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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2012
Over the past several decades historians have turned a critical eye to the complicity of the German churches in fostering poisonous societal attitudes towards Jews on the eve of the Holocaust.1 Emerging from this research has been the disputed relationship between Christian anti-Judaism and the intense race-based anti-Semitism of the Nazi era. Separating the content and motivation of these two forms of disparagement has allowed Christians to remove themselves from the genocidal equation linked to radical, racist attacks on Jews.2 Susannah Heschel’s The Aryan Jesus tackles this issue by examining the historical backdrop and explicit content of racially motivated attacks on Jews by German Protestants in the years preceding and during the Holocaust. Targeting the Eisenach Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life together with the Institute’s leader, Walter Grundmann, her findings may well render obsolete any theoretical dichotomy between religious anti-Judaism and racial anti-Semitism.3
1 Franklin H. Littell, The Crucifixion of the Jews: The Failure of Christians to Understand the Jewish Experience (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1975; repr., Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1996); Stephen R. Haynes, Prospects for Post-Holocaust Theology (Atlanta: Scholars, 1991); Micha Brumlik, “Post-Holocaust Theology: German Theological Responses since 1945,” in Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (ed. Robert P. Ericksen and Susannah Heschel; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999) 169–88; Ursula Büttner, “‘The Jewish Problem Becomes a Christian Problem’: German Protestants and the Persecution of the Jews in the Third Reich,” in Probing the Depths of German Antisemitism: German Society and the Persecution of the Jews, 1933–1941 (ed. David Bankier; Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2000) 431–59. For summaries of new conclusions and bibliographies, see Robert P. Ericksen and Susannah Heschel, “The German Churches and the Holocaust,” in The Historiography of the Holocaust (ed. Dan Stone; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) 296–318.
2 Perhaps the best example of this perspective is the Catholic Church’s statement on the Holocaust, “We Remember: A Reflection on the ‘Shoah’,” Origins 27 (1998) 669, 671–75. For an early critique, see Kertzer, David I., The Popes against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001) 5–8Google Scholar.
3 Heschel, Susannah, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.
4 Ibid., 22.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., 286.
8 Ibid.
9 Quoted in Gerdmar, Anders, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism: German Biblical Interpretation and the Jews, from Herder and Semler to Kittel and Bultmann (Studies in Jewish History and Culture 20; Boston: Brill, 2009) 293Google Scholar.
10 Stuhlmacher, Peter, “Adolf Schlatter (1852–1938),” in Theologen des Protestantismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (ed. Greschat, Martin; 2 vols.; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1978)Google Scholar 2:219–40, at 228.
11 For the following on Grundmann and Schlatter, see Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism, 538–40.
12 Kittel, Gerhard, “Gedenkrede bei der akademischen Feier,” in Ein Lehrer der Kirche. Worte des Gedenkens an D. Adolf Schlatter 1852–1938 (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1938) 19–33Google Scholar.
13 For Grundmann, see Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism, 539; for Schlatter and Stoecker, see below.
14 Walter Grundmann, “Adolf Schlatter. Ein Wort des Grußes und des Gedenkens zu seinem 85. Geburtstag am 16. August,” Kommende Kirche 33 (August 1937) 3 (unpaginated).
15 Neuer, Werner, Adolf Schlatter. Ein Leben für Theologie und Kirche (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1996) 757–58Google Scholar, esp. 788–89; Deines, Roland, Die Pharisäer. Ihr Verständnis im Spiegel der christlichen und jüdischen Forschung seit Wellhausen und Graetz (WUNT 101; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997) 268Google Scholar. This position is explicitly articulated by Schlatter defender Robert Morgan, in his somewhat reactionary response to Heschel. Morgan openly admits “Schlatter’s tendency to stereotype Jews and Judaism,” yet vehemently rejects any complicity on his part with anti-Semitism (Morgan, Robert, “Susannah Heschel’s Aryan Grundmann,” JSNT 32 [2010] 431–94Google Scholar; esp. 482, 484).
16 Schlatter was born in St. Gallen in 1852. Schlatter, Adolf, Rückblick auf meine Lebensarbeit (2d ed.; Stuttgart: Calwer, 1977) 13–17Google Scholar.
17 For Schlatter’s life, see Neuer, Adolf Schlatter. Ein Leben für Theologie und Kirche. An earlier popular biography was idem, Adolf Schlatter (Wuppertal: Brockhaus Verlag, 1988); translated by Robert W. Yarbrough as Adolf Schlatter: A Biography of Germany’s Premier Biblical Theologian (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995).
18 Ernst Käsemann, New Testament Questions of Today (trans. W. J. Montague; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969) 4. For a list of noted scholars who heard Schlatter and spoke of his influence—both positive and negative—including Paul Althaus, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich, see Harrisville, Roy A. and Sundberg, Walter, The Bible in Modern Culture: Baruch Spinoza to Brevard Childs (2d editon; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002) 179Google Scholar.
19 Stuhlmacher, Peter, “Adolf Schlatter’s Interpretation of Scripture,” NTS 24 (1978) 436–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 434.
20 Siegele-Wenschkewitz, Leonore, “Adolf Schlatters sicht des Judentums im politischen Kontext,” in Christlicher Antijudaismus und Antisemitismus. Theologische und kirchliche Programme deutscher Christen (ed. Siegele-Wenschkewitz, Leonore; Frankfurt-am-Main: Haag and Herchen, 1994)Google Scholar; McNutt, James E., “Adolf Schlatter and the Jews,” German Studies Review 26 (2003) 353–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Vessels of Wrath, Prepared to Perish: Adolf Schlatter and the Spiritual Extermination of the Jews,” ThTo 63 (2006) 176–90; Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism, 253–326.
21 In addition to the biography by Werner Neuer and essay by Peter Stuhlmacher, both noted above, see also Dintaman, Stephen F., Creative Grace: Faith and History in the Theology of Adolf Schlatter (New York: Peter Lang, 1993)Google Scholar; Köstenberger, Andreas J., “Schlatter Reception Then: His New Testament Theology,” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 3 (1999) 40–51Google Scholar; Yarbrough, Robert, “Schlatter Reception Now: His New Testament Theology,” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 3 (1999) 52–65Google Scholar; Yarbrough, , “Witness to the Gospel in Academe: Adolf Schlatter as a Teacher of the Church,” Perichoresis 4 (2006) 1–18Google Scholar. Note also the introductions to Schlatter’s translated works, Romans: The Righteousness of God (trans. Siegfried S. Schatzmann; Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1995); The History of the Christ: The Foundation for New Testament Theology (trans. Andreas J. Köstenberger; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1997); The Theology of the Apostles: The Development of New Testament Theology (trans. Andreas J. Köstenberger; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1999); Do We Know Jesus? Daily Insights for the Mind and Soul (trans. Andreas J. Köstenberger and Robert W. Yarbrough; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel, 2005). This last translation is of Kennen Wir Jesus? Ein Gang durch ein Jahr im Gespräch mit Ihm (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1937). Published in 1937 while anti-Jewish rhetoric was peaking, this book will be problematic for Schlatter’s legacy.
22 Morgan, Robert, review of Adolf Schlatter. Ein Leben für Theologie und Kirche by Werner Neuer, JTS 50 (1999) 824–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 824.
23 Klaus Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, Volume 1, Preliminary History and the Time of Illusions, 1918–1934 (trans. John Bowden; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988). For a critical discussion of Tübingen’s silence in the context of Siegele-Wenschkewitz’s break from that school, see Ericksen, Robert P., Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) 30–31Google Scholar. See also Hetzer, Tanja, “Deutsche Stunde”. Volksgemeinschaft und Antisemitismus in der politischen Theologie bei Paul Althaus (Munich: Allitera, 2009) 12Google Scholar.
24 Stuhlmacher, “Adolf Schlatter (1852–1938),” 229; Siegele-Wenschkewitz, “Adolf Schlatters Sicht des Judentum,” 95–110, at 108. Ulrich Oelschläger, Judentum und evangelische Theologie 1909–1965. Das Bild des Judentums im Spiegel der ersten drei Auflagen des Handwörterbuchs “Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart” (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2005) 59.
25 Robert Morgan, “Susannah Heschel’s Aryan Grundmann,” 480. Such perplexity may stem from unfamiliarity with recent historical research on this period. Heschel has shown how Morgan is often “mired in outdated historiographical paradigms regarding the German churches” (“Historiography of Antisemitism versus Anti-Judaism: A Response to Morgan, Robert,” JSNT 33 [2011] 257–79Google Scholar, at 262).
26 As shown below, Schlatter’s research holds little historical-critical value for contemporary biblical study. Morgan himself states that Schlatter’s conservative biblicism produced “historical conclusions [that] “would be almost universally rejected today” (Morgan, Robert, The Nature of New Testament Theology: The Contribution of William Wrede and Adolf Schlatter [ed. and trans. Morgan, Robert; Naperville, Ill.: Allenson, 1973] 29Google Scholar).
27 Yarbrough, Robert W., review of Adolf Schlatter. Ein Leben für Theologie und Kirche by Werner Neuer, JETS 41 (1998) 139–41Google Scholar, at 140.
28 Translator’s preface to History of the Christ, 14–15 [emphasis mine].
29 Robert Morgan, “Susannah Heschel’s Aryan Grundmann,” 434.
30 Quoted in ibid., 443.
31 Ibid., 476.
32 Ibid., 441. What follows this assertion illustrates the somewhat confusing nature of Morgan’s plethora of “-isms”: “Neither Grundmann nor Gerhard Kittel … were guilty of this medieval ‘theological antisemitism’. Further, their poisonous modern antisemitism is distinct from the results of their New Testament scholarship… . The theological anti-Judaism that they shared with many others is less inflammatory, and concerned with Christian self-definition, not (in principle) defamation of Judaism. However, in practice it has included that and so is also intolerable” (ibid., 441–42). The “intolerable” nature of “theological anti-Judaism” in “practice” is precisely what Heschel, this author, and a growing number of scholars have sought to explicate by resisting any separation of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism.
33 Schlatter’s clearest statement on this matter is: “After all, Israel had rejected its Messiah, cast him out and crucified him. The Cross was the crowning act of Israel’s disobedience, and the responsibility for it lay on every member of the people. For Jerusalem was not just an amorphous collection of isolated individuals, but a community. Every Jew was a member of the people of God, and therefore equally responsible towards him. Now the community had rejected its Messiah and stood self-condemned. Its fall was the fall of all” (The Church in the New Testament Period [trans. Paul P. Levertoff; London: S.P.C.K., 1955] 26–27).
34 Morgan, “Susannah Heschel’s Aryan Grundmann,” 485.
35 Schlatter, Adolf, Das christliche Dogma (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1911) 20Google Scholar. Schlatter also claims that “society is just as much a creation of God as man, who originates through nothing other than society… . Since we originate from parents, marriage and family are the foundation of society” (ibid., 65–66 [translation mine]). Althaus claimed Schlatter’s dogmatic broadening of God’s revelation provided his own theological development with a “powerful and joyous liberation” (Althaus, Paul, “Adolf Schlatters Gabe an die systematische Theologie,” in Adolf Schlatter und Wilhelm Lütgert zum Gedächtnis [ed. Althaus, Paul; Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1938] 31–40Google Scholar, at 33). For the close relationship between Althaus and Schlatter, see Hetzer, “Deutsche Stunde,” 37–40.
36 Schlatter, Adolf, Erlebtes. Erzählt von D. Adolf Schlatter (Berlin: Furche, 1925Google Scholar) 8, 19.
37 Schlatter, Rückblick, 187. For Adolf Stoecker, see Pulzer, P. G. J., The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1964)Google Scholar and Tal, Uriel, Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870–1914 (trans. Jacobs, Noah Jonathan; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975) 250Google Scholar.
38 Schlatter, Adolf, Wir Christen und die Juden (Essen-an-der-Ruhr: Velbert, 1930) 16Google Scholar.
39 Quoted in Härle, Wilfried, “Der Aufruf der 93 Intellektuellen und Karl Barths Bruch mit der liberalen Theologie,” ZTK 72 (1975) 207–24Google Scholar, at 210 [translation mine].
40 See Neuer, Leben, 564; Härle, “Aufruf,” 214.
41 Schlatter, Adolf, “Der Anteil der Christenheit an der Gestaltung unseres Volkstums,” in Gesunde Lehre. Reden und Aufsätze (Essen-an-der-Ruhr: Freizeiten, 1929) 293–302Google Scholar, at 294–95 [translation mine].
42 Morgan, “Susannah Heschel’s Aryan Grundmann,” 483.
43 Between 1930 and 1932, Grundmann was Kittel’s teaching assistant. He defended his disser-tation in 1931 (Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism, 534).
44 See Kittel’s preface in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (ed. Gerhard Kittel; trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; 10 vols.; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1964) 1:vii–ix, at ix. For the work’s controversial nature, see Rosen, Alan, “‘Familiarly Known as Kittel’: The Moral Politics of the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament,” in Tainted Greatness: Antisemitism and Cultural Heroes (ed. Harrowitz, Nancy A.; Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994) 37–50Google Scholar.
45 Quoted in Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism, 516. See also Smid, Marikje, Deutscher Protestantismus und Judentum 1932/1933 (Munich: Kaiser, 1990) 256Google Scholar.
46 Schlatter, Adolf, Wird der Jude über uns siegen? Ein Wort für den weihnachtszeit (Essen-an-der- Ruhr: Freizeiten, 1935)Google Scholar. For Kittel’s assistance, see Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism, 516.
47 Kittel, Gerhard, Die Judenfrage (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1933) 24Google Scholar.
48 Ericksen, Theologians under Hitler, 70, 74.
49 Neuer, Leben, 818–20.
50 Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism, 277.
51 For the Aryan paragraph, see Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, 1:272–73.
52 Neuer quotes Schlatter in Leben, 750, but this matter it is omitted in his translated popular biography.
53 Neuer, Leben, 765–66.
54 Schlatter made this point in a number of private letters to his son Theodor; cf. Neuer, Leben, 725–36.
55 Siegele-Wenschkewitz, “Adolf Schlatters Sicht des Judentum,” 96.
56 Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism, 544, points out the similarities between Grundmann’s Totale Kirche im Totalen Staat. Mit einem Geleitwort von Landesbischof F. Coch (Dresden: Oskar Günther, 1934) and Schlatter’s clearest expression of this motif in Die neue deutsche Art in der Kirche (Bethel bei Bielefeld: Verlagshandlung der Anstalt Bethel, 1933).
57 Schlatter, Adolf, “Adolf Schlatters letzte Weihnachtsansprache in der Tübinger deutschen christlichen Studentenvereinigung,” Deutsche Theologie 5 (1939) 182–87Google Scholar, at 185.
58 For an excellent overview of the movement, see Bergen, Doris L., Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)Google Scholar.
59 Ibid., 17.
60 Theses are translated in Conway, J. S., The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933–1945 (New York: Basic, 1968) 353–57Google Scholar.
61 Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism, 547–48. The Aryan Jesus, 195–96.
62 Ibid., 292.
63 Brezger, Rudolf, “Ein letzer Rückblick Adolf Schlatters auf seine Lebensarbeit,” Deutsche Theologie 5 (1939) 176Google Scholar.
64 Heinonen, Reijo E., Anpassung und Identität. Theologie und Kirchenpolitik der Bremer Deutschen Christen 1933–1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978) 155CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
65 Schmid, Friedrich, “‘Eine Insel des Friedens’. Die Jahre 1943–1945,” in Im Dienst an Volk und Kirche. Theologiestudium im Nationalsozialismus. Erinnerungen, Darstellungen, Dokumente und Reflexionen zum Tübinger Stift 1930 bis 1950 (ed. Hermle, Siegfried, Lächele, Rainer, and Nuding, Albrecht; Stuttgart: Quell, 1988) 117–24Google Scholar, at 122.
66 Walter Grundmann, “Adolf Schlatter. Ein Wort des Grußes und des Gedenkens.” For a detailed examination of Grundmann’s comments on Schlatter, see Heinonen, Anpassung und Identität, 154–59.
67 Ibid.
68 Schlatter, Adolf, Der Glaube im Neuen Testament. Eine Untersuchung zur neutestamentlichen Theologie (4th ed.; Stuttgart: Calwer, 1927) 31Google Scholar. This interpretation of Judaism best illustrates the severely outdated character of his work. Samuel Sandmel’s pointed comment that “with those Christians who persist in deluding themselves about Jewish legalism, no academic communication is possible” not only renders Schlatter obsolete, but also dampens the credibility of those reintroducing his position today. For Sandmel’s remark, see Sanders, E. P., Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977) 35Google Scholar.
69 The best summary of Schlatter’s thought in this regard is his 1930 lecture later published as a pamphlet, Wir Christen und die Juden.
70 Ibid., 21. See also Schlatter, Adolf, “Das Alte Testament und der Talmud,” in Das Alte Testament als Buch der Kirche by Adolf Schlatter, Gerhard Schmidt, and Christian Stoll (Munich: Kaiser, 1934) 27–36Google Scholar, at 31–32.
71 See Schlatter, Das Alte Testament, 35.
72 Schlatter, Die neue deutsche Art in der Kirche, 12.
73 Schlatter, “Das Ziel der Geschichte,” in Gesunde Lehre, 350–55, at 352–53. For more on these works, see James McNutt, “Adolf Schlatter and the Jews,” 361, 356.
74 For this phrase, see Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) 274Google Scholar.
75 Neuer, Adolf Schlatter, 150.
76 Tyson, Joseph B., Luke, Judaism, and the Scholars: Critical Approaches to Luke-Acts (Colum-bia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1999) 64–65Google Scholar.
77 Morgan, “Heschel’s Aryan Grundmann,” 481–82.
78 Heinonen, Anpassung und Identität, 159.
79 Ulmer, Martin, “Radikaler Judenhaß. Zur nationalsozialistischen Judenpolitik in Tübingen,” in Zerstörte Hoffnungen. Wege der Tübinger Juden (ed. Tübingen, Geschichtswerkstatt; Tübingen: Konrad Theiss, 1995) 99–119Google Scholar.
80 For background on Schlatter’s tract, see Siegele-Wenschkewitz, , “Adolf Schlatters Sicht des Judentum”; Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: Harper Collins, 1997) 165Google Scholar; Gerlach, Wolfgang, And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews (ed. and trans. Barnett, Victoria J.; Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2000) 104–5Google Scholar; Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism, 305–18.
81 Tal, Uriel, “On Structures of Political Theology and Myth in Germany Prior to the Holocaust,” in The Holocaust as Historical Experience: Essays and a Discussion (ed. Bauer, Yehuda and Rotenstreich, Nathan; New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980) 43–74Google Scholar, at 56. Haynes, Stephen R., “Who Needs Enemies? Jews and Judaism in Anti-Nazi Religious Discourse,” CH 71 (2002) 341–67Google Scholar.
82 Haynes, “Who Needs Enemies?,” 346.
83 Consistent with the totality of Schlatter’s work, the tract contains themes such as the regal mission of Jesus (13), Jewish selfishness (15), Jewish guilt in crucifying Christ (14, 17), and supersessionism (19).
84 Schlatter, Wird der Jude, 4.
85 Ibid., 14–15 [emphasis mine].
86 Ibid., 8.
87 Ibid., 7.
88 Ibid., 8.
89 This same argument was made by Michael Cardinal Faulhaber, who “accused his religious opponents of repeating Jewish sins, since denying Jesus’ Jewishness was a reenactment of the Gospel scene in which Jesus was attacked by (Jewish) crowds. Faulhaber also assailed Nazi racism by highlighting its ‘Jewish’ character: ‘No nation ever insisted more on race and ties of blood…than the Israelites of the Old Testament.’” Haynes, “Who Needs Enemies?,” 356.
90 Oelschläger, Judentum und evangelische Theologie, 59. Robert Morgan’s assertion that an insufficient account of Schlatter’s theology nullifies Saul Friedländer’s description of Schlatter as a “Jew hater” on the basis of this tract, fails to see how the pamphlet is thoroughly consistent with Schlatter’s theology, and represents the intrinsic unity of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. Morgan, “Heschel’s Aryan Grundmann,” 483.
91 Irene Harand, “Ein Priester, der die deutschen Juden beneidet,” Gerechtigkeit 4 (February 1936) 1. See also, Greenberg, Gershon, “Irene Harand’s Campaign Against Nazi Anti-Semitism in Vienna, 1933–1938,” in The Christian Responses to the Holocaust: Moral and Ethical Issues (ed. Dietrich, Donald J.; Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2003) 132–50Google Scholar.
92 Heschel, Susannah, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998) 13Google Scholar.
93 Walter Grundmann, Jesus der Galiläer und das Judentum (Leipzig: Georg Wigand, 1940).
94 His work has somewhat limited references to other scholarship. Schlatter was referenced thirteen times, with the next most frequent being Grundmann’s own work eleven times.
95 Grundmann, Jesus der Galiläer, 1.
96 Ibid., 12–13, 16.
97 Ibid., 23–24. Cf. note 68, above. See also Sanders, E. P., Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985) 274–81Google Scholar, where Sanders exegetically counters the position that the Pharisees were dominated by legalism and that Jesus’s conflict was rooted in his rejection of such legalism and externalism. His overall conclusion is as follows: “A reading of Jewish material which is more or less contemporary with Jesus (that is, give or take 200 years) does not reveal the legalistic, externalistic Judaism which Jesus and Paul are believed to have criticized” (276). The importance of Sanders’s correction in the context of Grundmann and Schlatter is cogently stated by Jacob Neusner: “Sanders takes up subjects with a virulent anti-Semitic tradition, and he has devoted his life to presenting Judaism in such a way as to help Christians overcome their ancient heritage of Jew-hatred and contempt for Judaism. This he has done not through apologetics for the Christian tradition of anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism—he never says blatant anti-Semitism is anything other than what it is—but through a positive reading of the Judaism of the time and place of Jesus… . No scholar in our time, then, has done more in his chosen, important field to prevent a future Holocaust involving Christianity’s inspiration and, in some countries, institutional complicity—not renegades like Hitler, but priests and bishops, German Christians and their pastors, professors of theology in the German universities, for instance—as did the one that took place in our own day” (Neusner, Jacob, Rabbinic Literature and the New Testament: What We Cannot Show, We Do Not Know [Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1994] x–xiGoogle Scholar).
98 Grundmann, Jesus der Galiläer, 148–50.
99 Ibid., 153.
100 Ibid., 152.
101 Ibid., 154.
102 Grundmann followed Schlatter regarding Jewish violence. See Aryan Jesus, 159.
103 Bodelschwingh, Friedrich, “Um unseres Volkeswillen,” in Ein Lehrer der Kirche. Worte des Gedenkens an D. Adolf Schlatter, 1852–1938 (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1938) 41–42Google Scholar, at 41. For Schlatter’s son’s comment see Do We Know Jesus?, 20.
104 Do We Know Jesus?, 19. I thank Karen L. King for pointing out how Schlatter here reproduces the early Christian rhetoric of race, setting Christians as a race apart from Jews and pagans. King points to Denise Buell’s work, which challenges the view that ethnicity and race were irrelevant to early Christians and seeks to destabilize the view that Christian universalism (which Schlatter would assert) is mutually exclusive with an ethnic particularism susceptible to anti-Judaism (Buell, Denise Kimber, Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity [New York: Columbia University Press, 2005]CrossRefGoogle Scholar x, and esp. 94ff.).
105 Quoted from the translated preface by Schlatter’s former student, and a later advocate for Jewish-Christian dialogue (Hans Stroh, Do We Know Jesus?, 30).
106 Stereotypes exploited by Schlatter in Do We Know Jesus? include: legalism and lack of any true Jewish spirituality (130, 143, 156–57, 159, 163, 181, 218, 252, 317); supersessionism and the nullification of Jewish religion (35, 42, 131, 136, 167–68, 352, 394); ethnic and national superiority (46, 52, 101–3, 172–73, 185, 197, 326, 358); personal selfishness and greed (96, 178, 187, 201, 217); and Jews as Christ killers (247, 287, 350, 369, 378).
107 Ibid., 567.
108 Ibid., 116.
109 Ibid., 178 [emphasis mine].
110 Ibid., 182.
111 Ibid., 276–77 [emphasis mine].
112 Ibid., 330.
113 Ibid., 34.
114 Ibid., 53–54.
115 Ibid., 358.
116 “[T]he Pharisees blocked people’s way to God, and the teachers of the Law by their scholarship choked out life” (ibid., 192).
117 Ibid., 50.
118 Ibid., 189–90.
119 Ibid., 92.
120 Ibid., 170.
121 Ibid., 295.
122 Ibid., 297 [emphasis mine]. The original German reads “sondern lebt von dem, was in der völkischen Gemeinschaft an Lebensmitteln vorhanden ist, ohne dass sie dadurch in die schimpliche Lage des müssigen Schmarotzers gerät” (Kennen Wir Jesus?, 268).
123 Traverso, Enzo, The Jews and Germany: From the “Judeo-German Symbiosis’”to the Memory of Auschwitz (trans. Weissbort, Daniel; Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska, 1995) 4Google Scholar; Fischer, Klaus P., The History of an Obsession: German Judeophobia and the Holocaust (New York: Continuum, 1998) 136–37Google Scholar.
124 The heading for the August 4th reading (Do We Know Jesus?, 359).
125 Ibid., 359 [emphasis mine].
126 Ibid., 316.
127 Ibid., 286.
128 Ibid., 356–57.
129 Ibid., 87.
130 Ibid., 365.
131 The title of the August 1st reading (ibid., 354).
132 Ibid., 355.
133 “Was sie aber von Gott und darum auch von Jesus verlangten, war die Erfüllung ihres Begehrens, ihre Grösse, ihren Sieg, die Vollendung ihrer nationalen Eigensucht. Was wollen die, die nichts höheres als ihre Rassenseele kennen, anderes?” Wird der Jude, 14–15.
134 See n. 73, above.
135 The Aryan Jesus, 286.
