Was Jesus Jewish?
Judaism in Five Minutes - Sarah Imhoff
Meira Z. Kensky [+]
University of Virginia
Meira Z. Kensky is Senior Assistant Dean and Director of Undergraduate Advising for the University of Virginia College of Arts & Sciences. Previously she was Joseph E. McCabe Professor of Religion and Director of Advising at Coe College. Kensky is the author of Trying Man, Trying God: The Divine Courtroom in Early Jewish and Christian Literature (Mohr Siebeck, 2010) and is working on a book for Eerdmans on the Apocalypses of Peter and Paul and Early Christian tours of Hell.
Description
All of our extant sources portray Jesus as a Jewish teacher. While Paul does not relay much information about the life of Jesus, the Gospel of Mark portrays Jesus as a Jewish apocalyptic prophet. Matthew emphasizes Jesus’s connection to Hebrew Bible prophecies of the expected Davidic Messiah, and Luke highlights Jesus’s familial background in Judaism as part of his demonstration of God’s fulfillment of his promises to Israel and extending them to all nations.