By Richard Allen Greene, religion.blogs.CNN.com
(CNN) – The relationship between Jews and Jesus has traditionally been a complicated one, to say the least.
As His followers’ message swept the ancient world, Jews who did not accept Jesus as the Messiah found themselves in the uncomfortable, and sometimes dangerous, position of being blamed for His death.
Jews, for their part, tended largely to ignore Jesus.
That’s changing now.
In the past year, a spate of Jewish authors, from the popular to the rabbinic to the scholarly, have wrestled with what Jews should think about Jesus.
And overwhelmingly, they are coming up with positive answers, urging their fellow Jews to learn about Jesus, understand Him and claim Him as one of their own.
“Jesus is a Jew. He spent His life talking to other Jews,” said Amy-Jill Levine, co-editor of the recently released The Jewish Annotated New Testament.
“In reading the New Testament, I am often inspired, I am intrigued. I actually find myself becoming a better Jew because I become better informed about my own history,” she said.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, a media personality who recently launched a bid for a U.S. House seat, argues in his own new book, Kosher Jesus, that “Jews have much to learn from Jesus – and from Christianity as a whole – without accepting Jesus’ divinity. There are many reasons for accepting Jesus as a man of great wisdom, beautiful ethical teachings, and profound Jewish patriotism.”
And Benyamin Cohen, an Orthodox Jew who spent a recent year going to church, admitted that he’s jealous that Christians have Jesus.
“He’s a tangible icon that everybody can latch on to. Judaism doesn’t have a superhero like that,” said Cohen, the author of the 2009 book My Jesus Year.
“I’m not advocating for Moses dolls,” he said, but he argued that “it’s hard to believe in a God you can’t see. I’m jealous of Christians in that regard, that they have this physical manifestation of the divine that they can pray to.
“There could be more devout Jews than me who don’t need that, but to a young Jew living in the 21st century, I wish we had something more tangible,” he said.
The flurry of recent Jewish books on Jesus — including this month’s publication of The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ by Daniel Boyarin — is part of a trend of Jews taking pride in Jesus, interfaith expert Edward Kessler said.
“In the 1970s and 1980s, Christian New Testament scholars rediscovered the Jewish Jesus. They reminded all New Testament students that Jesus was Jewish,” said Kessler, the director of the Woolf Institute in Cambridge, England, which focuses on relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
A generation later, that scholarship has percolated into Jewish thought, he said, welcoming the trend: “It’s not a threat to Jews and it’s not a threat to Christians.”
For Jews in particular, he said, “It’s not so threatening as it was even 30 years ago. There is almost a pride that Jesus was a Jew rather than an embarrassment about it.”
Boteach agrees, writing in Kosher Jesus that “Jews will gain much from re-embracing Him as a hero.”
“The truth is important,” Boteach writes. “A patriot of our people has been lost. Worse still, He’s been painted as the father of a long and murderous tradition of anti-Semitism.”
Boteach aims to claim, or reclaim, Jesus as a political rebel against Rome and to exonerate the Jews of His death. But Boteach’s book has attracted plenty of criticism, for instance for blaming the Apostle Paul for everything he doesn’t like about Christianity, such as hailing Jesus as divine and cutting his ties to Judaism.
“Paul never met Jesus, and Jesus certainly never would have sanctioned Paul’s actions and embellishments,” Boteach argues about the apostle who wrote much of the New Testament. “Jesus … would have been appalled at how His followers would later define Him.”
“Jews will never accept His divinity. Nor should they,” Boteach writes, in one of many instances of presuming to know what Jesus really thought and meant. “The belief that any man is God is an abomination to Judaism, a position that Jesus Himself would maintain.”
He cherry-picks the Gospels to to suit his arguments, writes in casual modern idioms (calling Pontius Pilate a “sadistic mass murderer” and comparing him to Hitler), and gets wrong the most basic details of the Passion story, such as the amount of money Judas took to betray Jesus.
Other experts in the field label Boteach’s book “sensationalistic,” and call him a “popularizer,” but Kessler sees Kosher Jesus as part of the trend of Judaizing Jesus. Cohen, the My Jesus Year author, offered some support for Boteach even as he expressed doubts about the book.
“I understand what Shmuley is trying to get at there,” he said, but added: “I don’t think anyone has the right to say ‘This is the definition of Jesus,’ especially a rabbi. He’s not ours to claim.”
Levine, who teaches New Testament and Jewish studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, also framed Jewish efforts to study Jesus in terms of mutual respect.
“Speaking personally as a Jew, if I want my neighbors to respect Judaism, which means knowing something about Jewish history, scripture, and tradition, I owe my Christian neighbors the same courtesy. It’s a matter of respect,” she said.
She urged Jews to “become familiar with the material and make up their own mind as to how they understand Jesus.”
Ironically, she added, Jews can understand their own history more thoroughly through studying the life of Jesus.
“The best source on the period for Jewish history other than (the first-century historian) Josephus is the New Testament,” she said.
“It’s one of those ironies of history that the only Pharisee writing in the Second Temple Period from whom we have records is Paul of Tarsus,” she said. “The Jewish Annotated New Testament is designed in part to help Jews recover their own history.”
But she also wants Christians to use it to understand Judaism more deeply, she said. While many Christian leaders acknowledge that Jesus was a Jew, she said, not many know much about what that means.
“Many Christian ministers and educators have no training in what early Judaism was like,” she said. “Not to take seriously first-century Judaism seems to dismiss part of the message of the New Testament.”
Cohen, the My Jesus Year author, found that Christians were very interested in Judaism during the 52 weeks he spent going from church to church.
“Many Christians look on Judaism as version 1.0 of their own religion. Because of that historical relationship, they’re interested in a lot of the theology of Judaism,” he said.
For his part, Cohen learned much that surprised him. “I was shocked when I went to church and heard them give sermons about the Old Testament,” he said. “I had no idea Christians read the Old Testament.”
“One week, I went to church and the pastor gave exactly the same sermon my rabbi did the night before about Moses and the burning bush, and the pastor did it much better,” he continued.
Cohen came away from his Jesus year with a clear understanding of what he believes.
“People ask me all the time if I believe in Jesus. Do I believe He exists? Sure. Do I believe He’s your God? Sure, I have no problem with that,” he said he tells Christians who ask.
“I understand Christians’ love for Jesus and I respect that,” he said. “If anything, I learned a lot from them and did become a more engaged Jew, a better Jew, and I appreciate my Judaism more because I hung out with Jesus.”
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