Download or read book The Symbolic Jesus written by William E. Arnal and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-12 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is widely accepted that Jesus was a Jew. However, both Christian and New Testament scholarship have a strong anti-Jewish history. 'The Symbolic Jesus' presents the controversies surrounding the Jewishness of Jesus. It examines the insistence among historical Jesus scholars that Jesus was a Jew and the ways this frames the figure of Jesus in ancient Christian literature. The book examines the anti-Jewish legacy of the past and more recent approaches to biblical scholarship. Contemporary identity issues - scholarly, political, religious and cultural - are shown to lie at the heart of the debate.