ABSTRACT
In attempting to articulate the ways in which the sacrifice of Jesus Christ has superceded the sacrificial system of Judaism, the author of the New Testament letter to the Hebrews draws heavily on the image of the shadow. The Israelite prie stly service is deemed "a shadow of heavenly things" (8:5), and the Torah merely "a shadow of the good to come" (10:1) . In short, Judaism before Christ is presented as a shadow ofglory, a religion that was useful in a fallen and limited way,but must now be abandoned in light of the fullness of Christ. For a thinker steeped in Platonic thought and struggling to encourage what was likely a small, threatened community, the characterization is an effective rhetorical maneuver. But for readers today the "shadow of glory" takes on a more unsettling meaning. For after nearly two millennia it is clear that such Christian supersessionism has had dire consequences for Jewsand Judaism. From forced conversions, to countless pogroms, to the systematic murder of six million Jews in Nazi Germany, the "glory" of Christianity's triumph in the West has indeed cast a long and baleful shadow. The present volume looks out from this shadow back at the texts of the New Testament and explores how those texts might be read differently in light of the Holocaust.
