The Importance of the Jewishness of Jesus for Interpreting the Gospels

Abstract

Both in Judaism and Christianity Jesus was to some extent separated or detached from Judaism. However, as Matthias Henze says, in the last 50 years we have been witness‐ ing significant changes in the approach and view of the Jewish world of the Gospels and consequently the New Testament. This positive shift should affect not only our view of the »Jewishness of Jesus« but also of biblical interpretation. Namely, we can expect that Jesus lived, thought, spoke and taught as a Jew and not as a »Christian« in the historical sense of the word. In terms of biblical interpretation, that means that the proper context for interpreting the Bible is the context of the biblical writers. Accordingly, our goal should be studying his‐ torical, cultural or literary contexts in order to discover a worldview context of the biblical authors and with these »glasses« approach to reading the Scriptures. Based on this reasoning, in the first part of the paper, we will address certain theological and historical reasons for the exclusion of the Jewishness of Jesus from both Judaism and Christianity. In the second part, we will discuss the importance of the Jewishness of Jesus for understanding the worldview context of the biblical authors. In the last part, as a case study, we will demonstrate through the interpretation of Matthew 16,13‐20 (the issue of »the rock«) and Luke 11,1‐4 (the Lord’s Prayer) through »Jewish eyes« that we can gain a different and even better interpretation of these two texts that better fit the context of the biblical writers.