Tempted by The Messiah Confrontation

 

ANNAS

How do we deal with a carpenter king?

PRIESTS

Where do we start with a man who is bigger
Than John was when John did his baptism thing?

CAIAPHAS

Fools, you have no perception!
The stakes we are gambling are frighteningly high!
We must crush him completely,
So like John before him, this Jesus must die.
For the sake of the nation, this Jesus must die.

ALL (inside)

Must die, must die, this Jesus must die.

from Jesus Christ Superstar -- This Jesus Must Die

I suppose I'm revealing my "hopelessly nerdy" status when I admit that I'm pondering the purchase of a book on the Sadducess and Pharisees, best known to Christians as the collective Bad Guys. They were the ones hovering around Jesus, the Blackflies and the Mosquitoes, intent on tripping him up and generally tormenting him. Then they were complicit in killing him. At least this is what we've been led to believe through the centuries, often resulting in a ant-Judaism taken to a deadly level. Add in the characterization of the Pharisees in he musicals Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell musicals of the early 1970s and it's little wonder we boo and hiss whenever they show up in scripture.

This new book, The Messiah Confrontation, has been praised in a bunch of reviews and seems to offer a fuller, readable perspective on the change of scholarly outlook that has been building over the past few decades. Here is one description: 

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. 

Will I buy the book? Maybe this synopsis and the reviews are enough, but can we ever have too many books, even of the theological persuasion?