Christopher Ochs has enriched the scholarly world with a medieval Jewish reception history of the Gospel of Matthew. I invite scholars from a broad range of fields – including late antique and medieval Jewish and Christian history, New Testament studies, Rabbinics and Jewish-Christian relations – to look past some of this impressive monograph's methodological issues, and to welcome an important contribution to the history of Jewish-Christian interactions. Ochs's seven main medieval witnesses to the Jewish use of the New Testament are the Arabic Qiṣṣat Mujādalat al-Usquf (‘Account of the disputation of the priest'), written in the eighth or ninth century under Muslim rule; its Hebrew translation known as Sefer Nestor ha-Komer (‘Book of Nestor the priest’), written before 1170 ce; the twelfth-century Milḥamot ha-Šem (‘The wars of God’); Sefer Yosef ha-Meqane (‘Book of Joseph the Zealous’) and the Sefer Niṣaḥon Yašan (‘Book of the old confutation’), both composed in the late twelfth to thirteenth century; the Even Boḥan (‘Touchstone’) and Kelimat ha-Goyim (‘Disgrace of the Gentiles’), both written in fourteenth-century Spain; and finally Sefer Ḥizuq Emunah (‘Book of the strengthening of the faith’), a Karaite work written in Lithuania in the late sixteenth century. Ochs carefully presents the historical context of each of these works, and illustrates how they used Christian literature, and especially the Gospel of Matthew, for their refutation of Christianity, focusing on the incarnation. Ochs's main rationale for focusing on Matthew is simply that this Gospel features more prominently in Jewish polemical works than any other Christian text. The most likely reason for the prominence of Matthew, Ochs plausibly argues, is that Jewish polemical works often challenge the allegation of Jesus’ divine genealogy, as well as Christology more broadly. Given the prominence of these themes in Matthew, it is no surprise to find many medieval Jewish citations of contemporaneous translations of this Gospel. Ochs generally notes the polemicists’ use of other Christian materials meticulously, be they Scriptural or ecclesiastical documents. The author goes much further than that; he presents and carefully explains the understanding of Matthew reflected in each Jewish work under consideration, often comparing a particular view to previous Jewish readings of Matthew. In passing, Ochs thereby carves out what I would call a Jewish polemical tradition of reading the Gospel of Matthew, which he masterfully illustrates to stand in partial continuation with late antique ‘pagan’ anti-Christological discourse (as exemplified by Emperor Julian, Porphyry and others). The strongest contribution of this new monograph may be the way in which it illustrates how the Jewish reading of the Gospels has grown not only as an internal Jewish tradition, but has also been formed by centuries of interaction between Jewish polemicists and the Christian exegetical tradition – Ochs's examples range from Tertullian and Origin, to Jerome and Cyril of Jerusalem, and all the way to Rabanus Maurus and Aquinas.

The monograph's focus on Matthew is certainly helpful for those who are interested in a reception history of this Gospel. Still, in this focus, and in its emphasis on comprehensiveness over a broader cultural analysis, it does at times become obvious that the monograph is a slightly revised PhD dissertation in New Testament studies. (It was written at the University of Nottingham, in the department in which I myself am teaching. It was supervised by Roland Deines; my own involvement was limited to a few friendly yet informal exchanges with the author.) Ochs candidly admits that his reading of the medieval Jewish polemical writings does not serve the purpose of investigating ‘the historical and cultural contexts of their authors’ (p. 22), but rather uses these polemics as a ‘touchstone for Christian interpretation’ of the New Testament, namely as ‘less christologically biased interpretations’ serving as ‘corrective to various interpretive extravagances’ (p. 19) among contemporary Christian exegetes.

The present review is not the place to discuss the hermeneutical and ethical implications of reading Jewish texts as witness to Christianity (let alone the Jewish compositional context of the ‘original’ Gospel). The following brief consideration of one example of how this reading affects the study itself is intended as an invitation to scholars to value the monograph's lasting scholarly contribution despite the narrowness of its immediate focus: the richness of the material it discusses, the contextualisation of the anti-Christian polemics in a ‘deep’ intellectual history of Christian, Jewish and ‘pagan’ discourse, and most of all its palpable, if imperfect, fervour for a better understanding across religious lines. Ochs goes as far as to reorganise the citations that he finds in the polemical works ‘following the order of the Gospel of Matthew’, allegedly since many of the [Jewish] polemical works ‘are seemingly random collections of exegetical arguments’ (p. 26, a view repeated repeatedly, for example at p. 141). Ochs considers the structure of the Jewish works under consideration, and the responsibility for the lack of studies on the (admittedly not always dominant) literary features of the medieval works can hardly be laid at his feet. This reviewer still wonders, however, whether it may be Ochs's rearrangement of the passages, and his focus on Matthew, that sometimes lead him to perceive as truncated and random the logically quite coherent material in the originals. A passage of Rabbi Joseph ben Nathan's Sefer Yosef ha-Meqanne, for example, discusses a reading of the Vulgate of Matthew xi.11, which Rabbi Joseph translates into Hebrew as ‘a son born by a woman is not greater than John the Baptist’ (153, §1 in Ochs's list at pp. 138–40). Rabbi Joseph teases out a contradiction in the Latin Christian Scripture: he posits that mulier denotes a woman that had had intercourse (b‘wlh). He leaves the issue open for the moment, and in §2 seemingly diverts to the issue of Jesus’ failure to act as a creator, since he could not produce bread at the Wedding of Cana in John ii.3. Rabbi Joseph then notes that Jesus, in the Gospel of John, himself addresses his own mother as a mulier. He concludes triumphantly that Scripture's own choice of words shows that Mary is ‘a woman who had had intercourse (b‘wlh)’ (see Rosenthal's edition, 125), concluding the topic first broached in §1. Ochs duly notes the relevance of John's Gospel (p. 154), but, bound to the use of Matthew alone, does not engage with Rabbi Joseph's argument deeply enough to illustrate its stringency and cohesion. Rabbi Joseph's citations, throughout his work, are by no means random, but show an interlinked progression of topics, reminiscent of classical rabbinic ring compositions: §3, for example, concludes that only God, not Jesus, is a creator, the topic already raised when Jesus’ imperfect powers as creator are discussed in §2; Jesus’ use of wine, a topic equally raised in §2, is used against him again in §4, and so on. The work's inner coherence is constituted by a tight web of thematic and ‘scriptural’ cross-references whose appreciation is prerequisite to a full understanding of the work. Ochs's interpretation of the said passage (pp. 153–5) remains helpful, rich and learned; indeed it breaks new territory in the study of a neglected yet important medieval Jewish work. Overall, Ochs has carefully edited and translated his Hebrew sources (marred by a few minor and generally inconsequential errors), meticulously availing himself of manuscripts and critical editions (whose inaccuracies he does not tend to correct). Yet the choice of considering, like Augustine (in his Commentary on Psalm 59, 19), only the scattered witness of the Jews, is a consequential one. I will leave it to the reader to fathom how much more effective Ochs's analysis could have been had he also engaged with the living letters of Sefer Yosef ha-Meqanne as a whole, in addition to reading it as a witness to the Wirkungsgeschichte of the Gospel of Matthew. Regardless, future studies of both Matthew's longue durée and of medieval Jewish polemics will clearly benefit from this solid piece of scholarship.