How to cite this article: Serge Ruzer, “25 Years Since David Flusser’s Passing,” Jerusalem Perspective (2025) [https://www.jerusalemperspective.com/31014/].
In this essay, I want mostly to share a few personal recollections about the late professor David Flusser, who died twenty-five years ago this September. I was first exposed to Flusser’s research in the late 1970s in Moscow, when I somehow laid my hands on a photocopy of his “Theses on the Emergence of Christianity from Judaism.”[1] Overwhelmed by the authority and clarity of his presentation, I shared my impression with some others in the local Jewish movement. At that time the Jewish movement in Moscow was fighting for the freedom to leave the country but in the meantime—as many of its members got stuck in Russia for years with repeated refusals of their applications for emigration—it also tried to develop a variety of cultural activities. I was consequently glad to receive an invitation to present Flusser’s views at the historical seminar conducted under the auspices of the movement.
As the date of the planned discussion was approaching, some people protested, arguing that the topic, Early Christianity, was not helpful to reviving a long-suppressed Jewish identity in Russia and just plain problematic, while others voted for its importance. Torn between different opinions, the head of the seminar started to ask Jewish visitors from the West – mostly community activists – for advice. I do not remember the details, but according to my recollection, a spectrum of negative opinions was voiced: from the mild suggestion that maybe Christianity’s emergence from Judaism was truly not the most appropriate topic for the 1970s Moscow setting, to the more extreme view that it would be better if Flusser, too, did something else. In the final account, my presentation was cancelled – I was completely unaware that in those days in Israel Flusser was a media star of sorts, speaking about his research on TV. Though sensitivities, even of a different kind, might have existed there too.
When I arrived in Jerusalem in 1987, I soon started to attend Flusser’s famous evening seminar where the discussions focused on attempts to unearth the earliest layers of various Synoptic traditions. I remember the feeling from my first year at the seminar – according to my uneducated evaluation, I managed to follow only about a quarter of the lecturer’s arguments. My Hebrew was fluent, but the problem was with the complexity of Flusser’s analysis. I did not give up, however, and continued to study at Flusser’s feet throughout most of my doctorate years, excusing myself only when I thought—maybe flattering myself—that I had reached the 75% level of comprehension.
The weekly (Tuesday?) seminars started at 8:30 pm sharp with Flusser freely floating between topics and languages, even sometimes trying a Czech version of Russian for my sake. Flusser discourse for more than an hour, was brilliant, theatrical and, yes, stunning, but mostly without a clear-cut substantial message. And then, after a prolonged suspense, around 9:45, he would offer an insight which would stay with me on my way home through dark Jerusalem streets and way beyond. I am not sure if I made the comparison then, but in retrospect I see Flusser – a declared foe of sports – as one of those illustrious soccer forwards: spending most of the time in the midfield, waiting for the crucial opportunity minutes before the end of the game to make the fateful move and score.
Flusser enjoyed polemical outbursts—one had difficulty knowing if they were staged or in earnest. For example, he was quick to criticize those Christian scholars who had no command of Hebrew, without which, so Flusser believed, it was impossible to fathom the true meaning of Jesus’ sayings hidden behind the Greek Gospel text. His attacks did not spare the participants of the seminar either. Flusser could address an archeology student, a kibbutznik or a pregnant woman with a nasty remark: “In your circumstances, you do not have to understand what I am saying here.” During my first two years at the seminar, he used to ask me: “What would Joseph Stalin say (about something discussed at that particular moment)?” I replied politely that I was not a representative of Stalin, but I was truly infuriated. Still, I stayed—unlike a German student who stopped coming to the seminars after Flusser repeatedly interrogated him about the Third Reich.
I have heard a psychological explanation for his confrontational fervor, but, of course, it is only a guess. In the late 40s of the last century, Flusser returned from Israel to Prague to try and convince his parents to immigrate to Israel, and got stuck there for a couple of years. Throughout that period, he taught at the University of Prague (on Hellenistic matters, I suppose) and felt that he should be extremely cautious in what he said: the common wisdom was that there were security apparatus informers in each class. So, when finally, in Israel, he felt free to unabashedly vent his suppressed bitterness preempting the potential animosity he still expected looming over there.
Anyway, my perseverance as an attentive listener would be greatly rewarded not only by being able to grasp more Flusser’s insights, but also by his mercifully changing the reference: he started to ask me instead what Vladimir Solovyov—a late 19th century Russian philosopher Flusser was very fond of—would say about the issue at hand.
There was an additional and most pointed reward, too. As a PhD hopeful at the Hebrew University, I was supposed to present the academic committee with a prospectus of my future dissertation, the approval of which was necessary for going forward with my research. The work on the prospectus took more than a year, and then the fateful date arrived. As I was planning to write on the Old Syriac Gospels, Guy Stroumsa, who agreed to be my advisor after Shlomo Pines’ passing, included into the committee both Moshe Goshen-Gottstein, from the Syriac side, and David Flusser, from the Gospel side. The meeting developed into a heated debate between those two towering personalities. Whereas the former attacked my proposal, claiming the topic was too close to that of his own PhD student who had just finished his dissertation, the latter defended its originality. I do not remember details, as one can trust the mechanism of suppression to delete traumatic experiences, but Flusser, who was, of course, right, won the day. For which I was and still am profoundly thankful.
Returning to Flusser’s confrontational style, was it justified? For me he definitely appeared to be the embodiment of Israeli academic elite, the true establishment: a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and winner of the Israel Prize (in the History of the Jewish People category at that). But was Flusser wary of a possible negative reaction from the ultra-orthodox circles due to his research emphasis on earliest Christianity? According to rumor, such an expected reaction is why he was in no hurry to publish his book on Jesus in Hebrew, though the declared reason was that he believed it should be first reworked with Israeli readers in mind. Anyhow, the Hebrew translation commissioned by the Magnes Publishers (the same that had published the English version) would appear only after Flusser’s death and, as far as I am aware, caused no backlash.
There is one more example of Flusser’s confrontational attitude, appearing in the introductory chapter “Christianity in the Eyes of the Jew” to his 1979 Hebrew volume Jewish Sources in Early Christianity.[2] It was an essay of a clearly apologetic nature, where the author aimed at describing the initial developments in what today is called the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity that took place during the first and second centuries C.E. Unexpectedly, having discussed those early metamorphoses in the body of the essay, Flusser switched, in the last few paragraphs, to a harsh reproach of the contemporary Israeli movement of messianic Jews, aka Jewish believers in Jesus. Why was he angry with them? I do not remember the presence of the students belonging to the movement in Flusser’s class when I studied with him about ten years later, but they might have been there in earlier times. Anyway, why the attack and also in writing? Having asked around, I did not manage to get a satisfying answer. Did the scholar, who could be definitely called “a Jew for Jesus” himself, albeit on his own terms, feel an urgent need to put on record his opposition to a group with which he did not especially sympathize, but which invoked a similar appellation? It still remains for me an enigma.
When we were finally leaving Moscow for Israel in late 1987, my dear friend Alexander Men, a charismatic Russian Orthodox priest and brilliant religious thinker, asked me to send him a recent photo of Flusser. Men was then working on his multi-volume Bibliological Dictionary (to be published posthumously),[3] in which an entry on Flusser was to be included. I managed to get the photo a short time before Fr. Men was brutally murdered. I then learned from a touching in memoriam by Flusser in an Israeli daily that the two had been in correspondence regarding Flusser’s reconstruction of Jesus’ teaching and outlook. I remember that Men deeply appreciated the Jerusalem scholar’s work. Therefore, his reservations concerning Flusser’ insights, appearing in one of his posthumously published conversations, are most telling. He said that if one were to follow Flusser’ s statement that Jesus was a Jew, lived as a member of Jewish religion and died as such, there would be almost nothing original in Jesus’ words. Or, to paraphrase Men’s words, one would miss the mystery of the unique presence of divine in the Sage of Nazareth.
This presents us with a fascinating recent modification of a traditional collision between historical research and theology, and it is a pity that the two have never had an opportunity to possibly move the contradiction to a next level of comprehension.
In late 1990s, I was appointed the editor of the two Flusser’s Hebrew volumes on Judaism of the Second Temple Period,[4] which were published posthumously in 2002. It was predominantly a collection of articles Flusser had published elsewhere in previous years, so my main function was preparation of the texts for print. The collection, however, was also to include a few short pieces the scholar penned right then. When I say penned, I mean literally written by hand and in penmanship very difficult to decipher. I engaged the help of my partner, Ilana, who was much better in that, and together we managed to create a computer version.
As noted, my task was mainly technical, but at one point I seem to have taken the title of “Editor” too seriously. Having deciphered his last piece entitled “שנאת ישראל באוונגליון של מתי (“The Hatred of Israel in the Gospel of Matthew”),”[5] where he called Matthew’s last editor, who introduced to the Gospel an ostensibly anti-Jewish flavor, a forger, I approached Flusser and expressed doubts about his insistence on singling out that editor’s “hateful” additions as “forgery.” My argument was that any editing—friendly too—is a falsification of sorts. The scholar looked down at me and stated: “A man has the right to say what he thinks.” It was very convincing and important for me, with my understanding being that Flusser viewed that specific editorial move as contradicting the intention of the original layer of the Matthew’s narrative—thus forgery.
The framework of this short essay does not allow me to adequately relate to Flusser’s research achievements and innovations, so I will limit myself to a few aspects, which are especially memorable to me. My comments will focus on Flusser’s insights regarding earliest Christianity, though, of course, he did much more, and the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls is only one of the fields in Jewish Studies where his contribution is so important. First, I notice the metamorphosis of the titles from his early collection of essays Judaism and the Sources of Christianity (1979) to the two later volumes, where some essays on early Christianity were also included Judaism of the Second Temple Judaism (2002, English edition 2007-2009).[6] If the former title highlights Christianity’s “growing out” of Judaism, the latter hints at a transition from using Jewish backgrounds to explain ideas that distinguished nascent Christianity, to presenting those ideas as part of the spectrum characterizing the contemporaneous Jewish religion. This transition is accompanied by dropping the attempts to define Jewish self-identity vis-à-vis Christianity. As noted, in the earlier volume Flusser dedicated a separate chapter to the “Christianity in the Eyes of the Jew”—nothing like that was felt to be needed in the later ones.
Unlike Joseph Klausner a few decades earlier, Flusser was already exposed to the Dead Sea Scrolls, so he did not have to ascribe the emphasis on grace in Paul’s writings, or Paul’s dichotomy between the flesh and the spirit—both featuring prominently in the Scrolls—to the influence of Hellenistic mysteries-oriented outlooks. Instead, intra-Jewish roots for these and other ideas could be exploited. As for the enterprise of contextualizing Jesus’ thought within the first-century Judaism, it finds its ultimate expression in Flusser’s Jesus (first German edition in 1968, various English editions starting with 1997, Hebrew version 2009). Like Joseph Klausner a few decades earlier, Flusser viewed the Sage of Nazareth as close to the world of the Pharisaic sages in the land of Israel—preferring it as the setting of earliest Christianity to that of Hellenistic Jewry. Now, however, thanks to exposure to Qumran, Flusser could define Jesus’ eschatological stance with more nuance. He thus often presented messianic perceptions centered on Jesus as conversing, sometimes polemically, with ideas—of possibly broader circulation—attested at Qumran. Most prominently, Flusser highlighted the difference between Jesus’ Kingdom of God teaching from the rigid apocalyptic stance in the Scrolls. It deserves notice, of course, that in his reconstruction, Flusser, who labored in the period when cracks had already appeared in the two-source model based on Mark and Q priority, often voted for the reliability of Luke’s version.
Speaking about Jesus’ closeness to Pharisees, Flusser, unlike Klausner, was not in a hurry to ascribe transcendental elements of Jesus’ teaching or his high self-awareness to “outside influences,” but insisted on grounding them in Jesus’ Jewishness. In general, the “foreign developments” are relegated to a later period of the church formation. My impression is that Flusser was undecided about Paul’s role: sometimes, though not always, it seems that he viewed Paul as the earliest proponent of that new phase, and in this cases Flusser seems to subscribe to the traditional view of Paul as the agent of the “parting of the ways.” This “estrangement” is derived, in addition to the contingencies of working among Gentiles, from Paul’s exclusive emphasis on the atoning value of the Messiah’s death. Paradoxically, it is the same Flusser who wrote an exhaustive study on quasi-Qumranic ideas in the Pauline epistles. I remember John Gager’s lecture honoring Flusser’s memory at the Hebrew University, where he asked why Flusser did not do to Paul what he did to Jesus – meaning, reconstructing the Jewish matrix of Paul’s thinking. Gager’s suggested that it is impossible for someone to introduce more than one revolution in his life-time.
The following sometimes overlooked aspect of Flusser’s work is especially encouraging and challenging for my own research interests. Unlike most of his predecessors and contemporaries, when reconstructing the historical Jesus’ biography and outlook, he also indicated a complementing line of investigation. Namely, he not only tried to highlight the Jewish background of the Sage of Nazareth’s teaching, but he also presupposed that Gospel narratives can bear witness to broader Jewish tendencies otherwise attested only in later rabbinic sources. This usually implicit presupposition lays the ground for more extensive use of various New Testament writings – not only Gospels – as sources for obtaining a fuller picture of the Second Temple Judaism. When now exploring this direction, I can identify a subconscious channel of Flusser’s influence.
Serge Ruzer
July 2025, Jerusalem
Be sure to check out these recent JP articles:
- Did Jesus Raise Jairus’ Daughter from the Dead?
Should readers give more weight to the bystanders’ impressions or to the words Jesus said? - Character Profile: Prostitutes in the Gospels
Was first-century Jerusalem really crawling with prostitutes, as Jesus’ saying about tax collectors and harlots entering the Kingdom of God seems to suggest? - Purity Halakha in the Story of the Hemorrhaging Woman
Does concern for ritual purity explain why the hemorrhaging woman touched Jesus’ tzitzit? - Coordinating Ritual and Moral Purity in the New Testament
Taking another look at how John the Baptist, Jesus, and the Apostle Paul related to issues of ritual and moral purity. - Two Kinds of Love in the Story of the Paralyzed Man
Two kinds of love operate in the story of the paralyzed man. One kind of love is inclusive and redemptive, the other is exclusive and destructive. Which kind of love will prove victorious? - Character Profile: Beelzebul
Get acquainted with this mysterious and sinister figure.
- [1] David Flusser, “Theses on the Emergence of Christianity from Judaism,” Immanuel 5 (1975): 74-84. ↩
- [2] David Flusser, “Christianity in the Eyes of the Jew,” in his Jewish Sources in Early Christianity: Studies and Essays (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1979), 13-27. ↩
- [3] Alexander Men, Bibliological Dictionary, (3 vols.; Moscow: Alexander Men Foundation, 2002). ↩
- [4] David Flusser, Judaism of the Second Temple Period: Qumran and Apocalypticism (ed. Serge Ruzer; Jerusalem: Yad Izhak ben-Zvi and Hebrew University Magnes, 2002) [Hebrew] and idem, Judaism of the Second Temple Period: Sages and Literature (ed. Serge Ruzer; Jerusalem: Yad Izhak ben-Zvi and Hebrew University Magnes, 2002) [Hebrew]. ↩
- [5] David Flusser, “The Hatred of Israel in the Gospel of Matthew” in his, Judaism of the Second Temple Period: Sages and Literature (ed. Serge Ruzer; Jerusalem: Yad Izhak ben-Zvi and Hebrew University Magnes, 2002), 345-347 [Hebrew]. ↩
- [6] David Flusser, Judaism of the Second Temple Period Volume 1: Qumran and Apocalypticism (trans. Azzan Yadin; Jerusalem: Magnes and Jerusalem Perspective; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), and idem, Judaism of the Second Temple Period Volume 2: The Jewish Sages and their Literature (trans. Azzan Yadin; Jerusalem: Magnes and Jerusalem Perspective; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009). ↩
