Christianity

The gospels present Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator, condemning Jesus to death, and his soldiers crucifying Jesus at the behest of the priests and the Jewish crowd. How, then, did the claim—found even in the Talmud—that the Jews physically crucified Jesus develop?

The Haggadah’s insistence that God, without an intermediary, saved the Israelites from Egypt is a veiled retort to the Christian belief that God relied on Jesus as an agent of redemption. Moreover, the midrash replaces the Arma Christi tradition of recounting the weapons Jesus used to save humanity during the Crucifixion with its own distinctively Jewish arsenal of redemption: pestilence, a sword, the Shechinah, the staff, and blood.

Hellenistic religion didn’t require charity. In contrast, the biblical command for charity is founded not only on YHWH’s commitment to reward the generous, but on YHWH adopting the voice of the poor, a critical factor in the vibrancy of early Judaism and Christianity.

Eastern Christianity includes prayer and a festival honoring the martyrdom of a woman and her seven sons who, in the time of Antiochus IV, refused to eat pork. The Talmud reimagines their story, depicting the woman and her sons as refusing to worship an idol in Roman times. This change reflects the rabbis’ tendency to downplay martyrdom in favor of a piety model centered on “dying” through exhaustive Torah study.

Esau/Edom is viewed negatively already in later biblical texts and throughout rabbinic literature, becoming a symbol of Israel’s oppressors. Marat Kila, an otherwise unknown woman, is quoted in a 15^th century supercommentary on Rashi offering a positive reading of Esau’s actions.

What really motivated the editors of Select Parts of the Holy Bible: For the Use of the Negro Slaves in the British West-India Islands (1807), better known as “The Slave Bible”?

Blood has a significant role in many biblical stories and rituals, most prominently in the atonement sacrifices of Leviticus. With the destruction of the Temple and the loss of sacrifices, Judaism and Christianity took very different paths to achieving atonement.

The historical John, יוחנן, was a thoroughly Jewish religious preacher, who had little if any relation to Jesus and his movement. Here is the story of how John and his central rite, baptism, became part of Christianity.

Paul, in the 1^st c., allegorizes the expulsion of Hagar to argue that his rivals should be expelled from the church, a lesson applied by later Christians to their own Jewish and Muslim rivals. Ramban, in the 13^th c., uses the same biblical story to explain why Jews of his day are persecuted. Such readings highlight an assumption ingrained in Judaism and Christianity alike: Biblical stories speak to the present-day circumstances of their audience.