Paul Johnson, the historian who wrote a 'History of Christianity,' also wrote his personal interpretation of Jewish history. During the course of writing the first book, he became aware for the first time in his life of the magnitude of the debt Christianity (his religion) owes to Judaism. It was not, as he had been taught to suppose, that the New Testament replaced the Old; rather, that Christianity gave a fresh interpretation to an ancient form of monotheism, gradually evolving into a different religion but carrying with it much of the fundamental concepts of its forbear. His aim was to explore the history of the Jews back to its origin and forward to the present day. According to Johnson, "The world tended to see the Jews as a race which had ruled itself in antiquity and set down its records in the Bible; had then gone underground for many centuries; had emerged at last only to be slaughtered by the Nazis; and, finally had created a state of its own, controversial and beleaguered. He wanted to "link them together, to find and study the missing portions, assemble them into a whole, and make sense of it."

       During this endeavor, Johnson found excitement in the sheer span of Jewish history. From the time of Abraham up to the present covers the best part of four millennia. That is more than three-quarters of the entire history of civilized humanity. The Jews created a separate and specific identity earlier than almost any other people which still survives. They have maintained it, amid appalling adversities, right up to the present. Johnson wondered, "Whence came this extraordinary endurance? What was the particular strength of the all-consuming idea which made the Jews different and kept them homogeneous? Did its continuing power lie in its essential immutability, or its capacity to adapt, or both?"

       Johnson observed that "Jewish history covers not only vast tracts of time but huge areas. The Jews have penetrated many societies and left their mark on all of them. Writing a history of the Jews is almost like writing a history of the world, but from a highly peculiar  angle of vision. It is a world history seen from the viewpoint  of a learned and intelligent victim."

       Johnson concludes his book with the summary, "Jewish history can be presented as a succession of climaxes and catastrophes. It can also be seen as an endless continuum of patient study, fruitful industry and communal routine…Over 4,000 years the Jews proved themselves not only great survivors but extraordinarily skillful in adapting to the societies among which fate thrust them, and in gathering whatever human comforts they had to offer. No people has been more fertile in enriching poverty or humanizing wealth, or in turning misfortune to creative account. This capacity springs from a moral philosophy both solid and subtle, which has changed remarkably little over the millennia precisely because it has been seen to serve the purposes of those who share it. Countless Jews, in all ages, have groaned under the burden of Judaism. But they have continued to carry it because they have known, in their hearts, that it carried them. The Jews were survivors because they possess the law of survival."

       It is impossible to summarize the entire historical record of Judaism in these few pages. But it is also impossible to understand why the Jews are so exercised over Mel Gibson's 'The Passion of the Christ' without a full understanding of that history. I will attempt here to provide brief summary statements of the primary elements of Judaism as elucidated by Johnson and then provide a more detailed historical summary of the time of the Crucifixion as Johnson saw it.

       Judaism evolved over time from the Patriarchs, leaders who had the power of prophesy, based on their being 'chosen' by God to be His intermediary to His Chosen People. God promised Abraham, a Babylonian by race, to be the ancestor of a lineage of people who would be shown the way to salvation. The Covenant between God and Abraham included a promise of a donation of land to his progeny. The notion of a personal covenant with God had no parallel in prior history.  It was a contract of obedience in return for special favor, implying the existence of an ethical God who acts as a kind of benign constitutional monarch bound by his own righteous agreements.

       The continuation of the Covenant to Abraham's grandson, Jacob, produced the twelve tribes of Israel, one each from his 12 sons -- the name, Israel, was given to Jacob by God as the agent of the evolution of the Israelites to the people chosen by God to show the world the way to salvation.

       One of Jacob's sons, Joseph, fatefully found himself in Egypt where he became a trusted advisor to the Pharaoh, in whose service he and his extended family prospered and multiplied. When a less gracious Pharaoh felt threatened by the Israelites, Moses led them out of Egypt and in the desert God renewed the Covenant, but this time for a people, not just a person. "Moses was a prophet and a leader who not only acted as intermediary between God and man but sought to translate the most intense idealism into practical and noble concepts for everyday life...he was a lawmaker and judge, the engineer of a mighty framework to enclose in a structure of rectitude every aspect of public and private conduct -- a totalitarian of the spirit. It was Moses who gave the Law, the written Torah to the Israelites from God. In the age of Moses, the Israelites developed a tendency to be subversive of the existing order. Consequently, Moses is strongly associated with the very earliest stirrings of systematic anti-Semitism."

       The Israelites developed for the world an evolving religion based on a rational, ethical monotheism, the Law, and the idea of a 'peoplehood,' or nation (not necessarily a state) for God's chosen people -- themselves. In effect, the ancient Israelite society merged its interest with God's and accepted Him in return for protection and prosperity, as a totalitarian ruler whose wishes governed ever aspect of their lives.

       Moses' successor, Joshua, was the instrument through whom God commanded that the Promised Land, Canaan, be conquered by the Israelites. The conquest "had an air of desperation that helps to explain their ruthlessness in taking towns from the gentiles. "They utterly destroyed all that was in [Jericho], both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and ass, with the edge of the sword...the city was burnt...and was not reoccupied for a very long time."

       After the conquest of Canaan, the Promised Land, the Israelites settled into a period of rule by the 'Judges,' local leaders of groups who affiliated only loosely with each other. The looming threat of the Assyrians, Babylonians and the Philistines over the next centuries brought the Israelites to their first realization of a 'state,' under the kingships of Saul, David, and Solomon. This 'experiment,' the first of many such flirtations with secular power, ended in disaster. Their defeat by their enemies, their slaughter, and Exile from their 'promised land' raises, according to Johnson, "a central dilemma about Israelite, later Judaic, religion and its relationship with temporal power. The dilemma can be stated quite simply: could the two institutions coexist, without one fatally weakening the other? The dilemma was unresolved throughout the First and Second Commonwealth -- it remains unresolved today."

       This pattern of oscillation, described by Johnson, of the Jews' flirtation with the idea of secular power as a guarantor of their survival and its rival, a rigorous practice of their religion -- as handed down by Moses and the Law -- was to occur again and again in the history of the 'ancients.' Indeed, right up to and after the time of Christ.

       The ancient prophets of the time of Kings and Exile, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and later, Ezekial foretold of a time in the future when a specific savior-figure would appear on earth as the will of God. These prophets led the Israelites into an inward-looking faith which stressed the individual as the bearer of faith and the universal, as well as ubiquitous and omnipotent God. These prophesies arose during the time -- over 400 years -- that there was a great scattering of the nation. It was a diaspora as well as an exile.

       It is during this period that the Book of Job appears, with its description of conversations between God, the Devil, and various leaders of the Israelites. It answered, for the Jews, "the problem of evil that fascinated and baffled  both scholars and ordinary people for more than two millennia, 'Why does God do these terrible things to us?'" The answer was to be that "Wisdom came to man, not by trying to penetrate God's reasoning and motives in inflicting pain, but only through obedience...The Jews were to find wisdom through obedience to God, and teach humanity to do likewise. They were to overthrow the existing, physical, worldly order, and replace it with the moral order."

       Johnson goes to great length to explain how the Jews struggled to maintain the rigor of the Mosaic Law from contamination by the social orders within which they resided -- particularly that of the Greeks. They fought vigorously to protect their religion from the hated pagan 'Hellenization' of the Greeks, by their assimilation into the mainstream of the Greek culture. This led to a religious 'civil war' within Judaism which built to a crescendo in the century or so before and during the time of Christ.

       Johnson explains, "So the Greek colonists poured into western Asia, built their cities everywhere, and were joined by locals [Jews] who wished to share their wealth and way of life...the [Jews] reacted to this cultural invasion, which was opportunity, temptation and threat all in one...from about 250 B.C. one identifiable group retreated into the wilderness, to recapture the Mosaic enthusiasm, and then -- when the time was right -- planned to launch back into the cities. Some, like the Essenes, would do so peacefully, by the word...others put their trust in the sword, organizing themselves for war, using a symbolic twelve-tribe structure, and were planning, when a sign brought their wilderness years to an end, to launch a Joshua-like invasion of the urban areas, rather like a guerrilla movement today."

       The latter group, the Hasmoneans, under the leadership of the Maccabee family, found the right moment of Seleucid (Greek occupiers) weakness around 162 B.C., "launched a guerrilla campaign against [their] garrisons and their Jewish supporters. They drove all the Greeks out of the area around Jerusalem and imprisoned the [Hellenized Jews]...Thus Israel became independent again after 440 years." This was to last until the crushing of the Jewish revolts in 66 and 135 A.D., which led to the second disastrous 'Exile' of the Jewish people -- which lasted for nearly two millennia, until 1948 when the United Nations mandated the state of Israel.

       Johnson describes the rule of the Maccabees. "[They] were brave, desperate, fanatical, strong-minded men. They saw themselves as reliving the Book of Joshua, re-conquering the Promised Land from the pagans, with the Lord at their elbow. They lived by the sword and died by it in a spirit of ruthless piety…[Their] wars of fire and sword were marked by massacres of city populations whose only crime was that they were Greek-speaking...inhabitants were forcibly converted to Judaism or slaughtered if they refused." This is not, of course, a history that we see emphasized in today's world of constant reminders of anti-Semitism, based on ubiquitous recalling of the Nazi holocaust of the Jews. But it is an objective history of the century or so just prior to the time of Christ. It is important to understand this history in order to understand the Jew-Greek animus during that time. [Note: In this day and age, this would be termed a Holocaust, but one carried out by Jews against Greeks and 'Hellenized' Jews in a quest for 'statehood' for their 'Promised Land.'].

       "The Hasmoneans spoke for a deeply reactionary spirit within Judaism. Their strength lay in atavism and superstition, drawn from the remote Israelite past of taboo and brutal physical intervention by the deity. Henceforth, any external tampering with the Temple and its sanctuaries instantly roused up a ferocious Jerusalem mob of religious extremists swollen by the excited rabble. The mob now became an important part of the Jerusalem scene, making the city, and so Judea as a whole, extremely difficult to govern by anyone - Greeks or Hellenizers, Romans or their tetrarchs, not least the Jews themselves." This, of course, is the real, objective 'context' of the historical record in the century or so preceding the crucifixion of Christ that has been completely overlooked by the New Age 'scholars' who have severely criticized Mel Gibson's movie.

       "Against this background of intellectual terror by the religious mob, the secular spirit and intellectual freedom which flourished in the Greek gymnasia and academies was banished from Jewish centers of learning. In their battle against Greek education, pious Jews began, from the end of the second century B.C., to develop a national system of education. To the old scribal schools were gradually added a network of local schools where, in theory at least, all Jewish boys were taught the Torah. This development was of great importance in the spread and consolidation of the synagogue, in the birth of Pharisaism as a movement rooted in popular education, and eventually the rise of the rabbinate. The education provided in these schools was entirely religious, rejecting any form of knowledge outside the Law. But at least these schools taught the Law in a relatively humane spirit. [They taught that] God had given Moses, in addition to the written Law, an Oral Law, by which learned elders could interpret and supplement the sacred commands. The practice of the Oral Law made it possible for the Mosaic code to be adapted to changing conditions and administered in a realistic manner." This change was the setting in which Christ entered the historical record. Judaism was already in a state of  religious 'civil war.' A great turmoil even absent the further one of the 'coming of the Messiah.'

       "By contrast, the Temple priests, dominated by the Sadducees, descendents of...the great high-priests from Davidic times, insisted that all law must be written and unchanged. They had their own additional text...which laid down a system of punishment: who were to be stoned, who burned, who beheaded, who strangled. But this was written and sacred: they would not admit that oral teaching could subject the Law to a process of creative development. With their rigid adherence to the Mosaic inheritance, their concept of the Temple as a sole source and center of Judaic government, and their own hereditary position in its functions, the Sadducees were naturally allies of the new Hasmonean rule in a rigid system of Temple administration, in which the hereditary high-priest performed the functions of a secular ruler, and a committee of elders, the Sanhedrin, discharged his religious-legal duties." [Note: the description here is a powerful 'spider' at the center of the Web, holding all power - in a group called the Sanhedrin. This has great significance in the cycles of Israelite/Jewish history and its lack of stability. It was not a scale-free system - either at this time or at the time of the Passion of the Christ.]

       Just as had happened during the earlier era of Israelite kings, "In becoming rulers, kings and conquerors, the Hasmoneans suffered the corruptions of power ... [As a result they faced] an internal revolt of rigorists. Josephus says the civil war lasted six years and cost 50,000 Jewish lives. It is from this time we first hear of the Perushim or Pharisees, 'those who separated themselves,' a religious party which repudiated the royal religious establishment, with its high-priest, Sadducee aristocrats and the Sanhedrin, and placed religious observance before Jewish nationalism. Rabbinic sources record the struggle between the monarch and this group, which was a social and economic as well as a religious clash. As Josephus noted, 'the Sadducees draw their following only from the rich, and the people do not support them, whereas the Pharisees have popular allies.' He relates that at the end of the civil war, Alexander Jannaeus [a descendent of a Maccabee and a despot and a monster] returned in triumph to Jerusalem, with many of his Jewish enemies among his captives and then 'did one of the most barbarous actions in the world ... for as he was feasting with his concubines, in the sight of all the city, he ordered about eight hundred of them to be crucified, and while they were living he ordered the throats of their children and wives to be cut before their eyes.'" It would appear that this history informs the 'context' of Caiaphus and his Sanhedrin's relationship to the rulers of the region and the crucifixion of Christ only a few generations in the future of this latest Jewish 'kingdom.'

       "The Hasmonean state, like its prototype the Davidic kingdom, had flourished in an age between empires. It was able to expand in the period when the Seleucid (Greek) system was in hopeless decay but before Rome had grown strong enough to replace the Greeks. By the time of Alexander's death, however, the advancing Roman empire was only just below the Jewish horizon. Rome had been an ally of the Jews when they were struggling against the old Greek empire, and it tolerated the existence, even the relative independence, of small and weak states. But an expansive-minded, irredentist Jewish kingdom, forcibly converting its neighbors to its own demanding and intolerant faith, was not acceptable to the Roman senate. Rome bided its time until the Jewish state was rendered vulnerable by internal divisions, as the Seleucid empire had been. Aware of this Alexander Jannaeus' widow, Salome, who reigned for a time after him, tried to restore national unity by bringing the Pharisees into the Sanhedrin and making their Oral Law acceptable in royal justice. But she died in 67 B.C. and her sons fell out over the succession."

The Era of Roman Rule
       "One of the claimants, Hyrcanus, had a powerful chief-minister, Antipater...whose family had been forcibly converted by the Hasmoneans. He was half-Jew, half-Hellenizer. For such men it was natural to come to terms with the new superpower, Rome, which combined irresistible military technology with Greek culture. Antipater saw an arrangement with Rome, whereby his and other notable families flourished under Roman protection, as much preferable to civil war. So in 63 B.C. he came to terms with the Roman general Pompey and Judea became a roman client-state. Antipater's son, who became Herod the Great, firmly locked the Jews into the administrative system of the Roman empire."

       According to Johnson, "Herod [the Great]...was [an] effective ruler [under the Roman mantle] of Judea...from 37 B.C. to his death four years before the Christian era...Herod was both a Jew and an anti-Jew; an upholder and benefactor of Greaco-Roman civilization, and an oriental barbarian capable of unspeakable cruelties...He combines in one person the tragedy of Saul and the successful materialism of Solomon, who was clearly his idol; and it is a thousand pities there was no one close to him to record his character and career with the same brilliance as the author of the First Book of Kings."

       "The general level of Palestinian prosperity rose during [Herod's] reign, thanks to external peace, internal order and expanding trade. The number of Jews, both born and converts, expanded everywhere, so that … in 48 A.D. [there were] some 6,944,000 Jews within the confines of the empire, plus...the 'myriads and myriads' in Babylonia and elsewhere beyond it. One calculation is that during the Herodian period there were about eight million Jews in the world,  of whom 2,350,000 to 2,500,000 lived in Palestine, the Jews thus constituting about 10 percent of the Roman empire. This expanding nation and teeming diaspora were the sources of Herod's wealth and influence."

       Herod rebuilt the Temple on a magnificent scale, exceeding even the glory of Solomon's. In a historic prelude to the 'context' of the crowds in Jerusalem during the great feasts, such as Passover, Johnson observes that "Pilgrims from all over Palestine and the diaspora, converging on the city in hundreds of thousands for the great feasts, ascended the platform from the city [to the Temple] by a vast staircase and the main bridge...Herod's temple was world-famous and greatly esteemed...By downgrading the importance of the high-priest, who was a hated Sadducee, Herod automatically raised in importance his deputy...a Pharisee, who got control over all the regular Temple functions and ensured that even the Sadducee high-priests performed the liturgy in a Pharisaical manner. Since Herod was on reasonable terms with the Pharisees, he avoided conflict between the Temple and his government, as a rule...The death of Herod the Great in 4 B.C...effectively ended the last phase of stable Jewish rule in Palestine until the mid-twentieth century."

Judaism During the Time of Christ
       Johnson describes the rising tension in the period after Herod the Great, "There followed a period of great and rising tension. This was most unusual under Rome. The Romans ran a liberal empire. They respected local religious, social and even political institutions so far as this was consistent with their essential interests. It is true that the rare uprising was put down with great force and severity. But most of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern peoples prospered under Roman rule and judged it to be far preferable to anything else they were likely to get. This was the view of the six million or more Jews in the diaspora, who never gave the authorities any trouble, except once in Alexandria under the impact of events in Palestine. It is likely that even in the Jewish homeland many, perhaps most, Jews did not see the Romans as oppressors or enemies of religion. But a substantial minority in Palestine became irreconcilable to the...Romans...and from time to time were prepared to risk the ferocious penalties which inexorably followed violent defiance. There was a rising, led by Judas of Gamala, in 6 A.D., in protest at the direct rule imposed after Herod the Great's death. There was another, for similar reasons, when direct rule was restored following the death of Herod Agrippa in 44 A.D. There was a third in the time of Procurator Felix (52-60 A.D.), when 4,000 people mustered on the mount of Olives in the expectation that the walls of Jerusalem would fall, like Jericho's. Finally there were the great surprising of 66 A.D. and 135 A.D., which were on an enormous scale and convulsed the eastern empire. There is no parallel to this sequence of events in any other territory Rome ruled."

       "Why were the Jews so restless? It was not because they were a difficult, warlike, tribal and essentially backward society...the real trouble with the Jews was that they were too advanced, too intellectually conscious to find alien rule acceptable. The Greeks had faced the same problem with Rome. They had solved it by submitting physically and taking the Romans over intellectually. Culturally, the Roman empire was Greek, especially in the East. Educated people spoke and thought in Greek, and Greek modes set the standards in art and architecture, drama, music and literature. So the Greeks never had any sense of cultural submission to Rome."

       There was great animus between the Greeks and the Jews and it had been building for at least a century before the time of Christ. Johnson explains, "Therein lay the difficulty with the Jews. They had an older culture than the Greeks...their literature was in various fields superior. There were as many Jews as Greeks in the Roman empire, and a higher proportion of them were literate. Yet the Greeks, who controlled the cultural policies of the Roman empire, afforded no recognition at all to the Hebrew language and culture... [The Greeks] had…a blindness towards Hebrews, Hebrew literature and Jewish religious philosophy. The ignored it and knew of it only from inaccurate hearsay. This culture-contempt on the Greek side, and the love-hate which some educated Jews had for Greek culture, were sources of constant tension...The only circumstances in which the Jews could have become reconciled to Greek culture was if they had been able to take it over - as, in the form of Christianity, they eventually did."

       "Hence it is important to grasp that the apparent Jewish revolt against Rome was at bottom a clash between Jewish and Greek culture.

       It was during this period that the apocalyptic theme began to permeate the Jewish literature as the decline of prophecy ensued...The idea of a final judgment fitted neatly into the whole Judaic concept of the rule of law. It was because they taught this doctrine, together with a rationalistic approach to observing the Law, which made salvation feasible, that the Pharisees attracted such a following, especially among the pious poor, who knew from bitter experience the small likelihood of happiness this side of death."

       "But if the Pharisees drew a distinction (as St. Augustine was to do later) between the heavenly kingdom and the earthly one, others took apocalyptic text more literally.  They believed the kingdom of righteousness was physical, real, imminent and that they were bound to hasten its appearance... Josephus distinguishes between the Zealots, who preached and practiced violence, and what he terms the other three principal sects, Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes, who seemed to have accepted foreign rule in general ...But, ... as the first century A.D. progressed, more and more pious Jews, such as the Pharisees, seem to have accepted that violence was inevitable in certain circumstances ... The legitimacy of terrorism when other forms of protest fail was as hotly debated then as it is today."

       Johnson sets the historical 'context' of the region around Jerusalem during the time of Christ. "John the Baptist lived and worked for the most part in Galilee and the Peraea, territory which was now overwhelmingly Jewish but which had been annexed to Judea by fire and sword - and often forcible conversion - in Maccabee times. It was an area both of fierce orthodoxy and diverse heterodoxy, and of religious and political ferment."

        The Jewish doctrine of the Messiah had its origins in the belief that King David had been anointed by the Lord, so that he and his descendants would reign over Israel to the end of time and would exercise dominion over alien peoples. After the fall of the kingdom, this belief had been transformed into a prophetic expectation that the rule of the House of David would be miraculously restored...The messianic doctrine, being of complex and even contradictory origins created great confusion in the minds of the Jews. But most of them seem to have assumed that the messiah would be a political-military leader and that his coming would inaugurate a physical, earthly state.

       Johnson informs us, in setting the 'historical' context for the 'Passion of the Christ' that, "Now it is obvious from the evidence we have that Jesus of Nazareth conformed to none of these messianic patterns. He was not a Jewish nationalist. On the contrary, he was a Jewish universalist. Like the Baptist, he was influenced by the teachings of the pacific elements of the Essenes. But like the Baptist he believed that the program000 of repentance and rebirth should be carried to the multitude, as was foreseen in Chapter 53 of Isaiah. It was not the job of the teacher of righteousness to hide in the desert or in caves; or to sit in the seats of the mighty either, like the Sanhedrin. It was his mission to preach to all, and in a spirit of humility before God, who might demand the extremities of suffering. The person of whom Isaiah wrote had to be the 'tender plant,' the 'despised and rejected of men,' the 'man of sorrows,' who would be 'wounded for our inequities, bruised for our transgression,' 'oppressed and afflicted and yet he opened not his mouth.' This 'suffering servant' of God would be 'taken from prison and from judgment,' 'brought as a lamb to the slaughter,' 'be buried with the wicked' and 'numbered with the transgressors.' This Messiah was not a mob leader or democrat or guerrilla chieftain, let alone a future earthly king and world sovereign. He was, rather, a theologian and sacrificial victim, a teacher by his word and example, and by his life and death."

       "If Jesus was a theologian, what was and whence came his theology? … The evidence we possess shows that, though Jesus was influenced by Essene teaching and may have spent some time living with them, and though he was personally connected with the Baptist sect, he was in essentials one of the Hakamim, the pious Jews who moved in the world. He was closer to the Pharisees than to any other group. This statement is liable to be misleading, since Jesus openly criticized the Pharisees, especially for 'hypocrisy.' But on close examination, Jesus' condemnation is by no means so severe or so inclusive as the Gospel narrative in which it is enclosed implies; and in essence it is similar to criticisms leveled at the Pharisees by the Essenes."

       "The truth seems to be that Jesus was part of a rapidly developing argument within the pious Jewish community, which included Pharisees of various tendencies. The aim of the Hakamic movement was to promote holiness and make it general. How was this to be done? The argument centered around two issues: the centrality and indispensability of the Temple [Note: the spider at the center of the Web], and the observance of the Law. On the first point, Jesus clearly sided with those who regarded the Temple as an obstacle to the general spread of holiness, since the concentration on the physical building, with its hierarchies, privileges (mostly hereditary) and wealth, was a form of separation from the people -- a wall built against them. Jesus used the Temple as a preaching forum; but so had others who had opposed it, notably Isaiah and Jeremiah. The idea that the Jews could do without the Temple was not new. On the contrary, it was very old, and it could be argued that the true Jewish religion, long before the Temple was built, was universalistic and unlocated. Jesus, like many other pious Jews, saw holiness spreading to the whole people through the elementary schools and synagogues. But he went further than most of them by regarding the Temple as a source of evil and predicting its destruction, and by treating the Temple authorities and the whole central system of Judaic administration and law with silent contempt."

       "On the second issue, the degree to which the Law must be obeyed, the original argument between the Sadducees, who admitted only the written Pentateuch, and the Pharisees, who taught the Oral Law, had by Jesus' time been supplemented by a further argument among the Hakamim and Pharisees. One school, led by Shammai the Elder (c.50 B.C.-c.30 A.D.), took a rigorist view especially on matters of cleanliness and uncleanliness, an explosive area since it militated strongly against the ability of ordinary, poor people to achieve holiness. The rigorism of the Shammai school, indeed, was eventually to take his descendants and followers out of the rabbinical-Judaic tradition altogether, and they vanished like the Sadducees themselves. On the other hand, there was the school of Hillel the Elder, Shammai's contemporary. He came from the diaspora and was later referred to as 'Hillel the Babylonian.' He brought with him more humane and universalistic notions of Torah interpretation. To Shammai, the essence of the Torah lay in its detail; unless you got the detail exactly right, the system became meaningless and could not stand. To Hillel, the essence of the Torah was its spirit: if you got the spirit right, the detail could take care of itself. Tradition contrasted Shammai's anger and pedantry with Hillel's humility and humanity, but what was remembered best of all was Hillel's anxiety to make obeying the law possible for all Jews and for converts. To a pagan who said he would become a Jew if he could be taught the Torah while standing on one foot, Hillel is said to have replied, 'What is hateful to you, do not unto your neighbor: this is the entire Torah. All the rest is commentary - go and study it.'"

       "Jesus was a member of Hillel's school, and may have sat under him, for Hillel had many pupils. [He agreed with Hillel that the Law created] great barriers between the pious Jews and the rest of humanity. Therein lay the great obstacle, not merely in universalizing Judaism but even in making its practice possible for all Jews."

       "Jesus' teaching career saw him translate Hillel's aphorism into a system of moral theology and, in doing so, strip the Law of all but its moral and ethical elements...Jesus' rigorism in taking Hillel's teaching to its logical conclusion led him to cease to be an orthodox sage in any sense which had meaning, indeed, cease to be a Jew. He created a religion which was sui generis, and it is accurately called Christianity. He incorporated in his ethical Judaism an impressive composite of the eschatology he found in Isaiah, Daniel and Enoch, as well as what he found useful in the Essenes and the Baptist, so that he was able to present a clear perspective of death, judgment and the afterlife. And he offered this new theology to everyone within reach of his mission: pious Jews, the amha-arez, the Samaritans, the unclean, the gentiles even. But, like many religious innovators, he had a public doctrine for the masses and a confidential one for his immediate followers. The latter centered on what would happen to him as a person, in life and in death, and therein lay his claim to be the Messiah - not just the Suffering Servant, but someone of far greater significance."

       "The more one examines the teachings and activities of Jesus, the more obvious it appears that they struck at Judaism in a number of fatal respects, which made his arrest and trial by the Jewish authorities inevitable. His hostility to the Temple was unacceptable even to liberal Pharisees, who accorded Temple worship some kind of centrality. His rejection of the Law was fundamental...He was asserting that man could have a direct relationship with God, even if he were poor, ignorant and sinful; and, conversely, it was not man's obedience to the Torah which creates God's response, but the grace of God to men, at any rate those who have faith in him, which makes them keep his commandments."

       "To most learned Jews, this was false doctrine because Jesus was dismissing the Torah as irrelevant and insisting that, for the approaching Last Judgment, what was needed for salvation was not obedience to the Law but faith. If Jesus had stuck to the provinces no harm would have come to him. By arriving at Jerusalem with a following, and teaching openly, he invited arrest and trial, particularly in view of his attitude to the Temple - and it was on this that his enemies concentrated. False teachers were normally banished to a remote district. But Jesus, by his behavior at his trial, made himself liable to far more serious punishment. Chapter  17 of Deuteronomy, especially verses 8 to 12, appears to state that, in matters of legal and religious controversy, a full inquiry should be conducted and a majority verdict reached, and if any of those involved refuses to accept the decision, he shall be put to death. In a people as argumentative and strong-minded as the Jews, living under the rule of law, this provision, known as the offence of the 'rebellious elder,' was considered essential to hold society together. Jesus was a learned man; that was why Judas, just before his arrest, called him 'rabbi.' Hence, when brought before the Sanhedrin - or whatever court it was - he appeared as a rebellious elder; and by refusing to plead, he put himself in contempt of court and so convicted himself of the crime by his silence. No doubt it was the Temple priests and the Shammaite Pharisees, as well as the Sadducees, who felt most menaced by Jesus' doctrine and wanted him put to death in accordance with scripture. But Jesus could not have been guilty of the crime, at any rate as it was later defined by Maimonides in his Judaic code. In any case it was not clear that the Jews had the right to carry out the death sentence. To dispose of these doubts, Jesus was sent to the Roman procurator Pilate as a state criminal. There was no evidence against him at all on this charge, other than the supposition that men claiming to be the Messiah sooner or later rose in rebellion - Messiah-claimants were usually packed off to the Roman authorities if they became troublesome enough. Hence Jesus was not stoned to death under Jewish law, but crucified by Rome. The circumstances attending Jesus' trial or trials appear to be irregular, as described in the New Testament gospels. But then we possess little information about other trials at this time, and all seem irregular."

       This 'historical context,' of course correctly informs the question of the culpability of the Jewish Temple-elites in the crucifixion of Jesus. It directly contradicts the New Age deconstructionist 'scholars' who imposed their views on the 'historical accuracy of the Christian Gospels in this matter.'

       Johnson makes a salient point about the compatibility of Judaism and Christianity -- at its fundamental core. "To the question Was Jesus God or Man?, the Christians therefore answered: both. After 70 A.D., their answer was unanimous and increasingly emphatic. This made a complete breach with Judaism inevitable. The Jews could accept the decentralization of the Temple: many had long done so, and soon all had to do so. They could accept a different view of the Law. What they could not accept was the removal of the absolute distinction they had always drawn between God and man, because that was the essence of Jewish theology, the belief that above all others separated them from the pagans. By removing that distinction, the Christians took themselves irrecoverably out of the Judaic faith."

       "Moreover, they [the Christians] did so in a way which made antagonism between the two forms of monotheism inevitable, irreconcilable and bitter. The Jews could not concede the divinity of Jesus as God-made-man without repudiating the central tenet of their belief. The Christians could not concede that Jesus was anything less than God without repudiating the essence and purpose of their movement. If Christ was not God, Christianity was nothing. If Christ was God, then Judaism was false. There could be absolutely no compromise on this point. Each faith was thus a threat to the other." Johnson is saying that the history of the Jews shows irrevocably and for all time that Judaism and Christianity are absolutely, immutably, and forevermore  irreconcilable.

       That is what the 'fuss is all about' in the maelstrom of Jewish criticism of Mel Gibson's 'The Passion of the Christ.' This situation is not understandable unless one has a firm grounding in the history of the Jewish people.
____________________________________________________________

Note: This account is supplemented by Part II of the review of Paul Johnson's book, 'A History of the Jews.' Part II, at the link below succinctly summarizes this review and continues the narrative from the time of the formation  of the state of Israel in 1948 to the present.

         Home           Neocons, Israel, & Iraq                America is at War                   The Jews (Part II) from 1948 to the Present