The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  Then what advantage has the Jew?

  (Romans 3:1)

  And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name in heaven given among men by which we must be saved.

  (Acts 4:12)

  For you, brethren, became imitator of the churches of God in Christ Jesus which are in Judea; for you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all men by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they may be saved, so as always to fill up the measure of their sins. But God’s wrath has come upon them at last!

  (I Thessalonians 2:14–16)

  Given what the Bible clearly says, and if one takes what the Bible says seriously, how can anyone fault Bailey Smith for what he said? The conventional wisdom is that the Bible, and particularly the New Testament, defines how Christians are to see themselves and to see others in relation to themselves. Must the Christian identity be sacrificed, muted, or compromised in order to satisfy the sensibilities of others, particularly of Jews? One Christian point of view toward anti-Semitism, alas of long-standing, is that anti-Semitism would disappear if all Jews simply accepted Jesus as the Messiah and became Christians. “Completed Jews,” as the Jews for Jesus describe Jews who affirm the messiahship of Jesus, would then accept the essential truths of the Christian scriptures as true not only for Christians, but true for themselves as well. The Christian ambition for the conversion of the Jews, a conversion regularly prayed for from the Middle Ages until fairly recent days, in the Christian liturgies for Good Friday, would then be accomplished, and the New Testament prayer attributed to Jesus, “that they all may be one,” would be answered.

  The Conventional Wisdom

  The conventional wisdom for most modern Christians is that we differentiate ourselves from the harsh and cruel anti-Semitism of former times. We do not engage in persecution of the Jews in the brutal fashion of premodern Europe. We are not like the medieval Christians, who, on their way to the crusades to rescue the Holy Land from godless Islam, also boasted of slaying Jews as they traveled. We recoil at the cruel pogroms of Europe, the expulsion of the Jews from Christian countries, the creation of ghettos, the blatant discrimination, great and small, against the Jews in the most civilized countries of Europe. Some of us wince at Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, and at Fagin in Oliver Twist, and feel a guilty pleasure when we like the music of that colossal anti-Semite Richard Wagner. Culturally, we have, over a very long period of time, become sensitive to the overt social and political anti-Semitism that has stained all Western societies, and we recoil at any egregious manifestations of Jew-baiting and discrimination. Tolerance and the American sense of fair play keep us, as a rule, aware of the risks to ourselves and to our society of anti-Semitism, and we recognize in the Father Coughlins of an earlier generation, and in the David Dukes of our own, the blatant dangers to our cherished civic pluralism.

  Yet, while recognizing the social and cultural dimensions of anti-Semitism, and while seeking to redress past grievances and to prevent new ones, we nevertheless should remember that anti-Semitism is at heart a religious phenomenon, and for Christians, at the heart of religious conviction and identity, sanctioned by the Bible and by the culture of interpretation that shapes how we read and hear the Bible. Temperance was an issue in which the Bible was used to support an extra-biblical concern; the Bible represented a divided mind on the issue of slavery; but, and alas for the case of anti-Semitism, the Bible seems to be hardly ambiguous at all. We could argue with Bailey Smith’s politics, his good sense and judgment, his cultural sensitivity, his sense of propriety, and his responsibility as a public figure of significant influence; how, though, could we argue with his reading of the New Testament, which seems not only to justify his position toward the prayers of Jews, unpalatable as it may be, but represents as well the way in which his fellow Christians for nearly two thousand years have read the same texts and reached something of the same conclusions? This is not to say that all Christians and all readings of Christian scriptures are inherently anti-Semitic. It is to say that the virus of anti-Semitism is in the bloodstream of inherited Christianity, and that it takes enormous effort and will to address that painfully indisputable fact.

  The “original sin” of Christianity is not so much the fall from grace in the Garden of Eden and the consequent loss of innocence; for Christians the original sin of anti-Semitism has to do with the fact that in the name of the risen Christ and the loving Jesus, and in pursuit of the righteousness and virtue of his service, we Christians, in the name of good and of God, are responsible for the systematic destruction of God’s chosen and beloved people, the Jews. “As a Christian,” wrote a 1937 prizewinning essayist in a little book, How to Combat Anti-Semitism in America, published by Opinion, a journal of Jewish life and letters, “I find it difficult to look a Jew in the eyes without a sense of shame. As a member of one of the great majority groups that outnumber the Jews of the world by more than a hundred to one, I feel like a cad and a coward because of anti-Semitism.” The essay was titled “A Job for Christians.” And so it is.

  It is not an easy job, however, for how can the average reader of scripture be expected to read the account of the crucifixion in Matthew 27, and not see in Holy Writ that “the people” in verses 25 and 26, the Jews, accept responsibility for the death of Jesus when they demand that Pilate, the governor, crucify him? Not only do they accept responsibility for themselves, relieving the Roman civil authorities of it, but they accept responsibility for their children as well. “His blood be on us and our children,” invites both the epithet of “Christ killers,” and a blood curse upon all Jews down through the centuries. Repeated in Latin homilies, and enshrined in the great passion music of Christian composers, this attribution of Jewish acceptance of guilt for the death of Jesus reminded Jewish Christians and Christian biblical scholars that in the Hebrew Bible bloodguilt or illicit bloodshed pollutes the earth. Such contamination, according to Numbers 35:33–34, can be expunged only by shedding the blood of the killer or killers. “You shall not thus pollute the land in which you live,” says Numbers, “and no expiation can be made for the land, for the blood that is shed in it, except by the blood of him who shed it.” This is nothing less than a license to kill in the name of avenging the blood of Jesus. It is not the heirs of Pontius Pilate and of Roman civil authority who are to make expiation; it is the Jews. This was not some abstract point of theology or some obscure matter of biblical exegesis. This was clear to anyone, anywhere, who ever bore a grudge against a Jew. Is it any wonder, then, that when Jews see a cross they both fear and expect a knock on the door in the middle of the night?

  Responsibility for the death of Jesus—indeed, in orthodox Christian doctrine, the death of God—is grave enough. Continuing obduracy in the face of the claims of Christianity compounds the original grievance against the Jews. Refusing to recognize Jesus—whose name is above every name—as Lord, and hindering those who do, is the sin of the Jew who is called variously in the epistles “stiff-necked,” “hard of heart,” and even, by the early Christians, “enemies of God.” In the English prayer-books descended from the Latin rites of the Roman Catholic Church of ancient times, among the so-called solemn collects on Good Friday until very recent days would be found one that numbers the Jews among Turks, infidels, and heretics and, after asking God’s mercy on them, prays:

  …and take away from them all ignorance, hardness of heart, and contempt of thy word; and so fetch them home, blessed Lord, to thy flock, that they may be saved among the remnant of the true Israelites, and be made one fold, under one shepherd Jesus Christ our Lord.

  Recent revisions of the Book of Common Prayer have softened this collect considerably, and the English version is itself a toned-down version of the old Roman collect, which referred to the “perfidious Jews.”

  With the destruction of the Jewish Temple in C.E. 70, Gentiles saw themselves prove
n right and the Jews wrong. The Jews’ punishment had now begun, and all that had been theirs, the covenant and promises of the Hebrew Bible, even the very name Israel, now passed into the possession of the Christians. Augustine, one of Christianity’s most significant thinker since biblical times, would write in the fourth century that “all that was concealed in the Old [Testament] was revealed in the New [Testament],” meaning that the very Hebrew scriptures themselves were now in full possession of the Christians.

  All of this is deeply rooted in the subconscious identity of the Christian inheritance, where, on the basis of reading and hearing the Bible, and of being faithful to the Church whose book it is, to be a Christian would appear to require that one be anti-Jewish, and it confirms at the heart of the Christian faith what Krister Stendahl, sometime bishop of the Church of Sweden, calls “the most persistent heresy of Christian theology and practice.” What will it take to unmask this demon and set us all free?

  After Auschwitz

  “Unless the church is reconciled with the Israel of God,” writes Clark M. Williamson in a Christian Century piece of October 13, 1993, “The Church’s Mission and the People of Israel,” “it is hard to see how it can claim to be reconciled with the God of Israel.” Fifty years after the Holocaust and the nearly successful attempt to rid the world of the Jews, and nearly as many years after the founding of the State of Israel, what can be news about the relationship between Christians and Jews? Despite the memorials to the Jewish dead of the German campaign against the Jews, and the sustained visibility of the new Jewish state rising out of those ashes; despite the vigilance of the Anti-Defamation League and the best of intentions, anti-Semitism remains an ugly fact of life for both Jews and Christians. The most fundamental place to address its root causes is in the Bible, and it is in the aftermath of Auschwitz that this process has at long last begun. We have needed new lenses through which to read old texts, new experiences through which to filter old truths and preconceptions. If any good can come out of the world’s descent into the abyss that was Auschwitz, a thoroughgoing reassessment of the biblical basis for Christian anti-Semitism is one such good. Some of the best and the brightest of the new generation of biblical scholars have been addressing themselves to this matter for some time. The harvest of their scholarship is both considerable and radical, radical in the correct sense of that much-maligned word, which means getting back to the root.

  No one argues that Adolf Hitler functioned as a Christian in the promulgation of his racist theories, but it can hardly be doubted that centuries of anti-Semitic readings of Christian scripture gave him cultural permission, indeed encouragement, to do as he did. If the connection for the Christian is difficult to sustain, it is not for the Jew, who, through the voice of Elie Wiesel, recalls that the German officers and staff who conducted the daily work of the prison camp at Auschwitz received communion weekly in the Catholic parish church. The work of Satan and the work of God in this horrible proximity seemed to go hand in hand. If for the Jew the question after Auschwitz, as Richard Rubenstine once put it, is “Where is God?,” then for the thoughtful Christian the question is exactly the same. For a generation, biblical scholarship has sought to find and disseminate an honest answer.

  Could We Have Got It Wrong?

  Perhaps the most visible public theologian practicing today is Professor Hans Küng, director of the Institute for Ecumenical Research at the University of Tübingen. He has been described as the Pavarotti of theology, not so much because he shares the enormous popularity of the Italian tenor who brings to ordinary people in the Hollywood Bowl the high culture of opera but because he takes theology out of the seminary, and even outside the church, and into the popular discourse of our age. Now nearly twenty years ago, as custodian of a set of endowed lectures at Harvard, I invited Professor Küng to address the university on the subject of his then new and very popular book, On Being a Christian. For three nights he held forth in the university church, filled to capacity with the great, the good, and the generally curious and eager. Priests and nuns from all over New England mingled with street people and with the university crowd. Each evening, in an almost parody of the German professor, Küng delivered himself of a set of theses that he proposed to answer, an intellectual’s catechism of the Christian faith. He took no prisoners, condescended to no one, and put in a bravura performance. The format was as old as a medieval disputation; the content was refreshingly, even stunningly, radical. He caught and kept the rapt attention of one of the most secular audiences on earth, and he did so by making them think, perhaps many of them for the first time, about the consequences of thinking about holy things.

  In the years since, Hans Küng has neither been silent, to the dismay of his ecclesiastical Fathers in God in Rome, nor has he been unproductive. In 1992 he published Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow, in which he addresses head-on the vexed topic of anti-Judaism in the New Testament. Asked if he would conclude that the New Testament is simply an anti-Jewish collection of documents, Küng said, “The apologetic positions of Christians in former times should not be replaced with any polemical position associated with our times.” Conceding that there are elements of anti-Judaism in the New Testament, he said that “we have to understand them in their historical context. We also have to strive at all costs to avoid interpreting them in the light of the anti-Judaism which lies within ourselves and within the Christian community.” In an interview on his book with James H. Charlesworth of Explorations, Küng was asked how we translate the Greek New Testament so that it reflects its social and narrative context but cannot be used to inflame hatred for the Jews in our communities. To this he replied that “translations implying that Jesus was a non-Jew and that the Jews were against him are inappropriate and misrepresentative.”3 For Küng, as for so many scholars of the New Testament and its relationship to anti-Jewish sentiment, the question of translation and the circumstances of the writing itself—text, context, and subtext, indeed, even pretext, as we might say in the literary trade—is critical, and a matter too important to be left to the experts.

  An example of the importance of understanding context is the gospel of John, widely regarded as the most anti-Jewish of the four gospels. There are constant confrontations between Jesus and “the Jews,” and the Jews are made to represent an ossified orthodoxy critical of Jesus and eager to do him harm and to prevent his teaching from being heard. The Jews claim to speak for Abraham, but Jesus tells them that they do not understand Abraham, nor do they act as Abraham did. Even the seemingly innocent miracle at Cana is interpreted in the form of anti-Jewish polemic, a fact that could easily be missed in our earlier fascination with the matter of wine and water. At the hands of a good exegete, the wine that had been exhausted quickly became the old covenant, the law, or the Jews; and the new wine, the best, which was served last and caused the comment of praise and surprise, this was the gospel now preached by Jesus. Within the very first miracle in this gospel the distinction is made between those who followed the old way, the Jews, and those who were now the beneficiaries of the new, the followers of Jesus, who became Christians. The climate of comparison and opposition is established at the very start of the gospel.

  Biblical scholars are quick to point out that the gospel itself is not anti-Semitic, but that “the text nurtures anti-Semitism in the church today.” Robert Kyser, in “The Gospel of John and Anti-Jewish Polemic,” tells us that it is important for the reader of John to remember that everybody in the discourse of John is Jewish. There are no “Christians” there; they are all Jews. Second, we are to remember that “the gospel [of John] was written in response to the exclusion of the Johannine church from the synagogue, and the subsequent dialogue between these two religious parties.” In other words, the gospel is one side of a bitter family quarrel. Third, we are to remember that, as in the case with most quarrels, and particularly with those of family, the arguments are heated, even exaggerated, and the literary form for a heated and exaggerated form is a polemic. I
nvective, exaggeration, hyperbole, sharply cast distinctions—this is all the stuff of polemic; and in the gospel of John the polemic is addressed to one group of Jews by another group of Jews.4

  However, those leaders of the synagogue responsible for the expulsion of the Christian Jews, so the theory goes, can also be seen to be responsible for the death of the Lord. Historical circumstance has now been introduced to support the polemic, and “herein lies a dreadful danger. It [the Gospel] is now read and interpreted outside of its original situation and beyond its original purpose. With the passing of centuries the historical organ becomes more and more remote, less and less known or knowable.” What was situational has become normative, and the tragic consequences are only too well known to us.

  Another example of a critical misreading is to be found in the letter of Paul to the Romans. The history of interpretation is the history of the presuppositions that interpreters bring to their work. Biblical interpretation is a cumulative affair and, like a giant snowball, it gathers momentum on the basis of its previous movement and picks up much in its path which becomes incorporated into the mass. The three great commentaries on Romans are those of Augustine, Luther, and Karl Barth, and none of these was written after Auschwitz. This means that the presence of anti-Semitism in the text of a major Christian writing, and the moral and social implications of such a reading for both Jews and Christians, were not yet the problems they would prove to be when after Auschwitz one was compelled to face the issue. Perhaps it is a perverse violation of the Clinton administration’s policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Do we really want to know if there is anti-Semitic content in our most sacred book? If there is, and if we know that there is, then whatever are we to do with that information?