I never tried to arrive at settled convictions about Jesus of Nazareth. Being Jewish, I saw no need to do that, except for holding a few broad-stroke opinions about certain views associated with Christianity. 

For example, take the belief that Christians were more loving than Jews. Nothing in my personal experience has led me to agree with that flattering opinion. My parents were pretty loving people.

Or take the theological tenet that Jesus, by his death on the cross, has freed believers from the spiritually dire consequences of Original Sin. I was aware that the doctrine of Original Sin had been introduced by Paul and never was a Jewish doctrine. You can’t find it in the Hebrew Bible. What’s more, to my knowledge, you can’t find Original Sin in any words attributed to Jesus in any of the four gospels.

Let me linger on that one for a moment. What’s the Jewish take on the Garden of Eden and the story of the expulsion of humankind from that Garden? I don’t speak for my co-religionists of course, but the story – as I understand it through my Jewish lens – is an analysis of the human condition put into narrative form. We suffer, we die, we know the difference between good and evil and we find ourselves in the midst of asymmetrical erotic relations (neither perfectly balanced nor ideally fair). That’s what it’s like to be human. Hey, live with it!

Does that place us incurably far from God – hopelessly out of the divine reach? Well, that’s not what the text in Genesis says. Once outside the Garden, Adam and Eve have two sons. They name the boys Cain and Abel. Abel’s sacrifice to God is accepted. Accepted, expulsion or no expulsion! Cain’s is not. As we know, Cain doesn’t take it well. He murders his brother and for that he bears responsibility. No doctrine of lapsarian incapacity blurs these dramatic distinctions, which will mark history going forward.

So, if I did not think of Jesus as freeing humankind from Original Sin, who or what was Jesus, as I thought of him? That’s hard to say. I didn’t blame him for Christian anti-semitism. I knew there were passages, in the gospels as we have them, that didn’t seem to me credible but could license a theology of contempt for Jews. Thus Matthew 27:25 has a Jewish crowd purportedly shouting to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, “His blood be upon us and upon our children!” My thought was, who on earth shouts such words? Would even a hysterical lynch mob emit such a yell – casting a dark, future-binding curse over their children? No, I thought, that has to be a later interpolation, from a redactor with an axe to grind. How many such interpolations might there be, or what circumstance might have prompted them was a matter for New Testament scholars. Not my academic specialty.

On the other hand, I must have thought it better not to think about such questions overmuch. Christian friends had given me support in a key instance I had written about in this column. Earnest interfaith discussions, in which I’d participated, had been heartening and thought-provoking. And I’ve always liked hillbilly gospel. Let’s not wake the powers of darkness.

Like G.W.F. Hegel, I hold the view that cultures can’t be understood until you ask what their members think about the Absolute. Who or what is ultimate for them? Where do they get their sense of life as meaningful? Much else in a culture – what’s considered good taste, its choreography of erotic relations, the threats to self-esteem within it, its supports for self-confidence – these shake down from its highest places. What is sacred in a culture? What counts as defiling for its members? Of course, in complex cultures, where there are many strands of influence, this is harder to get at. Still, the Hegelian questions remain instructive and worth asking.

Since last October 7, a tidal wave of antisemitism has swept over our small blue planet. I don’t know how this phenomenon looks from outer space, but here on earth it makes many once-familiar places almost unrecognizable to me. In Western countries, the most prominent voices seem to come from the secular associations and groups that dominate contemporary communication in our day. Often such groups are skeptical in their general outlook, and given over to causes and purposes that are post-religious. Despite these apparently nonsectarian surfaces, I have a Hegelian desire to know what view of the Ultimate lies back of the antisemitic tidal wave? 

Contemporary cultural formations descend from a culture whose view of the Ultimate was Christian. For nearly two thousand years – certainly after the first generation of Jesus-followers had died out – Christian culture emitted and transmitted a reflexive hatred and contempt for Jews. Do the nominally secular groups who now openly despise their Jewish fellow students, teachers, colleagues and neighbors, owe nothing to the theology that informed the culture of their forebears for the previous two millennia?

Out of curiosity about the whole phenomenon, I’ve started to read a book recommended to me as a careful study by the Cambridge-educated William Nicholls, an Anglican minister who founded and headed the Department of Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia. His book is titled Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate. It traces the origins of this thread in the fabric of Christian theology, making use of the latest work in New Testament scholarship, to lift out the historical Jesus, peeling back what recent scholarship suspects to be the partisan polemic partly overlaying and disguising the original figure.

So far, the effect on me of Nicholls’ 437 page book, of which I’ve only read up to page 67, has been to disclose Jesus the Jew. And so far, from the little I’ve read, he sounds wonderful.

I believe we might still be friends.

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