Canadian Store (CAD)
You are currently shopping in our Canadian store. For orders outside of Canada, please switch to our international store. International and US orders are billed in US dollars.
By DAVID VAN BIEMA
"I’m not offended when Christians eat pork," says Jacob Neusner. At
least not usually. The brilliant–and none too patient–Jewish scholar
does recall a religion conference where so much of the other white meat
was served that he was reduced to a diet of hard-boiled eggs. One day
on the food line something snapped, and he rhymed aloud, "I hope you
all get trichinosis/And come to believe in the God of Moses." A fellow
conferee instantly replied, "And if we don’t get such diseases/Will you
believe in the God of Jesus?" Neusner cackles. "That’s an example of
the right way to do Judeo-Christian dialogue," he says. "If religion
matters, and it does, then it’s not honest to be indifferent to the
convictions of others."
Doggerel
aside, Neusner, 74, lives by the story’s moral: confrontation is part
of his makeup, take it or leave it. One might expect many Christians to
leave it. But at least one has not. In his new book, Jesus of Nazareth
(Doubleday; $24.95), Pope Benedict XVI devotes 20 pages to A Rabbi
Talks with Jesus, a 161-page grenade Neusner lobbed in 1993. In that
volume, the professor (now at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson,
N.Y.) and noncongregational rabbi projected himself back into the
Gospel of Matthew to quiz Jesus on the Jewish law. He found the
Nazarene’s interpretation irredeemably faulty. In his 14-years-delayed
response, Benedict not only compliments Neusner as a "great Jewish
scholar" but also recapitulates the thesis of A Rabbi Talks and spends
a third of one of his 10 chapters answering it.
There is no real
precedent for this. The last time Christianity and Judaism had
knockdown debates was during medieval "disputations" convened by
Christian authorities and decisively rigged against the Jews. Although
the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 renounced the Roman Catholic
teaching that Jews were Christ killers and John Paul II acknowledged
Jews’ ongoing presence by visiting a synagogue, postwar papal discourse
has focused on Christianity’s view of Judaism, not the reverse, and
steered serenely around fundamental controversies. Jesus of Nazareth
takes the next huge step: "a Pope taking seriously what a Jew says–and
says critically–about the New Testament," marvels Eugene Fisher, the
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ liaison for Catholic-Jewish
relations. "Wow. This is new."
In choosing Neusner as his muse,
Benedict selected a man as formidable and controversial in the field of
Jewish studies as the Pope is in Catholicism. An expert on the
sprawling literature of the 1st through 6th century rabbis who shaped
modern Judaism, Neusner is an empire builder, a central figure in
wrestling an examination of Judaism into America’s universities. He
accomplished this through brilliance (he developed his own secularly
comprehensible synthesis of rabbinics), superhuman productivity (he has
written more than 950 books, although he will admit to a certain
reprocessing of material) and a knack for grooming gifted protégés who
now run Jewish studies at top schools. He is equally famous for
alienating many of his disciples with what came to be known as
"Neusner’s drop-dead letters." (Neusner calls the complaint
"overstated.") He can keep friends–Harvard classmate John Updike wrote
a fond 1986 short story featuring a "Josh Neusner"–but as Neusner
admits, he remains one of the most contentious people he knows.
Contention
was the very soul of A Rabbi Talks. Neusner based his book on the
common scholarly understanding that the New Testament’s Gospel of
Matthew was written as an invitation to Jesus’ fellow Jews, trying to
convince them, by dint of purportedly predictive passages in the Jewish
Bible and Jesus’ striking interpretations of Jewish Scripture, that he
was Israel’s longed-for Messiah. His claim in the Sermon on the Mount
that he came "not … to abolish the Torah and the [writings of the]
prophets … but to fulfill them" is one of the great hinge sentences
connecting Western monotheisms.
But Neusner insists it doesn’t
parse. A Rabbi Talks argues, for instance, that Jesus’ line that "he
who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me" defies
the commandment to "honor thy father and mother" and that his liberties
with Saturday rules on grounds that "the Son of Man is Lord of the
Sabbath" flout the one that explicitly orders all humans to observe the
day. Most important, Neusner read Jesus’ repeated rhetorical formula
"You have heard that it was said [in the Torah] … But I say to you
… " as his claim to be not merely the religio-military Messiah some
Jews hoped for at the time but also above the Torah and hence God.
Neusner imagined having a dialogue with a Jesus-era Jewish "master"
about Jesus’ Torah teaching:
"He: ‘What did he leave out?’
"I: ‘Nothing.’
"He: ‘Then what did he add?’
"I: ‘Himself.’"
Neusner
asserted that any thoughtful Jew must conclude that Jesus was actually
"abandoning the Torah" and reject him. He also suggested that insofar
as Matthew’s arguments are based in Jewish law, Christianity may be
flawed by its own standards.
Such open theological aggression is
rare in post-Holocaust interfaith parley–or buried amid affirmations
of commonality and practical issues like those impacting the state of
Israel. But Neusner had collected an interesting fan. He and Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger, then head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith, had struck up a professional correspondence
after the rabbi wrote the Cardinal an admiring note about something he
had published. Ratzinger blurbed A Rabbi Talks as "by far the most
important book for the Jewish-Christian dialogue in the last decade."
Still,
Neusner was "amazed" when he heard that Ratzinger, now Pope, has
revisited it in detail–and in print. When a papal confidant told the
Catholic News Service that it was "one of the reasons" Benedict had
undertaken his entire two-volume Jesus of Nazareth project, the
somewhat puzzled but delighted professor called it "an academic love
letter!"
In fact, a close reading of the Pope’s chapter suggests more a
marriage of convenience. Benedict is preoccupied with what he sees as
the Gospel’s overriding message of Jesus’ divinity, even in passages
that liberal Christians read primarily as straightforward injunctions
to help the poor and powerless. Having a rabbi help make that case is
novel and convenient. Regarding one verse, Benedict writes that
"Neusner shows us that we are dealing not with some kind of moralism,
but with a highly theological text, or, to put it more precisely, a
Christological one." He acknowledges the rabbi’s point that Jesus is
offering the Jews a transformation rather than a continuation of the
Torah but maintains that the trade-off is worth it, provided Jesus is
not merely "a liberal reform rabbi" but "the Son." That Neusner and
other Jews regard that very Sonship as a deal breaker does not bother
him much. "It would be good for the Christian world to look
respectfully at this obedience of Israel," he writes, "and thus to
appreciate better the great commandments" as universalized by Jesus.
Neusner,
in his Rhinebeck, N.Y., home, is equally unfazed by the Pope’s
repurposing of his argument. "You can’t expect him to get circumcised,"
he says. "He’s still a Christian, and I’m still a practitioner of
Judaism. But the two positions can consider the same text and identify
where they converge and where they part company. I think it’s terrific."
So
do other players in the Jewish-Christian conversation. "‘Pope Takes
Seriously What Rabbi Has to Say’ is a message that will be picked up by
anyone who reads their diocesan paper," says Fisher of the Bishops’
conference. Amy-Jill Levine, a Jew who teaches New Testament studies at
Vanderbilt University Divinity School and has her own Jesus book, The
Misunderstood Jew, says both undergrads and interfaith experts can
profit from the Neusner-Benedict exchange. Rabbi James Rudin, senior
interreligious adviser to the American Jewish Committee, says it is in
some ways "the full maturation of the modern Catholic-Jewish
encounter." But perhaps it may mature further still. Asked what he
would like to write next, Neusner says, "I’d like to do a book with the
Pope about Paul," whose letter, Romans, contains verses that have long
bedeviled Jewish-Christian relations. He is half-joking. But what if
the Pope said yes? What new wonder might emerge when two smart men
agree to disagree but then keep talking?
No comments yet.