PBS: Jewish Jesus; Huffington Post: Jesus 'Used to Be Jewish'?

In preparation for Session 1 of Mudhouse Sabbath, Judaism and Christianity, I recommend checking out this 7-minute PBS video interview with Professor Amy-Jill Levine (co-editor of the Jewish Annotated New Testament), Rabbi Schmuley Boteach (author of Kosher Jesus), and Professor Brad Young (of Oral Robert University):

Jewish Jesus

An especially poignant piece of the interview regarding the Jewishness of Jesus:

PROFESSOR LEVINE: He teaches like a Jew. He talks in parables, and Jews then knew that parables were not simple banal little stories. They were designed to shake us up, to get us to see the world in a new way, to challenge us. And Jesus is just a fabulous Jewish storyteller.

LAWTON (Correspondent): She says his teachings, such as in the famous Sermon on the Mount, are expansions of teachings in the Torah.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: He’s going to the law and bringing out the heart of it, which is also what Jewish teaching does. So he says not only don’t murder; he actually says you have to love your enemy, and he’s the only person in antiquity I’ve found who says that. But I think that gets to the heart of scripture.

An article in the Huffington Post by the author of Jesus Uncensored: Restoring the Authentic Jew, Bernard Star, provides still more fodder for the discussion on Judaism and Christianity:

Jesus 'Used to Be Jewish'? That's Not What the Gospels Say

Of note:

When I interviewed Christians and Jews for my book "Jesus Uncensored: Restoring the Authentic Jew," I heard over and over "everyone knows Jesus was Jewish." But when I dug a little deeper I discovered that "everyone knows he was Jewish" really means "he used to be Jewish."

And...Something that has come up numerous times in our discussions during the Animate studies:

I even took a walking tour of the Renaissance galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. To my astonishment, Jesus, his followers and his Jewish community were consistently pictured as blond, fair-skinned, northern European latter-day Christians, often surrounded by latter-day saints, Christian clergy and Christian artifacts -- images totally at odds with biblical facts and without a trace of any Jewish connections.