Book Reviews: Building on the Ruins of the Temple: Apologetics and Polemics in Early Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism

According to Gregerman, this mainstream rabbinic explanation for the hurban lost traction among the Palestinian rabbinate because it ceded too much theological ground to the Christian perspective.Because Gregerman focuses mostly on the commonalities between these Christian theologians, it would have been interesting to spotlight the fundamental divergences or innovations between Justin's, Origen's, and Eusebius's attitudes towards Judaism and Jewish law.[...]rather than regarding Gregerman's Eikhah Rabbah texts as an apologetic response to Christian claims, I would argue that they simply express Jewish anger towards God who seems to have sanctioned Jewish powerlessness, humiliation, and degradation (much as we encounter in post-Holocaust protest theology).