Customer Reviews

The Gospel of John Set Free: Preaching Without Anti-Judaism (Studies in Judaism and Christianity)

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My book review's title "Jews, Christians and the Gospel of John" pretty well covers the bases of Father George M. Smiga's 2008 THE GOSPEL OF JOHN SET FREE: PREACHING WITHOUT ANTI-JUDAISM.

The Holocaust, Shoah, Hitler's Final Solution of killing as many Jews as his Nazi armies and Gestapo could lay hands on -- that unspeakable 20th Century murder frenzy -- seared the consciences of millions of Christians. In the 1960s he Catholic Church in various documents and initiatives of or associated with its Second Vatican Council with shock and sorrow recognized that a long theological tradition of anti-Judaism had made it very hard for Catholics effectively to oppose Hitler's non-theological, racial anti-Semitism.

So the Church examined its own conscience, according to George Smiga, and did not like what it found. Smiga's GOSPEL OF JOHN SET FREE purports to be a mere, popular "how-to" hand book for Catholics -- preachers, laity in the pews, people wanting to make amends for past wrongs to Jews -- on how to defang the Gospel of John. The church's new thesis is that if we know John's Jewish context, then we can handle the personal anger and anachronistic projections of his community's quarrels of the 90s A.D. back into the 30s A.D. when Jesus lived, taught and was executed upon a Roman cross as a disturber of the Roman peace. And this pragmatic task George Smiga performs very well. He examines every text of the Gospel of John that appears in a three-year cycle of lectionary readings at Catholic Masses, especially the Passion Narrative -- so much less nuanced than the accounts of the three Synoptic gospels when it comes to identifying the principal Jewish opponents of Jesus the Messiah of Israel. Not all Pharisees and not all Jews hated Jesus.

Equally valuable, in my opinion, is the broader context in which George Smiga locates his concrete reflections and commentaries on the Gospel of John and its prima facie anti-Jewish polemics.

For Smiga portrays a late First Century world in which not only John's Messianic Jewish Christian community is expelled from its local synagogue, but the same thing apparently happens to Jewish Christians everywhere. The presumably very bitter controversies preceding this monumental expulsion of Messianic Christians call to mind Malay-majority Malaysia expelling Chinese-majority Singapore in 1965.

Down the centuries not only did Jews and Christians stop caring for one another, they also stopped talking to one another, learning from one another. Or if there was any talk, it was monolog, not dialog. The Septuagint (aka LXX), an inferentially Divinely inspired 3rd Century B.C. Jewish-approved translation into Greek of the Jewish Scriptures, eventually spared Greek Christians the need to read the Torah in its original language. Christians were, however, happy to tell Jews, condescendingly to dictate to them, what was right and wrong in Judaism. And some Church fathers, notably Cyprian, Melito of Sardis and John Chrysostom created a mini-theology of anti-Judaism: gentiles had accepted Jesus in huge numbers, most Jews rejected him. Morever (you) Jews "killed your Lord in the middle of Jerusalem" (Melito).

Theological anti-Judaism sowed, according to George Smiga, within Christian civilization, including even the stained glass windows of cathedrals, an unintended evil seed: race-based anti-Semitism. And a literal reading of several passages in John's gospel involving "the Jews" provided one basis for Christian theological anti-Judaism.

The answer today to history's evil is to reconceive Jesus as he truly was: an observant Jew, faithful to the Law, an admirer of Moses, a man who accepted the title Rabbi. He lived and died a Jew. It was the sins of all mankind at all times that lifted Jesus up on that Roman cross. Do not, therefore, blame Jesus for Jews and Christians stopping talking and developing unhelpful, even hateful stereotypes for cross-community (mis)understandings. Whether to blame John's gospel is the topic of George Smiga's book.

It is high time, said the Second Vatican Council, to right past wrongs. The Church must rediscover with great respect its Jewish roots. Christians must invite Jews to state "by what essential traits the Jews define themselves." Dialog must replace monolog, but will never do so unless "each side wishes to know the other, and wishes to increase and deepen its knowledge of the other" (Appendix I).

Both Catholicism and Judaism are mystery religions. Each must therefore respect the other's mysteries in addition to its own. Ignorance is a sin. Ignorant religious confrontation is a greater sin. Hence now is the acceptable hour for Jews and Christians to become friends. After so much hate this is, alas, no easy undertaking. And yet good starts have been made here and there. The Jewish and Christian editors of the Paulist Press Stimulus series for which Smiga writes cite the Catholic Diocese of Albany as an early experiment in cordial, fruitful Catholic-Jewish interaction.

George Smiga's THE GOSPEL OF JOHN SET FREE is meant, among other things, to be useful to Jewish-Christian inter-faith discussion groups. But is it really possible to purge certain passages in John from anti-Jewish connotation? The Catholic Church now thinks so and commands Catholics to do so. But Jewish discussion partners also have a powerful say in whether this can work.

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