Jesus

Jesus is central to Shmuel Ash’s unfinished inquiry into how Jews have understood him, but the novel’s most consequential portrait emerges when Shmuel reverses the conventional account of Judas Iscariot. Jesus is a Jewish teacher who does not set out to found a new religion; Judas, convinced that Jesus is divine and destined to redeem the world, engineers the crucifixion in the hope that a final miracle will prove it. When Jesus dies as a human being, the failure destroys the premise on which Judas has built his life. The novel places this imagined history beside centuries of Jewish writing about Jesus, asking how polemic, fear, and religious expectation have shaped the figure remembered by different communities.

Identity and Jewish Context

Jesus is presented as born and raised within Judaism, not as a Christian seeking to establish a separate faith. Shmuel argues that Jesus was Jewish in life and in death, and that Paul of Tarsus, rather than Jesus, created Christianity. In Shmuel’s account, Jesus sought to return Jewish religion to what he regarded as its roots, challenging what he saw as the accretions of ceremony and the authority of the priestly class. Shmuel imagines him as a reforming figure—or, in a different sense, a fundamentalist devoted to religious origins—whose disputes arose within Judaism rather than from a rejection of it.

The historical record considered in Shmuel’s research is not uniform. Josephus, identified as the earliest Jewish source to mention Jesus, appears in two contrasting accounts: the passage in Antiquities of the Jews describes Jesus in terms that sound explicitly Christian, including messiahship and resurrection, while the later writer Agapius presents Josephus as reporting what Jesus’s followers believed without affirming those claims himself. Professor Gustav Yom-Tov Eisenschloss considers the Christian-sounding passage a later interpolation, arguing that a Jewish author such as Josephus could not have written it in that form. The disagreement makes the sources themselves part of the novel’s subject: accounts of Jesus are also accounts of who preserved, altered, or transmitted them.

Other Jewish references are fragmentary and contested. Rabbinic passages mention figures whom some commentators identify with Jesus, but the identifications remain conjectural; later Talmudic references condemn him as a wayward student, sorcerer, or religious transgressor. Those passages were removed from almost all printed editions of the Babylonian Talmud because Jews feared what Christian readers might do upon encountering them. The fifth- or sixth-century poet Yannai, by contrast, composed an openly anti-Christian liturgical poem. When Shmuel reads it to Gershom Wald, Wald shields his eyes and objects not to disagreement with Jesus but to the degrading manner of the attack.

Competing Jewish Readings

The novel traces more than one Jewish response to Christian claims. In the medieval Book of Nestor the Priest, an anonymous Jewish author writing in Arabic ridicules Christian belief and disputes the Trinity and Jesus’s divinity. The work at once presents Jesus as a thoroughly Jewish, pious man who did not intend to found a new religion and deploys coarse attacks on his birth and death. Wald rejects this approach as a descent into abuse: disagreement with Jesus, he argues, should address the substance of his teaching rather than reproduce the language of contempt.

Other Jewish writers offer more measured or more complicated accounts. Rabbi Gershom ha-Cohen condemns insults against Jesus as foolish words that an educated person should be ashamed to utter, even as his own book questions the New Testament. In The Kuzari, Yehuda ha-Levi gives a Christian sage a coherent account of Jesus and the Trinity, while the Khazar king remains unconvinced by what he considers illogical. Maimonides calls Jesus a false prophet yet regards Christianity as a historical step away from paganism toward belief in the God of Israel; he also distinguishes Jesus from the teachings and legends attributed to his disciples after his death. These positions do not amount to a single Jewish verdict. They show writers separating, in different ways, Jesus’s life and teaching from later Christian doctrine.

Rabbi David Qimhi’s Book of the Covenant, composed in the Christian setting of Provence, answers Christian theological disputes with mockery and argument, including the claim that Jesus was spirit rather than flesh. In Shmuel’s notes, however, the more telling pattern is what these polemics leave aside. He observes that Jewish writers struggling against supernatural accounts of Jesus’s origin and death often avoid a spiritual or moral encounter with his message. Most strikingly, their accounts say almost nothing about Judas, even though Shmuel reasons that without Judas there might have been no crucifixion and, consequently, no Christianity.

Rabbi Yehuda Arie of Modena provides a different model in Shield and Sword. He depicts Jesus as a Pharisaic Jew who differed from his teachers on marginal legal questions but never abandoned the principles of his faith. According to the arguments Shmuel copies into his notebook, Jesus never claimed divinity in the New Testament; he called himself a man and the Son of Man, and belonged to the Pharisaic tradition among the Jewish groups of his time. The work’s appeal to critical reading and internal argument stands apart from both apologetic defense and blasphemous attack. For Shmuel, such readings expose a persistent imbalance: writers debate Jesus’s status but seldom confront the ethical demand associated with his words.

The Message and Its Difficulties

Shmuel loves Jesus while rejecting belief in God. He says he first encountered Jesus’s message in the New Testament at fifteen, and holds that Jesus was neither God nor the Son of God. The death of a three-and-a-half-year-old boy, Yosi Siton, struck and killed while chasing a green ball on Azza Street, is for Shmuel sufficient evidence that no God exists. Yet atheism does not prevent his attachment to Jesus’s language or to the teachings of love, forgiveness, charity, and compassion.

That attachment does not make Shmuel accept every saying attributed to Jesus without question. He insists that a serious disagreement must face the tensions inside the message of universal love. Wald likewise asks whether anyone can love everyone, without exception, at every moment, and sets the commandment against episodes of anger, conflict, and judgment in the Gospel accounts. He also argues that religious and revolutionary movements alike promise redemption but, when they acquire power, can become instruments of coercion and bloodshed. The dispute is not simply about whether Jesus is good or bad: it is about whether ideals of universal love survive contact with human limits and political authority.

Wald’s skepticism also shapes his account of dreams and power. He calls Jesus a great dreamer but warns that disciples hungry for power can turn a dream into violence. He refuses the easy hope that familiarity or friendly conversation will dissolve conflict, comparing the rival claims of two peoples over one land to the claims of two men who love the same woman. Yet he does not dismiss dreaming altogether: without dreamers, he says, even the more realistic would be more despairing. Jesus’s place in the novel is thus double. His message remains a source of moral possibility, while the expectation that he will redeem the world becomes vulnerable to the ambitions of those who claim to serve it.

Judas, Crucifixion, and the Reversal of Betrayal

In Shmuel’s reconstruction, Judas Iscariot is not the faithless disciple of conventional Christian memory but Jesus’s most devoted follower. Shmuel suggests that Judas may have been connected to Jerusalem’s priestly class, but his later account develops into a story of belief and love rather than calculated treachery. Judas becomes convinced that Jesus is the savior, the Son of God, and the one destined to establish a kingdom of redemption. He urges the hesitant Jesus to go to Jerusalem and interprets the danger there as the final test that will reveal Jesus’s divinity.

Jesus’s doubts persist. In Shmuel’s imagined narrative, he fears that he may not be the chosen one and that the signs he has trusted may mislead him. Once in Jerusalem, he experiences ordinary human fear of death and asks that the cup be taken from him. Judas answers those doubts with confidence: Jesus has performed miracles, so he must also be able to descend from the cross unharmed. This certainty is the tragic engine of the plot. Judas believes in Jesus more completely than Jesus believes in himself, and mistakes a human teacher’s acts of healing and compassion for proof of an imminent, world-transforming miracle.

Judas then works to make the crucifixion happen. Shmuel’s account says that the Romans had little interest in Jesus and that the priests did not initially consider him a significant threat. Judas must use his connections among the Pharisees and priests and persuade Roman officials to accept the execution. The familiar thirty pieces of silver are, in this version, either a later invention by Jesus’s enemies or a detail Judas himself may have supplied to complete the story; Shmuel rejects the idea that a wealthy landowner would have been motivated by so small a payment. Judas is therefore the organizer of the event, but the motive is not betrayal for money. He expects the crucifixion to become the stage for Jesus’s decisive vindication.

The expectation fails. Jesus dies, and his last words—“Dios mío, Dios mío, ¿por qué me has abandonado”—register abandonment rather than miraculous deliverance. Shmuel imagines Judas recognizing that he has caused the death of the person he loved and admired. He leaves and hangs himself. In Shmuel’s formulation, Judas is the first, last, and only Christian: the believer whose faith in Jesus’s divinity and redemption is absolute, and whose life collapses when the promised miracle does not occur. The familiar charge of betrayal is transformed into a more painful paradox: Judas acts from devotion, yet his effort to prove Jesus’s greatness helps bring about his death.

Narrative Significance

Jesus is assembled through disputed sources, historical interpretation, Shmuel’s scholarship, and an imagined account of his final days. These layers should not be mistaken for a single settled historical claim. Josephus’s contested testimony, rabbinic allusions, medieval polemics, and Shmuel’s reconstruction each show a different kind of engagement with Jesus; his private account of Judas is a literary hypothesis that turns inherited roles inside out. The novel’s interest lies partly in the gap between what texts say and what later communities make them mean.

The reversal also connects religious expectation with political history. Jesus’s promised kingdom and the hope that his death will redeem the world echo the larger danger, explored through Wald’s arguments, of turning a universal ideal into a program enforced by power. In the Judas narrative, the catastrophe begins with a sincere conviction that history can be forced toward salvation. Jesus’s message of compassion remains precious to Shmuel precisely because he cannot reconcile it with divine authority or easy redemption. The novel neither settles the historical Jesus nor treats the Gospel tradition as an uncontested record; instead, it makes the struggle to interpret him a test of how love, belief, power, and responsibility are narrated.