Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (24 page)

The point, however, is that this phenomenon of Jewish indifference to the coming of one announced as the Jewish Messiah called that kerygma into question from the start. This was true despite the fact that, in the decades alter Jesus, there were various tellings of his story, with some Christians emphasizing the Wisdom literature of Israel over the "suffering servant" tradition, and others seeing Jesus mostly in the context of apocalyptic expectations.
²⁸
But whether Christians were householders or itinerants, city dwellers or rural peasants, Judean Jews or Hellenized Jews, always the impulse involved a justification of Jesus' authority as "the Christ" by an appeal to Jewish Scriptures.

Ultimately, that appeal was made as much by non-Jewish as by Jewish Christians. Indeed, one of the consequences of the centrality of Jewish Scriptures to the story of Jesus was the ready presumption from the beginning—a presumption one still finds today—that even non-Jewish Christians were authorized and qualified to define Jewish traditions. I have learned this by making such a presumption myself. In the course of investigations like mine, Christians commonly ask the question What is a Jew?—and then answer it. For example, in his book
The Partings of the Ways,
the distinguished Christian scholar James Dunn has a chapter entitled "The Four Pillars of Second Temple Judaism." He defines those pillars as monotheism, election, land focused in the Temple, and covenant focused in the Torah. He shows how each one is undercut by an essential Christian affirmation, exemplified by Stephen's challenge to the Temple, Paul's to the Law, John's assertion of the Word's divinity, and Paul's extension of election to Gentiles. This analysis forces the conclusion that the "parting of the ways" between Judaism and Christianity was inevitable.
²⁹

But what if Judaism is not so neatly defined? In his book
Telling Tales,
the Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner objects to the way in which Christians define Jewish concepts of God in order to claim a greater humaneness or uniqueness for Christian concepts. In a footnote, he comments on Dunn's four pillars, which he calls "excellent proposals." "My problem," Neusner writes, "is only whether these 'pillars' really supported the Judaic systems that will have rested on them; whether they really make much difference in the systemic statements of various Judaisms."
³⁰
To suggest that the "ism" of Judaism was far less clearly defined at that time than subsequent Christian interpretations assert is, at least implicitly, to suggest that the split between "Judaism" and "Christianity" may not have been inevitable at all.

If there was a diversity among the first-century followers of Jesus, there was an even greater diversity among Jewish groups. Dunn's four pillars notwithstanding, the Greek-speaking Jews of the Diaspora probably had more in common with the Hellenized followers of Jesus than with the Pharisaic-rabbinic Jews, or the Qumran factions that emphasized a narrow reading of the tradition. One might say, equivalently, that secular American Jews today have more in common with their secular Gentile fellow citizens than with the ultra-Orthodox of Mea Shearim. To take one example, late-first-century Pharisees would have agreed with Christians, as reflected in Jesus' lament over Jerusalem, that the destruction was the result of Israel's once again turning away from God: "O Jerusalem! Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you!"
³¹
But the Pharisees took Israel's contemporary lapse, as revealed by the destruction, which was an enactment of the will of God, to mean that a rededication to a strict reading and observance of the Law was required. Just as Christian Jews saw the Temple's destruction as proof of establishment Judaism's failure in rejecting Jesus, Pharisaic-rabbinic Judaism saw that same destruction as proof—proof everywhere!—that overt challenges to Rome, which the story of Jesus could be taken to typify, were self-defeating. The post-destruction rabbis settled in Galilee, centering their piety on the Law and rejecting the Jesus movement more than ever.

Whatever it "proved," the destruction of
70 C.E
. served to focus the dispute among surviving Jewish groups, not only by narrowing their number, but by causing a religious identity crisis for all, with the elimination of the cultic center. As we saw earlier, the rabbis and the Christians were now locked in a struggle over the future of Israel. The rabbinic side of the conflict has been sketchily preserved, but one assumes its intensity. The Sanhedrin at Yavneh, where the rabbis had established themselves, for example, issued a condemnation of those who followed Jesus: "May the
minim
[heretics] perish!"
³²
When this occurred and whether the judgment applied to all followers of Jesus are uncertain.
³³
It is clear, however, that in some synagogues at least, Jesus' followers were early defined as apostates. The Epistles of Paul and Acts of the Apostles assume a high level of "Jewish" violence against "Christians" (the killing of Stephen and of James, the brother of Jesus; Paul says, "Five times I have received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one"
³⁴
). There are records also of a "Jewish" massacre of "Christians" in the year 132.
³⁵

On the Christian side, as the drafting of the kerygma with its polemical element went through numerous stages, beginning with those first post-crucifixion sessions of the "healing circle," one can see how the rules of narrative construction were followed. Not only did real-time competition with the rabbis lead to an emphasis on conflict, so did the very form of the story. Every schoolchild knows that a story consists of a beginning, middle, and end, as we saw earlier with Aristotle's masterly reflection on
Oedipus Rex.
In his terms, the structure of dramatic narrative involves conflict, crisis, and resolution. If the story of Jesus were written as straight history, the conflict would be defined as one between the Jewish Jesus movement and the Roman overlords, with some Jewish characters in supporting roles as Roman collaborators. But the conflict of the story as set in the year 30 took shape to reflect the conflict of the storytellers between, say, 35 and 90—an intensifying conflict ever more with fellow Jews than with Rome. The venality of Rome was a given for all concerned. There was no need to assert it or to make it central, in contrast to the struggle with one's sibling rival. That is why the Gospels prefer the centurion to the rabbi.

The long account in Matthew of Jesus' rebuke of the Pharisees is an example.
³⁶
Here Jesus proclaims his intention to "fulfill" the Law and the Prophets, which means setting a higher moral and religious standard than the "men of old." To them it was said, for instance, "You shall not kill ... But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment ... You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that ever)' one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart."

As if the tradition of the "men of old" were concerned only with form, not meaning; with the exterior, not the interior; with appearances, not reality. No one with the slightest acquaintance with Jewish Scriptures—certainly, from what we know of him as a Jew, not Jesus—could have characterized the "old" morality so crudely. This is the initiating, perhaps the licensing, example of what Neusner derides as the Christian habit of offering derogatory definitions of Judaism for the express purpose of highlighting a more benign Christianity. "For I tell you," Matthew has Jesus say, "unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."
³⁷
At the risk of overemphasizing the point, but also, familiar as I am with what is still routinely preached in Church pulpits, I repeat: This slander of the Pharisees originates not in Jesus' contest with them but in the conflict of the second generation of his followers with the Pharisees.

Conflict, crisis, resolution. Of course, the crisis in the story, what Aristotle defines as the "catastrophe," or moment of recognition
³⁸
—what James Joyce calls the epiphany
³⁹
—comes in the crucifixion-Resurrection event. Because "the Jews" with whom Christian Jews were in conflict were blind to that epiphany, which even a centurion sees, the resolution of the story—the end—follows from it. The resolution is that the old Israel is superseded by the new Israel. Implicit in supersession is a fact fraught with implication for the future—that the old Israel no longer has any reason to exist. In effect, the old Israel, by rejecting Jesus, has forfeited the right to be part of the new Israel, which defines itself now as the "true Israel."
⁴⁰

All of this—from the denigration of the Pharisees, to the delegitimizing of Israel's right to exist, to the implicitly supersessionist division between old and new, false and true—is what is meant by the teaching of contempt, a phrase originating with Jules Isaac, the scholar whom we earlier cited as a decisive influence on Pope John XXIII.
⁴¹
All of this is why Rosemary Radford Ruether can regard antisemitism as the left hand of Christology. It is built into the permanent structure of Christian worship, as Old Testament readings lay out "types" and "foreshadowings" and "promises" that in themselves are partial and superficial—mere shadows. And then the New Testament readings follow, reflecting the inherent structure of the kerygma, laying out the ways in which those insufficient promises are "fulfilled" in Jesus. The idea of fulfillment is itself a denigration, a reflection of the deeply embedded structure of conflict between "the Jews" and the followers of Jesus.
⁴²

At its most basic level, this polemic violates everything Jesus can be presumed to have taught about love, and surely contradicts what we can presume about his program of ending intra-Jewish sectarian dispute. As disheartening as this would have been initially, it became even more so as time passed. Those who carried the polemic forward were increasingly of the Gentile world. What we have here is not restricted to that particular era or movement, but is a manifestation of the inbuilt limits of human thinking about the past—the way people habitually read their own experience back into an earlier, different experience. Each generation can be counted on to misread the full context of its predecessor, which is why historical judgments, including those of this book, must be rendered as self-critically as possible. Human history is by definition contingent, and accidents of history—the Roman war, the loss of the Temple, the dispersal from Jerusalem, the readiness of Gentiles to be recruited—make it more so. Because the Scriptures, however sacred, are the record of human perceptions developed over time, we should not be surprised that they, too, reflect this fact of the human condition. It is when Scriptures are read as if they were exempt from the human condition that their effects can become lethal.

Thus the war and the Gentiles changed everything. Unlike the originators of the story of Jesus, these new Christians, when they used the words "the Jews," were not talking about a group to which they themselves belonged. It is at this point that something unprecedented and truly dangerous began to happen: "Jews" became the embodiment of the other. Because the conflict was cast as one between good and evil, consistent with Jewish apocalyptic tradition within which all of this unfolds, "the Jews" now became identified in the minds of Christians with the devil. An ethos of fulfillment became an ethos of demonization.
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13. Paul, the Martyr of Shalom

T
HOUGH THE FEROCIOUS
conflict between "Christians" and "Jews" developed gradually over the decades of the first century, and then the next, the direction of its unfolding was apparent early. One who is so often faulted for having imposed this structure on the Christian story was also the first to bemoan it. I am thinking, naturally, of Paul, whose role here I take quite personally. I referred in Part One to my vocation to the priesthood, and it is relevant that the religious order to which I belonged through most of my youth was the Paulist Fathers, more formally known as the Missionary Society of Saint Paul the Apostle. Beginning with my taking of "final promises," which is how we referred to our lifelong vows, I was entitled to use the letters CSP after my name, for Congregation of Saint Paul.

Paul never knew Jesus. We learn mainly from Acts of the Apostles that he was a tentmaker by trade, of a family established enough to have inherited the rights of Roman citizenship. He was probably born in Tarsus, a provincial capital located in present-day Turkey, sometime between 1 and 5
C.E.,
which would have made him five or ten years younger than Jesus. There is reason to think that he was a short man (the Latin word
paulus
means "small"),
¹
that he was physically resolute (despite some kind of disability, perhaps epilepsy), and that he was fiercely intelligent. While Jesus was coming to maturity, then moving inexorably from Galilee toward Jerusalem, Paul was being well schooled in Greek and Hebrew. He pursued his vocation as a pious Jew, associated with the Pharisees. He may have been present as an antagonist at the stoning of Stephen, who is remembered as the first Christian martyr. Paul participated not in the "Jewish" persecution of the Church, as it is so often put, but in the intra-Jewish sectarian dispute between those who followed the rabbis and those who followed Jesus. Around the year 35, or about five years after the death of Jesus, something happened "on the road to Damascus" that drew him to the Jesus movement. He became one of its most energetic proponents. During a ministry that lasted until his death, sometime around 65, Paul preached all over the Mediterranean world, and he wrote letters to those who'd associated themselves with the movement through him. These writings, later canonized (made part of the canon, or list), formed the oldest part of the New Testament, the so-called Epistles of Saint Paul.