Jesus of Nazareth: a magician and a false prophet who deceived God's people?

Abstract

The relationship of Jesus to first-century Judaism continues to be discussed vigorously. This continuing debate was sparked off initially by the publi-cation of Hermann Samuel Reimarus's Wolfenbüttel Fragments between 1774 and 1778. In deliberately provocative comments, Reimarus insisted that Jesus did not intend to abolish the Jewish religion and to introduce a new one in its place. The intention of Jesus, Reimarus claimed, was reversed completely after his death by both the actions and the teaching of the apostles. With their abandonment of the law, ‘Judaism was laid in its grave.’ In an equally influential publication two generations later, David Friedrich Strauss noted that a radical account of the origins of Christianity along these lines had been propounded by ‘the enemies of Christianity in its ecclesiastical form’, and that it had been done ‘most concisely of all in the Wolfenbüttel Fragments ’, i.e. by Reimarus. Although Strauss was sympathetic to many of Reimarus's claims, he knew that any presentation of Jesus as a faithful Jew was built on a one-sided reading of the evidence. Strauss emphasized that there was clear strong evidence within the gospels to support the opposite viewpoint: Jesus was at odds with the religious leaders of his day. Reimarus and Strauss both still have plenty of supporters, and many mediating positions are defended. After one hundred and fifty years of discussion, the relationship of Jesus to Judaism remains a contentious issue, as a cluster of influential book titles confirms: Jesus the Jew ; Jesus and Judaism ; Jesus and the Transformation of Judaism ; Jesus within Judaism .

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