ZEFFIRELLI

ZEFFIRELLI

Franco Zeffirelli’s 1977 film Jesus of Nazareth was a six and a half hour TV mini-series. You can pack a lot into that many hours. And what you leave out is just as significant. He was quoted at the time as saying that “he felt a ‘moral responsibility’ to restore a Jewish flavor to the Gospels” (Chattaway, 35). There is that “particular tenderness” for Jews which Denis Donoghue espied in our world following the Holocaust (see JEWISH FEARS).

So with tenderness and flavor, Zeffirelli gave us the Jewish wedding of Joseph and Mary, the circumcisions of both John the Baptist and Jesus, Jesus’ bar-mitzvah, Jewish prayer shawls aplenty, Jewish music and dancing, scenes in synagogues, and even a few Jews who are sympathetic to Jesus (outside of his followers, that is). If these are ghosts, they are quite lively ghosts.

But flavor is all it is. The substance of the film is terrifically anti-Jewish. What most people didn’t notice is that Zeffirelli, or his screenwriter, radically changed the Gospels in a few places to make them even more anti-Jewish than they are.

At Luke 10:25-28, a compatriot Jew asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, and, in Jewish fashion, Jesus answers with a question: “What is written in the law [i.e., Torah]? How do you read?” He never talks to gentiles this way. To the entreaties of the Syrophoenician woman (Mark 7:25-30; Matt 15:22-28), Jesus answers with statements or silence. But this encounter in Luke is a typical, friendly Jewish conversation. His fellow Jew answers Jesus’ question that it is to love God and to neighbor (quoting Deut 6:5 and Lev 19:18). Jesus has only approval: “You have answered right; do this and you will live” (Luke 10:28; the last comment means you will have life in the world to come).

That’s not the way Zeffirelli tells it. In the film, it is a member of the Sanhedrin (played by James Mason) whom Jesus asks about Torah and this man replies, “Hear O Israel, love thy God with all thy heart and soul” ... and stops! Half the answer in Luke! Zeffirelli’s Jesus has to gently reprove him, “You have said well ... But there is another commandment no less great. You must love your neighbor as yourself.” This does not correspond to anything in any of the Gospels. Not only does Jesus in the Gospels not reprove the man like this, but nowhere does he make this point.

At Mark 12:28-34 (cf. Matt 22:35-40), Jesus does not say love of neighbor is equal to love of God, but rather calls love of God the first commandment and love of neighbor the second. The effect in the film is to make Jesus appear spiritually and ethically superior to Jews. He apparently has discovered a great new ethical principle in distinction from Jews who worship a remote, sterile God divorced from humanity. The film opens with a synagogue scene (there’s that flavor) in which a Jew declares “in all diligence, love the Lord thy God”, but love of neighbor is never mentioned. You would never know from Zeffirelli’s film how much Judaism at that time emphasized relations to your fellow human beings. However gorgeous the Jewish veneer of the film, you come away with the distinct impression that Jews were spiritually lacking.

Zeffirelli directs the scene transposed from Luke very pleasantly and politely. There is no shouting or denouncing. Jesus has a smile on his face. They get along. Nothing overtly antisemitic takes place. Albert Schweitzer established the lesson long ago that if you are cultured and sophisticated enough about it, you can get away with almost anything. And Ernest Renan proved you do not necessarily have to be that polite.

Zeffirelli also introduced another significant change. In many ways, he seemed to favor the Gospel of John, especially at the end where the priests pressure Pilate to execute Jesus. But he omitted one important verse from John. John 18:3 relates that Roman soldiers were at Jesus’ arrest (and if they were there, it is a pretty safe guess they were in control). Zeffirelli makes it an exclusively Jewish event. Only the Jewish security staff of the Temple are present, no Roman soldiers.

How did Zeffirelli’s self-proclaimed moral responsibility to restore Jewish flavor to the Gospels result in eliminating a Gospel statement that helps to exonerate Jews of Jesus’ death? What kind of morality is this? The morality of flavor, which is a law unto itself, cannot be trusted to give us anything of substance.

In its way, Jesus of Nazareth is as racist a film as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, though it throws it at you with a softer curve. Both may have moments of beauty, but they present Jews and blacks as distinctly inferior and violent. Griffith did not bother to prettify it. He could get away with an openly ugly portrait. There was no post-slavery tenderness for blacks. The opposite, in fact. The emancipation of blacks in America had a similar effect as the emancipation of Jews had in Europe -- a kind of neurotic terror in the majority culture. Zeffirelli, on the other hand, was obligated to sneak in his anti-Jewish story under cover of the post-Holocaust tenderness for Jews. It takes a filmmaker to paint it pretty, it takes a Jew to cry.

In one respect, though, Zeffirelli was very faithful to the Gospels. He banished Romans from Jesus’ story until the very end. For over five hours, we hardly ever see Romans. It’s all about Jewish leaders fretting over Jesus and making their devious plans to deal with him (interspersed with scenes of tenderness for Jews). Then with about an hour to go, Rod Steiger as Pontius Pilate comes galloping in on a horse as if to say “You can’t end the movie until I get here.” For all of Zeffirelli’s concern to do some historical reconstruction in restoring Jewish flavor, he never does any reconstruction that would seriously affect your traditional understanding of the role of Jews in this story.

The only film I ever saw that got it historically right was Nicholas Ray’s 1961 King of Kings. He omits the Jewish “trial” altogether (which is correct as there was no Jewish judicial procedure of any kind). He repeatedly shows Pilate and his Roman officers worrying about rebellious Jews, while the Jewish priests are more or less indifferent to Roman concerns and to the Jewish preachers the Romans worry about. Their attitude is let Rome handle it. Why should we make a mountain out of a molehill?

And finally, Ray has Pilate take full responsibility for Jesus’ execution. As I comment near the end of BLAMING JEWISH LEADERS, Ray’s film is not as pretty as Zeffirelli’s, but it is closer to the truth which has its own beauty. Ray did some genuinely good reconstruction.

So how does Zeffirelli’s film compare to what scholars are doing? I think that BLAMING JEWISH LEADERS and THE OFFENSIVE JESUS make it very clear that scholars have changed nothing of substance. They keep telling the same story of Jesus in conflict with other Jews and making this imaginary conflict the prime cause of his death. They do not even bother to do a pretty job, as Zeffirelli does, of introducing more Jewishness into the story. It is strictly lip service they give to Jesus the Jew.

In an essay/lecture entitled “The Palestinian Background For A Life Of Jesus”, it takes Marcus Borg five pages to finally say that Jesus’ world was “a deeply Jewish social world” (in Shanks, Search, 41). Up to that point, he described his world in generic terms. And when he finally does say it was a Jewish world, what do we learn of this Jewishness? Next to nothing. Borg now switches from generic terms to Greek terms. The Greek for hypocrite is used as a possible basis to explain Jesus’ teaching on this rather than anything found in rabbinic literature (47). Borg speculates that Jesus may have attended Greek theater, perhaps sometimes taught in Greek, and as a carpenter, may have helped build a Hellenistic city (ibid.).

Is this a joke? Calling Jesus a Jew and then avoiding all things Jewish and using Greek culture (or anything non-Jewish) to explain his teachings? If it is a joke, it is a very popular one because John Crossan, Bruce Chilton, Ben Witherington III and virtually every other mainstream scholar, as I will explain, repeat it. The only bits of Jewish culture these scholars will allow into Jesus’ world are Hebrew scripture and Temple, and then they turn around and negate even these tiny bits of Jewishness by having Jesus transcend Torah and symbolically abolish the Temple (on this last, see THEOLOGY IN HISTORY).

Sitting around and shooting the breeze with other rabbis and Pharisees is not in their vision of things for Jesus. Rabbinic ideas about hypocrisy are Jesus’ social world, but they do not exist for Borg or any of these scholars. Borg’s “deeply Jewish social world” has no Pharisaic/rabbinic wisdom in it.

On the other hand, when you read a rare Christian scholar like Philip Culbertson, who is definitely not part of the mainstream, you will see him constantly refer to rabbinic literature in A Word Fitly Spoken. When Culbertson discusses “no one puts new wine into old wineskins” (Mark 2:22) in Chapter 9 of his book, he tells you all about the different kinds of wine mentioned by the rabbis and then makes a reasonable guess as to the one Jesus probably had in mind and its significance. This is Jesus’ world. I disagree with Culbertson’s ultimate interpretation of this saying, but he is on the right track and what I learned from him has helped improve my own interpretation.

There is nothing like this in any of the well-known scholars of so-called historical criticism. When, at the end of Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, John Crossan calls Jesus “a peasant Jewish Cynic” (198; his emphasis), that word “Jewish” drops in from a sky that never hovered over Crossan’s work. Nothing in this book preceding that comment (or, indeed, in any of his books) prepares you for the sudden announcement that Jesus was Jewish.

Crossan refers to Mediterranean cultures, Greek culture (such as Cynic philosophers), quotes from ancient Greek, Roman, or Egyptian sources, and utilizes modern sociological and anthropological analyses. He loves something he calls cross-cultural anthropology or studies (see the Prologue in the above book) by which he means that he will run to any culture on earth to understand the historical Jesus except Jewish culture. You can call this sophisticated scholarship as one writer does (Arnal, 441), but it amounts to sophisticated racism. (In THE OFFENSIVE JESUS, I explain that while this may be unconscious racism, it is still racism because he is disappearing everything good about ancient Judaism and leaving only a negative impression of it).

Crossan begins and ends In Parables with “Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Parable”, a series of quotations from such diverse writers as Nietzsche, Yeats, Wittgenstein, Auden, Tolkien, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Sewell, Wallace Stevens, and many more. Not one quotation from a Jewish scholar on Jewish parables or from rabbinic literature itself which has a few things to say about the nature of the parables found in its pages.

When it comes to parables, Crossan inhabits a generic world and he makes Jesus inhabit the same world. That the exact same, or sometimes similar, parables as Jesus’ are told by fellow rabbis does not penetrate Crossan’s consciousness. Crossan does have some great insights of his own about these parables, but he could have enriched his discussions and made them so much more accurate if only he had been willing to look carefully at the world of Jewish storytelling that Jesus was so obviously a part of.

When Crossan does reference a rabbinic parable, it is always to make a negative comparison to Jesus (In Parables, 19-21, 53, 66), a very old Christian practice. He does not mean to denigrate rabbinic stories, he says, only to emphasize that Jesus is “radically different” (53; cf. 20), but his defense rings hollow (words like “radical” and “subversive” are just euphemisms for “anti-Jewish” -- see RABBI JOSHUA).

Ben Witherington III does only marginally better. He makes a minimal effort at using rabbinic parallels to clarify Jesus’ world of thought and images (Jesus the Sage, 183f.). Like Zeffirelli, he puts some Jewish flavor into this (like using the Hebrew meshalim instead of “parables”) and expresses surprise that so little attention has been paid to rabbinic parables (183). But he soon makes it clear what he is really after. What he sees in Jesus, as he sums up in discussing one parable, is “a vision of a counter-order exceeding the bounds of usual Jewish thinking ... ” (193).

If this is not clear enough for you, in another work, he constantly presents Jesus as challenging Judaism and Torah (Christology, 60-80), even characterizing Jesus as a threat to Judaism (77, 115-16). Compared to anything in Judaism, Jesus is “higher”, “more authoritative”, “above”, “special”, “unprecedented” (65, 69, 80), one who “sometimes abrogated or transcended the Torah” (273; cf. 78, 80, 139). So when Witherington says that “a non-Jewish Jesus is a non sequitur” (Jesus Quest, 41), this is just lip service. In fact, he qualifies that last statement by adding “even if in certain ways he stood out from most of his contemporaries” and that is one of the mildest things he has said about Jesus in conflict with other Jews and Judaism; “stood out” is just another euphemism for “anti-Jewish”. The modern scholarly Jesus is as anti-Jewish as the traditional Jesus.

The Jewish flavor in Bruce Chilton’s Rabbi Jesus is also a rock bottom minimum. The title, which is very misleading, is the most Jewish thing about the book. In the text itself, Chilton hardly ever refers to him as rabbi. In only one place does he draw a comparison to any other Jewish figure, Hillel (87). Buddha seems to appeal to him more as someone comparable to Jesus (244), as is also true for Crossan and Borg (see SCHWEITZER AND RENAN).

Chilton claims to present Jesus “as a Jew, for Jews, and about Jews” (xix), as someone “with an exclusively Jewish agenda” (ibid.). He also says that his study of Jewish Aramaic works led him to his insights about Jesus (xvii). All this is a cover for what I review about Chilton’s work in THE OFFENSIVE JESUS: He repeats the traditional story of Jesus in almost every single detail, especially emphasizing conflict with just about all other Jews (and, of course, this leads to his death). That’s what Jewish flavor gives us.

Chilton’s Jesus is really a 16th century Christian combatant. Though the Gospels have Jesus celebrating the meal that came to be known as the Eucharist only once (the last supper), Chilton imagines that Jesus repeatedly practiced it earlier in his career and offered it as a replacement for Temple worship (255). Jewish leaders and devout Jews are made out to be offended by this (254). The Gospels do not even imply this idea of religious combat over the Eucharist. What Chilton has done is to take the Reformation/Counter Reformation battles of the 16th century (in which the Eucharist was one issue over which deadly engagements were fought) and project them back into the life of Jesus. This is Rabbi Jesus?

It does not trouble Chilton at all to rewrite the Gospels, making them say things they never said. He claims to be able to read the behind the texts, not from the texts (xxi), just as Robert Funk says he can bypass the Gospels (Honest to Jesus, 11). For so many scholars, their dissatisfaction with the Gospels is that these ancient books do not make a strong enough anti-Jewish case. It has to be made stronger by inventing things not in the Gospels. Unwittingly, these scholars provide some of my best evidence that the Gospels are not nearly as anti-Jewish as we have supposed.

Thus, Chilton makes the Temple incident into a huge fracas with Jesus’ followers beating vendors and dragging some away (Rabbi, 228), Barabbas into a murderer of one of the vendors (ibid., where Chilton actually has the audacity to cite Mark 15:7 as support), and the high priest questioning Jesus, “are you teaching that your feats replace Temple sacrifice because you are God’s own son?” (260-61). Absolutely none of this is in the Gospels or anywhere else.

Nobody ever reads more Jewishness into the texts (e.g., Jesus deciding whether chickens brought to him by women are kosher). But reading in more animosity between Jesus and other Jews is quite common. A Jesus who davens (prays) in Hebrew, laughs and trades stories with other rabbis, and cares about things like kosher foods is a laughable image for most Christian scholars. Sadly, a Jesus at odds with other Jews, inspiring ill-will wherever he goes, is not laughable but taken all too seriously.

Rather than give a long list of examples of other scholars bypassing the Gospels and writing their own version, I will provide just a brief look at a couple of revealing points in E.P. Sanders and Marcus Borg.

Sanders is a cut above most scholars in this field. In the end, his Jesus is no different from any other scholar’s (see RABBI JESUS and THE OFFENSIVE JESUS), but at least he will give a fair recitation of the evidence for the most part. If he is going to rewrite the Gospels, he is going to do it right in front of you and not behind your back as Chilton and so many others do.

Sanders knows very well that most of the information in the Gospels about Jesus’ relationship to the Temple is positive: “The few passages in the synoptics that deal with the Temple and priestly prerogatives are favourable ... “ (Historical Figure, 256). This is something Crossan will never tell you. Sanders also knows that Jesus only predicted the destruction of the Temple and that this is a far cry from a threat (258). Then he continues: “I shall assume that he threateningly predicted the destruction of the Temple ... “ (ibid.; his emphasis). Where does that come from?

Sanders also knows that, as the Gospels tell it, the altercation at the Temple and the prediction occur on different days. If Jesus had really intended to threaten the Temple, he missed a great opportunity for uttering his prediction on the same day he “symbolically abolishes” the Temple. It would be so much better for the scholarly case of a kung-fu Jesus, if Jesus had joined his action and the prediction. The Gospels do not tell it this way and Sanders is honest about it. But Sanders has to announce, “It is perfectly reasonable to put together Jesus’ action against the money-changers and his statement about the destruction of the Temple” (ibid.). The Gospels changed it, he asserts, because they wished to hide how threatening Jesus was (“they wished it would go away”, 259).

There is no evidence for any of this. Sanders makes it painfully obvious what is going on. His assertions are dictated by theology, by a racist worldview. Perfectly reasonable to put two separate things together? It is reasonable only if you assume that conflict with other Jews is the basis of Jesus’ life -- in other words, if you assume your conclusion. But if you argue from the facts (instead of rewriting them), you will see that you have a very hard time making out an anti-Jewish Jesus and anti-Jesus Jews in the Gospels (except in a very limited way).

The scholarly case is farce or it’s tragedy, but it’s not history and it’s not in the Gospels. More violence, more hostility towards things Jewish has to be read into the Gospels than is there. A racist worldview demands that it be so. “Worldview wins over the facts,” as Trouillot has said (Silencing the Past, 93).

How many scholars tell us that creating a disturbance at the Temple was the chief thing that got Jesus into trouble? All of them, really. Yet at the so-called Jewish trial of Jesus, he is never charged with this. It never even comes up. How did all the Gospel writers manage to report a “trial” and leave out the chief piece of evidence against Jesus? What we get in Gospel scholarship is one preposterous suggestion after another. Scholars have managed to create a field in which the Gospels are absolutely irrelevant to study of the Gospels.

So far I have focused on what the Gospels say. I have not even mentioned the historical context which scholars handle just as badly. They never tell you about the far more severe criticisms which rabbis and Pharisees made of certain Temple practices and no one persecuted them for it. I present this information in my (unpublished) book The Ghost in the Gospels. But in the next example, I will bring in the Jewish context.

Look at what Marcus Borg believes is a good illustration of an improved translation in a recent edition of the Gospels by a conglomerate of scholars. It is called the Scholars Version and can be found in The Complete Gospels, edited by Robert J. Miller. What has usually been translated as “Woe to you” (e.g., at Matt 23:13) is translated in this new version as “Damn you!” As the editors explain in the previous incarnation of their work in The Five Gospels (xiv), they believe this better captures the street quality curse of the original. Borg thinks this provides a fresh way of hearing it (Contemporary, 169). Fresh, but wrong.

“Woe” comes from the original Hebrew hoy. Isaiah uses it a lot (e.g., 5:11,18,20-22). The Revised Standard Version translated it as “woe”. The New Revised Standard Version has “Ah”, though in the Gospels it has continued to use “woe”. Now why the change to “Ah” in Isaiah? William Klassen provides some help on this, though his discussion is confined to Jesus’ use of “woe” with respect to Judas at Mark 14:21.

Klassen calls Jesus’ use of it for Judas “a cry of compassion” (Judas, 83). But he also comments on the word’s general significance in Hebrew scripture. “A woe in ancient Judaism was an expression of love” (ibid.). He points out (contrary to what the editors of The Five Gospels say) that it should not be confused with a curse: “We must guard against any equation of the woe with a curse” (ibid.; cf. 84; he cites many scholars in support of this). For scholars who love to compare Jesus with the ancient Hebrew prophets, they would do well to remember that “woe” is not a curse. (In The Ghost in the Gospels, I give a detailed explanation of how Jesus resembles an ancient prophet and it is not what you usually hear.)

So what is the “Damn you!” of the Scholars Version? It is a modern theological statement, not history. And it is very much in tune with the spirit of traditional Christian theology about Jesus and Judaism. Compassion and friendly relations with other Jews must not be allowed to enter Jesus’ story. You could say it is the cardinal rule of Gospel scholarship.

If the Jesus of any of these scholars is Jewish, then King George III was an Apache Indian and I am King Tut, puttin’ away on the 9th hole at the U.S. Open. They all send a very clear message: We will never abandon the traditional Jesus who knows only conflict with his fellow Jews; we will just look for more politically correct ways to put him over on everyone. (THE OFFENSIVE JESUS makes this agenda as plain as day.) That these scholars have convinced themselves they are doing something better is one of the great acts of self-deception in our intellectual history.

The nonsense has to end. The nonsense that this is historical analysis. Scholars can hold any theological beliefs they want to about Jesus, including a polemical, anti-Jewish theology (in which Jesus is always “radically different”, “above”, “apart”, “isolated”, or whatever, from other Jews), but they cannot call it historical analysis, much less Jewish, historical analysis, when it is no such thing. They all cling to a belief that Jesus was above and beyond all history and all Jewish context. (It hasn’t changed since the 19th century -- see SCHWEITZER AND RENAN.) They hide this by putting some very superficial references to Jewishness into their work, but they are no more interested in seeing a genuinely Jewish Joshua than Zeffirelli was.

It takes a Jew to cry about all this.