Historical Jesus research, Jewish or Christian, is marked by the search for origins and authenticity. The various Quests for the Historical Jesus contributed to a crisis of identity within Western Christianity. The result was a move “back to the Jewish roots!” For Jewish scholars it was a means to position Jewry within a dominantly Christian culture. As a consequence, Jews now feel more at ease to relate to Jesus as a Jew. For Walter Homolka the Christian challenge now is to formulate a new Christology: between a Christian exclusivism that denies the universality of God, and a pluralism that endangers the specificity of the Christian understanding of God and the uniqueness of religious traditions, including that of Christianity.

There is a general understanding within religious and academic circles that the incarnate Christ of Christian belief lived and died a faithful Jew. This volume addresses Jesus in the context of Judaism. By emphasizing his Jewishness, the authors challenge today’s Jews to reclaim the Nazarene as a proto-rebel rabbi and invite Christians to discover or rediscover the Church’s Jewish heritage. The essays in this volume cover historical, literary, liturgical, philosophical, religious, theological, and contemporary issues related to the Jewish Jesus. Several of them were originally presented at a three-day symposium on “Jesus in the Context of Judaism and the Challenge to the Church,” hosted by the Samuel Rosenthal Center for Judaic Studies at Case Western Reserve University in 2009. In the context of pluralism, in the temper of growing interreligious dialogue, and in the spirit of reconciliation, encountering Jesus as living history for Christians and Jews is both necessary and proper. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of the New Testament and Early Church who are seeking new ways of understanding Jesus in his religious and cultural milieu, as well Jewish and Christian theologians and thinkers who are concerned with contemporary Jewish and Christian relationships.

This insightful volume represents the “hands-on” experience in the world of academia of two Jewish scholars, one of Orthodox background and the other a convert to the Jewish faith. As a series of separate but interrelated essays, it approaches multiple issues touching both the historical Jesus (himself a pious Jew) and the modern phenomenon of Messianic Judaism. It bridges the gap between the typically isolated disciplines of Jewish and Christian scholarship and forges a fresh level of understanding across religious boundaries. It delves into such issues as the nature and essence of Jesus’ message (pietistic, militant or something of a hybrid), and whether Messianic Jews should be welcome in the larger Jewish community. Its ultimate challenge is to view sound scholarship as a means of bringing together disparate faith traditions around a common academic table. Serious research of the “great Nazarene” becomes interfaith discourse.

With an all-new introduction by the author, N. T. Wright's classic work helps us grow in our understanding of the historical Jesus within first-century Palestine while challenging us to follow Jesus more faithfully into the postmodern world of the twenty-first century.

A theology of how Christianity and Judaism can be separate but linked by their roots in Scripture; presents a thorough study of Jesus as teacher seen from a Jewish perspective.

Jesus Our Salvation: An Introduction to Christology is an innovative text designed with the introductory student in mind. The text is written in an engaging style and is enhanced by pedagogical elements which make the complex material accessible to the student reader. Jesus Our Salvation is both sensitive to the challenges of contemporary Christology and well grounded in Catholic identity. The book maintains a positive, though critical, dialogue with many voices in the Christian tradition including those of the classical tradition, historical Jesus research, the evangelical tradition, and contemporary theological thought. It addresses important issues of today such as Christology's capacity to promote social transformation and the questions that are raised about Jesus from the perspective of religious pluralism.

Shows how research and reflection on Jesus's Jewishness transforms contemporary Christian thought on memory, otherness, natality and law.

How the rise of Christianity profoundly influenced the development of Judaism in late antiquity In late antiquity, as Christianity emerged from Judaism, it was not only the new religion that was being influenced by the old. The rise and revolutionary challenge of Christianity also had a profound influence on rabbinic Judaism, which was itself just emerging and, like Christianity, trying to shape its own identity. In The Jewish Jesus, Peter Schäfer reveals the crucial ways in which various Jewish heresies, including Christianity, affected the development of rabbinic Judaism. He even shows that some of the ideas that the rabbis appropriated from Christianity were actually reappropriated Jewish ideas. The result is a demonstration of the deep mutual influence between the sister religions, one that calls into question hard and fast distinctions between orthodoxy and heresy, and even Judaism and Christianity, during the first centuries CE.

In this pioneering study of Scripture and reception history, Tucker S. Ferda shows that the hope for Jesus’s second coming originated in his own message about the coming of the kingdom after a time of distress. Most historical Jesus scholars take for granted that Jesus’s second coming was invented by his zealous early followers. In Jesus and His Promised Second Coming, Tucker S. Ferda challenges this critical consensus. Using innovative methodology, Ferda works backward through reception history to Paul and the Gospels to argue that the hope for the second coming originated in Jesus’s own grappling with the prospect of death and his conviction that the kingdom was near; he expected a return that would coincide with the final judgment and the end of the age within the space of a generation. Ferda also makes a major contribution to the reception history of the Bible, shedding light on how Christians distinguished their faith from Judaism by deriding “Jewish messianism” as earthly minded and militaristic. In the early modern period, critics found an expedient way to distance Jesus from this caricature of “Jewish messianism”: they pinned the expectation for the second coming on Jesus’s early followers. A new appreciation for the diversity of Judaism and messianism in the Second Temple period makes possible a fresh reconstruction of Jesus. Bold and historically astute, Jesus and His Promised Second Coming breathes new life into a long-stagnant conversation. It also offers readers fresh insight into the history of Jewish-Christian relations. Students and scholars of the New Testament will need to read and engage with Ferda’s provocative argument.

'The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus' is a religious themed book by agnostic author Arthur Drews. Drews writes this book in an effort to debunk the myth of the historicity of Jesus of the Bible. He seeks to demonstrate that the various non-Biblical sources commonly used to give further weight to the existence of Jesus as claimed in the Scriptures, are in fact further evidence of his non-existence.