Word: nazareth
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...quickly in historic Bethlehem, a small but vibrant city that feels biblical and modern at the same time. The main road is twisted and dusty, and the handsome buildings of white Jerusalem stone hold both fruit markets and Internet bars. The presumed birthplace of King David and Jesus of Nazareth, a flash point in the continuing and never-ending struggle between Israel and the Palestinians, and a city with an increasingly restive Muslim majority, Bethlehem was the perfect place to sit down and talk with Tony Blair about his new interfaith initiative and his personal odyssey of faith...
Viewing Jesus as a member of the house of Israel is prevalent today in academia, though that has not yet made it to the pulpits and pews [March 24]. Grasping the full Israelite identity of Jesus of Nazareth and his family is essential to understanding his historical roots, behavior and teaching. It will go a long way toward demolishing the delusion of Jesus as a blue-eyed Aryan, defanging Christian anti-Semitism and affirming that Judaism and Christianity have a common ancestry. Among his own people, Jesus was known as an Israelite and his followers were known as Galileans...
Doggerel aside, Neusner, 74, lives by the story's moral: confrontation is part of his makeup, take it or leave it. One might expect many Christians to leave it. But at least one has not. In his new book, Jesus of Nazareth (Doubleday; $24.95), Pope Benedict XVI devotes 20 pages to A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, a 161-page grenade Neusner lobbed in 1993. In that volume, the professor (now at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.) and noncongregational rabbi projected himself back into the Gospel of Matthew to quiz Jesus on the Jewish law. He found the Nazarene...
...Vatican Council of 1962-65 renounced the Roman Catholic teaching that Jews were Christ killers and John Paul II acknowledged Jews' ongoing presence by visiting a synagogue, postwar papal discourse has focused on Christianity's view of Judaism, not the reverse, and steered serenely around fundamental controversies. Jesus of Nazareth takes the next huge step: "a Pope taking seriously what a Jew says--and says critically--about the New Testament," marvels Eugene Fisher, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' liaison for Catholic-Jewish relations. "Wow. This...
Still, Neusner was "amazed" when he heard that Ratzinger, now Pope, has revisited it in detail--and in print. When a papal confidant told the Catholic News Service that it was "one of the reasons" Benedict had undertaken his entire two-volume Jesus of Nazareth project, the somewhat puzzled but delighted professor called it "an academic love letter...