Jesus the Jew in Christian Memory
Theological and Philosophical Explorations

Shows how research and reflection on Jesus's Jewishness transforms contemporary Christian thought on memory, otherness, natality and law.

Barbara U. Meyer (Author)

9781108498890, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 March 2020

222 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.7 cm, 0.45 kg

'Jesus the Jew in Christian Memory is an extraordinary conversation with Jewish thought and life. [This book] … invites us to open our eyes to the halakhic Christ so that we will in turn walk our talk.' Mary C. Boys, Modern Theology

Jesus the Jew is the primary signifier of Christianity's indebtedness to Judaism. This connection is both historical and continuous. In this book, Barbara Meyer shows how Christian memory, as largely intertwined with Jewish memory, provides a framework to examine the theological dimensions of historical Jesus research. She explores the topics that are central to the Jewishness of Jesus, such as the Christian relationship to law, and otherness as a Christological category. Through the lenses of the otherness of the Jewish Jesus for contemporary Christians, she also discusses circumcision, natality, vulnerability, and suffering in dialogue with thinkers seldom drawn into Jewish-Christian discourse, notably Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva, Martha Nussbaum and Adi Ophir. Meyer demonstrates how the memory of Jesus' Jewishness is a key to reconfiguring contemporary challenges to Christian thought, such as particularity and otherness, law and ethics after the Shoah, human responsibility, and divine vulnerability.

Introduction
1. What is Christian memory?
2. The past
3. The present
4. The future
5. After and against suffering
6. Between Jesus, the Jew, and the other
Conclusion
Postscript.

Subject Areas: New Testaments [HRCF2], The historical Jesus [HRCA], Philosophy of religion [HRAB]