Review of Kosher Jesus by Shmuley Boteach

In March of this year I reviewed Kosher Jesus by Shmuley Boteach. Here is an excerpt from the review:

Shmuley Boteach’s Kosher Jesus is a bold attempt by a person of great ability with no formal training in New Testament studies or the study of Second Temple Judaism to present a Jewish treatment of the founder of Christianity, his relationship to the Jewish people and the narrative of his birth, career and death in the Gospels. Beyond that, Boteach sets forth an entirely new and controversial paradigm for Jewish understanding of Jesus and for Jewish-Christian relations…

From the beginning, Boteach wants us to his book as totally revolutionary. We will see that parts of it are, in fact, totally unoriginal and that those parts that are most original put forward ideas that this reviewer finds to be highly questionable…

What is unfortunate, however, is that an entire world of scholarship on Second Temple Judaism, much of it the result of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, makes absolutely no appearance…

Read the complete review here in PDF format.