Historians and theologians will, no doubt, continue to debate the causes of the Holocaust of European Jewry for many decades. But one of the causes is quite clear: the centuries of anti-Judaism, labeled by historian Jules Isaac "the teaching of contempt," preached and taught in Christian churches and schools.

In recent decades, Christians have begun to come to grips with this legacy of hatred. But a difficult question must be asked. Is anti-Judaism indeed a perversion of the message of the New Testament, as many would like to believe? Or is it in fact integral to the Christian Scrip-tures, part and parcel of the entire Christian message? Is there warrant for Christians to see themselves as "Gentile worshippers of the God of Israel," or must Christians inevitably view their religion as having replaced the outmoded religion of Judaism?

Jesus, Judaism & Christian Anti-Judaism presents five fairly brief essays by some of the most significant contemporary scholars of early Christianity. The editors state that their purpose was to make the latest aca-demic scholarship accessible to a more general audience. "Academic writing can be obscure, intimidating, or just plain opaque . . . [p]opular writing, which frequently draws uncritically on familiar (usually noncritical) interpretative understandings, is more often part of
the problem than part of the solution." Fredriksen and Reinhartz and their colleagues have attempted to make the concerns and conclusions of critical scholarship available to a wider audience, and by and large they have succeeded.

The book is organized around key figures and texts that have shaped the Christian community and its attitudes towards Judaism. Fredriksen offers an introductory essay where she lays out the parameters of the question. How did a community rooted in the life and teachings of a Jew (Jesus of Nazareth) who brought his message to other Jews (the disciples, those who heard him teach during his lifetime, the apostle Paul) develop into a community conspicuous for not living by Jewish law and indeed defined by its hostility to Judaism?

Following this introductory chapter, there are chapters on the search for the historical Jesus, Paul, the Synoptic Gospels and Acts, and finally on the Gospel of John. While the book works as a whole, each chapter also stands on its own and could well be used as a study text for an adult education or interfaith dialogue group.

E. P. Sanders of Duke University is one of the leading contemporary scholars of ancient Judaism and Christian origins. He is well known for his work on what is known as "the quest for the historical Jesus." This "quest" is distinctly modern because it is based, as Sanders points out, on the assumption that not every statement or action the Gospels attribute to Jesus is attributed accurately. This leads to the further assumption that it is possible to distinguish between what the man Jesus actually taught and did, and those teachings and actions incorrectly attributed to him by later writers.

Anti-judaism enters the picture, however, when scholars apply their own values to judge a man who lived two thousand years ago. Since most "historical Jesus" scholars are Christian, they want a Jesus who is in line with their own values and beliefs, and often wind up concluding that what they find congenial represents
the true Jesus of history, while what they don't like is attributable to the context in which Jesus lived and taught. And that context, of course, was Palestinian Judaism in the late Second Temple Era.

Scholars who try to distance Jesus from his historical context portray Jesus as opposed to the Judaism of his time, or as an "anti-Jewish Jew." This distancing move then exposes the scholar to charges that he or she is him- or herself anti-Jewish. Sanders argues that not every accusation of "anti-Judaism" hurled at a particular scholar is necessarily correct. While a particular scholar may well be critical of aspects of Jesus' society, that does not always mean that he or she is anti-Jewish. He or she may simply be "anti-ancient," since the aspects of life that are often criticized (rituals, purity, apocalyp-tic eschatology) were common in the ancient world and by no means exclusively Jewish. At the same time, Sanders convincingly demonstrates that Jesus was by no means opposed to the Jewish religion, though he may well have been critical of some of the Jewish leaders of his day.

Perhaps the most important chapter in the book (at least for the intended audience of non-specialist readers) is John Gager's "Paul, the Apostle of Judaism." Gager rather succinctly summarizes the revolution in Pauline studies that has occurred in the last twenty years or so. A "paradigm shift" has taken place in much of the scholarly world, a shift that stands the old view of Paul on its head. The new scholarship attempts to replace our picture of Paul as "the father of Christian anti-Judaism, the author of rejection-replacement theology, who claimed that God has rejected his people Israel and replaced them with a new people, the Christians."

Gager rather convincingly demolishes the "Paul-as-rejectionist" view, which has been the standard perspective on Paul held by both Jews and Christians
for the better part of two millennia. Gager resolves a quandary that has bothered Paul's readers for centuries: Given that Paul teaches that God has rejected the Jews and their religion, how do we account for a number of pro-Jewish passages in Paul's letters? For his insistence that God has not rejected his people (Rom. 11:1)? For his statement that "all Israel will be saved (Rom. 11:26-noting that Paul says ‘will be saved’ and not ‘will come to recognize Christ’)?"

Many of the seeming problems in Paul disappear when one strips away subsequent assumptions about what Paul "really" means and allows Paul's words to speak for themselves. In Gager's reading, Paul is not speaking about Jews outside "the Jesus movement" at all. The argument is not about what Jews ought to do, but rather what Gentiles need to do. Should they adopt bits and pieces of Jewish observance in a haphazard way? Or rather, are they already saved through the faith of Jesus (not faith in Jesus)? Paul, in Gager's reading, is not arguing that Jews should not observe the Torah, that it is ineffective as a means of salvation, or that God has rejected the Jews. Rather, he is arguing that God has now, through the faith of Jesus, provided another, law-free, path to salvation for Gentiles, who are now "grafted on" and joined with the Jewish people in God's economy of salvation.

Gager's re-reading of Paul can come as a shock to
those of us, both Jews and Christians, who have been schooled in the old replacement-rejection theory of Paul's teaching. Yet Gager demonstrates that not only does his reading of Paul make sense, it is in fact the only way to read Paul that does not have him constantly contradicting himself.

After these chapters, we find Amy-Jill Levine's essay on the Synoptic Gospels and editor Reinhartz's chapter on John. These, too, provide valuable insights. For example, Levine shows how anti-Judaism enters the picture when the historical context of a statement is ignored. Jesus, Levine writes, was a Jew speaking to other Jews. As such, "his teachings comport with the tradition of Israel's prophets. Judaism has always had a self-critical component . . ." The problem arises when Jesus' criticisms are taken out of their internal Jewish context. "In such a case, the positive portrayal of God's people can all too easily be taken by Christian readers to refer to themselves, whereas the self-criticism can be taken to refer to the Jews only."

Reinhartz's subject matter is perhaps the most challenging, as John's Gospel draws the distinction between Jesus and "the Jews" more sharply than do
the Synoptic Gospels. Though Jesus and his disciples
are seen participating in the life of the Jewish commu-nity, observing Jewish customs and taking part in debates about Jewish law, Jesus himself is referred to as a Jew only one time (by a Samaritan woman, at that). Furthermore, John uses black-and-white rhetoric to distinguish his community from the Jews. If Jesus' followers are the children of light, "the Jews" must be the children of darkness; if Jesus' followers are children of God, "the Jews" must be children of the devil. Ultimately, Reinhartz declares that she is not able to do for John what Gager has done for Paul -- namely, acquit him of the charge of anti-Judaism. "There is, in fact, no solution that gets the Fourth Gospel ‘off the hook.’ It is not possible to explain away the negative presentations of Jews or to deny that the Johannine understanding of Jesus includes the view that he has superseded the Jewish covenant and taken over its major institutions and symbols."

Of course, Reinhartz is not the first scholar to arrive at such a conclusion. Others before her, troubled by John's anti-Judaism, have posited a historical setting wherein John's community had been recently expelled from the synagogue and thus sought to deal with that trauma by distancing themselves from their opponents. Reinhartz finds no historical justification for such an assertion and rejects it on theological as well as historical grounds because, even if true, it would be a form of blaming the victim (by declaring that the Jews provoked their own negative portrayal).

While there is no real way to acquit John of the charges of anti-Judaism, there is a way of mitigating the impact: "recognize that the Gospel, while inspired by a particular understanding and experience of Jesus, was written by human beings in specific, perhaps very difficult, circumstances."

Jesus, Judaism & Christian Anti-Judaism is, in sum, a valuable introduction to some of the latest and best scholarship on anti-Judaism in the New Testament. Its value is enhanced by its annotated bibliography of books for further reading on the subjects it covers. My most significant criticism of the book, in fact, has to do with its subtitle: Reading the New Testament after the Holocaust. One might expect, given the subtitle, some extended reflection on the question of the role of Christian anti-Judaism in setting the ground for the Nazi genocide. Do the authors, for example, agree with the rather nuanced statement in Dabru Emet that "Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon?" While there are a few mentions of the Holocaust as the trigger for many Christians to re-think their attitudes towards Jews
and Judaism, the book really deals with the larger phenomenon of Christian anti-Judaism and not at all
with the Holocaust. Perhaps the subtitle was added by the publisher in hopes of capitalizing on the continued popularity of Holocaust-related books.

This criticism notwithstanding, Jesus, Judaism & Christian Anti-Judaism is a valuable contribution. It
does not break much if any new scholarly ground, nor does it intend to; but it provides a solid, accessible "state of the question" for many of the issues that friends of the ICJS will want to consider as they read the New Testament.

Rabbi Charles L. Arian is the Jewish Scholar on staff at the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies

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