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The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah
1883 · 1460 pages
The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah
by Alfred Edersheim
Edersheim's great work sets the Gospels back inside the rabbinic and Second Temple world they came out of, drawing on Talmudic and midrashic sources that few Christian scholars of his day could read. It is reconstruction rather than argument, but the whole thing is written from a vantage point outside the Christianity it describes — by a man raised in the Viennese Jewish community who came to the faith in his twenties.
The convert behind the argument
Alfred Edersheim was born into a Jewish family in Vienna and educated in both the Jewish tradition and the German university system. He converted to Christianity as a young man in Hungary, trained for the ministry in Edinburgh, and spent his life bringing rabbinic learning to bear on the New Testament — a body of source material his Christian contemporaries largely could not use.
Summary
The book runs to two large volumes and moves through the life of Jesus in order, but its distinguishing feature is the apparatus around the narrative: extended treatments of the Jewish world of the first century — the synagogue, the Temple service, the schools, the sects, the calendar, the messianic expectation as the rabbis actually formulated it.
Edersheim's appendices, particularly the collection of rabbinic passages applied to the Messiah, were the part later scholars used most. He works directly from Talmudic and midrashic literature at a time when very few writers in English could, and he uses it not as decoration but as the context that makes particular sayings and controversies intelligible.
It is not a work of apologetics in the argumentative sense; it makes its case by reconstruction. Its scholarship has been superseded in places over a century and a half, and its polemical asides against contemporary Judaism have not aged well, but it remains in print because nothing quite replaced what it set out to do.
Who was Alfred Edersheim?
Alfred Edersheim (1825–1889) was born in Vienna to a Jewish family of some means and received both a traditional Jewish education and a secular one. Financial reverses ended his university studies, and he went to Hungary as a tutor, where he converted to Christianity in his twenties.
He studied at New College, Edinburgh, and in Berlin, ministered in Aberdeen and Torquay, and later held Anglican appointments and lectured at Oxford. The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (1883) was the work of his last decade and remains his monument.
Common questions
- What makes Edersheim's Life and Times distinctive?
- Its use of rabbinic sources. Edersheim read Talmudic and midrashic literature at first hand and used it to reconstruct the Jewish world of the first century as the setting of the Gospels — something almost no Christian writer of his generation was equipped to do.
- Was Edersheim Jewish?
- Yes. He was born into a Viennese Jewish family and educated in the Jewish tradition before converting to Christianity in his twenties. He spent his career applying his Jewish learning to the New Testament.
A note on the text. The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah is in the public domain. What you're buying is our edition: the careful typesetting and correction. The original text is also available free here.