is a Jew who has done as much for Judaism as any other, but has been hated by many Jews.
Others have seen not Jesus---the invented god in whose name Christians murder us---but
Yahshua (Y'shua) the rabbi, the great man obscured and mocked by both Christians and Jews.
"Without doubt, it is that whereas none of the claims and aspirations of
Jesus can be said definitely to associate him with role of Messiah, not to speak of that
of the son of man. the strange creation of the modern myth-makers, everything
combines, when approached from the viewpoint of a study of the first-century AD Galilee,
or of charismatic Judaism, or of his titles and their development, to place him in the
venerable company of the Devout, the ancient Hassidim....
...The discovery of resemblances between the work and words of Jesus and those of
the Hassidim, Honi and Hanina ben Dosa, is however by no means intended to imply that he
was simply one of them and nothing more....it is nevertheless still possible to say...that
no objective and enlightened student of the Gospels can help but be struck by the
incomparable superiority of Jesus....
...The positive and constant testimony of the earliest Gospel tradition, considered
against its natural background of first-century Galilean charismatic religion, leads not a
Jesus as unrecognizable within the framework of Judaism as by the standard of his own
verifiable words and intentions, but to another figure: Jesus the just man, the zaddik,
Jesus the helper and healer, Jesus the teacher and leader, venerated by his intimates and
less committed admirers alike as prophet, lord, and son of God.
(Geza Vermes. Jesus the Jew: A Historian's Reading of the Gospels.
London: Collins, 1973. Pp. 223-5.)
"'Jesus was not a Christian,' but he became a Christian. His teaching
and his history have been severed from Israel. To this day the Jews have never accepted
him, while his disciples and his foolowers of every generation have scoffed at and
persecuted the Jews and Judaism. But even so, we cannot imagine a work of any value
touching upon the history of the Jews in the time of the Second Temple which does not also
include the history of Jesus and an estimate of his teaching. What, therefore does Jesus
stand for in the eyes of the Jews at the present time?"
From the standpoint of general humanity he is, indeed, "a light to the
Gentiles." His disciples have raised the lighted torch of the Law of Israel (even
though that Law has been put forward in a mutilated and incomplete form) among the heathen
of the four quarters of the world.No Jew can, therefore, overlook the value of Jesus and
his teaching from the point of view of universal history. This a fact which neither
Maimondes nor Yehudah ha-Levi ignored."
"... in his ethical code there is a sublimity, distinctiveness and originality
in form unparalleled in any other Hebrew ethical code; neither is there parallel to the
remarkable art of his parables. The shrewdness and sharpness of his proverbs and his
proverbs and his forceful epigrams serve, in an exceptional degree, to make ethical ideas
a popular possession. If ever the day should come and his ethical code be stripped of its
wrappings of miracles and mysticism, the Book of the Ethics of Jesus will be one of the
choicest treasures in the literature of Israel for all time."
(Joseph Klausner. Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times, and Teaching. Trans.
Herbert Danby. New York: Bloch, 1989 (1922). Pp. 413-4.)