Two views of Pope Benedict's Jesus

National Catholic Reporter, Sept 21, 2007 by Alan Brill, Joseph O'Leary

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Although this book, fortunately, eschews magisterial status, its publication coincided with the notification rebuking theologian Jon Sobrino, a Jesuit faulted for failing to find the divinity of Christ explicitly taught in the New Testament. Perhaps Catholic exegetes will in future be rebuked for not seeing the fourth Gospel as historical, as Benedict does: The Johannine discourses faithfully reproduce the content of Jesus' controversies with the Jewish authorities, he really used the expression "I am," to reveal his divinity, and it was for this that he was crucified. Martin Hengel is found to be "amazingly negative" about the historicity of the fourth Gospel. These are the objections of a theologian trained in patristics rather than exegesis and who wants the exegetes to provide results more amenable to his purposes. Talk of the Gospel as a literary work reflecting the later revelations of the Spirit makes Benedict nervous: "How can it strengthen faith, when it presents itself as a historical witness--and this with great emphasis--and yet is not narrating historically?"

On a third front, I note a connection between this book and the publication in 2000 of Dominus Iesus. As Benedict closes, one by one, possible leaks through which a "Christology from below" might gain entrance, he insists that Christ is from the start the fullness of divine revelation; there is no space for "theocentric" or "regnocentric" readings of his mission that would be in tension with this. Even to argue on a Johannine basis that the Logos incarnate in Christ goes in search of itself in the other great religious traditions of humanity would be seen as implying too low a Christology. The Logos is so fully manifested in Jesus--in the historical Jesus--that there is nothing more to be added from outside, and any radiance found in other religions is very dim indeed in comparison with the glory of God revealed in Christ.

If Benedict is right, a whole century of New Testament scholarship will have to be radically corrected and largely jettisoned. For most readers of Benedict's book this will be received as an immense liberation, a recovery of the fullness of Christ in every page of scripture, but for critical exegetes and theologians it is more likely to induce gnashing of teeth and the sense of doors being locked.

[Fr. Joseph S. O'Leary teaches English literature at Sophia University in Tokyo.]