The Jewish Gospels Read Online Free PDF Page B

through the medium of a curse against those same Jewsand-Christians when they come to the synagogue. While both would undoubtedly have denied it angrily, Jerome and the Rabbis are engaged in a kind of conspiracy to delegitimate these folks who defined themselves as both Jewish and Christians, in order that the checklists remain absolutely clear and unambiguous.
    As we can see, these seemingly innocuous checklists are really tools of power, not simply description. If, thunders Jerome, you believe in the Nicene Creed, get out of the synagogue, and you will be a Christian. If you stay in the synagogue and drop your belief in Christian doctrine, then the Pharisees will agree to call you a Jew. Fill in the boxes correctly on the checklist, or you are neither a Christian nor a Jew. The very fact that Jerome and the Rabbis needed to fight against these minim , these Nazarenes who thought they were both Jews and Christians, suggests that they did, in fact, exist and in sufficient numbers to arouse concern.
    We need a way of thinking about the varieties of Jewish religious experience—especially in the crucial early period—that successfully accounts for the eddying and swirling of different currents of thought in a larger, more complex field of differences and similarities, one that enables us to speak of both the Rabbis and the Notzrim as historically—not normatively—expressions of Judaism.
    Instead of a checklist for who is a Jew, which inevitably, as we have seen, leads to arbitrary exclusions, we could use the idea of family resemblances in order to recapture the period of religious fluidity that followed Jesus’ death. As one literary scholar has noted, “Members of one family share a variety of similar features: eyes, gait, hair color, temperament. But—and this is the crucial point—there need be no one set of features shared byall family members.” 8 There is perhaps one feature that constitutes all as members of the Judeo-Christian family, namely, appealing to the Hebrew Scriptures as revelation. Similarly, there was one feature that could be said to be common to all ancient groups that we might want to call (anachronistically) Christian, namely, some form of discipleship to Jesus. Yet this feature hardly captures enough richness and depth to produce a descriptively productive category, for in so many other vitally important ways, groups that followed Jesus and groups that ignored him were similar to each other. To put this point another way, groups that ignored or rejected Jesus may have had some highly salient other features (for instance, belief in the Son of Man) that bound them to Jesus groups and disconnected them from other non-Jesus Jews. On the other hand, some Jesus Jews may have had aspects to their religious lives (following pharisaic, or even rabbinic, halakha) that drew them closer to some non-Jesus Jews than to other Jesus People. 9 Moreover, some Jesus groups might have related to Jesus in ways more similar to the ways that other non-Jesus Jewish groups related to other prophets, leaders, or Messiahs than to the ways that other Jesus groups were relating to Jesus. That is, some Jews in the first century in Palestine might have been expecting a Messiah who would be an incarnation of the divine but rejected Jesus as the one, while some other Jews who accepted Jesus might have thought of him not as divine butonly as a human Messiah. The model of family resemblance therefore seems apt for talking about a Judaism that incorporates early Christianity as well. This expanded understanding of “Judaism” completely allows for the inclusion of the earliest Gospel literature within its purview, thus making the earliest and in some ways most foundational texts of Christianity—Jewish.
    The Jewish Gospels
    By now, almost everyone recognizes that the historical Jesus was a Jew who followed ancient Jewish ways. 10 There is also growing recognition that the Gospels themselves