It has become fashionable among the modern day Jewish historians to present that controversial Jew, Jesus, in a favorable light. Yet, depictions of Jesus in Jewish art and literature remain rare.
jesus
 Sholem Asch stated (see Jesus in Jewish Art) that in his view, the authority of Y'shua was only for the gentiles because the Jewish people were already under the authority of the Torah. The dogma that the Torah is unchangeable, and forever binding to the Jewish people is commonplace in Orthodox Judaism. (The doctrine is called "the immutability of the Torah.") However, a number of factors suggest that the Torah was never intended to be an unchanging monolith, and that the authority of Y'shua is therefore a live option for Jews. Consider this: If you could go back a few centuries to a shtetl in Eastern Europe—or even to the early 1900s in the Lower East Side of New York City—and ask, Who do you think Jesus is?, you might receive a response like the following.You would probably be told that “Yoshke” was an illegitimate child, a sorcerer who led the Jewish people astray, a bad man who stole the name of God in order to work his deceptive miracles. Perhaps you would also hear him referred to as Yeshu, standing for the Hebrew phrase, “May his name and memory be blotted out.” Those ideas about Jesus go back at least as far as the middle ages. Why The Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History, by David Klinghoffer, Doubleday, 2005. Trojan horse triumph of history In the painting of The Sacrifice of Isaac, Marc Chagall draws a parallel between the story of Isaac and that of Y'shua. In doing so, he is going back to the biblical account which has occupied a substantial place in Jewish thought: the Akedah, or Binding of Isaac. The world cries out for a solution to the conflict that threatens to tear apart the Middle East. Political solutions have come and gone, leaving many feeling that the rocky road to peace will ultimately lead nowhere. But behind the doomsday headlines and beyond the violent images broadcast from the volatile region, several Israelis and Palestinians have achieved a true and lasting peace.  Jewish scholars have paid more attention to the person of Y'shua (Jesus) in the last hundred years than they have in the previous nineteen hundred. None deny his Jewishness. After all, Jesus was born to a Jewish mother, lived in Israel and taught a group of Jewish disciples. He also celebrated Jewish holidays. Modern Jewish theologian and rabbi, Pinchas Lapide, notes:  It is human nature to want to neatly categorize and label ideas--as well as people! It's not that we mean any harm by such an exercise; it just seems to make things more manageable, at least in theory, if not in reality. If Jesus is the Messiah, didn't he accomplish his mission the first time around? Our prophets didn't say anything about a second coming!" It has become fashionable among the modern day Jewish historians to present that controversial Jew, Jesus, in a favorable light. Yet, depictions of Jesus in Jewish art and literature remain rare. My name is Steven Peter Wertheim. I was born August 3, 1951 in the Bronx, New York—but our family actually lived in the upper west side of Manhattan, where it seemed like everyone was either Jewish or Catholic. Regular fights broke out between us neighborhood kids. As things heated up, invariably one of them" would call "one of us" "Christ killer." I had no idea what "Christ killer" meant, but I knew it meant a fight was imminent.  Jesus the Pharisee: A New Look at the Jewishness of Jesus We disagree with Jane Kathryn Conrad's letter in view of the following: (Adapted from Appendix 6 of the book, Y'shua, the Jewish Way to Say Jesus.) |