Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (111 page)

10. John 1:11.

11. Rosemary Radford Ruether, "Christology and Jewish-Christian Relations," in Peck,
Jews and Christians,
25.

12. Eugene J. Fisher, "The Church and Anti-Semitism: Rome Is Due to Pronounce,"
National Catholic Register,
July 14, 1996. See also Fisher,
Interwoven Destinies, 6.

13. Rahner,
Theological Investigations,
vol. 1, 155. He goes on: "The clearest formulations, the most sanctified formulas, the classic condensations of the centuries—long work of the Church in prayer, reflection and struggle concerning God's mysteries: all these derive their life from the fact that they are not an end but a beginning, not a goal but a means, truths which open the way to the—ever greater—Truth ... every formula transcends itself (not because it is false but precisely because it is true)...This holds good for the Chalcedonian formulation of the mystery of Jesus too. For this formula is—a formula" (149–50). I gratefully acknowledge Padraic O'Hare for drawing my attention to this thought of Rahner's.

14. Ruether,
Faith and Fratricide,
259.

15. Van Buren,
Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality,
pt. 3, 30–33.

16. Quoted by Peters,
Jerusalem,
80.

17. Ruether,
Faith and Fratricide,
256.

18. Schillebeeckx,
Christ: The Sacrament of the Encounter with God.

19. Quoted by Levenson, "The Temple and the World," 283.

20. Ibid., 284.

21. For diverse Jewish attitudes toward the Temple, see Sanders,
Judaism,
52–54.

22. Bahat,
Atlas of Jerusalem,
85.

23. Sanders,
Judaism,
63.

24. Genesis 22:1–19.

25. Bahat,
Atlas of Jerusalem,
83.

26. Ibid., 85. Today, Jews are not allowed to pray on the Temple Mount, a proscription enforced partly by rabbis, partly by Islamic authorities. I heard an Islamic official declare in Jerusalem in early 2000 that if the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Authority were to be resolved, then, on the Islamic side, the ruling might be changed. Nothing intrinsic to Islam prevents Jews from praying on the site of the Temple. See James Carroll, "A Sharing of Faiths in Jerusalem,"
Boston Globe,
February 23, 2000.

27.1 Kings 8:27.

28. A. J. Heschel,
The Sabbath,
1; Levenson, "The Temple and the World," 298.

29. Sec Neusner,
Method and Meaning,
152. See also Ezrahi,
Booking Passage,
9–10: "But what is 'remembered' is of course also imagined, as mimesis takes on the authority and license of memory and memory becomes an article of faith ... This is an imaginative license that has no geographical coordinates: it is an affirmation and reconfiguration of the Jewish word as nomadic exercise and Jewish exile as a kind of literary privilege." The Jewish "homeland" has thus become the Jewish "text."

30. Levenson, "The Temple and the World," 297.

31. For example, Crossan sees the act in the Temple, whatever it was, as "what led immediately to Jesus' arrest and execution."
(Who Killed Jesus?,
64.) But Fredriksen doubts that the "Temple tantrum" of Jesus would have drawn much notice from the Roman overseers. Rather, she locates the cause of Roman hostility to Jesus, in the enthusiastic way the crowds responded to him as he entered Jerusalem. She suggests that while Jesus did not himself have a political mission, the crowds thought he did, which made him dangerous to Rome.
Jesus of Nazareth,
225–34.

32. Mark 15:38.

33. Wilson,
Paul,
51.

34. Acts 7:55–60.

35. Koester,
Introduction to the New Testament,
vol. 1, 350.

36. In February 2000, 1 participated in a three-way discussion in Jerusalem among Muslims, Jews, and Christians about sacred space, with emphasis on the "risks and opportunities" of the shared Jewish-Muslim devotion to the Temple Mount. The Jews and Muslims at the conference began the painful but necessary process of "creating a new reality," as one put it, out of the old attitudes toward this most disputed acreage. See Carroll, "A Sharing of Faiths in Jerusalem."

37. Wilson,
Paul
45.

38. This does not mean that the
religious
dispute over the holy place of Jerusalem is to be resolved using only "political sovereignty" categories of nineteenth-century nationalism. But even secular Jews for whom "the Land" has no religious meaning as a sign of a covenant with the God of Israel share the attachment to place that originates in this faith.

39. John 2:21–22.

40. Segal,
Rebecca's Children,
179. The title refers to words spoken by God to Rebecca, mother of the twin sons Jacob and Esau: "Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples, born of you, shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger." (Genesis 25:23.) This background is one reason why, when contemporary Catholic spokespersons, with only good intentions, seek to honor Jews as "our elder brothers," as both "We Remember" and "Memory and Reconciliation" put it—and as John Paul II did, as we saw—Jews might wonder what is really being said.

41. Ezrahi,
Booking Passage,
15.

42. For example, the Vatican's insistence on "international guarantees" for Jerusalem and its readiness to treat the Palestinian Authority as having some kind of sovereignty over sites in East Jerusalem in advance of a final peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

43. John 11:45–53; Crossan,
Who Killed Jesus?,
61.

44. See, for example, Matthew 23:13–29.

45. One would expect by now that the upper echelons of the Catholic Church would have assimilated the lessons of New Testament scholarship and begun to move away from an uncritical repetition of anti-Jewish denigration that salts the Christian Scriptures. Yet even "Memory and Reconciliation" continues the negative stereotype of "Scribes and Pharisees": "Isn't it a bit too easy to judge people of the past by the conscience of today (as the Scribes and Pharisees do according to Mt 23:29–32), almost as if moral conscience were not situated in time?" (1.4). In the cited passage, Jesus is portrayed as vilifying, "Woe to you Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!"

46. As noted, Fredriksen places the cause for Jesus' execution not in the Temple, but in his arrival in Jerusalem at the beginning of the festival week. One result of deemphasizing the Temple crime is to lessen the importance of Jesus' opposition to the central Jewish institution, which protects his Jewishness. If Fredriksen's reading of the history is correct, the question remains: Why did the evangelists put such emphasis on the Temple crime? The answer is tied to its polemical and symbolic significance, in light of the Temple's having recently been destroyed, as three of the four were writing. And, as we have seen, the evangelists had reasons to emphasize Jesus' opposition to a Jewish establishment.

47. Cooke,
God's Beloved.
48.

48. Sanders,
Judaism,
91.

49. Schillebeeckx,
Jesus,
268.

50. Fredriksen,
Jesus of Nazareth,
232.

51. Crossan,
Who Killed Jesus?,
52.

52. Ibid., 64.

53. Isaiah 1:11.

54. Horsley and Silberman,
The Message and the Kingdom,
76. "He [Jesus] arrived in the city as a traditional prophet of Israel who came to pronounce God's judgment against the ornate, Roman-style Temple."

55. Sanders,
Judaism,
336–40.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid., 338–39.

58. Mark 12:31; Leviticus 19:18.

59. Fredriksen says that the "ethical instruction in the New Testament texts," which embodies Jesus' message of love, largely "trace[s] back to the very earliest movement."
Jesus of Nazareth,
103.

60. Horsley and Silberman,
The Message and the Kingdom,
55.

61. Koester,
Introduction to the New Testament,
vol. 2, 82. For an elaboration of the antisectarian, unifying effect of Jesus' ministry, see Horsley and Silberman,
The Message and the Kingdom,
55–57.

62. Matthew 5:45.

63. A typical example is this passage from the eminent mid-twentieth-century Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, who writes of "two images of God, the self-emptying Son stands opposed, for a moment, to God the Father who is still (Philippians 2) in some way depicted in the colours of the Old Testament palette ... What is at stake ... is an altogether decisive turn-about in the way of seeing God. God is not, in the first place, absolute power," but 'absolute love.'"
Mysterium Paschale,
28. More surprising, perhaps, is the reiteration of this notion of love as the "new commandment" in the Vatican declaration "Memory and Reconciliation," cited above.

64. Isaiah, in the words of Karen Armstrong, wanted Israelites to "discover the inner meaning of their religion. Yahweh wanted compassion rather than sacrifice." In this context, the Old Testament does indeed show God sternly rebuking his people, even displaying his revulsion at their sacrifices, but God's displeasure, in Isaiah, is manifested in the name of compassionate love. Armstrong makes the point that such regard for compassion toward the neighbor became "the hallmark of all the major religions formed" between 800 and 200 b.c.e.
History of God,
44.

65. Horsley and Silberman,
The Message and the Kingdom,
96–97.

66. Understanding the central meaning of Jesus' message as this apocalyptic proclamation of the imminence of God's Kingdom, Fredriksen concludes that what Jesus performed in the Temple was a symbolic act of prophecy: "The current Temple was soon to be destroyed (understood: not by Jesus, nor by invading armies, but by God), to cede place to the eschatological Temple (understood: not built by the hand of man) at the close of the age."
Jesus of Nazareth, no.

67. Jeremiah 31:31–34. For a discussion of the
one
covenant, see Lohfink,
Covenant Never Revoked.

68. Paul uses the phrase "new covenant," as in Galatians 4:24. In 1 Corinthians 2:14–15, Paul equates the "old covenant" with Moses, but this is the only time the phrase appears in the New Testament, and here it is not set in contrast to the new covenant. If Paul saw "two covenants," he certainly did not see them as discontinuous, in the manner of supersessionism.

69. Sanders,
Judaism,
277.

70. S. Heschel,
Abraham Geiger,
21.

71. Horsley and Silberman,
The Message and the Kingdom,
62.

72. Koester,
Introduction to the New Testament,
vol. 2, 89. See also Horsley and Silberman,
The Message and the Kingdom,
161.

73.1 Corinthians 11:25; Hebrews 13:20; I Corinthians 5:7.

74. Deuteronomy 21:22–23.

75. For a discussion of this verse, see Crossan,
Who Killed Jesus?,
163–68.

76. Quoted by Sanders,
Judaism,
42.

77. John 10:10.

12. The Healing Circle

1. Luke 24:13–16.

2. Eliot,
Collected Poems,
74–75.

3. Kubler-Ross,
On Death and Dying.

4. Luke 24:18–21.

5.1 first saw the connection between the elements of normal "grief work" and the narrative-constructing work of the first Christians while listening to a lecture by Helmut Koester, at Harvard in 1997.

6. Fredriksen,
Jesus of Nazareth,
262.

7. The film
The Big Chill
captured this phenomenon. The dead man whose funeral gathers a collection of friends never appears in the movie except as a corpse, but his presence animates everything the grievers feel. (A then unknown actor named Kevin Costner played the corpse.)

8. I acknowledge my debt for this understanding to Professor Koester. Evidence exists for gatherings like what I am calling a healing circle. Here is Fredriksen's summary: "Within just five years of Jesus' death, evidence abounds of this new movement's wide and rapid dissemination.
Ekklesiai,
small gatherings of its members, appear in the villages of Samaria and Judea as well as in the Galilee ... Jerusalem, meanwhile, had become home to many of the original disciples (Gal 1:18, 2:1). According to Luke, the core community had been there continuously since the final pilgrimage of Jesus for Passover (Lk 24:53 ... and passim)."
Jesus of Nazareth,
236.

9. Luke 24:25–27.

10. Crossan,
Who Killed Jesus?,
10.

11. See Brown,
The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave. A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels.

12. Crossan,
Who Killed Jesus?,
1.

13. Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46.

14. Luke 23:46. The fact that the "last words" of Jesus vary in the Gospels reflects the differing theological concerns of the writers, not that Jesus said first one thing and then another.

15. Amos 8:9: "'And on that day,' says the Lord God, 'I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight.'"

16. Matthew 27:51.

17. See note iv,
The Jerusalem Bible
(New York: Doubleday, 1966), 63.

18. Zechariah 9:9.

19. Isaiah 53:2–5.

20. John 19:23–25.

21. Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34. Krister Stendahl points out that, in rendering Jesus' cry in Hebrew— "
Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?
" —the two Gospel accounts actually mix in the Aramaic word
sabachthani,
a violation of linguistic consistency that suggests Jesus actually did utter the verse. "He was so broken," Stendahl said to me, "that he couldn't keep the language straight."

22. John 19:28.

23. Psalm 22:16–18.

24. Luke 24:30–32.