PART 1
THE
HARDEST THINGS TO SEE, TO SAY
I'm
an innocent victim
of a blinded alley
and I'm tired of all these soldiers
here.
No
one speaks English
and everything's broken
. . . . . .
I
begged you to stab me
you tore my shirt open
and I'm down on my knees
tonight
. . . . . .
No, I don't want your sympathy
fugitives say
that the streets aren't for dreaming
now.
Manslaughter
dragnets
and the ghosts that sell memories
they want a piece of the action
anyhow.
Go
waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda
you'll go a-waltzing Matilda with me.
- Tom Waits
from "Tom
Traubert's Blues"
CHAPTER
1
GOOD
NEWS, BAD NEWS, WHOLE
Not
to know what happened before you were
born is to remain forever a child.
-
The
only thing new in the world is the
history you don't know.
- Harry S. Truman
There
is good news in this book for Christians in general, for Jews as well;
difficult news for scholars. “Difficult”
might be an understatement. Whether the
news is bad or not for the scholarly world will depend on whether they can face
all the preconceptions and wrong assumptions they have been operating
under. That might seem bad, but
discovering your own fundamental mistakes ought to be good news and a joy to
anyone who is a genuine scientist or historian.
Gospel scholars will have to give up the traditional notion, which they
hold onto so tightly, that Jesus was in conflict with Judaism (Torah,
But
the news is unequivocally good for most Christians and for Jews because nothing
here threatens the essential Christian faith or what could be Christian faith
once it is free of all prejudices about Jews and Judaism and
about the wrongly imagined Jewish violence towards Jesus. The historical Jesus -- the historical Rabbi
Joshua of
If
you believe that his death was a sacrifice, a saving grace,
that is not going to change. You
can still believe that he reveals the nature of God better than anyone
else. If that’s how you relate to Jesus,
nothing in this book will change that.
The personal Jesus who aids and comforts, he is still there. If Jesus challenges you, he still will. The Jesus of faith will not disappear. History -- genuine historical investigation
-- is not a threat to Christianity.
If
the historical Rabbi Joshua of
The
scholarly world, on the other hand, may feel hugely threatened by all
this. Scholars will have to admit how
blinded they have been by fears, hatreds, and a racist worldview that has
eliminated the evidence that so obviously points to the truth of how Jesus
died. A Jesus in conflict with other
Jews who persecute him is all they want to see.
It’s easy to maintain. They just
erase all the evidence in the Gospels that says otherwise. Negative hallucination, they call it in
psychology.
There
is a dominant worldview here that has distorted this history for 2,000 years
and caused us to hallucinate the pro-Jewish clues
right out of existence. If scholars can
acknowledge that they have been heirs to this worldview and have contributed to
perpetuating it, then the news is very good for them. There is no greater accomplishment in any
field of scholarship or science than to discover your own blindnesses. (These blind spots were mine
too at one time and I am a Jew, still struggling with them; you never entirely
escape them; it has affected all of us in western civilization, Jews no less
than Christians. In Appendix H, I give
one example of how long it took me to shed one preconception and there are
others throughout this book.)
To
be a good scientist or historian is to examine your own mindset. That’s what all great scientists do. It is their own minds, our minds,
that are the problem, not reality or the world or history. As Einstein said, you cannot solve a problem
with the same mind that created it. Or
as Gloria Steinem put it, the chief task for all of us is not to learn but to
unlearn.
Gospels
scholars are stuck in the opposite place.
They have inherited their mind, their worldview, from ages past and use
it to obscure the evidence. Whatever
else scholars are doing (and I can think of a lot of bad names for it), if they
are not questioning their own worldview, they are not doing historical
investigation. “Question what you think,
not what you see” is the golden rule of science.
At
best, it is theology that scholars of so-called historical criticism practice,
but unless you study your own assumptions and how they affect what evidence you
see and don’t see, you cannot be called a rational historian. If Gospel scholars refuse to face this, then
the news for them is very bad. They will
end up fighting a defensive action for something that cannot be defended.
I
will not go over here what I mean by a racist worldview. I do that enough in the next chapter, which
is the Web site I put up on March 17, 2003 (I use all capital letters to refer
to the essays on this site). There are
only two things I want to stress in this first chapter. There was no religious cause for Jesus’
death, nor even a Jewish political cause.
That’s the first thing which I will go over a bit more below.
The
second thing is that I want to give some specific idea of how this wildly wrong
idea came to be. What is so wrong is not
just the idea that some Jews were responsible for Jesus’ death, but the idea
that this story of Jewish responsibility is based solidly on the Gospels and
that the Gospels contain no other story.
One of the most important themes of this book is that the traditional
story of Jesus’ death (which continues to be told by scholars) and
the Gospel story are not the same.
There are indeed some elements in the Gospels that gave rise to the
traditional version, but there is so much more there that we have utterly
failed to notice. Further on, I will
explain how we got it so wrong by giving a very brief review of the history of
the Bible (particularly, the English Bible) in western civilization. But first, there is the matter of Jesus as a religious
martyr.
The
Gospels are much richer and more complex than either religious authorities or
so-called historical scholars would lead you to believe. They are Jewish documents of the 1st century. Part of that richness is all the information
they contain about how positively Jews, including Jewish leaders, treated
Jesus. The original story of what really
happened is preserved in the Gospels and it is easily recoverable if only we
were sane enough to see it (that is, if only we were not blinded by centuries
of fear and racism that read more antisemitism into
the Gospels than can legitimately be found there).
If
you read the Gospels very carefully, it will become clear that they preserved
more than enough clues to prove that it was not Jewish enemies who ended his
life. I don’t know if there has ever
been a more harmful, historical falsehood.
It is demonstrably untrue.
I want to be stunningly clear about what I am going to establish once
and for all so that there will be no more confusion.
No
Jew had anything to do with Jesus’ death.
Not any Jew.
Not even Jewish leaders who are most often blamed. Not the priests of the
What
really did happen was that Jewish leaders tried to save Jesus from that Roman
execution. And Judas was no
traitor. He helped Jesus right to the
very end (there is more on Judas later on in this chapter). I can prove all this beyond any reasonable
historical doubt, there being no absolute truth in history, only a high degree
of probability. When one theory is far
more probable than any other, you are as close to the truth as you can get and
that is what I will offer. Explaining
how Jesus died is the easy part. The
hard part is facing how we all missed it.
Harry
Truman got it right. The only thing new
in the world is the history you don’t know -- the history that was always there
and always overlooked.
Not
only was there no lethal religious animosity towards Jesus, there were no
political concerns that would have led any Jews to cooperate with Romans to get
rid of him. Once you understand the
Jewish religion and history of the 1st century, the idea that any Jew would
have been complicit with
It
is impossible to overemphasize how important it is to understand that Jesus was
in no way a religious martyr. He was not
religiously offensive to his fellow Jews as far too many scholars falsely
relate (see THE OFFENSIVE JESUS in the next chapter). His death was an act of
Jesus
was thoroughly Jewish in his teachings, in his spirit, in his demeanor, and his
fellow Jews related to him this way. A rabbi, a healer, a prophet, a possible Messiah -- any and all of
these qualities were more likely to elicit admiration than hostility. Where there was disagreement, it could range
from friendly to rancorous, but not lethal.
Pharisees disagreed with each other all the time. Any position Jesus took on anything was well
within the range of normal disputes for the time.
I
stress this here at the outset because the desire to make Jesus a religious
martyr is one of the things that keeps us from seeing
the truth. This isn’t a problem just for
Christians. Jesus is a part of popular
culture. We have all heard his story
many times in numerous forms. As you
read this book and have reactions to it, you should check out the following
questions in yourself: How deep is the
need in you to believe that Jesus was a religious martyr? How deeply do you need to believe that he was
persecuted by his own people? How deep
the need to believe that he was betrayed by someone close to him?
Because none of these things happened and it is provable
that they did not happen. The evidence
is there in abundance, but you can’t see it if these needs get in the way. How upset will you be when the story turns
out to be different? Will it disturb you
to learn that Jesus was in harmony, not conflict, with
his fellow Jews and that they tried to save him? Will he still be Jesus if he was not
persecuted by other Jews?
Where
does the will and desire to tell and believe lies about history come from? Why the readiness to believe such a false
tale for 2,000 years? Isn’t it in each
one of us? Don’t we have a deep need to
create villains in history? We sometimes
reexamine heroes and de-escalate them in the pantheon, but we rarely rediscover
and rewrite the villains we’ve been handed.
We hold onto them so fiercely. We
love to hate. We have given Jesus
enemies he never had and we do not know how to let go of it.
It
bears repeating over and over again:
Jesus was not a religious martyr and did not provoke or offend any Jew
into wanting to get rid of him. He was
not a perpetrator or a victim of religious violence. He did not inspire religious violence and his
story should never be used to
promote such violence.
Religion had absolutely nothing to do with his death. Too many scholars depict Jesus as a violent
person who provoked other Jews into doing away with him. “The subversive Jesus” is the current
euphemism for this, or “the kung-fu Jesus” as I
sometimes call this scholarly fabrication.
They incorrectly imagine that Jesus was constantly at odds with a
conventional Judaism. By getting rid of
this historical lie, maybe we can begin to put all religious and ideological
persecutions behind us. Civilization
might actually make a huge advance here.
Here
is a bit of ancient history which is partly responsible for our current
situation and under whose thumb we are still living. What I am about to do is demonstrate how
little has changed since a certain age-old problem arose. This is a lengthy but focused tour of what
went wrong and continues to go wrong in modern scholarship. My accusation that nothing much has changed
may offend some people, perhaps many. It
is not my intention to shock or disturb people.
This is not what I want. But I
prefer this to silence. What follows is
a close look at an ignored part of our history that seems to have put a
permanent stamp on the academic quest for the historical Jesus.
When
Jerome was making his translation of the Bible (both Greek and Hebrew
scriptures) into Latin in the late 4th and early 5th centuries, Latin was still
a common, everyday language for many people.
His Bible was intended to be read by the average person. Jerome was not trying to create a mysterious,
unknowable Bible. Just
the opposite. The Latin he used
was a low class, vulgar Latin, not the high class
type. That’s why it came to be called
the Vulgate, and, with updated revisions, the Nova Vulgata
is still the official Bible of the Catholic Church today. It’s for theologians and esoteric
scholars. But Jerome wrote a Latin Bible
that was accessible by the common people.
He could not possibly have anticipated the rise of other European
languages.
Before
too long, Latin fell into disuse for all except theologians, academic types and
clerics, and soon it was only the first two groups, as the average priest
acquired a reputation for being ignorant of Latin and hence of the Bible. There were plenty of complaints about their
ignorance. The typical person who spoke
a western European language could no longer read the Vulgate. And the Church would not allow the Bible to
be translated into the common speech of Europeans. In English, only bits and pieces (the Ten
Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, some psalms, etc.) were translated. It might seem shocking now but, for almost a
thousand years, so few people knew what the Bible said. It was not until the 15th and 16th centuries
that the Bible became widely available again to people in their mother tongues.
In
After
he died, a couple of his disciples completed a project he had instigated --
translating the Bible into English from the Latin. It was an awkward
sounding English (being a literal rendition of the Latin) and, without a
printing press, it was never that widely used.
But the lower class reform movement, the Lollards,
made some use of it. Probably because
the English Bible had become associated early on with reform and the lower
classes, it frightened English Catholic authorities very much.
So,
a century later, when William Tyndale worked on his
translation of the Bible from the original languages of Greek and Hebrew, the
stage was set for a very tough battle.
The printing press had been invented by then and his translation was so
good that his Bible became very popular, despite an official ban. He was the first to translate most of the
Greek and Hebrew into English from the originals instead of from the
Latin. His New Testament appeared in
1526 and a revised edition in 1534. His
Five Books of Moses came out in 1530. He
did most of it on the continent on the run from English authorities and was
finally caught and executed in 1536 at a castle near
Tyndale continued to work on his translation of the Hebrew
Bible while in prison (his work would be included in that official Bible), but
did not live to finish it. A superb
linguist and translator, many parts of Tyndale’s
translations are still not surpassed.
The King James New Testament (1611) is mostly his. People who praise the King James’ English are
almost always unwittingly praising Tyndale.
In
any event, the legacy that the entire preceding period left us with is that,
for almost a thousand years, people could not read the Bible themselves and had
no direct knowledge of it. The Church
told them what it said through weekly sermons and other means. In the case of the Gospels, one of the chief
means was the popular “Lives of Christ” which had to be officially
approved. They were in the local
language. They were the equivalent of
modern movies. I focus on the “Lives”
rather than the Passion Plays because they gave much more descriptive content
and probably had a fuller impact on people’s imaginations. In
The
problem with any “Life of Christ” is that it was not the Bible. It contained many details, including words of
Jesus, which were not in the Gospels. It
got people to imagine all sorts of things that were not biblical. It was from these popular retellings that
people became used to a very racist version of Jesus’ life and death -- where
Jews are blamed for his death because of a) their violent instincts and b)
their inability to understand and appreciate Jesus. Violence and stupidity are key elements in
almost every racist fantasy. It turned
the Jews into pure wickedness (which might be somewhat faithful to the spirit
of John’s Gospel but not to the Synoptics, and even
John contains clues to contradict this).
Just
look at how Nicholas Love treats Judas.
He repeatedly calls Judas a traitor, sometimes adding other descriptive
epithets: “that wicked Judas”, “this
cursed traitor”, “the great obstinacy and malice of that traitor Judas”, “the
false traitor Judas”, “Judas and other enemies” (all from Ch. 39; I have
modernized the spelling). At one point,
I counted seven uses of “betray” or “traitor” in 35 lines. These words are not in the original Greek
Gospels (as I will explain further on when I pick up Judas’ story again). The sheer repetition beats a hateful,
detestable image of Judas into the reader.
Love
adds that if Peter had known who the traitor was, he would have torn him with
his teeth. This is not in the Gospels
either. You would think that if Judas
really had been a terrible traitor, we would be told something about the fierce
hatred that the other disciples had for him.
Silence is all we get from the Gospels.
We are never told how the others feel about Judas. Very odd for a story that
is supposed to be about personal treachery. And that’s not even the worst oddity. There is more as we will see.
The
hatred you are supposed to feel for Judas in Love’s account is
unmistakable. Though it is true that
Luke 22:3 and John 13:27 will associate Judas with the devil, there is nothing
in Mark to identify Judas as a reprehensible character and only the barest of
hints in Matthew. False, cursed, malice,
and the rest -- all this adds unwarranted color to the Gospel story, at least
as told by the first two Gospel writers.
When
Jesus predicts, at their last meal, that someone will “betray” him (so
mistranslations of the Gospels have it, as I will explain when I get to William
Klassen’s work), Love has the disciples stop eating: They are full of sorrow because “this speech
went to their hearts as a sharp sword.”
It is a very moving moment. Of
Judas, Love says this: “But the traitor
Judas left not off eating, [so] these words of betraying should not seem as
pertaining to him.” This too is not in
the Gospels, but it is very effective storytelling. Love’s Judas is devious. He tries to hide his sinister intentions. So by extension would all Jews be portrayed,
as the antisemitic myths of
I
am not suggesting that these popular “movie” versions of Jesus’ life and death
were the only cause of racism against Jews.
I believe that much of the traditional story (which, remember, is not
the same as the Gospel story) became fixed even when Christians still read the
Bible for themselves in Greek and Latin.
But one thing had not become fixed in the first three or four
centuries of Christianity: Hatred of
Jews. When Christians read the Gospels,
many could see how Jewish Jesus was. Hence, the phenomenon, which flourished especially in the 4th
century, of Christian Judaizers.
These
were gentile Christians, not Jewish Christians. They did not feel threatened by
Jews or Judaism. They enjoyed
participating in Jewish rites because Jesus as a Jew had done so and to be a
good Christian for them was to imitate Christ even in this. They were not heretics. As far as we know, they maintained their
Christian belief in Jesus (as Messiah, as Son of God, as divine) along with a
very close connection to Judaism, which was alarming to the Church. The Church was putting up walls and the Judaizers were taking them down. The Church needed myths to put up more
walls. It needed to create insiders and
outsiders. Judas, by the way, was the
first insider to be turned into an outsider, as Klassen
reminds us (Judas, 203).
What
the storytelling of the Middle Ages did, what it was enormously instrumental in
accomplishing, was to create a portrait of a Christian Jesus who is constantly
bedeviled by wicked, wicked Jews. It
further entrenched and amplified the traditional tale of this
death. It intensified the problem of
insiders and outsiders. It gave us vivid
images which were not in the Gospels so that we could never see these books any
other way.
It
was the growing hatred of Jews that helped solidify the tradition of turning
every story about Jews in the Gospels into a negative one. As the popular stories took hold, the Gospels
(Jewish documents of the 1st century) were treated carelessly (they still are)
and became almost irrelevant. Whatever the
Judaizers had noted in the Gospels about Jesus’ Jewishness and about his good relationship with his own
people and culture (Pharisaic/rabbinic culture) was soon forgotten.
But
surely, I will be told, modern scholars have advanced beyond these “Lives of
Christ”. No, they haven’t. That’s exactly my point. So-called historical scholarship remains
trapped in ancient and medieval traditions -- and in the emotions
of these traditions.
Academic scholars have taken over the mantle of power from religious
authorities and tradition, and convey the same story, the same legend, under the
guise of historical terminology. A
scholar like Bruce Chilton will claim to be doing something new in Rabbi
Jesus and then repeat verbatim the traditional story of Jesus persecuted
by other Jews (as I discuss in THE OFFENSIVE JESUS). Scholars still treat the Gospels as
irrelevant and maintain they have an almost supernatural ability to go behind
the texts (e.g., Chilton, xxi; Funk, 11).
As
you will see in my review of many mainstream scholars in THE OFFENSIVE JESUS,
BLAMING JEWISH LEADERS, ZEFFIRELLI, and the other essays from the Web site in
Chapter 2, they especially repeat the myth of Jesus in hostile conflict with
Judaism (Temple, Torah, Pharisees) and all religious Jews of his time, turning
Jesus into an alien creature engulfed by Jewish enemies. They repeat this thoughtlessly and use it to
rewrite the Gospels to make them support this myth more than they really
do. Scholars do not use the Gospels
to prove the historical validity of the myth.
Instead, they use the preconceived myth as their basis to alter the
historical record in the Gospels.
Can
anyone seriously maintain that scholars are not stuck in an old worldview and
an old set of emotions (of fear and hatred for Jews who, it is falsely
imagined, oppressed Jesus)? It reminds
me of David Freedberg’s point in The Power
of Images that art critics refuse to admit their own emotional
responses to art and ascribe strong emotional reactions to the “primitive” (see
xxi, 424, 434) -- which includes women, children, the mentally deranged, the
uneducated, “primitive” ethnic peoples generally, and people of long ago in
European culture (such as in the Middle Ages).
Critics will not admit the role that emotion plays in their knowledge of
art. They all pretend that the proper male
response to art analysis is cool detachment.
(If
you read Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error,
you will understand that cool detachment is practically a medical
impossibility. The brain is not made up
of separate, individual compartments walled off from each other. They are all interrelated. The various parts of the brain, including the
logical and emotional components, in a sense “bleed” into each other. Even when you do mathematics, emotions are
tapped into.)
In
fact, Freedberg often uses fear, or a related word,
to describe what goes on in so-called sophisticated art criticism (e.g.,
xxiii-xxiv, 423, 425, 428, 429, 430, 439).
Thus: “My claim, then, was that
we repress the evidence of responses clearly revealed by past behavior [e.g.,
in medieval times] because we are too embarrassed by it, and -- just as in the
past -- because we fear the strength of the effects of the images on ourselves
... Much of our sophisticated talk about art is simply an evasion ... we are
afraid to come to terms with our responses -- or, at the very least, with a
significant part of them. We have lost
touch with them, so we repress them ... ” (429-30).
Similarly,
Gospel scholars have their emotional relationship to this material which they
are loathe to admit -- but not admitting it does not
help them to be better scholars. Not
only is there a fear of ancient Judaism and a fear that Jesus will lose his
uniqueness if he is seen to be too much of a Jew (hence, John Meier’s A Marginal
Jew which expresses how most scholars feel about Jesus), but just as
important scholars will not acknowledge how emotionally attached they are to
the (false) story of Jesus as a religious martyr who is betrayed and done in by
his own kind, nor will they acknowledge their own strong feelings about those
they believe betrayed Jesus. These
feelings affect their scholarship, their “knowledge”.
Scholars
will give lip service to the idea that the Romans did it (as Chilton does in Rabbi
Jesus, xxi), but they will blame Jews over and over and say little or
nothing about Roman responsibility (as Chilton does, which I discuss in detail
in THE OFFENSIVE JESUS). Our whole
popular culture, Christian and Jewish, is convinced that, in some important
way, Jesus was maltreated by some fellow Jews.
We assume the Gospels could not possibly tell or preserve any
other story and so we all (including scholars) dispense with any careful
reading of the Gospels.
Blaming
some Jews, if not all, continues unabated in our day. People mistakenly think the Catholic Church’s
1965 Nostra Aetate initiated some great
sea change when it declared that Jews are not responsible for Jesus’
death. That is not so. They typically quote only the second half of
the sentence: “ ...
neither all Jews indiscriminately at that time, nor Jews today, can be charged
with the crimes committed during his passion.”
They rarely quote the first half of the sentence: “Even though the Jewish authorities and those
who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ (cf. John 19:6) ... ” The document
says absolutely nothing about
Even
when one, rare scholar makes a breakthrough, everyone
else either ignores or misinterprets his discovery. Giving a theory or insight the silent
treatment is the best way to suppress it.
Nothing can be allowed to challenge false facts and a very deep
worldview. It happened to Haim Cohn, as we will see in the chapter on the priests,
and it has happened most recently to William Klassen.
It
is Klassen who finally put this point on the map that
the Greek word paradidomi used in all the
Gospels to describe Judas’ action does not mean betray. It is a neutral word with no connotation of
betrayal, meaning “hand over” or “deliver”, as Klassen
has it, or “convey” or “escort” or “transfer”, as I would put it. I discuss his work in enough detail in the
Judas chapter and in BLAMING JEWISH LEADERS in the next. Before Klassen
wrote his book, practically no scholar acknowledged this point. There was close to one hundred percent
unanimity in concealing this fact. Since
his book, more scholars have admitted he is right (or admitted this point
without giving him credit), but they refuse to see any significance in it.
How
extraordinary this is, especially when you consider a couple of facts about
Judas in Mark’s Gospel that have been well-known to scholars for
centuries: Mark never gives a motive for
Judas’ “betrayal” or relates any conflict between Judas and Jesus that would
make sense of it. When you realize that
even the word Mark uses does not mean betray, it becomes clear that no one in
his right mind could pull a story of betrayal out of Mark’s account. But, of course, we “know” it is a story of
betrayal from all the ancient sermons, theological writings, Passion Plays,
“Lives of Christ”, films, etc., that we have been subjected to for almost 2,000
years.
Even
scholars who claim (without evidence) that Judas is an entirely
fictional creation still tell us he was a traitor (albeit a supposedly
fictional one now). Despite the fact
that nothing in Mark’s story fits either a real or a fictional traitor,
scholars seriously proclaim that this is his literary purpose in the story. And we are supposed to believe that scholars
aren’t living in the world of old stories when they “analyze” the Gospels? You know damn well they are. Until we face this, no one is going to
analyze the Gospels correctly.
But
doesn’t Mark at least say that Judas disappeared from the supper table and then
reappeared with armed men? Why, yes he
does. But you could draw a number of
inferences from that. It could be
something innocent, not evil. It is only
the innuendo of a preconceived idea that makes us see treachery as the only
explanation for that. It is easy to come
up with other possible explanations.
Judas might have left the table to get more food for the feast or to
give money to the poor (as some thought at the time; see John 13:29) and then
he runs into the Roman soldiers (mentioned at John 18:3) who were on their way
to arrest Jesus and they drag Judas back with them. That would explain what is in Mark.
But
Mark does not give any hints that this is what happened, you might object. That’s right.
But guess what? He doesn’t give
any hints, or any explicit comments, that betrayal is the explanation
either. (The kiss Judas bestows on Jesus
could have been out of fear and out of a need for reassurance from his
rabbi. Again, it is only innuendo and
tradition that makes us read something sinister into the famous kiss.) So why are we so sure it is an act of
betrayal that Mark relates?
We
know the answer to that. Judas, like Barabbas and so much else in the Gospels, is a developing
story. He is demonized in Luke and John
(which Gospels, I must stress, give us no more details to hold onto -- no
serious motive or conflict or any description of how his comrades felt about
this terrible act). It doesn’t stop with
the last Gospel, but continues on. Judas
is demonized more and more as time goes by.
It is later tradition that we read back into Mark and Matthew. We not only conflate all four Gospels (we’ll
see this happen with Barabbas too; even the best
known scholars do it), we import the whole developing outlook of European anti-Jewishness back into those first Gospels. It is the follow-up ancient storytelling that
makes us see Judas the way we do. Modern
scholars are as much a victim of it as anyone else, but, by virtue of their
power, they are also continuing perpetrators of it.
Look
at Mark 14:18 at the last meal Jesus shares with his students. In virtually all current translations, Jesus
predicts, “one of you will betray me.”
If you translate it more correctly as “one of you will transfer me” (or
“convey me”), it sounds startling, doesn’t it? And hearing it this way makes you think. It makes you think because it makes you see
in a fresh way. What a peculiar thing to
say. Why would Jesus expect someone to
transfer him? It sounds odd to us only
because we are used to “knowing” that this is a story of betrayal. Our preconceived “knowledge” gets in the
way. For thousands of years, the word
has been mistranslated precisely because no one wanted us to experience -- to
see and to think -- the Gospels in a fresh way closer to the original. That goes for “historical” scholars too who
have participated in this charade (being victimized by it and inflicting it at
the same time).
I
can give yet another explanation for the completely innocuous story that Mark
tells and that one, as you will see in the Judas chapter, is the right one
because it actually explains all the facts we have in a very
simple way and it fits the same simple interpretation of the Barabbas story and the positive role the priests played in
Jesus’ final hours. There is a reason why
Mark does not portray Judas as a traitor -- not because he was a bad
storyteller (which is a far-fetched explanation), but because Judas was not a
traitor. The simplest
theory that explains most, if not all, of the evidence wins. That’s what I have. That is what any good branch of science,
including historical studies, does. It
looks for simple theories which usually turn out to be the right ones. But Gospel scholars are always proposing
complicated theories for which they have little or no evidence.
I
have focused on Judas as an example of how scholars misread the Gospels. But it’s not just Judas. It’s everything else in the Gospels. Whether it is Barabbas
or the
The
Gospels describe a rather small affair in the commotion where Jesus attacks the
vendors and moneychangers on the periphery of the
Ball
also has some good insights. So do many
scholars. I am picking on their mistakes
for a reason. There is no other field
quite like this one where scholars so often are incapable of getting their
basic historical texts (the Gospels) right.
These are not just haphazard mistakes committed out of stupidity. There is a distinct bias to the way scholars
misread. Jews, like Judas, Barabbas, and the priests, are made out to be more hostile
or violent than they were. More division
between Jesus and fellow Jews is created than the Gospels warrant. There is a definite anti-Jewish pattern to
the scholarly mistelling of the Gospels. We have filled our heads with false facts
about what the Gospels say about Jesus’ relationship to other Jews and to
Judaism.
This
is not simply about defeating false theories which would be relatively easy to
do. All these ideas have taken on the
status of false facts. How do you fight
false facts? How do you fight what has
been so deeply ingrained in our consciousness that the evidence becomes
irrelevant because we think the false facts are the evidence? How do you fight this massive insanity or
hysteria which insists on falsifying the historical record in order to promote
an insidious belief?
It’s
bound to be a losing battle for me or anyone who first makes the attempt. Why?
Because people are more generally put off by those who call a historical
lie what it is than they are by those who promote the lies which make us
comfortable just because they have been told for so long. I think the lies and the willingness to
conduct irrational investigation is what should really offend people. But in this world, it’s usually the messenger
who is shot for being impertinent enough to suggest that the mess can be cleaned
up and that this is actually good news.
Others
can take a different course. But for me,
I think we have been silent too long about how bad scholarly work in this field
is. People, even friends, have told me
to shut up about this, but I will take note of what the Irish writer Hubert
Butler once wrote: “Yet it seemed to me
that for a man as for a community, too high a price can be paid for
tranquility. If you suppress a fact
because it is awkward, you will next be asked to contradict it” (Independent
Spirit, 452). If we continue to
call scholarly work on the historical Jesus rational, we will keep the embers
of racism, antisemitism, fear, and hatred burning,
with the potential to flare up out of control for future generations. We cannot blame racism on the general
population or the lower classes. The
intellectual world bears a large measure of responsibility -- not for vicious
racism but for perpetuating a racist worldview that is the foundation for all
our bad thinking about history and a people’s culture.
We
can understand the racist effect that “Lives of Christ” (and Passion Plays and
theological writings, sermons, etc.) had on our reading of the Bible by
comparing it to something very similar that happened later on when the
experience of racism was repeated with other peoples.
When
Europeans stumbled upon other cultures in the
For
example, while some of the first drawings of African natives dancing to the
beat of a drum may have been an expression of wonder at the magical innocence
of these people, they soon took on racist overtones. These natives were just emotional creatures
with little intelligence. For several
centuries, the drawings were repeated over and over. Practically just copies. The repetition established their
“truth”. Some of the later drawings were
presented as new discoveries, but they were merely repeating. The repetition is a key point (as with the
“Lives of Christ” and modern scholarly analyses). It made the drawings part of western
consciousness. Then came
photography. Many photographs uncannily
resembled the earlier drawings. Were the
photographs staged? Not all, but some
were. (For the two essays on repetition
in travel engravings and manipulation of photographs, which inspired this
analogy, see respectively Christopher B. Steiner and Virginia-Lee Webb in Barkan and Bush, 202-225, 175-201.)
Yet
Africans, Indians, and peoples all over the world had village councils and
other forms of government. They
frequently sat, rather than danced, in a circle, deliberating, reasoning,
debating. Europeans generally did not
bother to depict such behavior. That was
their choice. Few,
if any, engravings or early photos bore the caption “Village Council Meeting”.
We
have the same problem in Gospel scholarship.
A theology of Jesus’ death developed in which he is encircled and persecuted by Jewish enemies. It
was popularized in those “Lives of Christ”, just like the drawings of natives
dancing around a fire. Those “Lives of
Christ” contained a severely racist portrayal of Jesus’ life and death. The people of
The
Bible itself was now finally available again, but everyone saw what they had
been taught to see. Even Tyndale was constrained to translate that neutral word in
connection with Judas as “betray”, though he translated the same word
differently and neutrally when it appeared in other places in the New
Testament, a pattern that the Wycliffe translators had also followed (more on
all this in the chapter on Judas).
Neither Wycliffe’s disciples nor Tyndale could hardly have done differently. Even if the tradition of Judas as a traitor
had not otherwise been so solid, such works as Nicholas Love’s Mirror
would have made it impossible to represent the Gospel Judas any other way. No one was free to see the Bible for
itself. Our seeing was controlled. It still is by scholarly staged readings.
And
don’t forget the crucial element of repetition.
Over and over, we are told -- by so-called historical
scholars, not just by popular storytellers
-- Barabbas was a rebel troublemaker, Judas was a
traitor, the priests and Pharisees were offended by Jesus, they put him on
trial or some sort of judicial procedure, etc., etc. Modern scholars believe that if something is
repeated often enough, it becomes true.
They do not need any evidence and they do not care how much evidence
contradicts these “truths”. Repetition
is extremely successful at giving us false facts that lodge deeply in our
vision of the world. Once we are given
these pictures, we can’t see anything else and “proving” the rest of their
theories is a piece of cake.
We
were never given any other pictures. We
never saw Rabbi Jesus/Joshua sitting in a circle with other rabbis, engaged in
a lively dance of Torah. All we ever saw
was Jesus standing apart from and condemning other Jews, or Jewish leaders
standing apart, whispering amongst themselves about what to do with that alien
presence over there. Pictures,
pictures, pictures. Pictures in our head.
Always the same picture. Even today. So we assume that it is the only picture to
be found in the Gospels. There are no
other pictures in this incredibly racist discipline known as historical
criticism of the Gospels.
The
repetition of that racist lie (violent, uncomprehending Jews) had made
it true, authentic, believable. Sheer
repetition, that’s all it was. Evidence
was prejudicially selected, evidence was erased (negative hallucination), and
the result “confirmed” what was already deeply embedded in the western
mind. It goes on today. Scholars still give us these staged
readings. Repetition, staged readings,
negative hallucination -- these are some of the tools of invisible,
arbitrary power. Add this to the
power of naming (i.e., slapping a name, like “symbolic act of destruction of
the Temple”, on an element in the Gospels to create a false fact), which I
discuss in THEOLOGY IN HISTORY, and you have quite a panoply of techniques for
telling lies about history.
Those
one thousand years of a Bible-less society -- of relying on what we were told
the Bible said instead of reading it for ourselves -- affected us more than we
know. It is precisely as Michel-Rolph Trouillot has said, “We are
never as steeped in history as when we pretend not to be ...” (Silencing
the Past, xix). We are
still stuck in that one thousand year period because we will not acknowledge
that it happened and that it dominates us even now. We are too arrogant and proud to admit how
the past controls us. In large part
because of that millennial indoctrination into what the Gospels supposedly say,
we are still incapable of reading the Gospels.
That is a terrible thing to confess.
It is a hard thing to see and a hard thing to say.
I
know how difficult it will be for most of us, especially the scholars, to admit
how true this is. It means a loss of
innocence, a loss of comfort with our pretended knowledge. Yet it can also mean, as Trouillot
continues in the above quote, “ ... but if we stop
pretending we may gain in understanding what we lose in false innocence. Naiveté is often an excuse for those who
exercise power. For those upon whom that power is exercised, naiveté is always a mistake.” A fear of loss of innocence is a major
obstacle to researching the truth. We
have missed access to the very obvious history contained in the Gospels because
we have remained trapped in the history of not reading and misreading them. To confess it: We like misreading the Gospels (and the Bible
generally).
It
is not just the facts of Jesus’ life and death (the Jewish facts as recorded in
the Gospels and in the historical context of Josephus’ writings) that we have
to learn to see. There are other facts
in our long history right up to the present that have to be acknowledged. The erasing of facts from history that
scholars have engaged in -- that too is a fact.
The long history of an inaccessible Bible is also a fact. The racist story that replaced the full,
complicated story in the Gospels is another fact we have to deal with. Our culture got used to this racism and
considers it very normal. It doesn’t
feel like racism. It doesn’t feel like
we are using fear and hatred to read the Gospels. We wear the fear and hatred very
comfortably. This too is a fact. Ignore any of these facts and the facts of
what happened 2,000 years ago become harder, almost impossible, to see. In
other words, the continuing cover-up is as much a fact as the original
story. If we do not confront the one, we
will never see the other.
Does
this mean that scholars who call themselves historians are nothing but a
continuation of traditional, conservative theology? That is exactly what it means. This “historical” criticism has changed
nothing. It is instructive to look back
at the 16th century again at how the English (Catholic) Bishop John Fisher
reacted to the Frenchman Jacques Lefèvre’s historical examination of one relatively
minor point in the Gospels. (This was
before Henry VIII broke away from
It
should be remembered that this was the era of what was called the New Learning,
when scholars began studying Greek, Hebrew and other languages again, and
applied their knowledge to the Bible.
Though some would give credit to John Locke (late 17th century) for
being the first English historical critic of the Bible, I would give it to
William Tyndale, a century and a half earlier. He devoted himself to making a mostly more
accurate translation of the New Testament and the Hebrew scriptures,
and that is authentic historical investigation. To learn what the Gospels literally
say mattered to Tyndale. It mattered in a way that has mattered to
very few people since. Also, as a
genuine historical critic, he wanted to give the Bible back to the people. This was never supposed to be for
experts. Tyndale
was not interested in bamboozling his readers with fancy terminology or
awe-inducing language. What mattered was
what the Gospels actually say, not what we want them to say, and he hoped
people would discover that for themselves by introducing them to greater
accuracy about the original. He
sincerely challenged others to do better and make an even more accurate
translation.
(If I go on and on about Tyndale, it is
because for me personally, he has been such an inspiration. I ought to have been more inspired by Jewish
scholars who have studied the Gospels and I was, to a great degree by Jules
Isaac and then belatedly by Haim Cohn; Paul Winter
too was an influence. But somehow, it
was always Tyndale who grabbed my attention. He is often in my thoughts.)
In
any event, one of the problems in Gospel scholarship is how we carelessly mush
them together, when they actually contain many different strands. Scholars still do it with Barabbas
and Judas, taking the later Gospels of Luke and John and projecting them back
into Mark and Matthew. In western
Christianity, there was a tradition that the various references to Mary in the
Gospels (other than Jesus’ mother) were all about one Mary -- Mary
Magdalene. Hence, John Fisher would
write a book De Unica Magdalena. In the Greek Church, it had always been
recognized that there were three different Marys --
Mary Magdalene, Mary the sister of Martha and Lazarus, and Mary the forgiven
sinner. In 1517, the French scholar
Jacques Lefèvre
studied the Gospels carefully and came to the same conclusion. Fisher was disturbed.
Now
Fisher was not a close-minded man. He
was open to the New Learning and quite enthusiastic about some of it. He got along well with Erasmus, perhaps the
greatest Catholic humanist. He
appreciated and admired the work of Johann Reuchlin,
a scholar of Hebrew and the literature of the Kabbalah
(a Jewish mystical tradition). Fisher
himself undertook to learn Greek and Hebrew.
I think he could see the sense of Lefèvre’s arguments. But he seemed to be horrified by the possibility
that one could rediscover a bit of truth in the original Gospel texts that had
been forgotten by Church tradition. As
he put it:
I immediately thought of how many difficulties
would confront the whole church if Lefèvre’s
opinion were ever to be accepted. How many
authors would have to be rejected, how many
books would have to be changed, how many
sermons
formerly preached to the people would now have
to be revoked!
And then, how much uneasiness
would arise among the faithful, how many
occasions for loss of faith. They will soon
doubt other books and narratives, and finally
the mother of us all, the Church, who for so
many centuries has sung and taught the same
thing.
(quoted in
H.C. Porter’s essay in Bradshaw and Duffy, 90)
Discovering
the truth can cause us leaders such discomfort.
Think of the changes we will have to make! It is as if Fisher were saying, “With a
closed mind, we will lead humanity to truth and happiness.” There is an incredible fear here that if the
power of the Church or academia to tell what is in scripture is challenged in
any way, society will crumble! When push
comes to shove, Bishop Fisher will champion arbitrary power over truth. It does not seem to occur to him that this
kind of power harms the Church and the scholarly world. For, sooner or later, the truth will out and
then what will people think when they learn that their expert leaders lied to
them (even when they became aware of what was true) and tried to prevent the
truth from seeing the light of day?
Isn’t
there a kind of insanity in this self-destructive approach? Why doesn’t this motto ever occur to
authority figures: “With humility and an
admission that we sometimes make mistakes, we will lead humanity to the hope
that truth and justice are always worth seeking and will create greater peace
and happiness.”
I know, it’s too long. But apart from that. Why do leaders think humility is detrimental
to power? Wouldn’t it be the saner
approach?
I
know that today’s “historical” scholars will say that they are much closer to
the spirit of Lefèvre
than to Bishop Fisher. I am sure they
believe they examine the texts as closely as he did. I disagree.
They are far closer to Fisher.
This book will rather conclusively demonstrate this. For two hundred years, “historical” criticism
of the Gospels has taught and sung the same thing. It will brook no contradiction to its highly
anti-Jewish approach to the Gospels. It
assumes a Jesus in hostile conflict with other Jews and Judaism. It will allow no debate on this, no other
insights. All evidence that points in
another direction is systematically excluded from discussion. A total shut-down is in force. Only anti-Jewish views of Jesus’ life and
death are permitted. The power of academia
makes sure of that.
When
Raymond Brown is faced with the possibility that Jewish leaders treated Jesus
in “not ... so prejudiced” a fashion, he says that such an idea “should be
ruled out of the discussion” (Death, 422). I commend him for his blunt honesty. When Jewish scholars -- from Abraham Geiger
to Joseph Klausner to Paul Winter to Hyam Maccoby -- have suggested
that Jesus was at bottom a Pharisee, Christian scholars have generally been
incensed. (Only a very few, such as
Bernard Lee and Philip Culbertson, who are kept out of the mainstream, have
gotten this very Jewish point.)
As
Charlotte Klein, a Christian from
It
is pretty clear when you read Ernest Renan’s The
Life of Jesus (1863) and John Crossan’s
Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography
(1994) that they are the same book. (I give the details of the comparison near
the end of SCHWEITZER AND RENAN.) That
goes for the work of all the current mainstream scholars. They teach and sing the same thing over and
over and consider anything that upsets their tune a threat to their power. Regarding such issues as responsibility for
Jesus’ death and Jesus’ relationship to Torah, Pharisees, priests, and
I
put it this strongly for a reason (besides the fact that it is true -- that is,
it is substantiated by the evidence of what is in the work of scholars). The problem is as Hubert Butler put it: “It is well known that those who suppress
history have to relive it” (
Of
course, the full truth about Gospel scholarship is that it has not been all
bad. It is essentially misguided,
but that doesn’t mean there have never been any good insights. The best insight historical criticism ever
had was that, after Jesus died, the conflict and hostility between Jesus’
followers and their fellow Jews were projected back into Jesus’ life. That was an
excellent point. But scholars have been
extremely inconsistent in applying it.
They have failed to see that it applies just as much to a projection
onto the priests as the one onto the whole Jewish people. Scholars have made only piecemeal corrections
to the myth. They claim to rethink the
whole story, but they do not. Had they
been more consistent with their good ideas and thought the whole thing through,
they would have seen the original story long ago. And since consistent thinking reveals a very
simple, obvious solution to the whole problem, only something extremely
powerful could have blocked an entire academic field from carrying out the
simplest approach. Something
with the power to make us a little crazy.
Like
a piece of film looping over and over in a projector, we’ve been told the story
of Jesus’ demise the same way so often that we don’t notice how used to it we
are. Even scholars, who claim to be
doing historical investigation, just repeat the traditional story. No one bothers to look -- simply look, as
Goethe, Cézanne
and so many artists have told us -- just look at the Gospels and read them
carefully to see whether they actually tell that story. We’ve been told for 2,000 years that they do,
so it doesn’t occur to us that it could be any different. We just assume that the traditional
story is in the Gospels and no other.
That the Gospels might also contain a pattern of evidence for a somewhat
different story -- a very obvious pattern -- seems ludicrous ... well, frankly,
it sounds insane, doesn’t it?
Because
if true -- if there is another story here -- and the best scholars in western
civilization have missed it, then the implication is that the scholarly world
is insane for not having seen what is right under our noses. Negative hallucination. Erasing what is right in front of our
eyes. Something must be deeply
wrong. Somebody must be nuts. Either I am for suggesting that there is a
highly rational pattern of evidence in the Gospels that everyone has missed or
else the world of scholarship is.
I
am not saying it’s crazy to believe the traditional story. It might be historically wrong, but it’s not
crazy. People have a right to believe
what they want to believe. Faithful
Christians are not nuts. Some may even
hate Jews, and they have a right to that, as ugly and as dangerous as it is. You can believe a myth and be quite sane.
What
is crazy is to say you are doing historical analysis and then just repeat the
traditional story all over again with all its internal and external
contradictions. To conduct irrational
analysis and flush evidence down the toilet while claiming you are engaged in
rational, scientific discourse is a little loony. It’s not something you award certificates of
sanity for.
I
have used the terms “mass hysteria” and “insanity” several times in this
essay. That’s what negative
hallucination calls attention to. It is
as if someone handed you a road map, identifying where all the pebbles are and
omitting the boulders. As your smashed up car could tell you, a map like that is worse
than useless and you would think the mapmaker had lost his mind.
It
goes back for centuries and permeates our whole popular culture on this
issue. This mass hysteria about Jews and
telling Jesus’ story through that hysteria built up in that thousand year
Bible-less period. It has never left
us. We still read the Gospels through
the screen of what we “know” from that hysterical outlook. I have some qualms about using the word, yet
I can’t help but think that hysteria is absolutely the right word for
it.
Was
any of this conscious? Was it not all
unconscious, including the current scholarly misreading of the Gospels? Surely I am not claiming that this has been a
deliberate fraud? That’s right, I am not
claiming this. I suppose it is
unconscious, but I do not think that the conscious-unconscious distinction
matters.
First,
it certainly does not absolve us of the responsibility to understand what went
wrong and continues to go wrong, and correct it. Second, the Church, as soon as it acquired
any power, set about separating Christian and Jew, denigrating Jews and
Judaism, and de-Judaizing Jesus. This was deliberate policy on its part. The effort to bury history was planned. If scholars have inherited this and been
faithful to it, that is nothing to brag about or disguise with the label
“unconscious”, and it is quite mischievous to conceal that “historical”
scholars are indeed carrying forward the ancient Church’s program. (One difference today is that scholars put a
Jewish veneer on Jesus in order to disguise what remains a terrifically
anti-Jewish program. See ZEFFIRELLI in
next chapter.)
Third,
the real point here is not whether scholars have consciously orchestrated all
this or not, but that there is a distinct arrangement to the way they misread
the Gospels, and this system has to be exposed.
Scholars have a responsibility to acknowledge that they have helped to
perpetrate and perpetuate a system of misreading.
It
does not have to be conscious fraud for there to be a pattern here. Conscious fraud or not, mass hysteria or not,
these negative hallucinations -- this elimination of evidence -- is not a hit
and miss affair. It is not an accident
that Judas, Barabbas and the rest have been turned
into violent Jews, when the earliest Gospels do not support this at all. These are not innocent blunders. These are not arbitrary mistakes. There is a definite system to what is
overlooked and what is distorted.
Ancient Jews are always made to look the worse for it. All the evidence telling us that it was not
so is blotted out. That racist worldview
is in charge. As I alluded to before
when I quoted Hubert Butler, to suppress this history of a racist worldview in
scholarship is to condemn ourselves to relive it again and again. And giving in to that is a kind of insanity,
yes, it is.
To
grasp the enormity of this, you have to imagine a witch trial which enforces
this racist worldview and which has lasted not a few months or a year or a few
years (as the McCarthy era did) but thousands of years, conducted by judges who
are the best, most educated scholars in the world. And even when the field became a historical
discipline (or so it is claimed), the witch trial went on for hundreds of years
more. A witch trial enshrined as a
permanent academic institution. That’s
what we are up against.
Racism
cannot just be written off as being about the most evil people who commit
violent acts. It is also about hysteria,
this massive, pervasive insanity, infecting good people and creating a
comfortable world of thought and perception that makes it possible for evil
people to breed and to prosper. Fighting
racism is not just fighting the really bad guys (as important as that is). The fight has to go deeper. The bad news is that it is in all of us, even
the well educated. Racism is pervasive. Something very profound went awry in western
civilization and we can see it in the work of scholars which reveals the
hysteria and insanity we have all been living with. Their work is a window into the depth and
tenacity with which antisemitism and racism seized
the western mind.
The
good news is that all you have to do is face down your pride and expose the
racism in your own predilection to fall in love with false stories, and that’s
the cure -- simply to expose it in yourself and in our institutions (it may
then take years to work itself out of our system, but the beginning is
everything).
I
realize that, no matter how I spin it, too many people will not hear this as
good news. And I am not thrilled to be
the one to bring it to you. It is
depressing and sickening to think about the atmosphere that has ruled in
western civilization for so long and among such educated people. I know very well that I will appear to be the
outrageous one, the one who is complaining aloud, for exposing and challenging
this mood, this worldview, this witch trial, this outrageous that has become
normal. No matter how I do it, people
will say, What the hell is wrong with you?
I’ll
tell you what is wrong with me. If I
change just a few words, some lines from Tom Waits’ song (quoted on the first
page) speak well for how I feel about this:
I’m an innocent victim
of a blinded history
and I’m tired of all these scholars
here.
No one speaks logically
and everything’s messed up
I’ve
become a ghost selling memories that no one wants to hear. And I want a piece of the action. Now.
Copyright 2002, 2003 L. Zitzer