Jesus was more Jewish than you think.
When Rice University religion professor Matthias Henze visits local Houston-area churches and synagogues to promote interfaith understanding between Christianity and Judaism, he focuses on discussing one particular time period: the four-to-five-century gap between the Old and New Testaments.
“It’s been overlooked for a number of reasons,” said Henze, a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and early Judaism, with an emphasis on the Second Temple. “Both Jews and Christians don’t pay much attention to this period.”
This argument is alluded to in the subtitle to his new book, “Mind the Gap: How the Jewish Writings Between the Old and New Testament Help Us Understand Jesus.”
With an awareness of Hebrew religious texts from the gap years, “Jesus now has a context,” Henze said. “We put him where he belongs. He’s no longer a character by himself, he’s no longer sporadic.”
And, he said, “once we understand Jesus as part of a larger Jewish world, I think we’re doing much more justice to the New Testament.”
The gap began after the last books in the Old Testament were written in the fourth century BCE (the lone exception is the Book of Daniel, from the second century BCE). Closing the gap, the New Testament was written in the second half of the first century CE.
“My thesis is that in the gap,” Henze said, “Jews felt free to write new texts, think new thoughts, develop new literary forms of expression.”
It was a time when the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were ruled, successively, by the Persians, Greeks, Hasmoneans and Romans — with only the Hasmoneans, the Maccabean dynasty, representing domestic rule.
At the end of the period, Henze said, Jews bravely tried out new ideas, and “Christianity emerges… Jesus comes along, the inheritor of those ideas.”
Source: The Times of Israel.
