Saturday, April 11, 1998

Scholars say the traditional Christian view that the Jews were responsible for the crucifixion is 'the longest lie'

By Carol McGraw / The Orange County Register

Ruth Moos will never forget the time her children came home crying when next-door playmates called them "Jesus killers." Or the time her daughter was expelled from school for fighting a schoolmate who uttered similar ugly words.

Moos had seen what hate does. Her family was torn apart during the Holocaust and she was sent to live with a foster family in the United States. Repeatedly, over the years Moos told her children not to fight hate with hate. And she emphasized, "it's nonsense that the Jews killed Jesus."

Her children are grown now, and Moos is a Leisure World resident. She attends University Synagogue, which shares quarters with United Church of Christ in Irvine, Calif. The congregations -- one Jewish, one Christian -- often pray together, dine together, discuss their faiths' common Jewish heritage. Friday, the church will observe Good Friday, the day Jesus was crucified. The synagogue will mark the first day of Passover, commemorating the Jews' liberation from slavery in Egypt.

The relationship between the congregations has helped wipe out old wounds of hatred, Moos says.

Interfaith alliances such as the one Moos is involved in are becoming more common, but overcoming centuries of anti-Semitism also must focus on Gospel accounts of the crucifixion that blame the Jews for killing Jesus.

Many theologians today are debating that question: Who killed Jesus?

One Scripture considered a flash point for anti-Semitism is part of the Good Friday liturgy for many Christian services. The passage has been so inflammatory that, as recently as the 1940s, Jews in some places hid in their homes on Good Friday to avoid beatings or even murder by Christians.

Matthew 27: 25-26: "And all the people (Jews) answered, 'His blood be on us and on our children.' Then he (Pontius Pilate) ... having scourged Jesus, delivered him to be crucified."

This passage -- which seems to exonerate the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate and place blame on the Jews for the execution of Jesus -- has throughout the centuries been misinterpreted with tragic consequences, scholars say.

"It's no longer possible to think of the Passion fiction as benign propaganda. That the Jews killed Jesus has been our longest lie," says John Dominic Crossan, a biblical scholar and former Catholic priest.

Peter Gomes, Harvard University professor of Christian morals, agrees. "No one argues that 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."

Last month, Pope John Paul II issued an "act of repentance" for failure of Catholics to stop the mass killings of Jews by Nazis. The Catholic Church altered its theology in the 1960s, emphasizing that the Jews were no longer to be held responsible for Jesus' death.

But reassessing history is no easy job, Gomes says. "How can the average reader of Scripture be expected to read the account in Matthew 27: 25-27 and think that the people, the Jews, were not involved?"

The position of the Jews in Jesus' time was desperate. They had been in servitude to Rome for almost a century and, along with their loss of freedom, were being taxed almost beyond endurance, Houston Smith says in his book "The World's Religions."

A group of powerful Jews wanted to keep peace with Rome. Most of the other Jews looked to God to help them out of their plight. Another group sought to revitalize Judaism by strict adherence to religious law. Jesus offered another option -- a social revolution.

The Passion narratives, written an estimated four to six decades after his death, tell how Jesus came to Jerusalem during the Jewish Passover celebration, as did Jews from all over the Roman-controlled empire. Jesus had been been baptized by John the Baptist, an apocalyptic preacher, and had launched his own career as a teacher. Chafing under Roman rule and Roman oppression, Jesus preached for a new Kingdom of God on Earth.

Civil unrest had shaken the city during earlier Passovers, and the Romans were on alert, especially since the holiday celebrated the Jews' previous liberation from Egyptian slavery.

Amid this tension, Jesus chose to make a political statement by overturning the tables of the temple money changers. For centuries, Christians believed Jesus' action was a protest against fiscal wrongdoing, but many scholars now believe Jesus' statement was about the temple leaders' lack of social concern and collaboration with Rome.

In Mark 11:17, Jesus says: "Ye have made it (the temple) a den of thieves." Crossan says this is a literary flashback to Jeremiah's warning in the Old Testament that the temple should not be a refuge from life, and worship should not be a refuge from justice.

Regardless of motive, the action got him crucified after his disciple Judas led Roman soldiers to him.

Some scholars say the New Testament narratives that describe Jesus' final days were the work of writers reconstructing history for their own political and theological needs decades after the Crucifixion.

Jesus died in about the 30th year of the first century, or 30 C.E.

"The Gospels may sound like they are about the 20s and 30s, but they are about the 70s, 80s 90s," says Crossan, professor emeritus at DePaul University in Chicago and author of "The Birth of Christianity" (Harper SanFrancisco, 1998). He is co-founder of the controversial Santa Rosa-based Jesus Seminar, a group of about 100 scholars searching for the historical Jesus. The group, which includes experts in Greco-Roman history, archaeology and linguistics, meets twice yearly. They comb historical writings for "evidence of the man behind the Gospels."

The Passion narratives, contained in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, were penned decades after Jesus' death by unknown Jewish authors. Mark, written in the 70s, is thought to be a source for Luke and Matthew. No earlier Passion narratives have been found. Matthew was written in the 80s, John and Luke in the 90s.

The Rev. Fred Plummer of United Church of Christ, Irvine, doesn't see the passages as anti-Semitic in themselves.

"It's the way they are read," he says. "It's amazing to me how so many Christians are completely unaware of the political and religious struggles going on when they were being written."

The years after the crucifixion were tumultuous for Judaism. The Jerusalem Temple, considered the heart of Judaism, was destroyed by Romans in 77 C.E., after an unsuccessful revolt by the Jews.

"The whole Jewish religious structure imploded," Plummer says.

The Jewish temple system of priests and wealthy patrons was crumbling, being replaced by a more community-based worship led by rabbis.

The followers of Jesus were still very much Jewish, a sect within Judaism. They also were in crisis. The Kingdom of God had not arrived as Jesus had preached, and the Gospel writers were trying to keep the movement alive with their politicized versions of Jesus' story.

The writers tended to direct their Passion narratives against competing Jewish groups, and some exonerated Pilate because they feared critical comments would bring the wrath of Rome down on the Jesus movement, scholars say.

Karen King, a Harvard University professor of ancient Christianity, believes poetic license plays a big part in the Passion narratives.

Mark and Matthew say that Jesus was convicted during two trials, one religious, one Roman. Luke records three trials -- first before the Jewish priest Caiaphas; second before Herod, the Jewish governor appointed by the Romans; and the third before the Roman prefect Pilate. Also mixed into the gospels are references that "the Jews," "the crowd," "the people" called for the execution.

"There was no temple scene, no trials, no Jewish plot," King believes. However, the Romans were out to keep law and order, and Jesus, she says, "who had a following big enough to make them nervous, somehow got in the way."

Crossan also questions the trials: "The Roman soldiers would not have had to go up the chain of command to get rid of someone who was at the time considered a nobody," Crossan says.

The Gospels also tell how Judas was paid 30 pieces of silver for leading soldiers to Jesus. Some scholars say the story must be true, because Christians would never have made up such a character as one of their own. Others believe Judas was a literary device invented by Gospel writers.

Crossan, who does believe there was a Judas who betrayed Jesus, says one extreme view is that the name Judas, said in Hebrew, sounds much like Judaism "and so was created to accuse Judaism of betraying Jesus. He simply incarnates the anti-Judaism of earliest Christianity."

The scholarly view of Jesus' death has, in some quarters, been slow to be embraced by those in the pews and is even thought by some to verge on heretical.

Among those who prefer a traditional interpretation of the Bible are Evangelicals and some mainline groups who adhere to a more fundamental reading of the Scriptures.

Scholars disagree on how much of ancient history can be reconstructed. Raymond E. Brown, a Catholic priest and author of the two-volume "The Death of the Messiah," has said that while historical investigation deserves respect, it can "become an obsession that clouds understanding."

Last year, the Anglican Institute in Colorado Springs, Colo., held a seminar to counter the emphasis on revisionist history. The emphasis should be on spirituality, says the Rev. Donald Armstrong, institute director. "We stayed away from debating the political issues. Instead, we tried to promote the proclamation of Jesus so it will touch hearts. Then people can deal with the issues in a benevolent way."

But Crossan is adamant that accounts of Jesus' death must be understood in historical context. "The Gospels aren't going to go away. It is important for people to learn how to read them."

Plummer says it's important to look at the larger messages.

"We have always killed our prophets -- Martin Luther King, Jesus, Gandhi, Che Guevara -- those who would help the marginalized among us. Jesus was a radical and he calls us to look at our own hypocrisy, and we hate that."

Plummer says that the important question may not be who killed Jesus 2,000 years ago but this: "Who among us would kill Jesus today?"

(c) 1998, The Orange County Register (Santa Ana, Calif.).

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