Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (110 page)

19.
Jewish Antiquities,
17.42; Sanders,
Judaism,
13–14. See also Fredriksen,
Jesus of Nazareth,
64.

20. Sanders,
Judaism,
13.

21. Ibid., 78.

22. Ibid., 41.

23. The Qumran manuscripts, the first of which is said to have been found in 1947 by a goatherd in a cave above the Dead Sea, are a compilation of more than six hundred fragments and texts in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic, representing almost the entire Hebrew Scriptures as well as commentaries, lists of rules, hymns, prayers, and psalms. These documents date to the period between about 200
B.C.E.
and 68
C.E.,
and they reveal a great deal about the life and beliefs of the Essenes. Other manuscripts were discovered around the Dead Sea in the 1950s and 1960s. Altogether, these finds demonstrate that Judaism at the time of Jesus was far more varied, and sectarian, than scholars previously believed. For the first time, the early Christians could be seen, in full context, as one of many Jewish sects. That the last Qumran documents date to 68
C.E.
is significant, because the Essenes, unlike Christians and Pharisees, were wiped out by the Roman assault against Jews that commenced that year.

24.
Jewish Antiquities,
18.21; Fredriksen,
Jesus of Nazareth,
64; Sanders,
Judaism,
14.

25. Wilson,
Paul,
56.

26. Matthew 22:20.

27. Fredriksen,
Jesus of Nazareth,
64.

28. Segal,
Rebecca's Children,
59.

29. Wilson,
Paul,
21.

30. Broshi, "Role of the Temple," 35.

31. Sanders,
Judaism, 117.
See also Fredriksen,
Jesus of Nazareth,
64.

32. Horsley and Silberman,
The Message and the Kingdom,
15.

33. Fredriksen rejects the term "occupation" for the Roman presence in Judea, pointing out that the legions were concentrated in Syria, not Palestine. From those outposts, soldiers could sweep into Judea when necessary. But one of the characteristics of a police state is the relative invisibility of police. Occupation consists more in the mental state of knowing that rigid rule is ruthlessly enforced than in the obvious presence of troops. See Fredriksen,
Jesus of Nazareth,
169.

34. So, for example, from a later period: "The tendency to understand war in late antiquity from a Roman perspective is also a historiographical tradition, which has been compounded by a pervasive, almost unconscious, desire to share the Roman point of view. So the Battle of Adrianople of 378 is a catastrophe; and the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410 is a political disaster. Similarly, the defeat of Attila and his Huns on the Catalaunian Plains in 451 is a good thing." Brent D. Shaw, "War and Violence," in Bowersock et al.,
Late Antiquity,
134.

35. Acts 22:25–29. Note that Paul, in his own writings, never refers to his being a Roman citizen.

36. Wilson,
Paul,
9. It is important to note, in understanding early Christian claims that Jesus was the "Son of God," that the Mediterranean world had already heard such a claim from Caesar Augustus himself.

37. In the Vatican document "Memory and Reconciliation," the Church warns against that "historicism that would relativize the weight of past wrongs and make history justify everything" (4.2). Commenting on this passage, Leon Wieseltier wrote, "Moral absolutists cannot have it both ways. If moral values are timeless, then what is wrong now was wrong then." Wieseltier, "Sorry," 6.

38. Wilson,
Paul,
3.

39. In early 2000, a dispute broke out between Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Muslims over construction of a mosque near the Christian shrine at Nazareth. The construction permit had been issued by the state of Israel, prompting some Palestinians to decry a new version of the old strategy of divide and rule.

40. Sanders,
Judaism,
4.

41. Ibid.

42. Owing to a later error in composing the calendar, the year of Jesus' birth was not o but 4
B.C.E.
See Horsley and Silberman,
The Message and the Kingdom,
16.

43. For this understanding of the politics of Israel at the time of Jesus' birth, I am particularly indebted to Horsley and Silberman; see
The Message and the Kingdom,
9–23.

44. Ibid., 20.

45.
Jewish Antiquities,
17.250–89, quoted by Horsley and Silberman,
The Message and the Kingdom,
20. "Those who appeared to be the less turbulent individuals he imprisoned," Josephus wrote of the Roman general, "the most culpable, in number about two thousand, he crucified."

46. Sanders,
Judaism,
72. In Jerusalem today, archaeologists speculate that an ancient cemetery may abut the Western Wall, but Jewish authorities discourage investigation because if a cemetery were found, Orthodox Jews would no longer be permitted to pray there.

47. "There should be no question or mystery about the brutality of Roman crucifixion. Were we not so familiar with the stylized image of Jesus on the cross and were we not so thoroughly programmed from our earliest school days to admire the ... Roman Empire ... we might be able to see this oppressive, genocidal, imperial mode of torture for what it was." Horsley and Silberman,
The Message and the Kingdom,
85.

48. Luke 2:1.

49. Matthew 27:24.

50.
Embassy to Gaius,
302, quoted by Crossan,
Who Killed Jesus?,
148. See also Wilson,
Paul,
56.

51. Crossan,
Who Killed Jesus?,
148.

52. Fredriksen,
Jesus of Nazareth,
86.

53. Wilson,
Paul,
56.

54. Matthew 27:25.

55. "And as the narratives of Jesus' Passion evolve, we see their increasing tendency to exculpate Pilate and inculpate Jewish authorities—a sensible allocation of hostility and blame since, by the time the evangelists write, Jerusalem's priestly authorities were no more, and the new movement had to find its place in a world ruled by Rome." Fredriksen,
Jesus of Nazareth,
185.

56. Wilson,
Paul,
1, 4, 10.

57. Ibid., 12.

58. Ibid., ii.

59. Ibid., 10.

60. Foster,
Modern Ireland,
484.

61. O'Brien and O'Brien,
History of Ireland,
141.

62. Taylor,
Michael Collins,
152.

63. For more on this aspect of the Nazi method, see Langer,
Admitting the Holocaust.

64. "The stories of Pilate washing his hands of the matter and the bloodthirsty screams of the rabble who chose Barabbas over Jesus are all the work of later Christian writers who—unlike Jesus—were desperately intimidated by the Romans and turned the blame on the Jews to divert accusations of disloyalty or rebellion away from themselves." Horsley and Silberman,
The Message and the Kingdom,
84.

65. The written New Testament is based on oral traditions that included sayings attributed to Jesus, stories about him, and hymns and ritualized confessions of faith. A first written document, now lost, is hypothesized and referred to by scholars as Q, probably a compilation of the sayings of Jesus, composed during the 50s. The letters of Paul were written during the 50s and early 60s, before his death around the year 64. The first Gospel to be written was Mark, around 68. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke were composed around 80 or shortly thereafter. John was written around too.

66. Crossan,
Birth of Christianity,
524.

67. Ibid., 525.

10.
The Threshold Stone

1.
Against Apion,
2.234, quoted by Sanders,
Judaism,
42.

2. Küng,
Judaism,
125.

3. Jews who did not join in the rebellion, and were able to separate themselves from those who did, as in Sepphoris in Galilee, were apparently not attacked by the Romans. Josephus says that Titus, the Roman general and later the emperor who led the siege of Jerusalem in 70, refused to expel Jews from Antioch, showing that Jewish subservience, not racial elimination, was his purpose. On this point, see
Jewish War,
7.110–11.

4. Gilbert,
Atlas of Jewish History,
15.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Fredriksen,
Jesus of Nazareth,
38.

8. Mark 1:23–26.

9. Mark 3:22–27.

10. Mark 3:31.

11. Mark 8:33.

12. Luke 22:52.

13. Barbara H. Geller Nathanson, "Toward a Multicultural Ecumenical History of Women in the First Century/ies
C.E.
," in Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza,
Searching the Scriptures,
vol. 1,
A Feminist Introduction
(New York: Crossroad, 1993), 274.

14. Pagels,
Origin of Satan,
99.

15. John 8:44.

16. Pagels,
Origin of Satan,
104–5.

17. For this summary of the "quest for the historical Jesus," I am indebted to Brown,
Introduction to the New Testament,
817–30.

18. Koester,
Introduction to the New Testament,
vol. 2, 74.

19. Eliot, "The Waste Land," in
Collected Poems,
67.

20. I wrote about this moment in my memoir,
An American Requiem,
252.

21. Meier,
A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus.

22. Matthew 21:12–13.

23. John 2:17–18.

24. John 2:18–22.

25. Mark 13:1.

26. Quoted by Jeremias,
Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus,
24–25.

27. Levenson, "The Temple and the World," 275–6.

28. See, for example, Amos 2:4–5: "Thus says the Lord: 'For three transgressions of Judah, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment; because they have rejected the law of the Lord, and have not kept his statutes, but their lies have led them astray, after which their fathers walked. So I will send a fire upon Judah, and it shall devour the strongholds of Jerusalem.'" Or Amos 5:21–6:1: "I hate and despise your [ Israel's) feasts, I take no delight in your solemn assemblies ... Woe to those who are at ease in Zion."

29. Matthew 23:37–39.

11. Destroy This Temple

1. Avishai,
A New Israel,
3.

2. Tracy,
Dialogue with the Other,
4.

3. See, for example, Brown,
Introduction to the New Testament,
819. The first quest would have been the nineteenth-century effort discussed earlier, and the second would have come after World War II. The distinguishing note of the third quest, in the words of Tom Holmen, "is precisely its laying a clear emphasis and stress on the Jewishness of Jesus." From an unpublished paper, "The Jewishness of Jesus in 'The Third Quest.'"

4. Horsley and Silberman,
The Message and the Kingdom;
E. Schussler Fiorenza,
Jesus;
Borg,
Jesus, A New Vision;
Fredriksen,
Jesus of Nazareth.

5. Brown,
Introduction to the New Testament,
829. Critics of Crossan, and the Jesus Seminar generally, complain of a perpetuation of the "criterion of dissimilarity," as if the "real" teachings of Jesus are only those that are dissimilar from Jewish teachings of his era and from second-century Christian teachings. This criterion leads to the conclusion that almost nothing reported in the Gospels actually originated with Jesus. But a philosophical assumption about human identity underlies this approach—namely, that we have our identity by virtue of the ways in which we differ from those around us. A contrasting view assumes that we have our identity in community, sharing it with others. Thus when Jesus cites the so-called golden rule in Matthew 7:12, the fact that it appears earlier in Ecclesiasticus 31:1; and Tobit 4:15 does not mean, ipso facto, he did not say it. Indeed, as a Jew familiar with Jewish Scriptures, why would he not have?

6. "Many academicians and clergy feel that, when it comes to the study of the New Testament, most laypersons are simply lacking in the skills, training, and interest requisite for their assimilating in depth what for academicians, clergy, and seminarians are, after all, areas of expertise and full-time commitment. The scientific study of the New Testament and the quest for the historical Jesus are held to be properly the domains of experts only ... Many Christian clergy have learned in their own seminaries that those New Testament traditions most responsible for spawning ill-will between Christians and Jews do not genuinely go back to the historical Jesus. Yet they do not see how they can communicate ... the idea that only
some
of the gospels' teaching go back to Jesus." Michael J. Cook, "Turning the Corner in Dialogue: A Jewish Approach to Early Christian Writings," in Fisher,
Interwoven Destinies,
23.

7. Commenting on this painting, Jaroslav Pelikan asks "if there would have been an Auschwitz if every Christian church and every Christian home had focused its devotion ... on icons of Christ not only as Pantocrator, but as Rabbi Jeshua-bar-Joseph, Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of David, in the context of the history of a suffering Israel and a suffering humanity." Pelikan,
Jesus Through the Centuries,
20. Significantly, Fredriksen, whose book
Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews
is subtitled
A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity,
used this painting on its cover.

8. Fredriksen points out (
Jesus of Nazareth,
109), in fact, that when a sick person is described in Mark (6:56) as grasping at the "fringe" of the garment of Jesus, the Hebrew that stands behind the Greek original would have referred to the
tzitzit
that are still worn by devout Jews.

9. An example of how deeply ingrained in Christian thinking this "demonstrate a difference" impulse is can be found even in the Vatican's repentance declaration "Memory and Reconciliation," issued in March 2000. "Love of neighbor, absolutely central in the teaching of Jesus, becomes the 'new commandment' in the Gospel of John; the disciples should love as he has loved ... that is, perfectly, 'to the end' (John 13:1). The Christian is called to love and to forgive to a degree that transcends every human standard of justice" (2:2).