Geiger claimed Judaism rather than Christianity was the universal religion

Evidence

In the wake of intensifying anti-Semitism after 1871, Geiger spoke out against his detractors and his scholarship became more stridently anti-Christian. In particular, Susannah Heschel has demonstrated superbly the extent to which Geiger engaged in polemics and intellectual combat with contemporary Protestant New Testament scholars who were especially galled by Geiger’s provocative interpretation that Christianity was a derivative of Pharisaic Judaism and that Judaism, not Christianity, was the universal religion par excellence. … His position on the anti-Jewish biases of German biblical scholarship was clearly summed up in a letter he wrote to Theodor Nöldeke in 1872. Protesting the anti-Jewish biases of Protestant scholarship on Judaism, Geiger assured Nöldeke that Jewish scholars were not trying to dictate what the research agenda or methodological approach of Christians should be but “we do have the right to denounce the ignorance of those who, despite such ignorance, and with boundless arrogance and spite, air their derogatory opinions on such matters; and we are justified in banning such persons from the company of fair and honest scholars.” — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 386

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to supersessionism debates in contemporary theology and to the broader Orientalism framework where the ‘Orient’ claims priority over the ‘Occident.’
• SEED: An essay angle: how a subjugated tradition’s scholars inverted the dominant narrative by claiming precedence and universality, and how that polemic strategy maps onto modern decolonial scholarship.