The Messiah Confrontation

Autorentext

Israel Knohl is Yehezkel Kaufmann Professor of Bible Studies emeritus at the Hebrew University–Jerusalem and a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He is the author of The Divine Symphony: The Bible’s Many Voices (JPS, 2003), The Sanctuary of Silence: The Priestly Torah and the Holiness School, and The Messiah before Jesus: The Suffering Servant of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Knohl has taught at Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of California–Berkeley, and the Chicago Divinity School.

Klappentext

2023 Top Ten Book from the Academy of Parish Clergy

The Messiah Confrontation casts new and fascinating light on why Jesus was killed.

Grounded in meticulous research on the messianism debates in the Bible and during the Second Temple period, biblical scholar Israel Knohl argues that Jesus’s trial was in reality a dramatic clash between two Jewish groups holding opposing ideologies of messianism and anti-messianism, with both ideologies running through the Bible. The Pharisees (forefathers of the rabbinic sages) and most of the Jewish people had a conception of a Messiah similar to Jesus: like the prophets and most psalmists, they expected the arrival of a godlike Messiah. However, the judges who sentenced Jesus to death were Sadducees, who were fighting with the Pharisees largely because they repudiated the Messiah idea. Thus, the trial of Jesus was not a clash between Jewish and what would become Christian doctrines but a confrontation between two internal Jewish positions-expecting a Messiah or rejecting the Messiah idea-in which Jesus and the Pharisees were actually on the same side.

Knohl contends that had the assigned judges been Pharisees rather than Sadducees, Jesus would not have been convicted and crucified. The Pharisees’ disagreement with Jesus was solely over whether Jesus was the Messiah-but historically, for Jews, arguing about who was or wasn’t the Messiah was not uncommon.

The Messiah Confrontation has far-reaching consequences for the relationship between Christians and Jews.

Inhalt

Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Birth of the Messianic Figure
2. Rejection of the Kingship Concept
3. Reconceiving the Messiah
4. Messianic Rise and Fall of “the Branch”
5. Shifting Sands of Torah Authority
6. Torah Distinctions between the Human and the Divine
7. Introducing Resurrection of the Dead into Jewish Thought
8. The Sadducees’ Denial of the Doctrine of Reward
9. Qumran Accounts of an Exalted and Suffering Messiah
10. The Pharisees’ Expectations of an Imminent Messiah
11. Jesus’s Messianic Conception
12. The Trial of Jesus
    Afterword
    Notes
    Bibliography
    Subject Index
    Scriptural Index