The Messiah Confrontation
eBook - ePub

The Messiah Confrontation

Pharisees versus Sadducees and the Death of Jesus

  1. 220 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Messiah Confrontation

Pharisees versus Sadducees and the Death of Jesus

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access The Messiah Confrontation by Israel Knohl, David Maisel in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Theology & Religion & Biblical Criticism & Interpretation. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Contents
  5. Acknowledgments
  6. Introduction
  7. 1. Birth of the Messianic Figure
  8. 2. Rejection of the Kingship Concept
  9. 3. Reconceiving the Messiah
  10. 4. Messianic Rise and Fall of “the Branch”
  11. 5. Shifting Sands of Torah Authority
  12. 6. Torah Distinctions between the Human and the Divine
  13. 7. Introducing Resurrection of the Dead into Jewish Thought
  14. 8. The Sadducees’ Denial of the Doctrine of Reward
  15. 9. Qumran Accounts of an Exalted and Suffering Messiah
  16. 10. The Pharisees’ Expectations of an Imminent Messiah
  17. 11. Jesus’s Messianic Conception
  18. 12. The Trial of Jesus
  19. Afterword
  20. Notes
  21. Bibliography
  22. Subject Index
  23. Scriptural Index
  24. About Israel Knohl