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{en} Jesus, Paul, and the Jews (1936) is a book by James Parkes.

Abstract

Deeply involved in the Jewish-Christian dialogue, Parkes here has a personal motive for attempting to understand as objectively and as historically as possible the relationship between Jesus and Paul to the Judaism of the day. The often one-sided portrait of the Pharisees seen in the Gospels and in the letters of Paul, used by much detestable Christian scholarship, is due more to the misunderstandings of the evangelists and our own misunderstandings of Paul than to the actual beliefs of Jesus and Paul themselves. Jesus is portrayed as deeply imbued with Pharisaic teachings; a Jew who never called for the abrogation of the Law, but disputed particular points of the Law in traditional Pharisaic ways. Following Judaism and St. Paul: Two Essays (1914 Montefiore), book, Parkes depicts Paul as being primarily educated in a particularly Diaspora form of Pharisaism, where views on the Law were much more formal and timid than those of Palestinian Pharisaism (i.e., Rabbinism). This helps to explain his unique views on the Law, views which would have seemed completely foreign to Palestinian Rabbis. In addition, Paul, the young Diaspora Jew, is portrayed as being sympathetic to his Gentile contemporaries who were seeking the same spiritual way of life that Paul was fruitlessly seeking. This explains his mission to the Gentiles and his use of Hellenistic mystery religion language and motifs in his teachings about Jesus the Jewish Messiah, now the Gentile’s Savior God. Parkes ends with a brief discussion on the separation between Judaism and Christianity, primarily seeing the break due to questions regarding the Law, but that the lives and teachings of both Jesus and Paul did in no way make the separation inevitable. – Jason Zurawski, University of Michigan

Editions

Published in London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1936.

Table of contents

• Chapter I. Judaism in the New Testament and in Christian Teaching

• Chapter II. The Picture of Judaism in the Gospels

• Chapter III. The Source of the Teaching of Jesus

• Chapter IV. Jesus, Judaism and the Pharisees

• Chapter V. The Background and Life of Saint Paul

• Chapter VI. Saint Paul and Judaism

• Chapter VII. The Separation between Judaism and Christinaity

External links

• Google Books