Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

QUARTERLY REVIEW, WINTER 1984
The Jewish historian Ellis Rivkin has brought out as well as anyone
the connections between Jesus and Judaism relative to the Crucifixion.
He insists that for a proper understanding of Jesus' Crucifixion
we need to replace the question who crucified him with the question
what crucified him. As Rivkin interprets the events, Jesus died a victim
of Roman imperial policy. His death was ordered by the type of
political regime which throughout history has eliminated those who
have stood up for human freedom, insight, and a new way of
understanding human interrelationships. Those Jews who might
have collaborated wth the Romans in Jesus' execution deserve to be
condemned in Rivkin's view. The Jewish masses, however, were
greatly oppressed under the Roman colonial government, so much so
that they would undertake an outright revolt against its tyrannical
authority less than thirty years later. Hence, rather than serving as
The time has come to eliminate the term "Old Testament"
from the Christian vocabulary about the Bible and to use
instead the term "Hebrew Scriptures."
Jesus' executioners, the majority of the Jewish population, insists
Rivkin, saw in his Crucifixion "their own plight of helplessness,
humiliation and subjection."
Another important element in the restoration of the Jewish context
of Christianity is a deeper appreciation within the church of the first
part of our Bible—the Hebrew Scriptures. Too often Christians have
simply looked upon the so-called Old Testament as a prelude to the
spiritual insights found in the New Testament. We need to increase
our consciousness of the Hebrew Scriptures as a source of ongoing
religious meaning for us in their own right, and not merely as a
backdrop for the teaching of Jesus. It is helpful here to recall that for
Jesus and his apostles there was no "Old" Testament. They viewed
the Hebrew Bible as "the Scriptures," as standing at the core of their
religious identity. This is an attitude contemporary Christianity needs
to recapture. Contemporary Christian spirituality and preaching
remain peripherally influenced at best by the Hebrew Scriptures.
The time has come to eliminate the term "Old Testament" from the
Christian vocabulary about the Bible. Though admittedly the word old
can connote "reverence" or "long-standing experience," used in
reference to the first part of the Bible it tends to create an attitude that
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