Jesus the Jew in Christian Memory

Jesus the Jew is the primary signifier of Christianity's indebtedness to Judaism. This connection is both historical and continuous. In this book, Barbara Meyer shows how Christian memory, as largely intertwined with Jewish memory, provides a framework to examine the theological dimensions of historical Jesus research. She explores the topics that are central to the Jewishness of Jesus, such as the Christian relationship to law, and otherness as a Christological category. Through the lenses of the otherness of the Jewish Jesus for contemporary Christians, she also discusses circumcision, natality, vulnerability, and suffering in dialogue with thinkers seldom drawn into Jewish-Christian discourse, notably Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva, Martha Nussbaum and Adi Ophir. Meyer demonstrates how the memory of Jesus' Jewishness is a key to reconfiguring contemporary challenges to Christian thought, such as particularity and otherness, law and ethics after the Shoah, human responsibility, and divine vulnerability.

• Moves beyond the existing focus on the historical contextualization of Jesus' Jewishness to show its broader implication for interreligious thought
• Discusses the Jewishness of Jesus in comparison with his blackness, thus taking liberation and contextual theologies seriously
• Develops contemporary dogmatic thinking in conversation with Jewish and Muslim interlocutors and reveals fresh theological dimensions to the study of Abrahamic religions