IT’S YOUR OWN MESS SHMULEY – DON’T USE ME TO CLEAN IT UP
By Rabbi Michael Skobac
While no doubt reveling in all the attention his recent book is receiving, Shmuley Boteach has begun feeling the heat of scrutiny that it and he are attracting. His recent attempt to invoke a booklet I wrote as support for his “Kosher Jesus” is a desperate tactic. While there may be some similarity between my “The DaVinci Code: A Jewish Perspective” and his work, Boteach surely knows that it’s a far stretch from similar to congruent.
Many students of Christian origins have entertained the possibility that Jesus and his early followers were Torah observant Jews who did not seek to establish a new religion. While I am not married to this idea, I do find it plausible and explore it in my booklet. If Shmuley had stopped there, I would not be writing this response.
Because of the ambiguity and unreliability of so much of the primary source material, I inform my readers that the ideas I will be sharing are not conclusive and are controversial. Boteach, on the other hand, doesn’t introduce his work as speculative – it is presented as the truth.
My booklet was written with a counter-missionary agenda, directed primarily to Jews who have embraced Christianity. The goal was to provoke them to consider the possibility that Jesus did not deny the binding nature of the Torah and did not claim to be divine. Boteach goes beyond asking followers of Jesus to rethink who he was and seeks to encourage the Jewish community to re-examine Jesus. This ignores age-old rabbinic policies enacted to distance Jews from non-Jewish religions and inevitably encourages the exploration of the New Testament, a book that certainly cannot be deemed “kosher”.
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