John G. Gager

The author intends to argue that the standard reading of much of the New Testament as expressing anti-Semitism is a misreading. Considering Paul especially (although he strives to be exhaustive in his treatment of the entirety of the corpus) he concludes that Paul's negative statements about the Jewish law do not address the Jewish people, but only the relevance of Judaic law for Gentiles (i.e., none at all). The long Pauline section is largely redundant unless you desire such hammered show more detail. Parts I-III would suffice for most readers, as these adequately communicate Gager's primary points. For a complementary point of view on the same topic, consider John Allegro's The Chosen People. They differ in what while Allegro argues from the view of the Jerusalem Jew (to not flattering effect), Gager looks from the pagan perspective. show less

I found this book both informative and interesting. Only in the last decade or so have scholars started to seriously study the magic, superstitions, sorcery, etc of the ancient world as a guide to how the average person [not the rich, famous or intellectual] lived approximately 2000 years ago. Not surprisingly, Gager has deduced from the many amulets, curse tables, incantation bowls and love spells that sorcery was ubiquitous in the countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. Practitioners show more and clients were Jews, Christians, and pagans, wealthy, poor and everyone in between, in Babylonia and the Roman Empire. show less

Please allow me to offer a summary of this book for you, before you waste your time reading the entire thing as I did: First, everything that is said about Judaism in any ancient text, whether Christian, Jewish, or pagan, is actually supposed to be understood differently than the plainest meaning of the text and the way that everyone has always understood the text; this applies especially to the letters of Saint Paul as found in the New Testament. Second, because of our collective white show more guilt in the wake of the holocaust, we must find a way to completely distort what the New Testament actually says about Jews in order to make them feel better; essentially, because of something that happened in the 20th century, we must mutilate Christianity beyond recognition in order to make it seem nicer to Jews. In short, this book was a complete waste of time and is a better study in what modern white guilt does to a mind than in anything historical at all. show less

Attitudes toward Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity