The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ

225 Pages·2016·2.65 MB·English

by  Boyarin Daniel.

The Jewish Gospels
Also by Daniel Boyarin
Intertextuality and the Reading ofMidrash
Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture
A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity
Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the
Invention of the Jewish Man
Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity
and Judaism
Queer Theory and the Jewish Question
Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity
Socrates and the Fat Rabbis
The Jewish Gospels
The Story of the Jewish Christ
Daniel Boyarin
© 2012 by Daniel Boyarin
Foreword © 2012 by Jack Miles
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form,
without written permission from the publisher.
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be mailed to: Permissions Department,
The New Press, 38 Greene Street, New York, NY 10013.
Published in the United States by
The New Press, New York, 2012
Distributed by Perseus Distribution
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Boyarin, Daniel.
The Jewish Gospels : the story of the Jewish Christ / Daniel Boyarin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59558-468-7 (he.: alk. paper)
1. Jesus Christ—Jewish interpretations. 2. Bible. NT.—
Criticism, interpretation, etc., Jewish. I. Title.
BM620.B69 2011
296.3'96—dc23 2011034643
The New Press was established in 1990 as a not-for-profit
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Composition by dixl
This book was set in Berling Lt Std
Printed in the United States of America
2 4 68 10 9 7 5 31
For Aharon Shemesh, M
;
in whom I have fulfilled both directives of our Sages:
to find a friend and acquire a teacher

Contents
Foreword by Jack Miles ix
Acknowledgments xxiii
Introduction 1
1. From Son of God to Son of Man 25
2. The Son of Man in First Enoch and
Fourth Ezra: Other Jewish Messiahs
of the First Century 71
3. Jesus Kept Kosher 102
4. The Suffering Christ as a Midrash
on Daniel 129
Epilogue: The Jewish Gospel 157
Notes 161
Index 191

Foreword
Jack Miles
"DANIEL BOYARIN," A PROMINENT CONSERVATIVE rabbi con­
fided to me not long ago, "is one of the two or three greatest
rabbinic scholars in the world/' and—dropping his voice a
notch—"possibly even the greatest." The observation was
given in confidence because, quite clearly, it troubled the
rabbi to think that someone with Boyarin's views might
have truly learnedTalmudic grounds for them. As a Chris­
tian, let me confide that his views can be equally troubling
for Christians who appreciate the equally grounded origi­
nality of his reading of our New Testament.
Boyarin's is a troubling brilliance because it blurs and
complicates a pair of reciprocally settled identities. His
achievement is to have taken conceptual control of this
reciprocity and then deployed it in a bold rereading of the
rabbis and the evangelists alike, the results of which are so
startling that once you—you, Jew, or you, Christian—get
what he is up to, you suddenly read even the most familiar
passages of your home scripture in a new light.
I can best illustrate this point, I think, with a recent,