What Thomas Jefferson Could Never Understand About Jesus

this general thrust, of a very Jewish Jesus who was nevertheless opposed to some high-profile features of first-century Judaism, seems to me the most viable one if we are to do justice, not just to the evidence of the synoptic gospels (they, after all, are easy game for any critic who wants to avoid their implications) but more particularly to the

Christian Church has tended to overlook its Judaic origins, but the fact is that Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew of Palestine when he went about his Father’s business,…

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the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” Wherever his spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced the good news that

People have tried to read the story of Jesus as though the only thing it had to say to the Jews of Jesus’s day was that they were wrong. They were wrong about God, about God’s coming kingdom, about the way to salvation.