Jewish Jesus Research and Its Challenge to Christology Today

Historical Jesus research, Jewish or Christian, is marked by the search for origins and authenticity. The various Quests for the Historical Jesus contributed to a crisis of identity within Western Christianity. The result was a move ＂back to the Jewish roots!＂
For Jewish scholars it was a means to position Jewry within a dominantly Christian culture. As a consequence, Jews now feel more at ease to relate to Jesus as a Jew.
For Walter Homolka the Christian challenge now is to formulate a new Christology: between a Christian exclusivism that denies the universality of God, and a pluralism that endangers the specificity of the Christian understanding of God and the uniqueness of religious traditions, including that of Christianity.

Rabbi Walter Homolka, PhD (King’s College London, 1992), PhD (University of Wales Trinity Saint David, 2015), DHL (HUC-JIR New York 2009), is Professor of Modern Jewish Thought and Interreligious Dialogue at the University of Potsdam, executive director of the School of Jewish Theology and rector of the Abraham Geiger College.