By Pamela Eisenbaum Daniel Boyarin, professor of Talmudic Culture at the University of California Berkeley, may be the most influential scholar of ancient Judaism today. He also has wide-ranging interests—theology, religion, cultural studies, literary theory—and because Boyarin’s work is interdisciplinary and he writes in an engaging and entertaining style—a talent commonly denigrated as “popularization” among many academics—his work is more accessible to those outside the esoteric world of rabbinic scholarship. But he has not published a book specifically for the general public—until now. Boyarin has written nine books in English (and a couple in Hebrew), several of which deal with the relationship between Judaism and early Christianity from the second to fifth centuries. The Jewish Gospels, by contrast, mines an earlier stratum of Jewish literature for older evidence that explains the origins of belief in Jesus. Put briefly,...

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