Israeli scholar Serge Ruzer recently published “The New Testament as Jewish Literature,” the first research introduction book ever written in Hebrew on the New Testament.
Israel Today interviewed Ruzer who is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Religion and a research associate at the Center for the Study of Christianity at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Israel Today: What led you to devote your career to the New Testament?
Professor Ruzer: I grew up in Moscow. During my formative years there was renewed interest in religion after decades in which it had been absent from public discourse [due to atheist Soviet Communism].
Technically, my first research interest was the history of Jewish Torah interpretation throughout the ages. When I started looking at medieval Torah interpretation, I discovered that it relied on earlier rabbinic sources. The New Testament was even earlier than those interpretations, and contained an early witness for some rabbinical interpretive trajectories. The New Testament was also a central subject of discourse in my intellectual surroundings, as the foundational collection of...
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