The Great Betrayal: Christians and Jews in the First Four Centuries - Paperback

by Sheldon W. Liebman (Author)

In the view of many contemporary scholars, both Jesus and Judaism have been misrepresented by the church for the past two thousand years. Their main point is that Judaism was not a superficial, rigid, and outdated religion, and Jesus did not reject it. In fact, along with his disciples, he remained a Law-abiding Jew his entire life. However, as Christianity developed from a Jewish sect in the first century AD to the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, the church was transformed, Jesus was redefined, and both Jews and their religion were repudiated and marginalized. In short, both Christians and Jews were deeply affected by what many scholars now call the de-Judaization of Jesus. This book is an attempt to correct the traditional theological and scholarly misinterpretations of Jesus and Judaism that emerged over the first four centuries of the life of the church.

Author Biography

Sheldon W. Liebman is professor emeritus and former chair of the Humanities Department at Wilbur Wright College. Among his thirty-plus scholarly publications are an article in the Oxford University Encyclopedia of American Literature, an essay in Harold Bloom's Nathaniel Hawthorne, and a study of The Picture of Dorian Gray in the Norton Critical Edition of that novel. He received a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972.