{"id":185,"date":"2011-03-03T17:13:06","date_gmt":"2011-03-03T17:13:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/03\/pope-benedict-and-the-jews.html"},"modified":"2011-03-03T17:13:06","modified_gmt":"2011-03-03T17:13:06","slug":"pope-benedict-and-the-jews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/03\/pope-benedict-and-the-jews.html","title":{"rendered":"Pope Benedict and the Jews"},"content":{"rendered":"

OK, OK, I really do appreciate Pope Benedict’s hermeneutical exoneration<\/a> of the Jews in re: the case against Jesus. Never mind that Vatican II settled this half a century ago with Nostra Aetate<\/a><\/i>. As Jim Martin<\/a> and Michael Sean Winters<\/a>
\namong others contend, there are good reasons for the pope–this
\npope–to re-articulate the position in convenient narrative form for a
\nnew generation. And good of the ADL<\/a> and the Wiesenthal Center <\/a>to make gracious acknowledgement. And if it all sets the teeth of the SSPX<\/a>-Men on edge, so much the better.<\/p>\n

And yet, and yet, the historian in me cannot resist picking a bone–the
\nbone of the Gospel of John, which has stuck in craw of good
\nJewish-Christian relations lo these many centuries. Here’s what Pope B
\nhas to say about its apparent targeting of my kind.<\/p>\n

Now we must ask: who exactly were Jesus’ accusers?  Who insisted that he
\nbe condemned to death?  We must take note of the different answers that
\nthe Gospels give to this question.  According to John it was simply
\n“the Jews”.  But John’s use of this expression does not in any way
\nindicate – as the modern reader might suppose – the people of Israel in
\ngeneral, even less is it “racist” in character.  After all, John himself
\nwas ethnically a Jew, as were Jesus and all his followers.  The entire
\nearly Christian community was made up of Jews.  In John’s Gospel this
\nword has a precise and clearly defined meaning: he is referring to the
\nTemple aristocracy.  So the circle of accusers who instigate Jesus’
\ndeath is precisely indicated in the Fourth Gospel and clearly limited:
\nit is the Temple aristocracy – and not without certain exceptions, as
\nthe reference to Nicodemus (7:50ff.) shows.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But if John meant the Temple aristocracy, why didn’t he say so? Why
\ndidn’t he point to the Sadducees or the high priest, to someone who
\nmight plausibly have been running the Temple show, rather than saying,
\nas he does repeatedly, “the Jews”?<\/p>\n

The late great biblical scholar (and Catholic priest) Raymond Brown–who Benedict elsewhere cites–laid out a different scenario<\/a>.
\nBasically, it’s that around the year 100 John and his followers, having
\nfailed to persuade their fellow Antiochian Jews that Jesus was the
\nMessiah, and having been tossed out of synagogues as, well, non-Jews<\/i>
\nbecause of their messianism, were mighty pissed. They thought: Those
\nJews have rejected Jesus–just the way those Jews back in the day
\nrejected Jesus. It stands to reason that some of the language John used
\nwas intemperate and accusatory. And it’s very unfortunate that, in
\ncanonical form, it led to a lot of persecution. <\/p>\n

But the point is that John was writing at a difficult time for both
\ncommunities. The Temple was destroyed, and the new rabbinic Judaism was
\ngetting its act together and extruding what didn’t fit–like the new
\nthing that would become Christianity, which was trying to get its own
\nact together. Does the contemporary Jewish-Christian relationship need
\nto wrestle with the hard separation that the Gospel of John bears
\nwitness to? Maybe not. I can understand why it makes good sense for
\nBenedict to take the line he does, but I don’t have to buy it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OK, OK, I really do appreciate Pope Benedict’s hermeneutical exoneration of the Jews in re: the case against Jesus. Never mind that Vatican II settled this half a century ago with Nostra Aetate. As Jim Martin and Michael Sean Winters among others contend, there are good reasons for the pope–this pope–to re-articulate the position in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nPope Benedict and the Jews - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/03\/pope-benedict-and-the-jews.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Pope Benedict and the Jews - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"OK, OK, I really do appreciate Pope Benedict’s hermeneutical exoneration of the Jews in re: the case against Jesus. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}