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Was Jesus really Jewish? Notes from the Front Lines of Scholarship

Deborah L. Forger, Dartmouth College

Tuesday, July 30, 2019
4:30pm – 6:00pm
Filene Auditorium, Moore Building
Intended Audience(s): Public
Categories: Conferences, Lectures & Seminars

The assertion that Jesus was a Jew and not a Christian may seem an obvious fact of history. However, the discussion of Jesus in his Jewish context is a surprisingly recent, and frequently heated, topic for historians of Jewish and Christian antiquity. After a brief look at the diverse Jewish world into which Jesus was born, as well as the paucity of historical evidence, this lecture will take a historiographical turn, unpacking the diverse ways that Jesus has been depicted throughout history, exploring, in particular, modern presentations of Jesus in the arts and film. Special attention will be paid to how some persons continue to present Jesus in a historical and anti-Semitic ways, as well as to how Jesus’ own message can help to combat such violence.

A postdoctoral scholar (2018–2021) in the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth College, Forger is a scholar of Second Temple Judaism and the New Testament, with an additional focus in early Jewish-Christian relations. She was a fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies and received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where she was awarded the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fellowship, a multi-year national dissertation award. Though later polemics suggest that Jews and Christians differentiated themselves based on their view of God’s body, her work complicates this picture by analyzing how first-century Jews envisioned God in visible and corporeal forms and humans as divine. She is also interested in questions of where, how, and when the ways parted between Jews and Christians, and how scriptural hermeneutics impacted, complicated, impinged upon, and fortified those separations.

Free and open to the public

Sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program/Leon Black Lecture Series

*location subject to change, please check the Dartmouth Events Calendar for updates*

 
For more information, contact:
Carol Bean-Carmody
carol.a.bean-carmody@dartmouth.edu
Permanent URL to this event: https://jewish.dartmouth.edu/events/event?event=57091

Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.