Jeremy Cohen, “On Pesach and Pascha: Jews, Christians, and the Passion,” in Oliver Larry Yarbrough, ed., Engaging the Passion: Perspectives on the Death of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 335-358 (original) (raw)

Controversy, Mythicism, and the Historical Jesus

While the New Testament offers the most extensive evidence for the existence of the historical Jesus, the writings are subject to a number of conditions that have dictated both the form and content of the traditions they have preserved. These conditions did not disappear with the writing of the first gospel, nor even with the eventual formation of the New Testament canon. They were expressly addressed by Christian writers in the second and third century who saw an incipient mythicism as a threat to the integrity of the message about Jesus. The history of this controversy is long, complex, and decisive with respect to the -question‖ of Jesus.

History of Christianity HIST 297

I taught this course at the University of Alberta. This course will outline the History of Christianity from the perspective that throughout Christian history people have constructed and continually reconstruct the Christ myth to legitimize their interests and in order to adapt to competing challenges. To do this, we will study the historical, social, and cultural situations that arise in Christian history by analyzing Christian literature in the various contexts to understand how the myth is scripted and re-­‐scripted to suit the new situation.

Feeling persecuted: Christians, Jews and images of violence in the middle ages

2010

Ever since R. I. Moore published his The Formation of a Persecuting Society in 1987, we have increasingly come to understand medieval society in terms of its treatment of its 'others': Jews, lepers, heretics and so forth.(1) New bureaucratic structures starting in the 11th century established themselves by persecuting these minorities. David Nirenberg added importantly to this analysis by showing the role of violence, especially symbolic violence, in enacting and policing these boundaries.(2) And Israel Jacob Yuval opened up another dimension of the historiography by showing how Jews and Christians shared a common language of violence and traded motifs back and forth over the religious barricades: Jews killed their families and themselves in the Crusades in imitation of Christian ideas of martyrdom.(3) Yuval also demonstrated how the ritual murder accusation against Jews played a key role in the production of Christian saints. For the victim-typically a child-to die at the hands of the Jews was to imitate Christ's passion. Violence by Jews was a necessary component in the Christian economy of redemption. Anthony Bale has productively built on these and other works in his brilliant study of the medieval iconography of violence. Drawing primarily-but not exclusively-on English materials, he significantly revises Moore by showing that images of violence were significant methods of inculcating Christian virtues of meekness and clemency. In a paradoxical way, to persecute the Jews was a way of enacting the Christian message of love, since the Jews had rejected that message with violence. Or, as Christopher Ocker has put it, a theology of love was just as responsible for the ritual murder accusation as a theology of hate.(4) Despite appearances to the contrary, Jews were powerful, while Christians were weak, as befit those who imitated Christ. Images of violent Jews reinforced Christians' identities as victims and thus justified their own violent attitudes toward the Jews. And in some cases, this emotional economy operated without actual Jews, such as in England after the Jews had been expelled in 1291. Bale places emphasis on feeling, for he believes that 'if we wish to uncover how medieval people thought, we must take seriously how they felt' (p. 11). As opposed to the Enlightenment hierarchy of reason over the emotions, the Middle Ages sought to inculcate feeling in its iconography, the primary means of communication when literacy was restricted to tiny elites. Love and hate were inextricably intertwined so that images aroused both of these emotions simultaneously and dialectically. In addition, the feelings aroused by images of Jews tormenting Jesus were designed to make those viewing these images feel that the