A Legacy of Blood

...Worse, the contextualizations are presented often as fact rather than as a theory...

...Familiarly known as the CEV, this Bible uses traditional softenings ("council" for "Sanhedrin" in the story of St...

...Some Christians come away from scripture readings with philo-Semitic feelings...

...They include 14 letters, attributed to Paul, that are addressed to fledgling Christian communities scattered around the Mediterranean...

...No rendering of "Temple" as "temple" and no elimination of "synagogue" can disguise this, can hold the line against, for example, the more than 500 quotes from Tanakh woven into the 408 verses of Revelation, or the fact that Jesus' final words are lifted from Psalm 22 ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me...

...A retired Philadelphia businessman, he has written that "the common understanding of the New Testament" was and is "the most potent factor fostering anti-Semitism" and that following a cenrury that has seen "the murder of two out of five Jews," Christian leaders have an urgent responsibility "to remove hateful and inaccurate references to Jews from their Bibles...

...Carroll's book does advance some radical proposals— the election of Catholic bishops by democratic vote, for example—but in advocating that Christians be taught to read the New Testament with understanding of the document's human origins, he is far from revolutionary...

...This is so because the author of John preached at a time (and in a place) when it was becoming increasingly clear that the Jewish rejection of Christ was probably absolute, and that the only hope for the survival of a fledgling "unofficial" faith within the Roman Empire lay with winning over gentiles to the cause...

...Many others have human hearts that simply and naturally find spe...

...In Mary Boys's words, "Christians need to become a community of text interpreters...

...the chorus director...

...Meanwhile, in the waking world of 2001, Charlie Ward, a basketball player, looks up from his Bible study group with fellow Knicks in a Milwaukee hotel room and says to a New York Times reporter, "Jews] had [Christ's] blood on their hands...

...Gene Fisher, last I saw him, was walking around with a letter from a Catholic priest in Los Angeles who had informed his diocese that he could not preside at Easter masses so long as there were required readings from John or Matthew 23...

...In addition to conferences, educational programs, and a museum, the institute has underwritten 17 books, eight of which are completely or predominately about the portrayal of Jews in the New Testament...

...or that Judas, however vigorously Christian theology teaches that he stands for all Christian sinners, is not named Frank or Bill or even Gamliel...

...Because these sentences were written by Jews arguing with other Jews about an internal matter: what form their faith should take after the loss of the Jewish Temple...

...In the past they killed those who foretold the coming of the Just One, and now you have become his betrayers and murderers...

...Eugene Fisher asks for patience...

...There is no reason to use certain problematic liturgical readings," he said, except for traditions overseen by Rome...

...and, generally speaking, the later the book, the stronger its presence...

...Originally published in 1984 as the American Family Bible, the AHB represents what is probably history's first serious attempt to "retranslate" the New Testament so that it cannot be used to support hatred toward Jews...

...October 28, 1965, the day on which the Second Vatican Council issued Nostra Aetate, literally begins the Catholic Church's attempt to understand its relationship to the Jewish people...

...But for all that, the CEV remains a translated— not bowdlerized—Bible, and so it contains passages that will be sorely offensive to Jews, such as Galatians 3:16, where Paul notes that, "The promises God made [to Abraham] were not made to many descendants but only to one, and that one is Christ," or as in Matthew 23, where in spite of the editors' kindly efforts to turn Pharisees into kids who won't give up the playground ball, Jesus still howls: "Jerusalem, Jerusalem...

...Catholic textbooks in the United States have been completely changed, for example, so you literally can't use them to teach contempt for Jews...

...The text is sacred—just as the Tanakh is sacred for Jews—but it sometimes needs an explanation, just like ours does...

...The churches need to implement, at the level of every local church, what their theologians have been writing for years about the New Testament in official church documents...

...says Boys, of the Union Theological Seminary...

...I do not think the word of God, in anyone's religion, should be domesticated...

...John's gospel, for example, generally accorded a date ranging from 90 to 120 C.E., contains 71 references to "Jews" compared to 16 in the three earlier gospel recountings of Jesus' life...

...And then along came the Shoah to trim out the worst consequences of those teachings in white bone...

...Meanwhile in Nashville, Tenn., Levine, afflicted with the resoluteness of a Jewish mother as well as that of a scholar, once a year stands her young son, in kippah and tzitzit, at the front of the classroom before her seminary students...

...would run: God used to love the Jews, but they became fixated on law and sacrifice, refusing to attend to God's will and His prophets, and so God decided to replace Torah with Jesus, and Jews with Christian gentiles, and the Jews then killed God's son who had been sent to bring this news to the world, and that is why God destroyed the Temple and scattered the Jews and condemned them to suffering on earth and in eternity...

...I felt there would be more pogroms," he continues, "so I made a major decision...

...RECENTLY I HEARD RABBI DANIEL Lehmann, principal of Boston's New Jewish High School, tell a gathering of Christian and Jewish scholars that Christianity needed to develop a midrashic—or interpretive— tradition to deal with difficult scriptures...

...He shrugged...

...That this contradicts 1,900 years worth of theological conviction has not been much of a problem for the churches...

...Rather, in his book Proclaiming Shalom (Liturgical Press: 1995) he recommends brief introductions for pastors to recite before the scriptural readings each Sunday at Mass...

...For good and for ill, this fact is reflected in nearly every sentence of the New Testament, with all its references to Shabbat, tefillin, tzedakah, Pharisees, and priests...

...The choral director and pastor made well-intended efforts to reconcile great art and vileness, while Gould declared himself able to sing such lines as "away with him, crucify him!'' with sufficient historical perspective that no sweat broke—and was convincing...

...They," she was saying, may have had good reason for persuading Christian churches to abjure anti- Semitic preachings and teachings...

...Will those dreams be gentled by an understanding that the author of Matthew may have had a beloved mother or aunts who put money in the pushke every Friday to support the rabbis at Yavneh...

...Here's the American Holy Bible retranslation: "Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised, you do always resist the Holy Ghost...

...Rather, he wants the Vatican to call Catholics "to a more sophisticated understanding of God's word" that would allow them "to read the foundational texts not as divine, but as...

...Bowdlerization has its costs as well as benefits, however...

...What people sling back and forth in the Knesset," he told me, "cannot be anti-Jewish, though in Nebraska those would be fighting words...

...A]nd they have slain them which shewed before of the coming of the just one...

...She suggests, rather, that appropriate treatments for anti- Jewish text will of necessity range from history lessons to "apology and repenting...

...She concludes, "I find especially helpful the exercise of having Jews and Christians read together, so that the Jew can see that most Christians do not read with anti-Semitic eyes, and so that the Christian can see that the references to Jews in, say, John 8 [when Jesus says to some Jews, "You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father's desires"], can have a very personal impact on real people and real lives today...

...Meanwhile, efforts to change the nature of the New Testament's authority and use continue...

...Five generations," said one religious educator when I asked how long it might take to change the way American Christians read anti-Jewish passages in the New Testament...

...In his best-selling Constantine's Sword—The Church And The Jews, Carroll recommends that the Roman Catholic Church (in which he is a communicant) convene a historic Third Vatican Council to direcdy confront Christian anti-Judaism and its tragic consequences...

...He does not advocate M O S T N E W T E S T A M E NT F O R P O L I T I C A L , N O T M A T T E R , R E S P O N S I B I L I TY what he calls "pulpit seminars...

...and Revelation...

...Says Currningham: "A priest should introduce a reading by saying, 'What Mark or Luke or Paul wants us to understand here is this'—so people start seeing the gospel text as a work created by human beings for a particular purpose within a particular community and time, and stop thinking of it as a straight transcript of Jesus' activities that can't be held up to critical examination or reviewed in light of new understandings...

...Nostra Aetate, the Vatican's 1965 declaration on Judaism, puts this cleanly, noting that while some Jews "pressed for the death of Christ...

...Several knowledgeable Catholics told me that the Vatican was in fact quietly reviewing the required Mass readings for anti-Jewish content, and would soon be making the first changes in liturgical practice since the late 1960s...

...While this may not quite serve to take the heat off Jews (who else, after all, would one be trying to insult with the word "uncircumcised...

...Klenicki told me that he had just completed a book for use in Christian seminaries that he called, with bright irony, "the first rabbinic commentary on John...

...Sister Mary Boys, who holds a chair in religious education at Union Theological Seminary, in New York City, advances a similar agenda...

...Stephen's nasty speech to the Sanhedrin in Acts 7:51-52 is rendered this way in The Jerusalem Bible—an authorized, plain-speech Catholic Bible published by Doubleday: "You stubborn people, with your pagan hearts and pagan ears...

...It does so through some standard- issue "softening," such as the substitution of "meeting place" for "synagogue," and 71 substitutions of "people" for "Jews" in John...

...This has been the standard approach since the late 1960s," says Philip Cunningham, executive director of the Center for Christian- Jewish Learning at Boston College (a university where I work in administration...

...Another guessed one generation...

...Fisher was in absolute sympathy...

...So why not turn "the Jews" into the historic opposition to Jesus...

...And the book contains respectful footnotes: "Many of the Jewish people prayed in their homes at regular times each day and on special occasions they prayed in the Temple...

...And the list of contributors to those books reads like a who's who of contemporary Christian and Jewish contextualizers...

...Can you name a single prophet your ancestors never persecuted...

...But "they" simply could not be allowed to change the way Christians, innocent in their beds and Barcaloungers and pews, read the Word of God and relate to the beloved, familiar, and inspiring locutions and stories of the New Testament...

...It was Easter season, and the meetmg"was'hosted by an Episcopal church in a Boston suburb and cosponsored by a chorus that was about to perform the piece...

...What Jews should ask [for] now is very simple: education...

...Another asked: What can be done for the majority of the world's Christians, who read their Bibles and listen to their liturgies in Africa and Asia, and have never seen a Jew...

...At the complex end of things, context means understanding that whatever the malignant import and consequences of certain New Testament passages as they were read in 1095 or 1933, the true intent of those words, when they were first set down in 70 or 110, was neither anti-Jewish nor threatening to Jews...

...It's a Christian moral responsibility not to allow people to come to these texts without context," says Sara Lee, director of the Rhea Hirsch School of Education at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles, "but there are many challenges...

...A Christian who opens his Bible this evening after dinner and reads Matthew 27:15-25 (Pilate's unsuccessful attempt to release Jesus rather than Barabbas, that concludes with Pilate's statement, "I am innocent of this man's blood," followed by, "Then the people as a whole answered, 'His blood be on us and on our children!'") has read a curse upon Jews and will sleep with its damning echoes...

...I published 24 [different] magazines before I decided to remove anti-Semitism from the world," Borowsky tells me over the phone in a line that feels worn with use but still warm with ardor...

...Period...

...And is a scripture that has been falsified still scripture...

...The speakers were the pastor...

...We do not know who comprised the audiences of John or Matthew's gospels, so the argument of Jews talking to Jews is at best hypothesis...

...At this point, an elderly woman seated behind me turned to the elderly woman seated beside her and whispered: "Oh, no...

...Stephen, the first martyr, stoned by Jews), and some translations aimed at children (the Pharisees in Matthew 23 are "show-offs," not the traditional "hypocrites...

...Verse 37 now comprises only its comparatively innocent second sentence...

...Each Christian denomination has its own educational system and curriculum, for example, and many rely on volunteer lay teachers— sometimes lightly trained and supervised only with gratitude...

...In Has God Only One Blessing, Boys writes, "In effect we are inviting people to a reading diat seems to contradict the apparent meaning of the text—and that with a text that is a (indeed for many the) precious artifact of their faith...

...seven letters attributed to James, Peter, John, and Jude...

...and James Carroll, then known as a novelist and memoirist...

...A woman of great spirit whom I once heard declare in the midsr of a debate with other scholars, "Listen, I know Matthew better than Matthew," Levine has her doubts about contextualization...

...But not all ideas can be softened, and where they can't, the AHB takes the next necessary step...

...Over lunch recently, a Jesuit priest who is a friend of mine told me that while he certainly took note of cultural anti-Semitism in his youth in the 1940s, the anti-Jewish messages of the New Testament never registered with him...

...Additionally, says Lee, "It's hard to provide historic context to children, whether Christian or Jewish, when they are faced with a problematic text...

...Christians take their sacred text seriously (as seriously as Jews take their own texts), and no theologian I spoke with for this article, Jew or Christian, could imagine any mainstream Christian denomination that would authorize a text like the American Holy Bible—that is, a text altered for social and not scholarly reasons...

...IRWIN BOROWSKY WANTS A BIT MORE AND a bit sooner from Christians...

...But Borowsky is also known for a more quixotic and daring volume, the American Holy Bible (AHB...

...Eugene Fisher, who represents the American Catholic bishops in their relations with American Jews, compares New Testament polemics to Israeli parliamentary debate...

...Your people have killed the prophets and have stoned the messengers who were sent to you...

...Since that time we've been teaching Christians to bring to bear on the Bible what they already know from larger society: that books are shaped by individual authors...

...Most people don't know how to read poetry, so why would we expect them to know how to read scripture...

...It just didn't trigger anything...

...Cunningham has been a consultant to neighborhood churches as well as the Vatican, and he is a realist about congregational life...

...We'd say, 'The real Amalek was back then, but these people today, they're not really Amalek.'" It's an elegant midrash, but not available to Christianity...

...In this way, he wrote, he hoped to bring his church to an honest understanding of its faults, of the dangers of triumphalist pride, and of Christianity's relationship to Judaism...

...cious hatred of other human beings suspect...

...Less surprisingly, Ward and Weyrich seemed unaware that most New Testament researchers had found their own reasons to doubt the charges against the Jews, and had concluded that Jesus was killed for political (Roman), not religious (Jewish) reasons, and that the Jews were later "framed by the gospels," in the words of the scholar Hyam Maccoby...

...To give them their due, Ward and Weyrich were reflecting the straight gospel reading (see sidebar, p. 54) as well as the meditations of theologians from the second century through Luther right down to poor Edith Stein (also known to her fellow Carmelite sisters as Benedicta of the Cross, and to the world as a soon-to-be Catholic saint), who set off for her death in Auschwitz believing that the Shoah was "the fulfillment of the curse which my people called down upon its own head...

...Responding from Europe to questions I put to her by email, she wrote: "I fear that attempts to contextualize are simplistic excuses that seek to exculpate Christianity...

...They're not going to take that away from us...

...Supreme Court...

...Ultimately, he writes, the church "must help Christians learn to read anti-Jewish texts as if they were themselves Jews...

...The gist of the priest's argument was: I may understand the context, but the parishioners don't, and I can't give them context along with everything else I'm supposed to teach them in the seven minutes I'm allotted for my homily...

...Similarly, passages that deal with conflict between Jews and followers of Jesus have been changed, while references to Jewish responsibility for Jesus' death have been removed...

...This is an argument, of course, for the integral innocence of the New Testament—a matter of some importance for Christians, certainly, and probably a historic truth...

...Amy-Jill Levine is a professor of New Testament at Vanderbilt Theological Seminan', an interdenominational Protestant institution...

...And then Jim Carroll, in his earnest public manner, said that Christianity would never rid itself of the culture and sin of anti-Semitism until its scriptures were newly understood by all Christians as documents corrupted by the human failings of their authors...

...They" may have had good reason for convincing many Christians to change the way they consider Jews and Judaism...

...Rather, they are sisters, or mother and daughter, or branch and branch...

...Another guessed 50 years...

...In the new imagery adopted by these churches, Judaism and Christianity are no longer, respectively, the broken branch and the new shoot of the olive tree...

...the four Gospels...

...At the simple end of things, context here means that a Christian believer must be taught to set aside, as invalid, certain scriptural sentiments—approval of slavery, for example—that we 21st century sojourners now know to be wrong-headed...

...Regarding the New Testament, while Carroll does favor some "softening" language—the substitution of "leaders" for "priests" in the crucifixion narratives, for example—he is not for editing out the nasty bits...

...Tomorrow the Marxists might like to change the text, and the day after that the Republicans...

...Jim Carroll seems to feel the same way...

...Any attempt to change the New Testament text is an invitation to anarchy," said Rabbi Klenicki...

...A Legacy of Blood Can Christianity Be Purged Anti-Semitism Without Changing he Gospels BEN BIRNBAUM NE EVENING a few years ago, I attended a forum on anti-Judaism in the text of Bach's "St John's Passion...

...Since that time, "mainstream" Christian churches have taken pains to reject and repent of the anti-Semitism that they've been able to identify in their teachings, heritage, and practices...

...That Jews were sinful, cursed, and "perfidious"—as the Catholic liturgy expressly said—remained a matter of fact supported not simply by Christian scripture, art, and the pious divinations of a thousand theologians, but by the visceral evidence of Jewish life under the heel of Christendom...

...THE FOCUS OF THIS PROPOSED INTERPRETATION IS a set of 27 books that together are about a quarter as long as the Tanakh, the three categories of books comprising the Hebrew Bible...

...Progress has begun to permeate textbooks and teachers...

...Breathing it, however, is no guarantee of illness...

...Will these dreams be filtered by an awareness that the author of Matthew almost certainly believed himself to be as faithful a Jew as Moses...

...Secondly, the words these Jews used against their brothers and sisters, no matter how powerful they may seem to us, were in fact examples of standard issue polemic drawn right from the pages of Samuel, Psalms, and the later prophets—as common in ancient Israel as date palms, and nearly as banal...

...Four years later, Carroll's proposals for dealing with anti-Judaism in the New Testament (and in Christian history and theology) are a matter of very public record...

...This is the virus at its most powerful, distilled to its essence...

...Paulist: 2000) she compares the way Christians should understand the New Testament with the way Americans understand the Declaration of Independence, as a document full of truth mediated by individuals in a particular society...

...With some rare exceptions, the work of these scholars was not directed at lowering the temperature of anti-Semitism among Christians...

...This is, of course, the ultimate contextualization: reading as the other would read and feeling as the other would feel...

...Acts of the Aposdes...

...For example, if the NT [New Testament] is seen as only presenting 'in-house' polemic, then the fault of the anti-Jewish material must lie widr Jews...

...As for the awkward fact of a received scripture that contradicts these new truths about Judaism and Christianity, Christian scholars and churches have tried to solve the problem by teaching the contextual understandings advanced by Cunningham, Boys, Carroll, and many others...

...The decision, in 1982, was to sell his publishing business and found the American Interfaith Institute (All), a foundation "committed to modifying the anti-Judaism in Christian theology," according to its Web site...

...You are always resisting the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do...

...And "they" may even have been right about making certain Easter traditions conditional on crowding 250 people into church to consider the consequences of text...

...Christianity begins as a kind of Judaism," says John Stendahl, a Lutheran pastor who serves on a national panel that advises his church on relations with Jews, "and we must recognize that words spoken in a family conflict are inappropriately appropriated by those outside the family...

...But there's still plenty of work ahead...

...I believe the New Testament is a factor in anti-Semitism today as in the past," says Rabbi Leon Klenicki, the recently retired director of interfaith relations for the Anti- Defamation League...

...If you draw anti-Semitic ideas from scripture, the Roman Catholic Church now teaches, you have read it wrong...

...But if one wished to reduce it to its anti-Jewish argument, the sentence C H O L A R S SAY JESUS W A S K I L L ED R E L I G I O U S R E A S O N S . AS A H I S T O R I C A L LIES W I T H THE R O M A N S , NOT THE JEWS...

...its combination of passive verbs and blind-box pronouns renders the action simply nonsensical, which may be an improvement over offensive, but which is false to the spirit as well as the words of the text...

...But it does not, of course, render the New Testament benign...

...Afterward I asked him how he thought Judaism would interpret one of its own problematic passages—Exodus 17, the story of the Amalekite attack on the wandering Israelites, concluding with God's vow to "blot out Amalek"—if the Amalekites were still around...

...It's a contextualization of the New Testament that she hopes they will remember all their Christian lives...

...More successfully, Borowsky's foundation did influence the translation and dissemination of the American Bible Society's Holy Bible—Contemporary English Version...

...That's only 35 years, and we've done a lot since then...

...And while you're at it, why not score some points with Roman authorities by setting up "the Jews" to take the fall for Jesus' execution...

...Dating from the middle of the first century to the middle of the second century, these writings had coalesced as the Christian story by about 200 C.E...

...And finally, those Jews who, as Jews, believed in Yeshu ben Yosef as God's moshiach numbered about 100,000 at the turn of the first century in contrast with an estimated five million Jews within the Roman Empire, and so had no more prospect or intent of drawing serious blood from their co-religionists than the Michigan Militia has today of bringing down the U.S...

...Which of the prophets have not been persecuted...

...Since the Shoah, scholars have filled miles of library shelves with works that dissect and recalibrate the relationship between Judaism and Christianity...

...Jews are still around and Christianity needs real Jews and Judaism to be whole...

...These anti-Jewish themes remained Christian wallpaper until the 19th century, when some Protestant theologians began working on textual analysis of the New Testament...

...The New Testament is about many things, principally God's covenant with man...

...For Levine, "text-taming" is not a solution either...

...Whether it catches or not, however, anti-Judaism is in the plain reading of the New Testament...

...the paleontologist, Jew, and bass Stephen Jay Gould...

...Theology is, after all, a human tradition...

...And now your temple will be deserted...

...still, what happened in His passion cannot be blamed upon all the Jews then living, without distinction, nor against the Jews of today...

...In Has God Only One Blessing...

...There have been tremendous advances, but there is an immense amount of work to be done...

...Just as with some Biblical references to women or slaves,translation alone can't solve the problem of text that appears hostile to Jews," Boys told me, reflecting a sentiment I heard from a dozen theologians, Jewish and Christian, whom I spoke with for this article...

...It was like hearing news stories about a sport that doesn't mean anything to you...

...Meanwhile, Paul Weyrich, a respected conservative commentator, writes in an Easter column that "Christ was crucified by the Jews [because] He was not what the Jews had expected so they considered Him a threat...

...a flawed gospel created by flawed believers" who attempted, in difficult times, to mediate God's felt will and spirit...

...This is why these studies of the New Testament context are so important...

...For example, in Matthew 23:37 (Jesus' blast against the scribes and Temple priests), the sentence about murderous Jerusalem ("Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her") is gone...

...Don't ever say anything that would hurt this child," she tells the future pastors, "and don't ever say anything that would cause a member of your congregation to hurt this child...

...Surprisingly, Ward and Weyrich didn't seem to know that mainstream Christianity had decades earlier renounced the charge of deicide as a matter of justice...

...A 1993 Vatican commission declared illegitimate any interpretation of scripture that could promote anti-Judaism...