"...Mesmo assim, seria errado pensar que o fim dos laços entre cristãos e judeus ocorreu instantânea ou completamente. Durante séculos, muitos cristãos da Ásia Menor à África continuaram a participar dos serviços  na sinagoga e a observar os principais feriados judaicos. 'Escritores cristãos gentílicos do quarto século,' escreve Fredriksen, "apesar de toda a ideologia anti-judaica de seus próprios bispos, guardavam o sábado como seu dia de descanso, aceitavam convites para as refeições de Páscoa de seus amigos judeus, e ainda celebravam a ocasião de acordo com a data fixada pelos judeus para a Páscoa."

"Mas, apesar de Cristianismo e Judaísmo permanecerem culturalmente interligados, a política separou-os cada vez mais. Em 312, Constantino, um dos quatro Césares da época, alegou ter recebido uma visão que o teria levado à conversão. 'Até esse ponto, os cristãos eram muito mais perseguidos que os judeus,' diz Donald Akenson, um professor de história da Queen's University, do Canadá. Para os cristãos, acrescenta Akenson, a decisão de Constantino 'foi como ganhar na loteria'."

"Guerreando sob o signo da cruz, Constantino derrotou seu último rival e se tornou o imperador de Roma em 324 e, tendo unificado o império politicamente, iniciou movimentos rápidos para fazer o mesmo com a Igreja. Reuniu o Concílio de Nicéia, de que participaram pelo menos 250 bispos, os quais se reuniram para formular os artigos oficiais de fé, incluindo um lugar para Jesus na Santíssima Trindade, no primeiro Credo de Nicéia. (Aqueles bispos que discordaram do credo foram prontamente exilados.)"

"Sob seu regime [isto é, de Constantino], o Domingo tornou-se o sábado cristão. Cristãos foram proibidos de conversar com os rabinos por ocasião da Páscoa, e qualquer judeu que obstruísse a conversão de outro ao Cristianismo era condenado à morte. 'Enquanto o Império Romano é tido como cristão, Jesus é visto mais como uma divina encarnação da Trindade e menos como um judeu de Nazaré,' diz Amy-Jill Levine, professor na Vanderbilt Divinity School. 'Quando Seu judaísmo é apontado, dizem logo que "Ele veio para os Seus, mas os Seus não O receberam", ou afirmam que "veio para demolir o antigo sistema [religioso] deles."

Obs. Seria ótimo se alguém pudesse traduzir todo este artigo e enviar para nós, através do e-mail: adventistas@adventistas.com.

That has changed during the past 50 years. Aided by finds like the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars have made great strides in reconstructing the centuries surrounding the Crucifixion. In addition to restoring the fully Jewish context of Jesus's career, they have also shown how some early Christians attempted to distance their founder and his movement from their Jewish roots.

Geza Vermes, emeritus professor of Jewish studies at Oxford University, is arguably the dean of this recent scholarly enterprise. Three decades ago, with his book Jesus the Jew, he led the way by reading the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke as part of what he calls a "continuously evolving Jewish religious and literary creativity." Among other things, Vermes showed how these three narratives drew on many of the same sources that later rabbinical writings would draw on. In one such source, the first-century B.C. Psalms of Solomon, for example, the psalmist evokes the coming kingdom of God and anticipates a "Jewish savior-king establishing divine rule over the gentiles." Vermes's reading yields a figure who "fits perfectly into the first-century Galilee," an exemplar of the "charismatic Judaism of wonder-working holy men" of the time. The Gospels can be read in many ways, Vermes acknowledges, and he does not disparage orthodox Christian interpretations. "But if you read them literally," he cautions, "without knowledge of what they describe in terms of institutions and politics, then suddenly the Jews can become different, the enemies, the opposition. What is really going on in them is a family quarrel within Judaism."

This is not strictly an academic matter for Vermes. In his view, a willful disregard of the Jewishness of Jesus and his teaching has been partly responsible for "all the nasty things" that are associated with Christian anti-Semitism. And it is not only Jews who share that concern. New Testament specialist Margaret Mitchell, a professor of religion at the University of Chicago and a Roman Catholic, worries that Gibson's movie, like all uncritical, ahistorical readings of the Gospels, will potentially "flatten what ought to be a curriculum for each generation of Christians to struggle with, including this strange fact of a religion starting in Judaism and then moving away from it."

Trigger finger. What, then, are some of the highlights of the corrective "curriculum" that recent scholarship has provided? The first, certainly, is a fuller understanding of the politics of ancient Palestine. The conquest of that land by Pompey in 63 B.C. inaugurated an era of shared Roman-Jewish governance, during which time able and compliant local leaders such as Herod the Great (37-4 B.C.) enjoyed considerable autonomy. Less adept leaders such as Archelaus, who inherited a third of Herod's lands (namely, Judea and the city of Jerusalem), fared less well. After tolerating 10 years of his incompetence, Roman prefects took over Archelaus's territory, though they continued to share the running of Jerusalem with the high priests of the Temple. The two other portions of Herod's former lands, including Jesus's state of Galilee, remained under Jewish rule. This arrangement lasted until a major Jewish revolt brought on a harsh Roman reaction and the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70.

It is not clear whether Jesus's followers thought he was the Messiah or an apocalyptic prophet declaring the imminent coming of God's kingdom. But the fact that his arrival in the city stirred up popular interest among the holiday crowds in Jerusalem would have set off Pilate's alarms that he might be dealing with a seditious leader. The Jewish high priests of the Temple were also certainly concerned about any disturber of the peace, although declaring oneself the Messiah, Vermes has argued, was not blasphemy by Jewish law. Indeed, if Jesus's crime had truly been blasphemy, as the Gospels assert, then the priests would have rightfully condemned Jesus to death by stoning--rather than handing him over to Pilate for the Crucifixion. As Boston University scholar Paula Fredriksen puts it, "I see Roman concerns exceeding priestly ones. If Pilate didn't have an itchy trigger finger, the Crucifixion, which was a specifically political punishment, probably would not have happened."

The new scholarship also emphasizes the theological variety within Judaism at Jesus's time. To be sure, there were certain constants: All Jews worshiped only one God, and all believed in the divine election of Israel, the divine origin of the law, and repentance and forgiveness. Apart from that, there were many different beliefs associated with the priestly class and clergy, the various religious parties, and, not least, the great majority of unaffiliated Jews.

The Pharisees, for instance, a party some 6,000 strong, shared with most first-century Jews a belief in life after death and developed their own traditions governing observance of the law. The Gospels, particularly Matthew, would later caricature the Pharisees as inflexible legalists in order to suggest a divide between the Jewish emphasis on the law and Jesus's emphasis on the spirit and grace. Yet as the discoveries of post-biblical Jewish texts have helped to demonstrate, the concern with mercy, forgiveness, and the inner spirit of the law was widely shared throughout Judaism, and certainly not unique to Jesus's teaching. Even the Gospel of Mark shows Jesus sharing the Pharisees' belief that love of God and love of one's fellow man are the greatest commandments.

The distancing of Jesus from his Jewish roots is a complex story involving the gradual separation of the Christian movement from Judaism both in Palestine and the rest of the eastern Mediterranean world, beginning shortly after the Crucifixion. Yet as the new scholarship emphasizes, even the belief in Jesus's Resurrection should not be considered a Christian novelty. "The resurrection of the dead was one of the redemptive acts anticipated in Jewish traditions about the End of Days," Fredriksen explains in Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. Jesus's individual Resurrection was thought by his early followers to herald a more general resurrection that would come with the establishment of the kingdom of God.

Rebels. Soon, though, there arose a clear and powerful reason for Christians to distance themselves from Judaism: the Jewish revolt of 66-74 and the Roman leveling of the Second Temple in the year 70. All four Gospels were probably written between 70 and 110, in the dramatic afterglow of the Temple's destruction. Since many of the intended readers of the Gospels were gentiles, Vermes argues, they shared the strong anti-Jewish sentiment that followed the unpopular rebellion against the Romans. It would have been unwise and counterproductive for the Gospel writers to claim that Rome was responsible for killing a Jewish redeemer. So it's no surprise, Vermes contends, that the Gospel writers--especially Matthew--blame the Jews for Jesus's death.

Even so, it would be wrong to think that the close ties between Christians and Jews were instantly or fully severed. For centuries, many Christians from Asia Minor to Africa continued to attend synagogue services and observe Jewish high holidays. "Fourth-century gentile Christians," writes Fredriksen, "despite the anti-Jewish ideology of their own bishops, kept Saturdays as their day of rest, accepted gifts of matzo from Jewish friends at Passover, indeed still celebrated Easter according to when Jews kept Passover."

But however culturally intertwined Christianity and Judaism remained, politics increasingly divided them. In 312, Constantine, one of the four Caesars at the time, reputedly had a vision that led to his conversion. "Up to that point, the Christians were much more persecuted than the Jews," says Donald Akenson, a professor of history at Queen's University in Canada. For Christians, Akenson adds, Constantine's decision "was like winning the lottery."

Fighting under the insignia of the cross, Constantine defeated his last rival to become the emperor of Rome in 324 and, having unified the empire politically, he moved swiftly to do the same ecclesiastically. He convened the Council of Nicaea, where at least 250 bishops met to formulate the official articles of faith, including Jesus's place in the Holy Trinity, in the first Nicene Creed. (Those bishops who disagreed with the creed were promptly exiled.)

Under his regime, Sunday became the Christian Sabbath, Christians were told not to confer with the rabbis on the date of Easter, and any Jew who obstructed the conversion of another to Christianity was put to death. "As the Roman Empire goes Christian, Jesus is increasingly seen as the divine incarnation of the second person of the Trinity and less as a Jew from Nazareth," says Amy-Jill Levine, a professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School. "When his Judaism is noted, it is only to say that he was `rejected by his own' or that he came `to demolish the old system from within.' "

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."

In response to the Holocaust, in large part, Vatican II issued its famous Nostra Aetate, in 1965, which fully exonerated Jews of Jesus's death and launched a serious Catholic scholarly reconsideration of Jesus's Jewish context. More specifically, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued guidelines reminding Catholics "that the correct presentation of the Gospel accounts of the Passion and death of Jesus Christ do not support anti-Semitism."

It is a well-publicized fact that Mel Gibson is happy neither with the reforms nor the larger spirit of Vatican II. But it would be too easy--or cynical--to say that Gibson's movie simply reflects a yearning for pre-Vatican II approaches to the relationship between Jews and Christians. It does, however, quite pointedly ignore any of the new understandings brought forth by dedicated Christian and Jewish scholars of the past 50 years.

Gibson, of course, can hardly provide centuries of background in a two-hour movie--or all of the scholarship that deals with it. And yet, says Bard College's Jacob Neusner, "The entire corpus of the work has been completely dismissed by Gibson." Focusing strictly on the Passion, Gibson made no effort to provide much-needed context. Nor does he apologize for that. "I know how it went down," he told Sawyer in the ABC interview. "Not everybody does. Maybe they'll find out. It's not my job, you know. My job is to make a film as well as I can make it." Maybe so. But, at the very least, Gibson has helped to perpetuate some of the same misunderstandings that have plagued Christian-Jewish relations for nearly 2,000 years.