Index on Censorship

http://ioc.sagepub.com/ Who Killed Jesus Christ?

Eric J. Greenberg Index on Censorship 2004 33: 128 DOI: 10.1177/030642200403300125 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ioc.sagepub.com/content/33/1/128

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WHO KILLED JESUS CHRIST?

ERIC J GREENBERG
AN AM ER ICAN JEWISH COM M ITTEE SCHOLAR WHO REVIEWED TALMUDIC PASSAGES REFERRING TO JESUS CHRIST FELL INTO THE ROW SURROUNDING FILM STAR MEL GIBSON'S CONTROVERSIAL FILM ACCOUNT OF CHRIST'S FINAL DAYS

The controversy over Mel Gibson's upcoming film about the death ofJesus has spurred painful exchanges between Jews and Christians and progressive and traditional Catholics in recent weeks. To date, the debates have centred on the 'proper' interpretation of the role ofJews in Jesus's Crucifixion, as presented in the four New Testament Gospels. But Gibson's US$25 million biblical epic, which the director insists is about love and forgiveness, has triggered a new squabble - among Jewish scholars. The texts in question are not New Testament but rather passages about Jesus from the Talmud long censored by Christian authorities. The Talmud is the encyclopaedia ofJewish law and tradition considered sacred by traditional Jews. Raising the issue is an article by Steven Bayme, the national director of Contemporary Jewish Life for the American Jewish Committee (AJe), which declares that Jews must face up to the fact that the Talmudic narrative 'does clearly demonstrate ... fourth-century rabbinic willingness to take responsibility for the execution ofJesus'. 'Jewish apologetics that "we could not have done it" because of Roman sovereignty ring hollow when one examines the Talmudic account,' Bayme said. He contends that Jewish inter-faith representatives are not being honest in dialogue if they ignore the explicit Talmudic references to Jesus. His article was posted on the AJC's website in late September 2003, then removed after media enquiries. Ken Bandler, a spokesman for the AJC, said the article was taken down to 'avoid confusion' over whether it represented the organisation's official position. AJC officials now refer to the article as 'an internal document'.

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Some Jewish scholars and inter-faith officials were upset by the article, questioning either Bayme's scholarship or his timing - saying this was a particularly delicate time to call attention to Jews' role in Jesus's death - or both. But Bayme was unswayed. Citing the continuing controversy over Gibson's flim The Passion, which has reignited concern over Christianity's ancient charge against Jews as 'Christ-killers', he wrote that it is also important 'that Jews confront their own tradition and ask how Jewish sources treated the Jesus narrative'. Bayme cites a passage from the Talmud, Sanhedrin 43a, which relates the fate of a man called Jesus who is hanged on the eve of Passover for practising sorcery and leading the people of Israel astray. When no one comes forward to defend the accused sorcerer during a 40-day reprieve, Jewish authorities put him to death, despite Jesus's 'connections with the government'. The Talmud cites this incident during a discussion of due process and capital punishment in Jewish law. Bayme acknowledges that the passage was written by Talmudic scholars in Babylon, who lived about 400 years after Jesus. 'To be sure, historians cannot accept such a text uncritically,' Bayme wrote. But he says the passage is significant because the Talmudic text 'indicates rabbinic willingness to acknowledge, at least in principle, that in a Jewish court and in a Jewish land, a real-life Jesus would indeed have been executed. No effort is made to pin his death upon the Romans,' Bayme said. 'Pointedly, Jews did not argue that crucifixion was a Roman punishment and therefore no Jewish court could have advocated it.' Bayme said he wrote the piece for two reasons: to educate Jews and to promote honest dialogue with Christians. He cited the Catholic Church's 1965 statement that Jesus's death 'cannot be blamed upon all Jews then living, without distinction, nor upon the Jews of today'. Bayme said Gibson's movie 'has alienated many Jewish leaders who correctly worry whether the movie's graphic description of the Crucifixion and its alleged overtones of a Jewish conspiracy to kill Jesus may ignite long-dormant Christian hostilities to Jews'. That's why the Gospel and its association with anti-Semitism need to be confronted as well as Jewish sources, he said. But Bayme stressed that he is not suggesting a moral equivalency between problematic anti-Semitic Gospel passages 'which have caused the death ofJews' and the Talmudic Jesus references.

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Indeed, the Catholic Church, which burned copies of the Talmud in the Middle Ages, officially censored the Talmud's Jesus references in the thirteenth century. Even today the standard Vilna edition of the Talmud omits any discussion about 'Yeshu', Jesus in Hebrew. The Jesus omissions began to be restored in the last century, Bayme said. And the passages 'are now included in most of the new printings of the Talmud', said Yisrael Shaw of Daf Yomi Discussions, an online Talmud service. 'If you do an internet search for Sanhedrin 43a, you will find that it is one of the favourite sources of the Christians to use as proof of the Jewish murder and hatred of their god,' Shaw said. But Bayme is concerned that Jews know nothing about the censored texts. 'Whenever I talked about the origins of Christianity with fellow Jews, I discovered massive ignorance ofJewish narratives concerning the death of Jesus. It's something I thought Jews ought to confront fairly,' he said. Bayme contends the Talmudic text resonates with the Gospel accounts for several reasons. He said the Talmudic charge of practising sorcery and seducing Israel into apostasy, a biblical capital crime, matches recently discovered 'hidden Gospels' that 'a historical Jesus was indeed a fmt-century sorcerer'. 'A mature relationship between two faiths should allow for each faith to ... uncover these texts and view them critically,' Bayme said. But some disagreed with Bayme's analysis and policy suggestion. His own organisation pulled the piece only a couple of days after it was posted. Rabbi David Rosen, the group's director of inter-religious affairs, said Bayme's views were not the 'official AJe position' concerning the trial of Jesus. He called the Talmudic text historically 'dubious' and questioned Bayme's connecting the text with the Gospel stories, noting the actual charge against Jesus and the nature of the court 'is in conflict'. Some outside specialists also refuted Bayme's article. Brooklyn College history professor Rabbi David Berger, a specialist in Christian-Jewish issues, said it would be a mistake and a diversion to bring the Talmudic texts into the inter-faith dialogue. 'The Second Vatican Council properly rejected collective Jewish guilt for the Crucifixion, even though it affirmed that some Jews were involved,' he said. 'Consequently, raising the question of the historical involvement of Jews, with or without reference to Talmudic texts, diverts us from the key issue, which is the denial of contemporary Jewish culpability for these events.'
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He noted that in the Middle Ages, 'most Jews assumed that Jews executed Jesus of Nazareth based on these Talmudic passages, though some asserted that the Jesus of Talmud is not the same as the Jesus of Christianity'. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, whose Talmud edition has been translated into English, Russian and Spanish, said he believed the Talmudic Jesus is probably not the Christian Jesus. 'It could very well be somebody else', who lived 100 or 200 years earlier, because the stories do not match the Gospel account, he said. Rabbi Steinsaltz noted that the Hebrew name Yeshu was popular then and that 'stories about the resurrection of dead leaders are a dime a dozen, before Jesus and after him. This is not a historical issue.' In any case, Rabbi Steinsaltz said Christians would do best to avoid these texts because there is nothing politically or theologically significant to them in Jewish tradition. Ellis Rivkin, professor emeritus of Jewish history at Hebrew Union College and author of the seminal book What Crucified Jesus, said dragging in the Talmud text is 'dangerous, utterly meaningless and irrelevant' . But Dr David Kraemer, professor of Talmud and rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary, supported Bayme's call for honesty about Jewish texts and Jesus. 'I think it's very relevant to bring up evidence of the difficulty of our relationship with Christianity,' he said, contending that it is indeed Jesus of Nazareth in the text. Kraemer believes the text was written at a time of fierce competition between the early rabbis and Christian leaders in the early centuries of the Common Era. 'The attitudes expressed [in the Talmud] can be pretty hateful attitudes,' he said. 'It's not about comparing them [with the antiSemitic Gospel passages]. Just because you can't equate them doesn't mean you can't raise the issues.' 0

Eric] Greenberg is a staff writer at The Jewish Week newspaper in New York, where a version of this article first appeared

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