Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (20 page)

The Christian imagination must shift. The Temple, as the house not of a pope but of God, must be compared not to St. Peter's Basilica but to Jesus himself. The very first Christians, because they were Jews, knew this. The comparison of the Temple to Jesus was made early—but, alas, vindictively so. As we saw, already in the Gospel of John, Jesus is remembered as defining his body as the Temple: "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 words which Jesus had spoken."
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In some ways this anecdote epitomizes the Jewish-Catholic problem, and in some ways this anecdote causes it. Worship of Jesus makes worship in the Temple obsolete. This idea was the perfect solution to the overriding religious trauma that took place as the anecdote was being written down, which was the Roman obliteration of the Temple. Not only was the Temple destroyed, so were the sects that defined themselves by it—the Sadducees and priests, who did so positively, and the Zealots, who did so negatively. In Alan Segal's image, only "Rebecca's children" survived the destruction—the Judaism of the Jesus movement, which evolved into the Church, and the Judaism of the Pharisees, which evolved into rabbinic Judaism. Segal explains, "Both Judaism and Christianity consider themselves to be the heirs to the promises given to Abraham and Isaac and they are indeed fraternal twins ... As brothers often do, they picked different, even opposing ways to preserve their family's heritage. Their differences became so important that for two millennia few people have been able to appreciate their underlying commonalities and, hence, the reasons for their differences."
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Human memory is inevitably imprecise, and it is not uncommon for the past to be retrieved in ways that serve present purposes. How convenient for the purposes of the post-destruction competition with the surviving sibling for Christians to have creatively retrieved "memories" both that Jesus predicted that destruction and that it was caused—again, not by Rome—by the "Jewish" destruction of the Temple that was Jesus' own body. We shall soon see how this opposition between the Temple and Jesus combined with a Christian theology that made something positive of the destruction of Jerusalem and the banishment of the Jews, but the point to make here is that the necessary shift in modern Christian attitudes toward Judaism must be tied to this basic question. And, not incidentally, it is precisely here that the pilgrimage of John Paul II to Jerusalem in 2000 was so significant.

Even though the pope's visit to Yad Vashem was the emotional high point of that week, his subsequent stop at the Western Wall was more important. For the pope to stand in devotion before that remnant of the Temple, for him to offer a prayer that did not invoke the name of Jesus, for him to leave a sorrowful
kvitel,
a written prayer, in a crevice of the wall, in Jewish custom, was the single most momentous act of his papacy. It was a culmination of the slow reversal of ancient Christian denigration not only of the Temple but of the Jews who had, as the scholar Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi writes, constructed "memory temples ... out of the ruins of their material existence."
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That denigration has been the essence of supersessionism, and the source of antisemitism. The pope's unprecedented presence in Jerusalem had said, in effect, that the Catholic Church honors Jews at home in Israel—a rejection of the ancient Christian attachment to the myth of Jewish wandering, even if Catholic ambivalence about the Jewish state seems less than fully resolved. But whatever political problems remain,
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a religious threshold has been crossed. The pope's religious devotion at the Western Wall was an unmistakable act of affirmation of the Temple, and of God's unbroken covenant with the Jewish people today.

In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus' assault on the money changers and pigeon sellers in the Temple is the immediate cause of his death, although in their accounts, it is Jesus' symbolic destruction of the Temple that is emphasized. By contrast, in John, the Temple authorities are imagined as destroying Jesus,
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a process that begins with the disturbance but unfolds more gradually. The point is that all accounts tie the fate of Jesus to this Temple event.

In the Gospel re-creations of the conflict, especially in Matthew,
⁴⁴
the main antagonists confronting Jesus throughout his public life are not the Sadducees of the Temple establishment, much less the Romans, but the Pharisees. That alone suggests that Jesus was not generally motivated, like a Zealot, by a hatred of the priestly caste, which had found it prudent to cooperate with Rome. On the other hand, the Pharisees are absent as antagonists in the Passion narratives, where the enemies of Jesus are very much the priests. In fact, Jesus' movement had more in common with that of the Pharisees than perhaps any other Jewish sect. Ironically, this closeness no doubt intensified the competition, especially as time wore on, which may be what accounts for the Pharisees' role as preeminent villains, as later recalled in the pre-Passion life of Jesus. As a result, the name Pharisee, in a Christian mouth, is pejorative.
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Of all the characters in the Jesus story, none are more vilified by the Christian imagination than the Pharisees, and not because they would have so opposed what Jesus represented, or because they actually challenged him during his lifetime. While Jesus lived, the Pharisees would have been relatively powerless missionaries, teachers, and low-level administrators. It is only with the elimination of the Temple and its priesthood that the Pharisees emerge as rivals—not of Jesus, but of his movement a full generation removed. That is why they are cast as enemies in the Gospels, which is why, in turn, almost nothing said by Christians about these particular Jews is true. Even Paul, who was one of them, misrepresents what the Pharisees believed for his own polemical purposes.

As for the initial disturbance caused by Jesus in the Temple, even the most skeptical scholars see a reason to believe that a "historical" occurrence of some kind took place. Jesus committed a violation in one of the courtyards or colonnaded porticoes where the changing of money, the paying of Temple taxes, and the selling of animals for sacrifice took place. He caused the disturbance during the volatile Passover festival that year, and—consistent with all that is known of Roman methods—he was quickly taken out and summarily executed.
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The details of the account of his crime given in the Gospels raise more questions than they answer, for, as commonly read by Christians, the Gospels have him challenging the Temple as if he were not a Jew. The usual Christian understanding is tied to the notion of his "Abba intimacy" with God, referred to earlier. If God was present to him
immediately,
not religiously, then he had every right to enter his "Father's house" not as a Jew, not even as a new version of the ancient Jewish prophets who criticized Temple abuses. Rather, he issued his challenge with a unique claim to authority. "The priestly reaction to his 'cleansing' of the Temple," the Catholic theologian Bernard Cooke writes, "makes it clear that he was considered by the official establishment as an outsider who was unjustifiably interfering in what was not his business. That he himself obviously did think it was his business appears to have stemmed from his Abba experience: the Temple was his 'Father's house' and Jesus' devotion to the Temple was but a reflection of his devotion to his Abba." Cooke is like most Christian interpreters in seeing the Temple event, whatever it was, as a definitive break between Jesus and his Jewishness. "In conflict were Jesus' experience of God and his experience of religious institutions; Jesus remained faithful to his Abba, though this meant death amid alienation from all he had most cherished as a Jew."
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Is that true? We saw earlier the difficulty of ascribing a univocal set of beliefs or practices to "Judaism." The attitudes of Jews toward the Temple were complex, as the prophetic tradition with its criticisms of "empty worship" indicates. Even while the post-destruction Mishnah idealized the Temple, some rabbinic sources criticized its corruptions.
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The architect of the Temple of which we are speaking, after all, was the wicked Herod, and every devout Jew would have been sensitive to the contradictions implied in that.

But the point must be made again: This building's transcendent meaning would have trumped all such paradoxes. And whatever Jesus' experience of God, it makes nonsense of his whole life to think that experience would set him fundamentally against the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who was the God worshiped in the Temple. Scholars agree that Jesus' use of "Abba" to address God was unusual, but did that mean alienation from the Jewish idea of God? Can't the Abba experience be understood within the Jewish context? Schillebeeckx emphasizes that the Abba experience of Jesus was "fostered in the religious life of the Jewish followers of Yahweh ... The core of what was enunciated in Israel's best moments of its experience of God is somehow in Jesus condensed in an original and personal way."
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Thus the originality of Jesus' intimacy with God, instead of alienating him from his Jewishness, can qualify him as a Jew.

And
how
that God was worshiped could almost certainly not have been the issue either. However Herod's collaborationist hegemony shadowed the Holy of Holies, it is highly unlikely that a Jew of Jesus' time and background would have taken offense at money changing or pigeon selling in the Temple portico. As Sanders and others point out, those activities were essential to the Temple cult: Jews traveled here from all over the Mediterranean to offer sacrifices, the single holiest act of Jewish piety. At Passover, tens of thousands of Jews from throughout Palestine and beyond would have come to Jerusalem for just that purpose. They had to purchase animals and they had to pay the Temple tax, and they needed local currency for both. Money changers, like those ubiquitous
bureaux de change
in the cities of pre-euro Europe, enabled them to do so. Likewise, the pigeon sellers provided only what a devout pilgrim needed. There is no question of a Jew like Jesus taking offense in this way, as if usury were the issue, or as if Temple functionaries presided over a system, as bigoted Christian memory might put it, of "Jewing" people down.

What then? Some theorize that Jesus would have been appalled by the blood running in the gutters of the Temple, spilloff from the slaughter of thousands of animals, as if the very practice of animal sacrifice were at issue. But would a religious figure so motivated
then
be memorialized in a cult based on violence of what was, after all, the
human
sacrifice of his own death? No, Jesus would have understood animal sacrifice, given its root in the story of the binding of Isaac, as the religious observance that put an end to human sacrifice. It seems anachronistic in the extreme to attribute the blood squeamishness to him of a people who prefer to pretend that the meat we eat comes to us without slaughter.

It is better to acknowledge the impossibility of our knowing for sure or in detail what the disturbance caused by Jesus in the Temple at Passover in 30
C.E.
amounted to. It is clear only that Jesus did something, and that it was taken by the authorities to be a subversive act. Whether his act would have been widely noted, given the holiday throng, is unclear—Fredriksen, for one, argues that Roman soldiers would not have been in a position to notice such an incident.
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The Gospel accounts suggest an element of violence—those overturned tables, the whips—that has always troubled the devotees of a sweet, cheek-turning pacifist. Was Jesus then a revolutionary after all?

Around the year 68, according to Josephus, a group of Zealots took control of Jerusalem, an act that would spark the vengeful rage of the Roman general Vespasian.
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In their siege of the ruined Temple, the Zealots violently targeted in particular their fellow Jews, the priests and other Temple officers who probably appeared to the radicals as craven collaborators, according to the sectarian-political divisions we have been tracking. This slaughter by Jewish Zealots of Jewish Temple authorities establishes the possibility that a peasant revolutionary from Galilee could have targeted Jews as such in enacting a demonstration in the name of a purified Temple. Such an act would have had elements of anticolonial resistance and class warfare both—and for that reason, this kind of reading of Jesus' Temple disturbance had great appeal in the turbulent 1960s, when I first studied these texts. Crossan's view is more sophisticated than that, yet he finds it illuminating to compare Jesus' demonstration in the Temple to the draft board raids of Vietnam War protesters.
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The analogy can be misleading, since the Temple was not a Roman war engine. Crossan sees Jesus' attack on peripheral, and in themselves legitimate, Temple activities as a peasant revolutionary's symbolic attack on the entire Temple enterprise. But why? Not only was the Temple not a Selective Service office—that is, not an arm of violent Roman oppression—it was, despite the paradox of its place in the power structure of the occupation, the only institution that allowed Jews to stand against Rome and its identity-smashing totalitarianism. Just as, for centuries, the dominated Irish were able to resist the overlord English by aggressively practicing their Catholic faith—religion as a political force, as the only political force—so every Jew who entered the Temple to participate in God's cult of sacrifice was defying Rome.