Pinchas Lapide is an orthodox Jewish theologian who has worked hard in the cause of Jewish-Christian relations and in recent years has become the favourite Jewish conversation-partner for German Christian theologians. A few years ago he took the unprecedented step of accepting (without becoming a Christian) that the resurrection of Jesus was a real historical event, and in this book explains why. If I have understood him correctly, there are three reasons: (1) The historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, while not unambiguous enough to convince the determined sceptic, is very good. In particular, Lapide is impressed by the transformation of the disciples from a frightened and despairing group on Good Friday to a confident missionary society: only a real historical event can explain this. (2) The disciples’ experience of Jesus’ resurrection must be understood as a genuinely ‘Jewish faith experience’. Its preconditions (especially the Jewish expectation of resurrection) are Jewish beliefs which Lapide as an orthodox Jew shares. (3) Following Maimonides and some modern Jewish theologians such as Franz Rosenzweig, Lapide sees Christianity as part of God’s providential purpose to spread the knowledge of the God of Israel throughout the world. But, he reasons, in that case the resurrection of Jesus, without which there would have been no Christianity, must have been a real act of God in history. It does not make Jesus Israel’s Messiah (and so Lapide has not become a Christian), but it gives Jesus a prominent place in God’s preparation of the world for the coming messianic age.

Whether or not other Jewish theologians find Lapide’s argument acceptable, he seems to me to have moved Jewish-Christian dialogue in a significant direction. Modern Jewish assessment of Jesus and Christianity would seem to have two major features. There has been, in the first place, an attempt to retrieve Jesus as a Jewish teacher with Jewish (as opposed to Christian) significance, and, secondly, there has been a positive assessment of Christianity as serving, in God’s providence, to bring Gentiles to faith in the God of Israel. But between the historical Jesus and Gentile Christianity lies, historically, the faith of the first JewishChristians in the risen Jesus as Messiah. Lapide has rightly seen the need for serious Jewish assessment of this original Jewish Christian faith in Jesus, without which there would have been no Gentile Christianity. What he attempts to do is to assess it positively as the historical root of Gentile Christianity. But there is a problem here with regard to Jesus’ significance for Jews, which Lapide seems to have missed but which may make other Jewish theologians reluctant to follow him. Acceptance of Jesus’ resurrection establishes, as Lapide’s book repeatedly shows, a fundamental continuity between Jesus himself and the earliest Christian message about Jesus, i.e. between Jesus the thoroughly Jewish figure with a mission to his own people alone and the first Jewish Christians who called their own people to faith in the risen Jesus. It becomes difficult to see where a line can be drawn between the retrieval of Jesus himself for Judaism and a Jewish assessment of Jewish Christianity as having only Gentile significance. I do not mean this as a polemical point, but to indicate that Jewish theological assessment of Jesus and Christianity must involve itself rather deeply in the question of the historical continuity between Jesus and the rise of Christianity. As far as further dialogue is concerned, Lapide’s book points in the direction of the need for both Jews and Christians to look rather carefully at the reasons for and the meaning of the original Jewish Christian belief in Jesus’ messiahship: this is not so obvious a matter as Christians have tended to think.

The fact that this book has been written is significant. But I have to say that I found it in detail an unsatisfying book: it is a very brief and lightweight treatment, which fails to press the important theological issues and which seemed to me inconsistent in places. Carl Braaten’s introduction is useful particularly in filling in some of the background to Lapide’s thinking from his earlier works.

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