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CURRENT
ISSUE: April 23, 2007
VOL.
45, NO. 8Oakland,
CA
U.S. rabbi has prominent
place in pope’s new book
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VATICAN CITY
(CNS) -- After the Gospel writers and the apostle Paul, the author most
quoted in Pope Benedict XVI’s new book is Rabbi Jacob Neusner, a
U.S. professor of religion and theology.
In his book, “Jesus of Nazareth,” released April 16 in Italian,
German and Polish, Pope Benedict joined the literary dialogue that Rabbi
Neusner invented for himself in his 1993 book, “A Rabbi Talks With
Jesus.”
The pope said that Rabbi Neusner’s “profound respect for the
Christian faith and his faithfulness to Judaism led him to seek a dialogue
with Jesus.”
Imagining himself amid the crowd gathered on a Galilean hillside when
Jesus gave his Sermon on the Mount, Rabbi Neusner “listens, confronts
and speaks with Jesus himself,” the pope wrote.
“In the end, he decides not to follow Jesus,” the pope wrote.
“He remains faithful to that which he calls the ‘eternal Israel.’”
Pope Benedict said Rabbi Neusner makes painfully clear the differences
between Christianity and Judaism, but “in a climate of great love:
The rabbi accepts the otherness of the message of Jesus and takes his
leave with a detachment that knows no hatred.”
The pope praised Rabbi Neusner for taking the Gospel of Jesus seriously
and, in fact, more seriously than many modern Christian scholars do.
Jesus is the Son of God, the unique savior, and not simply a social reformer,
a liberal rabbi or the teacher of a new morality, the pope said.
Pope Benedict
wrote that in trying to understand who Jesus was and his relationship
with his Jewish faith and with the Torah, the law given to Moses, Rabbi
Neusner’s book “was of great help.”
Rabbi Neusner, a prolific author and professor at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson,
N.Y., said he did not want to talk about the pope’s book until he
had seen it. The English edition is scheduled for a May release.
In the introduction to the revised and expanded 2000 edition of his book,
Rabbi Neusner wrote, “If I had been in the land of Israel in the
first century, I would not have joined the circle of Jesus’ disciples.
... If I heard what he said in the Sermon on the Mount, for good and substantive
reasons I would not have followed him.
