The Order (Gabriel Allon #20) - Daniel Silva Page 0,116
whether there was anything to be done about the devastating portrayal of Pius XII in Rolf Hochhuth’s searing play The Deputy. “Do against it?” the incredulous pope reportedly replied. “What does one do against the truth?”
The culmination of John XXIII’s bid to repair relations between Catholics and Jews in the wake of the Holocaust was the milestone declaration of the Second Vatican Council known as Nostra Aetate. Opposed by many Church conservatives, it declared that Jews were not collectively responsible for the death of Jesus or eternally cursed by God. The great historical tragedy is that such a statement had to be issued in the first place. But for nearly two thousand years, the Church taught that Jews as a people were guilty of deicide, the very murder of God. “The blood of Jesus,” wrote Origen, “falls not only on the Jews of that time, but on all generations of Jews up to the end of the world.” Pope Innocent III wholeheartedly agreed. “Their words—‘May his blood be on us and our children’—have brought inherited guilt upon the entire nation, which follows them as a curse where they live and work, when they are born and when they die.” Were such words spoken today, they would rightly be branded as hate speech.
The ancient Christian charge of deicide is universally regarded by scholars as the foundation of anti-Semitism. And yet the Second Vatican Council, when issuing its historic repudiation, could not resist including the following seventeen words: “True, authorities of the Jews and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ.” But what source did the bishops use to justify such an unequivocal declaration about an event that took place in a remote corner of the Roman Empire nearly two thousand years earlier? The answer, of course, was that they relied on the accounts of Jesus’ death contained in the four Gospels of the New Testament—the very source of the vicious slander they were at long last disavowing.
Needless to say, the Second Vatican Council did not suggest excising the inflammatory passages from the Christian canon. But Nostra Aetate nevertheless set in motion a scholarly reappraisal of the canonical Gospels that is reflected in the pages of The Order. Christians who believe in biblical inerrancy will no doubt take issue with my description of who the evangelists were and how their Gospels came to be written. Most biblical scholars would not.
No original draft of any of the four canonical Gospels survives, only fragments of later copies. It is widely accepted by scholars that none of the Gospels, with the possible exception of Luke, were written by the men for whom they are named. It was the Apostolic Father Papias of Hierapolis who in the second century provided the earliest extant account of their authorship. And it was Irenaeus, the heresy-hunting leader of the early Church in France, who declared that only four of the many gospels then in circulation were authentic. “And this is obviously true,” he wrote, “because there are four corners of the universe and there are four principal winds.” Paul Johnson, in his monumental history of Christianity, asserted that Irenaeus “knew no more about the origins of the Gospels than we do; rather less, in fact.”
Johnson went on to describe the Gospels as “literary documents” that bear evidence of later tampering, editing, rewriting, and interpolation and backdating of theological concepts. Bart D. Ehrman, the distinguished professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, contends they are riddled with “discrepancies, embellishments, made-up stories, and historical problems” that mean “they cannot be taken at face value as giving us historically accurate accounts of what really happened.” The Gospels’ depiction of Jesus’ arrest and execution, says Ehrman, “must be taken with a pound of salt.”
Numerous critical biblical scholars and contemporary historians have concluded that the evangelists and their editors in the early Church consciously shifted the blame for Jesus’ death from the Romans to the Jews in order to make Christianity more appealing to gentiles living under Roman rule and less threatening to the Romans themselves. The two primary elements utilized by the Gospel writers to blame Jews for the death of Jesus are the trial before the Sanhedrin and, of course, the tribunal before Pontius Pilate.
The four canonical Gospels each give a slightly different account of the encounter, but it is perhaps most illuminative to compare Mark’s version to Matthew’s. In Mark, Pilate reluctantly sentences Jesus to death at the urging of a Jewish crowd. But