The Passion Narrative: Who Are These “Jews”?

The Jews, the Jews, the Jews—hoi Iudaioi in Greek—are everywhere in the Holy Week readings. But who they are is not as simple as the surface of the texts suggests.

Many, if not all preachers know that “the Jews” is used in many different ways. It doesn’t always mean the whole Jewish people. Very few parishes, however, use translations that make this clear, especially on Palm Sunday and Good Friday. Church-goers easily get the impression that "the Jews"en mass rejected Jesus. In past centuries, such distortions led again and again to religious murder. No less.

Diverse groups of "Jews"

Hoi Iudaioi means, in its most basic sense, the Jewish people as distinguished from other tribes and tongues. But those Jews who followed the Jewish man Jesus, of course, didn’t reject him. The “great crowds” of Jews at Passover “heard him gladly” and mourned his death (Mark 13, Luke 22; see blog #3 in this series). When the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel tells the Samaritan woman that “salvation is from the Jews,” he takes his stand firmly in the tradition of Moses and the Prophets, as remembered by the Jews, a.k.a. Judeans, who returned from the Exile (John 4:22).

But while “many of the Jews...believed in Jesus,” others reported the incident to the authorities, who are also called “the Jews” in many verses (John 11:45-46). These Iudaioi, those Judean leaders and their followers who get into verbal brawls with Jesus in John’s gospel, are the target group Jesus accuses of being blindly resistant to the light of God, not all those other Jews (1).  It is from this leadership group and their supporters alone that the disciples huddle behind barred doors after Jesus execution “in fear of the Jews" (John 20:19).

The Odd Rigidity of Most Modern Translations

While the Fourth Gospel clearly uses hoi Iudaioi in different ways, an oddly rigid refusal to paraphase these words seems to possess most translators. The NRSV translators, for example (who paraphrase a great many other words to aid reader understanding) stick doggedly to “the Jews” in these gospel passages. They know about the different uses, but refuse to indicate them. Is the weight of historic Christian scorn for "the Jews" so strong that it lingers still in their work, however unconsciously? Because of such bloody history, this matters.

Some, however, seek to make the truth clear. Consider the different message these two translations of John 7:11-13 deliver.

NRSV: The Jews were looking for him at the festival and saying, “Where is he?”...While some were saying, “He is a good man,” others were saying, “No, he is deceiving the crowd.” 13 Yet no one would speak openly about him for fear of the Jews.

New Living Translation: The Jewish leaders tried to find him at the festival and kept asking if anyone had seen him....Some argued, “He’s a good man,” but others said, “He’s nothing but a fraud who deceives the people.” 13 But no one had the courage to speak favorably about him in public, for they were afraid of getting in trouble with the Jewish leaders.

“Judean leaders” or even “the leaders” would be better, in my opinion. But these translations  support the historical and spiritual reality: Jesus wasn’t against Judaism as such, but against the hypocrisy, resistance to God and abuse of power that can arise in any religion, nation, or group. They too often flourished among Christians themselves! 

The New Living Translation is a giant step in the right direction, as are a few others.  Pray God the day comes when all the Holy Week lessons are read from translations that make clear what “The Jews” means. Soon.

Next: What to do with "The Reproaches"?
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1.  John's version of Jesus' verbal brawls with opponents are most likely influenced by the violent hostility between some Jews and the emergent Jesus movement in the decades after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E.

Perils and Pitfalls of Passiontide Storytelling

I heard it from the pulpit in another state just a couple of weeks ago: “Jesus taught a religion of freedom and love to counter the oppressive Jewish religion of fear and law.”

The sermon, in this liberal, progressive congregation, went on to describe the elaborate pettifogging burden of “613 detailed laws” that Jews had saddled themselves with by Jesus’ day, and Jesus’ genius in boiling them all down to two: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.  No mention, of course, of the rabbinical sage Hillel the Elder, the real author of this alleged “simplification,” or of the fact that Jesus himself surely knew that a lion’s share of those 613 Torah commandments applied to temple and judicial officials rather than to daily life.

But there it was, hanging in the air, this age-old stereotype, confirming life-long impressions of many of the hearers. A stereotype peddled by a theologically sophisticated, even avant-guarde Protestant minister, and repeated in a variety of ways in both liberal and conservative churches to this day, on occasion fueled by some “liberationist” readings of the Gospels.  Jesus vs. “them,” the Jews—or, at the least, the Pharisees. 

The Holy Week Drama

Jesus, of course, had opponents, and eventually, enemies. Every return to Holy Week, the most emotionally intense part of the Christian Year, promises to sharpen stereotypes of this adversarial relationship, from the supposed fickleness of the Jerusalem crowds to the reasons for Jesus’ death.  Holy Week, therefore, has been, and can be still, a perilous time for re-telling this story, for it is so very easy to fall into time-worn stereotypes of both Jews and Judaism, especially in an attempt to make this tragic—and triumphant—tale more dramatic.

Much teaching and seminary training in recent decades has blunted the sharp edge of Christian anti-Judaism a great deal. But these stereotypes still roll all too often from the tongue of preachers and rise up too easily in the minds of Bible-readers, even those with no desire to denigrate Jews or Judaism. The narrative reflex is old and deep.

In this short series of blog essays I plan to share what I’ve learned in almost five decades of intense Jewish-Christian dialogue and reading of texts both Jewish and Christian. This bears on the Gospel narrative, especially on Palm Sunday and Holy Week preaching, teaching and meditating. The foci will be three, though the essays may be more than that: 1) Stereotypes about Second Temple Judaism;  2) The Passover crowds on Palm Sunday and Easter; 3) “The Jews” and the death of Jesus. 

Real-life consequences, then and now

Necessity drives such stereotype-purging. Not so very long ago in historical time, Holy Week served as prime time for attacks by Christian mobs on Jewish towns and neighborhoods. An elderly Jewish man told me recently that he knows Jews in cities like New York who still steer clear of even walking near churches in Holy Week. Here is an inherited reaction to almost twenty centuries of ugly Holy Weeks, reinforced by vivid memories of bullying in childhood by Christian kids calling them “Christ-killers.”

The Christian world, even the “enlightened” section of it, has not yet fully outgrown some of its deeply inherited misunderstandings. In a second post tomorrow, I’ll begin by taking on that preacher and his all-too-easy sermonic flourish, (hoping that, for most of my readers, I will only be confirming what they've already learned).

Next: Law vs. Love or Law the Means of Love?

Has music become more real than religion for the young?

The young man got more excited when I observed that “music seems to have become the real religion of a great many young people.” What I had heard him saying was that his journey into self-knowledge, soul-knowledge, was happening via music.

I was all the more interested because this seventeen year old has served as an acolyte, sung in the choir, participated in youth activities, and says he likes church. But his journey into the soul is marked chiefly by a succession of musical periods, all of it from secular sources.

It wasn’t that way when I was his age. As a teen-ager (we were “young people” in my Detroit neighborhood in the 50s), music was entertainment, not meaning—a pleasant diversion. I ask you, how much meaning-juice can you get out of “How much is that doggie in the window/ the one with the waggly tale?” or even the early Elvis: “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog...”? The path to adult identify was well laid out for us within a fairly clear, if superficial, moral and religious framework.

But things changed in the culture, and music along with, though it’s hard to tell which comes first as there arose a deep, searching synergy between them. First there was the folk music explosion, with its ballads and yearnings. Then came the early civil rights music like Peter, Paul and Mary’s rendition of “If I had a hammer/ I’d hammer out justice”) Culture changing forces were on the move, and the old path to adulthood became less formally outlined, less clear.

I remember vividly the first time, in my post-college seminary days, that I heard Bob Dylan’s “A hard rain’s gonna fall.” Being a meaning-junkie, my soul perked up its ears, and I was led into the revolutionary, self-transformative spirit of the 60s and 70s. So I haven’t been altogether surprised to hear from more than one younger person, recently, how formative music is for them as they seek a sense of identity in a largely post-Christian popular culture. I get it because for us, in our early 20s, a lot in the world suddenly went “up for grabs” and plunged us into questioning and re-defining ourselves and our world. I, at least, was a somewhat late bloomer in this search.

Still, it was different. My soul had already been significantly formed by a deep Christian rooting, a teen-age evangelical “decision for Christ,” a lot of Bible study, and a rich and meaningful experience as a growing kid in a vital Christian congregation with a thoughtful and progressive minister, for someone on the liberal edges of fundamentalism. The bards of the counter-culture period came as expansions of meanings already established, formative forces for a soul already set on a path.

The world is very different now for Christian (or Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist) kids growing up in America. The tameness of most of our congregational music, the sedateness of our liturgy, and the “nice” character of our teaching can’t hold a candle to the power of most of the music out there, where the vocals are saturated with angst of soul and frameworks of meaning. As long ago as the mid-1960s the Pied Pipers of the music industry and the alternative music scene captured the attention of a huge swath of kids. The transmission of the great cultural heritage of the West, including the sacred Story, was interrupted and dimmed by the new music-makers.

This is not in any way an “ain’t it awful” rant about kids, music or society. On the contrary, I’m intrigued about where the soul is being touched and where God may be hiding out. I’m offering an observation of what’s happening on the ground, and why so many young people, even those with a church, synagogue or mosque grounding, just don’t seem be receiving the transmission of the heritage. A rabbi I know, for example, who at the time presided over a growing and very successful synagogue, lamented to me in a surprising moment of irony, that his congregation provided a place where acculturated, suburban Jews could bring their children so that “they would have the memory of having been Jewish.”

So now I’m not only returning to the music of my youth, revisiting my late 20-something use of music as, at least, a commentary on themes established, but being taught by some contemporary youths—a high school junior and a graduating college senior in particular—something about the contemporary alternative music scene. What I’m finding people reading this blog may have known for years, but I’m finding a revelation about the state of soul of lots of younger people. A prime example for me has been discovering “Radiohead,” a British group which performs seductively beautiful music with lyrics that seem to express the confusion and despair of a culture dying and being reborn at the same time—but reborn to what? Take this for example:

We're rotten fruit/ We're damaged goods
What the hell, we've got nothing more to lose
One gust and we will probably crumble/ We're backdrifters

Or this:

Everything is broken/ Everyone is broken
You can force it but it will stay stung/ You can crush it as dry as a bone
You can walk it home straight from school/ You can kiss it, you can break all the rules
But still...Everything is broken/ Everyone is broken

What I hear in what I’m being introduced to, and this is by no means the whole of contemporary music is the underbelly of much American youth culture. There are other voices, of course, pointing in a different direction—U2 for example, or this cut from Delta Spirit:

my heart it is thumping/ the veins they've been blue
the blood thats been pumping/ still hasn't met you
the beard that I'm growing/not fully grown
the years are not coming/the way I thought they would
hoping and waiting/for something to sing
like the angels in heaven/ the bones on the street
hoping for love/ to find a new voice
the song that's needs singing/has already been sung before

These kids are from “good” homes in affluent suburbs; they are well-educated, and headed onto the American career path of success, with high hopes of “making it.” And yet this music speaks of an underlying mood full of confusion, searching, with touches of despair and whiffs of nihilism. It is a disarming revelation of the underbelly of soul for millions, I suspect.

Part of this is surely the breakdown of the transmission of the sacred meanings that have sustained Western culture for centuries. As one young man told me recently, “I’ve been fed a lot of information, and filled with questions in college, but given no framework of value or meaning by which to understand the meaning of any of it for my life.” Nor had he really gotten such a framework from his church, though I know they tried.

As another young man, now in his 30s, who is an adult convert to the religion he wasn’t touched by in his youth describes the situation:

All is broken, at least for us urban cosmopolitan youth who were raised in the deracinating circumstances of "multiculturalism" and "self-expression." the two, of course, are related, because if there are no communal horizons, if it is all hybridity and fluidity, then it is up to the self to self-discover. Hence the individualization of everything, the growing despair and disenchantment of youth, and the thriving marketplace of quick-fixes, base sentiments, and little real guidance. In the pool of the marketplace, narcissus finds only his reflection. It compels nothing, asks
nothing, does nothing.

Well, perhaps it sings us some good songs. Perhaps it speaks to us in ways we actually feel. But unlike the church, or what the church might be, it doesn't take those feelings and guide them to a higher purpose. Transformation is not the business of the market. It's the business of communal traditions. And so we have a marketplace that knows how we feel but asks nothing. And a church that has no clue how to speak to us, but asks everything.

Such a statement of the reality of a post-Christian and now post-modern situation! And I don’t have a spiffy answer about to how to transmit the sacred meanings in this situation, though I plan to follow some clues about how to sing the “song that has been sung before.” But it’s a quest people concerned with this transmission need to take. Anybody reading this is quite free to make comments. I know others are further along than I am. As I said, I’m a late bloomer.

You've got to have some sympathy for God.....

Poor God is getting buffeted about badly these days. To be more accurate, the most widespread stereotype about the God of western religion (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) is taking it in the neck a lot. A grand Idea, developed over centuries by the leading lights of Western philosophy—Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Maimonides, Kierkegaard, Schliermacher, Tillich....I could go on—is treated with the scorn and contempt suffered by Zeus in some of the Roman comedy, who appears as a bit of a buffoon.

But poor God has become a Poor God indeed. Tarred and feathered over being the biggest cause of prejuice and hatred (murder, genocide, sexual dysfunction...I could go on) in human history, He who was once the fount of all goodness is now for many the source of noxious fumes. You'd almost think he had become the Devil in many people's eyes, like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the leading "Brights" of the new vanguard of evangelistic atheists.

In a way, you can't blame them, what with hateful preachers saying "God hates Gay," fanatical suicide bombers claiming (through a distorted, non-classical form of Islam) to kill in the name of the God of Abraham, and 8 years of a right-wing "Christian" American presidential administration pushing "abstinence only" programs for teens that cause more pregnancies than any other advice for teen behavior.

"Good" Religion Under-reported

The news media, of course, can't be bothered to report that religious institutions are responsible for most of the charity provided to the poor, the sick, and other people in need. The history books, mostly, don't tell young people that American Christians (and later on Jews) launched the women's suffrage movement, the abolition of slavery, supported labor union organization, virtually created and was a major force in the progressive politics of the first half of the 20th century. They don't report that religious institutions are the base of most of the volunteer work in America. Nor can Hollywood or TV find much room for positive images of clergy, who are usually Bible-toting, narrow-minded moralizers, or worse.

Having seized the headlines, fundamentalist, right-wing Christianity has come to define the brand name in the eyes of millions, especially a growing section of the next generation. Few people realize what a specifically "modern," trimmed-down, and (from the standpoint of the mainstream of classical Christianity through the ages) distorted version of a grand way of wisdom.


Counter-trends in Religion

There are counter-trends of course. Interfaith cooperation between Christians, Jews and, increasingly, Muslims is growing remarkably and rapidly. Millions of "progressive" Christians and Jews support progressive social change, and fight against racial prejudice, gay oppression, America's historic "too bad for you: work harder" stance about the poor, and many other causes liberal atheists, agnostics, and humanists support.

And progressive theologians, as they did in every age, incorporating new knowledge into ancient religious impression of a Divine ground and Source of the life of the universe. Their "God" is not your grandmother's God, and a good thing too. While respecting the wisdom of the ancestors, they see a Divine energy at the heart of evolution, growth and change in moral awareness, sexual joy, physical health, and love of the stranger and those who are different from us.

Meanwhile, trends in anthropology, studies is social evolution, brain research, cross-cultural study of mystical experience in every religion, and demonstrating that while theological explanations of God change, the actual experiences of "cosmic mind," overwhelming Love surging through creation, a compassionate awareness lurking at the depths of the human psyche, unexpected and seemingly miraculous guidance and healing, and the subtle but unmistakable feeling of being in a "Knowing Presence" persist in every age. They are erecting a new picture of religious pathways as a powerful, and mostly beneficial, bond in human societies, and major source of moral inspiration.

What's the Future of our "Secular Paradise"?


Meanwhile, the 20th century utopian fantasies of building a secular paradise on earth through capitalist progress, Fascist or Communist dictatorship, socialist and humanist progress, while they contain bright hopes for human flourishing (based, often, on ideas drawn from the Hebrew prophets) keep coming a bit of a cropper, even though they sometimes (Fascism excepted) do some good along with more evil than modern people want admit.

Some of the evil is clear: it was not Christianity that killed tens of millions in Stalin's atheist regime or Hitler's neo-pagan hell; it was not Buddhism that produced the killing fields of Cambodia. Some less highlighted, even taken for granted: the slaughter of the native populations by "enlighted, progressive" European colonialism (the missionaries often tried to save the natives); the "ethnic cleansing" that built secular Turkey and other nations; and the (inadvertent, unintended) death of millions of infants and adults in modern medicine around the world, especially in areas overpopulated and underfed because of increased hygience and lowered infant mortality rates. Not all evil is planned and intended--and every movement causes some.

Religious groups sometimes commit evil because any human institution—medicine, government, even the family—are capable of evil. Secular humanism can cause much good. It has not had time enough in human history to demonstrate it is capable of more good than the religions at their best.

Don't get me wrong: I have relatives and good friends who are humanists and/or atheists. I have nothing but admiration for their moral courage and deep human values. Nor do I despise all fundamentalists or religious conservatives. Again, I know dozens of loving fundamentalist Christians who are the lights of the world. But the question is what represents Christianity best, and what is the most socially, morally, and spiritually beneficial view of life and the universe for humanity going forward in this difficult century.

The Aims of Religion Re-assessed

"At least religion is trying for something more than local satisfactions," writes the British cultural critic Terry Eagleton in his new book "Reason, Faith and Revolution" (Yale University Press, 2009). Religions “subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself, in relation to what it takes to be its transcendent source of life.” And it is only that great subject, and the aspirations it generates, that can lead, Eagleton insists, to “a radical transformation of what we say and do.”

Not a traditional believer himself he feels that in the wisdom of the religious "radicals might discover there some valuable insights into human emancipation, in an era where the political left stands in dire need of good ideas....(T)he Jewish and Christian scriptures have much to say about some vital questions—death, suffering, love, self-dispossession, and the like—on which the left has for the most part maintained an embarrassed silence. It is time for this politically crippling shyness to come to an end." (See "God Talk" by Stanley Fish in the NY Times, May 3, 2009)

And it is time for educated, progressive Jews and Christians, especially those who represent a generous reading of the classical theological and moral tradition, to speak out boldly and vigorously to address the burning issues of our day, and to take the bull of reactionary religion by the horns and try to wrestle it to the ground. The world deserves better than what they offer, and what we have too often not offered while the foundations of culture eroded beneath us while we were coasting on the progressive hegemony of the last century.