Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - Very often, especially in the past, the Christian community forgot to teach that Jesus was a Palestinian Jew; to all effects a member of the Jewish religion. Still today, more than 40 years since the Second Vatican Council, this historical and anthropological truth is often unknown or not clear to many people, especially in Europe. A fact which has produced in Christianity and, now and then, still produces, - if not enmity or discrimination, certainly indifference or worse, the inability to fully understand the Mystery which lies at the root of the fecund and atavistic pluri-millenary relationship between the Jewish religion and that from which it comes, as its root and source, the religion founded by Christ.
Jesus then was a Jew and His teaching is rooted in the Jewish Bible and in the Judaism of His time. Only in the early 20th century some Jewish scholars admitted that the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, were very similar to Judaic schools which existed in Palestine in the 1st century. These original studies led to the first comparisons between the texts of the Gospels and the Rabbinic writings, and in particular commentaries on the New Testament, the Talmud and the Midrashìm.
In the light of recent archaeological discoveries, what is more, there have been no few studies on the Jewishness of Jesus, indeed the Jewishness of Christianity itself, which we know was born and developed within Judaism, a phenomenon which gave rise to a just as unknown experience in the early Syrian-Palestinian Christian community, called Jewish-Christianity. Mary, Joseph, the Twelve, the disciples and Christ's followers of the Syrian-Palestinian area up to the end of the 4th century AD, were identified by scholars of early Christianity as Jewish-Christians, in other words, Jews who had converted to Him, the Lord and Saviour of the world, and therefore the awaited Messiah of the Scriptures and God incarnate in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The One, true God and true Man, who brought to fulfilment the ancient writings of the Fathers and revealed the identity and nature of the Triune God.
Moreover it is just as true that we can only understand the Bible if we are familiar with both the Biblical context and the sitz im leben, or the place in which every text is rooted. Even from an approximate reading of the Gospels we grasp that Jesus lived as a Jew, he kept the law of Israel, celebrated the Jewish feasts, went regularly to the Temple and the synagogue. He was born and he died a Jew. However it should be said that he acted autonomously, almost keeping at a distance from the surrounding context, in a complex and original relationship of continuity and discontinuity, tradition and novelty, revolution and renewal, law and grace, justice and mercy, community and individuality. Definitively, what Jesus adds to Judaism, and so doing inaugurating a new religion - Christianity - is His very person, the Mystery which underlies the incarnation of God made man, that humanity might have a model not only theological but also anthropological, visible and concrete, and so become holy, divine. This is what Orthodox Christians call divinisation and Catholics salvation. However the theme of salvation, in relation to the various covenants we find in the Old Testament and to the new and everlasting Covenant revealed by Christ to mankind, will be the subject of our next reflections. For the time being it is enough to say that in order to communicate to the world the newness of his message the Master Jesus of Nazareth drew abundantly from the treasure of what was first Israelite and later Jewish, culture and wisdom.
In this regard Nostra Aetate - the Vatican II document on relations between Christianity and other religions, Judaism in primis - endorsed the teaching of the Apostles of the Nations, an exemplary Jewish convert to Christianity, who carried the Word of God to the end of the then known world, with the famous statement: "The Church keeps ever in mind the words of the Apostle about his kinsmen: "theirs is the sonship and the glory and the covenants and the law and the worship and the promises; theirs are the fathers and from them is the Christ according to the flesh" (Rom. 9:4-5), the Son of the Virgin Mary".
Ultimately, to fully understand what historically happened, we must start from the historic fact of the Jewishness of Jesus. That Jesus is a Jew, and he always will be and that his teaching is rooted in the Jewish Bible and Judaism. The Christ of the faith is Jesus of Nazareth, whose Mystery of the incarnation leads us inevitable to the profound and fathomless plan of God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
In the history of progressive estrangement and involuntary interweaving due to the diaspora between the two religions of the same Revelation, which marked major events in the past two millennia, only recently we see a desire for dialogue and discussion, necessary and urgent, in order to trace new paths, not without purification and conversion on both sides, so as to plan a different future charged with hope not only within the two Abramitic faiths, but above all to bear witness to the world of the true face of God, of which the responsibility falls to the chosen people, but also to the Church founded by Christ, who as a Jew brought to fulfilment and perfection the ancient prophecies.
Dialogue however, it should be underlined, means acknowledging and maintaining firm the difference between the two faiths. Therefore, undertaking serious and clear comparison, without syncretism or weakening; telling each other the truth, as was the title of a statement made public on 10 September 2000 in the New York Times, signed by 172 intellectuals and rabbis, Dabrù Emèt. Expression taken from the prophet Zechariah who says “ Speak the truth to one another” (8,16). This statement, a Jewish declaration on Christians and Christianity, is an important milestone in the many Jewish statements in response above all to Nostra Aetate.
Starting out again from Jesus, Jewish Master and Rabbi, produces in both faiths that awareness which highlights differences yes, but at the same time creates the conditions for admitting the limits and obstacles which have led especially in the past to hatred and enmity. Negativity to transform by means of profound reflection on the Mystery of the One and Only God, Father of all, who needs both faiths in order to be illuminated on all sides. (7 - to be continued) (Agenzia Fides 30/5/2008; parole 1.040)
