Jesus the Jew: Survey on the Cliché in Its Context

Abstract

This essay pursues the studies pertaining to the Quest for the Historical Jesus, which began in the Enlightenment era, and focuses on the dominant discourse of this quest in the present-day scholarly works on Jesus the Jew. The late-coming acceptance of the Jewishness of Jesus is now a scholarly cliché. In the context of the Gospels, to say “Jesus was a Jew” is not a really shocking or unexpected idea. The problem with the Jewishness of Jesus is why it took until the 1970s for this idea to develop. The second problem is how the assertion of the Jewishness of Jesus could develop so tremendously in the contemporary academy. That is a difficult question to answer within the borders of mere theology. Therefore, in this essay, I will have recourse to the help of politics and anthropology, and ultimately will claim that the changing of the main discourse in the New Testament scholarship on Jesus the Jew has happened for several reasons, but the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli Wars and the Prague Spring of 1968 have played more important roles than others, such as multiculturalism, the Second Vatican Council, and neoliberalism. These two events might show us the motivation for the sudden but widely accepted alteration. With the rise of the Jesus the Jew emphasis in Historical Jesus Studies, the intensity of Holocaust studies has also increased. Whereas until the 1970s there was no significant concentration of work on the Holocaust, since the 1970s this trend has been reversed and has taken a dominant place in modern academia. The Holocaust narrative has also been valorised by the changing geopolitics of the world, which has also influenced Historical Jesus Studies. With the rise of Israel in the region as a result of the Arab-Israeli wars, which made Israel one of the countries that could serve the world system, the emphasis on the Holocaust and Jesus the Jew became a kind of propaganda in the academy. However, it is not these movements that have ensured the success of this wind change. The event that led to the thawing of the Cold War was the Prague Spring of 1968. The ideal of a Socialism outside the example of the Soviet Union, which was trying to be created in Czechoslovakia, was crushed by Soviet tanks. Since the Soviet Union itself destroyed this attempt to heal the corruption within itself, the Soviet reaction must be seen as the suicide of Socialism. It is for this reason that the second power of the Cold War period ideologically withdrew from the scene. The crushing of the Prague Spring led to a spring in a different field of modern academia: the Quest for the Historical Jesus and Holocaust Studies.