Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (109 page)

14. Hochhuth,
The Deputy,
200.

15. Ibid., 204–5. Krister Stendahl, former dean of the Harvard Divinity School and the retired Lutheran bishop of Stockholm, told me that when his predecessor, the Swedish bishop Erling Eidem, was asked during World War II to go public with what he knew about the death camps, he refused, saying that after the war Sweden would be needed as a mediator.

16. Ibid., 206.

17. Eugene J. Fisher, "The Church and Antisemitism: Rome Is Due to Pronounce,"
National Catholic Register,
July 14, 1996.

18. Küng,
Judaism,
256.

19. One way to account for Hitler's not having been excommunicated is that the Church takes such drastic action to combat "wrong thinking" more than "wrong acting." The theologian Bernard J. Lee, S.M., comments, "To some extent, it is a function of the western deep story that Arius, Martin Luther, George Tyrrell, and Leonard Feeney were excommunicated, and Hitler was not." But such a distinction assumes that Hitler's actions were not rooted in "wrong thinking," and the Church saw no such dichotomy when it came to Communism. Lee,
Jesus and the Metaphors of God,
69.

20. I heard Father Bryan Hehir of the Harvard Divinity School cite this line in the spring of 1999 when discussing the
NATO
intervention in Kosovo.

21. Arendt,
Men in Dark Times,
63. See also Küng,
Judaism,
258.

22. Zahn,
German Catholics,
203.

23. A J. Heschel,
Moral Grandeur,
231.

24. The Berrigan brothers, like many Catholics who followed them into the peace movement, were motivated to oppose the Vietnam War partly in reaction to the Catholic failure to oppose Hitler. See Zahn,
German Catholics,
xii.

25. A. J. Heschel,
Moral Grandeur,
viii.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid.

28. A. J. Heschel,
God in Search of Man,
25, 29.

29. A. I. Heschel,
Moral Grandeur,
xxii.

30. Ibid.

31. A. J. Heschel,
God in Search of Man,
33.

32. Krister Stendahl helped me to see that Paul's "universalism" was still exclusive. Paul thought that both Jews and Gentiles were included in the new dispensation, but that said nothing about the rest of humankind. The "new Israel" is still a minority, a sign lifted up to others, but with no mandate to universal conversion. Jews never thought that God's will required all people to become Jews: "For all the peoples walk each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever" (Micah 4:5).

33. Quoted by Zahn,
German Catholics,
xiv.

34. Douglass,
Non-Violent Cross,
u.

35. Isaiah 45:3.

36. My source for this tradition is M. L. Kagan. "The Book of Intentions (Kawanot)," unpublished manuscript, cited with permission.

37. Augustine,
The Confessions,
bk. 12, ch. 16, 297.

38. A. J. Heschel,
Man Is Not Alone,
257.

39.
Who Killed Jesus?
is the title of a book by John Dominic Crossan.

40. "The cross became the symbol both of Roman violence and of the faith of those who dared resist its inevitability ... For Paul, the cross was vitally important as a way to transform a familiar cultural icon into its antithesis." Horsley and Silberman,
The Message and the Kingdom,
161.

41. Quoted by Cornwell,
Hitler's Pope,
25. The dating of Easter, according to an imprecise calendar, led the Church into the business of astronomy, a first and permanent scientific endeavor that assured mathematics its central place in Western civilization. Ironically, the Christian "science of Easter," in J. L. Heilbron's phrase, began in this rejection of the authority of the rabbis to set the date of Passover. "Early Christian communities had to apply to the leaders of a rival church to learn when to celebrate their principal feast. The ignominy of this procedure, and the difficulty of a timely dissemination of the result as the church spread, forced the bishops into arithmetic." Heilbron, Sun
in the Church,
27–28.

42. Ruether,
Faith and Fratricide,
245.

43. Greenberg, "Relationship of Judaism and Christianity," 13.

44. William Sloane Coffin, quoted by Nardi Reeder Campion,
Valley News,
June 19, 1999.

7.
Between Past and Future

1. I learned this from the theologian Mary Boys, quoted by O'Hare,
Enduring Covenant,
7. Citing Boys, O'Hare summarizes "eight tenets that define supersessionism: (1) revelation in Jesus Christ supersedes the revelation to Israel; (2) the New Testament fulfills the Old Testament; (3) the church replaces the Jews as God's people; (4) Judaism is obsolete, its covenant abrogated; (5) post-exilic Judaism was legalistic; (6) the Jews did not heed the warning of the prophets; (7) the Jews did not understand the prophecies about Jesus; (8) the Jews were Christ killers."

2. Wilson,
Paul,
46.

3. Pelikan,
Jesus Through the Centuries,
96. Pelikan cites the complaint against Christians of Julian, who ruled briefly as emperor in the middle of the fourth century: "You adore the wood of the cross and draw its likeness on your foreheads and engrave it on your house fronts."

4. Romans 10:1–4.

5. Genesis 27:34–38.

6. "For the longstanding claim of the Church that it
supersedes
the Jews in large measure continues the old narrative pattern in which a late-born son dislodges his first-born brothers, with varying degrees of success. Nowhere does Christianity betray its indebtedness to Judaism more than in its supersessionism." Levenson,
Death and Resurrection, x.
Because of this pattern, some Jews are less than moved when Christians refer to them as brothers, as Pope John Paul II often does. For example, at the Rome synagogue in 1986, he said, "You are our dearly beloved brothers and, in a certain way, it could be said that you are our elder brothers." John Paul II,
Spiritual Pilgrimage,
63.

7. Quoted by Robert P. Ericksen, "Assessing the Heritage, German Protestant Theologians, Nazis, and the 'Jewish Question,'" in Ericksen and'S. Heschel,
Betrayal,
33.

8. "Along with most historians, I'm skeptical about the so-called lessons of history. I'm especially skeptical about the sort of pithy lessons that fit on a bumper sticker. If there is, to use a pretentious word, any wisdom to be acquired from contemplating a historical event, I would think it would derive from confronting it in all its complexity and its contradictions ... the past in all its messiness ... The desire to find and teach lessons of the Holocaust has various sources—different sources for different people, one supposes. Probably one of its principal sources is the hope of extracting from the Holocaust something that is, if not redemptive, at least useful. I doubt it can be done." Novick,
Holocaust in American Life,
261–63.

9. See Bartoszewski,
Convent at Auschwitz,
21.

10. Alessandra Stanley, "At Yad Vashem, Pope Tries to Salve History's Scars,"
New York Times,
March 24, 2000.

11. "In the Pope's Words: 'The Echo of the Heart-Rending Laments.'"
New York Times,
March 24, 2000.

12. Deborah Sontag and Alessandra Stanley, "Ending Pilgrimage, the Pope Asks God for Brotherhood,"
New York Times,
March 27, 2000.

13. Karen Armstrong, "A Pilgrim, Not a Pawn,"
New York Times,
March 25, 2000.

14. John Paul II, General Audience Discourse, September 1, 1999, in
L'Osservatore Romano,
English edition, September 8, 1999, cited in "Memory and Reconciliation," 4.2.

15. Arendt,
Between Past and Future,
10.

16. Fredriksen,
Jesus of Nazareth,
76.

17. Landes,
Wealth and Poverty of Nations,
98.

18. Arendt,
Between Past and Future,
9.

19. John Paul II, introductory letter, "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah."

8. My Great-Uncle

1. Mortal Friends
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1978);
Supply of Heroes
(New York: Dutton, 1986I. The anecdote related here about my great-uncle's tombstone I first told in the acknowledgments of
Supply of Heroes.

2. Another example of Irish complexity in this period is found in Conor Cruise O'Brien,
Memoir: My Life and Themes
(New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000). One of O'Brien's uncles was an Irish rebel killed during the 1916 Rising, another was a British soldier killed at the Somme.

3. Crossan,
Who Killed Jesus?,
211–15.

4. Sanders,
Judaism,
5–7. For an example of a scholar who is more skeptical of Josephus, see McLaren, "Turbulent Times?," 312.

5.
Jewish Antiquities,
18.63–64. Quoted by Crossan,
Birth of Christianity,
12. Note that Josephus's report of activities in the time of Jesus involves a time lag roughly equivalent to that between the Easter Rising of 1916 and my first visit to Ireland in 1969.

6. Crossan,
Who Killed Jesus?,
5.

7. Ibid., 152.

9. Jesus, a Jew?

1. S. Heschel,
Abraham Geiger,
11.

2. S. Heschel, "When Jesus Was an Aryan: The Protestant Church and Antisemitic Propaganda," in Ericksen and'S. Heschel,
Betrayal,
77.

3. Ibid., 73. Demonstrating the end result of this Aryanizing of Jesus, Heschel cites a catechism published by a pro-Nazi Protestant institute: "Jesus of Nazareth in the Galilee demonstrates in his message and behavior a spirit which is opposed in every way to that of Judaism. The fight between him and the Jews became so bitter that it led to his crucifixion. So Jesus cannot have been a Jew. Until today, the Jews persecute Jesus and all who follow him with unreconcilable hatred. By contrast. Aryans in particular can find answers in him to their ultimate questions. So he became the savior of the Germans." The catechism was published in 1941.

4. Yasir Arafat, meeting with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican in February 2000, saluted him as the successor of St. Peter, "a Palestinian." Obviously, it would not suit Arafat's political agenda to think of Peter as what he was, a Jew. Not long after this meeting, on March 10, the Vatican published "Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past." A short section called "Christians and Jews" reiterated the Vatican's earlier declaration that "Jesus was a descendant of David; that the Virgin Mary and the Apostles belonged to the Jewish people." The Church obviously sees the need to emphasize this.

5. The attitude of the Irish Catholic culture in which I was reared is captured in James Joyce's
Ulysses.
"Mendelssohn was a jew," the badgered Bloom cries out at one point, "and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Savior was a Jew and his father was a Jew. Your God." A character identified as "the citizen" takes offense at once. "Whose God?" Whereupon Bloom cuts him with,"...Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me." The citizen responds to this slander with rage. "By Jesus, says he, I'll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I'll crucify him so I will. Give us that biscuitbox here."
Ulysses (
New York: Random House, 1961), 342.

6. Cooke,
God's Beloved,
23.

7. John 14:11. It is John's failure to provide a genealogy for Jesus that Fichte cites as evidence that he is not Jewish.

8. Fredriksen,
Jesus of Nazareth,
108.

9. "The Father metaphor for the God Jesus faces takes on a larger and larger life in the evolution of the gospels. In Mark's gospel, Jesus speaks of God as 'Father' or 'the Father' four times (and the retention of the Aramaic
Abba
makes Jesus' historical use of it highly probable). Matthew has Jesus speak of God in those terms 32 times. This language is in Jesus' mouth 173 times in John's gospel. We are surely witnessing evolution in the faith articulation of the early communities." Lee,
Jesus and the Metaphors of God,
160.

10. Pawlikoski,
Christ in Christian-Jewish Dialogue,
93.

11. Lee,
Jesus and the Metaphors of God,
53.

12. Cooke,
God's Beloved,
23.

13. S. Heschel,
Abraham Geiger,
12.

14. For example, Walter Grundman, a Protestant New Testament scholar and firmly pro-Nazi German, had cited Jesus' use of the word "Abba" in addressing God to make the point that Jesus had rejected the Hebrew word for "God" (although most Jews then and now would not utter the word in any case). What to me was an expression of Jesus' intimacy with his Father was, in the interpretation of Grundman, a hammer to use against Jews. "With the proclamation of the Kingdom of God as present," he wrote, "a new experience of God and a new understanding of God were linked. Internally, it had nothing to do with Judaism, but meant the dissolution of the Jewish religious world. That should be recognizable from the fact alone that the Jews brought Jesus Christ to the cross." (Quoted by'S. Heschel, "When Jesus Was an Aryan," in Ericksen and'S. Heschel,
Betrayal,
76.) It matters greatly that Grundman wrote these words as the literal and physical "dissolution" of the Jewish world was under way, but it is not incidental that that theology was attractive to me years later.

15. Gilman,
Faith, Sex, Mystery,
243–44.

16. Segal,
Rebecca's Children,
1–2.

17. Ibid.

18. The phrase "true Israel" was not used by those first-century groups. It apparently was first used by Justin Martyr in the second century. See Simon,
Verus Israel.