Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (23 page)

To the eyes of faith, Jesus was really present. Whether a video camera could have recorded his "appearances" or not is less important than the fact that for those who loved him, and for those who sensed the full power of the love he'd offered them, the continued presence of Jesus beside them was no mere "delusion," in Eliot's word. His presence, of course, was different now. Instead of being immediate and physical, it was mediated. In part, at least, it was mediated as my friend's had been, through the stories told about him and the affirmations made in his name. His presence was real. On this claim rests the entire structure of Christian religion, and I, for one, recognize it as an unwilled claim of my own experience. The writing of this book is a response to the undefined, unseen, continuing presence in my life of Jesus Christ. By now it is clear that my knowledge of Jesus is indirect, incomplete, a matter more of inference than experience, which is why my reflections on his meaning are less than certain. This is not knowledge of Jesus, but faith in him. I am one of those haunted friends who found themselves incapable of believing him simply gone, but I am also one who knows him in the first place only through the story those first friends gathered to tell.
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The story of the journey to Emmaus is important for its strong hint of what happened to enable the friends of Jesus both to understand what his coming and going had meant and to experience him as still present in their midst, if indirectly. And what happened was the singing of their songs and the reading of their cherished texts, activities that, over time, gave them a way to put the theretofore inexpressible experience into words. This is how the basic story of Jesus took shape in the first months and years after his death, what scholars call the kerygma.
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Remember that the New Testament consists solely of words that were written down decades after the year 30. Recall that the earliest materials are the letters of Paul, dating to the 50s.

The healing circle of men and women was, at the beginning, still under the spell of the love of Jesus. Their love for him was surely powerful, but eventually a felt experience of
his love for them
overwhelmed their disappointment. Just as their hope in the continued life of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob rested in the conviction that God's power to create life was not undone by death, and that God's love for those three and for all God's people outweighed human mortality, the followers of Jesus soon sensed the same thing about Jesus' love for them. His love survived his death—which is what the Resurrection means.

They came to that experience not mystically or magically, but—as this people always had come to faith—through prayerful consideration of their texts and through reflection on a tradition that looked forward to the resurrection of the dead. The songs they sang were the Psalms of David, and the readings they brought to their gatherings were the Jewish Scriptures. The Psalms and Scriptures gave them the story by which they could finally name the one in the hooded shroud beside them. Or, as the mysterious companion on the road to Emmaus himself put it to the bereft pair whose grief had undercut their hope, "'O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?' And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in the scriptures the things concerning himself."
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Remember that this anecdote, in Luke, concerning what happened within days of Jesus' death was in fact composed years after the event, a fully theologized reflection on what took place. The point is that Jesus' followers used the materials of the prophets and psalmists—incidents and metaphors and figures of speech—as the raw material out of which to create an elegant and coherent story, indeed a literary masterpiece, of experiences that would, in actuality, have been anything but elegant, coherent, or patently meaningful. Scholars agree that, within a relatively short time, the followers of Jesus had constructed an account of his last days that would become the source of each of the four Gospels' Passion narratives. John Dominic Crossan calls that primordial account the "Cross Gospel."
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Where scholars differ—and this difference is relevant to our attempt to name the ultimate source of anti-Jewish contempt—is on the question of whether the Passion story thus told is essentially a historical or a literary composition. Most agree on the historicity of the basic elements—that there was a crime, committed by Jesus, probably in the Temple, an arrest, and an execution.

A traditional reading of the elaborated account, typified by Raymond Brown, sees the Gospel story of the Passion as essentially true to what happened, as remembered by the friends of Jesus, who would have been witnesses.
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If this way of reading the Gospel texts is correct, Christians sensitive to the anti-Jewish elements in the story, and Jews who are offended by them, are stuck with the facts that, as matters of history, Jesus' offense was against Judaism, not Rome, and Jews sponsored Jesus' death, even if Romans carried it out. That so many elements of the Passion narrative echo the themes, language, and events of the Jewish Scriptures may show that the narrative's composition was influenced by exegesis of such texts, but since most of what is reported can be assumed to have actually happened, such echoes more importantly show that Jesus was consciously modeling himself on the prophetic tradition of Israel, and fulfilling it. This is what Crossan calls "history remembered."
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It has served as the traditional Christian mode of reading the Passion story because all those fulfilled prophecies are the proof that it is true. That is what the stranger of Emmaus demonstrated to the disciples, the Scriptures concerning himself.

"My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?" for example. These last words of Jesus, in Mark and Matthew,
¹³
were "foretold" in Psalm 22. His last words in Luke, "Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit,"
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were "foretold" by Psalm 31. The fact reported in Matthew, Mark, and Luke that "darkness came over the land until three in the afternoon," as Jesus died, was "predicted" by the prophet Amos.
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That the curtain of the Temple was "torn in two" at the moment of Jesus' death, that "the earth shook, the rocks were split, and the tombs also were opened,"
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all was "foretold" by the prophets as signs that the Messiah had come.
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Moreover, the unexpected arrival of the Messiah as a suffering servant instead of as a victorious king had been anticipated by the image of the king entering the city "on the foal of an ass" in Zechariah
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and, more elaborately, by certain songs of the prophet Isaiah: "He had no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows ... he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed."
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That wounding was rendered in the Passion narrative as the piercing through of Jesus' side. The thirst of Jesus on the cross, the vinegar to slake that thirst, the presence of the two thieves beside him, the crown of thorns, the mockery of passersby—these details originate in the Jewish Scriptures. And such details were soon put to a polemical purpose. Here is an anecdote from the Passion according to John, and an indication of the argument that was made from it at the start: "When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his garments and made four parts, one for each soldier. But his tunic was without seam, woven from top to bottom; so they said to one another, 'Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see whose it shall be.' This was to fulfill the scripture, 'They parted my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.' So the soldiers did this."
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But what if they didn't? Obviously, no scholar in this debate was present for these events, so we can never know for sure that such details in the Passion narratives never happened, and it is possible that at least some of them did. For example, a devout Jew might well have prayed the line from Psalm 22—"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"—as Matthew and Mark say Jesus did. That the words originate in Hebrew Scripture does not mean, ipso facto, that Jesus did not repeat them, and internal evidence may suggest he did.
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And so with some other details. But the broad pattern of the Passion accounts does indicate that the motive is not the recounting of history as we think of it. When John reports that the dying Jesus said, "I thirst," he declares that Jesus did so not because he was in fact thirsty, but "to fulfill the Scriptures."
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That verse, in other words, has a clear literary purpose, or even a polemical purpose, not a "historical" one.

That Jesus may have indeed cried out in prayer the "My God, my God" line from Psalm 22 might mean that his followers used other details from the same psalm to elaborate the story of his death. Which brings us back to the question of what those soldiers did at the foot of the cross. What if, fifty or sixty years before those verses of the Gospel of John were committed to parchment, a man or a woman who loved the only recently dead Jesus had opened a scroll to Psalm 22, perhaps because Jesus had cited it in his prayer? And what if that disciple read aloud this verse, appearing a bit later in the text: "Yea, dogs are round about me; a company of evildoers encircle me; they have pierced my hands and my feet—I can count all my bones—they stare and gloat over me; they divide my garments among them, and for my raiment they cast lots"?
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Perhaps these verses so perfectly captured the dread spirit of what their friend had undergone that the circle got in the habit of reading them, or chanting them, every time they gathered. This would have been in the year 30 or 31. By the year 35 or 40, it is easy to imagine that the fine details of Psalm 22—the thirst that makes a "tongue cleave to my jaws," the jeer "Let the Lord save him!" those soldiers casting dice for his garment—had begun to form the core of the story. If this is what happened, those who told the story to each other in this way would have known very well that such details were not "historical." They would have known, say, that the "seamless robe" had nothing to do with the robe Jesus wore but was an allusion-rich metaphor, since the only figure who wore such a robe was the High Priest, and only upon entering the Holy of Holies. To that first circle, such details proved nothing. The point was not "proof"; it was expression. The point was lament. The point was grief. The point was drawing order out of chaos, out of the worst thing that could have happened. The point was the story.

In their gatherings around his story, around the Scriptures, and around the table fellowship they had first had with him, the followers once again felt the presence of Jesus, were certain of it, were healed by it. So the story says it was that day in Emmaus. "When he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognized him; and he vanished out of their sight. They said to each other, 'Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures?'"
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Here is the key issue: "opening the scriptures." By the time this story jells as the narrative we know, two decisive things have happened to change everything. First, most of those who knew Jesus, who knew firsthand how the story was composed, have died. Second, the next, hyperviolent phase of the war with Rome has begun; the Temple, and with it the central cult of Jewish religion, has been destroyed. At that point, the followers of Jesus found themselves in fierce and unprecedented competition with the Pharisees for control of the legacy of the "true Israel." Dispersed from a ruined Jerusalem, and increasingly influenced by Gentile members who knew nothing of the Jewish Scriptures, they began to argue that the claims they made for Jesus as Messiah could be "proven" by the "fact" that the very things he said, did, and underwent, according to the story they all knew, had been predicted in what could only seem miraculous detail by those same Jewish Scriptures. Although the late-first-century Christians claimed, and probably believed themselves, to be working from what Crossan calls "history remembered," it is far more likely—I accept Crossan and Koester here against Brown—that they were working from "prophecy historicized."
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Gentiles throughout the Mediterranean world were rapidly won over by the kerygma, a story of liberation, of imminent deliverance, of a transcendent love that spoke powerfully to their situation. These Gentiles could recognize themselves in the figure of the Roman centurion who, in the accounts of Matthew and Mark, after witnessing the crucifixion, declared, "Truly this was a Son of God."
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In Luke's account, there appears a small but significant difference, for there the centurion declares, "Certainly this man was innocent."
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The Hebrew word rendered here as "innocent" has the sense of "righteous," which is a reference to "the Righteous Man" from the Jewish text known as the Wisdom of Solomon, a detail that brings to the surface a large problem that the missionary preachers of the Good News of Jesus confronted at every turn. Their magnificent proclamation was shaped as a story of the fulfillment of Jewish hopes: Why were Jews so much slower to accept it than Gentiles? The converted centurion served a polemical purpose in the Gospel accounts—reinforcing Roman innocence—but he underwent something decisive, too. Especially after the community of Jewish Christians in Jerusalem was dispersed when the Romans attacked the city in 70, relatively few Jews accepted Jesus as the Messiah. Their rejection threatened the Christian idea far more profoundly than any pagan rejection. Why, of all people, would Jews be unmoved by the logic, so elaborately displayed in the kerygma, of their own Scriptures? The truth of Jesus Christ is
proven
by Jewish Scriptures. This essential structure of the Christian claim must be confronted anew by Christians. Why? Because Jewish denial of that claim
remains
a mortal threat. The entire history of conflict between Judaism and Christianity begins here. And the problem abides.