Christianity and Judaism, a Personal Reflection
Jean Le Tavernier. “Portrait of Jean Miélot in His Scriptorium,” Miracles de Notre Dame
(colored engraving, MS fr. 9198, fol. 19), c. 1456.
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
(Listen to an audio version of the blog post below!)
As many of you know, Christian/Jewish relations is a subject near and dear to my heart, for I have many close personal relationships with Jewish friends and rabbis, both here at home and in my many teaching tours to Israel. On the whole, the Christian Church in general—and the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic church particular—has had a shameful and scandalous history regarding Judaism and the Jews, based (sadly) upon scripture itself. In Matthew’s gospel when Jesus stands before Pilate and a large crowd consisting of the chief priests, Jewish elders and a mob of onlookers, Pilate, having no basis under Roman law to condemn Jesus to death, offers to exchange Jesus for Barabbas, an insurrectionist, one guilty of a capital offense. Pilate asks the crowd, “Which one do you want me to release to you, Barabbas or Jesus, called Messiah?” The crowd shouts, “Barabbas!” Pilate replies, “Then what shall I do with Jesus called Messiah?” The crowd shouts even louder, “Crucify him!” Pilate, wishing to avoid the very real possibility of a riot in the city, gives in to the crowd, saying: “I am innocent of this man’s blood. Look to it yourselves.” The crowd then shouts back, “His blood be upon us and upon our children” (27: 17-25). Those words laid the foundation for Christian persecution against the Jews that would last for nearly two millennia.[1]
Two examples suffice to illustrate, the first focuses on St. Ambrose of Milan (340-397)—St. Augustine’s mentor—in his collection of homilies, Expositio evangelii secundum Lucan, composed in the 380s. In an insightful article, Maria Doerfler observes that Ambrose’s homilies display a virulent anti-Jewish tenor”; indeed, Doerfler writes that “scarcely a passage of the voluminous commentary is free of venom,” noting that Ambrose habitually links heretics and Jews together, equating the two.[2] We might pluck a second example from St. Cyril of Alexandria (376-444), the powerful and influential patriarch of Alexandria (412-444) and a central figure at the Council of Ephesus (431). Alexandria contained one of the largest Jewish communities in the Roman Empire, and like St. Ambrose, Cyril viewed the Jews with a jaundiced eye. During the first decade of his episcopate, Cyril wrote Adoratione et cultu (On Adoration and Worship in Spirit and Truth) which is primarily a commentary on the Pentateuch, offering harsh criticism of the Jews,[3] and the Glaphyra (the “Elegant Comments”), once again addressing the Pentateuch. In his Preface to the Glaphyra Cyril makes clear that the purpose of his exegesis is to demonstrate that “the end of the law and the prophets is Christ.” In the Glaphyra, we should note his many references to Matthew 27: 25 (“His blood be upon us and upon our children”), drawing a parallel between the story of Cain murdering his younger brother Able and the Jews murdering their younger brother, Jesus. That’s an ongoing theme with Cyril, whose festal letters, written during the first decade of his episcopate (412-422), and hence coextensive with Adoratione et cultu and the Glaphyra, are preoccupied with anti-Jewish polemic.[4] In 415, just three years into his episcopate, Cyril expelled the entire Jewish community from Alexandria, allegedly because some Jews had lured Christians into the streets at night and slaughtered them. Cyril’s opponent, Orestes, vehemently disagreed, appealing to the Roman emperor Flavius Honorius (395-423), inflaming five hundred zealous monks loyal to Cyril to stone Orestes to death, accusing him of paganism and idolatry.
With the murder of Orestes, tensions escalated in Alexandria, resulting in Hypatia (c. 360-415), the brilliant female Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, mathematician and friend of Orestes, being attacked by a mob loyal to Cyril. The mob snatched her from her carriage, dragged her to the Caesareum, a former temple built by Egypt’s last pharaoh, Cleopatra VII, in honor of her lover Julius Caesar, and there they stripped Hypatia naked, butchered her with shards of pottery, hacked her body to pieces and set her remains on fire. In the mind of many, pagans and Jews deserved the same fate.[5]
That’s just a glimpse of Christianity’s early persecution of the Jews. It continued more or less unabated, reaching a high point during the “Black Death” of the Middle Ages (c. 1348-1352), the bubonic plague entering Europe and killing over one-third of Europe’s population in a mere three years. Many blamed the Jews for the catastrophe, resulting in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Jews throughout Europe, especially in the Rhineland.[6] We need only read Shakespeare’s play, The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596-1599) with its miserly, money-lending Jew, Shylock, demanding his “pound of flesh” from Antonio, to see the ongoing characterization of Jews during the Renaissance. And, of course, we all know about the Nazi Holocaust of 1939-1945.
That’s not to say that the Church failed utterly in its relationship with the Jews. Many stepped forward in their defense; for example, Pope Clement VI issued a bull in 1348, Quamvis perfidiam, condemning violence against the Jews and urging their protection during the plague years. Nonetheless, antisemitism ran deeply throughout the Church. The pre-1962 Easter liturgy had Catholics praying that the perfidis Judaeis, the “perfidious (or ‘treacherous’) Jews” might be converted to the truth. It wasn’t until 1955 that Pope Pius XII ordered that perfidis be translated as “unbelieving,” and later Pope John XXIII took a further step, ordering that perfidis be dropped entirely from the Good Friday liturgy, rewriting the liturgy to ask that Catholics instead pray for “the Jewish people, first to hear the word of God, that they may continue to grow in the love of His name and in the faithfulness to His covenant.” Finally, Vatican Council II issued Nostra aetate (“In Our Time”) by a “yes” vote of 2,281 to 88. It was officially promulgated by Pope Paul VI on October 28, 1965. Nostra aetate reads, in part:
“True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ”
(NA 4).
That was a major step in the right direction.
Since this blog is my personal reflection on Christian/Jewish relations, I’d like to offer my own experience as a scripture teacher on my interaction with Judaism and the Jews. Early on in my UCLA English Department course, The English Bible as Literature, I thought it would be interesting for my students if I team-taught the course with a Jewish Rabbi. I had met Rabbi David Wolpe while using the library at what was then the University of Judaism in Los Angeles (now named the American Jewish University). David was a very bright young man, newly ordained, and he took me up on the offer. Together, we team-taught the Old Testament section of my three-quarter long evening class, three hours per week, ten weeks each quarter. It was a great success: the students loved it; I enjoyed the in-class banter with David; and we resolved to continue on, as David had the time and opportunity. Teaching that class made me realize how little I really knew about contemporary Judaism, so I enrolled in an eighteen-week course at the University of Judaism, “An Introduction to Judaism,” basically a course similar to our Catholic Church’s RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults), a course for converts to Judaism. We had fifty-three people in class: about 2/3s were non-Jewish women who were planning to marry Jewish men for the sake of their future children, for a “Jew” is someone born of a Jewish mother; it has nothing to do with his or her father; the remainder were what I would call “church-damaged” Christians, a few “searchers” . . . and me. Honestly, it was the best course I had ever taken. We met for three hours each week for the eighteen weeks; we were “adopted” by a Jewish family, who had us in their home each Shabbat for dinner and for worship together; and we attended synagogue services each week at Sinai Temple in Beverly Hills (where David later become the senior Rabbi). At the end of our course, some students had dropped out, but the majority converted to Judaism, and I had the privilege of attending their conversion ceremony (which for males involved circumcision . . . yikes!).
About a year later, largely due to my “Introduction to Judaism” instructor, Rabbi Zvi Dershowitz, I was invited to become the Scholar in Residence at Sinai Temple, the first Christian to hold that one-year appointment. It was truly an honor. As part of my duties, I was to preach the sermon at Shabbat services once each quarter (a 30-40 minute sermon) and hold four quarterly “Saturday Seminars” on Jewish/Christian relations. Shortly after that, I hired Rabbi Michael Myersohn as a Logos Bible Study teacher. Michael worked for me for nearly ten years, teaching classes throughout Southern California, and participating as a speaker at our bi-annual Logos Bible Study Advent and Lenten weekend retreats at the Franciscan Renewal Center in Scottsdale, Arizona. Those were great years!
Since 1992 I have been leading “teaching tours” to Israel, usually two or three each year. This past March I lead my 64th Israel tour, with another scheduled for this coming October/November (https://www.logosbiblestudy.com/travel ). When I touch down at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, I feel like I’ve “come home.” Over the past thirty years I’ve developed many close and lasting friendships with my Israeli Jewish colleagues.
So, yes, understanding Christian/Jewish relations is very dear to my heart, for I have “skin in the game.” In my experience, authentic relationships with members of other religions must be based upon genuine friendship and mutual respect, void of any “conversion” agenda. That is the only starting point from which we can move forward, understanding that we can learn as much from our Jewish brothers and sisters as they can learn from us. In that spirit, I’d like to devote the next several blogs to exploring the Jewish holidays: 1) Shabbat (or the “Sabbath”), the weekly day of rest; 2) the Spring festivals: Feast of Unleavened Bread (Passover), Feast of First Fruits and Feast of Weeks (Pentecost); and the Fall festivals: Feast of Trumpets (Rosh Hashanah), Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) and Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot).
We have much to learn from this Jewish “liturgical cycle,” for it is the heartbeat of the Jewish community’s relationship with God . . . and it is the DNA of our own Christian liturgical cycle.
[1] For an excellent collection of scholarly articles on this topic, see: James G. D. Dunn, ed. Jews and Christians, the Parting of the Ways, A.D. 70 to 135 (The Second Durham-Tubingen Research Symposium on Earliest Christianity and Judaism, Dunham, September 1989) (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1992). See also the somewhat older study by James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue: A Study on the Origins of Antisemitism (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1961), which explores the rise of antisemitism from the early centuries of the Christian era into the Middle Ages.
[2] Doerfler, Maria. “Ambrose’s Jews: The Creation of Judaism and Heterodox Christianity in Ambrose of Milan’s ‘Expositio Evangelii Secundum Lucam.’” Church History 80, no. 4 (2011): 750-751. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41410751.
[3] See Matthew R. Crawford’s “The Preface and Subject Matter of Cyril of Alexandria’s De Adoratione,” The Journal of Theological Studies 64, no. 1 (2013), pp. 154-167. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43665252.
[4] See John J. O’Keefe, ed. St. Cyril of Alexandria: Festal Letters, 1-12, trans. by Philip R. Amidon, S.J. (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009). For an in-depth examination of St. Cyril and the Alexandrine Jews see B. Lee Blackburn, Jr., “The Mystery of the Synagogue: Cyril of Alexandria on the Law of Moses,” PhD diss. (University of Notre Dame, 2009).
[5] The fate of both the Alexandrian Jews and Hypatia under Cyril’s influence speak volumes about the heated climate of persecution after the Edict of Milan issued in 413 and Theodosius I (347-395) issuing the Edict of Thessalonica in 380, making Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. For those interested, Alejandro Amenábar’s 2010 film, Agora, depicts the story of Hypatia (trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOXKF1mb9Hc), and there is a wonderful 1885 painting of Hypatia by Charles William Mitchell in the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hypatia_(Charles_Mitchell).jpg).
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[6] Cohn, Samuel K. “The Black Death and the Burning of Jews.” Past & Present, no. 196 (2007), pp. 3–36. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25096679.