Book Review
Benedict XVI on Jesus,
the Church, and the Jews
Joseph Ratzinger, Jesus
of Nazareth (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 374 pp., $24.95, Hardcover.
Reviewed by W. Patrick Cunningham
The election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI in 2005 gave the world a Bishop of Rome coherent with, but significantly different from his predecessor. Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger were close colleagues in the Vatican for many years. As head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger was point man on several important doctrinal disputes that historians will consider crucial to John Paul’s papacy—liberation theology, faith and reason, and reproductive morality in particular. Ratzinger was primarily responsible for the Catholic Catechism. The two functioned almost as one mind.
But John Paul II was
a philosopher and thespian at heart.
Reading his papal writings, particularly Fides et Ratio, is primarily a philosophical exercise with
theological and scriptural excursions.
Cardinal Ratzinger was and is a teacher, theologian and writer. His first, and so far only, encyclical,
Deus Caritas Est, is a theological
master work accessible to both scholar and person in the pew.
Unlike most recent
popes, Benedict has a huge opera. Ignatius has brought out a number of
his works over the years, and the sum of just these fills a couple of feet of
space on a bookshelf. Although his
theological production has slowed during the papacy, Benedict continues to
write, and his latest is a book called Jesus
of Nazareth, which he calls “solely an expression of my personal search
‘for the face of the Lord.’” The book, published in the U.S. by Doubleday in a
very readable translation by Adrian J. Walker, appears to be intended as the
first of two volumes. The pope’s
sense of humor and realism comes out as he admits wanting to publish this
volume because he doesn’t know how many years he has left.
I had read a number
of the pre-election works of Joseph Ratzinger, most notably his thick Introduction to Christianity and Behold the Pierced One, so I was taking
a break from his writings when my plans were changed for me. First my school president, a Marianist
priest recovering from a brown recluse spider bite, told me how gripping Jesus of Nazareth was for him. Then my Archbishop (also my boss)
referred to the book when he was commenting on another article I had
written. I wouldn’t need a third
hint to cause me to read it.
We don’t have much
experience with modern popes writing about Jews and Judaism, but Benedict has
no such reticence. He sees
the Jesus of Jesus of Nazareth to be
steeped in Hebrew realities. Jesus
goes up to the mountain to preach.
But the disciples to whom he preaches are not limited by lineage. “Everyone who hears and accepts the
word can become a ‘disciple.’” (p. 66)
The mountain is not a “rocky mass in the desert.” It is any place where Jesus prays and
teaches. There, on the mountain of
the presence of God, Jesus fulfills the mission of Moses, the Jewish lawgiver,
and of Elijah, who “experienced God passing by, not in the storm or in the fire
or in the earthquake, but in the still small breeze. . .That transformation is
completed here.”
Jesus, on the
metaphysical mountain, becomes the new Torah-giver. For Benedict, that reality calls for an honest dialogue with
a modern rabbi, Jacob Neusner, who wrote A
Rabbi Talks with Jesus (1993-2000, translated into six languages). Neusner, currently holding an endowed
chair in the history and theology of Judaism at Bard College, was one of the
founding fathers of the academic study of religion that has infiltrated U.S.
higher education in the past forty years.
Benedict has a deep respect for Neusner’s academic and personal integrity,
and employs his book to discern answers to the greatest question of the first
century, and an important one for our own: why do Jews not accept Jesus as
Lord, the fulfillment of the promises to Abraham, Moses and David? For Benedict, Neusner’s book is a
dialogue between Neusner as a hearer of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus
himself. That dialogue “has opened
[Benedict’s] eyes to the greatness of Jesus’ words and to the choice that the
Gospel places before us.” (p. 69)
Benedict echoes the
view of many scholars that the Beatitudes—the heart of the Great Sermon—are
really a program for discipleship modeled on the lifestyle of Jesus
Christ. This is particularly true
in terms of the call to purity of heart, the key to seeing God. “It belongs to [Jesus’] nature that he
sees God, that he stands face-to-face with him, in permanent interior
discourse—in a relation of Sonship . . . We will see God when we enter into the
‘mind of Christ.’” But to achieve
union with Christ the Son, we must imitate his “descent of love” and his
self-abnegation. “These words mark
a decisive turning point in the history of mysticism. . .God descends, to the
point of death on the Cross. And
precisely by doing so, he reveals himself in his true divinity. We ascend to God by accompanying him on
this descending path.”
Benedict, no one to
set up straw dogs, then confronts the philosopher whose thought poisoned the
whole 20th century: Friedrich Nietzsche. “It is not Christian doctrine that needs to be critiqued, he
says, it is Christian morality that needs to be exposed as a ‘capital crime
against life.’ And by ‘Christian
morality,’ Nietzsche means precisely the direction indicated by the Sermon on
the Mount.” Nietzsche ridicules those
who follow Christ as weak and unequal to life’s demands, avenging themselves by
“blessing their failure and cursing the strong, the successful, and the
happy.” Benedict admits that much
of this self-absorbed and success-pleasure orientation has captured the modern
mindset. Even Christians are
inwardly resistant to the call of Christ.
But, he maintains, the Beatitudes demand conversion, “that we inwardly
turn around to go in the opposite direction from the one we would spontaneously
like to go in. But this U-turn
brings what is pure and noble to the fore and gives a proper ordering to our
lives.” In other words, it frees
us to be like Christ.
The new Torah of
Christ sets us free to be like Christ.
“The ‘Torah of the Messiah’ is totally new and different—but it is
precisely by being such that it fulfills
the Torah of Moses.” (my emphasis)
Benedict admits that much of Matthew’s redaction of the Great Sermon
stands as a contrasting set of statements: “It was said to them of old . . . but I say to you . . .”
“Jesus’ ‘I’ is accorded a status that no teacher of the Law can
legitimately allow himself.” Jesus
taught with his own authority, not from the authority of some long-dead
scribe. Benedict tells us that the
Greek says the people were “alarmed” by this kind of teaching. But he knows it teaches us something
“about Jesus, about Israel, about the Church.” Here he turns to Neusner’s analysis for help.
As Benedict sees
Neusner, he takes his place among the crowds listening to Jesus, compares
Jesus’ words with those of the Old Testament and with the oral traditions of
the Talmud and Mishnah. Neusner is
touched by the greatness and purity of Jesus’ words, but is troubled by the
“ultimate incompatibility” at the heart of the Great Sermon. In the end, Neusner “decides not to
follow Jesus. He remains—as he
himself puts it—with the ‘eternal Israel.’” Why does Neusner stop short of discipleship? In an imagined dialogue with an ancient
rabbi, he admits that Jesus left out nothing of the essential of Torah, but
added Himself. The central alarm of the believing Jew
is “the centrality of Jesus’ “I” in the message, which redirects
everything. The scandal of Jesus
is his words to the rich young man, “If you would be perfect, go, sell all you
have, and come, follow me.” (Mt
19:21) (p. 105—Benedict’s
emphasis)
Neusner, according to
Benedict, parts company with Jesus because he perceives Jesus commanding him to
disobey three of the ten commandments: the third, the fourth, and the
commandment to be holy as God is holy.
Benedict agrees with Neusner on one issue—Jesus, in saying “the sabbath
was made for man, not man for the sabbath” (Mk 2:27) is not just taking a
liberal point of view, “a freedom-loving and rational man’s critique of an
ossified legalism.” He considers
the action of eating grain on the sabbath to be a trivial issue. Neusner’s scandal at Jesus’ teaching is
tied up with Jesus’ assuming that he and the disciples now “stand in the place
of the priests in the Temple; the holy place has shifted, now being formed by
the circle made up of the master and his disciples.” (p. 108) Indeed, in Matthew, the verses
(11:28-30) immediately preceding this radical reinterpretation of the Sabbath
set up Jesus as equivalent to the Sabbath rest: “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” (my
emphasis) In Neusner’s view, Jesus
is attempting to replace the Torah with himself.
And this is entirely
true. “Jesus understands himself
as the Torah—as the word of God in person,” just as John’s Gospel begins: “in
the beginning was the word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
(p. 110) The Synoptic Gospels are
saying exactly the same thing as John: the historical Jesus is the Logos, the
Word of God, the true Torah.
Liberal exegesis has got it exactly wrong, when they say that the Son,
Christ, is foreign to the Gospel of Jesus. The Christ reality is always “at the center of it.” (p. 111)
But, Benedict
continues, what bothers Neusner the Jew about Jesus’ teaching on Shabbat is not “just the centrality of Jesus
himself. . .Rather, he is concerned with the consequence of Jesus’ centrality
for Israel’s daily life: The Sabbath loses its great social function. . .[to]
hold Israel together.” Because now
the community of Jesus’ disciples is the new Israel. If one accepts Jesus as the Messiah of Israel, then “the
eternal Israel” loses its identity, its viability, its existence. Benedict admires Neusner’s candor as he
poses the question to the Christian disciple: “Is it really so that your
master, the son of man, is lord of the Sabbath? . . . I ask again—is your
master God?” As the Catholic
Church, under Constantine, began to reform the Empire’s culture and habits, one
of the first actions was to introduce to slaves certain Lord’s Day
freedoms. The new Sabbath was the
eighth day, the day of Resurrection, not the seventh. Despite the movement of the day of the week, the
introduction of the Christian day of rest was in solidarity and continuity with
the Jewish Sabbath. (p. 112)
Neusner’s concern
about the breakdown of “the eternal Israel” implied by Jesus’ attitude toward
the Third Commandment extends into the realm of the Fourth, as a matter of
sheer logic. The Fourth
commandment, to him, anchors “the heart of the social order, the cohesion of
‘the eternal Israel,’” in the living family of Abraham and Sarah and their
(Hebrew) descendants. Jesus,
however, decrees that this biology-based family is not adequate to the Father’s
plan: “Here are my mother and my
brothers. For whoever does the
will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Mt
12:46-50) Neusner accuses Jesus of
teaching the violation of one of the two great commandments concerning the
social order. Benedict comments
that Neusner’s charge is twofold:
“The first problem is the seeming individualism of Jesus’ message.” (p.
114) Unlike Torah, with its
hundreds of intricate regulations of daily life and worship, the Torah of Jesus
offers no “politically concrete program for structuring society.” The message of Jesus in the Great Sermon
is located on “another level” than social politics. Jesus is apparently setting aside all of Israel’s
ordinances, laws that “have guaranteed its continued existence through the
millennia and through all the vicissitudes of history.” Jesus’ broadening of the fourth
commandment “affects not only the parent-child relation, but the entire scope
of the social structure of the people of Israel.”
Benedict admiringly
notes that Neusner understands that the student of Torah was also admonished to
turn their backs on home and family for long periods to study Torah. But this action forged a stronger
connection with Torah, and thus with “the eternal Israel.” Jesus’ command is not designed for that
purpose, but to bind the disciple to Jesus himself, to the “Jesus Torah.” Neusner realizes that Jesus’ words
imply Jesus’ divinity. “Only God
can demand of me what Jesus is asking.”
Only on the condition of Jesus’ divinity can he “have the right to
interpret the Mosaic order of divine commands in such a radically new
way.” Only the Lawgiver can amend
the Law.
Benedict’s critique
of Neusner—a friendly and paternal one, for certain—suggests that the solution
to this problem comes “when we read the Torah together with the entire Old
Testament canon, the Prophets, the Psalms, and the Wisdom Literature.” Once we do that, the pope tells us, we
realize that Torah itself makes Israel responsible for more than itself. If Israel is to live according to the
“eternal” dispositions of the Law, it “exists to be a light to the nations.”
(p. 116) God does not “wish to
abandon the nations to themselves.”
In the Old Testament as in the New, God’s dream is universal: “the
boundaries will fall and. . .the God of Israel will be acknowledged and revered
by all the nations as their God, as the one God.”
The Jewish critic
objects, “So what has your ‘Messiah’ Jesus actually brought? He has not brought world peace, and he
has not conquered the world’s misery.
So he can hardly be the true Messiah, who, after all, is supposed to do
just that.” Benedict acknowledges
that the peaceable kingdom of perfect justice has not come. We may add that it cannot come while
God respects our free will, a will that only in the eschaton will be “frozen” in eternal obedience or eternal rebellion. But Benedict parries that what Jesus
has done is to bring the God of Israel “to the nations, so that all the nations
now pray to him and recognize Israel’s Scriptures as his word, the word of the
living God. He has brought the gift of universality, which was the one great
definitive promise to Israel and to the world.” (p. 116) This gift, for Benedict, is the clear proof that
Jesus is the Messiah.
Moreover, Benedict
tells us that the first great dispute of the early Church, the contest between
Paul and his fellow missioners to the Gentiles and the so-called Judaizers, was
precisely about the gift of universality.
“A literal application of Israel’s social order to the people of all
nations would have been tantamount to a denial of the universality of the
growing community of God. . .The Torah of the Messiah could not be like
that. Nor is it. . .” In other words, to force the growing
community of Gentile believers to adopt circumcision, the laws on foods and
ritual purity, and especially Temple sacrifice (which in a few years were to
cease, anyway, forever) would be to force new wine into old wineskins, bursting
the Church and ruining God’s intention for the world. Thus could Paul preach a freedom from the “cultural”
requirements of Torah, a freedom that “is able to build the very thing that is
at the heart of the Torah,” the Law of love of God and love of neighbor.
As the Holy Father
sees it, Neusner is doing the Church, and the world in general, a great favor
by showing all that Jesus is far more than a “liberal rabbi.” To hear Jesus is to hear one who is
speaking with the full authority of the Son, whose interpretation is “the
beginning of a new communion in a new, free obedience.” Jesus is either the divine Son, acting
for the Father, God Almighty, or he is a total fraud. Neusner, despite his reverence for Jesus, rejects Jesus’
opening up the family and the Sabbath, creating a “new and broader context for
both.” The social order of the
“eternal Israel” is too important to Neusner. Being Jewish is something he is unwilling to forfeit in the
hopes of something more universal.
Before I comment on
Benedict’s attitude toward the believing Jew, it is appropriate to look at the
Pope’s commentary on the Parable of the Two Brothers, ordinarily referred to as
the Prodigal Son. He notes that
the Fathers of the Church typically considered the prodigal brother to be
analogous to the Gentiles, and the elder brother to correspond to the Jews. Jesus “opened the door” for the pagan
world to commune with the Father, and to feast with the whole Church in a
banquet of reconciliation. As the
elder brother of the tale, Israel’s fidelity and image of God are clearly
revealed in . . .fidelity to the Torah.
Benedict says that
“the application to the Jews is not illegitimate so long as we respect the form
in which we have found it in the text:
as God’s delicate attempt to talk Israel around, which remains entirely
God’s initiative. . .It would be a false interpretation to read this as a
condemnation of the Jews.” Benedict
goes on the teach that the broader meaning of the parable is to exhort all the
righteous, Christian or Jew, to rejoice whenever anyone converts from the
“Law-God to the greater God, the God of love.” This does not mean that the “elder and faithful” brother has
to stop obeying the Law. It means
that “this obedience will flow from deeper wellsprings and will therefore be
bigger, more open, and purer, but above all more humble.”
How, then, can the
habitual reader of this journal listen to the Pope tell us about the
relationship between the Church and Judaism? In what way can we integrate his teachings into our
understanding of the historical conflict between the “revolutionary Jew” and
the Church of Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church?
First, we must note
that Benedict is engaging in an imagined dialogue with a believing, practicing
Jew, one who understands that love of God and love of neighbor are fundamental
to keeping Torah. There is no
acrimony obvious in Jews like Neusner, and no reason for either Benedict or
Neusner to fear the dialogue partner.
Neusner, and Jews like him, do not appear as revolutionary, in the sense
that they are looking for a person or political system to establish a Jewish
hegemony over everyone else by force or political guile. As a result, many Jews support the
secular state of Israel, some to the extent of making it a kind of Jewish
“sacrament.” In Stranger at Home (1981), Neusner says “Zionism
provides a reconstruction of Jewish identity for it reaffirms the nationhood of
Israel in the face of the disintegration of the religious bases of Jewish
peoplehood . . . with the end of a singularly religious self-consciousness, the
people lost its understanding of itself.”
It was, however, Neusner who, a number of years ago, damaged the aliyah (return) by noting that Jews are
safer in the U.S. than in Israel.
But neither does
Neusner, or most Jews, act as Orthodox practitioners, some of whom even pray
for the destruction of the secular Israeli state as being set up outside God’s timing. Neusner himself distinguishes seven
kinds of Jews, ranging from the ultra-orthodox to the secular Zionist. The Orthodox Jews are themselves
segmented, some supporting the Zionist movements, others resisting them.
The Holy Father’s
lengthy dialogue with Neusner as a representative of Judaism, then, is only a
way to come to a deeper understanding of Jesus as the new Moses, the center of
the New Testament Torah.
Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth
does not attempt an understanding of or dialogue with the revolutionary,
secular Jew. The work does,
however, bring us to a deeper understanding of the Jewish-Christian
divide. Jews of all stripes reject
Jesus not because they misunderstand his teachings, but because they clearly
comprehend what he is demanding.
They do not follow him because he requires a universalization of the law
of love of God and neighbor, a radical commitment to forgiving our enemies, and
an incorporation into a new family comprised of Jew and Gentile, the Church,
under the leadership of Jesus-Messiah, the divine Son. 
This review was
published in the October, 2007 issue of Culture
Wars.
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