Wilson, Marvin R. Our Father Abraham: Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1989.

This is a balanced look at the Jewish roots of Christianity (the best I have read so far) and an excellent book for someone who knows little about Judaism and is wondering what it means to say that Christianity has Jewish roots. He traces the history of the synagogue and the Church touching on their theological conflicts. Wilson also takes some time to talk about Hebrew thought and why it is foundational. A few selected studies cover subjects like marriage, Passover and the last supper, the land and learning.  This would be a great book to read before Levine’s The Misunderstood Jew. Both books will show different perspectives and concerns and will raise important questions for both Jews and Christians.

“The Protestant tradition, especially Lutheranism, has tended to see the leitmotif for Paul’s understanding of the Gospel in the emphasis on justification by faith as opposed to the works of the law. Though this theme is certainly important to Paul, we are in essential agreement with Davies, who finds the locus of Paul elsewhere, namely, in his ‘subordination of the Law to Christ as in Himself a new Torah—new not in the sense that He contravened the Old but that He revealed its true character, or put it in a new light.’” (Wilson 1989: 28-9, quoting W. D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, p. xxxiv).

There is at least one thing in common between Christianity and Judaism: monotheism. However, not everyone will agree with that. To many, Christianity’s claim that it is a monotheistic religion is at the very least a mix-up of categories. You cannot say that you worship only one God, but then define it in such a way that strains the definition to the max. The doctrine of the Trinity seems to be a way that Christians found to have their cake and eat it too.

But when we talk about monotheism, what are we really referring to? Are we certain that the way we’ve come to understand monotheism is the same way Jews and Christians understood it in the 1st century? That’s the main question James McGrath, associate professor of Religion at Butler University (see his blog Exploring our Matrix), poses to us in his book The Only True God. Simply assuming that the way we define monotheism today and the way it was defined two thousand years ago is a huge fallacy. We need to set aside our understanding of monotheism and let the texts that we have from that period define the term for us.

At first, I thought this was going to be a defense of Christian monotheism, showing that what people thought about the one true God was in line with later Christian doctrine. But what McGrath wants to remind us is that the worldview of the Jews and early Christians allowed for certain things that were later extrapolated (my word, not McGrath’s) in Christianity and suppressed in Judaism as a way to contain its new definition of monotheism. The result is that neither quite formulated its understanding of the oneness of God as was perceived early on.
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