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2023 Top Ten Book from the Academy of Parish Clergy
The Messiah Confrontation casts new and fascinating light on why Jesus was killed.
Grounded in meticulous research on the messianism debates in the Bible and during the Second Temple period, biblical scholar Israel Knohl argues that Jesus’s trial was in reality a dramatic clash between two Jewish groups holding opposing ideologies of messianism and anti-messianism, with both ideologies running through the Bible. The Pharisees (forefathers of the rabbinic sages) and most of the Jewish people had a conception of a Messiah similar to Jesus: like the prophets and most psalmists, they expected the arrival of a godlike Messiah. However, the judges who sentenced Jesus to death were Sadducees, who were fighting with the Pharisees largely because they repudiated the Messiah idea. Thus, the trial of Jesus was not a clash between Jewish and what would become Christian doctrines but a confrontation between two internal Jewish positions-expecting a Messiah or rejecting the Messiah idea-in which Jesus and the Pharisees were actually on the same side.
Knohl contends that had the assigned judges been Pharisees rather than Sadducees, Jesus would
not have been convicted and crucified. The Pharisees’ disagreement with Jesus was solely over whether Jesus was the Messiah-but historically, for Jews, arguing about who was or wasn’t the Messiah was not uncommon.
The Messiah Confrontation has far-reaching consequences for the relationship between Christians and Jews.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Birth of the Messianic Figure
2. Rejection of the Kingship Concept
3. Reconceiving the Messiah
4. Messianic Rise and Fall of “the Branch”
5. Shifting Sands of Torah Authority
6. Torah Distinctions between the Human and the Divine
7. Introducing Resurrection of the Dead into Jewish Thought
8. The Sadducees’ Denial of the Doctrine of Reward
9. Qumran Accounts of an Exalted and Suffering Messiah
10. The Pharisees’ Expectations of an Imminent Messiah
11. Jesus’s Messianic Conception
12. The Trial of Jesus
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Subject Index
Scriptural Index
About the author
Israel Knohl is Yehezkel Kaufmann Professor of Bible Studies emeritus at the Hebrew University–Jerusalem and a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He is the author of
The Divine Symphony: The Bible’s Many Voices (JPS, 2003),
The Sanctuary of Silence: The Priestly Torah and the Holiness School, and
The Messiah before Jesus: The Suffering Servant of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Knohl has taught at Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of California–Berkeley, and the Chicago Divinity School.
Summary
The Messiah Confrontation argues that Jesus was convicted and crucified because of a confrontation between two Jewish ideologies—expecting a Messiah or rejecting the Messiah idea—in which Jesus and the Pharisees (the majority of Jews) were actually on the same side.
