LIT CRIT, ESSAYS, FILM
Jesus, the Man and the Myth: A Jewish Reading of the New Testament Frederic Seager 181p, trade paper, $15, ISBN 979-8-736-14823-3
Seager tells the story of Jesus from a Jewish perspective, highlighting how the story, as told in Christian scriptures,”naturally puts the Jews and Judaism in a bad light.” Rather than reclaim the historic prophet as a Jew, historian Seager seeks to highlight Jesus’s “abusive language” (“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!”), ignorance of the Torah, and even his unhygienic practices, as set down in the Gospels. More pressingly, Seager demonstrates how Jesus’s moral code of absolutism and asceticism is and was at odds with a Jewish morality of moderation which is much more applicable to everyday life. Jesus’s story, in Seager’s eyes, is one of a claimant to the throne of David who was shown to be a fraud by the Jewish leaders of his day and then killed by the Romans.
Seager also analyzes the further narratives about Jesus in the New Testament, particularly in Paul’s writings, which laid the groundwork for centuries worth of claims that Jews were behind the killing of Jesus. In the book’s latter half, Seager’s focus shifts to broader contrasts
between Judaism and Christianity, including an extensive discussion of intermarriage between Christians and Jews, a choice that may disappoint readers anticipating a critical biography. The text closes with a helpful bibliographical essay on Jewish perspectives on the New Testament.
“The authors of the Christian Scriptures use Judaism as a foil to demonstrate the superiority of the new religion,” Seager writes, and he in turn argues the superiority of Judaism, a faith that ‘“gives meaning to life on earth instead of promising salvation in the hereafter” while “Christianity has never quite managed to accept human sexuality as anything but a necessary evil.” While at times polemical, this text will prove helpful for anyone seeking a strong Jewish perspective on Jesus that views him as a deeply flawed person whose followers founded a deeply flawed religion.
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