The Pope's Favorite Rabbi

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

I'm not offended when Christians eat pork," says Jacob Neusner. At least not usually. The brilliant--and none too patient--Jewish scholar does recall a religion conference where so much of the other white meat was served that he was reduced to a diet of hard-boiled eggs. One day on the food line something snapped, and he rhymed aloud, "I hope you all get trichinosis/And come to believe in the God of Moses." A fellow conferee instantly replied, "And if we don't get such diseases/Will you believe in the God of Jesus?" Neusner cackles. "That's an example of the right way to do Judeo-Christian dialogue," he says. "If religion matters, and it does, then it's not honest to be indifferent to the convictions of others."

Doggerel aside, Neusner, 74, lives by the story's moral: confrontation is part of his makeup, take it or leave it. One might expect many Christians to leave it. But at least one has not. In his new book, Jesus of Nazareth (Doubleday; $24.95), Pope Benedict XVI devotes 20 pages to A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, a 161-page grenade Neusner lobbed in 1993. In that volume, the professor (now at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.) and noncongregational rabbi projected himself back into the Gospel of Matthew to quiz Jesus on the Jewish law. He found the Nazarene's interpretation irredeemably faulty. In his 14-years-delayed response, Benedict not only compliments Neusner as a "great Jewish scholar" but also recapitulates the thesis of A Rabbi Talks and spends a third of one of his 10 chapters answering it.

There is no real precedent for this. The last time Christianity and Judaism had knockdown debates was during medieval "disputations" convened by Christian authorities and decisively rigged against the Jews. Although the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 renounced the Roman Catholic teaching that Jews were Christ killers and John Paul II acknowledged Jews' ongoing presence by visiting a synagogue, postwar papal discourse has focused on Christianity's view of Judaism, not the reverse, and steered serenely around fundamental controversies. Jesus of Nazareth takes the next huge step: "a Pope taking seriously what a Jew says--and says critically--about the New Testament," marvels Eugene Fisher, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' liaison for Catholic-Jewish relations. "Wow. This is new."

In choosing Neusner as his muse, Benedict selected a man as formidable and controversial in the field of Jewish studies as the Pope is in Catholicism. An expert on the sprawling literature of the 1st through 6th century rabbis who shaped modern Judaism, Neusner is an empire builder, a central figure in wrestling an examination of Judaism into America's universities. He accomplished this through brilliance (he developed his own secularly comprehensible synthesis of rabbinics), superhuman productivity (he has written more than 950 books, although he will admit to a certain reprocessing of material) and a knack for grooming gifted proteges who now run Jewish studies at top schools. He is equally famous for alienating many of his disciples with what came to be known as "Neusner's drop-dead letters." (Neusner calls the complaint "overstated.") He can keep friends--Harvard classmate John Updike wrote a fond 1986 short story featuring a "Josh Neusner"--but as Neusner admits, he remains one of the most contentious people he knows.

Contention was the very soul of A Rabbi Talks. Neusner based his book on the common scholarly understanding that the New Testament's Gospel of Matthew was written as an invitation to Jesus' fellow Jews, trying to convince them, by dint of purportedly predictive passages in the Jewish Bible and Jesus' striking interpretations of Jewish Scripture, that he was Israel's longed-for Messiah. His claim in the Sermon on the Mount that he came "not ... to abolish the Torah and the [writings of the] prophets ... but to fulfill them" is one of the great hinge sentences connecting Western monotheisms.

But Neusner insists it doesn't parse. A Rabbi Talks argues, for instance, that Jesus' line that "he who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me" defies the commandment to "honor thy father and mother" and that his liberties with Saturday rules on grounds that "the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath" flout the one that explicitly orders all humans to observe the day. Most important, Neusner read Jesus' repeated rhetorical formula "You have heard that it was said [in the Torah] ... But I say to you ... " as his claim to be not merely the religio-military Messiah some Jews hoped for at the time but also above the Torah and hence God. Neusner imagined having a dialogue with a Jesus-era Jewish "master" about Jesus' Torah teaching:

"He: 'What did he leave out?'

"I: 'Nothing.'

"He: 'Then what did he add?'

"I: 'Himself.'"

Neusner asserted that any thoughtful Jew must conclude that Jesus was actually "abandoning the Torah" and reject him. He also suggested that insofar as Matthew's arguments are based in Jewish law, Christianity may be flawed by its own standards.

Such open theological aggression is rare in post-Holocaust interfaith parley--or buried amid affirmations of commonality and practical issues like those impacting the state of Israel. But Neusner had collected an interesting fan. He and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had struck up a professional correspondence after the rabbi wrote the Cardinal an admiring note about something he had published. Ratzinger blurbed A Rabbi Talks as "by far the most important book for the Jewish-Christian dialogue in the last decade."

Still, Neusner was "amazed" when he heard that Ratzinger, now Pope, has revisited it in detail--and in print. When a papal confidant told the Catholic News Service that it was "one of the reasons" Benedict had undertaken his entire two-volume Jesus of Nazareth project, the somewhat puzzled but delighted professor called it "an academic love letter!"

In fact, a close reading of the Pope's chapter suggests more a marriage of convenience. Benedict is preoccupied with what he sees as the Gospel's overriding message of Jesus' divinity, even in passages that liberal Christians read primarily as straightforward injunctions to help the poor and powerless. Having a rabbi help make that case is novel and convenient. Regarding one verse, Benedict writes that "Neusner shows us that we are dealing not with some kind of moralism, but with a highly theological text, or, to put it more precisely, a Christological one." He acknowledges the rabbi's point that Jesus is offering the Jews a transformation rather than a continuation of the Torah but maintains that the trade-off is worth it, provided Jesus is not merely "a liberal reform rabbi" but "the Son." That Neusner and other Jews regard that very Sonship as a deal breaker does not bother him much. "It would be good for the Christian world to look respectfully at this obedience of Israel," he writes, "and thus to appreciate better the great commandments" as universalized by Jesus.

Neusner, in his Rhinebeck, N.Y., home, is equally unfazed by the Pope's repurposing of his argument. "You can't expect him to get circumcised," he says. "He's still a Christian, and I'm still a practitioner of Judaism. But the two positions can consider the same text and identify where they converge and where they part company. I think it's terrific."

So do other players in the Jewish-Christian conversation. "'Pope Takes Seriously What Rabbi Has to Say' is a message that will be picked up by anyone who reads their diocesan paper," says Fisher of the Bishops' conference. Amy-Jill Levine, a Jew who teaches New Testament studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and has her own Jesus book, The Misunderstood Jew, says both undergrads and interfaith experts can profit from the Neusner-Benedict exchange. Rabbi James Rudin, senior interreligious adviser to the American Jewish Committee, says it is in some ways "the full maturation of the modern Catholic-Jewish encounter." But perhaps it may mature further still. Asked what he would like to write next, Neusner says, "I'd like to do a book with the Pope about Paul," whose letter, Romans, contains verses that have long bedeviled Jewish-Christian relations. He is half-joking. But what if the Pope said yes? What new wonder might emerge when two smart men agree to disagree but then keep talking?