Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - Fourteen years ago Jacob Neusner the world’s most renowned scholar on Judaism in the first centuries of the Christian era, published with the title A Rabbi talks with Jesus, which the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger considered the most important for Jewish-Christian dialogue, among those published in that decade. He affirmed among other things that the book’s absolute intellectual honesty, precision of analysis, respect for the other party as well as a deeply rooted loyalty to the authors own position, made it a challenge especially for Christians, who should reflect well on the contrast between Moses and Jesus. I questions the author posed to us Christians are fundamental and precisely for this fruitful. Moreover the Cardinal the approach of the author who all told did not address Jesus as a fictitious historical figure, instead he gave always the right importance to the real figure of Jesus as presented in the Gospel of Matthew.
In our opinion this “mutatis mutandis” judgement can be applied to the book “Jesus of Nazareth”, for both its contents and its method. Therefore it is to be hoped that the publication of the Pope’s book will lead people to reconsider relativistic pluralism structuring which often characterises confrontation, because its method is not scientific but merely self-referential and politically correct, nor is it an ecclesial method, since, as Saint Peter would say, it does not help us “explain the reason for our hope”.
Now, it is urgent to present Jesus in his public life, as the Author says in the preface, “to help the reader develop a living relationship with Him ” (p. 20), and the task must be inserted in bimillenary context of reflection on Jesus of Nazareth. In the first century of our era, to hear people speak of the resurrection of the flesh, the body and soul of the human being was the most antithetic thing which could exist for the mentality of the day. And if Christ were a semblance of God? - said no few Christians while the Apostles were still alive - could it be that God came in the flesh? And John replies: «any spirit which acknowledges Jesus Christ, come in human nature, is from God, and no spirit which fails to acknowledge Jesus is from God; ; it is the spirit of Antichrist, whose coming you have heard of; he is already at large in the world.» (1 Jn 4, 2-3). With his Gospel the apostle, an eye witness, counters the heresy called Docetism (from the Greek dokêin).
Two centuries later other Christians followers of the priest Aryan will affirm that Christ is only man; others on the contrary will state that He is only God. The Christological debate seemed concluded in the 5th century with the Council of Chalcedon, but actually in continued, in alternate stages, up to Bultmann and rationalist theologians, and all the others who distinguished and/or separated “the historical Jesus” from the “Jesus of faith ”. And today we see the same situation. Some would abolish or reduce the incarnation and the divinity of Christ in order to dialogue better with Jews and Muslims. And to think that for sustaining faith in the incarnation, Athanasius was exiled more than once, Cyril, Ambrose, Pier Crisologo bore abuse, scorn, insults and persecution ! Now Pope Benedict XVI makes no secret of his “attempt to present the Jesus of the Gospels as the real Jesus, the “historical Jesus” in the real sense of the word” (p. 18).
At this point something must be said about present day exegesis on Sacred Scripture. There is a diffused neo-Gnostic idea that to engage in history it is necessary to free oneself of any pre-comprehension or philosophical interpretation, especially in faith. A man of faith can never be serious historian! However biblical faith presupposes facts which really happened because faith is not mythical, including interventions by God and theophany: to remain with the New Testament, from the birth of Jesus from the Virgin Mary, to the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper, the bodily resurrection of Jesus and the descent of the Holy Spirit. This does not exclude that particular aspects may need to be studied and clarified.
This means we have again the question of whether the faith is a means of knowing on the level of reason. It is difficult to understand why it should not be, since natural science acknowledges, on the basis of what is called Werner Heisenberg's principle of the uncertainty, that man knows the truth both in his objectivity and from his subjective position and with his capacity of comprehension. (1)
Therefore faith also knows. And faith is not only individual it belongs to the pilgrim People of God in history and the exegetes who often highlight its role for formation and understanding the Scriptures inspired by God to authors among his people, should reasonably include it in the understanding of the Book.
One more point. The benefit of historical-critical exegesis and its claims to historicity and homogeneity, ends up paralysing.
For example some have reached the point of considering the books of the Bible less credible than rediscovered pharaoh's inscriptions of the Gilgamesh epoch; but archaeological discoveries do not “prove” the Bible, if anything they add tangible evidence to that of the texts, without which the former would be erratic boulders. Otherwise we would make «the Bible a closed book, whose interpretation, always difficult, would demand technical competence which would make it a field reserved for few specialists. To the latter some apply the Gospel words: “'Alas for you lawyers who have taken away the key of knowledge! You have not gone in yourselves and have prevented others from going in who wanted to” (Lk 11,52; cfr.: Mt 23,13)».(2)
De Lubac, in his book 'Storia e spirito, sull’opera esegetica di Origene', while not scorning philological, historic critical precision, affirms that the Bible can be reduced to the letter. And precisely Origen, as all tradition, said that Scripture in some way is the body of Christ, the word of God. As in Christ there is a human nature and a divine nature, so in his biblical body there is a literal sense, “the flesh”, and a symbolic spiritual sense, “the spirit”, corresponding to the divinity of the word. The entire cosmos, life and all mankind draw origin from and focus on the unity of the Word: according to the thought of the Fathers of the Church, the whole of history is a genesis of Christ.
Sacred Scripture is valid above all for the Spirit manifested in the letter according to a comprehension which crosses space and time diagonally, from the beginning, down to our day. Scripture is the Word of God, since it re-echoes in a living body, the Church, giving her voice and opening the way to comprehension of the mysteries of the Lord which would otherwise remain sealed, hidden, and incomprehensible. Truly «to be ignorant of the Scriptures is to be ignorant of Christ - says Saint Jerome, and - …what can I say about its doctrine on physics, ethics and logic?».(3) Reading them individually or in contrast to the Church in history has led to esoteric currents and heresies.
The interpretation of Scripture is treated by Benedict XVI of his book in this passage in Chapter 2 on The Temptations of Jesus: «The first point is the striking fact that the devil cites Holy Scripture in order to lure Jesus into his trap, [...] he presents himself as a theologian. [...] Vladimir Solov'ëv took up this motif in his short story 'The Antichrist'; The Antichrist receives an honorary doctorate in theology from the University of Tubingen and is a great Scripture scholar. Solov'ëv's portrayal of the Antichrist forcefully expresses his scepticism regarding a certain type of scholarly exegesis current at the time. This is not a rejection of scholarly biblical interpretations as such, but an eminently salutary and necessary warning against its possible aberrations. The fact is that scriptural exegesis can become a tool of the Antichrist. Solov'ëv is not the first person to tell us that; it is the deepest point of the temptation story itself. The alleged findings of scholarly exegesis have been used to put together the most terrible books that destroy the figure of Jesus and dismantle the faith». (p. 57-58).
Giuseppe Ricciotti, the author of the most well known Life of Jesus Christ written in 1941 and re-edited and printed many times even today, writes: «The Gospels narrate that the Jesus sealed in the tomb by the Pharisees is risen. History narrates that the Jesus killed successively a thousand times, showed himself every time more living than before. Since the tactic is the same, there is every reason to believe that the same will happen to the Jesus nailed again to the cross by historical criticism».
He was right, but he would have never imagined that a Pope - admittedly an exceptional thinker - would be among the artificers of a new ‘resurrection’, with the publication of the book Jesus of Nazareth which will leave its mark on the life of the readers, believers and non, in favour or against.
Therefore, Vittorio Messori is right when he says Joseph Ratzinger's book «is intended as a tool to “start from the beginning” to proceed with that re-evangelisation so pressingly invoked by John Paul II» . Not however in the ambiguity of the “new beginning”, which often conditioned even the interpretation of the Second Vatican Council, but in the happy certainty of the bimillenary continuity of the Church ever in need of reform and always the humble and convinced custodian of the Truth of God. (Agenzia Fides 20/4/2007; righe 104, parole 1466)
(1) Der Teil und das Ganze. Gespräche im Umkreis der Atomphysik, München 1969, p. 117.
(2) Pontificia Commissione Biblica, L’interpretazione della Bibbia nella Chiesa, Città del Vaticano 1993, p. 27.
(3) Prologo al commento del profeta Isaiah, 1-2; CCL 73,1-3
