Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (21 page)

Scholars like Richard Horsley and Neil Asher Silberman emphasize that Jesus' attack should be seen not in the light of later Christian denigration of the Temple, which opens into antisemitic stereotyping, but in light of the earlier prophetic tradition: "'What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?' says the Lord."
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In this view, the Temple offends Jesus because of the lavish, Hellenized style of Herod's construction.
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Jesus' protest is for the sake of a purified Temple, true to an unpolluted Israel, what the prophets always wanted. Objecting to the distance between the realities of the Temple and the ideals of the Covenant was nothing new. But the Christian emphasis on the prophets' contempt for the institutions of Israel has itself become problematic, a way of judging, and rejecting, the present against an idealized past. Why is the flawed present such a scandal? Isn't the point of biblical faith that God has chosen to be at home not among angels but among humans? And won't every human community and its every institution be therefore flawed, compromised? Would Jesus set himself against the very humanness—contingency, finitude, and, yes, political paradox—of the Temple when God's making a home in that humanness is the point?

When I first visited the Holy Sepulcher in 1973, I was offended by the filth and disrepair of the ancient church. It smelled of mold. Its corners had accumulated bushels of dirt. Its crumbling walls were supported by makeshift scaffolding. The sacred shrine had been allowed to decline to this degree because Western Christians, represented on the scene by Franciscan friars, were locked in a jurisdictional dispute with Eastern Christians, the Orthodox monks who had sold me a candle in the tomb of Jesus. This ecclesiastical quarrel was a vestige of the brutal crusader wars, and all in all it was enough to make a pilgrim flee the place.

In the late nineteenth century, a group of Protestant pilgrims had seen something similar at the Holy Sepulcher and concluded that it could not possibly be the authentic site of the death and Resurrection of the Lord. They "discovered" an alternative place on the outskirts of the Old City, the so-called Garden Tomb, which still competes for pilgrims, claiming to be the real site of the foundational Christian events. The Garden Tomb, in contrast to the Holy Sepulcher, is tidy and quiet, conducive to pious meditation. Lovely. One can picture the rolled-back boulder, well-trimmed bushes and shrubs. But when I visited it, the place struck me as lifeless and artificial, and I realized that if there was any point to an incarnational faith, it was that God comes to us precisely in our need for God. This is not to say that God's coming to us does not always imply the challenge to change our world, but the evident need for change is no proof of God's absence. When I returned to the conflict-ridden Holy Sepulcher, I saw it differently.

As noted earlier, the image of Jesus as a peasant revolutionary—recall that widely circulated poster of the 1960s, Jesus as Che Guevara—is central to the liberation theology so many of my kind embraced, and which clearly continues to inform much of the scholarship of the historical Jesus. But, as before, one is left asking, Is the face on that wanted poster really the face of a Jew? Is this ongoing Christian denigration of the Jewish Temple cult really necessary? In other words, with the new scholarship, has anything really changed?

Against much of this, E. P. Sanders argues that the Temple hierarchy would not have been seen as immoral.
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The officials would have made an unlikely target for a man like Jesus. Nothing we know of him suggests the character of a radical purist. The Gospels, contrasting Jesus with the hair-shirted John the Baptist, and placing him with revelers and at dinner tables, take pains to show him as the opposite. Indeed, the idea of the Incarnation itself—human flesh as the locus of the divine—argues against the angelic imagination of the rigid revolutionary who takes offense at the compromises required by life in the real world. It is in this way that the ideas of the Incarnation and of the Temple mesh. In the Roman world, a certain compromise, a knack for living with the enemy, for living with what is as opposed to with what ought to be—all of this would have been the price of survival. In the history-bound religion of Jews—the religion of Jesus—the accommodation necessary to human as opposed to angelic life would not have been a sin. In respectfully differing with what I take to be the views of scholars like Crossan, Horsley, and Silberman, I acknowledge that such a perception may be a matter of temperament and background. I write, after all, as the great-nephew of an Irishman who died in 1916 in a British uniform.

But the Irish story, with its tradition of the informer, is a reminder that accommodation with the overlord can be carried too far. Not all compromises are required, and sometimes survival must take second place to integrity. Sanders, however, doubts that the Jewish authorities of Jesus' time were corrupted in this way.
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He argues that the Sadducees and priests of the Temple would in all likelihood have been upright Jews, working hard to shield the populace from the worst of Roman abuse, and that populace would have repaid them with respect. Was Jesus an elitist who set himself above the religion of most people?

What about the disparity between the rich and the poor? Was that inequity at the heart of Jesus' protest? The fabulous mansions of the Temple aristocrats are even now being laid bare by archaeologists in the upper-city digs of ancient Jerusalem. By our standards, such wealth, built on the backs of the poor, is a clear injustice, doubly so when linked to religion, but again, are we here seeing Luther rejecting St. Peter's Basilica more than Jesus rejecting the Temple? We shouldn't make too much of Zealot assaults on the Temple aristocrats, Sanders says, because there is evidence that many of these same aristocrats wound up as anti-Roman revolutionaries.
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In other words, we should beware of the urge, so highly developed among Christians, to define Judaism and its sects in ways that serve mainly to buttress conclusions we already draw.

Just as there is a problem with the idea of Jesus symbolically "destroying" a Temple that would have been sacred and beloved to him as a Jew, there are two problems with the idea of Jesus storming the Temple to rebuke its leadership, even if the debatable characterization of that leadership as greedy, wicked, hated, and collaborationist was true. This denigration of Jewish cult, worship, and society is the primordial idea of Jewish-Christian conflict, and it is still very much with us. The first problem is that this idea epitomizes the structure of antisemitic thinking: Jews as they exist are compared to Jews as they
should
exist, and are found wanting, sometimes to forfeit that existence. Second, this idea conflicts with all that we know of the message that Jesus actually preached.

Jesus may have been an illiterate peasant (Crossan, Horsley, et al.) or a relatively learned member of the middle class (Koester, Brown, et al.); we do not know. He may have been an apocalyptist (Fredriksen) or a magician (Morton Smith), a "wisdom" sage or a self-styled prophet. Scholars disagree on what to emphasize. But the essential message of Jesus—despite all questions of sources, sayings, oral and written traditions, and situations of Gospel composition—comes through every aspect of the communal memory with ringing eloquence. That message is love.

The word is used in so many different ways, and so cheaply; as Krister Stendahl said to me, "When the preacher does not know what to say, he speaks of love." The word has been attached to the name of Jesus with such saccharine domestication that it is almost impossible to use it now with anything like the required bite. Ordinarily, for example, "love" is taken to be an act of relatively private devotion, and the preaching of Jesus is most often understood as having to do with relations among friends, family members, communities, the Church. Jesus reiterates as the greatest commandment the injunction from Leviticus to love thy neighbor.
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But there are sayings about the loving of enemies and the loving of those who are different. There are demonstrations of love, as Jesus is reported to have gone out of his way to care for the poor, to affirm sinners, even the collaborationist and corrupt tax collectors. There are sayings about loving the Father, and the Father loving. And there are reasons to understand, in what is recorded and in what happened, that for the followers of Jesus, the sayings about love originated in a rare, life-changing experience of a relationship of love. The word, as they said, must have been flesh. That most banalized and inflated word was spoken by this man in an original, authentic, generous way—presumably because of how he was seen to have lived it out. Love informed, shaped, inspired,
drove
the Jesus movement forward into history.
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We are not talking about puppy love, nor about an ocean of warm feelings, nor about a network of the merely friendly or the narrowly religious. "This was not mere pacifism or meekness," Horsley and Silberman observe, "but the first step in the reconciliation and renewal of the People of Israel."
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We began by remembering the larger social-political milieu that was shaped by the culture of a ruthless occupying military force on one side, and by a sorely divided occupied population on the other. The sect-beset Jews, like the Irish and every similarly victimized people, shifted the brutal weight of oppression onto each other. What Jesus spoke of, and in his life embodied, was the opposite of Roman domination. It was also the opposite, not of anything "Jewish," but of an oppressed people's readiness to turn against itself. Thus "love" defies the occupying enemy, not in some sweetly powdered passive aggression—as if Caesar could be shamed by a timidly turned cheek, as if masochism could function as a strategy—but by truly realizing something entirely other than the institutionalized hatred of phalanx, standard, legion, centurion, siege machine, and, yes, crucifix.

For Jesus, "love" changes everything. That is why his reiteration of the command to love the neighbor opens into the command to love the enemy. In the context in which Jesus preached, that exhortation would have been double-edged, applying to the love of Rome, the ultimate enemy, and to the love of one's rival sect. "The dignity of human beings which requires such deeds of love," Koester comments, "cannot be derived from one's membership in a particular social class or religious group (elect people of God), nor from political affiliation or common interest groups."
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The model for the love of which Jesus speaks is the love of God, who created not just one group but the whole cosmos (and in affirming this all-inclusive creation, Genesis is a mold-shattering myth). This God makes rain to fall and sun to shine on every person, just and unjust alike.
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The foundational Christian slander against the Jews is that the "God of the Old Testament" is the heartless God of the Law, of revenge, of punishment, while the "God of the New Testament" is the God of love, mercy, and forgiveness.
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To emphasize here that the message of Jesus was a message of love is to risk being understood as repeating this canard, which is why equal emphasis must be given, again, to the Jewishness of Jesus. He was never more Jewish than in this proclamation.
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The liberating and system-shaking message of love was given its
renewal
by Jesus. In Horsley and Silberman's useful formulation, what we have here is a "renewed Covenant" more than a new one.
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There is little reason to doubt that Jesus' preaching was heard in the villages of Galilee and the towns of Judea as having a powerful freshness—perhaps because it was tied, as Fredriksen and other scholars suggest, to a message that the End Time of Israel's God was at hand.
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However this message of love is understood, the thing to emphasize is that it was original in comparison to the situation of a divided, demoralized people imprisoned in their own land, not in comparison to that people's own history. Indeed, one must assume that people responded to Jesus because they recognized in him something of their own.

The phrase "New Covenant," which has come to define Christianity's status as the superseding religion, has its origin, in fact, in Jeremiah, but the Hebrew word that prophet used carried exactly this connotation of renewal, a notion that does not open into the deadly dichotomy between new and old. For Jeremiah,
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and for Jesus, there was only
one
covenant.
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So we are not talking here about Judaism's being brought to fulfillment in the discontinuous message of a different movement. The point, again, is that Jesus offers a Jewish renewal, and it is tied to love. Jesus' message was thus rooted not only, say, in the opening chapters of Genesis, but in the piety of Judaism as such. I read it as a Christian, yet the record of the Torah seems clear: before God gave commandments, God gave blessings. Before the Law, there was the rescue from Egypt. Hosea, Isaiah, and other prophets strike the theme repeatedly: If Israel behaves like a faithless wife, sometimes provoking God's rage, God nevertheless takes her back every time. Nothing Israel does can undo this love.

If there is a Jewish hope in an afterlife, it has nothing to do with the "immortality of the soul," a Greek idea foreign to the biblical tradition. Jewish hope has everything to do with the faith that "the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" does not break the covenant with Jews when they die. Not even human mortality outweighs the love of God. Thus God does not need to be appeased like some puny clay idol, nor does God's grace need to be earned. Despite a two-millennia-long exploitation of the crassest stereotype, the Jewish God is no garment-district bargainer shuffling dress racks, looking among his creatures for the ones who offer wholesale. No. Again I say this is a Christian's reading, but the tradition is clear: The Jewish God's attitude is one of love. Period.