Rejoicing in the Legacy of Jesus the Jew

However improbably, Jesus is emerging as a figure through whom Jews and Christians are discovering each other. For many centuries, Jews viewed Jesus with resentment and dread. Even uttering his name was considered an act of unbearable intimacy with the person Jews regarded as the ultimate apostate, responsible for their persecution. In the name of Jesus, after all, Jews were martyred and humiliated and forcibly converted. And so Jews referred to Jesus as “that man,” or avoided invoking him altogether.

Growing up in Brooklyn in the early 1960s, I’d cross the street rather than pass the local Catholic church, which I imagined a place of menace, where Jews were kidnapped and forcibly baptized. I avoided even glancing at the crucifix displayed outside: The image of a Jew hanging in agony seemed to me a taunt.

For their part, Christians revered a dejudaized Jesus, emphasizing those of his sayings that seemed to repudiate Jewish law while ignoring those which upheld it. Jesus’ mission was equated with the spiritual displacement of the Jewish people--supplanting God’s covenant with the Jews with the new Christian covenant. In its religious paintings and statues, Western Christianity remade Jesus into its own image, European rather than Semitic.

Now, though, as growing numbers of Christians confront the Judaic roots of their faith, the historical Jesus is reemerging in his inevitable Jewishness. And in a reciprocal gesture, some Jews are discovering their spiritual kinship with Christianity and their literal kinship with Jesus.

That mutual convergence has been made possible by a growing Christian repudiation of triumphalism. In a series of documents beginning with the 1965 Vatican II statement of Nostra Aetate, the Catholic Church has become increasingly explicit in affirming the ongoing validity of the Jewish covenant; the pope has repeatedly referred to the Jews as “the people of the covenant.”

Jewish and Christian theologians are grappling with the notion of parallel covenants for the two faiths. Meanwhile, a new generation of Christian and Jewish scholars now places Jesus firmly within the Judaic context of his time. Jesus lived and died a practicing Jew. Some of his aphorisms--like noting that man wasn’t given to the Sabbath but the Sabbath to man--were borrowed from Rabbinic discourse. A penitent Christianity enables Jews to stop blaming Jesus for the persecutions of the past and appreciate his role in transforming humanity. Obviously, those of us who now embrace Jesus as a long-lost brother relate to him in a particularly Jewish way. For Christians, Jesus is the sacrificial redeemer who took upon himself the sins of humanity; for Jews like me, Jesus is a prophetic figure through whom faith in the God of Israel was spread among nations.

That perspective emerges in a groundbreaking statement issued last year and signed by more than 200 rabbis and Judaic scholars. Called “Dabru Emet,” (Hebrew for “speak truth”), the statement was an attempt to fashion a positive Jewish theology on Christianity. “While Christian faith is not a viable religious choice for Jews ... through Christianity, hundreds of millions of people have entered into relationship with the God of Israel,” it read.

My friend, Sister Gabrielle--a French-born nun who lived for many years in Jerusalem--notes that Jews and Christians both anticipate a redeemed world without suffering. What matters most, she insists, isn’t that we disagree over the identity of the messiah but that we await his coming together.

And so as Christians celebrate the birth of the man they revere as their messiah, I join them in praying for redemption--and rejoice in the legacy of Jesus the Jew.

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Yossi Klein Halevi is the author of “At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew’s Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land” (Morrow, 2001).