Continuing the conversation - relations between Catholic Church and Judaism

Commonweal, March 8, 2002 by Luke Timothy Johnson

Another thing: don't lean too heavily on James Carroll. He's not much of a historian, and he is even less of a theologian.

In particular, check your logic. Sullivan is right (though he states his point too narrowly). You try to acknowledge that there is not a direct line between symbols and actions, but again and again you argue as though there were. Yes, there is the abysmal and shameful story of Christian anti-Semitism, official and unofficial, before, during, and after the Holocaust. Another part of the historical record, however, is that Jews and Christians lived together with considerable harmony for many centuries in Europe, and continue to live as neighbors in considerable harmony in many places of the world today. Not only is anti-Semitism not the central motivating force in Christianity, it is possible to read the largest part of Christian literature without finding evidence of it. You are surely aware that it is possible to take polemical language about "the other" from the normative texts of Judaism and Islam as well as of Christianity, and connect them to the horrendous things that Jews and Muslims as well as Christians have done and are doing to living "others." But each of these traditions also contains rich resources for living in quite a different manner, and the majority of Jews, Muslims, and Christians live out of those resources even today. And this leads me to my final letter.

Letter to all interested parties: Do some serious reading in the excellent scholarship that has been done over the last forty-plus years on ancient Judaism and early Christianity. Learn something about these traditions at the point of their origin and divergence. I have at times been critical of my colleagues in the academy, but I am proud of what Jewish and Christian scholars have accomplished, together and separately, in examining the complex relations among Judaism, Greco-Roman culture, and Christianity.

Such scholarship has had the effect of increasing mutual appreciation for the respective traditions, and of decreasing the power of long-held and harmful stereotypes. Serious history shows how complex were the interconnections among traditions, and therefore how complex are the apparently simple statements, "Jesus was a Jew" and "Paul was a Jew." It shows that the conventions of polemical rhetoric were used by all parties in service of self-definition, and that the main difference between Jew and Christian in this respect is that Christian rhetoric got married to power and became malign in fact and not just in intention. Those who have studied the matter most responsibly conclude that the reductions "the Jews killed Jesus," and "the Romans killed Jesus" are equally simplistic and distorting.

Contemporary historians who insist on the evaluation of the full record on recent events should not peddle second-hand historical judgments about antiquity or second-rate theological judgments about religious traditions. Like Wieseltier, I wish we could all "just hate Hitler together." But if we want to move forward rather than stay stuck in the cycle of recrimination and misrepresentation, we all need to learn much more about each other and much more from each other. What we need is less "historical moral reckoning" and more shared commitment to a moral future.