Susannah Heschel: Nativity of the Jews
[Heschel holds the Eli Black Chair of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and is the author of "Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus" (University of Chicago Press).]
Mary and Joseph must have been great parents. Jesus' followers were so impressed by his religious personality that they believed he was anointed by God (Christos means "anointed" in Greek). Because Jesus became such a religious hero, the Nativity narratives in the Gospels, written long after his death, adopted mythic themes associated with the birth of special figures. Yet modern Jews believe that the birth of Jesus was not the birth of Christianity, a religion that did not emerge until after his death. The first Christians were Jews, and thought of themselves as Jews; it is therefore impossible to understand Christianity without tracing its Judaic roots.
This is not just interfaith boilerplate; it is responsible history. Rather than a "parting of the ways" between Judaism and Christianity with Jesus' emergence, scholars now call the first three centuries the era in which both faiths came to take on shapes we would recognize—they were, in these years, "the ways that never parted," as scholar Annette Yoshiko Reed describes it.
Still, seeing the two belief structures with such equanimity hasn't always been the ascendant view. According to Christian supersessionism, Judaism lost its legitimacy with the Jews' rejection of Jesus as the Messiah. Yet Judaism is not just the prologue to a Christianity that renders it obsolete. For Jews, Christianity was a theological colonizer, usurping Judaism's Scriptures and religious ideas. The 19th-century German Protestant theologian Gustav Volkmar wrote that "Christianity was born of the virgin womb of the God of Judaism." By suggesting that God was a virgin until birthing Christianity, Volkmar implied that Judaism was not born of God; Christianity was God's first and only offspring....
Read entire article at Newsweek
Mary and Joseph must have been great parents. Jesus' followers were so impressed by his religious personality that they believed he was anointed by God (Christos means "anointed" in Greek). Because Jesus became such a religious hero, the Nativity narratives in the Gospels, written long after his death, adopted mythic themes associated with the birth of special figures. Yet modern Jews believe that the birth of Jesus was not the birth of Christianity, a religion that did not emerge until after his death. The first Christians were Jews, and thought of themselves as Jews; it is therefore impossible to understand Christianity without tracing its Judaic roots.
This is not just interfaith boilerplate; it is responsible history. Rather than a "parting of the ways" between Judaism and Christianity with Jesus' emergence, scholars now call the first three centuries the era in which both faiths came to take on shapes we would recognize—they were, in these years, "the ways that never parted," as scholar Annette Yoshiko Reed describes it.
Still, seeing the two belief structures with such equanimity hasn't always been the ascendant view. According to Christian supersessionism, Judaism lost its legitimacy with the Jews' rejection of Jesus as the Messiah. Yet Judaism is not just the prologue to a Christianity that renders it obsolete. For Jews, Christianity was a theological colonizer, usurping Judaism's Scriptures and religious ideas. The 19th-century German Protestant theologian Gustav Volkmar wrote that "Christianity was born of the virgin womb of the God of Judaism." By suggesting that God was a virgin until birthing Christianity, Volkmar implied that Judaism was not born of God; Christianity was God's first and only offspring....