THE OFFENSIVE JESUS

THE OFFENSIVE JESUS

As upsetting as it might be for people to hear this, the traditional tale of Jesus’ death is one that is highly racist against Jews. But the Gospel story is not. The traditional version and the full Gospel story are not the same. The traditional account does come from certain elements in the Gospels. But there is a lot more in the Gospels which points to quite a different story. For 2,000 years, we have just chosen to ignore -- even worse, blind ourselves -- to what else is in the Gospels. What I will do in this essay is review how “historical” scholarship has maintained the old story.

The basic racism comes from the fact that Jews play all the evil roles in the traditional morality play of Jesus’ death. Rome may wind up crucifying him, but the Roman governor is presented as a reluctant executioner. The real impulse to violence is attributed to the Jewish side -- plotting priests, a traitorous Judas, a stubborn Jewish mob clamoring for his execution.

Even as scholars tell it, every Jew in this story is violent or has violent tendencies. They are stupid besides. Jews just do not get Jesus. They are offended by him. So they become his enemies. Some of them plot his death. Judas betrays him into the hands of the priests and the priests betray him into the hands of the Romans. They capture him, put him on trial, and turn him over to Rome for execution. The Jews would choose to set free a violent rebel, Barabbas, instead of the peaceful Jesus. Pilate hardly wants to do it. It is the Jews who harbor violent instincts.

These are the fantasies that racists project onto the people they victimize. It would be a model for all the racism that followed, not only against Jews but against other peoples as well. Jews are too stupid to understand Jesus and too stupid to understand their own scriptures which are said to point to him as Messiah. They are violent, murderous, underhanded. They conspire to get rid of him. They practice an inferior form of religion, obsessed with rituals and legalities. They don’t get Jesus’ spiritual outlook. They are immature compared to him. What they don’t understand, they seek to undermine, secretively, behind the scenes, and then eliminate it.

But to maintain this abusive myth, we have to do violence to the Gospel texts which do not support this myth as much as we have been led to believe. There is something psychologically complex in the way scholars and theologians do violence to the texts and then project their own violence onto Judaism.

Violence and stupidity are key characteristics which racists assign to the people they denigrate. I know scholars will vehemently object that they do not maintain this story. They will say they have done so much to defeat the notion that the Jewish people were responsible for Jesus’ death. They focus on the leadership and that, they will say, is not racist. They are wrong. They are wrong on several counts.

I used to think that they were doing a good job fighting the pernicious idea that Jews killed Jesus. That was a point in their favor, which is what I said when I first started writing my book about six years ago. But the more I looked into it, the less true this became. If they no longer come out and directly say that the Jewish people killed Jesus, they do create a lot of innuendo that the people would have tacitly approved. They always portray Jesus as offending not only leaders, but most Jews as well.

Along with “dangerous” and “threatening”, “offensive” is one of the most popular words that modern scholars use to describe Jesus in his relationship to his own people and religion. Below, I give many examples. The style of older scholars was to call the Jews evil and accuse the Jewish leaders of judicial murder of Jesus. Current scholars have cleaned up their language. But they have changed nothing of substance. Even when they declare that parts of this story, such as Barabbas and Judas, are completely fictional, they still incorrectly tell their readers that the Gospels relate this story about violent Jews. They still read all this Jewish violence into the texts and thus maintain a racist reading of the Gospels.

Instead of calling Jews evil, they say that Jews were offended by Jesus. And, of course, this implies that they did not get his ideas and were very wrong to misunderstand him. If Jesus is good and Jews are so spiritually inferior as to be offended by him, then what are these Jews? Scholars create the innuendo that Jews must have been evil in some way. Especially the Jewish leaders, but not only them, as we will see.

In addition, their reasoning about Jewish leaders is equally racist. My explanation of this is in BLAMING JEWISH LEADERS. But in this essay, listen to how often “offensive” (or an equivalent word) pops up in their account.

Just to begin with Albert Schweitzer who practically fixed the idea of a quest for the historical Jesus in our consciousness at the very beginning of the 20th century, his Jesus cannot merely have Jewish enemies. He must make Jewish enemies, for he “thinks only how He can so provoke the Pharisees and the rulers that they will be compelled to get rid of Him” (Quest, 392; my emphasis). Jesus makes history and enemies. He is intent on being so offensive that they will want to kill him.

Forty years earlier, Ernest Renan, in his enormously popular The Life of Jesus (1863), depicted Jesus as being very unhappy as a Jew: “All these old Jewish institutions [such as the Temple] displeased him, and he suffered in being obliged to conform to them” (220). In fact, on the Calvary of Jewish life in Jerusalem, “Jesus suffered more than at Golgotha” (307).

Jesus’ constant criticisms “naturally exasperated the sacerdotal class” (ibid.). Pharisees were “threatened by the doctrine of the new teacher” (313). Jesus preached a new social order (151) in which “all authority in this world will be humiliated” (159). “It was, then, neither Tiberius nor Pilate who condemned Jesus. It was the old Jewish party; it was the Mosaic Law ... This death was ‘legal’ in the sense that it was primarily caused by a law which was the very soul of the nation” (358). Renan also calls it a “judicial murder” by Jewish leaders (347).

Modern scholars are less openly vitriolic, but change nothing.

Denis C. Duling, in a review of the book by Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz, states that the Romans, who were primarily to blame for Jesus’ execution, “were galvanized by Jerusalem’s local aristocracy, who were offended by Jesus’ anti-Temple prophecy and considered him a false prophet” (Bible Review, August 1999, 45). He speaks for the overwhelming majority of scholars when he calls this view “historically plausible” (ibid.). Marcus Borg, whom I will return to further on, has written, “That Jesus’ death involved not exclusively Roman authority but also cooperation from the Jerusalem elite is widely accepted” (Contemporary, 119, n. 23).

One of Charlotte Allen’s problems with Jesus as rabbi is that there would then be “no longer any rationale for Jewish participation in his crucifixion ... No other rabbi (or Pharisee) of the early first century is known to have been so religiously offensive as to warrant capital punishment” (The Human Christ, 299). And we all know, of course, that Jesus must have been offensive to religious Jews. He wouldn’t be Jesus otherwise.

John Meier on Jesus: “By the time he died, he had managed to make himself appear obnoxious, dangerous, or suspicious to everyone from pious Pharisees through political high priests to an ever vigilant Pilate” (Marginal, 1.9). Pilate is mentioned dead last. Jews are always put in the forefront as enemies of Jesus, despite the occasional obligatory statement that primary blame goes to Rome (as in Duling’s comment above).

Meier also goes on this long rant: “A tweedy poetaster who spent his time spinning out parables and Japanese koans, a literary aesthete who toyed with 1st-century deconstructionism, or a bland Jesus who simply told people to look at the lilies of the field -- such a Jesus would threaten no one, just as the university professors who create him threaten no one. The historical Jesus did threaten, disturb, and infuriate people ... “ (1.177). Jews most of all -- which is the clear message of all these scholars though they are careful not to be as open about it as previous scholars.

Here is E.P. Sanders, who really is one of the most pro-Jewish of Christian scholars: “Jesus did come into fundamental conflict with ‘Judaism’; that is, with views ... which were probably shared by most ... He was doubtless seen as having attacked it [the Temple]. In this case not just the priests, but most Jews, probably even those only marginally observant, would have been deeply offended” (Jesus and Judaism, 270). The title of one of his sections is “The offence” (204).

While Sanders criticizes some scholars for misrepresenting the teachings of Judaism on forgiveness and repentance in order to draw a false contrast between Jesus and Judaism, he praises these same scholars for at least trying to make a connection between Jesus’ teachings and his death (and bear in mind that this connection affects only Jews since Romans who would have had no interest in Jesus’ religious teachings): “We see in such proposals [which Sanders just condemned as wrong] the laudable desire to find links between Jesus’ teaching and activity, on the one hand, and his death, on the other” (201-02). It is laudable to believe that Jesus antagonized other Jews. You can almost hear Sanders say, à la Schweitzer, that making enemies is laudable. This Jesus is not really a part of the Jewish people. He is a lonely outcast.

So too for Bruce Chilton, who claims to present Jesus “as a Jew, for Jews, and about Jews” (Rabbi Jesus, xix), but who characterizes Jesus as “exposed and alone” (259) and asserts that not only Jewish leaders but “many other devout Jews ... were offended by the scandalous new element in Jesus’ practice” (254; the new practice is a ritual meal which Chilton claims, without evidence, that Jesus promoted as a replacement for Temple worship, 255). Chilton also includes “a large proportion of his popular following” and “some of his closest disciples” as alienated by Jesus (250). This Jesus offends just about everybody.

One of the most shocking things about Chilton’s book is that while he claims in a sense to be doing something new (“the first comprehensive, critical biography of Jesus”, xx) and to present a Jewish Jesus, he repeats the traditional story in practically every detail. His Jesus, as noted above, offends many Jews, not just the leaders. The Pharisees practice a religion that focuses on externals (85, 87). They are “sticklers for adhering to the letter of the Law” (117) and concerned to maintain “their system of purity” (ibid.). Jesus mocked them (118) so that “Conflict with Jesus was inevitable” (85). This Jesus is opposed to Temple worship and wants to create something new (250-61). The Jewish priests more than Pilate are out to get Jesus. Pilate regards Jesus as an internal Jewish problem (233). The Pharisees stalk him (121). Pharisees and priests whip up a Jewish mob against him, making the Temple “a place of danger for Jesus” (122). And the high priest Caiaphas has to manipulate and pressure a highly reluctant Pilate who “was content to let Caiaphas dangle” (234).

It goes on and on. What is new or Jewish about any of this? It is extremely rare for any Christian scholar to emphatically stress Roman over Jewish responsibility for Jesus’ death. Even if they lay blame on Rome, they spend most of their time going on and on about Jesus’ activities causing anxiety in Jewish authorities (as they imagine). This imbalance suggests a scholarly obsession with exaggerating the power and faults of Jewish religious leaders. Chilton may say that it is historically inaccurate to pin Jesus’ death on Jews rather than Rome (xxi), but in his text, blaming Jews is exactly what he does. Chilton can promote the traditional story all he wants (that is his right), but to call his own version new or his Jesus to be “for Jews, and about Jews”, when all his Jesus does is alienate Jews, is a great act of self-deception.

John Crossan calls Jesus’ death a “religiopolitical execution” (Revolutionary, 196), the “religio” part referring to the Jewish priests. Similarly, Raymond Brown will meld “Roman and Jewish soldiers/police” into one expression (Death, 400-01), as if the Temple police and Roman soldiers ever worked together. (Brown, 251, 308, is one of the rare scholars who doubts the historical accuracy of John 18:3 which mentions Roman soldiers at Jesus’ arrest. Brown would make it almost exclusively a Jewish event.)

An editorial in the London Times in 1999 (reprinted in First Things, May 2000, 66-67, with favorable comments by editor Father Richard John Neuhaus) pronounced on the significance of Jesus’ death: “His Crucifixion was the direct consequence of his challenge to the religious authorities of his day”, making Roman responsibility important but secondary. It even revived the charge of judicial murder against Jewish leaders, describing Jesus’ execution as “all of piece ... with the judicial murders and tortures of every century of human history.” Very cleverly, by the way, the editorial never mentions “Jews”, but its intent to blame Jesus’ demise on something evil in Jewish leaders is unmistakable.

Crossan characterizes Jesus as being “against all the major [Jewish] religious options of his contemporaries” and as “lethally against his contemporary Judaism”, as also against primitive Christianity, he will add (In Parables, 35). At least three times in his writings, Crossan, with some slight variations, will sum up the three possible attitudes towards Jesus during his life with this formula: “Clearly, some people ignored him, some worshiped him, and others crucified him” (Revolutionary, xi; also, ibid., 199-200; and Who Killed, 216; in the last two, he says “let’s execute him” instead of “crucified”).

You are either worshipful of Crossan’s Jesus or rejecting of him (which can be either indifference or deadly opposition). Except that he adds indifference as an option, how is this any different from the traditional picture? It is still worship or reject and the rejecters aren’t looking too good. Not to mention the still thoughtless accusation that some Jews wanted to kill Jesus (like the London Times editorial, Crossan is careful not to explicitly mention Jews by name here). Jews conversing with Jesus in fruitful dialogue (which can include agreements and disagreements) is not part of the picture. It’s not a historical choice that Crossan is willing to see or present.

Look at what Crossan has eliminated from history. Where are the thousands upon thousands of Jews who liked Jesus or found him interesting or respected him or disputed with him in friendly disagreement or embraced him, all without worshiping him? Why not the following formula? “Some Jews loved talking and debating with him, some were inspired by him, some disagreed with him, some ignored him, some adored him, and the Romans wanted to crucify him.” This is accurate history, full history -- a formula Crossan will never give you. Crossan (and not only Crossan) has disappeared thousands of Jews from history, especially those who passionately and respectfully argued with Jesus and engaged him and loved him (without worshiping him). It is very much the product of a racist worldview. One could wish that scholarship would do a lot better than this.

It may be unconscious racism on the part of Crossan and all these scholars who thoughtlessly disparage Jews as opponents of Jesus, but it is racism (and imperialism) because a) they are disappearing from history the best and largest part of the Jewish people, and b) they are leaving only a negative image of this people and this culture, which, in their view, could not understand Jesus.

Do any of these scholars tell you about the times that Pharisees invited Jesus to dinner (Luke 7:36, 11:37, 14:1) and that the Pharisees would not invite just anyone? Do they remind their readers in an emphatic way that Rabban Gamaliel, a leading Pharisee, came to the aid of Peter and others (Acts 5:34-40) and that Pharisees helped Paul out (Acts 23:6-9)? Do they point up other positive encounters Jesus has with fellow Jews (Mark 12:28-34, Luke 13:31, John 3:1-15)? (At one time, some Christians would remember Rabban Gamaliel’s goodness by naming their children after him. It was the middle name of President Warren Harding, who was given this name after an uncle, I believe.)

All this information is from the New Testament which corroborates what we know about the peaceful nature of the Pharisees from other sources (and a majority of Jews probably sympathized with Pharisees more than any other group). Actually, John Meier will tell you that “Jesus can at times engage in civilized debate or even friendly dialogue with Pharisees ... “ (Marginal, 1.347). But he gives the impression that this was due solely to Jesus. He does not tell you that such dialogue was characteristic of Pharisees.

Marcus Borg, like many scholars, continually celebrates a subversive Jesus who challenges conventional wisdom (e.g., Meeting, 75-80). “Clearly, challenging conventional wisdom is often experienced as offensive and threatening” (89, n. 3) -- and gets you executed, as Borg also implies in comparing Jesus to Socrates (ibid.). The reference to Socrates is meant to remind us, no doubt, that he was killed by his own leaders.

Borg also complains that Sanders insists too much on “Jesus’ congruity with Judaism”, the result being that in Sanders’ views “there is little that puts Jesus in conflict with his Jewish contemporaries” (Contemporary, 20-21). Conflict with other Jews is the main thing that Borg and all these scholars must have in Jesus, otherwise he is not Jesus. As we saw, Borg need not worry. Sanders in the end wants conflict with other Jews in Jesus’ life as much as anyone else.

Raymond Brown: “If one takes the Gospels at face value (and even if one examines them through the microscope of historical criticism), there emerges a Jesus capable of generating intense dislike ... he would be offensive on any religious scene ... “ (Death, 392). Well, Brown and I do not share the same microscope. Brown, too, emphasizes that responsibility for Jesus’ death lies with some particular people at a particular point in time and it’s not the Romans whom he chiefly has in mind (385-86).

David Catchpole believed that Jesus’ insistence on the realization of the kingdom of God in the present “marks Jesus out from all contemporaries in a way which could not fail to be offensive” (Trial, 122). He regarded it as a basic fact that “Jesus stood in a position of tension with Judaism” (267; his emphasis). (This, by the way, is in a book which was dedicated to understanding the Jewish point of view about Jesus. Yet there was so much Jewish scholars were saying that he just did not want to hear. Donald Hagner, whom I discuss in JEWISH FEARS, has the exact same problem.) Catchpole considered the strictly political theory of Jesus’ demise a failure (270), and asserted, “The one place where Jesus can be shown to have caused offence is in matters religious. It is here that he was both different and dangerous ... ” (271).

The repeated use of such words as “offensive” or “offense” suggests that scholars are trying to create a very deep, lethal animosity between Jesus and other Jews. I could have offered another hundred examples without breaking a sweat. Most of these scholars probably believe that many or most ordinary Jews, not just leaders, were offended by Jesus (their beloved rabbi!). Sanders and Chilton say so explicitly. Others, like Crossan and Borg, certainly imply it. As Charlotte Klein noted in her study of anti-Jewish writing in Christian theology (after World War II no less), the ideas and expressions are so repetitive, you could almost suspect these writers of plagiarizing one another (Klein, 29; she also commented, on 28, “It is tedious to find the same ideas expressed again and again in almost the same way.”).

Christian scholars have made it clear that they are never going to let go of the traditional story which blames Jews far more than Rome for Jesus’ death and which makes Jesus out to be at odds with and offensive to most Jews. Because we live in the era after the Holocaust, they are going to make some effort to disguise their anti-Jewish views (as the London Times editorial and Crossan did) and to give lip service to being more positive about ancient Judaism, but they will not change anything essential in the old (and false) anti-Jewish story. And they don’t want to hear that the Gospels preserved a far less anti-Jewish tale.

Practically the entire Christian scholarly world fosters an extremely negative impression of 1st century Judaism -- and that’s racism -- by constantly portraying Jews as being in conflict with Jesus. (For two exceptions to this dominant trend, see RABBI JOSHUA where I discuss Philip Culbertson and Bernard Lee.) Most scholars never tell you about Jesus’ predominantly friendly relations with other Jews or his own deeply Pharisaic nature and love of written and oral Torah.

All this is erased from history and from the Gospels. We are given a Jesus who is just as violent (provoking his own death, as Schweitzer said) as his imagined opponents. The scholarly subversive or radical Jesus is a kung-fu Jesus who overturns Judaism. There even seems to be a fear that a too Jewish Jesus would be too effeminate -- as in the following examples.

Robert Stein likes the image of Jesus overturning the tables of the vendors and moneychangers at the Temple, even though he knows that this incident has been exaggerated (Jesus the Messiah, 191) and that for Jesus “the temple was a holy place” (193). Jesus was not against the sacrificial system (193). But despite knowing all this, Stein likes this Gospel image of violence because in it “Jesus is portrayed as God’s righteous servant” (191). “Certainly the picture of Jesus given in the Gospel accounts is far from the weak, effeminate Christ found in so much Christian art” (191). God forbid that Jesus should be effeminate (or bland or an aesthete, as Meier put it). Rejecting such a weak Jesus, Stein prefers this threatening Jesus “Armed with right, empowered with zeal for God ... irresistible” (191). The macho, kung-fu Jesus, I call him.

Bible Review (April 1999, 16) reported on an ad for a church in Britain which depicted Jesus as Che Guevara with a crown of thorns instead of a beret, against a shocking red background. The slogan on the poster said: “Meek. Mild. As If. Discover the real Jesus.” (The copywriter must have been reading all these scholars.) A representative for the Churches Advertising Network said, “We wanted to get away from the wimpy Nordic figure in a white nightie.”

JoAnn Wypijewski reports attending an Easter service in Wyoming in 1999 (around the time and in the vicinity of the trial of the alleged killers of Matthew Shepard) and hearing the narrator of the Passion play break off into this spontaneous utterance: “Every time I see an image of a feminine Jesus, it makes my blood boil. Jesus wasn’t a weakling. Jesus was a man. If Jesus was here today, he could take on any man in this room ... Jesus was a man’s man” (Harper’s Magazine, September 1999, 68).

One would hope that scholars especially would be uncomfortable with how closely their macho Jesus resembles that of the German Christian movement of the 1930s, which tried to buddy up to the Nazis. It wanted a manly Jesus and a manly Church, as Doris Bergen explains in Twisted Cross (Chapter 4). One German Christian, Hossenfelder, contended, “The origin of Christianity is anything but effeminate and weak. Jesus Christ stood alone without any external means of support in the tumult of his time ... He is a shining example of heroic courage ... Christian faith is a manly, heroic matter” (in Bergen, 166-68). (Recall Chilton’s Jesus “exposed and alone”, Rabbi Jesus, 259.) Another wrote to Hitler in 1933 that, in Bergen’s summary, “German nature demanded a ‘fighting Christ’, not ‘a cowardly sufferer’ who assumed the guilt of others and turned the other cheek to his enemies” (74). Yet another complained of the “nasty degradation of Jesus’s greatness into the realm of sentimentality” and called Jesus “an unprecedented warrior” (ibid.). A warrior against Judaism is always one of the implications.

I am not accusing today’s scholars of being Nazis. They are not proposing the creation of “a church of men, not a church of women of both sexes”, as another German Christian put it (63). But they are being rather thoughtless in repeating the traditional story and reading it into the Gospels as if nothing else were there. Repetition is not historical investigation.

Also, their subversive, kung-fu Jesus is based more on emotions -- the emotions of power (the desire for power to maintain a system) and fear, which are perhaps just flip sides of the same thing -- than on an assessment of the facts. Something other than a cold, rational analysis of the facts is going on in modern scholarship. Feelings are at play in the words these scholars choose -- laudable, obnoxious, dangerous, offensive -- and what feelings! Exploring some of these feelings, including my own, is the central purpose of this Web site.

Scholars can deny their emotional outlook, if they want, and pretend there is no such influence on their work. But it is clear to me that emotions are already in this study. I did not put them there. All I am doing is making them more visible and putting them on the table. These emotions have been there at least since Mark and Matthew imagined that Jews struck, spit at, and mocked Jesus. If you believe that Jesus was betrayed and done in by Jewish leaders, you are not going to feel neutral about that. This is visceral stuff. You cannot read about it without feeling something, whether you are Jewish or Christian.

A very small part of the Gospel narrative is highly emotional and we have let these emotions control and color the rest of it. Whether anyone likes it or not, we are going to have to think about how attached we are to each part, how losing parts will affect us, and what the story really means to us in each of its details.

But you cannot do any of this if fear gets in the way. Our emotions are central to historical studies. Ultimately, history is not about emotions or whose emotions are more righteous. It is about seeing the facts, all the facts. Some emotions can help us to see more facts and some, like fear, will hide facts. That is why our emotions must be investigated. They light up our brains and reality, or they keep things in the dark. When emotions are out there in the open, honestly confessed, then they will not be secretly controlling the search for truth. It is the hidden baggage we carry that poses the most danger for us. We will never get rid of our emotions, but we must acknowledge them, if we really want to attain objectivity.