Content area
Full Text
doi: 10.1017/S0009640708000437 Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen. By Jeremy Cohen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. xii + 320 pp. $29.95 cloth.
Throughout his distinguished scholarly career, Jeremy Cohen has explored the perplexing and painful relationship between Jews and Christians in antiquity and the Middle Ages. In his latest work, Cohen unpacks the claim that the Jews were responsible for the death of Christ. According to Cohen, over the last two millennia the Christ-killer myth has been essential to the development of anti-Judaism. anti-Semitism. Christianity, and western culture. In fact, "Christianity needed the Jews to serve as the killers of Christ and repeatedly cast them in that role" (3).
Cohen traces the origins and interpretation of biblical texts through history, especially the Passion and crucifixion accounts of the New Testament. He contends that no accurate historical records exist to identity those actually responsible for the death of Jesus of Nazareth. The canonical Gospels reflect the complexities of Jewish-Christian relations decades after the crucifixion. Drawing on John Dominic Crossan's claim that the Gospels are not properly historical but "prophecy historici/cd," Cohen identifies narratives and motifs from the Old Testament, which the evangelists borrowed to construct their versions of the life and death of Christ. The Gospels offer a myth in the guise of history-"a story that expresses the ultimate truths and values of a community" (16)-and narratives that portray the Jews of Jesus' day as guilty of his death. The tendency...