Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (17 page)

In other words, I am a Christian at work here, and everywhere in this book, on the project of clinging to that faith. But this is not enough. A generous understanding of intra-Jewish polemic is not enough. "Christians," in addition to slandering "Jews" about their role in the crucifixion of Jesus, began eventually—over the decisive years of the Roman war against the Jews—to define them as not just their enemy, or Jesus', but as God's. And that, when later, mainly Gentile Christians misread the story, is what made it lethal.

Elaine Pagels, in her groundbreaking study
The Origin of Satan,
showed how the antagonism between a Jewish establishment and the followers of Jesus evolved, in the experience of those followers, into a cosmic struggle between evil and good, with "the Jews" defined as evil. In the earliest Gospel, Mark, dating to around 68, Jesus is locked in conflict with an embodied Satan who has possessed a man,
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who energizes the antagonism of the Scribes
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and that of his own family,
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and who even tempts Jesus through the mouth of his favorite, Peter.
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By the time Luke is written, a decade or more later, the enemy of Jesus is still the "evil one," but now he is identified with the leaders, "the chief priests and captains of the temple and elders."
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Pagels shows how, with the last Gospel, John, dating to around too and clearly reflecting the intensification of intra-Jewish sectarian conflict that followed the destruction of the Temple, the identification of "the Jews" and Satan himself has become complete. This movement is reflected in the fact that the loaded phrase "the Jews" (in Greek,
hoi loudaioi)
appears a total of 16 times in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, while in John it appears 71 times.'
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As Pagels says, "John chooses to tell the story of Jesus as a story of cosmic conflict—conflict between divine light and primordial darkness, between the close-knit group of Jesus' followers and the implacable, sinful opposition they encountered from 'the world.'"
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But in John, Jesus himself identifies the evil one with the people. The "temptation scenes," which are played out in other Gospels between Jesus and Satan, are played out in John between Jesus and the people. This is why the phrase "the Jews" appears so frequently. The climax of this movement comes in chapter 8 of John when Jesus is portrayed as denouncing "the Jews" as the offspring of Satan. "You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning."
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Thus Jews have become not just the historical enemy but the ontological enemy—the negative against which every positive aspect of Christianity is defined. This Manichaean demonizing of Jews by the first-century followers of Jesus—themselves mostly Jews—and the sanctioning of that demonizing in the canonizing of the Scriptures are what made this story murderous down the centuries. Pagels concludes, "John's decision to make an actual, identifiable group—among Jesus's contemporaries and his own—into a symbol of 'all evil' obviously bears religious, social, and political implications. Would anyone doubt this if an influential author today made women, or for that matter Muslims or homosexuals, the 'symbol of all evil'? Having cast 'the Jews' in that role, John's gospel can arouse and even legitimate hostility toward Judaism, a potential that New Testament scholar Reginald Fuller says 'has been abundantly and tragically actualized in the course of Christian history.'"
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Despite all that we have seen of context and milieu, the question remains: How did this happen? In attempting to retrace the arc of this lethal narrative, I have, inevitably perhaps, pushed farther and farther into its past. Yet scholars emphasize that when it comes to Jesus, there is a limit to how far back we can go. Only a few lines ago, I asserted that Jew hatred could not have begun with Jesus. By what authority can I make that claim? Can we gain access to the actual history of Jesus, or to that period immediately after his death, decades before the Gospel accounts were written? Was it then that the hidden wound was inflicted on the minds of "Christians" toward "Jews"? As a seminarian many years ago, I had read my Rudolf Bultmann, the German scholar who held that it is impossible to get behind the mythmaking of the New Testament to that chimera "the historical Jesus."
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Like Albert Schweitzer before him, Bultmann debunked the quest, insisting that what searchers invariably found was less a real Jesus than projections of their own cultural and theological assumptions. The perfect example of that is the so-called Aryan Jesus that pre-Nazi German Protestantism embraced, a legacy that no doubt seeded Bultmann's own skepticism of the entire project. Bultmann affirmed, instead, "the Christ of faith," the figure whom the Church from the first generation holds up to us. Thus faith need not be tied to the real or the historical. What "happened" to spark this community's vision is less important than the vision itself. Our faith, in other words, is less in Jesus than in the community, in the community's memory, which is what we mean by the Church, alive with the Holy Spirit.

Without knowing why, I did not assent to this view even in my youth. My first trip to Jerusalem, that summer of 1973, was decidedly my version of the quest for Jesus. The Christ of faith had become an ephemeral figure to me, an icon of triumphalism. And his Church—alas, the lens through which I saw it then was the distorting one of Vietnam. The late Cardinal Spellman's role as an instigator of the war, Ngo Dinh Diem's role as its Torquemada, my own bishop's role as yet another silent bystander, all compounded my starkly Oedipal struggle with my Air Force general father and my stalwart mother. This combined weight fell on the fragile structure of my own priesthood, but was it fragile because I knew so little of Jesus, who should have been my strength? So of course, in the midst of such a crisis, I had to go in search of him.

I tracked through the Gospels, commentaries, sources, epistles, and traditions; the rumors, gossip, and wishes—all that had once been bolted together as the scaffolding of faith. But the scaffold was tottering. American violence against an Asian people—what was that to me? European violence against the Jewish people—if it were somehow Catholic, why hadn't anybody said so? Unspeakable violence of the past and present, committed in the name of the Father and of the Son—why shouldn't the soul of this failed young American priest have been troubled?

It is hard to explain now, but all of these questions—Vietnam, Auschwitz, Spellman, a devoted mother, an Air Force father, Pius XII, the bystanding U.S. bishops, the Body of Christ which I would place into the cupped hands of the shaken young—were tied in the same knot. The texts had not undone it, because the knot was in my chest. It took me to Jerusalem, where I saw something new about Jesus, and was saved by it. Never mind, yet, that it was wrong.

"Jerusalem is builded as a city, strongly compact." Psalm 122 was one I had often recited as part of my daily priestly office, and the lines were in my mind. "I was glad when they said unto me, 'Let us go into the House of the Lord. Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem.'"

The gates were still there. Josephus had described a city of marble walls and gilded palaces that dazzled from whatever direction it was approached. Because I was staying that summer in a religious house on the edge of the Judean Desert, near Bethlehem, I approached from the south. Along that road was a ledge that looked across the Kidron Valley, which displayed the hilltop city as on a pedestal. Though the marble was gone, the white Jerusalem stone of the city walls still gleamed in the baking sun, and the gold of the Dome of the Rock dazzled as much as any ancient sanctuary ever could have. The sight of the great Muslim shrine on the Temple Mount, together with the sight to the west of the dull gray but striking dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher—the juxtaposition of the three sources of conflict brought to mind other lines from the same psalm: "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee. Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces."

I tried to imagine Jesus taking in this view as he so fatefully approached the holy city. The synoptic Gospels say he came here once, to die; John says he was here perhaps three times.
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But Jesus the Galilean would have come from the north, either down the Jordan River Valley and up the Judean Hills from the east, or descending the Mount Bezetha ridge, so the city would not have appeared to be on a hill to him. Nothing about Jesus seemed available to me, not even a glimpse of his last vista.

Instead of a sharp image from Scripture, I carried in my mind something from T. S. Eliot, Jesus as the ghost he had become to his grief-stricken followers along a road—was it the road to Emmaus? "But when I look ahead up the white road / There is always another one walking beside you / Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded / I do not know whether a man or a woman /—But who is that on the other side of you?"
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I followed the hooded figure, as it were, into the city and past its holy sites: the pit of Siloam Pool where the blind man was healed, the shrine of the Virgin above the beautiful gate, the olive grove at Gethsemane, and the Church of Mount Zion where the upper room is revered. I shouldered among the credulous tourists and pious pilgrims, a self-anointed refugee. I saw myself as above the commercial phoniness of the Via Dolorosa, and deplored the vise grip of Byzantine-crusader competition, still, for the filthy places—all in the same crumbling church—where Jesus died, was wrapped in oil, and laid to rest. I went from Judgment Gate to the Gates of Sorrow, increasingly blind myself, seeing no more of Jesus there than I could in the blessed carnage of Ngo Dinh Diem or in the holy war against the Jews. When I entered the dark cell that claims to be the tomb of Jesus, alas, it was not empty. A toothless Greek monk ambushed me with his last candle, demanding a dollar for it.

It was only when a skeptical old Frenchman, a biblical archaeologist, took me into the bowels of a Russian convent in the Old City, not far from the embattled Holy Sepulcher, that I sensed—literally sensed, in that dank air—what I had come for. He showed me an excavation beneath a string of naked light bulbs and pointed to a large stone slab at our feet. "This was the threshold stone of the city gate at the time of Jesus," he said. "It was buried in the rubble of the Roman destruction and is only now being uncovered. It is certain"—the Frenchman had used this expression of nothing else he had shown me—"that Jesus of Nazareth would have stepped on this stone as he left the city for Golgotha."

I knelt—a simple, automatic gesture—as if I were an altar boy again, with the Host passing before me. Equally automatically, I bent to kiss the stone. My quest, such as it was, seemed concluded. If Jerusalem gave me nothing else, this would be enough. Enough for me that behind the Christ there was a man, that I could touch what he had touched, that the stark simplicity of his life on earth—no gilded raiment now, no triumphalism—could be as clear and incorruptible as the sensation of cold stone against dry lips.
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I was thirty years old. I understand now that what I saw in the shadow of the man who'd crossed that stone on the way to a rebel's death was, as Schweitzer and Bultmann and all agnostic therapists said it would be, a rank projection of myself. Thirty years old, as Jesus was, was the first point. As old as Jesus was when he began to be in trouble was the second. The aspect of Jesus' character that became real to me, that summer of my first visit to Jerusalem, was his having been a troubled man who made trouble. Which is how, with the help of several judges at antiwar trials, my father's open anger, and my bishop's increasingly unmuted displeasure, I had come to think of myself.

As I disapproved of the vanities of Holy Land religiosity, it was so easy to imagine Jesus doing the same. As I found myself at the mercy of a lusty restlessness with my vow of celibacy, I cherished the scandal of his friendliness toward prostitutes. I clung to the idea of Jesus as a "marginal Jew," as one scholar would dub him much later,
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a misfit who, while opposed to the religious and political establishment of his day, had no fixed attachments among the Essenes or Zealots or even the movement of John the Baptist. He had nowhere to lay his head; I blanketed my loneliness with his. But mostly, his contempt for his "religious superiors"—the high priests, the Pharisees, the scribes—made mine for Cardinal Spellman's jingoism and Pius XII's apparent complacency seem legitimate.

So of course I knew why Jesus did what he did, though doing it got him killed. Jesus was radically with the poor, as I thought I should have been. A relatively privileged man—that carpentry shop, that learned eloquence—still he was the avatar of liberation theology. "And Jesus entered the temple of God and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. He said to them, 'It is written. My house shall be called a house of prayer; but you make it a den of robbers.'"
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In the Gospel of John version, the narrative continues, "His disciples remembered that it was written, 'Zeal for thy house will consume me.' The Jews then said to him, 'What sign have you to show us for doing this?'"
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The Jews. In this scene of upended cash boxes, scattered coins, scales, and counting tables, it was easy to picture them as Fagins and Shylocks, userers and pawnbrokers, crafty shopkeepers of the inner city, and master financiers who kept the Third World poor. Jesus was attacking "Jews" we knew so well. "What sign...?" they asked, and the text goes on: "Jesus answered them, 'Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.' The Jews then said, 'It has taken forty-six years to build this temple. And you will raise it up in three days?' But he spoke of the temple of his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken."
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