Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (18 page)

In Mark, there is this coda to the story: "And as he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, 'Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!'"
²⁵

It was true. Josephus said that the whole façade of the Temple, 150 feet square, was covered with gold plates, as were the entrances and the portico. Titus would bring a huge solid-gold menorah to Rome as his greatest piece of war booty; its image can still be seen on the Arch of Titus near the Colosseum. In the Holy of Holies, every inch of wall surface was overlaid with gold. Josephus says that after the sack of Jerusalem in 70
C.E.,
gold from the Temple flooded the market, so much so that "the standard of gold was depreciated to half its former value."
²⁶
But to Jesus, wealth was the enemy. He replied to his awestruck disciple in Mark, "You see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down."

And I knew that Jesus attacked the Temple for another reason. I had learned in seminary that the Temple cult had violated the Mosaic command to keep the Ark of the Covenant enshrined in a simple tent, a symbol of Israel's perennial readiness to pull up stakes in response to the command of Yahweh. The Temple cult—I had preached on this!—owed more to Canaanite traditions than to the Torah. The Temple's rigid clerical hierarchy ran against the egalitarian spirit proper to the people of God. With its narrow identification of God's presence in one place, the Temple was wrongly exclusive. The compulsively observed rituals were effectively a denial of grace, as if God's love could be purchased by the coin of form over substance, another way to turn the Father's house into a thieves' den. In all of this I was exercising, without knowing it, the age-old Christian prerogative of defining the meaning of Israel's religion, so that the meaning of Jesus' rejection of that religion would be unmistakable. Jon Levenson of Harvard Divinity School shows how "members of the senior generation of [Christian] Old Testament scholars in America find in the Temple of Solomon a notorious lapse on the part of Israel into the culture that surrounds it ... The Temple is a negative model, the pole to be rejected or subordinated if authenticity is to endure."
²⁷
Having gotten my theology from such scholars, I was convinced that I knew what the Temple meant not only to Jesus but to Jews. Of course he would attack it.

If you had told me that my characterization of the Temple culture—the greed of the moneychangers, the exclusivity of the priests, the near idolatry of the edifice as such—partook of antisemitic stereotyping, I would not have known what you were talking about, especially since I extended such critiques to my own Roman Catholic Church. But in that, was I perhaps indulging the mental habit of supersessionism, setting myself above my own tradition, just as my tradition had set itself above Israel?

My perceptions in 1973 may thus have been shaped by an unknowing projection of my own prejudices, needs, and wishes onto a figment scrim named Jesus. My perceptions may have unconsciously banalized the beliefs of Jews. My perceptions may have assumed the ancient supersessionism by which the Old Covenant was replaced by the New. Nevertheless, these perceptions rescued my tottering faith. Indeed, the idea of Jesus as disapproved by the powerful, attached to the powerless, still serves as the spine of my religious conviction. But now, looking back, I see the limits of those perceptions, particularly in relation to the question that drives this book. I saw Jesus as marginal—but marginal to his own religious tradition. I saw him as rebellious—but in rebellion against the piety of the Pharisees and the scribes, whom I thought of as Spellman and Pius XII. My hero Daniel Berrigan was in jail, which was where I'd have been if I weren't a coward. (As I write this, twenty-five years later, his brother Philip is in jail again, a felon in his seventies whose crime this time was a symbolic attack on American nuclear weapons.) I cherished the thought of Jesus as a breaker of the law. The "brown mantle hood," in'T. S. Eliot's phrase, had fallen from his face, and I knew he was a man, not a woman. He was of the earth, of the stone I had kissed. He was closer to me than ever.

Like those naive college kids confused about his religion, I saw Jesus as anything but what he was. With the Vatican, I may no longer have been capable of indicting the Jews for deicide, but I saw Jesus so clearly then, because in my eyes he stood in such sharp contrast to his own people. "The Jews" still embodied everything he was against, and therefore so was I. "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, city that murders the prophets, and stones the messengers sent to her!" None of this made Jesus—or me—antisemitic because, as is clear from his heartbroken lament in Matthew, Jewish recalcitrance made him not vengeful but sad. In any case, his rebuke of Jerusalem here is mild compared, say, to that of Israel's prophet Amos.
²⁸
Jesus laments, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not! Behold, your house [the Temple] is forsaken and desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again, until you say, 'Blessed be he who comes in the name of the Lord.'"
²⁹

11. Destroy This Temple

W
E ARE TRACKING
here the shifting perceptions of a mind deeply, if unconsciously, rooted in traditions of anti-Jewish contempt. The modern history of Israel has taught one set of lessons: for example, that the Jewish state is not to be judged by standards different from those used in judging other states, or that Jews themselves, struggling to survive after the Yom Kippur War and the Intifada, do so with "pain, introspection, and grim self-criticism."
¹
But among Christians another set of lessons has been taught, as part of a remarkable renewal among scholars who have studied the life of Jesus, some of the most important of whom I have already cited. No doubt these scholars, coming of age in the post-Holocaust era, have been influenced by the profound, if implicit, challenge to Christians represented by Holocaust studies conducted mainly by Jews. "How can we pretend to take history with theological seriousness," the Catholic theologian David Tracy asks, "and then ignore the Holocaust?" That catastrophe is, in Tracy's words, a fundamental interruption in the flow of history, changing everything.
²

For Christians the change must involve Jesus Christ, and that is fully reflected in the work of the new scholars. A "Third Quest" for the historical Jesus, as scholars refer to it,
³
has been under way since the late twentieth century, with special urgency since 1980. Qumran discoveries, further studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls, archaeological explorations, and the application of modern anthropological analysis to first-century Galilee and Judea have led to major revisions of assumptions about Jesus and the movement he inspired. The Jesus Seminar, led by John Dominic Crossan and Robert Funk, involving a score or more of scholars meeting regularly since 1985, has questioned the historicity of much of the information provided about Jesus in the Gospels. Not only are his miracles questioned, but so are his claim to be the Messiah and much of what he is reported to have said. The litmus test of assertions about Jesus has become their relationship to the overriding issue of the hatred of Jews.

Some scholars find reasons to imagine Jesus as a peasant revolutionary, as a prophet come to obliterate male dominance, as a wandering sage who preached a universal and subversive equality, as a divine agent announcing the imminent End of Days.
⁴
Much of recent Jesus research is greeted skeptically by more traditional scholars. Raymond Brown, for example, who among Roman Catholics was perhaps the most widely respected New Testament expert of the late twentieth century, responded sharply. "Those who advance such views of Jesus often claim they are trying to reshape Christian belief and proclamation. More bluntly, however, their views of Jesus would make traditional Christian belief illusory and traditional proclamation irresponsible."
⁵
But isn't "traditional proclamation" the issue here? The scholars have their arguments, Crossan and Brown in particular. A key question divides them, and we will return to it. The Jesus Seminar is mocked by its critics because of a penchant for calling news conferences, peddling its radical critiques in the popular media. Scholars wince, but the popular media are what the rest of us read and see. We are the ones whose attitudes about Jesus, and therefore about "the Jews," have done so much to shape (and misshape) history. Are ordinary believers worthy of the insights of scholarship? Will we be scandalized, for example, by the suspicion that Jesus—in his interior life and in his observances; in his preaching, even, and in his death—really was a Jew?
⁶
Can the Christian imagination envisage Jesus as the Jewish artist Marc Chagall did in his
White Crucifixion,
as a crucified figure saved from the indignity of nakedness not by a loincloth but by a
tallit,
the fringed shawl worn by a Jew while praying?
⁷
If Jesus were alive today, would he be one of those fervent black-hatted figures davening at the Western Wall?
⁸

In other words, what if Jesus was really a Jew from beginning to end? What if that was the single large conclusion of all the work of history, archaeology, anthropology, and cultural analysis? To repeat Susannah Heschel's question, Would "the foundation of Christianity as a distinctive and unparalleled religion [be] shattered?" Heschel was writing of the nineteenth-century Christian urge to "demonstrate a difference," but don't the origins of this problem rest with those first-century "Christians" acting on the same impulse?
⁹

The most radical and precedent-setting critique of that first-century impulse, at least as written by a Christian, was offered in 1974 in
Faith and
Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism,
by the Catholic feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether. That Jesus was proclaimed early on as the Messiah of Israel, opposed by the forces of evil yet victorious over those forces, required a reading of the Torah that not all agreed with. For example, some groups of Jews, like the Pharisees, gave little or no emphasis to messianic expectation, so that when Jesus was proclaimed as a Messiah, instead of as, say, a teacher, such groups were inevitably alienated. Those who declined to assent to a messianic reading of the tradition were quickly placed in the story as embodiments of the evil forces, and in the story they were designated as "the Jews." Thus a later dispute involving a telling of the original Jesus story led to a recasting of that story. The religious claims made for Jesus required a set of villains to reject those claims, and this was a role for which the religiously detached Romans were unsuited. A religious rejection of Jesus by his own people—"his own people received him not"
¹⁰
—became an essential note of the theology, or Christology, implied in the messianic proclamation. So for Ruether, "the left hand of Christology"
¹¹
is a rejection of Judaism, particularly its way of reading the Scriptures. That rejection amounts to an act of revenge for "Judaism's" prior rejection—not of Jesus but of the story told about him. Christology itself is a source of Christian contempt for Jews.

Ruether's critics have dismissed her work for what they took to be an implication that the hatred of Jews is ontologically tied to Christian faith. One Catholic official ranked Ruether's book with Hochhuth's
The Deputy
for having "skewed" the debate about Catholic responsibility for the Holocaust. This official defined Ruether's assertion that antisemitism is rooted in Christology as "the 'straight-line method' of going immediately from the Gospels to the death camps," and accused her of "conveniently ignoring that, in fact, it took almost two millennia to move from the one to the other, a rather long period of time to fail to account for. Ruether's thesis is seriously flawed. It leaves Christians with the stark choice of abandoning our faith in Christ or learning to live with being endemically antisemitic."
¹²

Critics of Ruether's sweeping indictment of Christology are right to insist, as Krister Stendahl put it to me in conversation, "that it all depends on what Christology you have." But it is not true that Ruether's position regarding the Christology that has dominated Christian thinking for centuries is "seriously flawed." The criticism just cited is wrong on two counts. First, the matter of time. If the death camps are causally linked through two millennia to mistakes made by the first generation of Christians—and I believe they are—can they still not be acknowledged as mistakes? What difference does it make whether two years have passed or two thousand if the causal link can be made? And second, we Christians have another choice besides rejection of Jesus or living with an antisemitism supposedly intrinsic to Christianity. In the light of what those first-generation mistakes led to, we can revise even now what we believe about Jesus. I make the assertion as a
Catholic
Christian, for what has been distinctive about the Catholic tradition ever since Martin Luther raised the banner of
sola scriptura,
or "Scripture alone," as the measure of truth has been its emphasis on the claim that the normative literature of our community was produced by that community, and not the other way around. The New Testament, that is, was made by the Church; the Church was not made by the New Testament. That is why, speaking generally, Catholics differ from Protestants in the importance given to the authority of the Bible on the one hand, and to the authority of the Church on the other. Therefore, Catholics more than Protestants would tend to say that the community has authority over its normative literature. How that authority is to be exercised and how that literature—if shown, for example, to be in some part antisemitic—should be reinterpreted are questions that arise only after the basic confrontation with this truth occurs. The assumption of this book is that a revision in what we believe about Jesus and what we say about him is necessary.