One might have thought that, after 2,000 years of opposition, hostility, persecution and eventually extermination at the hands of supposedly Christian authorities, the Jews would be in no frame of mind to look favourably upon the Christians’ Saviour. It is all the more surprising, therefore, to discover that the reverse is true; in-deed, that the 20th century has seen a pronounced movement for what has become known as “the reclamation of Jesus for Judaism”.
Joseph Klausner, writing in the Twenties rejects the idea that Jesus is not an historical figure. He speaks glowingly of Jesus, although he does not accept Jesus as the Messiah. He writes: “Everything which Jesus ever uttered on ethical teaching is Jewish but his over-emphasis was NOT Judaism and, in fact, brought about non-Judaism”; “It is universally admitted…that Christ taught the purest and sublimest system of ethics, one which throws the moral precepts and maxims of the wisest men of antiquity far into the shade”; and “In his ethical code there is sublimity, distinctive-
ness and originality in form unparalled in any other Hebrew ethical code; neither is there any parallel to the remarkable act of his parables”.
Another prominent Jewish scholar, Claude Montefiore,writes:
“The rabbis see both sides: their counsel. is, therefore, cooler and better balanced than Jesus. Jesus teaches an excess of virtue, an excess of forbearance, an excess in forgiveness, an excess in gentleness, an excess in giving and yielding….Jesus teaches the same thing as the rabbis with burning passion and as part of a rounded whole of self-sacrifice and devotion…
“We can find rabbinic parallels to each of the beatitudes but as a whole they seem original.
“To call sinners to repentance, to denounce vice generally, is one thing. To have intercourse with sinners and seek their con-version by counselling and comforting them – that is quite an-other”.
The Jewish scholar who has concentrated more than any other on Jesus since WW2 is Professor Geza Vermes. Beginning in 1973, Professor Vermes has produced a trilogy on Jesus. These are some of the conclusions he reaches about Jesus:
“Second to none in profundity of insight and grandeur of character he is in particular an unsurpassed master of the art of laying bare the inmost core of spiritual truth and of bringing every issue back to the essence of religion, the existential relation- ship of man and man and man and God…..
“In addition to proclaiming the oppressed blessed, he actually took his stand among the pariahs of the world, those despised by the respectable. Sinners were his table-companions and the ostracised tax-collectors and prostitutes his friends”.
“Thanks to the sublimity, distinctiveness and originality of his ethical teaching he stoodd head and shoulders above the known re- presentative of this class of spiritual personality”.
Another Jewish scholar, Dr Pinchas Lapide, goes so far as to claim that the Resurrection of Christ actually happened. Dr. Lapide does not believe that Jesus is the Messiah. He believes that God brought Jesus back from the dead in order to bring the knowledge of Himself to the Gentile world.
Quotations could be supplied from other Jewish scholars, such as S.Sandmel, S.C. Reif and D. Flusser, to show that Jesus stands above His contemporaries.