Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times, and Teaching

by Joseph Klausner

Esta obra es un fascinante resumen de lo que se conoce sobre el marco histórico-cultural hebreo en el que surgieron los Evangelios. El lector encontrará en ella una lúcida reflexión sobre las causas que hicieron posible el surgimiento de la cristiandad, así como un juicio de valor sobre el significado histórico del fundador del cristianismo. También descubrirá materiales y puntos de vista difícilmente accesibles, en especial una exposición crítica de las fuentes rabínicas que antes de la publicación de esta obra sólo conocía un reducido número de especialistas.

Genres: Religion, History

434 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1925

About the author

Joseph Gedaliah Klausner (יוסף גדליה קלוזנר‎) was a Jewish scholar. His family later moved to Odessa, Ukraine where he was educated. He was a professor of Hebrew literature and a devote Zionist. He died in 1958 in Israel.

Reviews

[Marcus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scholarly, erudite and informative; a great study/biography, for Jew and Gentile alike, of Jesus, the Jew...his times, his provenance and his teachings. The author was the great uncle of the Israeli author, Amos Oz.

[987643467881 · Rating 3 out of 5]

This isn't exactly the type of book I would normally have looked for and decided to read, but my obsession with Amos Oz inspired me to do so, and I'm glad I did.

In A Tale of Love and Darkness (Amos Oz's semi-autobiographical book) his great uncle Joseph Klausner's rivalry with S. Y. Agnon intrigued me enough for me to read S. Y. Agnon, who became one of my favourite authors (and whose writing Klausner considered to be “prolix, provincial and adorned with all sorts of over-clever cantorial grace notes”), so I thought it was only fair to give Klausner (who was supposedly the inspiration behind the ludicrous character of Professor Bachlam in Agnon's novel Shirah) a try too. Now, having read something from both authors, I think the irony of Klausner's house eventually being demolished and Agnon's house being preserved for the benefit of all it's visitors and tourists on Klausner Street, is almost comically fitting.

That his books were his “children” in whom he invested “the blood of his soul” (as he professes in Oz's book) is completely believable. The “torments” that he had to endure in order to ensure that his style was “simple and fluent and crystal clear”, crossing out words, tearing up drafts and the like, is equally as believable. I can almost picture him staying up night after night, motivated by the fantasy of causing “a great stir in this land of ours [as well as] the whole cultural world” and finally “silencing the obscurantists once and for all!” I know all this was gently, affectionately mocked in Amos Oz's book, but, in the supposed words of Joseph Klausner himself (according to Oz): success evidently really does “flow from perspiration, and inspiration from diligence and effort”. The book is obviously painstakingly written and edited, and the work did indeed pay off: the book is remarkably easy to read and understand, despite all the historical references and academic language.

In this book, his magnum opus, Klausner examines two main questions: “Why did Jesus arise among the people of Israel ? and why, in spite of that, did the people of Israel repudiate his teaching?” (page 407). The book is divided into 8 sections:
1) The Sources (Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Canonical and Uncanonical Gospels, etc.),
2) The Period (political, economic, religious and intellectual conditions),
3) The Early Life of Jesus,
4) The Beginning of Jesus' Ministry,
5) Jesus Reveals Himself as Messiah,
6) Jesus in Jerusalem,
7) The Trial and Crucifixion of Jesus, and
8) The Teaching of Jesus.
All his thorough research lead Klausner to his controversial conclusion: Jesus was “the Jewish moralist par excellence […] a kind of Reform rabbi […] a mortal, and […] a Jew who has nothing at all to do with the Church” (quote from A Tale of Love and Darkness) - a conclusion that was not only scandalous for Christians and Jews alike during the 1920s when the book was published, but also lead to the Anglican missionaries in Jerusalem demanding that the archbishop dismiss the missionary who translated the book into English, Dr. Herbert Danby.

I thought it was interesting that Dr. Danby (writing in 1925) says in the Translator's Preface:
“The book is not, of course, intended for Christians. They will, and quite rightly, find much in it to dislike. Though the author is conscientiously convinced that he has been quite untouched by subjective influences, the Christian reader will not agree. But apart from this, the Christian reader, and especially the Christian scholar, will be thankful for the material which the book provides for the better understanding of the Jewish mental and historical environment in which our Lord worked and lived.”
Although it may indeed be the case that the book may be an uncomfortable read for a more sensitive reader who holds differing views from the author, I think this sort of reader would actually benefit the most out of reading it, even if it is just to provide intelligent counter arguments to the author's assertions, if only to organise/examine their own opinions and thoughts on the matter. I find it difficult to believe that the book was “not intended for Christians” because then it would just be a case of the author preaching to the converted, and I think Joseph Klausner had bigger aspirations with this book than that. Klausner's plea at the end of the book's introduction for both Christian and Jewish readers to “peruse it with the same good intentions with which it was written” says it all.

Klausner's motto: “Judaism and Humanism” (as stated on the brass plate on the entrance to his home) reveals his belief that the values of the two -isms would never come into conflict with each other, and that seems to be the ideal he attempted to reflect in his work, almost successfully in my opinion. Having said that, I do think that author's tone and implications often border on passive aggressive, and although at times he tries very hard not to, at other points in the book he quite unabashedly makes statements that reveal a tendency towards Edward Said's “Orientalism”.

In this book Jesus is not only a Pharisaic* Jew through and through (“the most Jewish of Jews” with evidently no desire to start up a new religion, despite some of his reformist ideas), but a schizophrenic one at that – a schizophrenic Jew with a mystic “je ne sais quoi” magnetism that allowed him to attract and lead “the poor, the impoverished and the unemployed” as well as “the sick and suffering and with those pathological types which we now label neurasthenics and psychasthenics” who were created by the extreme political, social and religious circumstances of the time (page 226). The author is too polite and diplomatic to diagnose Jesus himself, but the symptoms definitely match up – in his own passive aggressive way, the author makes his point clear.
*(Incidentally, for anyone interested in the topic, the author has an extremely clear and well written section explaining the distinctions between the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes and Zealots in the Second Book: The Period, Section 3: Religious and Intellectual Conditions, page 193.)

An example of a section that gave away the author's Orientalist leanings can be found in his list of the five categories of miracles performed by Jesus, the third and fourth types in particular. The third type of miracles were the “Illusions” which were “imaginary visions, 'hallucinations' of simple, oriental village-folk and fishermen, for whom the whole world was full of marvels”(page 269). The fourth type were “Acts only apparently miraculous” (page 269): the example given of such a miracle is the story of Jesus and his disciples being on a boat on the Sea of Galilee during a storm and the storm suddenly subsiding after Jesus tells the panicked disciples to trust in God. This is the author's explanation for the miracle:
“This is unquestionably what happened : the Sea of Galilee frequently becomes rough suddenly and as suddenly becomes calm again. The present writer witnessed such a change while sailing on the Sea in the spring of 1912. Yet for the Galilaean fishermen, with their craving for marvels, it was a miracle which Jesus had performed. Such has ever been the way with simple-minded people.”
That the disciples were an impressionable bunch is obvious, but is the author seriously suggesting that the frequent, natural sudden changes of the Sea of Galilee, something that he was able to observe after sailing on it a couple of times one Spring, would not have been known to fishermen with years of experience on that same sea?

All in all, it was a thought provoking book. The more I read about the history of different religions, the more I think that many of the more outspoken, active atheists are missing the point. My main gripe with them is that they give religion too much credit (by blaming it for a lot of the world's problems), and in doing so give people too much credit (by giving them an out by suggesting that if it wasn't for their religious views, they would have been better people). Religion is not the problem, people are. People choose an ideology, it doesn't choose them – and if they let it choose them, well then, that says something about them too, as well as about the strength of the natural pull towards being part of a “herd”, if you will. That is not to say that all religions are equal; it's impossible to deny that different religions perpetuate and encourage different societal characteristics, but the root of those characteristics is one and the same: it's all just different manifestations of human nature, both at its best and at its worst. I realise I have a little bit of a chicken and egg problem with this theory, but I really think that getting into religious debates and criticising religion on it's own, for it's own sake, is not only pointless but ultimately futile.

In the end, “man does not live on bread alone” as Jesus quoted from Deuteronomy 8:2-3. in both Matthew 4:4 and And Luke 4:4 (further proving Klausner's point), and I suppose that up until a certain point one cannot entirely be blamed for not bothering to thoroughly research what belief system it is exactly that they're subscribing to and why.

[matthew mcdonald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Has some faults, but way more interesting than, eg, the book by Reza Aslan.

Gives a lot of background on what has happening in Palestine around 2000 years ago. Pretty sympathetic treatment of almost everybody involved in the story - apart from the Romans, the high priests, and Herod & Co.

Not without faults. There are a few bits where he pretends to understand what people, primarily Jesus, were thinking on pretty flimsy grounds. But 95% of the time he's got some reasonable basis in source material for what he's saying, and it's generally pretty intelligent and sympathetic.

There are currently only 2 reviews of this on goodreads. The review by "Robert" mentions being bothered by (a) claimed psychological insight into Jesus' motivation, and (b) arguments/assumptions about which bits of the New Testament are late additions. For what it's worth, I didn't think (b) was much of an issue. Most of the significant places where Klausner is suggesting that something is a late addition (eg Matthew 16, 9-20) that seems to be generally well known - early copies of the relevant text *actually* *don't* have those sections. Similarly, when Klausner's arguing about which parts of Josephus are authentic, he seems to be at least making a reasonable, although not iron-clad, argument.

I tend to agree with Robert about the claimed psychological insight into Jesus' motivation seeming bogus in parts (a). But in other parts it seems reasonable, where certain events have just happened, and Jesus the goes and does something that seems to have a pretty straightforward psychological motivation (like wanting to avoid being arrested.) I think that I probably didn't object to as many of these sections as Robert did.