Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

NEW
TESTAMENT RECONSIDERED
the "cancer" of Judaism. 3
Such piety "separates us from God."
Consequently, legalistic exegesis of the Old Testament is "blind."
Only the church can read the Scriptures. Legalistic Jews were "deaf to
the gospel,"
Jeremias is or is thought to be by some a counterweight to Rudolf
Bultmann in New Testament scholarship. Both share a common
failing, however: neither knew Second Temple Judaism from its own
sources and each was quite capable of caricaturing it. Bultmann's
anti-Jewish remarks are scattered throughout his writings. Critics of
Bultmann, however, sometimes go overboard and charge him with
anti-Semitism, which is racist Jew-hatred and something different
from harboring negative images of first-century Judaism. In an
address called "The Task of Theology in the Present Situation,"
delivered on May 2, 1933, Bultmann declared:
it is clear that we have to decide whether Christian faith is to be valid
for us or not. It, for its part, can relinquish nothing of its nature and
claim; for 'verbum Domini manet in aeternum.' And we should as
scrupulously guard ourselves against falsifications of the faith by
national religiosity as against a falsification of national piety by
Christian trimmings. The issue is either/or! 4
Whatever his failings, Bultmann never lost sight of the promise and
command of the gospel.
The third major theme in the anti-Jewish interpretive model is the
Pharisees, who continue to be represented as the enemies of Jesus'
teaching. This theme can carry over even into liberation theologies.
When Jon Sobrino discusses Jesus' approach to prayer, he does so
under the rubric of "Jesus' Criticism of Contemporary Prayer." 5
He
starts with the Lukan version of the parable of the Pharisee and the
publican, in which, he says, "Jesus condemns the prayer of the
Pharisees [note the plural] because it is the self-assertion of an
egotistical T and hence vitiated at its very core." Sobrino transforms a
parable into a general indictment. The Pharisee's "pole of reference"
is not to God but to himself. Also, the Pharisee is "even less oriented
toward other human beings. He holds them in contempt. . . and he
thanks Gxl that he is not like them" (Christology at the Crossroads,
p. 147). Pharisaic prayer is a mechanical ceremony in self-deception.
The issue of Jesus' understanding of prayer is used merely as an
example; on every point Jesus contradicts the teaching of the
Pharisees. The way Sobrino, following Jeremias, knows this is by
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