Jesus, Judaism, and Christian Anti-Judaism: Reading the New Testament after the Holocaust

by Paula Fredriksen (Editor), Adele Reinhartz (Editor)

While academic writing can be obscure and popular writing can be uncritical, this group of experts have striven to write as simply and clearly as possible on several hotly contested topics in biblical studies. The essays are arranged around the historical figures and canonical texts that matter most to Christian communities and whose interpretation has fed the negative characteristics of Jews and Judaism.

Genres: Religion, History, Judaism, Christianity, Nonfiction

144 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2002

About the author

Paula Fredriksen, the Aurelio Professor of Scripture emerita at Boston University, since 2009 has been Distinguished Visiting Professor of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she also holds two honorary doctorates in theology and religious studies. She has published widely on the social and intellectual history of ancient Christianity, and on pagan-Jewish-Christian relations in the Roman Empire. Author of Augustine on Romans (1982) and From Jesus to Christ (1988; 2000), her Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, won a 1999 National Jewish Book Award. More recently, she has explored the development of Christian anti-Judaism, and Augustine’s singular response to it, in Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (2010); and has investigated the shifting conceptions of God and of humanity in Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012). Her latest study, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (2017), places Paul’s Jewish messianic message to gentiles within the wider world of ancient Mediterranean culture.

Reviews

[Robert D. Cornwall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christianity has a long history of anti-jewish actions that are rooted in the way we read Scripture. This collection of essays helps navigate the challenge of following Jesus without denigrating Judaism. Well worth the read.

[Christina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very good collection of essays on the topic.