The prediction that Jews may reclaim Jesus “as a result of a wider and more comprehensive conception of the scope of Jewish learning and Jewish literature and of a general recognition of our lost literary treasures, ” was made by Professor Harry A. Wolfson, professor emeritus of Hebrew literature and philosophy at Harvard University in the memorial issue of the Menorah Journal published today in honor of its late editor, Henry Hurwitz, who died in November 1961. This is the final issue of the Menorah Journal. The first issue of the magazine appeared in Jan. 1915.
Professor Wolfson, who is considered one of the greatest living Jewish scholars, explains that, during the time of Jesus, only those individuals who were heads of schools–such as Bet Shammai and Bet Hillel–were quoted by name in Tannaitic records. Jesus, Prof. Wolfson declared, was an unaffiliated teacher “who taught and preached during the period of the Bet Shammai and Bet Hillel. If the teachings of Jesus were not consigned to oblivion, it is due to the fact that his followers banded themselves, not into a sect, as it is usually supposed, but into a ‘House,’ a Bet Joshua, corresponding to the Bet Shammai and Bet Hillel, and this ‘House’ it was that collected and preserved the teachings of Jesus.
“When the works of Josephus, and the Apocrypha, and the Hellenistic writings have all been restored by us and given a place beside the hallowed literature of our tradition, then the works of Jesus also will find a place among them,” Prof. Wolfson believes. “It is not as a returning hero that Jesus will be restored, and not as a beatified saint–we shall not regret the past nor shall we apologize for our forefathers, ” he says.
“But when painstaking Jewish scholars, in an effort to reorganize and reclassify our literary treasures, will come to compile anthologies of the wise sayings and inspiring teachings of our ancients, they will include among them the sermons and parables of Jesus the Nazarite, the Galilean rabbi who, like Philo and Josephus, has by force of historical circumstances been for centuries better known among non-Jews than among Jews, ” he asserted.
Professor Wolfson concluded with a speculation on how a Jewish scholar of the future, studying a new anthology of the Sayings of the Fathers, will come across the utterances recorded in the name of Jesus the Galilean, and will gently debate with him in the time-honored tradition of rabbinical give and take.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
