41845358-Antisemitism

24 ANTISEMITISM
It continued, especially in a numerous diaspora which allowed Israel to carry
to the whole world a witness—often heroic—of its fidelity to the one God ...
while preserving the memory of the land of their forefathers at the heart of
their hope (Passover Seder).” 21 No Catholic qua Catholic can countenance supersessionism,
anti-Pharisaism, and the like today. It remains a tragic irony
that anti-Pharisaism has been so rife in Christianity, for without Pharisaism
and its teaching of the afterlife, Christianity would never have developed.
Another of the besetting difficulties of New Testament interpretation is
the “uniqueness” of Jesus, a claim that has had the effect of setting him off excessively
from the Judaism(s) of his time: The more “unique” Jesus is depicted,
the more “inferior” Judaism is rendered. No historical personage can
be entirely “unique,” and the scholarship of the last generation has insisted
more clearly than previously that Jesus lived his life squarely within Judaism.
That is an inescapable conclusion from the massive new documentary and archaeological
material that has come into the scholarly domain since World
War II. 22 “In fact,” comments E. P. Sanders, “we cannot say that a single one
of the things known about Jesus is unique”; he had much in common with
John the Baptist, Judas the Galilean, Theudas the Egyptian, and other unnamed
figures referred to by Josephus. John Meier, author of a 3-volume
study of Jesus, remarks that New Testament scholars have associated Jesus
with almost every one of the known parties in first-century Judaea, that undoubtedly
“Jesus the Jew had points of contact with almost every branch of
Judaism.” 23 Helmut Thielicke, a German exegete who is consistently restrained
in his judgments, nevertheless concludes that Jesus “hardly spoke a
word that could not already be read, in [Jewish] literature before him, in substantially
the same form.” 24 As mentioned earlier, biblical scholars have long
interpreted Jesus as a type of Pharisee; the new sources complicate but do not
undermine this interpretation.
Recent scholarship also links Jesus to the Essenes. It is likely that Jesus
knew of the Essenes and their ideas and practices. He may have known them
personally and been influenced by them. His mentor John the Baptist fits the
profile of an Essene perfectly. The archaeological discovery of the Essene gate
and exploration of the sector of Jerusalem where Essenes lived raise the possibility
that it was the site where Jesus lived with Mary and his brother, James,
when they came up to the city. A negative instance of the Jesus-Essene connection
might be found in Jesus’ criticism of the too-stringent sabbath observance,
which may be his censure of the Essene community at Qumran, whose
members were very strict sabbatarians indeed. A positive instance of Essene
influence might be the beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount: Blessed are