The Kosher Messiah

Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (The New Press, 2012), 224 pages, $31.95

As Jewish–Christian dialogue evolves, the landscape is changing dramatically, and in unforeseen ways, as the methodological insights of the last two hundred years bear their inevitable fruit, as old assumptions are being questioned. One assumption goes like this: Christianity appropriated the Old Testament, a Jewish text, to interpret the New Testament, a post-Jewish text. This assumption is hard to defend, now that we have a better understanding of early Christianity as initially a movement within first-century Judaism, of how Jewish the New Testament really is, and of Jesus’ kosher and halakhic context: that is, how he observed the Law while debating the Law.

As many Jewish scholars have been writing on this subject for several years now, what does Boyarin’s The Jewish Gospels offer that’s new? Two things stand out. First, he provides a compelling new perspective on…