Plenty of blame to go around

Author says the Passion is about eternal life, not Jewish perfidy

by Alexa Smith

LOUISVILLE — Is it possible for Christians to talk about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ without talking about Jews?

“No, I don’t think we can, historically speaking,” Bruce Chilton says in a telephone interview. “It is so tightly connected with what Jesus did at the Temple. It is not abstract.”

Chilton, a professor of religion at Bard College and an Episcopal priest who works at the Free Church of Saint John in Barrytown, NY, speaks with authority on this issue.

In his book, Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography, he devotes more than 300 pages to establishing what actually happened to Jesus during Passover in 32 C.E. His conclusion is that power struggles and political intrigue in Rome had profound consequences for Pilate, the Roman procurator; Herod Antipas, the Roman tetrarch; and Caiphas, the Jewish high priest — forcing their hands in a deadly direction.

He speculates that Judas, when he handed Jesus over to Caiphas (who had no authority to execute anyone) wasn’t aware that Pilate was under extreme pressure because his patron in Rome had been executed. Under the circumstances, Pilate couldn’t tolerate dissension in a Jerusalem jam-packed with pilgrims.

More specifically, he couldn’t abide an apocalyptic rabbi who had torn up the Temple courtyard and claimed an authority greater than that of the high priests, whose roles were validated in the Torah.

Chilton is fascinated by the twists and turns of plot, the depth of human treachery, and the mystical mindset of Jesus, who was advocating dramatic reform of the Temple-based Judaism of his day and was nourished by a Kabbalah-like practice and an intimacy with God that no building could accommodate.

He makes it very clear that, while historical accuracy is a worthy pursuit, it is always trumped by theology. The great story of the death and resurrection of Christ — the subject of the recent controversial film, The Passion of the Christ — isn’t a tale of ancient Jewish villains, but a deeper drama still unfolding in the lives of the faithful.

“Christianity is not a spectator sport,” he says. “Reading the Passion is intended to graft our lives to Christ’s self-giving love — not hatred of other people.”

That also is the view of Chilton’s Bard College colleague, Rabbi Jacob Neusner. They, along with archeologist Peter Feinman, took their private conversation public recently in New York in a symposium at Auburn Theological Seminary on The Death of Jesus and Anti-Semitism.

The conversation was about theology, history, and distortions of both. It was about shared theological convictions that ought to connect Christians and Jews through the common feasts of Passover and Lent, not bring more of the ugliness and acrimony that has permeated many interpretations of Jesus’ death, which portray the Jews as villains and enemies in the story of God’s ultimate act of redemption.

“Christians do not so much have to be cautious in talking about the death of Jesus, but must bring a spiritual understanding to the point that the narrator wants to make, whether it is Matthew or Mark,” says Neusner. “What the narrator is trying to say about the Passion, or what the narrator is trying to say to focus on resurrection. And that has nothing to do with the ethnic actors in the drama of death and resurrection.

“It just so happens that Jesus is Jewish, so the entire drama took place among Jews. ... But the spirit of Christianity is not the spirit of ethnic bigotry.”

So how are preachers to pick their way through lectionary texts, often a confusing mix of theology and history? How does one read the tale in the Gospel of Matthew about a frenetic Jewish mob demanding Jesus’s crucifixion? Or texts in John’s Gospel that use “the Jews” as a slur?

Chilton’s advice is to get to the theological heart of the story.

“Over the course of weeks (in Lent), the preacher has to prepare the way of the reader,” he says. “So when it comes to the moment when the Passion is read, the people reading it hear it as a story of redemptive love, not deflected hatred. That is primarily the pastoral task.”

As culturally intertwined as Judaism and Christianity were, Chilton says, people must be reminded that the fractious texts about Jews were written by Jews, about other Jews.

“His followers were Jews,” Chilton says of Jesus, pointing out that the scriptures actually are a chronicle of a family feud within Judaism. “Jesus certainly did have mortal enemies,” he says, “but it was not the whole Jewish people — although the Gospels sometimes give that impression.

“In a way, the truth of the Passion is our tendency to deflect guilt onto those who don’t deserve it.”

The schism that ultimately separated Christians from Jews was largely political. Both groups were minorities oppressed by a ruthless Roman government. And when Constantine unified the Holy Roman Empire in 324, Christians had a vested interest in blaming Jews for the death of their savior, rather than the Roman procurator, Pilate — who in the Gospels is depicted as indecisive, but in history books is decidedly a tyrant and autocrat.

It was expedient for fourth-century Christians to distance themselves from Judaism, in Chilton’s view.

He says Christians ought to think of the ancient Jews who witnessed Jesus’s death both as oppressors and as fellow sufferers. The Gospels may blame the Sanhedrin for Jesus’ fate, he says, but they also report that it was members of the Sanhedrin who took the lead in giving him a proper burial.

Chilton is willing to mine the crucifixion drama for historical twists and turns, but is interested in a contemporary theological conversation between Christians and Jews, about their many comparable, if not identical, ideas.

Passover and Lent, and their underlying notions of atonement and resurrection, are good starting points. As Neusner puts it: Both traditions are trying to illuminate the perfect justice and mercy of a God who aims to redeem humanity from death and restore to eternal life in the world to come.

Atonement is a concept that often appears in the Hebrew scriptures. The ancient Jews’ annual Day of Atonement featured rituals whose purpose was to expiate the sins of the entire people. The parallels with Christianity are obvious:

In the Jews’ release from bondage in Egypt and safe passage through the Red Sea, Moses leads his people to freedom. Later, Jesus comes to lead his people to victory over sin and death and a new freedom.

The author of Hebrews contrasts the once-and-for-all character of Christ’s atoning act — his death — with the cleansing ritual undertaken by the Jewish high priest.

Neusner says the Mishnah makes clear that even the criminal who pays for his worldly crimes with his life may be rehabilitated in eternity. “The Mishnah interprets the death penalty as a medium of atonement in preparation for judgment leading to resurrection,” he says, “just as the theology of the Passion narratives has always maintained. For both the Mishnah and the Gospels, the death penalty is a means to an end. ...

“The trial and crucifixion of Christ, for Christianity, like the trial and execution of the Israelite criminal or sinner, for Judaism, from

necessary steps toward the redemption of humanity from death, as both religions have maintained, each in its own idiom.”

But the Passion narrative is part of a larger theology of atonement, he says, noting that its prologue of suffering on the cross gives way to a “luminous, truly sublime vision of resurrection, in all its glory.”

For Jews, he says, atonement — and hope for resurrection and eternal life — are more than abstract ideas. In every Jewish service, he says, worshippers pray that “my death may be an atonement for all of my sins.”

Which is exactly what Chilton says for Christians: The Passion drama is meant to draw believers into the Gospel story — “To make you a part of it,” he says. “Unless you walk with Jesus through the liturgical year, you miss the point of the Gospels.”

The Jesus of Chilton’s book is a man of apocalyptic energy who is politically out of his depth. He points out that that Jesus is also a model for suffering and death, who understood that God’s Kingdom was making its way into a world that resisted transformation. The prophetic vocation of his followers, Chilton says, was to seek the life beyond this life and to discover divine power in the midst of weakness.

He says Rabbi Jesus understood that the Spirit transforms people, finally, in resurrection, and taught that “life here is not a preparation for the life of the Spirit; life here is a life of the Spirit.