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Jesus in the Promised Land
Paula Fredriksen, Adele Reinhartz, and Stephen Prothero in conversation with Alan Segal
APRIL 29, 2007


Jesus of Nazareth is Israel's single most successful expatriate. Though the movement that formed around the memory of his mission and message has small representation in the modern state, from its inception it thrived abroad, and Christianity in its many varied avatars currently comprises the largest single religious community on the globe. As Christianity developed, however, peculiar forms of anti-Judaism developed with it; and conversely, rabbinic Judaism, Christianity's sibling, developed its own forms of anti-Christianism. As a result, Jesus of Nazareth as an historical figure has seemed marooned, without a native context, interpreted as an anti-Jew by both Christian and Jewish tradition. Modernity, however, has created three new, non-theological contexts for Jesus: America, academia, and the modern Jewish state. How do these new contexts affect the historical 'content' of the idea of Jesus? What features do the American Jesus, the academic Jesus, and the Israeli Jesus have in common, and what sets them apart? And why is it only in Israel, that most self-consciously and self-confidently Jewish context, that "Jesus" seems least like a Jew?

PAULA FREDRIKSEN is the Aurelio Professor of Scripture at Boston University. She has also taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity, which won a National Jewish Book Award, and the forthcoming Augustine and the Jews. She edited, with Adele Reinhartz, Jesus, Judaism, and Christian Anti-Judaism: Reading the New Testament After the Holocaust and has edited a collection of essays about Mel Gibson's controversial film, On 'The Passion of the Christ'.

ADELE REINHARTZ is Professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa in Canada. Her main areas of research are the Gospel of John, early Jewish-Christian relations, feminist criticism, and, most recently, the Bible and Film. She is the author of numerous articles and several books, including Befriending the Beloved Disciple: A Jewish Reading of the Gospel of John and Scripture on the Silver Screen. Her latest book is a study of the Jesus movies, entitled Jesus of Hollywood. She was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2005.

STEPHEN PROTHERO is the Chair of the Department of Religion at Boston University and the author of numerous books, most recently American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon and Religious Literacy: What Americans Need to Know. He has commented on religion on dozens of National Public Radio programs, and on television on CNN, NBC, FOX, and PBS. A regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, he has also written for The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, Salon, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe.

ALAN F. SEGAL is professor of Religion and Ingeborg Rennert Professor of Jewish Studies at Barnard College. His publications include Rebecca's Children: Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World; The Other Judaisms of Late Antiquity; and Paul the Convert: The Apostasy and Apostolate of Saul of Tarsus. He has held fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His latest book is Life After Death: The Afterlife in Western Religions.