A J Heschel: The Malaise of Protestantism

Heschel was once asked to comment on the challenges facing Protestant religious life.  He then wrote a thought provoking piece, from which this is an excerpt:

A deliberate cultivation of differences from Judaism, a tendency to understand itself in the light not of its vast indebtedness to but rather of its divergencies from Judaism. With the emergence and expansion of Christianity in the Greco-Roman world, Gentile Christians overwhelmed the movement, and a continuous process of accommodation to the spirit of that world was set in motion. The result was a conscious or unconscious dejudaization of Christianity, affecting the church's way of thinking and its inner life as well as its relationship to the past and present reality of Israel – the father and mother of the very being of Christianity. The children did not arise and call the mother blessed; instead, they called the mother blind. Some theologians continue to act as if they did not know the meaning of "honour your father and your mother"; others, anxious to prove the superiority of the church, speak as if they suffer from a spiritual Oedipus complex.

The Christian message, which in its origin is intended to be an affirmation and culmination of Judaism, became very early diverted into a repudiation and negation of Judaism; obsolescence and abrogation of Jewish faith became conviction and doctrine, the new covenant was conceived not as a new phase or disclosure but as abolition and replacement of the ancient one; theological thinking – and its terms in the spirit of antithesis to Judaism. Contrast and contradiction rather than acknowledgement of roots, relatedness and indebtedness, became the perspective. Judaea is a religion of law, Christianity a religion of grace; Judaism teaches a God of wrath, Christianity a God of love; Judaea is a religion of slavish obedience, Christianity the conviction of free men; Judaism is particularism, Christianity is universal; Judaism seeks work-righteousness, Christianity preaches faith-righteousness. The teaching of the old covenant a religion of fear, the Gospel of the new covenant a religion of love; a Lohnordnung over against a Gnadenordnung.

The Hebrew Bible is preparation; the gospel fulfilment. In the first is maturity, and the second perfection; in the one you find narrow tribalism, and the other all-embracing charity.
The process of dejudaization within the church paved the way for abandonment of origins and alienation from the core of its message.

The vital issue for the churches is to decide whether to look for roots in Judaism and consider itself an extension of Judaism to look for roots in pagan Hellenism and consider itself as an antithesis to Judaism.

The spiritual alienation from Israel is most forcefully expressed in the teaching of Marcion, who affirmed the contrariety and abruptness discontinuity between the God of the Hebrew Bible and the God whom Jesus had come to reveal. Marcion wanted a Christianity free from any vestige of Judaism. He saw his task as that of showing the complete opposition between the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels. Although in the year 144 of the Christian Era the church expelled the apostle of discontinuity and anathematized his doctrines, Marcion remains a formidable menace, a satanic challenge. In the modern Christian community Marcionism is much more alive and widespread than is generally realised.

Notwithstanding the work of generations of dedicated scholars who have opened up new vistas in the understanding of the history and literature of ancient Israel and their relation to Christianity, the is an abiding tendency to stress the discontinuity between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.

According to Rudolph Bultman (as summarised by Bernhard Anderson), "for the Christian the Old Testament is not revelation, but is essentially related to God's revelation in Christ as hunger is to food and despair is to hope… The God who spoke to Israel no longer speaks to us in the time of the new covenant." [1] (here is the spiritual resurrection of Marcion. Was not the God of Israel the God of Jesus? How dare a Christian substitute his own conception of God for Jesus' understanding of God and still call himself a Christian?

What is the pedigree of the Christian gospel? These are the words with which the New Testament begins: "the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of a Abraham" (Matthew 1:1; see also 1 Corinthians 10:1-3; 1 Peter 1:10ff). Yet the powerful fascination with the world of Hellenism has led many minds to look for origins of the Christian message in the world derived from Hellas. How odd of God not to have placed the cradle of Jesus in Delphi, or at least in Athens!

Despite its acceptance of sola scriptura which ought to have protected it from dejudaization, Protestantism has often succumbed to an individualistic Hellenised conception of the Christian tradition, to a romantic oversimplification of the problem of faith and inwardness, to pantheism and sentimentality. Only a conscious commitment to the roots of Christianity and Judaism could have saved it from such distortions. To the early Christians the premise of the belief that the word became flesh was in the certainty that spirit had become the word. They were alive and open to the law and the prophets.

In modern times there was a tendency to look for the spirit everywhere except in the words of the Hebrew Bible. There is no religio ex nihilo, no ultimate beginning. There is no science without presumption and no religion without ultimate decisions. An ultimate decision for Jew or Christian is whether to be involved in the Hebrew Bible or to live away from it. The future of the Western world will depend on the way in which we relate ourselves to the Hebrew Bible.  The extent of Christianity's identification with the Hebrew Bible is a test of its authenticity – as well as of Jewish authenticity. Lack of such identification lies at the heart of the malaise of Protestantism today.

Reconnection between Christians and Jews is critical to both traditions.  Without each other, neither will see the full potential of religious life envisaged by both Jesus, his disciples and Paul.  The "dividing wall" remains.  Heschel's view is a little harsh.  I think he underestimates how deep a culture can etch itself in the minds of a society.  It is not easy to understand how deeply the Hebrew worldview is different from a Hellenistic one.  It is even more difficult to adopt a new worldview and operate within it.  It's like trying to lose a foreign accent when learning English.  Hard work. 

Source:  Heschel, A J.  Insecurity of Freedom.  Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

Knowing Jesus

I have just been reading Jacob Fronczak's book Yeshua Matters, a book that describes his journey in discovering the historical Jesus.

He writes:

Christians generally understand that they should be like Jesus Christ, but most of us don't know enough about Jesus to make this aspect of discipleship a daily reality in our lives.

There is no Christianity without Jesus Christ. He is at the centre of everything we believe in. He is our connection with God. We literally worship and adore him.

But we hardly know anything about him.

But how can we be like someone we don't know anything about?

Think about it for a while, and even scarier questions begin to emerge. What if Jesus isn't anything like what most of us think?

What if the real Jesus doesn't look anything like the stained glass windows and children's book illustrations? Even worse – what if we're not really following his teachings? What if Jesus wouldn't agree with either of our political parties' platforms? What if the core of his message is different then we think it is? What if we think we are doing a great job following him but in reality we would have been kicked out of the upper room?

What if we have lost a really pivotal idea of who Jesus is?

Pick up any popular book on American Christianity and you'll read about problems. The church has problems. Christianity has problems. We aren't functioning correctly. In some way, we're broken; we're sick. People are leaving churches, youth aren't keeping their faith into their college years, pastors are suffering from burnout, and church doors are closing all over the country.

Some of our churches are experiencing great numerical success, but statisticians like George Barna remind us that even as the majority of Americans claim to have had a conversion experience, and even some churches experience huge growth, only a tiny fraction of professed believers are truly committed to the faith, and most churches are struggling. If anything, the Western church appears to be shrinking. We're getting weaker, smaller. Slowly but surely, we're circling the drain.

Spare me the Bible verses about the narrow path if you find. I have read the New Testament, in the New Testament Church wasn't sick or dying. It grew exponentially. It rocked its world. It set in motion a movement that now encompasses the globe. Why don't we generally see that kind of movement in the church down the street?

Every book I have read has a different solution. Maybe we don't love hard enough. Maybe we don't pray hard enough. Maybe we don't evangelise enough. Maybe we haven't fully grasped God's grace. May be we're not satisfied enough involved. Maybe we're not committed to making disciples. Maybe we have failed to engage the culture. Maybe we have forgotten what our mission is. In short, these are all problems. But what is the source of these problems? Why aren't we doing all those things?

To me these problems sound like symptoms. The church at large hasn't found the real root of the issue, the real disease. Not yet.

I have been going to church for longer than I can remember. I have wondered, along with everyone else, what the problem is. Why doesn't our church looked like Acts 2 or 1 Corinthians 13 or Philippians 4? Why aren't church attendees becomingconverts and why aren't converts becoming disciples? Why do people in in church complain so much? Why do they leave at the drop of a hat? What's with the backbiting and shallowness? Where is the depth? Where is the passion? Where is the commitment? Where is the community? Where is the Love?

As committed Christians, we are so close to the answer. We are on the cusp of it. We are standing on the solution, and we don't even know it. We sing about it and church and hear about it from the pulpit.

The solution is Jesus, and the problem is that we have lost sight of who Jesus is.

Not only that, we have lost sight of so much of what Jesus came to do, of what Jesus' core message was, and even to whom Jesus' message was originally delivered.

In place of the real, living Jesus, we have substituted a theological formula, a set of beliefs, a litany of dogma. We have substituted the apostles' Creed for the teachings of the apostles. We have substituted the Nicene Creed for the person of Christ. I am not saying that beliefs are bad – they are good, they are necessary, and Christians cannot afford to be slouches when it comes to theology – but theology and beliefs are no substitute for a real relationship with a real person, the real historical Jesus.

The only solution to Christianity's problem, the only cure for her illness, is to bring back a personal, intimate knowledge of Christ, to really encounter him, to meet him afresh, to get to know him as the first Christians did. We have to know Jesus better. If necessary, we have to sacrifice everything else in order to know Jesus better.

There is no other solution. There is no way to sustain a Christianity that is not fully, completely centred on the historical person of Jesus Christ, and there is no way to centre our lives on Jesus Christ if we don't take the time and effort to know Jesus as well as we possibly can.

Jesus is all we have – our only connection with the father. If we get one thing right, it had better be Jesus.

"On Christ, the solid rock, I stand; all other ground is sinking sand."

If you are a disciple of Christ, then wherever your spiritual journey takes you from here, it must be informed by an accurate conception of Jesus. The picture of Jesus in your mind must match the real historical person of Jesus. In this chaotic world of full of differing and contradictory beliefs about Jesus, you cannot afford to be any less than crystal clear on the identity of Jesus of Nazareth.

Today, thanks to the efforts of centuries of biblical scholarship, we know that Jesus was a practising Jew. We know that our faith is built on nothing less than the blood and righteousness of a Jewish rabbi from a backwater town in Israel.

And I think this matters. Yeshua matters. The fact that Jesus was a practising Jew matters. It changes how we see him, how we here his teachings, how we follow him. It changes how we see ourselves and how we see his people, the Jewish people. It changes how we live and how we do church. It changes our message. Or at least it should.

Pages 143-146.

Brad Young: Jesus, the Jewish Theologian

Dr Brad H. Young



"In an internationally recognised university, a world-renown New Testament scholar remarked to his students, "The first thing you must do to be a good Christian is to kill the Jew inside of you."  One of the students raised her hand to respond to his statement with a question. The learned professor listened as she asked him, "Do you mean Jesus?"  Jesus the Jewish Theologian, page xxi.

"Theologians have read the gospels as Christian literature, written by the church and for the church. When Jesus is viewed among the Gentiles, the significance of Jewish culture and custom is minimized, or forgotten altogether. But when Jesus is viewed as a Jew, within the context of First Century Judaism, an entirely different portrait emerges." Jesus the Jewish Theologian, page xxii.

"As Christians we tend to view Paul as the Church's first theologian. I have become convinced that this approach is theology at its worst. Christianity begins with Jesus."  Jesus the Jewish Theologian, page xxxiii.

"Many Jews have died because of Christian views of Judaism. Not only have Christians wrongly persecuted the Jewish people because of our erroneous beliefs about Jews and Judaism,  but we have robbed ourselves of a treasured heritage which would have been the source of great spiritual enrichment. By rejecting Judaism, the church has missed Jesus. The major problem with Christianity today is a failure to appreciate the life and teachings of Jesus."  Jesus the Jewish Theologian, page 261.

I suppose we will never miss what we have never known or had to begin with.

Brad Young is a Professor of Biblical Literature in Judeao Christian Studies at the Graduate Department of Oral Roberts University. He is also founder and President of the Gospel Research Foundation, Inc.

The Jesus I never knew

Philiip Yancey

"Martin Buber said, "We Jews know [Jesus] in a way -- in the impulses and emotions of his essential Jewishness -- that remains inaccessible to the Gentiles subject to him."  He is right, of course.  To know Jesus story I must, in the same way I get to know anyone else's story, learn something of his culture, family and background."

Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew , pages 28-29.

The corollary to this, is that unless you know something about Jesus' culture, family and background then you will struggle to understand what he is trying to say.

He was a Jew, speaking to other Jews, in their language, using figures of speech, idioms and humor familiar to them. 

If you don't know anything about what is was to be a first century Jew, then I venture to say, you won't understand what he is trying to say at all, however much you think you do.

Pharisees and the Parable of the Prodigal Son

Continuing on through our Behold the Man study, Pryor covers the Parable of the Prodigal Son. He notes that in fact the Parable is not about the son, but about the father. Jesus' purpose was to illustrate the merciful character of the father, rather than focus on the plight of the prodigal son. Brad Young, in his book "Jesus the Jewish Theologian" writes: When this parable is studied in its original Jewish context, the traditional title, “the Prodigal Son,” becomes misleading. Actually, the title that we know so well distorts the story’s true meaning. It is a story with three key actors, the father and his two sons. The listener must pay close attention to each one of these performers and ask questions about the story’s setting in life. Three questions need to be asked:

1. What did the father think when his younger son asked for his inheritance? 
2. How should the elder brother have responded to the family crisis? 
3. What laws governed inheritance? 

Later he says,

Jesus emphasizes the connection between the brothers. He is teaching about God’s compassion and how people respond to it. Jesus is not making a veiled attack against the Pharisees. Such an approach, which criticizes the Pharisees, claims that they opposed repentance and the acceptance of the outcast. New Testament interpreters who make claims of this sort not only misrepresent the core of the teachings of the Pharisees, they completely miss the message of Jesus as well. They divorce his teachings from their original setting.

The Pharisees emphasized the love of God. They taught that God would receive with their great compassion anyone who truly repents. The rabbis, who were the spiritual heirs of the Pharisees, said that if a person would just take the first step toward repentance, by making the opening as small as an eye of a needle, God would take the initiative and receive that individual in love. For example, Rabbi Jose talks about God’s compassion for the sinner who repents. He tried to describe divine love in vivid terms to drive home the message:

“By the verse, “Open to me” (Song of Solomon 5:2), the Holy One means “Make me for an opening as big as the eye of a needle and I will make the opening so wide that wagons full of soldiers and siege battlements can go through it.” (Pesikta Derav Kahana 24:12)

Like Jesus the Pharisees believed that God was compassionate and desired to receive each individual who makes the first step. Divine grace is given to the sinner who repents and returns to God. A reader looking for an attack upon the Pharisees in this parable will miss the point. Jesus intended each person to see himself or herself in this story. Each person who hears this story looks into a mirror. Jesus wants his followers to see themselves. When interpreters see the Pharisees, they miss the point of the story. Will one see the image of the father? Will one recognize his or her behaviour in the actions of one of the two brothers? Each individual must carefully examine his or her image in the mirror of this parable. In the end the parable calls for a decision from the audience.”

Dunn on Christian Anti-Semitism

J D G Dunn

Continuing my readings on Christian Anti-Semitism here are some thoughts from James Dunn:

One of the most astonishing features of the quest of the historical Jesus has been the seeming determination of generation after generation of questers to discount or to strip away anything characteristically Jewish from the Jesus tradition. We can explain the underlying logic, even if we can never sympathize with it—the logic of traditional Christian anti-Semitism. As is well known, from the second century onward, perhaps we should say from the Epistle to the Hebrews onward, a consistent strand of Christian supersessionism has dominated Christian perception of the Jews. This is the view that Christianity had superseded Israel, had drained from its Jewish heritage all that was of value, and had left Judaism as an empty husk. On this view Christianity was antithetical to Judaism; indeed, the first time the word “Christianity” appears, in Ignatius of Antioch, early in the second century, it is coined as an antithesis to “Judaism.” Christianity, in other words, was early on perceived as not-Judaism, and Judaism as not-Christianity. The Jews, after all, had set themselves against the gospel and had rejected Christ; Judaism had thus set itself in opposition to Christianity. Worse still, the Jews had been responsible for Jesus’ death. The people themselves had accepted this bloodguilt: “His blood be on us and on our children” (Matt. 27:25); they were deicides, murderers of God. What Jesus said of Judas was true of them all: “It would have been better for that man not to have been born” (Mark 14:21, author’s translation). This was the underlying rationale behind the later persecutions and pogroms against the Jews in Christian Europe.

From this background emerged the governing instinct or assumption that Jesus himself cannot have been a Jew like that; he must have been different. And so we find as one of the most striking features of the quest repeated attempts to distance Jesus from his Jewish milieu. Susannah Heschel provides a penetrating analysis of this unsavory trend during the nineteenth century: “As Jewishness, Judaism represented a set of qualities associated with everything Christian theologians wished to reject and repudiate: false religiosity, immorality, legalism, hypocrisy, physicality, seductiveness, dishonesty, to name just a few.” She observes that liberal theologians painted “as negative a picture as possible of first-century Judaism” in order “to elevate Jesus as a unique religious figure who stood in sharp opposition to his Jewish surroundings.” A unique religious consciousness, unaffected by historical circumstances, in effect cut Jesus off from Judaism. Ernest Renan, for example, could write: “Fundamentally there was nothing Jewish about Jesus”; after visiting Jerusalem, Jesus “appears no more as a Jewish reformer, but as a destroyer of Judaism.… Jesus was no longer a Jew.” And for Albrecht Ritschl, the chief theological spokesman for liberal Protestantism, Jesus’ “renunciation of Judaism and its law … became a sharp dividing line between his teachings and those of the Jews.”6 Almost equally as striking is the fact that the great account of the liberal quest by Albert Schweitzer simply failed to take account of the substantial debate between Jewish and Christian scholarship on the theme of Jesus the Jew. On this point the irony of liberalism is that it not only sought to “liberate” Jesus from the distorting layers of subsequent dogma, but it also sought to present Jesus as the one who “liberated” the quintessential spirit of religion from the “outmoded garb” of Jewish cult and myth.

At the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, Wilhelm Bousset, in his little book on Jesus, well illustrates the twin aspects of the liberal quest—the idealization of the Christian’s Jesus set starkly over against the vilification of his opponents and of the religion they represented.

The bitterest enemies of Jesus, and the true antipodes to all that he stood for, were the Scribes. However closely he resembled them in the outward forms of his activity, in the spirit of it he and they were at opposite poles. On the one hand was the artificiality of a hairsplitting and barren erudition, on the other the fresh directness of the layman and the son of the people; here was the product of long generations of misrepresentation and distortion, there was simplicity, plainness, and freedom; here a clinging to the petty and the insignificant, a burrowing in the dust, there a constant dwelling upon the essential and a great inward sense of reality; here the refinement of casuistry, formula- and phrase-mongering, there the straightforwardness, severity, and pitilessness of the preacher of repentance; here a language which was scarcely to be understood, there the inborn power of the mighty orator; here the letter of the law and there the living God. It was like the meeting of water and fire.

Rudolf Bultmann’s reaction to his liberal teachers included his own recognition that so far as NT theology was concerned, the proclamation of Jesus did indeed belong under the heading of “Judaism.” But his insistence was even stronger that faith had nothing to do with history, that therefore we need know nothing of this Jesus, and that the only thing that matters is an existential encounter with the kerygmatic Christ. Consequently, the outcome was not so very different: faith in the kerygmatic Christ was a quantum leap away from anything that might be shown to be true of the Jewish Jesus. And although the generation following Bultmann began to move away from his existentialism, they continued to regard the Judaism of Jesus’ day with a jaundiced eye. Nothing shows this more clearly in German theology than the commonplace description of Second Temple Judaism as Spätjudentum (late Judaism)—even though they well knew, of course, that Judaism continued to thrive and still flourishes to the present day. The logic again is clear, the assumption still that of Christian supersessionism: that Judaism’s only function and purpose was to prepare for the coming of Christ and of Christianity; when Christ came, that marked the end of Judaism; the generation of Jesus’ time was “late Judaism,” the last Judaism. So too, with an astonishing insensitivity in the post-Holocaust period, it was not uncommon, even among prominent German theologians, to speak of Jesus doing away with Judaism or bringing Judaism to an end.

In the renewed quest of the post-Bultmann era, most of the debate centered on the question of criteria, criteria that would enable the quester to determine whether any particular saying derived from Jesus himself. We will return to this subject in the next section. Here we simply need to note that the principal criterion, dissimilarity, tried to make a virtue out of what second questers perceived as a necessity, by reconstructing their picture of Jesus out of what distinguished Jesus from his historical context and set him over against his Jewish milieu. And the neoliberal quest of Dominic Crossan and Burton Mack differs from the old liberal quest at this point only by its argument that the influence of hellenization, which in Harnack’s view marked out the difference of the early church from Jesus, is already found in Jesus’ own teaching; despite the acknowledgment of Jesus’ Jewishness, the tendency is to play up the similarities between Jesus’ teaching with Hellenistic culture and the differences from his native Jewish culture. In other words, the Jewishness of Jesus still remains an embarrassment to far too many attempting to take part in the quest.
In view of this embarrassment, it is a refreshing feature of the other main strand of current inquiry into the life and teaching of Jesus that it takes its start from the very point of embarrassment—Jesus the Jew. Indeed, my own preference is to limit the title “the third quest of the historical Jesus” to the quest for Jesus the Jew. The prospects for such a (third) quest have also been considerably improved by the fresh insights into the character of Second Temple Judaism that have been granted to scholarship during the past fifty years.

Here the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has pride of place. More than anything else the scrolls have broken open the idea of a monolithic, monochrome Judaism, particularly as set over against the distinctiveness of newly emerging Christianity. It has now become possible to envisage Jesus, as also “the sect of the Nazarenes,” within the diversity of late Second Temple Judaism in a way that was hardly thinkable before. This breakthrough has been accompanied and reinforced by other important developments—particularly the breakdown of the previously quite sharp distinction between Judaism and Hellenism, the recognition that the portrayals of rabbinic Judaism in Mishnah and Talmud may not simply be projected backward into the first century, the renewed interest in the rich range of apocryphal and pseudepigraphical Jewish literature as further testimony to the diversity of Second Temple Judaism, and the increasing sophistication in evaluating the steadily mounting archaeological data from the Israel (particularly Galilee) of Jesus’ time. In short, it is no exaggeration to say that scholarship is in a stronger position than ever before to sketch a clearer and sharper picture of Judaism in the land of Israel at the time of Jesus and as the context of Jesus’ ministry. And, as Nils Dahl observed forty years ago: “Everything that enlarges our knowledge of this environment of Jesus (Palestinian Judaism) indirectly extends our knowledge of the historical Jesus himself.”

This third quest allows us to shift the goal of our search from the distinctive and different Jesus to the characteristic Jesus. The quest for a Jesus who is different from Judaism has led us down some dubious roads and into some very unsavory places. To look for a Jesus who was brought up in Galilee and carried through most of his mission there, and yet who distanced himself fundamentally from the practice and beliefs of his fellow Galilean Jews, was always bound to end up with a rather odd Jesus. But a Jesus who was brought up in Galilee and who could evidently empathize with typical Galilean Jews suggests rather that the Jewishness of Jesus is a valid and viable starting point for the quest, rather than something to be stripped away or shied away from. We should, of course, not go to the opposite extreme of assuming that Jesus would be characteristically Jewish through and through. Those who have pioneered this new way of looking at Jesus, particularly Geza Vermes and Ed Sanders, are open to criticism at this precise point—that they have minimized the tensions between Jesus and the Pharisees in particular. Jesus appears to be such a good Jew that his denunciation by the high priestly party and execution become something of a puzzle. In closing the gap between Jesus and Judaism, such scholars open up the other gap, the one between Jesus and the Christianity which followed.

Nevertheless, looking at Jesus within the context of the Judaism of his time remains a more plausible line of search than starting with the intent of wrenching him out from that context. By noting what the characteristics are of Jewish practice and belief, we can infer, unless we have indications to the contrary, that Jesus shared these characteristics. A basic list would include the fact that he was circumcised, that he was brought up to say the Shema, to respect the Torah, to attend the synagogue, to observe the Sabbath. In addition, Sanders has offered a list of what he describes as “almost indisputable facts” about Jesus: that his mission mainly operated round the towns and villages of Galilee; that the main emphasis of his preaching was the kingdom of God; that he characteristically taught in aphorisms and parables; and so on. Here again, what emerges is a picture of the characteristic Jesus.

Dunn, J. D. G. (2005). A new perspective on Jesus: What the quest for the historical Jesus missed (58–65). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic.

James D. G. "Jimmy" Dunn (born 1939) is a leading British New Testament scholar who was for many years the Lightfoot Professor of Divinity in the Department of Theology at the University of Durham, now Emeritus Lightfoot Professor. He has worked broadly within the Protestant tradition.

Dunn has an MA and BD from the University of Glasgow and a PhD and DD from the University of Cambridge. For 2002, Dunn was the President of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas, the leading international body for New Testament study. Only three other British scholars had been made President in the preceding 25 years. In 2006 he became a Fellow of the British Academy.

Historical Jesus and New Perspectives on Paul resources

 

Here's a list I compiled a while ago for a bible study group:

Website resources

www.artscroll.com:  An excellent source of hardcopy resources covering Judaic theology, bible study for purchase. I found the Chumash and the Siddur particularly useful.

www.e-sword.net:  Free bible study software can be downloaded from here.  This software package is free but the author encourages you to make a donation toward his ministry.  There is an abundance of commentaries, dictionaries and additional writings that can be useful.  Most are older public domain resources but over the last few years a small number of publishing houses have signed up with e-sword allowing their resources to be purchased and used in the program. 

www.ffoz.org:  This is the official website of the organisation that published the Ha Yesod and Torah Club studies.  The pdf file with the parasha readings for the year can be downloaded from here.  One can also subscribe to a mailing list to receive a free weekly reading and commentary.

www.hebrew4christians.com:  An easily accessible site with interesting resources and articles covering many aspects of Hebraic roots such as backgrounds on biblical festivals and the Lord’s Prayer.

www.jcstudies.org: Website where you may purchase the study materials such as the Behold the Man study series, produced by the late D Pryor. 

www.jerusalemperspective.com:  A site with many well-researched articles from a collaboration of Jewish and Gentile authors on First Century Judaism and how it relates to the Synoptic Gospels.  Many are free but most available for purchase at a modest price.

www.logos.com: The Gold Standard in bible study software.  They have done a great job over the years of signing up modern publishing houses to integrate their resources into their program.  This allows the material to be quickly searched and cross referenced.  Expensive in comparison to e-sword but then users gain access to a vast array of modern scholarship not available in e-sword, all interlinked.  Needs a modern computer for acceptable performance.  A growing collection of Judaic resources.  Jewish Publication Society of America is one of the principal suppliers.  Complete versions of the Mishah, Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds are also available.

www.mechon-mamre.org/:  This site has free OT bible software that includes many Jewish commentaries (mishnahs).  Here you will find the Hebrew Bible (Tana"kh) and the RaMBaM's Complete Restatement of the Oral Law (Mishneh Torah).  The Bible and Mishneh Torah texts have been carefully prepared, and they are as accurate as found in the very finest printed editions.  (Additional materials are also provided, but they are not the heart of this site.

Historical Jesus and New Perspectives on Paul Authors

Becker, B

Bivin, David

Bockmuehl, M

Brown, M L

Bultmann, R

Charlesworth, J H

Crossan, J D

Dunn, J D G

Edersheim, A

Evans, C A

Flusser, David

Fruchtembaum, A

Ginzberg, L

Hegg, T

Heschel, A J

Johnson, L T

Josephus

Keener, C S

Lancaster, D

Lapide, Pinchas

Lindsay, R L

Munk, R E

Nanos, M D

Neusner, J

Notley, R Steven

Pryor, R

Safrai, S

Sanders, E P

Schweitzer, A

Silcox, F

Stuhlmacher, P

Stern, D H

Turnage, M

Wright, N T

Yancy, P

Young, Brad