Authors: Susannah Heschel
ISBN-13: 9780226329598, ISBN-10: 0226329593
Format: Paperback
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Date Published: April 1998
Edition: 1
Susannah Heschel is the Eli Black Associate Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College. She is the coeditor of Insider/Outsider: Multiculturalism and American Jews and the editor of On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader and Moral Grandeur and Spirited Audacity: Essays on Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Was Jesus the founder of Christianity or a teacher of Judaism? When he argued the latter based on the New Testament, Abraham Geiger ignited an intense debate that began in nineteenth-century Germany but continues to this day.
Geiger, a pioneer of Reform Judaism and a founder of Jewish studies, developed a Jewish version of Christian origins. He contended that Jesus was a member of the Pharisees, a progressive and liberalizing group within first-century Judaism, and that he taught nothing new or original. This argument enraged German Protestant theologians, some of whom produced a tragic counterargument based on racial theory.
In this fascinating book, Susannah Heschel traces the genesis of Geiger's argument and examines the reaction to it within Christian theology. She concludes that Geiger initiated an intellectual revolt by the colonized against the colonizer, an attempt not to assimilate into Christianity by adopting Jesus as a Jew, but to overthrow Christian intellectual hegemony by claiming that Christianity—and all of Western civilization—was the product of Judaism.
Acknowledgments | ||
Introduction: Reversing the Gaze | 1 | |
Ch. 1 | The Creation of a Historical Theologian | 23 |
Ch. 2 | Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Prelude of Revisionist Configurations | 50 |
Ch. 3 | Reconceiving Early Judaism | 76 |
Ch. 4 | D. F. Strauss, the Tubingen School, and Albrecht Ritschl | 106 |
Ch. 5 | The Jewish Jesus and the Protestant Flight from the Historical Jesus | 127 |
Ch. 6 | From Jesus to Christianity: Geiger on the Postapostolic Era | 162 |
Ch. 7 | Fixing the Theological Gaze: The Reception of Geiger's Work | 186 |
Conclusion | 229 | |
Notes | 243 | |
Index | 301 |