The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ A Review Article Miriam DeCock Boyarin, Daniel. The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ. New York: The New Press, 2012. ISBN-13: 978-1595584687. Berkeley’s Daniel Boyarin, well-known for his revision of the understanding of the interactions between nascent Christianity and nascent Judaism in the years 100–500, looks to extend such work to the period of the New Testament in his 2012 book, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ. 1 Here he seeks to challenge the popular understanding of the first-century Jesus movement, and thus the relationship between ancient Jews and Christians. As most, if not all, of recent New Testament scholarship has demonstrated, few would dispute the “Jewishness” of the human figure of Jesus. Many, however, would dispute Boyarin’s distinctive thesis in The Jewish Gospels that the divine Christ is Jewish too. According to Boyarin, Christology is itself a Jewish discourse. Behind this claim lies the most significant argument of his book: the “germs” of both the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the Incarnation were already present within the thought-world of Second Temple Judaism. In his first of four chapters, Boyarin addresses the title “Son of Man,” given to Jesus in the gospels. By the time the gospels were written, he writes, the title had already come to signify a divine figure in contemporary Jewish thought, and it is therefore not inconceivable that a group of monotheistic Jews now understood Jesus as the fulfillment of this tradition. To demonstrate this, Boyarin provides a close reading of Dan 7, the apocalyptic text from which the title derives. Daniel’s vision features two divine figures, the Ancient of Days and one like a human being (or literally, “one like a son of man”), to whom the former gives eternal dominion over all nations. The author of Daniel then has the vision interpreted, and the one like a son of man is said to refer to “the holy 1 Most notably, see his Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).