we want to guard against some possible misunderstandings of the conflict that led to Jesus’s crucifixion. It was not Jesus against Judaism. Much of the scholarship of the last half century, especially the last twenty years, has rightly emphasized that we must understand Jesus within Judaism, not against Judaism. Jesus was a part of Judaism, not apart from Judaism. The conflict is also not about priests and sacrifice, as if Jesus’s primary passion was a protest against the role of priestly mediators or against animal sacrifice. Rather, his protest was against a domination system legitimated in
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