Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (13 page)

"When Pilate," Josephus wrote, "upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing amongst us ... condemned him to be crucified ..."
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Indeed, the death of Jesus, Crossan writes, "by execution under Pontius Pilate is as sure as anything historical ever can be."
⁶
Yet our knowledge of what are taken to be sure facts of history goes beyond that. Thus it is a "fact" that Jesus proclaimed a God of love over against the Pharisees' God of legalism and revenge; a "fact" that Jesus attacked the money changers in the Temple and proposed to destroy it, which is why the Jews accused him; a "fact" that, in actions and words, Jesus "fulfilled" key prophecies of Jewish Scripture, proving the truth of claims made about him by his followers; a "fact" that those claims (he was the Messiah, he was
Christus,
he was Son of God) were rejected by Jews; a "fact" that some of those followers were attacked and killed by Jews (Stephen, James, the brother of Jesus); a "fact" that Christianity did not thrive as a new religion until it broke free (in Antioch, Asia Minor, Rome) of a limiting Jewish culture; a "fact" that the meaning of Christianity, even in a non-Jewish world, would depend on Jews, far more than on pagans, as the permanent embodiment of what Christians were not.

But what happens when such foundational "facts" are remembered without regard for the social and political ground out of which they grew? As with Jim Morrissey, partially remembered "facts" can turn the truth on its head. The "longest lie" is what Crossan calls the web of distortions that are thus woven into the primal Christian narratives.
⁷
It is a lie about the Jews—or is it, first, a lie about Jesus? As with my mother's uncle, is there an overgrown but reliably engraved tombstone in the presence of which we can finally face the truth?

9. Jesus, a Jew?

W
HAT RELIGION WAS JESUS?

A college professor I know routinely includes this question on a comprehensive quiz he gives to incoming freshmen each year. The pattern of responses is constant. Some students answer "Catholic," most answer "Christian." A distinct minority answers "Jewish." It is easy to condescend to students who do not know that Jesus was a Jew, but in fact there are good reasons to be confused about his religious identity. Some of those reasons have to do with the difficulty of imagining what this extraordinary person's inner life consisted of, and some with whether our compartmentalized idea of religion is relevant to the question. Part of the difficulty has to do with the rampant ambiguities of "Judaism" itself at the time Jesus lived, and part has to do with Christianity's long attempt to purge itself of Semitic content.

The famous "quest for the historical Jesus" that so gripped Protestant scholars in the nineteenth century led both to a new appreciation of Jesus' ties to his native Jewish milieu and to a new emphasis on what separated Jesus from his Jewishness. Jewish scholars at first welcomed Christian explorations into the Jewishness of Jesus, thinking that, as Susannah Heschel puts it, "the more Jewish Jesus could be shown to have been, the more Christians would respect Judaism." But that is not what happened. "Christians had a different agenda," Heschel writes. "For them, the more Jewish Jesus was shown to be, the less original and unique he was. If Jesus had simply preached the ordinary Judaism of his day, the foundation of Christianity as a distinctive and unparalleled religion was shattered ... As strongly as nineteenth-century Jews tried to show an identity between Jesus and Judaism, Christians tried to demonstrate a difference."
¹

That theological debate was skewed by political developments, especially in Germany, where, ludicrous as it may now seem, the image of the Aryan Christ emerged as something to be taken seriously. Under Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), pan-German nationalism jelled, spawning a unifying racial theory, which led to a purified notion of a German
volk.
Similar efforts had marked Christian dogma and practice, going back to the early times of the Church, but nineteenth-century nationalism brought a new edge to such discussions. Ideas of racial purity as a component of social identity influenced religious identity, leading to a notion of Christianity stripped of all Semitic influence. As important a figure as the philosopher Johann Fichte (1762–1814), for example, had posited a Jesus who was not Jewish at all, and throughout the century theologians followed suit.
²
This would be one of the ways that German Protestant scholars tilled the soil for Nazi antisemitism, promulgating an idolatry of Aryan racial identity by defining Jesus over against Jewishness, not only religiously but racially. Eventually German Protestant hymnals would be "de-Judaized" by the removal of words like "amen," "hallelujah," and "hosanna."
³

In the Christian world, the influence of nineteenth-century German Protestant theology was so dominant that it was felt even within Roman Catholicism, especially in the matter of a historical quest for Jesus that led to his removal from the Jewish milieu. As critics of that "quest" remind me now, the illustrated books used in Catholic schools that I attended as a child had been subtly shaped by visual cues. Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and all their intimates, save one, were portrayed with the racial and sartorial characteristics—blue eyes, light brown flowing hair, graceful robes—of northern Europe, in stark distinction to the pictured Pharisees, Sadducees, and high priests, with their odd headdresses, phylacteries, tasseled prayer shawls, oversized noses, and dark skin. It was as if the residents of the towns of Galilee were of a different racial strain than those of Judea—indeed, in the nineteenth century Jesus commonly came to be referred to as "the Galilean," or "the Nazarene," an implicit distancing from "Judea," the region of the Jews. The only obvious Semite in Jesus' inner circle, of course, was the one named for that region, Judas. The betrayer functioned in this filtered narrative as the one Jew, and the story forever emphasized his motive as greed.

The occupations of the fishermen friends of Jesus, like Jesus' own trade of carpenter—think of those pastel scenes of the boy and his dad in that airy, neatly swept workshop, making cabinets—were emphasized to contrast with the Judas-like moneygrubbers whom Jesus would go to Judea to attack. The nineteenth-century quest for the historical Jesus, in other words, in its effort to get behind the façade of an overly divinized Lord, led to the application of nineteenth-century racial categories and cultural stereotypes to first-century Palestine, a way of making Jesus human without making him Jewish.
⁴
I have been saying "nineteenth-century," emphasizing the German Protestant origins of this mindset, but this was all still thoroughly in place in the crucifix and stained glass of St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church in Alexandria, Virginia, and in the textbooks and bulletin-board posters of my parochial school, by which, despite myself, I continue to measure God.
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One would think that six years of Scripture study and theology in a rigorous seminary at the time of the revolutionary Vatican II would have remedied this shallow notion of who Jesus was, but German Protestant theology and scholarship, still largely uncriticized for its implicit anti-Judaism, was in the early 1960s more influential in Catholic circles than ever.

True, the most patently childish notions—that cabinetmaker's workshop, Jesus hand-carving birds, then bringing them to life—had dropped away. But an idea that distanced Jesus even further from Jewishness had taken over my understanding. I learned to think of Jesus as a mystical genius whose direct experience of God the Father, whom he called Abba ("Daddy"), was such that he had no need of any mediating culture. Religion is by definition such a culture. Here is how one of the theologians I learned this from, Bernard Cooke, explains it: "What was distinctive about Jesus' experience [of God] was its intimacy and immediacy. All the textual evidence points to the fact that Jesus' knowledge of his Abba was immediate personal acquaintance."
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The word "religion" shares a root with "ligament," meaning "tie." Religion exists to overcome the gulf between creatures and Creator. It is a system of beliefs and rituals that ties the human to God. But Jesus was presented, in this understanding, as the one man who had no need of such a tie. "Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me," the Gospel of John reports him as saying.
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The theology that develops from that mystical union makes Jesus himself the ligament. So the question of the religious identity of Jesus never arises—not Jewish religion, not Christian religion—because his knowledge of God is immediate. He has no need of the ligament of religion. If he at first participated in Jewish ritual, he did so for the sake of form, not because he needed it. And the Gospels show him distancing himself from Jewish religious observances. As Paula Fredriksen points out, for example, the Gospel of Mark shows Jesus dismissing central religious traditions of Judaism like "Shabbat, food, tithing, Temple offerings, purity—as the 'traditions of men.' To these he opposes what Jesus ostensibly propounds as 'the commandment of God' (7:8). The strong rhetoric masks the fact that these laws are biblical and, as such, the common concern of all religious Jews: It is God in the Torah, not the Pharisees in their interpretations of it, who commanded these observances."
⁸

When the disciples of Jesus asked him how to pray—this story became the core of my belief in him—he replied with the Our Father.
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Christians recite this prayer in rote fashion, as if it were the farthest thing from religiously revolutionary, when in fact it is nothing less than an invitation to call God "Daddy"—that is, to think of the Almighty One, the Ineffable, in the most intimate way. Ironically, this aspect of Jesus' spirituality, which for most Christians has had the effect of distancing him from Judaism, actually shows him participating in its vital and at that time multifaceted manifestation. As the Catholic scholar John Pawlikowski has written, "In particular, Jesus' stress on his intimate link with the Father picks up on a central feature of Pharisaic thought."
¹⁰
Indeed, there is evidence that, by the time of Jesus, Jews were regularly praying to God as Father.
¹¹
But that was never explained to us. The intimacy Jesus claimed to have with God the Father was made to seem unique, entirely his. More than anything else, to us, it set him apart from Jews.

Based on what was presented to us, we could only have concluded that, if anything, Jesus' Abba experience put him at odds with Jewish religion, for, as Cooke puts it, "There were fundamental incongruities between the Abba he experienced and the God known and explained by those around him."
¹²
This spirituality had the simple effect of deleting any reference to Jewish cult in the life of Jesus. It was impossible to picture him in that tasseled prayer shawl, wearing phylacteries, entering the Temple not to protest but to pray. Having learned in parochial school that Jesus was racially not Jewish, I learned in graduate theological school that he was religiously not Jewish either. Susannah Heschel characterizes the Aryanizing of Jesus as an effort "to create a
judenrein
Christianity for a
judenrein
Germany,"
¹³
but this spiritualizing of Jesus was a
judenrein
of such subtlety that I did not know, until reflecting on Heschel's recent work, that it had completely dominated my religious imagination.
¹⁴
What religion was Jesus? I'd have surely answered Jewish, unlike those ill-informed college freshmen—but their answers were more honest than mine.

What is a Jew anyway? At the end of the second millennium, Jews themselves carry on the argument, with the ultra-Orthodox of Mea Shearim, their enclave in Jerusalem, aiming anathemas at the secular children of David Ben Gurion, modern Israel's first prime minister. Hitler said that a Jew was anyone who had at least one Jewish grandparent, and, as if to spite him, many Jews adopted that definition. The rabbis, holding to matrilineal descent, define a Jew as someone having a Jewish mother. In the state of Israel, a Jew can be an atheist, although not a baptized Christian. Part racial, part religious, the meaning of Jewishness today is ambiguous. In his memoir, the drama critic Richard Gilman described a life's journey that had taken him from the Jewish faith into which he was born, into unbelief, then into Roman Catholicism, from which he subsequently "lapsed." And where did that leave him? As "a lapsed Jewish-atheist-Catholic. Fallen from all three, a triple deserter!" But not quite. In the end, he had, without choosing it, resumed his original identity. "The difference is that you stay Jewish in your bones and pores, there's no lapsing from that; changed names or nose bobs won't do."
¹⁵

The contemporary argument among ultra-Orthodox Jews, Reform Jews, and secular Jews over the question Who is a Jew? points to a piece of the social and political context that is mainly missing from the Christian memory of foundational events. To imagine that first Jesus and then his followers were in conflict with "the Jews," a conflict with the sequential climaxes that occurred when "the Jews" killed Jesus and then certain of his followers, is, of course, to ignore the fact that Jesus and his first followers were themselves Jews. But on a more basic level, it is to assume that there was a social-religious entity called "the Jews." Obviously, a period of time had to pass before something called "Christianity" came into being as a distinct community, but emphasis on that evolution ignores the fact that, in the same period, there was no clearly defined "Judaism" either. Indeed, the suffix "ism," suggesting a set of coherent ideological boundaries, a membership definition, a precisely notated theology and cult, is anachronistic. If my great-uncle's story was misremembered by my family, it was because the post-1916 Irish imagination could no longer contain the ambiguous experience of a dual loyalty to London and Dublin. If the story of Jesus is misremembered, with devastating effect on the Jews, however defined, it is first because a later Christianity presumed a univocal—and, not incidentally, flawed—Judaism against which to define its uniqueness and value. But there was no such Judaism.