against the Pharisees, damning them as
“broods of vipers.” Jesus reviled his fellow Jews further, accusing them of laziness,
oppressiveness, false piety, vanity, uncleanliness, and hypocrisy. These various sins, which
are reminiscent of those included in the “al chet” confession that we read on Yom Kippur,
were no doubt committed frequently by Jews during the 1st century, just as they are today, but
it would be difficult to imagine that they would justify such condemnation. So why was there
all of this ferocious acrimony by Jesus against those we would have anticipated to have
received his respect and affection? The New Testament provides no convincing answer, but it
does assert that “the Jews” themselves harbored intense animosity against Jesus, so much so
that they paid witnesses to give false testimony against him, and that they constantly plotted
to kill him
So what, then, supposedly motivated such awful enmity on the part of the Jews? That, the
gospels tell us, arose to a large extent from their perception that Jesus violated Jewish laws and
customs. In one prominent example, Jesus allows some of his disciples, who were hungry and had
nothing to eat, to pluck some grain on the Sabbath. A group of Pharisees who witness this are
outraged because of Jesus’ disregard for the law that prohibits work on that day. Elsewhere in the
gospel stories, Pharisees castigate Jesus for healing on the Sabbath. Additional passages relate how
Pharisees take him to task because his disciples did not wash their hands before eating, or because
they failed to observe certain fasts. It would indeed be plausible for the Pharisees, who were
generally strict in their compliance with the law, to have frowned upon such infractions, but would
they have wanted to kill Jesus for violations such as these? The writers of the gospels do appear to
have recognized the need to build a more compelling case to justify the supposed hatred of Jesus by
his Jewish brethren, and perhaps it was for that reason that they introduced the accounts of Jews

5. scheming to bring false testimony against him. But nowhere do they reveal the accusations that
these false witnesses supposedly made.
These puzzling accounts of mutual animosity between Jesus and his Jewish
countrymen come into sharper focus in a later part of the gospel narratives, which purport
that after Jesus was arrested and brought before the High Priest, the Kohen Gadol of the
Temple, “The high priest . . . said unto (Jesus), I adjure thee by the living God that thou tell us
whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God.” And each time that question is put to him, Jesus
answers in the affirmative. Of course, we would assume that the High Priest would not have
employed the Greek word “Christ (Χριστος)” in his discourse with a fellow Jew, so if an
interchange such as that one had actually taken place, he certainly would have used an
Aramaic or Hebrew word. The gospel of John (1:41) tells us “Christ” has the same meaning as
the Hebrew vhan, “messiah,” but there is more to it than that: “Christ” also denotes divinity.
The second part of the High Priest’s question to Jesus raises another such double meaning.
Perhaps any 1st century Jewish man would have considered himself to be a son of God; but
when the High Priest purportedly asked Jesus about his being the Son of God, the gospel
account leaves little doubt that he was actually demanding to know if Jesus regarded himself
to be the one and only son of God, which again would have implied his status as a deity.
The New Testament narratives make it unmistakably clear that Jesus was arrested at the
instigation of the Jews. The sum of the alleged transgressions that purportedly led to his indictment
evidently included the various relatively minor sins referred to earlier, to which were added Jesus’
declaration of being the messiah, and as well his assertion that he was the Son of God, a claim of
deityship.
T
he messiah (the word literally means “anointed”) has figured large through virtually all of
Jewish history, although the messianic idea in Judaism has been reshaped considerably since
it first appeared in the writings of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Malachi. Its exemplar has always
been King David, the supremely mighty warrior who vanquished his enemies and conquered
Jerusalem, establishing it as the holy city of the Jews, and then paved the way for the building of the
Temple. Messianic aspirants have all sought to follow more or less in David’s footsteps. Most of
the Jewish messianic figures in ancient times emulated King David quite literally, by waging war
against their opponents. These messiahs (Simon Bar Kochba is a prime example) organized
military forces and led them into battle against the occupiers of his country. Although Bar Kochba
managed to gain the upper hand against the Romans for at least for a few years, he and his army
were ultimately destroyed, and that was the eventual outcome of every other messiah who engaged
the Romans militarily.
But a few messiahs pursued an alternative approach to freeing Jerusalem and the temple
from their hated Roman occupiers. Their strategy was to initiate a mainly symbolic attack,
counting on a miracle from God to stay the hand of the enemy and assure that they were victorious.
The gospel of Luke suggests that this was exactly the approach Jesus took. The New Testament
account relates that at the end of the Last Supper, as Jesus was preparing to go out with his disciples
onto the Mount of Olives, the following dialog took place: “And (Jesus) said to them: . . . ‘he that
hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.’ And they said ‘Lord, behold, here are two
swords.’ And he said unto them, ‘It is enough.’” But out on the mountainside, what his tiny army

6. encountered was not the Romans, but rather a contingent of the Temple Guard, who promptly
arrested Jesus. And it was shortly thereafter that the High Priest supposedly confronted Jesus,
demanding to know if he were the Christ.
So what was the significance of the High Priest’s purported accusation, and in particular,
was it an infraction of the law of the land for Jesus to proclaim himself the messiah? The reality is
that throughout the centuries, Jews always honored and invested their most profound hope in
virtually every reasonably credible individual who declared himself to be the messiah. And through
all those years, to have made such a claim has never been interpreted as a violation of Jewish law.
As for the High Priest’s question about whether Jesus was the Son of God, and therefore,
presumably, was a deity himself, that needs to be looked at from the perspective of how such ideas
were viewed in antiquity. Although many peoples of the ancient world, Greeks and Romans among
them, commonly elevated their leaders to the status of gods, Jews never accepted the notion of
human deification, even for the patriarchs, for the most revered of the prophets, or for King David,
the paramount messiah of Jewish history. And perhaps out of recognition of that reality, as the late
Hyam Maccoby strongly emphasized, no Jewish law was ever promulgated that forbad anyone from
claiming to be a god. So even if Jesus had proclaimed himself to be the messiah, and if, in
addition, he were to have announced that he was the Son of God, neither of those assertions would
have represented any violation of existing laws. In light of that, the purported intense hatred of
Jesus by his Jewish countrymen could not plausibly have been justified by the infractions of Jewish
law that the gospel stories describe.
T
he contention that the Jews killed Jesus, and accordingly, that the Jewish people are guilty of
deicide, was for a very long time a central element of Christian belief. That accusation is
clearly stated in Thessalonians (1-2:15), one of the earliest of Paul’s epistles. In recent
years, a good many Christian denominations have finally come to acknowledge that Jews did not
kill Jesus, and that it was the Romans who were responsible for his crucifixion.
So why, then, would the Romans have bothered to condemn a small-town preacher who
traveled about the country urging his followers to lead lives of charity and righteousness? Most
likely it was for the same reason that had led them to put John the Baptist to death. Both John and
Jesus preached the imminent coming of God’s kingdom, and that message must have caused
considerable apprehension among the Roman authorities. Because the establishment of God’s
kingdom in Judea would perforce have meant the end of the Roman kingdom, it would have been
treasonable to advocate any such idea. Moreover, the bringing together of sizeable numbers of
people to hear such a message, both by John and by Jesus, could well have raised fears among the
Romans that the two men were inciting their countrymen to rebellion. Those concerns would have
been ample cause for the two men to have been arrested and executed.
But if that indeed had been the case, why would the writers of the New Testament have
devoted such a sizeable part of their gospel narratives to accounts clearly intended to demonize
Jesus’ Jewish brethren, and why did they pepper their scriptural texts with so many stories of
mutual hatred between Jesus and his fellow Jews? The explanation that has been most widely
advanced in recent years is that the early writers of Christian scripture were faced with a serious
political dilemma: The Jewish nation was moving into open rebellion against its foreign ruler, and

7. the Roman forces, in turn, were responding with brutal force, killing large numbers of Jews and
sending thousands of others into slavery. Eventually, the Romans went on to destroy the temple in
Jerusalem, bringing an end to the sacrifices that were of such fundamental importance to the
religious life of Jews everywhere. It was while all of this was taking place that the beginnings of
early Christianity were coming together. The Jesus movement at that point was in fragile
circumstances, and to side with the defeated Jews might well have left them in even more
precarious straits. So, instead, they carefully fashioned their scriptural texts so as to place the Jews
in the worst possible light, in an effort to curry favor with Rome. To that hypothesis, I would offer
another, viz. that much of the anti-Jewish hatred expressed in the New Testament could well have
stemmed from a personal animosity against Jews and Judaism, on the part of the chief architect of
Christian theology, Paul of Tarsus.
I
n his epistles, Paul declared that he himself had been a Jew, “Circumcised the eighth day, of the
stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a
Pharisee.” But compelling textual analyses by Hyam Maccoby, an extraordinary Talmudic and
New Testament scholar whose writings informed many parts of this article, suggest that Paul was
far more likely to have been a Greek who converted to Judaism only in his adult life. Noteworthy
evidence in support of that assertion is, firstly, that Paul’s knowledge of the Hebrew language was
surprisingly limited; most telling was that a number of passages he quoted from the bible were
unmistakably taken from the Septuagint, the Greek language version, rather than from the primary
Hebrew texts, with errors in the Greek translation appearing prominently in Paul’s letters.
Moreover, the unique forms of reasoning and argumentation that characterized learned Pharisee
discourse were often distorted or misapplied in Paul’s writings. And what perhaps may be most
significant of all is that a good many of the theological conceptions that made their first appearance
in the Pauline epistles of the New Testament were utterly foreign to Judaism, but had close parallels
in the Greek mystery cults that were prominent in Paul’s native city.
Among Paul’s most important innovations was the Eucharist, the ritual involving the
ingesting of bread and wine (1-Cor. 11:24-25). The drinking of blood was of course always a taboo
for Jews, and for a Jew, as Paul claimed to be, to initiate the practice of drinking wine as a proxy for
Jesus’ blood would hardly seem imaginable. But on the other hand, such a tradition was well
known in the mystery religions, whose adherents ate meat and drank blood of sacrificial animals to
bring them into communion with Attis or others of the cult gods. Paul’s description of the Eucharist
established it as the most universal element of Christian observance.
Paul disparaged the Torah as being a curse (Gal. 3:13), and based on that contention, he
introduced another of Christianity’s fundamental tenets, viz. that faith in the risen Jesus supplants
the Torah’s commandments: “A man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of
Jesus Christ (Gal. 2:16). ” He also, apparently for the first time, asserted that events associated with
Jesus’ life and death had taken place in fulfillment of prophesies from the Hebrew Scriptures.
Later, that claim was also made, repeatedly, by the authors of the gospel stories, presumably to give
greater authority to their Jesus narratives. But because the “fulfillments” were always written about
after the fact, Rabbi Michael Cook, another prominent New Testament scholar, has suggested that
the process could well be likened to shooting arrows at a blank wall and then painting the bulls-eye
around them afterward. And as a final example, Paul wrote: “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth
the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be

8. saved,” which is presumably the scriptural underpinning of my neighbor Jack’s understanding of
what one needs to do to get into heaven.
S
o in the end, what do we really know about Jesus? With there being very few historically
reliable contemporary accounts about him, the gospel stories, in spite of their obvious
limitations, still carry the greatest potential for providing at least occasional kernels of useful
information. But how can the apparently few accurate historical elements be extracted from the
gospel texts’ religious and political constructs? Through skillful, often ingenious analyses of the
gospel stories, a number of scholars, of whom one of the most notable was Hyam Maccoby, appear
to have achieved enough success in this endeavor so that at least a shadowy image of the historical
Jesus has emerged:
In all likelihood, Jesus was a pious Jew, a man deeply committed to fulfilling the
commandments of the Torah. At a momentous turning point in his life, Jesus apparently became a
disciple of John the Baptist. And in time, after John was arrested and executed, Jesus went on, with
some of John’s disciples as well as others of his own, and continued to preach John’s message,
admonishing his fellow Jews to atone, repent, and prepare themselves for the imminent coming of
God’s kingdom. As Jesus’ ministry evolved, it took on a unique flavor, growing out of his special
talents and abilities: He undoubtedly was a charismatic figure, and to enhance his already engaging
speaking style, he developed to an exquisite degree the Pharisee custom of speaking in parables. In
addition, he apparently was an exceptional healer, with acute powers of observation coupled with
outstanding analytical skills, and those abilities aided him in attracting people who needed his help,
and who then stayed on to listen to his religious message. Jesus’ teachings followed the same
course and direction as those of other apocalyptic Pharisee teachers of his time, but in addition to
preaching Torah-based principles of righteousness, he gave special emphasis to his followers to the
importance of charity and concern for the less fortunate.
Eventually, Jesus came to believe that God had chosen him to be the messiah, the King of
the Jews. To consummate his kingship, Jesus led his disciples into Jerusalem, to initiate the holy
war that would culminate in "the great and terrible day of the Lord" that had been predicted long
before by the prophet Malachi.
After Jesus was arrested and executed, his disciples, who had fully accepted his
messiahship and kingship, became convinced that he had miraculously been returned to life, and
they exchanged stories among themselves of having encountered their master fully restored and
alive. They also quoted the resurrected Jesus as having told them that he would be leaving, but that
he would return imminently to take up his messianic mission. Christians have been awaiting his
“second coming” ever since that time.
We can now perceive Jesus as having been a committed Jew, devoted to Judaism’s highest
ideals and values, but a man whose life story and mission may well have been refashioned to meet
the needs of a very different religious movement, one that might have been scarcely recognizable to
Jesus or his contemporaries. So perhaps the mention of Jesus’ name ought not bring us discomfort.
And it seems likely that had his life had been depicted more accurately, Jesus might justly have
become a respected figure in Jewish history. •