Passover and the Passion
WHY IS THIS week different from all other weeks? It begins with Passover and ends with Easter. These two rituals are rites of spring, yet each is the organizing act of a religion that has spent most of two millennia in tension with the other. Because the Christian observances of Holy Week are structured around the last days of Jesus, which were themselves structured around his own Jewish observance of Passover, the two are intrinsically linked, and always will be. But that is far less so for Judaism than Christianity -- which, after all, generates the conflict. Passover has no reference to Easter, while Easter, even calculated by a slightly different calendar, begins with Passover. That these memorial events sparked such positive-negative energy does not mean the polarity must continue.
But from the Christian side, a difficult problem remains -- how the story of Jesus, and especially the story of his death, are told. In 1965, the fathers of the Second Vatican Council decreed that Christians should no longer lay blame for the death of Jesus at the feet of "the Jews." Mainline Protestants concurred. The trouble is, Holy Week is defined by Christian reading of Passion narratives that are explicit in blaming the Jews. "Crucify him!" the Jewish crowd demands, and an intimidated Pontius Pilate only reluctantly complies. "I am innocent of this man's blood," he says, and washes his hands.
Indeed, even beyond the way the Gospels portray the death of Jesus, their entire dramatic form consists in setting Jesus against his own people. "He came to his own home," the Gospel of John says in its very first chapter, "and his own people received him not." If the story that the Gospels tell is true to history, it is hard to see how Christians can let go of their essentially denigrating attitude toward Jewish religion, and, at least implicitly, toward Jewish people. The "Christ killer" charge remains embedded in texts that will be read in churches all around the globe this week.
That is why it is urgent that Christians revise their relationship to these texts, and their understandings of how -- and when -- they came to be written. Many Christians assume the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses who were present for the events reported, but that is wrong. Mainstream scholars are unanimous in dating the Gospels to a period about two generations after the death of Jesus, between the historic crises of the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple (in the year 70 ), and then of Jerusalem itself (in 135 ). These catastrophes prompted the questions, What is it to be a Jew without the Temple? What is it to be a Jew without Jerusalem?
Some Jews answered that observance of Torah, or Law, would be the center of Jewishness now, with memory joined to hope. Rabbinic Judaism was born, and its cry at Seder tables would forever be, "Next year in Jerusalem!" But other Jews answered that Jesus was now the "new Temple." They understood themselves as the "new Jerusalem," and became the church. The important point is that Christian-Jewish antagonism began as an argument within Judaism. The conflict portrayed in the Gospels took place not in the lifetime of Jesus, but in the tumultuous post-Temple era decades later. When the contemptuous phrase "the Jews" is used, it is being used by Jews , whose reference is to fellow Jews who disagree about what it is to be a Jew.
Meanwhile, more and more Gentiles came into the Jesus movement, and this polemic fell on their ears differently -- and dangerously. They heard "the Jews" as if Jesus was not himself Jewish, and soon enough his Jewishness was forgotten. He preached a God of love from the very heart of Jewish belief, but his followers saw a divine polarity, pitting a New Testament God of love against an Old Testament God of vengeance. Still, Christians understood Jesus as the fulfillment of Jewish expectations, and so the on going Jewish rejection of Jesus posed a uniquely mortal threat. Christian antagonism mounted, even to calculating the calendar, with Easter set negatively against Passover, a polarity of time. Holy Week became the season of anti-Jewish violence.
To leave the "Christ killer" time bomb behind, Christians must read the Passion narratives with a critical eye, emphasizing that, when it comes to the question of "the Jews," the Gospels are not gospel. Only when the texts are thus defused will this week be truly different for Christians and Jews alike.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. 
