David Flusser

Professor David Flusser died and was buried in Jerusalem on Friday, September 15,
2000, his 83rd birthday. A founding member of the Jerusalem School of Synoptic
Research, Flusser was one of the world's leading Jewish authorities on Early
Christianity. His pioneering research on Jesus and Christianity's relationship to Judaism
won him international recognition. His collaboration with Robert Lindsey, beginning in
1961, inspired a new approach to the Synoptic Gospels.
Flusser was born in Vienna, but because of food shortages caused by the First World
War, his family relocated to the small Catholic, Bohemian town of Pbram,
Czechoslovakia. As a young man Flusser studied at the University of Prague. While a
student there he met Josef Perl, a pastor and member of the Unity of Bohemian
Brethren. It was Perl who stirred the young Flusser's insatiable curiosity. The many
evenings that he spent in conversation with Perl spawned what became an enduring
interest in Jesus' teachings and the Jewish origins of Christianity.
On the eve of World War II, Flusser left his native Eastern Europe for the Middle East.
He arrived in Palestine in 1939. In 1957 he received his doctorate from the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, where he later taught in the Comparative Religions department
for many years, training several generations of scholars. For example, Jerusalem
School members Professors Brad Young and Steven Notley wrote their doctoral
dissertations under his supervision.
A member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Flusser was frequently
recognized for his scholarship: he was awarded the Israel Prize (1980), the State of
Israel's most prestigious honor, as well as the Rothschild Prize for Jewish Sciences
(2000). He was a recipient of honorary doctorates from, among others, the Catholic
Faculty of Theology of Lucerne, Switzerland (1989), and Hebrew Union College (2000).
Flusser could converse fluently in nine languages and read literature in an additional
seventeen. He authored over 1,000 scholarly articles in Hebrew, German, English and
other languages. Among the books he wrote are Jesus (3nd ed., 2001) and Judaism
and the Origins of Christianity (1988). Paradoxically, his book Jesus has been
translated into eleven languages, but not into Hebrew.