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(More customer reviews)Raised as a Christian who recently became a Jew by Choice and is teaching a Religious Belief and Disbelief course,I couldn't put this book down. The book happens to support a view I find personally intriguing. But I never realized that the New Testament did too.
The power of Kupor's approach is in using the most official Christian sources to make his Jewish case--Jesus exhorting Jews to become more spiritual and devout as Jews, following their Jewish precepts. At most the discrepancy ebtween de facto Jewish practice and his teachings created a new Jewish sect, similar to the Essenes but also less rigidly orthodox. Christianity, by contrast with either sects, was more likely started by Paul (Saul of Tarsus)who never met Jesus and radically altered Jesus's teachings.
Christians arguing against Kupor's case--say fundamentalists relying on a literal biblical interpretation--would have no leg but his to stand on. But unlike them, he uses the literal meaning of the Bible when it was written, not reinterpreted later. This is as literal as one can get. Those arguing from Church doctrine against a Jewish Jesus would also be recruiting Kupor's own position. He squares his New Testament reading with the Church's. And those relying on faith, aided by these two sources, would find themselves as faithfully Jewish as Kupor shows Yeshua to be. There is hardly a more powerful way to convince critics than to argue to them on their own grounds.
What Kupor challenges is the proprietary right Christians feel over Jesus, defining him based simply on the idea that they like him so much and claim him as their own. It's as if saying his name (in the wrong language) and repeating his citations from the Torah is enough to make them Yeshuans. It's unclear they are even Christian since `they say yes to God, but do not do his will.' Only the evangelicals, as far as I can see, spend a significant part of each year in full-time service to the poor. And `by their deeds will you know them.'
According to Kupor's Jewish Jesus,we must love God with our whole heart our whole soul and our whole strength and love our neighbor as ourself. These are the two greatest commandments. But who actually lives by these precepts among either the Christians (bad Jews) and the Jews (also bad Jews). Not only does Kupor offer a new account of Jesus--the Christian account of Jesus as a Jew, but an account of Christians' would-be Judaism.
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"We must understand that some of the early Christians [in the decades after Jesus' death] saw the message of Jesus largely within the context of Judaism. Indeed, Christianity might have remained as a sect within Judaism ... In this initial stage there was little or no thought of any dividing line between Christianity and Judaism."—The Catholic Study Bible (written by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, ruling body of the American Roman Catholic Church)
*****
When the world's largest Christian denomination acknowledges that early "Christianity" was merely a sect of the Jewish religion—both during Jesus' life and for years thereafter—isn't it time to reexamine what the New Testament really says about the Man from Nazareth?
The Roman Catholic Church monopolized the New Testament for over fourteen hundred years, forbidding laypeople from reading or interpreting it. Although this monopoly was shattered by the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, knowledge about Jesus' first-century world was too sparse for anyone to understand the New Testament in its proper context. Today, we know more about Jesus' times than ever before. Yet Christian religious leaders have been reluctant to disseminate these new insights—largely because they reveal that Jesus was a Jewish prophet who insisted on adherence to traditional Judaism. In Jesus the Misunderstood Jew: What the New Testament Really Says About the Man from Nazareth, Dr. Robert Kupor illuminates the New Testament in a way that allows both Christians and Jews to understand this seminal document in a startling new light. Jesus the Misunderstood Jew will surprise and enlighten you.
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