Jesus and the Judaism of His Time

by Irving M. Zeitlin

Book Overview

Following his study of Ancient Judaism, the author turns his attention to the emergence of Christianity. The main aim of this work is to understand Jesus as he saw himself, and to compare that... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 074560448X
• ISBN13: 9780745604480
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: Polity Press
• Length: 204 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Signs of the times...

Irving Zeitlin followed up his acclaimed survey of `Ancient Judaism' with a study of one of the pivotal points in Jewish political, sociological, and theological history: the time of the Roman occupation, which is also the time of Jesus.In his book, `Jesus and the Judaism of His Time', Zeitlin examines the different varieties of Judaism present in Palestine during the period of the early Caesars, to look for unifying principles (that which all Jewish people would agree makes one a member of the people) as well as the established variants: Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots and Sicarii. He also looks at a movement of thought and feeling that was crossing these more established lines, namely, the messianic idea.Drawing primarily on the three sources contemporary with the time, namely, the writings of Josephus, the Misnah*, and the Christian New Testament*, and borrowing occasionally from other sources such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, Zeitlin constructs a picture of Judaism that works toward a comprehensive overview of the source of both modern Judaism and Christianity. Zeitlin pulls in examples of Judaic influence outside (such as on the works of Aristobulus and Philo) to show the influence that Judaism was already having in the Greek- and Roman-dominated world. (*While the Misnah and the New Testament were largely composed after this period, the subject material and stories date to this period, and were carried by people comfortable with oral traditions of transmission.)Across the varieties of Jewish expression, Zeitlin argues, there was always a grassroots support for each of the varieties because they adhered to certain principles of respect for the Torah in the face of much more politically-powerful and worldly-seductive influences. As Josephus wrote:`The greatest miracle of all is that our Law holds out no seductive bait of sensual pleasure, but has exercised this influence through its own inherent merits; and, as God permeates the universe, so the Law has found its way among all mankind.'There was, however, varying shifts in outlook, not the least of which was the definition of salvation, redemption, and God's ultimate will (a situation that occurs in the development of many religious frameworks). Is salvation corporate or individual? Is God working to save the people of Israel, or each individual among the people of Israel, or both? Messianic feeling wavered between these two sentiments, and can often be seen in interchanges that occur between Jesus and others, particularly Zealots. Of course, the idea of messianism gave rise to false prophets (and, most likely, some of them truly believed themselves to be acting according to the will of God), who often lead their followers to disaster. In some terms, even the Jesus movement apparently ended in disaster. It was due to the continuing rise of messianic figures that the Romans were sensitive to political uprising and difficulty in a province so strategically located to the Parthians and the Eg