ABSTRACT
The claim that I would like to defend in this chapter is simply that the Jewish Jesus is a liberal Protestant Jesus. In an important sense, this statement should be uncontroversial. The contention that Jesus was a Jew, whose teachings affirmed Jewish practice and tradition, originated in the Protestant academy as an historical claim aiming to distinguish the historical Jesus from the subsequent history of Christianity. As Susannah Heschel has shown, Abraham Geiger’s Jewish Jesus is the quintessential liberal Protestant Jesus in that Geiger re-imagines Jesus much like his Protestant contemporaries did, as a moral exemplar that reflected the ethical ideals of pure monotheism. 1 Geiger differed from his Protestant contemporaries by insisting on Jesus’ fundamental Jewishness and by implying that the perversion of Jesus’ teachings defines Christianity and its history.
