The Real Jesus
How a Jewish reformer lost his Jewish identity
So why did God become a man in the first place? The 11th-century bishop St. Anselm argued in Why God Became Man that the Crucifixion atoned for the sins of humankind. Carroll elaborates: "It's not a coincidence it was written when it was. St. Anselm was a friend of Pope Urban II, who called for the First Crusade. "It was a time of plagues, of savage war, of millennial fever," he says. The notion of Christ's sacrifice was "a way of coping with a very violent and brutal world, and it's a way of making sense of it. Crusaders are promised a life in heaven if they die on the Crusades." En route to liberate the Holy Land, however, the soldiers stopped in the Rhineland, where they left up to a third of northern Europe's Jews dead.
Retaliation. Although the attack was officially condemned by the church, nothing stanched the ongoing anti-Jewish violence. From the 12th century on, Jews were repeatedly accused of "ritual murder" for the killing of Christian boys as a re-enactment of the Crucifixion--a charge that always provoked brutal retaliation. "Blood libel," a related charge that Jews killed Christian children to drink their blood at Passover, originated in the 13th century--and, even today, continues to resurface in some parts of the world.
Official tolerance was suspended in 1215, when a council convened by Pope Innocent III recognized the existence of one universal church. No one outside the Catholic Church would be saved. New laws required Jews to dress a certain way--a precursor to the yellow armbands of Nazi Germany--and banned them from public office. Even the Black Plague of the mid-1300s, which killed 1 in 3 Europeans, was attributed to a Jewish plot.
Throughout much of the Middle Ages, Passion plays were among the most dramatic illustrations of the medieval Christian demonization of the Jews. Focusing on the suffering, death, and Resurrection of Jesus, performances typically sent many Jews into hiding to avoid mob violence that included ransacking their homes and killing them.
Christian ambivalence about Jesus's Jewishness became most evident with Martin Luther and the Reformation. Six years after he posted his 95 Theses, Luther wrote a defense of the Jews called "That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew." He believed his purified form of Christianity would finally bring the Jews around. When they failed to respond to what Luther saw as a magnanimous gesture, he retaliated in 1543 with a tract called "On the Jews and Their Lies." "He thought Catholics were like Jews, only worse," says Mary Boys, a professor at Union Theological Seminary. For its part, the Catholic Church declared in 1545 that all sinners bore the burden of Christ's death, even while it imposed new restrictions on "unbelievers."
The relationship between Christians and Jews improved only slightly during the Enlightenment. Jews got out of the ghettos to which they had been restricted, for instance. "But the desire to keep Jesus away from any `Jewish contamination' at this point becomes actually greater," says Levine. By the second half of the 19th century, the quest for the historical Jesus was in full swing. While of great interest to scholars, the resulting picture of Jesus as a Jewish teacher of his day was troublesome for many Christian theologians, especially in Germany. "Scholars said there's nothing new in Jesus," says Susannah Heschel, a professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth. "So then what's new about Christianity? Where does it differ from Judaism? It touched a sensitive nerve."
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