Essay: Who killed Jesus? Boring
By HILLEL HALKIN
There is something absurd in the Jewish eagerness, manifested once again in the clamor surrounding Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, to prove that "we" didn't kill Jesus. Honestly, it wasn't us, it was the Romans! We simply turned him in. This kind of plea-bargaining is not only demeaning and historically questionable, it is also unreflectingly accepting of the premise of traditional Christian theology that it really matters who killed Jesus because there is a collective responsibility for his death that damns the people of its perpetrators forever . . . . .
. . . . . Abba! I can read that a hundred times and still get a chill down my spine. The Aramaic word handed down to the authors of the Gospels as that used by Jesus to pray to his Father in heaven still means "father" in the colloquial Hebrew we speak every day in Israel. There is an intimacy and a tenderness in that colloquialism, uttered in prayer by no known rabbi of Jesus's time, that only a Hebrew speaker can savor.
I suppose this is merely to make what has become by now - though for thousands of years it was not - a commonplace observation: that the story of Jesus is a Jewish story, set in a Jewish world with Jewish characters and Jewish themes and Jewish preoccupations. Pontius Pilate is the only non-Jew in it. Its final chapters are not about how the "son of God" was killed by the Jewish people. They are about how some Jews helped to kill another Jew who had Jewish disciples and Jewish loyalties and Jewish thoughts and a Jewish message meant for Jews. The fact that by the time the Gospel stories were written, the message in question, or rather, a garbled version of it, was being addressed mainly to non-Jews does not obscure this . . . . .
. . . . . What's to be proud of is Jesus himself. Only Judaism could have produced such an extraordinary character.
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