Notes

EPIGRAPH

1. Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Penguin Classics, trans. Leo Sherley-Price, introduction by D. H. Farmer (New York: Penguin Books, 1991). The anecdote accounts for the king’s decision to allow the first Christian preaching in England.

INTRODUCTION: Christ Actually

1. From Geoffrey Hill, “Christmas Trees,” a poem about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In New and Collected Poems, 1952–1992 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).

2. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 8 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 362. I first grasped the importance of this question years ago in reading John Macquarrie’s Jesus Christ in Modern Thought (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990), 338–422.

3. I have written of my Air Force coming-of-age elsewhere. See James Carroll, An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996) and House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006).

4. “The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking . . . and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Quoted in Carl Seelig, Albert Einstein: A Documentary Biography, trans. Mervyn Savill (London: Staples Press, 1956), 223.

5. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 362–65.

6. The Second Vatican Council was a meeting of the world’s Catholic bishops, convened in 1962 by Pope John XXIII. It met in Rome in four sessions over three years, and promulgated major revisions in Catholic thought and doctrine. In subsequent decades, those revisions were partly rolled back by conservative Church leaders, but the Council’s reforms seeded the Catholic imagination, and may yet come to flower. See Norman Tanner, ed., Vatican II: The Essential Texts, introductions by Pope Benedict XVI and James Carroll (New York: Doubleday, 2012).

7. Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper Perennial Classics, 2001), 111.

8. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 185.

9. Bonhoeffer was cited as an inspiration, for example, by the British scholar J. A. T. Robinson, whose 1963 book Honest to God rang the opening bell of the “secular theology” craze. Hard questions about the capacity of traditional theism to stand up to numerous challenges from postmodernist thought and contemporary science were swamped by a pop-culture reduction to the absurd under the heading “God is dead.” But the questions asked were serious. In America, secular theology was given its most influential expression by the Harvard theologian Harvey Cox, whose 1965 book The Secular City remains a milestone, helping to extend Bonhoeffer’s reach. For a study of Bonhoeffer’s influence on Cox and the movement he spawned, see Jess O. Hale Jr., “A Journey of Christian Human Responsibility: Harvey Cox’s Appropriation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” Journal of Lutheran Ethics (November 2005).

10. Three-quarters of the once devout Czech Republic are now religiously unaffiliated. Pew Research Center, “The Global Religious Landscape,” Religion and Public Life Project, 2012, http://www.pewforum.org/global-religious-landscape-exec.aspx.

11. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 91.

12. Zvi Kolitz, “Yid Rakover Talks to God,” Lapham’s Quarterly 3, no. 1 (Winter 2010), 91.

13. As of 2010, 84 percent of the world’s population is religiously affiliated. The Pew Research Center found that, as of 2010, there were 2.2 billion Christians (32 percent of the world’s population), 1.6 billion Muslims (23 percent), 1 billion Hindus (15 percent), 400 million folk religionists (6 percent), and 14 million Jews (0.2 percent). The breakdown by region of the unaffiliated: 21 percent live in Asia-Pacific, 18 percent in Europe, and 17 percent in North America, and the large majority of the globe’s religiously unaffiliated (62 percent) is in China. Pew Research Center, “The Global Religious Landscape.”

14. In the name of “renewalist” pieties, Bonhoeffer himself was reimagined and reclaimed. As a man of conscience who defined his political resistance in expressly Christian terms, he became, decades after the Death of God fad had passed, a hero to a very different breed: conservative evangelicals in the United States, who drafted the German martyr into antigovernment campaigns on issues like abortion and homosexuality. See Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Spy (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2011). Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, a good friend of Eberhard Bethge, to whom Bonhoeffer addressed his most important letters, published a more objective biography: Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906–1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance (New York: T.T. & Clark, 2010). Bethge himself, who collected and published Bonhoeffer’s letters, wrote what remains the most intimate account of his friend’s life: Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Man of Vision, Man of Courage (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1970). For a 2000 edition, Bethge’s book was revised and edited by Victoria J. Barnett. The most important contemporary biography of Bonhoeffer is by Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Knopf, 2014).

15. Appeals to Christian themes and disciplines are routinely made, for example, not only by conservative American politicians—the “religious right”—but also by mainstream U.S. military institutions, from the Pentagon to the military academies. See Anna Mulrine, “Too Much Religion at Military Academies? West Point Cadet Revives Charge,” Christian Science Monitor, December 7, 2012. Many U.S. businesses centered in the Sunbelt have Jesus Christ as an icon. See Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009).

16. Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2014), 3.

17. Against Arab dictators, the decisive demonstrations in places like Cairo’s Tahrir Square were regularly launched on Fridays, after crowds had been stirred up in mosques. Against Moscow, the Polish labor union Solidarity was inspired by—and partly financed by—the Polish pope, John Paul II. The democracy movement in East Germany climaxed at weekly “Peace Prayer” gatherings called by Lutheran pastors, with thousands and ultimately tens of thousands rallying at Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche. Inside the Soviet Union itself, a decades-long struggle by Jews as Jews struck early blows against the tyranny.

18. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” in No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures and Notes 1928–1936, ed. Edwin H. Robinson, trans. Edwin H. Robinson and John Bowden (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 226.

19. Soon after publishing the 1933 essay, Bonhoeffer contacted the New York–based Rabbi Stephen Wise, who would prove to be one of the staunchest resisters of the Holocaust. Bonhoeffer alerted Wise to what was happening, and from then on he participated actively in drawing attention to the plight of Jews in Germany and, ultimately, in helping them escape.

20. “Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/bonhoeffer/?content=5. The staff director of the Committee on Ethics, Religion and the Holocaust at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is Victoria Barnett, an expert on Bonhoeffer and coeditor of the complete works of Bonhoeffer in English. I acknowledge my debt to her.

21. Martin Luther, “On the Jews and Their Lies,” Jewish Virtual Library, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/Luther_on_Jews.html.

22. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (New York: Touchstone, 1955), 90–91.

23. After the Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini met with Hitler not long before Ethics was written, for example, Mussolini reported on the German leader’s denigrations of Catholicism by saying to his ambassador to the Holy See, “I will spare you all the idiotic things that Hitler said about Jesus Christ being of the Jewish race, etcetera.” Hitler aimed to discredit the Church by emphasizing the Jewishness of Jesus, but Mussolini dismissed Hitler’s pronouncement as “sciocchezze”—nonsense. Jesus was no Jew. Mussolini understood that the Catholic establishment regarded as ludicrous any notion that Jesus was Jewish. In fact, the wily Mussolini knew that trumpeting the absurdity of the idea could build a bridge between himself and the pope. David I. Kertzer, The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (New York: Random House, 2014), 205.

24. Martin Luther’s Jew-friendly tract “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew” was published in 1523, when he imagined that Jews would come over to his reformed Christianity. They did not. In 1543, he published his foully anti-Semitic “On the Jews and Their Lies,” venting his rage, and defining Jews as the ontological enemy of the German nation. Now Judaism was cast in such evil light that Jesus Christ could have no connection to it. The Aryan Christ was born. See Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008).

25. Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Bantam, 1999), 5.

26. We should note right at the outset that there is something problematic in the use of the word “Jew” in this context, because the word overwhelmingly has its main contemporary resonance in the culture and imaginative world of Rabbinic Judaism, a particular religious form derived from the Israel of Jesus’ time but decisively including elements—especially the talmudic tradition and the traumatic collective experience of exile—of which Jesus would have known nothing. Jesus was not a Jew in the way that, say, Irving Howe was. This book will explain that. But Jesus was wholly a son of Israel in all that he did and believed, and that is our larger point. It is enough to note here that the word “Jew” has its origins in the name of the tribe of Judah, one of the sons of Jacob, who, after wrestling with the angel, took the name Israel. At first the word—Yehudi in Hebrew—referred to those living in the territory of the tribe of Judah, Judea. But it eventually came to be used to refer to all children of Israel. Yehudi is first applied to a person in the book of Esther, which dates to the fourth or third century B.C.E. It appears seventy-four times in the Hebrew Scriptures.

27. “From the 1970s onward, scholars . . . have hammered home the vital importance of seeing Jesus within and as part of the living and lively world of 1st century Palestinian Judaism. Unfortunately, the response of all too many American academics has been lip service. One need only page through the many Jesus books that enshrine the word ‘Jew’ in their titles . . . One finds a politically correct shift away from portraying a Jesus who attacks the Law, at least in its pharisaic interpretations, to a Jesus who attacks hierarchy, priesthood, and temple—the latter suspects being assigned the role of villain in our more enlightened age.” John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 4: Law and Love (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), 647–48.

28. And not just modernity. Medieval and Renaissance portraiture commonly gave Jesus features characteristic more of Europeans than of Semites. See Bernard Starr, The Ethnic Cleansing of Judaism in Medieval and Renaissance Art (San Antonio, Texas: Omnihouse Publishing, 2013).

29. In 1965, Vatican II explicitly renounced the Christ-killer slander in Nostra Aetate: “What happened in His Passion cannot be blamed upon all the Jews then living, without distinction, nor against the Jews of today.” But Christians, including Catholics, who read the Gospel texts uncritically are condemned to the Christ-killer trope. Latino Catholics, for example, are twice as likely as other Catholics both to take the Bible literally as the Word of God and to have negative attitudes toward Jews. The two mind-sets go hand in hand. See “Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion,” Pew Research Center, Hispanic Trends Project, 2007, http://www.pewhispanic.org/2007/04/25/changing-faiths-latinos-and-the-transformation-of-american-religion; and Tom W. Smith, “Hispanic Attitudes Toward Jews,” American Jewish Committee, 2007, http://www.ajc.org/atf/cf/%7B42d75369-d582-4380-8395-d25925b85eaf%7D/hispanic_attitudes_jews_042007.pdf. In the United States, according to a poll conducted by the Anti-Defamation League in 2011, 31 percent of Americans agreed with the statement “Jews were responsible for the death of Christ.” Evangelical Christians around the globe are more broadly given to the same text-based anti-Jewish mind-set, even as American evangelicals are simultaneously supportive of the State of Israel. According to a 2014 ADL survey, more than one-fourth of the world’s population harbors anti-Semitic attitudes. ADL Global 100, 2014, http://global100.adl.org.

30. A paradigmatic and influential work by a Jewish scholar is Jesus of Nazareth: King of the Jews, by Paula Fredriksen (New York: Knopf, 1999). Another is The Historical Jesus in Context, by Amy-Jill Levine (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008). The scholarly convergence is reflected more broadly—for example, in Pope John Paul II’s statement that “Jesus’ human identity is determined on the basis of his bond with the people of Israel.” Address to the Pontifical Biblical Commission, 1997. Levine sums the task up: “After two thousand years of ignorance, the time has come for church and synagogue, Jews and Christians, to understand our intertwined histories, to see Jesus as a Jew who made sense to other Jews in a Jewish context, to learn how our two traditions came to a parting of the ways, to recognize how misunderstandings of Jesus and Judaism continue even today to foster negative stereotypes and feed hate, and to explore how the gains in interfaith relations made over the past several decades can be nurtured and expanded.” Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2006), 16.

31. Matthew 27:25.

32. John 1:11. A definitive elucidation of New Testament roots of European contempt for Jews appeared in 1948, out of the still smoldering ashes of the Holocaust. It was Jesus and Israel, by the French Jewish historian Jules Isaac. Pope John received Isaac in a private meeting in 1960 and accepted a copy of the controversial book. Isaac described the encounter as positive, even warm. Soon after that meeting, the pope put the Church’s relationship with the Jewish people on the agenda of the Vatican Council. Hedwig Wahle, “Pioneers in Jewish-Christian Dialogue: Some Known and Unknown Pioneers of Continental Europe,” SIDIC (Service International de Documentation Judeo-Chretienne, English edition) 30, no. 2 (1997): 2–9.

33. John P. Meier, N. T. Wright, Paula Fredriksen, John Dominic Crossan, et al. We will see more of this “criterion of dissimilarity,” with its origins in German biblical scholarship.

34. John 1:1, 1:14. “Word” is the most common translation of the Greek Logos, which had a long history in Hellenistic thought. We will see more of the idea later.

35. John 10:30.

36. Since Jesus was taken to be not Jewish, the early Church faced a critical question: “What purposes—theological, cultural, social, and political—did his circumcision serve?” Andrew S. Jacobs, Christ Circumcised: A Study in Early Christian History and Difference (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), x. One common trope had it that the cutting of Jesus’ foreskin was an anticipation of his crucifixion, and, consequently, purported bits of the foreskin of Jesus were favored relics in the medieval Church, companions to pieces of the True Cross. The sense of the child Jesus as victim of Jewish violence reinforced the Christ-killer myth (and surfaced unexpectedly in the twenty-first century when a German court outlawed circumcision as abusive).

37. The Dead Sea Scrolls, comprising various writings of Jewish groups dating to before, during, and shortly after the time of Jesus, have been found in caves above the Jordan River Valley in a sequence of discoveries beginning in 1947 and continuing until 2014, when nine new scrolls were discovered inside material that had been found previously. Giorgio Bernardelli, “Nine New Qumran Scrolls Discovered, Vatican Insider, May 26, 2014, http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/world-news/detail/articolo/qumran-qumaran-qumaran-archelogia-archeology-arqueologia-32410.

38. Deuteronomy 6:4–9.

39. “Since between 95 and 97 percent of the Jewish state was illiterate at the time of Jesus, it must be presumed that Jesus was also illiterate, that he knew, like the vast majority of his contemporaries in an oral culture, the foundational narratives, basic stories, and general expectations of his tradition, but not the exact texts, precise citations, or intricate arguments of its scribal elites.” John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), 25–26. Other scholars assume Jesus’ literacy, and even his fluency in Greek as well as Aramaic. See Chris Keith, Jesus’ Literacy: Scribal Culture & the Teacher from Galilee (London: Bloomsbury, 2011).

40. David M. Neuhaus, “Engaging the Jewish People,” Catholic Engagement with World Religions, ed. Karl J. Becker and Ilaria Morali (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2010), 396.

41. The word “kingdom” here translates the Greek basileia, which some scholars translate as “empire.” The temptation is to offer yet another translation, one that honors the egalitarian—decidedly nonmonarchical—attitudes of Jesus. The scholar John Cobb suggests “commonwealth,” a word that implies the liberal democratic polity that might well come closer to Jesus’ meaning. To him, God was “Abba,” after all. But seeing Jesus as a Jew of his time, immersed in the legacy of the kingdom of David and assuming “kingship” as a metaphor for God’s sovereignty, makes “commonwealth” a shade too anachronistic. John B. Cobb Jr., Spiritual Bankruptcy: A Prophetic Call to Action (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon, 2010), 27.

42. “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), 31.

43. That Pope Francis, beginning in 2013, explicitly brought the spirit of Vatican II back into the life of the Catholic Church made apparent how thoroughly it had been stifled by the pontificates of his two predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. See my “Who Am I to Judge? A Radical Pope’s First Year,” New Yorker, December 15, 2013.

44. Take one denomination as an example. In the United States, as of 2010, fully one-third of all people raised as Catholics have left the Church. An unprecedented 10 percent of the nation’s population identifies itself as “former Catholic,” which makes that cohort the third largest after Catholicism itself (23 percent) and “unaffiliated” (16 percent). Pew Research Center, Religion & Public Life Project, 2013, http://religions.pewforum.org/reports.

45. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York: Viking, 2010), 83.

46. Hans Küng, Credo: The Apostles Creed Explained for Today (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1992), 9.

CHAPTER ONE: Personal Jesus

1. James Joyce, Dubliners (West Warwick, R.I.: Merry Blacksmith Press, 2010; first published 1914), 178.

2. Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer who had fought the Nazis in Warsaw before fleeing Poland, decried “the crime without a name.” He saw where Hitler’s program was headed and in 1943 coined the word “genocide,” defining it as “the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group.” The word appears in his prophetic treatise Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944). Lemkin lost nearly fifty members of his family in the Holocaust.

3. The first Jews were murdered at Auschwitz in 1941, but in 1943, with the construction of three massive crematoriums and the mechanized introduction into sealed death chambers of the cyanide gas Zyklon B, its conversion from labor camp to extermination camp was complete.

4. Bruno Bettelheim asked that question in 1960. “The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1960.

5. Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006), 66–68.

6. Emil Fackenheim, for example: “A Jew today is one who, except for an historical accident—Hitler’s loss of the war—would have either been murdered or never born.” To Mend the World (New York: Schocken, 1982), 295. The Shoah might have exhausted Jewish identity, but for the triumph of Zionism, with the establishment of the State of Israel, which countered the Jew-as-eternal-victim theme. “Zionism was the most fundamental revolution in Jewish life. It substituted a secular self-identity of the Jews as a nation for the traditional and Orthodox self-identity in religious terms.” Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 13.

7. Here is Freud’s frontal assault on the faith, from 1913: “The psychoanalysis of individual human beings teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation—and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.” Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1998), 126.

8. The Blessed Virgin “appeared” to three sheep-herding children near the Portuguese town of Fátima six times over the course of six months in 1917—the year, not incidentally, of the Bolshevik Revolution. She encouraged the use of the rosary in prayer, and exhorted prayers for the conversion of Russia. She was the prima donna of anti-Communism. It is supremely ironic that “Fátima” became another name for Mary, since the name first belonged to Muhammad’s daughter and wife of his successor, Ali. Surely a Moorish population in Iberia, eventually expelled by Catholic rulers, was responsible for the place name.

9. Lourdes, a small town in France, was the site of the masterpiece apparition of the Blessed Virgin, who appeared more than a dozen times to a young girl in 1858. The enthusiasm of Catholics for the Virgin equated to the competing cults of secular nationalism, a rallying to the side of the Church against anticlerical forces in France and elsewhere in Europe. France had its Napoléon, America its Lincoln, Britain its Victoria, Germany its Bismarck, Italy its Garibaldi. The Church had Our Lady of Lourdes.

10. “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.” Max Weber, writing in 1918. Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 155.

11. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 59.

12. The rosary’s “Hail, Holy Queen” begins: “Hail, holy Queen, Mother of Mercy! our life, our sweetness, and our hope! To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve; to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.”

13. The Act of Contrition: “O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee. And I detest all my sins because I dread the fires of Hell and the loss of Heaven, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God, who art all-good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to make amends, to sin no more, and to avoid the near occasion of sin. With Thy help, through Jesus Christ, Our Lord. Amen.”

14. Saint Anselm, an eleventh-century theologian reflecting the era’s juridical legalism, explained in his 1098 treatise Cur Deus Homo that satisfaction for Adam’s infinite insult to God could be accomplished only by the sacrifice of an infinite being, one whose equality to God the Father made him ontologically eligible to pay the debt. Hence the necessity for the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus. By his crucifixion, the penal debt to God the Father was paid off. Saint Paul’s metaphor of ransom paid by Christ to Satan was thus perverted into a kind of ransom paid to God. No longer metaphor, but now fact, this idea of “penal atonement” dominated Christian theology from the twelfth century on because of a simplicity that could be grasped, even if inchoately, by a child.

15. The so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a second-century text unrelated to the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas, and the Quran both show the boy Jesus fashioning birds out of clay and bringing them to life.

16. In convening Vatican II, John XXIII surely was influenced by his own wartime experience, while serving as papal legate in Turkey, of being one of the few Catholic prelates to actively oppose the genocide. He personally provided hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fugitive Jews with documents they needed to escape.

17. Leading us in that chorus was the Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin. I have written about this experience in An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996).

18. For a critical unpacking of this idea of “marginal,” as applied to Jesus, see John P. Meier’s monumental four-volume A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1991–2009).

19. Exodus 3:7–8.

20. James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, a History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), which was made into a documentary film in 2007; Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2011).

21. John 1:1–3. I take the point from John Macquarrie, who translates these verses as, “Fundamental to everything is Meaning . . . Meaning and God are virtually identical . . .” John Macquarrie, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990), 106.

22. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, XVIII:62–64.

23. The Nicene Creed offers the fourth-century definition of Jesus as “God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father; through him all things were made.”

CHAPTER TWO: The First Holocaust

1. Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), x.

2. For Rome’s “Jewish War,” Jack Miles uses the phrase “Roman Shoah” and draws the comparison with the “twentieth-century slaughter of the Jews of Europe.” Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God (New York: Knopf, 2001), 109–111. I independently made the same comparison in Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, a History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 89.

3. The Roman historians Josephus, Tacitus, and Cassius Dio provide estimates of Jewish dead in the three-phased war totaling more than two million. Such figures cannot be taken as precise, yet they suggest the scale of killing. We will see more of these reports.

4. Josephus says that Titus, the Roman general in charge of the siege of Jerusalem in 70, did not assault Jews of Antioch, presumably because they had yielded to Roman rule. But Jewish submission in Antioch was exceptional. See Josephus, The Jewish War, VII:110–11.

5. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, XIV:4, 4. Josephus (37–c. 100) was a Jerusalem Jew, descended from priestly aristocrats. In the citation here, he refers to the start of the Roman occupation. When, a century later, in 66, the great rebellion against Rome began, he was a military leader in Galilee. One of dozens of Jewish fighters about to be captured, he led his men in an act of collective suicide, each one killing others, rather than surrender. Josephus was the last one alive. Instead of killing himself, he defected to Rome, claiming to have had a vision that the Roman commander, Vespasian, would become emperor. When that, in fact, occurred, Vespasian ordered him released, Josephus became a Roman citizen, took the name Titus Flavius Josephus in honor of his patrons, and began to compile his histories. For obvious reasons, his accounts cannot be read as wholly objective, but modern scholarship has essentially confirmed them.

6. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, XVII:250–89.

7. Matthew 2:16–18. I am especially informed here by John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).

8. Some scholars regard the word “occupation” for the Roman domination of Palestine as anachronistic, since the legions were mainly kept apart from the Jewish population, and Roman authority was often exercised through local petty tyrants. But police enforcement in a total tyranny can be apparently restrained, even absent, precisely because what is most “occupied” is the mind of the oppressed. When Rome chose to act, the imposition of control was swift, brutal, and complete.

9. The numbers are impossible to verify, although scholars find it plausible that hundreds of thousands of Jews rallied to the side of the rebels in Jerusalem. Paula Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth: King of the Jews (New York: Knopf, 1999), 64. E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE–66 CE (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992), 127.

10. His last words were said to be “What an artist dies in me.”

11. Reza Aslan’s 2013 book, pointedly entitled Zealot, conveys its considerable punch by associating Jesus with this movement. I find much in Aslan’s work to admire, but, as is clear by now, I offer a different reading of Jesus.

12. Josephus, The Jewish War, VI:9.3. Again, Josephus’s report may be unreliable, although much in his account of the war is affirmed by twentieth-century finds like the Dead Sea Scrolls. The dead would have included those killed by Romans, and by fellow Jews in what amounted to a civil war among the various factions in Jerusalem, as well as those who starved or died of disease.

13. The Roman historian Cassius Dio, writing most of a century after the fact, says the Jews of Judea in this period “occupied the advantageous positions in the country and strengthened them with mines and walls, in order that they might have places of refuge whenever they should be hard-pressed.” “Dio Cassius, Historia Romana, LXIX:12–14: A Roman Account of the Bar Kokhba Revolt,” in Texts and Traditions, ed. Lawrence H. Schiffman (Hoboken, N.J.: KTAV Publishing, 1998), 487–88.

14. Here is the account from Cassius Dio: “At Jerusalem Hadrian founded a city in place of the one which had been razed to the ground, naming it Aelia Capitolina, and on the site of the temple of the god he raised a new temple to Jupiter. This brought on a war of no slight importance nor of brief duration.” Historia Romana, LXIX:12:1.

15. Numbers 24:17. The Christian historian Eusebius, writing two hundred years after the fact, maligned Bar Kokhba as a madman, and those who followed him as blind Jews, yet again responding to a false messiah. For Eusebius, Roman brutality in putting down the revolt was just retribution. The Ecclesiastical History IV, 6.

16. Werner Eck, “The bar Kokhba Revolt: The Roman Point of View,” Journal of Roman Studies 89 (1999): 76–89.

17. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana, LXIX:12, 2.

18. Jerusalem Talmud Ta’anit, 4:5. http://www.jewishtreats.org/2013/07/the-second-uprising.html.

19. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana, LXIX:12–14.

20. Hitler killed one in every three Jews in the world, and two of every three Jews living in German-controlled Europe. Scholars suggest that the first-century Jewish population of Judea, Samaria, Galilee, and adjacent Syria would likely have ranged well above a million, perhaps as high as two or two and a half million—with perhaps another million in Egypt and a million or more elsewhere. Josephus, as noted, puts the number of Jewish dead in just the first siege of Jerusalem, in 70, at 1.1 million. Diaspora Jewish revolts between 115 and 117 in Cyprus, Egypt, Libya, and Mesopotamia resulted, according to reliable estimates, in many hundreds of thousands killed. And the put-down of the so-called Bar Kokhba revolt, beginning in 132, was even more violent, with the Roman historian Cassius Dio putting the number of Jewish dead at 580,000. Out of a total Jewish population, then, of something like four to five million, it is more than conceivable that, across two generations, about a third of those living at any one time were killed in violence sparked by Romans.

21. Matthew 24:2.

22. Matthew 23:37.

23. John 2:19, 2:21.

24. Matthew 27:51; Mark 15:38; Luke 23:45.

25. Matthew 24:6–10. I find the juxtaposition of “text” and “context” in Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 1994).

26. Matthew 24:12–14.

27. Matthew, Mark, and Luke have Jesus’ “cleansing” of the Temple as the immediate cause of his arrest; John locates it at the beginning of his ministry, the source of his ongoing conflict with Jewish authorities.

28. Matthew 12:6.

29. Genesis 22.

30. Dan Bahat, The Illustrated Atlas of Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Carta, 1989), 38–43.

31. Exodus 31 describes the construction of the Ark of the Covenant, a chest in which to house the tablets of the Law given to Moses. It is not clear what the Ark kept in the Temple actually was.

32. As we will see, the idea of monotheism, as defining Israel’s faith in the one God, confuses as much as it explains. In sum, the oneness of God is a moral principle of reconciliation, not a numerical value of ranking that would require subservience from all other religions.

33. “For thou hast no delight in sacrifice; were I to give a burnt offering, thou wouldst not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise” (Psalm 51:16–17).

34. “He has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people; he did this once for all when he offered up himself” (Hebrews 7:27). For an elucidation of Jewish notions of metaphor, symbol, and sacrifice, see the work of Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, e.g., Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

35. Both Rabbinic Jews and Christians regard the move away from literal blood sacrifice into the realm of metaphor as a humane progression. Jews see sacrifice as a matter of Law observance and prayer. Christians see the Eucharistic meal as an “unbloody” sacrifice. But there is a problem here. “For an understanding of sacrifice in ancient Israel, it does not matter that according to Maimonides, sacrifice was destined to be replaced by prayer. It does not matter that according to Hebrews, sacrifice was destined to be replaced by Jesus. . . . Looking back at ancient Israel from the presumption of intellectual, ethical, and religious superiority is not the way ancient Israel will truly be understood.” Jonathan Klawans, Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 47.

36. The practice of divide and rule showed up in Northern Ireland, where, for two centuries, London stoked conflict between local Catholics and Calvinist settlers. London’s exploitation of divisions between Hindus and Muslims in India left a legacy of hatred between India and Pakistan that lasts to this day. To say nothing of the British Mandate for Palestine’s legacy of hatred between Arab and Jew.

37. A scholarly consensus holds that the written New Testament is based on oral traditions that included sayings attributed to Jesus and stories about him, as well as hymns and ritualized confessions of faith. A first written document is hypothesized and referred to by scholars as “Q,” for Quelle, the German for “source,” probably compiling the sayings of Jesus and composed during the 50s. The letters of Paul were written during the 50s and early 60s, before his death in around the year 62. The first Gospel to be written was Mark, dating to around 70. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke were composed in around 80 or shortly after. John was written in around 100. Because so much depends on our understanding of it, we are noting this chronology again and again.

38. Qumran became famous when its library was discovered in caves near the Dead Sea in the 1940s and 1950s—the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls, already referred to.

39. In the anti-Jewish imagination of Christians, the “money changers” whose table Jesus overturned evoke the greed of Jews, but in the Temple, where crowds came from diverse and distant realms, currency adjustments, necessary to the purchase of offerings, would have been a service.

40. The scholar E. P. Sanders makes the point this way: “Modern scholars, both Jews and Christians, are inclined to see the Temple system as corrupt, or as detrimental to the people’s welfare. We all like moral reform, and it is nice to see our spiritual ancestors as moral reformers. The first century predecessors of modern Jews and Christians (Pharisees, rabbis, Jesus and his followers) must have thought there was something wrong with common Judaism, the Judaism of the Temple.” Judaism: Practice and Belief, 91. For an explanation of how Jesus’ offense in the Temple could have been in defense of it, see Bruce Chilton, The Temple of Jesus: His Sacrificial Program Within a Cultural History of Sacrifice (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 121–27. For Christians continuing to worship in the Temple, see Acts 2:46.

41. “The Zealots, no matter how much their struggle was against the alien Roman oppressors, were first fighting a class war against their own Jewish nobility.” Richard A. Horsley and John S. Hanson, Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs: Popular Movements at the Time of Jesus (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1985), 225. Josephus describes the Zealots’ attacks as terrorism pure and simple. The Jewish War, V:10.1.

42. I first heard the phrase “wartime literature” applied to New Testament texts in conversation with Elaine Pagels. She develops the idea in her groundbreaking book Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (New York: Viking, 2012).

43. In 1644, four years before the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Roger Williams of Rhode Island cut to the essential cause, publishing the declaration that “magistrates as magistrates have no power of setting up the form of a church government.” Williams used the phrase “wall of separation” between church and state, which Thomas Jefferson picked up more than a century later. See John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul (New York: Viking, 2012), 6. While the Thirty Years’ War raged, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Thomas Hobbes, to name only three, were laying the intellectual groundwork for a world without the religion that had spawned such mayhem.

44. Other apocalyptic writings are 1 Enoch, Syriac Baruch, and the later New Testament book of Revelation, or Apocalypse. I am giving emphasis in this work to “wartime literature” as essential to Jewish and Christian understandings, but that is not to deny other, more positive experiences as constitutive of Jewish and Christian religious thought—the goodness of creation, God’s promise of life, memory of liberation, and so on. My focus on war is not to be taken as an instance of what Salo Wittmayer Baron called “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” On the contrary, I aim to show how this most negative of experiences generated again and again creative, life-affirming responses.

45. Daniel 6:22.

46. Daniel 12:11.

47. Daniel 12:1–2.

48. Daniel 12:13.

49. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, X:11, 7.

50. Recall that Joseph puts the figure at 1.1 million. The Jewish War, VI:9.3.

51. John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 136.

52. Mark 13:9–13.

53. Mark 1:9.

54. The First Letter of Peter refers to “my son Mark” (1 Peter 5:13). “Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, himself also handed down to us in writing what was preached by Peter.” Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III.I. But Mark’s authorship and place of writing are unresolved questions. For a discussion of both, see Adela Yarbo Collins, Mark: A Commentary, ed. Harold W. Attridge (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 1–10.

55. “Any argument based on the identity of the Gospel writer or on the composition of the original audience must remain speculative, since both who wrote the Gospels and where the Gospels were written remain unknown. . . . In Gospel studies, scholarship proceeds according to an elegant circular argument: it determines the audience on the basis of the text, and then determines the meaning of the text on the basis of the audience.” Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2006), 105.

56. Mark 13:17, 13:19.

57. Mark 3:16.

58. Matthew 16:18.

59. Mark 9:4–6.

60. Mark 8:29–33.

61. Mark 14:34–41.

62. Mark 14:27–31.

63. Mark 14:66–72.

64. Mark 15:40.

65. A contemporary reckoning with this phenomenon shows in the story of Pope Francis, whose own self-described failures as a prelate during the so-called Dirty War in Argentina turned out to be the ground of his remarkable character as a pope who eschews the moralizing condemnations of his kind. When he asks, “Who am I to judge?” he is acknowledging his own sins against courage, which takes another kind of courage altogether and establishes the only moral credential that matters. See my profile of Pope Francis, “Who Am I to Judge? A Radical Pope’s First Year,” New Yorker, December 15, 2013.

66. Mark 8:34.

67. Mark 13:13.

68. Mark 13:12.

69. I acknowledge my debt to Ched Myers for this reading of Mark. “During the war . . . precisely the situation the text reflects . . . the double pressure of the Roman reconquest of Galilee and aggressive rebel recruitment . . . Mark’s community would surely have been wrestling with faltering solidarity within its ranks, the suspicion of informers . . . the betrayal of some members by others to the authorities.” Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1991), 419.

CHAPTER THREE: The Jewish Christ

1. The opening line of the novel The Go-Between, by L.P. Hartley, published in London by Hamish Hamilton in 1953. It’s become a cliché, with a life apart from the book, but it captures a still-underappreciated truth.

2. John Shelby Spong offers a lucid account of this Jewish liturgical origin of the Gospel of Mark. See Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 67–86. The three Gospels—Mark and the derivative Matthew and Luke—agree that the Last Supper was the Passover meal. The Gospel of John has the meal before Passover, so that Jesus—more emphatically the paschal lamb in John—can be shown being crucified exactly as the lambs are being ritually slaughtered.

3. John 1:1.

4. John 1:14.

5. Mark 14:63–64.

6. Wesley J. Wildman, Fidelity with Plausibility: Modest Christologies in the Twentieth Century (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1998), 147.

7. Here, for example, from the preface to the Common English Bible: “Ben ’adam (Hebrew) or huios tou anthrōpou (Greek) are best translated as ‘human being’ (rather than ‘son of man’) except in cases of direct address, where the CEB renders ‘Human’ (instead of ‘Son of Man’ or ‘Mortal,’ e.g., Ezek 2:1). When ho huios tou anthrōpou is used as a title for Jesus, the CEB refers to Jesus as ‘the Human One.’” http://www.commonenglishbible.com/Connect/Blog/ViewBlog/tabid/209/ArticleId/13/From-Son-of-Man-to-Human-One.aspx. Daniel Boyarin drew my attention to this usage in the Common English Bible. The Jewish Gospel: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New York: New Press, 2012), 25–26. An example of a Jesus scholar who explores the complexities of “Son of Man” as a synonym for “human being” is John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now (New York: HarperOne, 2007), 125.

8. Mark 14:61–62.

9. Luke 22:70. Scholars suggest that in these texts, Jesus’ blasphemy consists in his use of the term “I am,” an echo of the name Yahweh applies to Himself: “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14). We will return to this.

10. The great Catholic theologian of the twentieth century Karl Rahner observed that “the heresy of monophysitism (Jesus is God in human dress) dominates the Christian view today.” “Current Problems in Christology,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 1, trans. Cornelius Ernst (Baltimore: Helcion Press, 1961), 160. As the name suggests, Monophysitism means that there was only one (divine) nature in Jesus, against the orthodox idea that his one person was made up of two natures. Another condemned heresy was Docetism, which held that Jesus seemed human but was not. That Church authorities had to regularly and repeatedly anathematize the idea that Jesus was not really human shows how pervasive the belief was.

11. For a discussion of the traditional Jewish point of view—that divinity claims made for Jesus had to be rejected by Jews at the beginning, and must be rejected now—see Jacob Neusner, A Rabbi Talks with Jesus: An Intermillennial Interfaith Exchange (New York: Doubleday, 1993).

12. “No mortal thing could have been formed on the similitude of the supreme Father of the universe, but only after the pattern of the Second Deity, who is the Word of the Supreme Being, since it is fitting that the rational soul of man should bear the type of the divine Word.” Philo, Questions and Answers on Genesis, trans. Charles Duke Yonge, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/yonge/book42.html, II:62. The idea here is that the Supreme Being, changeless and wholly other, could not have had direct intercourse with the corruptions of the created world, and hence the need of the second, lesser God, who is the Creator.

13. Already noted is the fact that the Court of the Gentiles was the largest section of the Jerusalem Temple. Proselytes are referred to in Matthew 23:15. In Acts, Saint Paul is shown addressing God fearers in Antioch: “Men of Israel, and you that fear God, listen” (Acts 13:16). It is plausible that many, if not most, of the “Gentiles” to whom Paul preached were, in fact, these believers already at home on the margins of Judaism.

14. Albert Einstein, “Living Philosophies,” in Living Philosophies: The Reflections of Some Eminent Men and Women of Our Time, ed. Clifton Fadiman (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 6. Einstein went on to say, “In this sense and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men.”

15. Ronald Dworkin, Religion Without God (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 6.

16. “History is an exercise of self-transcendence of the human spirit, its ability to understand the other as other. . . . The historian seeks to transcend his or her present context in order to grasp Jesus precisely as having existed in another context.” Roger Haight, Jesus: Symbol of God (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1999), 58.

17. Charles Taylor asks how it was that “it was virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?” Part of the answer lies in another of Taylor’s points: “Belief in God isn’t quite the same thing in 1500 and 2000.” Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 25, 13. For that matter, belief in God changes within the span of one person’s life; it is not the same for “a six year old and a sixty year old, for someone riding the crest of ecstasy and someone crawling through despair.” Bernard Lee, Jesus and the Metaphors of God: The Christs of the New Testament (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), 31.

18. Take one example of an ancient mind that does not conform to modern prejudices about its content: Lucretius (99–55 B.C.E.), the Roman poet who influenced Virgil and Cicero. All of his works but the poem/treatise “On the Nature of Things” are lost, but that work is momentous for attitudes recognized now as “modern.” He denies that humans have any need of gods, warns against religion-inspired fear, and posits that all matter is made of tiny particles that are in constant motion. Stephen Greenblatt sees Lucretius as precursor to, and even inspiration for, the Enlightenment. See The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: Norton, 2011). A somewhat different reading of Lucretius is implied by Charles Taylor: “It is no surprise that Lucretius was one of the inspirations for explorations in the direction of naturalism, e.g. with Hume. . . . But . . . overcoming our illusions about the Gods . . . wasn’t what was needed for a humanism that could flourish in the modern context.” A Secular Age, 27.

19. Taylor, A Secular Age, 58.

20. “Whereas the Church fathers and early ecumenical councils insisted on an ever more clearly defined orthodoxy, the rabbis wove together an ever more detailed orthopraxis. . . . Whereas Christians formulated creeds, Jews developed halakha, often translated as ‘law,’ but essentially meaning ‘walking’: How to walk in the world.” David Neuhaus, “Engaging the Jewish People,” in Catholic Engagement with World Religions, ed. Karl J. Becker and Ilaria Morali (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2010), 403.

21. Mark 12:29. The Shema can be seen to inspire the Shahada of Islam: “There is no God but God. Muhammad is the messenger of God.”

22. Deuteronomy 6:4; Mark 12:29; 1 Corinthians 8:6.

23. 1 Corinthians 8:5. Paul refers to “the god of this world” in 2 Corinthians 4:4 and to “beings that by nature are no gods” in Galatians 4:8.

24. Ephesians 6:12.

25. See, for example, 1 Kings 18:24, which depicts Elijah’s contest with Baal’s 450 prophets: “The god who answers by fire—he is God.”

26. Jeremiah, for example, declares, “For the customs of the peoples are false. A tree from the forest is cut down, and worked with an axe by the hands of a craftsman. Men deck it with silver and gold; they fasten it with hammer and nails so that it cannot move.” But a few verses on, Jeremiah refers to the other gods as inferior to the Creator God. “But the LORD is the true God; he is the living God . . . Thus shall you say to them: ‘The gods who did not make the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens’” (Jeremiah 10:3–4, 10:10–11).

27. “Whoever sacrifices to any god, save to the Lord only, shall be utterly destroyed” (Exodus 22:20). “For I know that the Lord is great, and that our Lord is above all gods” (Psalm 135:5).

28. Cited by Paula Fredriksen, “Mandatory Retirement: Ideas in the Study of Christian Origins Whose Time Has Come to Go,” in Israel’s God and Rebecca’s Children: Christology and Community in Early Judaism and Christianity: Essays in Honor of Larry W. Hurtado and Alan F. Segal, ed. David B. Capes et al. (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2007), 37.

29. Paula Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth: King of the Jews (New York: Knopf, 1999), 37. This obliteration of the fast distinction between polytheists and monotheists points to a further breakdown—that of the radical distinction between “theists” and “atheists” themselves. The usefulness of these terms, too, is called into question by the facts that Christians and Jews, refusing to pay tribute to the gods of the pantheon, were derided as the ancient equivalent of atheists, and that when contemporary “atheists” debunk “God,” they are often attacking crudely anthropomorphic theologies that many, if not most, believers have long since left behind. We will return to the contemporary quest for the God beyond “God,” pursued by self-identified religious people who regard “secular humanism” more as a purification of belief than a threat to it. This quest can be seen from the starting point of religion in Paul Tillich (Dynamics of Faith) and from the starting point of atheism in Ronald Dworkin (Religion Without God), but they are the same quest.

30. John 10:30.

31. Philippians 2:6. (The RSV renders “clung to” as “grasped.”) Romans 10:13; Joel 2:32. Romans 10:6–8 shows “Christ” preexisting the birth of “Jesus.” Adela Yarbro Collins comments, “Paul sometimes implied that Jesus became the son of God by his being raised from the dead. At other times he implies that Jesus, as Wisdom, is preexistent.” Collins, “How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?” in Capes, Israel’s God and Rebecca’s Children, 66. The point is that, even in Paul, the status of Jesus is ambiguous. We have here the human imagination grasping for new categories.

32. These Jewish and Christian scholars, locating claims for the divinity of Jesus far earlier in the first century than most scholars, call themselves, with tongue in cheek, “the early high Christology club.” The group was cofounded by the Jewish scholar Alan F. Segal and the Christian Larry W. Hurtado. See Capes, Israel’s God and Rebecca’s Children, ix.

33. 1 Corinthians 1:2.

34. Collins, “How on Earth,” 57.

35. In Acts 25:26, the term “Lord” is applied to Nero. The Roman Senate voted that the emperor Octavian “should be inscribed on a par with the gods, in the hymns.” Collins, “How on Earth,” 62–63.

36. The “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity did not irretrievably occur until the fourth century, with the totalizing emperor Constantine and the orthodoxy-establishing Council of Nicea, whose creed was already noted. See my book Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, a History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 144–50. It should be emphasized that, though some Jews and Christians are engaged today in a new joint project of uncovering commonalities between ancient Judaism and early Christianity, this is not about blurring the differences between the two faiths as they developed. Despite all parallels, the religions remain mutually exclusive—and should. The point, for Christians, is to dismantle mistaken notions that led to Christianity’s self-understanding as ontologically positive over against a Jewish negative. Jews have no equivalent problem.

37. Daniel Boyarin taught for ten years in the Talmud department of Bar-Ilan University, in Israel. He is currently the Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Borderlines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

38. Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New York: New Press, 2012), 6.

39. “If Jesus did not think of himself as a or the Messiah, however the term is defined, he may well have been the only one in his inner circle who did not.” Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2006), 85.

40. Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels, 6–7.

41. If Boyarin’s thesis, and my taking off from it, proved to be an inadvertent back door into a new supersessionism . . . well, one thinks of William Styron, who sought to advance civil rights by writing about the slave rebellion leader Nat Turner, but wound up revivifying antiblack stereotypes.

42. Peter Schäfer, “The Jew Who Would be God,” New Republic, May 18, 2012, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/103373/books-and-arts/magazine/jewish-gospels-christ-boyarin. Schäfer is director of the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton.

43. “Peter Schäfer Slams Daniel Boyarin—Scholarly Brawl,” BLT, May 31, 2012, http://bltnotjustasandwich.com/2012/05/31/peter-schfer-slams-daniel-boyarinscholarly-brawl.

44. Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels, 10.

45. Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels, 7.

46. Recall that the birth of Jesus is recounted in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, although not in Mark, which begins with Jesus’ encounter with John the Baptist, nor in the Gospel of John, which begins with the preexisting Word. Matthew and Luke offer similar accounts of the nativity, but with differences: Matthew, citing the death of Herod, has Jesus being born in 4 B.C.E., while Luke, citing the Augustan census, has him being born in 6 C.E. Matthew has the family at home in Bethlehem, while Luke has them sojourning there. Importantly, only Matthew tells the story of the Magi, their encounter with Herod, and Herod’s determination to kill Jesus, culminating in the slaughter of the innocents and the flight of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph to Egypt. But in the Christian imagination, all these details come together to form one Christmas narrative.

47. Matthew 2:18.

48. Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels, 30–31. A classic Christian study of the “Son of Man” motif in the Gospel, as derived from Daniel, is found in Joachim Jeremias, New Testament Theology: The Proclamation of Jesus (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), 272. Jeremias, unlike Boyarin, sees the title referring to a future eschatological role for Jesus, not to a present ontological status for “Christ.”

49. Mark 1:11; Psalm 2:7. “Son of God” “connotes divine appointment rather than divine nature.” Robert H. Gundry, Mark: A Commentary on his Apology for the Cross (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1993), 909. In five key places, Mark uses the title “Son of God”: 1:1, 1:11, 9:7, 14:61, 15:39. Always behind this phrase in Mark is the address God directed to Israel, as His chosen people. For an elucidation of “Son of God” references in Judaism, see Jon D. Levenson, Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995).

50. “Somehow” is to the point here. Compared with the rigidly defined categories of a Trinitarian godhead that come later, under the full influence of Greek philosophy, this Jewish vision may seem slippery, but it has the advantage of a built-in modesty about what humans can know of transcendence, which, by definition, transcends human knowing and language. Daniel’s images are more like poetry than philosophy.

51. Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels, 45. This duality noted by Boyarin—divine judgment in tension with divine mercy—gives rise not only, as Boyarin says, to the “Father and the Son,” but also ultimately to the tension between a merciless Old Testament God of judgment and a kindly New Testament God of love. The duality, once conceived in these terms and reified by oppositionalism, forms the structure of the Christian anti-Jewish imagination.

52. Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels, 39, 40.

53. Daniel 7:13–14.

54. Mark 2:9–12.

55. Jesus makes the “I am” claim even more blatantly in John: “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). We will see more of this later.

56. Mark 14:62–64.

57. Demonstrating the astounding turnabout in Christian thinking since the Second Vatican Council, Pope Francis carried the council’s logic about Jews to its conclusion when, in 2013, he wrote that Christians “can never be sufficiently grateful” to Jews who “preserved their faith in God.” That preserving, of course, was a matter of rejecting Christian claims. What Jews were condemned for in the past they are thanked for now. Pope Francis, “Letter to a Non-Believer,” La Repubblica, September 4, 2013.

58. Mark 16:6.

59. Levenson, Death and Resurrection. Levenson shows how the sibling-rivalry motif, with the younger son usurping the elder’s claim to the father’s blessing, runs through the Hebrew Bible, from Cain and Abel to Isaac and Jacob. When the Church replaces Israel as the chosen people, it is acting out this Jewish pattern.

60. 1 Corinthians 15:14.

61. Kevin J. Madigan and Jon D. Levenson, Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 219.

62. Words of the Apostles’ Creed, which dates to perhaps the late second century.

63. John 2:19.

64. Madigan and Levenson, Resurrection, 171.

65. Daniel 12:2–3.

66. Ezekiel 37:11.

67. Isaiah 26:19.

68. 2 Kings 4:35. Madigan and Levenson, Resurrection, 131.

69. Madigan and Levenson, Resurrection, 176.

70. The so-called Jesus Seminar came to near consensus, in the 1990s, about a non-apocalyptic Jesus, with 97 percent of its fellows agreeing that “Jesus did not expect the world to end soon.” David B. Gowler, What Are They Saying About the Historical Jesus? (New York: Paulist Press, 2007), 35. Authors who disagree and insist on Jesus as an End Time apocalyptic include N. T. Wright and E. P. Sanders. Paula Fredriksen defines the action Jesus performed in the Temple as apocalyptic: “The current Temple was soon to be destroyed (understood: not by Jesus, nor by invading armies, but by God), to cede place to the eschatological Temple (understood: not built by the hand of man) at the close of the age.” Jesus of Nazareth, 210.

71. Jesus can seem to have been explicitly apocalyptic in, for example, a statement such as this: “I say to you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes” (Matthew 10:23). But we cannot know whether those words were put into the mouth of Jesus by the writer.

72. N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 102.

73. Mark 16:8.

74. This expanded version, Mark 9–20, is included in most Bibles now, but usually with brackets or notes explaining the questions about its origin.

75. Mark 1:9.

76. In the Gospel of John, the term “lifted up” refers simultaneously to the crucifixion and the Resurrection, the being hung up on the cross and the being exalted into new life. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14–15).

77. 1 Thessalonians 4:16–18. Madigan and Levenson drew my attention to this aspect of early Christian expectation, reflected in Paul’s first letter. Resurrection, 28.

78. Romans 13:11–12.

79. 1 Thessalonians 5:23.

80. Crossan says that, in contrast to John, Jesus preached an interior kingdom, not a restored Israel. “One enters that Kingdom by wisdom or goodness, by virtue, justice, or freedom. It is a style of life for now, rather than a hope of life for the future. This is therefore an ethical Kingdom, but it must be absolutely insisted that it could be just as eschatological as was the apocalyptic Kingdom. Its ethics could, for instance, challenge contemporary morality to its depths.” The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 292.

81. Luke 17:20–21.

82. Matthew 11:5, 13:16–17; Luke 7:22, 10:23.

83. James D. G. Dunn, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1993), 321. The technical name for this transformed attitude toward the End Time is “realized eschatology,” an idea made popular by the twentieth-century scholar C. H. Dodd. Crossan distinguishes between “apocalyptic eschatology” and “sapiential eschatology,” which shifts the transforming initiative from God’s intervention to the acts of the faithful disciples. John Dominic Crossan, The Essential Jesus: Original Sayings and Earliest Images (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), 8.

CHAPTER FOUR: Gospel Truth

1. Joyce Carol Oates, “The Calendar’s New Clothes,” New York Times, December 30, 1999.

2. John B. Cobb Jr. describes the succession of covenants. Spiritual Bankruptcy: A Prophetic Call to Action (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 2010), 21. The champion of historical consciousness was Friedrich Hegel, who transformed philosophy by locating it within history. Hegel understood the human person as an essentially historical being. The search for meaning, as opposed to “truth,” is a quest through time, with each person—and society—grasping its present significance only in relationship to past experience and future purpose. See Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

3. See, for example, Bernard Lonergan, “The Transition from a Classicist World-View to Historical-Mindedness,” in A Second Collection: Papers by Bernard Lonergan, S.J., ed. William F. J. Ryan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 1–9.

4. Catholicism stopped thinking of itself as the “one true Church” (Lumen Gentium); embraced conscience as the defining note of salvation (Dignitatis Humanae); affirmed the validity of the Jewish Covenant and other religions (Nostra Aetate); and left Just War dominance behind to become a peace Church (Pacem in Terris). That these changes have been resisted by the Catholic hierarchy in subsequent years does not undo them for the vast population of Catholic people. See Norman Tanner, ed., Vatican II: The Essential Texts, introductions by Pope Benedict XVI and James Carroll (New York: Doubleday, 2012).

5. Quoted in John Finnis, Religion and Public Reasons: Collected Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 151.

6. Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 1994). Schorsch, the former chancellor of Jewish Theological Seminary, is a leading conservative thinker. Rethinking the nature of Judaism centers on the Holocaust but also involves nineteenth-century Zionism, and continues in an expressly Jewish reckoning with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

7. Blaise Pascal, Thoughts, trans. W. F. Trotter (New York: P.F. Collier & Sons, 1910), 99.

8. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, XVIII:63.

9. John Henry Newman coined the phrase “development of doctrine” in the nineteenth century, a theological adaptation of Darwin’s contemporaneous idea of evolution. We are tracing here the evolution of faith in Jesus. In fact, since Jesus is mediated by the “development,” our faith is more in the evolving medium than in him. Eventually, that medium will be known as “Church.” See John Henry Newman, “An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine,” 1909, Newman Reader, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/development.

10. What we know as the New Testament was not doctrinally defined until the Council of Carthage, in 397. The selection of the twenty-seven books was from among a larger number of texts. There might have been a dozen or more “gospels.” The criteria for selection was shaped by the controlling orthodoxy of the Council of Nicea (326), which was related to the imposition of imperial uniformity on the Church, after Constantine.

11. Jack Miles, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God (New York: Knopf, 2001), 113.

12. There is almost no money to be made from the writing of poetry. The New Yorker, in 2011, typically paid about $400 for a poem. There are about 750 teaching positions for poets in American colleges. The bestselling American poet of 2011, Poet Laureate Billy Collins, sold about eighteen thousand copies of his book Horoscopes for the Dead, earning about $40,000. Rachel Friedman, “Livelihoods of the Poets,” New York, December 11, 2011, http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/topic/poetry -2011-12/?mid=nymag_press. There is no contemporary equivalent of Homer, Virgil, Plutarch, Dante, or Milton—the Enlightenment genius who marked the last of his breed.

13. I make this assertion fully aware that across the centuries, in various epochs, bloody state power enforced quite literal readings of such images, and many Church authorities to this day insist, with religious sanctions, on such literal readings.

14. N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 333.

15. Wright, The New Testament, 334.

16. John 20:26–31.

17. “Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the ‘most portable’ person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, ‘Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.’ That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.” Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 125.

18. Roger Haight, The Future of Christology (New York: Continuum, 2005), 45. This book was, in part, Haight’s defense of his earlier book Jesus: Symbol of God (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1999), which had drawn fire from Catholic authorities in significant part because of the authorities’ shallow and dismissive notion of the meaning of symbol.

19. John Dominic Crossan, A Long Way from Tipperary (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2000), 167.

20. All four Gospels tell of Jesus’ feeding five thousand people: Matthew 14:13–21; Mark 6:31–44; Luke 9:10–17; John 6:5–15. Mark and Matthew additionally tell of Jesus’ feeding four thousand people, in what wants to be taken as an independent event but surely wasn’t: Mark 8:1–9; Matthew 15:32–39.

21. “A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined. . . . It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die on a sudden: because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle, that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed in any age or country.” David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon, 1902), 114.

22. The “placebo effect” is one example, in which interventions with no actual drug ingredients can nevertheless bring about actual physiological effect. See, for example, Cara Feinberg, “The Placebo Phenomenon,” Harvard Magazine, January–February 2013, http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/01/the-placebo-phenomenon.

23. See, for example, John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now (New York: HarperOne, 2007), 119. Crossan cites medical anthropologists to distinguish between “illness” and “disease.” Disease is purely physical; illness includes the “personal, social, and cultural reactions to disease.” Jesus’ “miracles” affected change in the latter, not the former.

24. Jesus’ acts “as healer of the physically ill, exorciser of the possessed, and dispenser of forgiveness to sinners, must be seen in the context to which they belong, namely charismatic Judaism.” Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981), 58.

25. Matthew 11:5. I have this insight about suffering resistance from Haight, Jesus: Symbol of God, 8.

26. Regarding disputed readings of the Passion, two divergent Catholic scholars make the point. Raymond Brown sees the Gospels accounts, centered on the Sanhedrin and Pilate trials of Jesus, as essentially historical. The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave (New York: Doubleday, 1994). But another scholar, Gerald Sloyan, writes, “It is impossible to conclude from the Gospels what sequence of events brought Jesus to the cross.” The Crucifixion of Jesus: History, Myth, Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 40. John Dominic Crossan goes so far as to say that the Passion story is almost wholly fictional. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), 123–58.

27. 1 Corinthians 15:14.

28. Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New York: New Press, 2012), 159–60.

29. “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). Mark here is picking up a note of Paul’s: “And you are not your own, for you are bought with a price. Therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). But in both cases, the one receiving payment is Satan, to whom, after the Fall, humans were in bondage.

30. An example of this perverted theology is the “substitutionary atonement” idea found in Saint Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, referred to earlier. Roger Haight helped me see how history rescues theology here. Jesus: Symbol of God, 85. For me, of course—having been that atonement-tormented child at his First Confession—the rescue is personal.

31. Ched Myers’s reading of Mark informs me here. Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1991), 104.

32. Roger Haight proposes his version of these three purposes as criteria for all of Christology: “fidelity to scripture and the landmark interpretations of Jesus Christ . . . intelligibility to a present-day community . . . to empower a Christian life in the contemporary world.” I have adapted these three points to Mark. Haight, Future of Christology, 43.

33. Wesley J. Wildman, Fidelity with Plausibility: Modest Christologies in the Twentieth Century (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1998), 199.

34. I heard the late scholar Krister Stendahl offer a version of this camera analogy.

35. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation (New York: Continuum, 2000), 6.

36. Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Christology and Jewish-Christian Relations,” in Jews and Christians After the Holocaust, ed. Abraham J. Peck (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), 25.

37. Matthew 2:13–22.

38. See Peter Schäfer, The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012).

39. Paula Fredriksen sees the fact that Jesus alone—and none of his disciples—was executed by the Romans as evidence that Jesus was not taken as a revolutionary, even by Rome. Otherwise, members of his movement, too, would have been hunted down and killed. Rather, Fredriksen argues, Jesus was killed for being a troublemaker, one in whom the crowds, during the dangerous time of Passover, saw a focus of their discontent. It was an incipient, not actual, revolution that Rome feared. Jesus was a spark to be squelched, not a raging fire. Paula Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth: King of the Jews (New York: Knopf, 1999), 214–34.

40. “John of Patmos” is not to be taken as the author of the Gospel of John, which is usually dated to around 100. Second Peter, dated by some scholars to as late as 150, is also almost certainly later than the book of Revelation.

41. The journalistic character of Revelation is also hinted at when the seventh angel blows his trumpet “and something like a great mountain, burning with fire, was thrown into the sea; and a third of the sea became blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed.” This refers to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Elaine Pagels, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (New York: Viking, 2012), 20.

42. Nero is identified as the enemy whose “number is six hundred sixty-six.” This seems an obscure reference, but it was not. Hebrew and Greek designate letters by numbers, and 666 spells out “Caesar Nero.” For a discussion of contemporary understandings of “666,” see Adela Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), 13.

43. Pagels, Revelations, 32.

44. Revelation 5:12, 13:8.

45. Revelation 3:9.

46. Pagels, Revelations, 50.

47. Crossan, God and Empire, 224.

48. For example, the narrative was composed in part of details, like the “casting of lots” at the foot of the cross, that were drawn from Scriptures, such as Psalm 22:18, with its “They divided my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing.” The origin of the “lots” was not a historical event, but an appropriation from the sacred text. When Gentiles later read of the lots, however, they assumed a historical fulfillment of a “prophecy” in the Old Testament, and they took it as self-evident proof of Jesus’ status as the longed-for Jewish messiah. See James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, a History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 122–34.

49. I owe this insight about the difference between “faith” and “faithfulness” to John Cobb, Spiritual Bankruptcy, 29.

50. The Nicene Creed, first promulgated, as we saw, in 325. This elevation of Jesus to full equality with God, understood as Yahweh, the Ancient One, or, in Greek terms, the Prime Mover, made any further affirmation of Jesus by Jews as Jews impossible.

51. The parting of the ways, while not “willed by God,” enabled both traditions to develop creatively. “Had the church remained a Jewish sect, it would not have achieved its universal mission. Had Judaism given up its particularistic practices, it would have vanished from history. That the two movements eventually separated made possible the preservation of each.” Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2006), 84.

52. With this caveat: Once, after Constantine, the Roman emperor became the enforcer of Christian orthodoxy, and the state, especially under Theodosius, began to execute heretics, Christians continued to die at the hands of Rome by the tens of thousands. That war ended with the elimination of condemned sects like Arians, Docetists, and Nestorians.

CHAPTER FIVE: Jesus and John

1. See, for example, Robert W. Funk, Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 298. Funk is “fundamentally dissatisfied with versions of the faith that trace their origins only so far as the first believers: true faith, fundamental faith, must be related in some way directly to Jesus of Nazareth.” But the reason faith abstracted from the relationships Jesus had is impossible is that the faith was alive in those relationships. For a criticism of Funk, see Jack Miles, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God (New York: Knopf, 2001), 270.

2. In his 1952 book, The Eclipse of God, Buber wrote, “Something is taking place in the depths that as yet needs no name. Tomorrow it may happen that it will be beckoned to from the heights . . . The eclipse of the light of God is no extinction; even tomorrow that which has stepped in between [man and the eternal Thou] may give way.” The Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Philosophy and Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1952), 129–30.

3. Richard L. Rubenstein, “Martin Buber and the Holocaust: Some Reconsiderations,” New English Review, November 2012, http://www.newenglishreview.org/Richard_L._Rubenstein/Martin_Buber_and_the_Holocaust%3A_Some_Reconsiderations.

4. The Camus short story “The Artist at Work,” first published in 1957, ends with the artist having painted on the canvas a single word, which cannot be made out clearly: it is either “solidary” or “solitary.” The 2007 Vintage edition offers the translation as “interdependent” or “independent.” Albert Camus, Exile and the Kingdom, trans. Maureen Freely (New York: Vintage, 2007), 80.

5. Rubenstein, “Martin Buber,” 19.

6. Richard L. Rubenstein, for example, faults Buber for neglecting both the Law in Judaism and Jesus Christ in Christianity as mediations enabling an encounter with God. Rubenstein, “Martin Buber,” 7. Rubenstein seems to miss the larger point of Buber’s thought: that the eternal Thou is encountered only through the mediation of the earthly Thou, which presumes human solidarity for Jews, Christians, and all others.

7. This from Paul, for example: “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:18).

8. Luke 2:52: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man”—an elegantly simple description of Jesus’ life as he grew up in the household of Joseph and Mary.

9. Mark 1:11.

10. “And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter” (Isaiah 53:7–8).

11. Mark 1:8.

12. Mark 1:12, 14.

13. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, XVIII:2–9. This account squares with the story of John’s execution in the Gospel of Mark, although its elaboration on the broader political intrigue shows that Josephus is not dependent on Mark, and draws from other sources. Unlike a passage in which Josephus describes Jesus’ death and Resurrection (the so-called Testimonium Flavianum, XVIII:3.3.), this one is regarded by scholars as wholly authentic.

14. Ancient manuscripts and papyrus scrolls were found in clay jars in caves and excavations from Egypt to Israel to Iraq to Turkey: “The Teaching” (in Greek, Didache) was the rule of a first-century Christian community, discovered in 1873 in a monastery in Istanbul; independent second- and third-century texts like the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Mary, and the Gospel of Thomas were discovered in Egypt in the late 1800s; fourth-century Gnostic texts, the Nag Hammadi codices, were discovered in Egypt in 1945; and the Dead Sea Scrolls, elaborate records of a Jewish sect dating to the time of Jesus, were discovered at Qumran in 1947. John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan Reed, Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 13.

15. The political and economic context within which Jesus would have come of age, summarized here, is elaborated in one of my main sources, Richard A. Horsley and Neil Asher Silberman, The Message and the Kingdom: How Jesus and Paul Ignited a Revolution and Transformed the Ancient World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002).

16. Examples of scholars who accept the image of Jesus as a young man in his twenties in John’s movement are Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz, The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide, trans. John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998).

17. Virgil, Aeneid, trans. David Ferry (unpublished), VI, II, 761.

18. See David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil (New York: Random House, 2003), and Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

19. Virgil, Aeneid, VI, II, 719–61.

20. Genesis 1:1. See Richard Elliott Friedman, The Hidden Book in the Bible (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998). An influential study of cyclical versus linear thinking is Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 2nd ed., trans. William R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005; first published 1971).

21. Church fathers Jerome and Eusebius agreed that the date for Adam’s creation was 5,200 years before the birth of Jesus. That date defines the Earth’s chronology for many creationists to this day.

22. Walter E. Wegner, “The Book of Daniel and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” lecture, University of Wisconsin, http://www.wlsessays.net/files/WegnerDaniel.pdf.

23. Daniel 8:17–26.

24. E. P. Sanders sees no break. “Jesus thought that God would soon bring about a decisive change in the world. This context is historically crucial, since it is the framework of Jesus’ overall mission: it includes the man who baptized him and also his own followers.” The Historical Figure of Jesus (London: Penguin, 1993), 8.

25. “What is time? Who can explain this easily and briefly? Who can comprehend this even in thought so as to articulate the answer in words?” Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1991), 11.17.

26. “Earlier he had received John’s baptism and accepted his message of God as the imminent apocalyptic judge. But the Jordan was not just water, and to be baptized in it was to recapitulate the ancient and archetypal passage from imperial bondage to national freedom. Herod Antipas moved swiftly to execute John, there was no apocalyptic consummation, and Jesus, finding his own voice, began to speak of God not as imminent apocalypse but as present healing.” John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), xii.

27. Roger Haight, Jesus: Symbol of God (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1999), 70.

28. John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. II (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 154.

29. Matthew 11:11: “Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has arisen no one greater than John the Baptist. Yet the one who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”

30. This, for example, from John 3:22–30: “After this Jesus and his disciples went into the land of Judea; there he remained with them and baptized. John also was baptizing at Ae’non near Salim, because there was much water there; and people came and were baptized. For John had not yet been put in prison. Now a discussion arose between John’s disciples and a Jew over purifying. And they came to John, and said to him, ‘Rabbi, he who was with you beyond the Jordan, to whom you bore witness, here he is, baptizing, and all are going to him.’ John answered, ‘No one can receive anything except what is given him from heaven. You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him. He who has the bride is the bridegroom; the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice; therefore this joy of mine is now full. He must increase, but I must decrease.’” By putting these words into John the Baptist’s mouth, the Gospel writer can be assumed to be attempting to quell an ongoing competition between Jesus people and John’s movement.

31. Luke 7:20–22.

32. Isaiah 61:1.

33. Luke 7:26.

34. Luke 4:17–21.

35. Horsley and Silberman, The Message and the Kingdom, 55. I owe my understanding of the importance of the contrasting Isaiah passages in Luke to these authors.

36. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, XVIII:5, 2.

37. Or almost immediately. According to Matthew’s account, John’s “disciples came and took the body and buried it; and they went and told Jesus. Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a lonely place apart” (Matthew 14:12–13).

38. Horsley and Silberman, The Message and the Kingdom, 61.

39. Luke 13:32–33.

40. Matthew 23:37; Luke 13:34.

41. Acts 7:52.

42. See, for example, Dennis R. MacDonald, The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000).

43. In Hosea, Israel itself is referred to as “Son of the living God” (Hosea 1:10). In Deuteronomy, Israel is called “sons of the Lord Your God” (Deuteronomy 14:1–2). This sonship defines the chosenness of Israel. See Jon D. Levenson, “The People Israel as the Son of God,” in Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 36–42.

CHAPTER SIX: Thou Art Peter

1. The Latin for “Be not afraid.” As reported by his son. Henry McDonald, “Seamus Heaney’s Last Words Were ‘Noli Timere,’ Son Tells Funeral,” Guardian, September 2, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/02/seamus-heaney-last-words-funeral.

2. Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 182.

3. Bernstein and Politi, His Holiness, 232.

4. “Had the Pope chosen to turn his soft power into the hard variety, the regime might have been drowned in blood. Instead, the Pope simply led the Polish people to desert their rulers by affirming solidarity with one another. The Communists managed to hold on as despots a decade longer. But as political leaders, they were finished. Visiting his native Poland in 1979, Pope John Paul II struck what turned out to be a mortal blow to its Communist regime, to the Soviet Empire, [and] ultimately to Communism.” Angelo M. Codevilla, “Political Warfare: A Set of Means for Achieving Political Ends,” in Strategic Influence: Public Diplomacy, Counterpropaganda and Political Warfare, ed. J. Michael Waller (Washington, D.C.: Institute of World Politics Press, 2008).

5. John 6:20; Matthew 17:7; Matthew 28:10; Matthew 10:31.

6. Matthew 26:39.

7. Genesis 15:1; Exodus 14:13; Psalm 91:5; Isaiah 35:4; Jeremiah 42:11. See also Felix Just, “Have No Fear! Do Not Be Afraid!” Catholic Resources for Bible, Liturgy, Art, and Theology, http://catholic-resources.org/Bible/HaveNoFear.htm. A Google search of “Be not afraid—Bible” generates about twenty million results. The Bible can be understood, therefore, as essentially addressed to human fear.

8. On May 13, 1981, Mehmet Ali Agca, an Islamic radical, shot John Paul II at close range in St. Peter’s Square. Agca claimed that he was acting for the Bulgarian state intelligence service, which was never proved. The Vatican expressed skepticism that the Soviet KGB was behind the assassination attempt, but in 2005, documents found in East German Stasi files indicated that the KGB was indeed implicated. “1981 Attack on Pope Planned by Soviets,” Agence France-Presse, March 30, 2005.

9. Mark 4:37–41.

10. Jens Schroter, “Gospel of Mark,” in The Blackwell Companion to the New Testament, ed. David E. Aune (London: Blackwell, 2010), 177–78.

11. John 21:4–17.

12. Mark 14:30. Here is the account of the betrayals: “And as Peter was below in the courtyard, one of the maids of the high priest came; and seeing Peter warming himself, she looked at him, and said, ‘You also were with the Nazarene, Jesus.’ But he denied it, saying, ‘I neither know nor understand what you mean.’ And he went out into the gateway. And the maid saw him, and began again to say to the bystanders, ‘This man is one of them.’ But again he denied it. And after a little while again the bystanders said to Peter, ‘Certainly you are one of them; for you are a Galilean.’ But he began to invoke a curse on himself and to swear, ‘I do not know this man of whom you speak.’ And immediately the cock crowed a second time. And Peter remembered how Jesus had said to him, ‘Before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times.’ And he broke down and wept” (Mark 14:66–72).

13. Luke 22:61–62.

14. John 8:31.

15. “Then Jesus said to them, ‘Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brethren to go to Galilee, and there they will see me’” (Matthew 28:10).

16. Acts 1:6–13.

17. Acts 1:15–21.

18. Acts 2:22–28.

19. In an astounding reversal of tradition, the image of Peter lifted up at the start of the 2013 papal conclave was not the triumphalist “Thou Art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church” from Matthew, but the penitential Peter from John, whom Jesus interrogates three times with “Do you love me?” In hindsight, this seemed a prediction of the election of Pope Francis, who has more in common with the forgiven Peter than with the power broker. See my “Who Am I to Judge? A Radical Pope’s First Year,” New Yorker, December 15, 2013.

20. Acts 4:13, 2:41–42.

21. This is why, for example, Jack Miles disdains the “historical Jesus” quest to “get behind” Peter and all the others to an unmediated Jesus. The mediation is the point. “A faith that confesses its origins in Peter and Paul as well as in Jesus is superior to one that would admit no source but Jesus.” Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God (New York: Knopf, 2001), 270.

CHAPTER SEVEN: The Real Paul

1. John F. Deane, “Triduum,” from A Little Book of Hours (Manchester, U.K.: Carcanet, 2008), 95.

2. The famous Dead Sea Scrolls, the Qumran manuscripts, already noted as having first been discovered in caves above the Jordan Rift Valley by a goatherd in 1947, are dated by scholars to a period between 200 B.C.E. and 68 C.E. That last date tells the story, for, unlike the Jesus people and the Rabbis, the Qumran Zealots, mainly Essenes, were wiped out by the Romans in the assaults that began just then. No more scroll making.

3. A. J. Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Noonday, 1997), 1.

4. The death of Jesus is said, as we saw, to occur simultaneously with the tearing of the Temple veil “from top to bottom” (Mark 15:37–38). By the time the Gospel of John is written, three decades after Mark, the identification of Jesus with the Temple was explicit: “But he spoke of the Temple of his body” (John 2:21).

5. For example, “Now when the Pharisees gathered together to him, with some of the scribes, who had come from Jerusalem, they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands defiled, that is, unwashed. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they wash their hands, observing the tradition of the elders; and when they come from the market place, they do not eat unless they purify themselves; and there are many other traditions which they observe, the washing of cups and pots and vessels of bronze.) And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, ‘Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with hands defiled?’ And he said to them, ‘Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men”’” (Mark 7:1–7).

6. For example, “Again the high priest asked him, ‘Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?’ And Jesus said, ‘I am; and you will see the Son of man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.’ And the high priest tore his garments, and said, ‘Why do we still need witnesses? You have heard his blasphemy. What is your decision?’ And they all condemned him as deserving death” (Mark 14:61–64). This portrait of high-priest villainy, composed in about 70, can be compared to the antipriest contempt of the Zealots, who, in 68, according to Josephus, violently targeted the priestly caste and Temple officers as craven collaborators, a takeover of the Temple that sparked Vespasian’s assault. John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus (New York: HarperOne, 1996), 52.

7. “Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus” (Luke 1:1–3).

8. Luke 4:2–30.

9. Colossians 4:14; 2 Timothy 4:11. The actual authorship of these two “Pauline” letters is uncertain. Second Timothy might have been written by a follower of Paul’s shortly after his death. It includes this forecast of his martyrdom: “For I am already on the point of being sacrificed; the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award me on that day: and not only to me, but also to all who have loved his appearing” (2 Timothy 4:6–8).

10. The description comes from the apocryphal Acts of Paul, a second-century text that is not to be taken as historically accurate.

11. Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New York: New Press, 2012), 6–7.

12. 1 Thessalonians 4:16–18.

13. In Romans 11:25–32, Paul emphasizes that God does not revoke his promises, underscoring the permanence of the covenant with Israel. In Romans 15:4–21, Paul celebrates, in terms drawn from Isaiah, the opening of that same covenant: “Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people.”

14. The rape of a slave woman was not a crime unless she was somehow injured, and then the crime was damage to property.

15. Thirty-nine lashes, three times beaten with rods, stoned at least once, shipwrecked three times. Paul acknowledged: “weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities” (2 Corinthians 12:10).

16. Philippians 2:5–8. The RSV renders “cling to” as “to be grasped.” Note that Paul’s reference to “servant” here is a signal of his dependence for this interpretative coup on the Suffering Servant motif of Isaiah (Isaiah 52:13–53:12).

17. 1 Corinthians 15:55.

18. Galatians 4:8, 3:28–29. This inclusive language of Paul probably derives from a baptismal formula in use among Jewish Christians in the Hellenized world. Rosemary Radford Ruether, “St. Paul, Friend or Enemy of Women?” Beliefnet, n.d., http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Christianity/2004/03/St-Paul-Friend-Or-Enemy-Of-Women.aspx. See Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2006), 114.

19. “By the year 100, more than 40 Christian communities existed in cities around the Mediterranean, including two in North Africa, at Alexandria and Cyrene, and several in Italy.” Susan Tyler Hitchcock, Geography of Religion: Where God Lives, Where Pilgrims Walk (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Press, 2004), 281. Thomas the Apostle is regarded as having brought the message of Jesus to Kerala in about 52.

20. Seven of the thirteen are assumed by scholars to have certainly been written by Paul. Scholars are divided on the authorship of the others, although a consensus holds that Colossians, Ephesians, the two letters of Timothy, and Titus were not written by Paul, and came well after his death. The first of Paul’s letters, 1 Thessalonians, dates to about 51. The latest actually written by Paul, Romans, dates to about 60—although it comes first in the New Testament arrangement. When we take up the question of women below, we will see the relevance of distinguishing between writings attributed to Paul and those actually written by him. Hebrews was long attributed to Paul but no longer is so, and it is rarely counted as a Pauline letter.

21. For example, Paul opens his address at the synagogue in Antioch by saying, “Brethren, sons of the family of Abraham, and those among you who fear God, to us has been sent the message of this salvation” (Acts 13:26).

22. Here is Tacitus’s report, from the Annals, written in about 116 C.E.: “Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind.” Annals, XV:44.

23. Mark D. Nanos, The Mystery of Romans: The Jewish Context of Paul’s Letter (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 50.

24. “The roster of ancient writers who expressed anti-Jewish feeling reads like a roster for a second-semester course in classics: Cicero, Tacitus, Martial, Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Cassius Dio, Marcus Aurelius, Apuleius, Ovid, Petronius, Pliny the Elder, Plutarch, Quintilian, Seneca, Suetonius.” John C. Meagher, “As the Twig Was Bent: Antisemitism in Greco-Roman and Earliest Christian Time,” in Anti-Semitism and the Foundations of Christianity, ed. Alan T. Davies (New York: Paulist Press, 2004), 6.

25. In Corinth, Paul “found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, lately come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome” (Acts 18:2).

26. Bruce Johnston, “Roman Colosseum ‘Built with Gold Loot from Sack of Jerusalem Temple,’” Solomon’s Temple, 2004, http://www.solomonstemple.com/2004/01/roman-colosseum-built-with-loot. The menorah on the Arch of Titus served, in 1948, as the template for the menorah on the flag of the newly established State of Israel.

27. At the climax of the Punic Wars, in 146 B.C.E., with Hannibal finally defeated by Scipio, Carthage was burned to the ground and left in rubble. Legend has it that the Romans ruined the place forever by grinding salt into the dirt.

28. At the time of the Reformation, Pope Paul IV began the tradition, at the Arch of Titus, of requiring Rome’s Jews to make an annual oath of submission. In 1821, the Arch of Titus was restored, and a panel containing this inscription was mounted on one of its pediments: “This monument, remarkable in terms of both religion and art, had weakened from age: Pius the Seventh, Supreme Pontiff . . . ordered it reinforced and preserved.” Thus the pope rescued the monument that Jews despised. Jews had always refused to walk under it, but in 1948, celebrating the establishment of the State of Israel, Rome’s Jews went to the Arch of Titus and walked through it—backward.

29. “This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. . . . Jesus, whom you delivered up and denied in the presence of Pilate, when he had decided to release him” (Acts 2:22–23, 3:13–14).

30. “Go and tell that fox . . .” (Luke 13:32).

31. Crossan, Who Killed Jesus?, 148. Paula Fredriksen says that Tacitus, Josephus, and Philo all emphasize Pilate’s character as “one of the worst” of Roman governors. Jesus of Nazareth: King of the Jews (New York: Knopf, 1999), 86.

32. Luke 23:13–22.

33. Matthew 27:24–25. This idea of Pilate as friendly to Jesus, and forced by “the Jews” into ordering the crucifixion, so grips the Christian imagination that the ecumenically minded Pope Francis could offhandedly reiterate it in 2013 to a mass audience in Brazil when he said, “Sometimes, we can be like Pilate, who did not have the courage to go against the tide to save Jesus’ life.” The “tide” referred to here, of course, is “the Jews.” Lisa Wangsness, “Pope Francis Proves to Be a Pontiff of Surprises,” Boston Globe, July 27, 2013, http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/07/26/pope-francis-proves-pontiff-surprises/BSfrY2tEAGZIXcyI2CHXsN/story.html.

34. Acts 28:17.

35. See, for example, Acts 21:27–31: “The Jews from Asia . . . seized Paul and dragged him out of the temple . . . trying to kill him.” Paul was rescued from “the Jews” by Roman authorities.

36. Acts 22:24–29. See Helmut Koester, Introduction to the New Testament, vol. 2: History and Literature of Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), 323.

37. Acts 28:25–31.

38. Romans 11:1–29. While Paul’s concerns in Romans “involve Jews, they are not directed toward Jews, or Jewish exclusivism . . . [but toward] Christian-gentile exclusivism. In Rome, gentiles are being tempted to consider Jews excluded from God’s purpose (Rom. 11): Israel has rejected the gospel; God has rejected Israel. . . . Paradoxically, these gentiles are actually guilty of the same arrogant ethnocentric exclusivism that was ascribed to that part of Israel in Rome considered stumbling: judging when they ought to be serving; boasting when they ought to be grateful.” Nanos, Mystery of Romans, 10.

39. Martin Luther, quoted by Alice E. Eckardt, “The Reformation and the Jews,” in Eugene Fisher, ed., Interwoven Destinies: Jews and Christians Through the Ages (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), 112. In his Table Talk, Luther denounced Jews and papists as “ungodly wretches . . . two stockings made of one piece of cloth.”

40. Nanos, Mystery of Romans, 31.

41. “Then Paul took the men, and the next day he purified himself with them and went into the Temple, to give notice when the days of purification would be fulfilled and the offering presented for every one of them” (Acts 21:26). In his letters, Paul shows followers of Jesus paying the Temple tithes, even Gentiles, and even from far away: 1 Corinthians 16:1–3; 2 Corinthians 1:1–9:15; Rom 15:25. See Paula Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth: King of the Jews (New York: Knopf, 1999), 36–38.

42. Nanos, Mystery of Romans, 338. Romans 3:29.

43. This, for example, from Isaiah: “It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it, and many peoples shall come, and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways, and that we may walk in his paths.’ For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Isaiah 2:2–4).

44. “The Greek-speaking Jews of the second temple period and the Hebrew- (and Aramaic-) speaking Jews after 70 C.E. debated the meaning of circumcision and the ritual’s exact place in the conversion process.” Shaye J. D. Cohen, “Crossing the Boundary and Becoming a Jew,” Harvard Theological Review 82, no. 1 (January 1989): 27.

45. Koester, Introduction to the New Testament, vol. 2, 323. John Gager, “The Parting of the Ways: A View from the Perspective of Early Christianity: ‘A Christian Perspective,’” in Fisher, Interwoven Destinies, 65.

46. Jon D. Levenson, Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 230. Levenson’s assertion would seem to be contradicted by 1 Thessalonians 2:14–15: “For you, brethren, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus which are in Judea; for you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets.” But these verses are taken by most scholars to be a post-Pauline interpolation, added later, because in the early 50s, when Paul wrote, there was no known persecution of “Christians” by “Jews.” See Levine, Misunderstood Jew, 96.

47. Felix Just, “‘The Jews’ in the Fourth Gospel,” Catholic Resources for Bible, Liturgy, Art, and Theology, http://catholic-resources.org/John/Themes-Jews.htm.

48. Luke 22:52.

49. John 8:44. For the Gospels’ progression of Satan from metaphor to “the Jews,” see Elaine Pagels, Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics (New York: Vintage, 1996), 99, 104–5. I acknowledge my large debt to Pagels.

50. Luke 2:1–20; Isaiah 7:14.

51. Though the canon of the New Testament would not be formally established until the fourth century, its first draft, including a version of the Gospel of Luke and some of Paul’s letters, had appeared by the middle of the second century. The term “Old Testament” was coined by Melito, bishop of Sardis (died c. 180), whom we saw earlier as originator of the phrase “deicide people.”

52. “Jesus left the temple and was going away, when his disciples came to point out to him the buildings of the temple. But he answered them, ‘You see all these, do you not? Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down’” (Matthew 24:1–2).

53. So here can be seen the symbolic significance of the solemnly respectful visit made by Pope John Paul II to the Western Wall in 2000. For a pope to pray at the last vestige of the Temple—praying in the Jewish mode, not Christian—was implicitly to reverse this ancient denigration. Jews recognized this meaning of the pope’s act. Christians, mainly, did not. In 2014, it was repeated by Pope Francis, but now in the company of a rabbi.

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Women, Too

1. Wisdom of Solomon 6:12, 7:25.

2. 1 Timothy 2:11–15.

3. Colossians 3:18; Ephesians 5:22.

4. 1 Corinthians 14:33–34.

5. 1 Timothy 1:1. Scholars agree that this letter is wrongly attributed to Paul, although down through the centuries it has been cited with Pauline authority. See Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992). It should be noted that just because Paul himself can be excused for responsibility for these troubling antifemale texts, like those that seem excessively anti-Jewish, that takes nothing from the fact that they reside in the tradition with all the power of biblical authority—no matter who “wrote” them. See Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2006), 97.

6. Romans 5:12; 1 Corinthians 15:47.

7. The tradition of the woman as originator of sin becomes lethal when, at the turn of the fifth century, Saint Augustine pairs the idea of Eve as temptress with the teaching that her sexual intercourse with Adam constituted the original sin. Through sex, humans are doomed, and the antidote to doom is the avoidance of women. Celibacy becomes the defining virtue for males.

8. 1 Corinthians 11:5.

9. “The misogyny of 1 Timothy 2:11–14.” Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, “The First Letter to the Corinthians,” in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, ed. Raymond Edward Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, and Roland E. Murphy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1990), 811–12. Murphy-O’Connor argued that a “circle” of later antifemale misogynists wrote to dilute Paul’s affirmations of equality with women. It is notable that this critical view of female “post-Pauline interpolations” comes from a scholar who, until his death in 2013, was a Catholic priest.

10. Romans 16:7, 16:1–2. See Karen L. King, “Women in Ancient Christianity: The New Discoveries,” Frontline, "From Jesus to Christ," http://pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/first/women.html.

11. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Discipleship of Equals: A Critical Feminist Ecclesiology of Liberation (New York: Crossroad, 1993). In an earlier work, Schüssler Fiorenza affirms “a feminist hermeneutics of suspicion [which] also questions the underlying presuppositions, androcentric models, and unarticulated interests of contemporary biblical interpretations.” In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Early Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1984), 16.

12. Galatians 4:8, 3:28–29.

13. 1 Timothy 3:1; Titus 2:15.

14. Kyriarchy takes off from the Greek word for “Lord.” “I have coined the expression kyriarchy . . . in order to name the system of domination that goes back to antiquity and is still at work today.” Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Democratizing Biblical Studies (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 11. Paul often uses the term kyrios to refer to Jesus, but his point of reference in doing so is Hebrew messianic expectation, not a Roman power structure.

15. Mark 7:28. See King, “Women in Ancient Christianity.” King, especially, informs me here.

16. Mark 5:27.

17. Luke 18:1–8; Matthew 25:1–13; Luke 21:1–4.

18. Matthew 5:31–32; Luke 7:36–50; John 4:1–42.

19. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Penguin, 1972), 151. My attention was drawn to this passage in Pericles’s funeral oration by Thomas E. J. Wiedemann, “Thucydides, Women, and the Limits of Rational Analysis,” 1983, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/642567?uid=3739696&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102412465331.

20. Such “a feminist biblical hermeneutics of remembrance” would risk uncovering “a dangerous memory that reclaims the visions and sufferings of the dead.” That is, of the dead women. Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, 19.

21. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 20.

22. Beginning in the early 1990s, there were four distinct wars of independence, all waged against the Yugoslav government in Belgrade: in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo.

23. Violeta Krasnic, “Women of Bosnia and Herzegovina: Twenty Years Later,” Foreign Policy in Focus, April 11, 2012, http://www.fpif.org/articles/women_of_bosnia_and_herzegovina_twenty_years_later. A reckoning with rape by Americans in World War II has also been undertaken by scholars. The scale of criminal behavior by GIs—reliable estimates put the number of their documentable rapes in France, Germany, and Britain at something like fourteen thousand—was “moderate” only by comparison with Soviet crimes. J. Robert Lilly, Taken by Force: Rape and American G.I.s in Europe in World War II (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). American reluctance to confront this history is suggested by the fact that this book was first published in France in 2003.

24. Judt, Postwar, 20. This figure says nothing about the number of abortions and miscarriages, which can be presumed to have been large.

25. The rape of the Sabine women has been rendered on canvas and in sculpture by Giambologna, Pietro da Cortona, Johann Heinrich Schönfeld, Nicolas Poussin, Peter Paul Rubens, Jacques-Louis David, John Leech, and Pablo Picasso. It is the basis for Stephen Vincent Benét’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

26. “For I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem to battle, and the city shall be taken and the houses plundered and the women ravished” (Zechariah 14:2–3). “Their infants will be dashed in pieces before their eyes; their houses will be plundered and their wives ravished” (Isaiah 13:16).

27. The Catholic Church “holds that it is not admissible to ordain women to the priesthood for very fundamental reasons: the example recorded in Sacred Scripture of Christ choosing his Apostles only from among men, the constant practice of the Church which has imitated Christ in choosing only men, and her living teaching authority which has consistently held that the exclusion of women from the priesthood is in accordance with God’s plan for his Church.” Pope John Paul II (citing Pope Paul VI in 1975), Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, 1994.

28. 1 Peter 3:1.

29. In 2012, an alleged fourth-century papyrus fragment came to light, a scrap of text that seems to suggest that Jesus was married. Referred to as the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, the text might have originated as early as the second century, although its authenticity is disputed. The fragment includes a reference to “Mary,” followed by the words “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife . . . she will be able to be my disciple . . . As for me, I dwell with her.’” Harvard professor Karen L. King, who made the fragment public, commented, “Christian tradition has long held that Jesus was not married, even though no reliable historical evidence exists to support that claim. This new gospel doesn’t prove that Jesus was married, but it tells us that the whole question only came up as part of vociferous debates about sexuality and marriage. From the very beginning, Christians disagreed about whether it was better not to marry, but it was over a century after Jesus’ death before they began appealing to Jesus’ marital status to support their positions.” Jonathan Beasley, “HDS Scholar Announces Existence of a New Early Christian Gospel from Egypt,” Harvard Divinity School, September 18, 2012, http://www.hds.harvard.edu/news-events/articles/2012/09/16/hds-scholar-announces-existence-of-new-early-christian-gospel-from-egypt.

30. Modern archaeology has uncovered such texts as the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of the Hebrews, and the Gospel of Truth. Several texts show women as subject to special revelation or as leaders, like Dialogue of the Savior and the Acts of Paul and Thecla, in which Paul sends forth a patrician woman “to go and teach the word of God.” We take up another below, the Gospel of Mary.

31. Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, who died in about 373, compiled a list of twenty-seven books that he called, after Melito, the New Testament, a first formal “canonization” of Christian writings. But there were dozens more texts from which, in effect, he chose. In the interest of establishing an “orthodox” reading of Christian origins, Athanasius, in 367, ordered those other texts to be destroyed. It is almost certainly this order that prompted an anonymous monk at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, to take more than fifty other “books” and hide them in a cave in a cliff, where they were discovered in 1945. Among these books are the so-called Gnostic Gospels. Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: Random House, 2005), 96–97.

32. Including, at least, “kissing.” Karen L. King, The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Polebridge, 2003), 153. I offered an early take on Mary of Magdala in my book Practicing Catholic (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2009), but now, in the light of both Roman violence and Christian anti-Judaism, I understand the denigration of this woman as an instance of the broader oppositionalism that gripped the Christian imagination.

33. Magdala may be the prosperous town that, according to Josephus, was destroyed by the Romans during the Jewish War. Josephus, The Jewish War, III:10.5

34. Matthew 28:9; John 20:14–18; Luke 24:13–27; Mark 16:1–7.

35. John 20:1–18.

36. Luke 8:1–3.

37. Luke 7:36–50. The anointing of Jesus’ feet by a “woman with an alabaster jar” shows up in Matthew, but with differences. In Matthew, Judas is shown taking offense at the value of the ointment, so the violation is less about sex than about money (Matthew 26:6–13). In John, Jesus’ friend Mary of Bethany, sister of Lazarus, is the one who anoints Jesus’ feet—the act of a loving friend, not a repentant prostitute. Again Judas objects about cost, and again Jesus defends the woman: “Let her alone, let her keep it for the day of my burial. The poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me” (John 12:1–9).

38. Mark 16:8.

39. Luke 24:11.

40. Virgil, Aeneid, II.246–247, 341–346, 403–408. Cassandra was cursed by a scorned Apollo to always speak the truth and never be believed.

41. Even men as astute as the historians Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder misremember the importance of Cassandra, as this exchange shows. They are discussing the role of the intellectual as critic of the conventional wisdom. Snyder has just challenged Judt for his naysaying. Judt replies, “Well, you know, Cassandra has quite a reputation. It’s not so bad to go down fighting as the last person to tell an unpleasant truth.” Snyder: “We remember Cassandra, but no one remembers what her unpleasant truth was.” Judt: “Fair enough.” But her “unpleasant truth” about the Trojan Horse was momentous! Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 309.

42. A papyrus document, the Gospel of Mary, was found in Egypt in the late nineteenth century. It dated to the fourth century but was a copy of a text dating to the middle of the second century. See King, Gospel of Mary of Magdala.

43. Gospel of Mary 6:1–4.

44. Gospel of Mary 10:7–9.

45. Ross S. Kraemer, “The New Testament,” in Women in Scripture, ed. Carol Meyers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 21.

CHAPTER NINE: Imitation of Christ

1. George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah, Part 1, Act 1 (Digireads.com, 2011; first published 1921), 7.

2. David Tracy, Dialogue with the Other: The Intra-Religious Dialogue (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1991), 4.

3. Bonhoeffer later wrote to his brother-in-law, “I can’t think what made me behave as I did. I am tormented by the thought that I didn’t do as you asked as a matter of course.” Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Knopf, 2014), 166–67.

4. Marsh, Strange Glory, 326, 345.

5. Protestants speak of the “inerrancy” of Scripture, which of course is belied by the Jew and female denigrations in the New Testament. Catholics speak of the “infallibility” of the pope, which is belied by—take your pick of papal sins. Inerrancy and infallibility both seek to protect the idea that the Church is a reliable custodian of the Gospel, but that reliability does not imply any kind of perfection. Christian coresponsibility for the Holocaust is the single clearest refutation of any notion that the Church as such is exempt from—or above—the human condition.

6. “And passing along by the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net in the sea; for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, ‘Follow me and I will make you become fishers of men.’ And immediately they left their nets and followed him” (Mark 1:16–18).

7. Nachfolge was first published in 1937. Its English edition, appearing in 1948, was titled The Cost of Discipleship. “Costly grace,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus. It comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him. It is a grace because Jesus says, ‘My yoke is easy and my burden is light.’” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, trans. R. H. Fuller (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 45.

8. Terry Eagleton’s characterization of T. S. Eliot’s idea. Culture and the Death of God (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2014), 121.

9. Schweitzer published The Quest of the Historical Jesus in 1910, a book that is taken to mark the end of the so-called first quest for the historical Jesus. The second quest came after World War II, sparked by the “demythologizing” typified by the work of Rudolf Bultmann, and the third quest came in the 1980s, centered on pro-and-con criticism of the Jesus Seminar.

10. The resonance of the Schweitzer quote shows in its being cited, for example, by John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), 53; by Paula Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth: King of the Jews (New York: Knopf, 1999), 270; and by John S. Dunne, Eternal Consciousness (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 2012), 9.

11. Albert Schweitzer, Albert Schweitzer: Essential Writings, ed. James Brabazon (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2005), 76–80.

12. This is Ross Douthat’s characterization of the portrait of Jesus offered by Reza Aslan in his book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. “The Return of the Jesus Wars,” New York Times, August 3, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/opinion/sunday/douthat-return-of-the-jesus-wars.html. It is not clear that Aslan would regard Douthat’s characterization as accurate.

13. Philippians 2:9–10.

14. Dorothy Day, From Union Square to Rome (Silver Spring, Md.: Preservation of the Faith Press, 1938), repr. The Catholic Worker Movement, http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/Reprint2.cfm?TextID=207.

15. The Imitation of Christ was written by Thomas à Kempis, a sixteenth-century monk, a kind of rebutter of Martin Luther. Bonhoeffer valued the book, taking “imitation” as a key idea, although he did not associate with its denigrations of the world as “vanity.” Marsh, Strange Glory, 241, 315.

16. Dorothy Day, “Room for Christ,” Catholic Worker, December 1945, 2.

17. Philippians 2:6–7.

18. Luke 4: 21.

19. Philippians 2:8–11.

20. “Then the LORD said, ‘I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians’” (Exodus 3:7–8).

21. Isaiah 52:14. This is the New Living Translation. The RSV gives the verse as “His appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the sons of men.”

22. Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God, 160.

23. From a letter written in 1940 to Marguerite Caetani, on the occasion of the death of her only son: “You have been much in my thoughts, and I knew that your loss would not become easier. I do not pretend that such a loss ever does; only in time, perhaps, it is simply like learning to live without one’s eyesight, or crippled. One just makes do and carries on the rest of life. I don’t even maintain that faith makes loss easier; it just, if I may say so, improves the quality of the suffering and makes it sometimes fruitful instead of useless.” T. S. Eliot, quoted in Helen Barolini, Their Other Side: Six American Women and the Lure of Italy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 210.

24. Matthew 27:46 repeats a line from Psalm 22. Luke 23:46.

25. Consider, for example, Christopher Hitchens’s criticism of Mother Teresa, as “not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.” “Mommie Dearest,” Slate, October 20, 2003. It is not necessary to share Hitchens’s contempt for Mother Teresa and like-minded charity workers to see the point that concern for the poor must be extended to opposition to what causes poverty.

26. Dorothy Day, “Our Stand,” Catholic Worker, June 1940, and “Poverty Is to Care and Not to Care,” Catholic Worker, April 1953.

27. Matthew 5:38–48.

28. “We want genocide to have begun and ended with Nazism,” the Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist observed of European colonialism. “[But] the air he [Hitler] and all other Western people in his childhood breathed was soaked in the conviction that imperialism is a biologically necessary process, which, according to the laws of nature, leads to the inevitable destruction of the lower races. It was a conviction which had already cost millions of human lives before Hitler provided his highly personal application.” Exterminate All the Brutes (London: Granta, 1996), 141. In hatred of the Jew, that is, lies “the origin of white Christian Europe.” Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1979), 391.

29. In the decade of the 1950s, the American nuclear arsenal far outstripped the Soviet Union’s, growing from fewer than two hundred atomic bombs to, by 1960, more than twenty thousand mostly hydrogen bombs. The Soviet arsenal in 1960 was still counted in the hundreds, although in subsequent decades Moscow would draw even in the arms race. “Table of Global Nuclear Weapons Stockpiles, 1945–2002,” Natural Resources Defense Council, 2002, http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/nudb/datab19.asp.

30. See Paul Elie’s treatment of Dorothy Day in The Life You Save May Be Your Own (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004).

31. James Carroll, Prayer from Where We Are (Washington, D.C.: National Office of Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, 1970).

32. Ronald Dworkin, Religion Without God (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 1. Dworkin might be one of those chided by Terry Eagleton as “reluctant atheists . . . They have everything of religious faith but the substance of it.” Culture and the Death of God, 204.

33. Albert Einstein, “Living Philosophies,” in Living Philosophies: The Reflections of Some Eminent Men and Women of Our Time, ed. Clifton Fadiman (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 6.

34. I came to this understanding in reading John Macquarrie’s masterwork, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought (Philadelphia: Trinity International Press, 1990), 360.

35. James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (New York: Pantheon, 2011). I acknowledge my debt here to Gleick.

36. “A more familiar metaphor is the cloud. All that information—all that information capacity—looms over us, not quite visible, not quite tangible, but awfully real; amorphous, spectral; hovering nearby, yet not situated in any place. Heaven must once have felt this way to the faithful.” Gleick, The Information, chapter 14.

37. The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works, trans. A. C. Spearing (New York: Penguin, 2001), 27–28.

38. “God is that-without-which-there-would-be-no-evolution-at-all; God is the atemporal undergirder and sustainer of the whole process of apparent contingency and ‘randomness,’ yet—we can say in the spirit of Augustine—simultaneously closer to its inner workings than it is to itself. As such, God is both ‘within the process’ and ‘without.’” Sarah Coakley, “God and Evolution: A New Solution,” Harvard Divinity School Bulletin, Spring/Summer 2007, 10.

39. 2 Peter 1:4. Here is how John Macquarrie makes the point: “Only if there is in all human beings a possibility for transcendence and a capacity for God, can there be such a possibility and capacity in the man Jesus. . . . So if there is any entity on this planet in and through which God can be present and revealed, it would be in a human person.” Jesus Christ in Modern Thought, 381.

40. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 26.

41. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 2.

42. Exodus 3:13–14. “I AM WHO I AM” is variously translated, as, for example, “I AM WHO CAUSES TO BE,” and the meaning of this phrase is much debated. For our purposes, the biblical intuition that God’s name is best given as some form of the verb “to be” is the point.

43. John 8:56–59.

44. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him” (Genesis 1:27).

45. “The primary imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the ethereal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 304.

46. Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God, 101.

47. Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God, 101. “It is through this imaginative force that individuals become most intensely alive; yet in doing so, they also become conscious of sharing in some larger more corporate form of existence, aware that the roots of the self sink down to infinity . . . the imagination is a secular form of grace, one which seizes upon the self from some unfathomable depth beyond it . . . The subject does not fundamentally belong to itself.” Culture and the Death of God, 101–2.

48. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny, with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 318.

49. Effie Kymissis and Claire L. Poulson, “The History of Imitation in Learning Theory: The Language Acquisition Process,” Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 54, no. 2 (September 1990): 113–27.

50. “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us” (Hebrews 12:1).

CONCLUSION: Because God Lives

1. Fyodor Dostoyevsky commenting on “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” in notes on The Brothers Karamazov.

2. 1 Thessalonians 4:16.

3. Edward Schillebeeckx, Interim Report on the Books Jesus and Christ (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 109.

4. “Surely the depths of Christian revelation are inexhaustible and always yield new convictions in new situations. Globalization and current religious dialogue and conflict have thus yielded new awareness of the implications of what has been revealed in Jesus Christ.” Roger Haight, The Future of Christology (New York: Continuum, 2005), 159. I acknowledge a particular debt to Haight.

5. Haight, Future of Christology, 162.

6. “The projecting upon Jesus of a divinity that radically sets him apart from other human beings does not correspond to the New Testament and undermines the very logic of Christian faith.” Haight, Future of Christology, 162.

7. Ernst Troeltsch: “Whatever is true, great and profound in our faith today will be so two hundred years hence, even if perhaps in quite a different form. Since we possess these religious powers of the present only in association with the present and reverenced person of Christ, we gather around him unconcerned whether in a hundred years religion will still be nourished on Jesus or will have some other center. . . . We have resolutely to grasp the divine as it presents itself to us in our time.” Quoted in Wesley J. Wildman, Fidelity with Plausibility: Modest Christologies in the Twentieth Century (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1998), 20. I acknowledge Wildman, whose “fidelity with plausibility” formulation nicely captures my dual commitment to classical tradition and contemporary intelligibility.

8. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 360–61.

9. Recall this as a variation on the opening lines of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:1, 1:14).