Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen, and: Holy Hatred: Christianity, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust (review)

Jeremy Cohen has contributed significantly to our understanding of the relationship between Christians and Jews over the centuries. Cohen traces the origins of the Christ killer charge in the New Testament, through the Fathers of the Church, especially Augustine, whose reasoning provided the basis for the religio licita status of Judaism within Christendom, and medieval thinkers such as Abelard and Aquinas, to the Second Vatican Council, which rejected it. The final section of the book (pp. 185–261) deals with the passion in religious art, Oberammergau and the changes made in the text of the 2000 version to ameliorate its traditionally negative portrayal of Jews and Judaism, and the Crucifixion as depicted in the movies.

I highly recommend this book for the insightful survey it provides of Christian history over the centuries, but I do have a problem that goes to the understanding of Nostra Aetate, no. 4 (hereinafter NA). Cohen summarizes modern Catholic New Testament scholarship by contrasting Father Raymond Brown (who was a Sulpician, not a Jesuit as Cohen states on p. 181), opting for John Dominic Crossan's approach over that of Brown. In the process, however, he misreads Brown, claiming that Brown did not take into account the fact that the text of a given New Testament book reflects the time in which it was written as much as the time it is writing about. This is not true, of course, and it skews the discussion into further misunderstandings. For example, on the same page he states that Brown holds to "the official 'party line' of the Catholic Church . . . holding Jews, not Romans primarily responsible for Jesus' death." No, that is not the official line of the Church. NA holds that some, not necessarily all, Jewish leaders were involved. It does not exonerate or hint at exonerating Pilate, whose decision it was. Caiphas is considered in Jewish tradition to be the quisling puppet of Pilate, as indeed he was. Jesus did, the gospels agree, challenge the temple leadership, which thereafter began looking for a way to silence him. Pilate, harsh as he was, probably did not have the scruples about killing Jesus that the later gospels ascribe to him. But in any event, the gospels do not present the Crucifixion as merely a Jewish plot, but as an act agreed upon by the Roman and temple authorities.

Michael intends his book, which is admirably concise and readable, to be a history of anti-Semitism over the centuries to its culmination in the Holocaust. To some extent he succeeds. But there are some very serious problems, such as his rejection of the validity of any real distinction between the ancient Christian teaching of contempt against Jews and Judaism, to use the telling phrase of historian Jules Isaac, and modern, racial anti-Semitism. Pushing this theory that nothing really significant happened in Christian Jewish relations, save for evil things done by Christians against Jews, moves Michael to deny or slide over quite a number of key distinctions and historically complex realities.

It is not adequate to Augustine's thought, for example, to state that he believed that "any injustice done to [the Jews], short of murder . . . was justified—and even murder was sometimes justified" (p.2). Augustine in fact laid the theological groundwork for the canon law, initiated by Pope St. Gregory the Great and reaffirmed by his successors throughout the centuries, that recognized Judaism, alone among non-Christian religions, as religio licita. Augustine argued that Jews, who witness to the validity of the Old Testament, should be able to worship freely as did their ancestors. They should not be forced to convert but should be attracted to Christ by the witness of Christian love.

One of the promotional blurbs...