The Messiah Confrontation
Pharisees versus Sadducees and the Death of Jesus
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
2023 Top Ten Book from the Academy of Parish Clergy
The Messiah Confrontation casts new and fascinating light on why Jesus was killed.
Grounded in meticulous research on the messianism debates in the Bible and during the Second Temple period, biblical scholar Israel Knohl argues that Jesus’s trial was in reality a dramatic clash between two Jewish groups holding opposing ideologies of messianism and anti-messianism, with both ideologies running through the Bible. The Pharisees (forefathers of the rabbinic sages) and most of the Jewish people had a conception of a Messiah similar to Jesus: like the prophets and most psalmists, they expected the arrival of a godlike Messiah. However, the judges who sentenced Jesus to death were Sadducees, who were fighting with the Pharisees largely because they repudiated the Messiah idea. Thus, the trial of Jesus was not a clash between Jewish and what would become Christian doctrines but a confrontation between two internal Jewish positions—expecting a Messiah or rejecting the Messiah idea—in which Jesus and the Pharisees were actually on the same side.
Knohl contends that had the assigned judges been Pharisees rather than Sadducees, Jesus would not have been convicted and crucified. The Pharisees’ disagreement with Jesus was solely over whether Jesus was the Messiah—but historically, for Jews, arguing about who was or wasn’t the Messiah was not uncommon.
The Messiah Confrontation has far-reaching consequences for the relationship between Christians and Jews.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Knohl (The Messiah Before Jesus), a Bible studies professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, delivers a cogent account of how the trial of Jesus illuminated schisms within Judaism about the messiah. Knohl traces the evolution of the concept of a human redeemer and persuasively argues that the "trial of Jesus was not a clash of Jewish and Christian doctrines, but a confrontation between two internal Jewish positions—of expecting a Messiah or rejecting the messianic idea." The author chronicles how this disagreement played out between the two major Jewish sects in Roman-occupied Palestine: the Pharisees, who believed that a "godlike warrior Messiah" would save them from Roman oppression, and the Sadducees, who refuted the idea of a messiah. Pharisee opposition to Jesus, Knohl contends, was based on their belief that he was not the messiah, but they did not find the idea of a messiah heretical, and Knohl suggests that Jesus would not have been convicted and executed if tried by Pharisees instead of Sadducees. Accessible prose makes parsing scriptural texts and placing them in historical and political context enthralling, even for those unfamiliar with biblical criticism. This thought-provoking work fascinates.
