I suppose that there is always a debatable boundary between who makes a critique from a position of fundamental loyalty and one who in the end cannot stay with the group or movement.
I always have a problem with the ‘Jewish Jesus’ approach, whose basic argument is, I think, that the Jewish world was full of variation and that the dominant interpretations were always being opposed, but with fundamental commitment to the Jewish way on all hands, Jesus being at most one such ‘loyal critic’. I’ve never been certain whether the Jewish Jesus approach is saying that this is how he is presented in the accounts we have of him or that this is how he really was? You could say both, of course - though neither strictly implies the other. The first implies that the accounts of Jesus’ life we have are written in an entirely Jewish voice as a contribution to discussion within the Jewish world, with no significant suggestion that this was not a world in which Jesus could not belong or remain. The second implies that the real Jesus has been presented, if not at first then quite soon, with serious inauthenticity.
I suppose that there is always a debatable boundary between who makes a critique from a position of fundamental loyalty and one who in the end cannot stay with the group or movement.
I always have a problem with the ‘Jewish Jesus’ approach, whose basic argument is, I think, that the Jewish world was full of variation and that the dominant interpretations were always being opposed, but with fundamental commitment to the Jewish way on all hands, Jesus being at most one such ‘loyal critic’. I’ve never been certain whether the Jewish Jesus approach is saying that this is how he is presented in the accounts we have of him or that this is how he really was? You could say both, of course - though neither strictly implies the other. The first implies that the accounts of Jesus’ life we have are written in an entirely Jewish voice as a contribution to discussion within the Jewish world, with no significant suggestion that this was not a world in which Jesus could not belong or remain. The second implies that the real Jesus has been presented, if not at first then quite soon, with serious inauthenticity.