The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The ... - josephprestonkirk

402 QUMRAN AND SUPERSESSIONISM
O most afflicted.
Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee.
’Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee;
I crucified thee.
“Herzliebster Jesu, was hast du verbrochen”
“It was I, Lord Jesus…I crucified thee.” That is how I remember my
stance and mood on Good Friday. And the haunting questions in the
refrain of the Reproaches: “O, my people, what have I done to thee? Or
in what have I afflicted thee? Answer me!”—those questions likewise were
heard as chastising our sins made more grievous in contrast to God’s generous
acts—just as such words do when they first occur in the book of the
prophet Micah. 9
For generations that is how Christians have read their Bible.
Generations were taught to apply the rule tua res agitur—“it is your case
that is dealt with.” They have read the words of their Old Testament as
directed to themselves, be it as human beings in general or as Christians
in particular. Especially in their hymns and their liturgies have they spoken
of themselves as Zion, as Jerusalem, as the sons (and daughters) of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as Israel. They have done so without feeling
the need to supply “the New” before those glorious self-designations.
Yet one should note that there is a difference when this unconscious
hermeneutical move applies to New Testament texts. For here the designation
“Jews” is locked into the construct Jew = sinner = me qua sinner,
including the sin of self-righteousness. The word “Jew” has negative
valens. Thus, it is striking when a positive connotation is called for as in
the famous words about Nathaniel: “See, there is a true Israelite in whom
there is no guile” (John 1:47). That is also consistent with the ways in
which the church’s identification with Israel in its reading of the Old
Testament oscillates between the pattern of promise and fulfillment and
of a more thoroughgoing supersessionism where the texts are read
directly as about “the church,” “us,” or “me.” Often the same text can
function in both ways simultaneously.
The irony with this type of supersessionism is, of course, that it is
chemically free from any conscious anti-Judaism, but this is “achieved”
by making the Jews and the Jewish community invisible, as if it did not
9. The Reproaches and their precursors, dating back to Melito of Sardes’s second
century “Sermon on the Passion,” are patterned after Micah 6:3–4: “O my people,
what have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me! For I brought
you up from the land of Egypt…”