Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age. James Carroll

ancient world. Nothing but a two-thousand-year-old divinity claim puts Jesus before us today.

      And more: if a faith in Jesus as Son of God—a present self-disclosure of God’s fatherly and forgiving disposition, an “incarnation”—does not survive the critically minded, scientifically responsible, properly “secular” inquiry of the kind I aim to undertake, however imperfectly, then Jesus will surely drop back into the crowd of history’s heroes, ultimately to be forgotten.

      The God/man affirmation, in other words, need not condemn this pursuit to irrationality or absurdity—or to a separate “non-overlapping magisterium” where normal rules of logic do not apply.²⁵ It can, instead, sponsor a retrieval of the light, depth, and beauty of Christian tradition at its best, even while offering a new way—appropriate to a less credulous time—to say that Jesus is Christ; that Jesus Christ is God. Speaking quite personally, nothing matters more to me than that. For no other reason would I take up this work.

      But the words “Jesus” and “Christ” bring us back to Bonhoeffer, for whom, under the pressure of history, the key was Jewishness. For while “Jesus” can be routinely understood as a Jew, “Christ” is taken to be the claim that cuts him off from Jewishness. In fact, on the hinge of this contradiction, as Bonhoeffer saw, turns every question—both those that close off inquiry and those that open into new understanding.

Jesus a Jew ²⁶

      That “Jesus” was Jewish can seem an obvious statement today, but in fact, the idea has barely penetrated the shallow surface of Christian theology.²⁷ And we are not just talking here about grossly anachronistic distortions of Jesus into something alien—like the blue-eyed, flowing-haired Northern European who appeared in the picture Bibles, holy cards, and altar murals of modernity.²⁸ No, the anti-Jewish distorting goes deeper than race, ethnicity, or cultural milieu. Lessons of the Holocaust notwithstanding, it perverts the religious imagination of the West to this day.

      Christian anti-Judaism springs from the Gospel construct, dating to the late first century, that pits Jesus against “the Jews” during his Passion and death, which occurred early in that century. That construct led to the “Christ killer” slander, which many Christians have declined to repeat since World War II.²⁹ A transformation of mainstream Christian theology, centered in the Roman Catholic reforms of the Second Vatican Council, has mostly transformed the age-old “teaching of contempt” for Jews into a “teaching of respect.” Most Christians routinely, and authentically, renounce anti-Semitism. Christian scholars and religious leaders find in Jews creative and open-minded partners in the momentous project of interfaith dialogue; Jewish scholars and leaders reciprocate.³⁰ Nevertheless, a chasm separates Jewish and Christian perspectives, and the slow plumbing of this chasm will be a main project of this book. The separating gulf begins not at the beginning, but not long after the beginning, with the portrait first drawn of Jesus and then, across time, reified by the Church.

      Among Christians, and therefore among everyone else, thinking about Jesus has not really changed much, because, even beyond the most troubling verses (“His blood be on us and on our children,” for example³¹), the entire structure of the Gospel imagination assumes a cosmic conflict between Jesus and his own people such that, despite the narrative’s taking pains to place Jesus in the line of David, he was hardly portrayed as authentically Jewish at all. This is more than, say, Mark’s pitting him against Pharisees in Galilee and against high priests in Jerusalem; more than the libels of the Passion. As the Christian memory overwhelmingly shapes the story, Jesus is opposed not just to particular antagonists but to the whole culture into which he was born.

      In the Prologue to John’s Gospel, we find the theme struck with power: “He came to his own home, and his own people received him not.”³² It’s a basic rule of narrative, older than Aristotle: every story needs a conflict. In history—in about the year 30, the first of our three time frames—the mortal conflict faced by Jesus, like every Jew in occupied Palestine, was with Rome. But the Gospels—dating to that second time frame, between 70 and 100—do not tell it that way. As various historians and theologians point out today,³³ the virtues of Jesus (openness, compassion, egalitarianism) are constantly displayed in the Gospels precisely by contrast with his corrupt Jewish milieu, which is rendered as exclusivist, unloving, legalistic, and mercilessly hierarchical. “Jesus” is the name of the manual laborer from Nazareth. Once he began to see himself, or be seen by others, as the exalted “Christ” (from the Greek for “anointed” and meaning “Messiah”), Jesus began to be understood as other than Jewish, even if his declared identity was as a fulfillment of Jewish messianic expectation. His being “Christ,” that is, worked against his being “Jesus,” because his elevation up the pyramid of what scholars call “high Christology”—from peasant Galilean to anointed Christ; then to apocalyptic Son of Man; then to favored Son of God; then to preexisting Logos, or “Word”; ultimately to second person of the Trinity, and “True God of True God”—had the practical effect of obliterating the single most cogent note of his identity as a man.

      Judaism, after all, is a religion—a form of mediation between humans and God. Such mediation is necessary because, by definition, humans cannot have direct access to God. If it were otherwise, there would be no need of religion. But because Jesus as the Word of God (“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”³⁴) was understood as fully participating in the Godhead, in immediate mystical union (“I and the Father are one”³⁵), the Gospel writer makes it clear that Jesus had no real need of the mediation of religion. He had no real need, that is, of the Jewish rituals of sacrifice, Temple observance, salvation history, metaphors, memory, Book, Law, peoplehood. Jesus underwent the paradigmatically Jewish initiation of circumcision, yes, but early Christians obsessively invented non-Jewish reasons for him to have done so.³⁶ Christian theology, since at least the Council of Chalcedon, in 451, has insisted on the true humanity of Jesus, but by deleting the religious significance of this main fact of his particular human condition, theology has simultaneously undercut his humanity. Belief in the divinity of Jesus as usually propounded, that is, makes his authentic Jewishness not just unnecessary but impossible.

      Since well before Bonhoeffer, Christian scholars have known there is a problem here. But ever since Bonhoeffer—and the crisis of the war—theologically minded historians, together with historically attuned theologians, have been driven to do heroic work in addressing that problem. We will see that. But scholarship aside, a complete transformation of popular consciousness and faith has yet to occur. If our reach is toward such a transformation here, still our reckoning with the full Jewishness of Jesus Christ will mark only the start of the story, not its end point. Taking my own case as typical, I thought years ago that I understood the meaning of the Jewishness of Jesus, having been ambushed one afternoon in the Art Institute of Chicago, for example, by the sight of the French-Jewish artist Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion, a large painting of the crucified one draped not with the familiar loincloth but with a Jewish prayer shawl. The cross rises up from a lit menorah, and the figure is surrounded by fugitives dressed in recognizably Jewish garb, terrorized by raging fires. I read, presumably on the artwork’s posted identity card, that Chagall had painted the work in 1938, in response to Kristallnacht. Jesus was a Jewish victim! But that recognition came to me in the tumultuous 1960s, when it seemed the most natural thing in the world to see Jesus, even more dramatically, as a kind of Che Guevara Jew, in rebellion against the corruptions of most fellow Jews and a Jewish establishment that saw to his killing. That perception was a block to what Chagall revealed. Who the victim? The line from Sophocles came to me, first, in this connection: “Who is the slayer, who the victim? Speak!”

      The so-called Dead Sea Scrolls marked the start of a scholarly transformation and ultimately, in my case, a personal one—a decisive illumination of the context within which Jesus lived. Having been discovered beginning not long after the end of World War II,³⁷ the ancient texts produced whole libraries of studies demonstrating that in the time of Jesus, there was not one “Judaism,” but a multiplicity of Judaisms. Various Jewish groups of that ancient era vied with one another,