Jesus the Jew - again!

Channel 4 begins a new series on Sunday evening at 7pm called Christianity: A History. This is how it describes the series:
This provocative eight-part series explores the history and global impact of the world's biggest religion through the personal views of leading British figures.
Over the course of the series, eight high-profile personalities - including Michael Portillo, Rageh Omaar, Kwame Kwei-Armah and Cherie Blair - look at the origins and history of the Christian faith.
In each film the presenter addresses a subject that means something particular to them. In doing so, they bring their own perspectives to a challenging and comprehensive debate that explores Christianity's role in shaping the modern world.

The first episode is titled Jesus the Jew and is presented by the writer Howard Jacobson. If what Jacobson has written in The Guardian today is anything to go by then I don’t hold out much hope for the series. His article Behold! The Jew Jesus is largely focused on Christian anti-Semitism which he argues has disowned the fact that Jesus was a Jew. Let me say that Jacobson’s criticism of the history of anti-Semitism in Christianity is perfectly justified and he clearly identifies attitudes towards Jews and treatment of Jews for which we as Christians should be ashamed.

However, where Jacobson comes unstuck is in the second part of his article when he writes this:
Explain it how you will, Judaism is Christianity's guilty secret, and God help whoever happens to be the occasion of a people's guilt. "When will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust?" asks that dark philosopher John Gray. There is a prior question. When will Jews ever be forgiven giving Christianity its religion?

Now I don’t know what New Testament scholarship Jacobson has read and I don’t know which experts have been consulted for the programme he presents but Jesus being a Jew is no guilty secret. The primary focus of N.T. scholarship of the last thirty years has been on Jesus the Jew! In the early 1980s when I studied Theology at Durham and Oxford leading N.T. scholars including E. P. Sanders and J. D. G. Dunn spoke and wrote of little else. N.T. Wright argues that you can’t understand Jesus without understanding later Second Temple Judaism while Funk, Crossan and The Jesus Seminar argue that Jesus was nothing more than an itinerant Hellenistic Jewish sage. The one criticism of contemporary studies of Jesus that cannot be made is that it doesn’t take the fact he was a Jew seriously. This has been the main concern of what has been termed The Third Quest for the Historical Jesus.

There are other throwaway comments in the article which don’t stand even superficial examination, for example Jacobson writes:
In this matrix of fear, superstition and distaste can be discerned the hand not just of the early Church fathers who set out deliberately to malign the Jewish religion, but also the apostles - "Ye are of your father the devil," the Gospel of St John has Jesus say to those whom John is already calling "the Jews", to suggest Jesus is no part of them. In order for Jesus to be extricated from his Jewishness, Jews themselves had to be discredited, demeaned and ultimately diabolised.

Set aside the question of the authorship of the Gospels and look at Jacobson’s claim. Jacobson is guilty of the very thing he accuses Christians of doing, denying peoples Jewishness. The fact is that the Apostles were Jews, whether or not they wrote the Gospels. The N.T. does not hide the Jewish origins of the disciples or of Christianity, otherwise why would it be the centre of so much debate within the texts. Marcion was rejected as a heretic by the Church Fathers precisely because he attempted to excise any positive portrayal of Judaism from the scriptures.

The basic problem with Jacobson's piece, which at times becomes little more than a rant, is that he seems to be arguing that Christianity somehow arose out of somewhere unconnected with Judaism and reinterpreted the life of Jesus the Jew. He denies that any of the central claims of Christianity; Jesus as Son of God, Jesus as Saviour and the resurrection, for example, have any basis in Judaism. Well where do they come from then? Jacobson fingers Paul as the culprit:
It took Paul, however, to realise the transforming power not only of the supernatural but the universal. Christianity triumphed over Judaism when it abandoned the law and the people to whom it had been given. Christians may glory in that if they choose, but such had never been Jesus's intention.

But Jacobson’s done it again; Paul was a Jew. Jacobson can’t have his cake and eat it. He cannot argue for the Jewishness of Jesus and deny the Jewishness of Jesus’ followers who proclaimed the Christian faith.

Who is the Jesus that we are left with according to Jacobson.
Remove the slippery metaphor of personal salvation and the blasphemy of his being the Son of God - with neither of which concept Jesus himself had the slightest bit to do - and there is nothing that he is reported to have said or performed that would have raised the ire of his fellow Jews sufficiently for them to chant for his death. In so far as we can separate his actual words from later theological interpretations of them - the historical Jesus from the person Christians writing after the event needed him to be - the voice we hear is that of an unequivocally Jewish healer and teacher.

To me this looks much like the sort of stuff that was doing the rounds in the 1960s & 1970s perhaps best articulated in The Myth of God Incarnate edited by John Hick. This leaves me with the following question:
Is this Jesus a person worth believing in, worth dying for, someone that would change peoples lives. Yes, Jesus was a Jew but if Jesus was no more than a simple Jewish healer and teacher then what was all the fuss about?

There is one other issue which Channel 4's series raises for me. Here we have a group of 'high profile personalities', including a Jew (Jacobson who is clearly hostile) and a Moslem (Omaar), presenting their views on a history of Christianity. I look forward to a similar series on Islam, Mohammed and the Qur'an but I won't be holding my breath.