Delivering the Fourth Gospel from Anti-Judaism

An essay I submitted to a magazine. Have not heard back from them, but I think that the issue is so important that we need to start discussing it now.

As I pray with the resurrection accounts in Chapter 20 of the Gospel of John, in my imagination, I can see a silhouette of the risen Lord, in my backyard, inviting me to be with him. There is no artifice in him. He plays no games. He just is and his presence fills my heart with hope. For a very significant moment, I am not concerned about the affairs of the secular world. For a moment, I feel my purpose renewed. Glances and shimmering fragments of grace enlighten my mind, but then there is a jarring moment. I come upon the sentence “On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews. . . .” “The Jews”--the phrase bounces around in my mind. The disciples are afraid of the Jews. But the disciples were Jews. I return to the risen Lord. He’s still there, but now I am watching him with this awareness, that somewhere in the scene, the disciples are afraid of “the Jews.” These disciples—Peter, whom we as Catholics consider the first bishop of Rome, James, John, and other heroes of the early Church, they are afraid of the Jews. Why are they afraid of “the Jews”? We get our answer in John 19:6-7 in which Pilate protests that Jesus is innocent and “The Jews answered, ‘We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die. . .’” Later in John 19: 15 “The Jews cried out ‘Take him away! Crucify him.” As John portrays it, even though Jesus was crucified by the Romans, it is “the Jews” who have demanded his execution. Not “the Jewish Sanhedrin of Jesus’ day.” Not “the Jewish authorities,” but “The Jews.” Now why would a group of Jewish disciples be afraid of “the Jews”? Jesus himself was a Jew. It sounds a lot like saying that, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, the followers of Dr. King stayed in a locked room “for fear of the Americans.”

Sensing the absurdity present in the current text, we need to use our minds. The phrase “the Jews” is a translation of the Greek “hoi Ioudaioi.” Every major Protestant and Catholic Biblical scholar has explained that “hoi Ioudaioi” was not spoken by Jesus. In The Community of the Beloved Disciple, Fr. Raymond Brown, one of the best Biblical critics, Catholic or Protestant, of the past 50 years, argues that the word was inserted into the Fourth Gospel by the community that produced the Fourth Gospel because they had most probably been thrown out of Jewish synagogues after the council of Jamnia. It reflects a late first century polemic.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Church has been very clear about the danger of misinterpreting these texts (that is, claiming that “the Jews”—that is, every Jew of Jesus’ day-- conspired to kill Jesus. At Vatican II, the Church taught in Nostra Aetate that all of the Jews of Jesus’ day and the Jews of later generations are not to be blamed for the death of Christ. In his Speech to Symposium on the roots of anti-Judaism, Pope John Paul II has written “In the Christian world—I do not say on the part of the Church as such—erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people and their alleged culpability have circulated for too long, engendering feelings of hostility towards this people." He mentions in his Reflection on the Shoah that “Such interpretations of the New Testament have been totally and definitively rejected by the Second Vatican Council.”[1]

Yet, as I contemplate the scene and when I hear it read from the pulpit, I find the phrase “the Jews” jarring. Moreover, even though the Church has made it clear that these passages have to be placed in their historical context, as they are read, they have a particular effect. I contend that the very translation of the phrase “Hoi Ioudaioi” as “the Jews” fosters anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. First we need to clarify those terms. Anti-Judaism is a religious hatred and as such contains no racial hatred. Anti-Semitism, intimately connected to anti-Judaism, is a racial hatred. For the purpose of this paper, the two are so inter-related that I will use the terms interchangeably. It seems to me that centuries of anti-Judaism led to the anti-Semitism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Today, as in the past, we need to examine why anti-Semitism and its closely related phenomenon anti-Judaism continue to exist.

At face and when analyzed, anti-Semitism is thoroughly irrational. In the first half of the twentieth century, when anti-Semitism reached its horrific zenith, the Jewish community was accused of controlling the world financial system and at the same time causing the Bolshevism that sought to undermine it—a strange and existentially vicious contradiction. Yet it was revealing—Nazis and Christians were obsessed with the Jew as a conspirator, always nefarious. Why would such an image develop? While I was attending a Bearing Witness Program in Washington, DC, one Catholic commentator remarked that anti-Judaism has been part of the Christian collective unconscious. Inasmuch as images of the Blessed Mother and the risen Christ give us peace, the unconscious image (archetype?) of Jews as conspiring to harm Christ and by extension--Christians has led us to horrific acts and outlandish accusations. It also seems that, sometime during modernity, anti-Judaism crept into the collective unconscious of Muslims. I personally think that there are many factors that contribute to anti-Semitism with the anti-Judaism of Christian sources being one of the most important factors. The views that led to the Nazi Holocaust were also fed by a bizarre racial Darwinism, rising nationalism in Europe, and a rejection of spirituality and ethics as the cultural grounding of Europe. Nonetheless, for decades we have been grappling with the question why so many Christians, Protestant and Catholic, actively cooperated with Nazism or were unwilling to risk their own lives to save the lives of their Jewish neighbors. Examining the anti-Semitic statements made by influential Christians over the last four decades such as Richard Nixon’s paranoiac “The Jews are all over the government. . . Most Jews are disloyal” and Mel Gibson’s, "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world,"[2] we have to admit that to Christians, in many ways, Jews remain an other whom we frequently feel discomfort with, and even suspicion towards. Consider the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s claim that President Obama will not talk with him not because the President considers it prudent to part ways with a man who has made overtly racist comments, but because “them Jews aren't going to let him talk to me."[3] The Vatican’s welcoming back of Lefebvrist Bishop Williamson who (prior to discipline from Rome) had denied the Holocaust and accused the Jewish people of plotting world domination has once again brought the issue into the light. Because of this, I think it is time to take some significant action to undo the errors in the Gospel narrative that have leached their way into our Christian Collective Unconscious. It is time for a hermeneutical and translative metanoia .

Why consider a change in translation? First, if we simply reflect on our lived experience, we will have to admit that from time to time, we hear the word “Jew” used in a contemptuous way, and if not contemptuously, then irreverently or mockingly. What is the historical source of the association of the phrase “the Jews” with someone or something demonic? The clear answer is the historical roots of the expression in the Gospel of John. If we consider a different ethnic phrase such as “the English” or “the Americans,” we will have to admit that it does not carry the same linguistic valence. In and of itself, if a Jewish person were to say, “I am a Jew” there is no negativity to that. If someone were to say, “Jews are literate people” he would simply be stating a fact, but if a non-Jew says, “Here comes a Jew” or “Oh, the Jews” there is a bite, a sting to it. If you doubt this, consider the difference between saying “The members of the Jewish community are discussing this issue” and “The Jews are discussing this issue.” “The Jews,” when uttered by non-Jews with a particular tone, brings to mind the 2000 year old Christian habit of proclaiming on certain liturgical days that the Jews are conspiring to kill the savior. Quite simply, one must wonder how the cultural usage of the phrase “the Jews” would change if we changed the translation from “the Jews” to “the authorities.” I consider this particularly relevant because at The Shrine of the Blessed Sacrament in Washington DC, sometime in 1994, I heard a young Catholic priest preaching about the Gospel of John say, “And who is it that gives Jesus trouble? Why, of course, the Jews.” Thankfully, that was the only time I have ever heard a priest say such a thing.

As I comment upon this issue, I do so as one who has undergone his own metanoia. As a child, I knew only one Jewish boy. He was ridiculed by many of my Christian friends. One friend in particular would shout “Jew” or “Hebe” whenever we saw David. I didn’t always like it when he did it. In all honesty, I didn’t shout at the Jewish boy, but I didn’t tell my friend to be quiet. I didn’t find it funny, but I didn’t see why I should stand up to my friend and ask him to stop. On another occasion, when I was fourteen, thinking it funny to be obnoxious around my Catholic friends, I did shout something offensive to a group of Jewish students at a rival high school. They laughed—more at the shock value than anything else. On another occasion, when I was in college, a relative of mine (who tends to say ethnic things about everyone, himself included) continuously referred to one man as “Herbie the Jew.”

Now that we have established the fact that the current translation of the Gospel of John has fomented hatred and intolerance in our world, we next need to consider why the effect that a translation has upon a society determines the validity of a translation. Every translation is an interpretation. For example, St. Jerome, influenced by his own theological horizons, translated the opening verse of Psalm 23 as “The Lord rules me.” This translation, the Vulgate, stood as the official Catholic interpretation that was read at the Mass, prayed with, and studied in seminaries for a Millenium. Throughout the centuries, the Jewish community had always understood that translation to be less accurate than the translation we use now: “The Lord is my shepherd.” In Protestant circles, “The Lord is my shepherd” became the translation thanks to the reformers. How does this particular verse demonstrate that every translation is an interpretation? During the act of translation, a translator studies many different translations of the Bible. That is, when translating the Hebrew Scriptures, she looks at a variety of early Hebrew or Greek versions, the Aramaic targums, Jerome’s Vulgate, English translations, French translations, and countless other texts and compares how a particular verse is written in those texts. As seen in Psalm 23, one Bible may understand Psalm 23 as “the Lord rules me” and another may understand the Psalm as “the Lord is my shepherd.” These are very different understandings. “The Lord is my shepherd” is much more tender than “the Lord rules me,” and given the Christian and Jewish experience of a loving God, “the Lord is my shepherd” is the more accurate translation. As translators have analyzed the Psalms, they have also analyzed the Greek New Testament. When a translator is considering a particular passage, she once again compares a variety of texts. Basically, a translator, or more accurately, a community of translators looks at the various reasons for a translation, discerns how the Spirit of Truth is at work, and then makes a decision about how the translation should be written. How does the nature of a translation weigh in on the translation of “Hoi Ioudaioi”? We must study the various texts and look at all of the reasons it has been translated as “the Jews.” We must ask as we asked with Psalm 23 whether “the Jews” is the most loving translation of “Hoi Ioudaioi.”

At The Catholic University of America, when I would discuss Biblical translation and interpretation with Professor Stephen Happel, personal theologian to Cardinal McCarrick, he would remind me that a text is the performance of the text and that there is no such thing as a value neutral translation. Dr. Happel would frequently point out that a text is just “marks on a page” until there is a reader who interprets those marks on the page. The Bible has never been able to read itself. It becomes the Word of God for a community as it is read, and in the reading, performed, that is, lived by the community of readers. Moreover, the translation is always informed by the moral, theological and spiritual horizons of the translators. That is, the task of translation is always informed by the level of a translator’s attentiveness to all of the relevant data regarding a text, the intelligence of the translator, the ability of the translator to discern the various reasons for a particular translation and against another translation, and by the commitment of a translator to the responsible use of skills as he seeks to live what he has learned from the study of translation.
What makes a good translation is a good translator and a good translator is aware of the history of translations and the effects those translations have had upon the Christian community as we attempt to live the Gospel in the world of Christians and non-Christians. Another way to understand this is to say that the Christian Truth is a lived truth. It is not an abstraction. We understand this from the beautiful poetry, the inspired word, of the Fourth Gospel itself. As the community of the Fourth Gospel produced the Fourth Gospel, the community reflected on the meaning of the oral tradition about Jesus, and guided by the Holy Spirit, the community tells us that Jesus said that he is the “way, the truth and the life.” Jesus, the word of God (John 1:1), tells us that he is the truth. Jesus is alive. The truth is something that lives. It is not just a concept that we memorize and then talk about. It is the way of love. “Beloved, let us love one another for love is of God and God is love.” (1 John 4:7) What does this mean for translation? It means that a Christian translation is valid if it promotes love and understanding. An interpretation that promotes division and suspicion between Christians and another religion is not a living truth but a distortion and an interpretation that has historically encouraged Christians to slaughter Jews or to stand by in indifference as Jews are slaughtered, terrorized, or neglected (as the translation “the Jews” has done) is completely antithetical to the truth.

Furthermore, as Christians, we know that God’s word is active. As the Lord tells us in Isaiah 55,
9 As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts.
10
For just as from the heavens the rain and snow come down And do not return there till they have watered the earth, making it fertile and fruitful, Giving seed to him who sows and bread to him who eats,
11
So shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; It shall not return to me void, but shall do my will, achieving the end for which I sent it.

The word of God acts like the rain and snow, actively watering the fields. Moisture accumulates, the clouds gather, the moisture actively condenses in time, and acts in time to water the fields. Then the wheat and corn grow. God’s word is spoken in time, written in time, translated in time, meditated upon in time, discussed in time and lived in time. As the weather changes, as farmers develop new strategies for harnessing the weather to feed their people, so the cultural milieu for understanding God’s word changes. In the modern and post-modern world, we have developed a reflective cultural milieu, one that examines the historical origin and the validity of our traditions. Hence, in a new era, the Holy Spirit will reveal new insights.

God’s word acts as history unfolds. God’s word as logos is not a philosophical concept or a phrase to be memorized and used to test whether others have memorized the word or particular word. God’s word as logos in the fourth Gospel is a translation of the Hebrew term dabar, and as we see in the previous passage from Isaiah, God’s dabar is active in history. This leads us to ask, as we proclaim that the disciples were hiding from “the Jews” and that “the Jews” conspired to kill Christ, whether, in this translation, we are actively listening to how God is speaking his word to us now, in a world in which Christians have killed and tortured millions of Jews from the time of Constantine to 1948 and in which Christians have been involved in conflicts with Jews from the time of Constantine until this present moment. Can the Holy Spirit who guides the Church be leading Catholics to conclude that centuries of brutality toward and suspicion toward “the Jews” motivated by the fourth Gospel’s blaming “the Jews” for the death of Christ endorse maintaining the current translation of Hoi Ioudaioi as “the Jews”? This question is particularly relevant as we consider the words of Pope John Paul II (as he comments upon Vatican II’s document on Judaism and other non-Christian religions):

We deeply regret the errors and failures of those sons and daughters of the Church. We make our own what is said in the Second Vatican Council's Declaration Nostra Aetate, which unequivocally affirms: "The Church ... mindful of her common patrimony with the Jews, and motivated by the Gospel's spiritual love and by no political considerations, deplores the hatred, persecutions and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time and from any source".(18)

The highlighted terms “from any source” call us to reflect: can we finally in all humility and sincerity admit that the language of one of the four canonical Gospels is a source of anti-Judaism and hence, anti-Semitism? As a Catholic, I find that I can answer this question very easily. Since we belong to a communitarian tradition that recognizes that it was the Holy Spirit motivating human Christian communities to produce each Gospel, we can say “Yes, our tradition has some minor distortions which can be corrected and one of those corrections is the mistranslation of Hoi Ioudaioi as ‘the Jews.’” The Catholic Church is communitarian. Interpreting the Bible in the Catholic Church is never just a ”me and Jesus” operation. We believe that scripture developed within the context of the situation in life of the early Christian community. We also know that the community deliberated and discerned about which writings should belong in the Christian Scriptures. Within this context of communal interpretation, we have come to understand that the community teaches authoritatively. Hence the term “magisterium”—the official teaching authority of the community. The magisterium, the teaching office of the Bishops in union with the Pope, tends to get a lot of negative news coverage, and in some cases, justifiably so. There have been times when bishops have erroneously disciplined theologians. The history of the development of Catholic doctrine tends to read like this: scholar X publishes a legitimate interpretation, the Pope or individual bishops investigate the interpretation, the bishops declare the interpretation erroneous and suppress the theologian’s writings, after a generation or two, the magisterium decides that after all, the interpretation is insightful, even authoritative. In such a manner, Thomas Aquinas, Galileo, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, John Courtney Murray, Karl Rahner, and certain aspects of liberation theology have been suppressed and then embraced. In the case of this translation, I know of no scholar whose writings have been suppressed, but I do know of many Catholics who have puzzled about how to read “the Jews.” We have been seriously studying this situation for decades and wondering about solutions. I think we should consider an act of magisterial teaching authority.

It is important to note that the actions of individual members of what we consider the magisterium or at least the historical forerunners of those we call the magisterium have not always treated Jews with kindness. As a matter of fact, their acting on the mistranslation of the Gospel of John has produced the following anti-Judaic statements (which no doubt led to anti-Judaic actions):

Justin Martyr in his Dialogue with Trypho claimed that Jewish suffering was due to the fact that “the Jews” had killed the Messiah:

For the circumcision according to the flesh, which is from Abraham, was given for a sign; that you may be separated from other nations, and from us; and that you alone may suffer that which you now justly suffer; and that your land may be desolate, and your cities burned with fire; and that strangers may eat your fruit in your presence, and not one of you may go up to Jerusalem.' For you are not recognised among the rest of men by any other mark than your fleshly circumcision. For none of you, I suppose, will venture to say that God neither did nor does foresee the events, which are future, nor fore-ordained his deserts for each one. Accordingly, these things have happened to you in fairness and justice, for you have slain the Just One, and His prophets before Him.[4]

Augustine follows suit in Against Faustus: “the Church admits and avows the Jewish people to be cursed, because after killing Christ they continue to till the ground of an earthly circumcision. . .”[5]

Augustine again in On the Psalms:

O you Jews, killed him. Whence did you kill Him? With the sword of the tongue: for ye did whet your tongues. And when did ye smite, except when ye cried out, “Crucify, crucify”? .... This is the whole of the Jews sagacity, this is that which they sought as some great matter. Let us kill and let us not kill: so let us kill, as that we may not ourselves be judged to have killed’[6]

John Chrysostom is even more shocking in that he prescribes a particular course of action for what he considers the crime of “The Jews”: “Although such beasts are unfit for work, they are fit for killing. And this is what happened to the Jews: while they were making themselves unfit for work, they grew fit for slaughter.”[7]

Now, ironically, I will make the case that the very same men who misinterpreted the Gospel of John also provided a method for undoing the mistranslation that led to the current crisis. Consider the fact that the New Testament canon was not given some universal official status until 393 at the Council of Hippo Regius (The canon was finally defined at an ecumenical council at Trent in the 1540s). That is, the early Church bishops and theologians actually debated which writings from the early Church should be considered inspired. There were a series of debates. One of the first concerned the writings of Gnostic Christians. Around 180 CE, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, rejected the Gnostic Gospels because they did not teach what was taught in the churches that were founded by the apostles of Jesus. Later debates considered whether or not the Book of Revelation should be included in the canon. The fact that the community debated which texts should be included based upon what the apostles had taught their ancestors which their ancestors in the Christian faith then orally passed down to them points to a deeper reality—the later words about Jesus were judged by what the Christian community was living which was inherited from those who had lived with Jesus. What the apostles, who were Jewish, had lived, was caritas flowing from agape—love. It is telling that Irenaeus considers the Gnostic writings outside the canon because they did not contain passion and death accounts—the very testimony of Christ’s love. So, what we can conclude is that the reality of love guided the early leaders of the Church as they considered the validity of various writings about Jesus. Why then, did they do the unloving thing and include passages blaming the Jews for the death of Christ? They were people of their time. Walter Benjamin once remarked that every act of civilization is also an act of barbarism. Rene Girard has demonstrated that as cultures are forming, including our early Christian culture, people tend to be scapegoated. It is a dynamic of the culture of humanity to exclude, even to do violence to, an “other.” However, in all truly Catholic traditions, traditions that are open to the whole truth, we seek to move beyond the violent, resentful dynamic of culture and move into the kingdom of God, which excludes no one.

But does moving into the kingdom of God include re-translating a Gospel? Yes, since to do so would continue our acts of repentance (teshuva) for two millennia of massacres, demonstrate to Jewish people that the Catholic Church is a real peace-maker when dealing with fate of Israel, and prevent future discord between Christians and Jews. Consider the following situation: nothing better exemplifies harmony between Christians and Jews than the loving marriage between a Christian and a Jew. But imagine what it must be like for the Jewish spouse who accompanies his/her Christian spouse to a Christian liturgy and hears that “the Jews” conspired to kill the Christian messiah. It has to cause extreme discomfort. To overcome this and other possible suffering, we need to change the translation.
How then can the Catholic Church claim authority to change a translation which has stood for two millennia? Consider the change to be proposed:
John 8:32-44:
Jesus then said to a crowd of people who believed in him, "If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." They answered him, "We are descendants of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. 16 How can you say, 'You will become free'?" Jesus answered them, "Amen, amen, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin. A slave does not remain in a household forever, but a son 17 always remains. So if a son frees you, then you will truly be free. I know that you are descendants of Abraham. But you are trying to kill me, because my word has no room among you. 18 I tell you what I have seen in the Father's presence; then do what you have heard from the Father." 19 They answered and said to him, "Our father is Abraham." Jesus said to them, "If you were Abraham's children, you would be doing the works of Abraham. But now you are trying to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God; Abraham did not do this. You are doing the works of your father!" (So) they said to him, "We are not illegitimate. We have one Father, God." Jesus said to them, "If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and am here; I did not come on my own, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I am saying? Because you cannot bear to hear my word. You belong to your father the devil and you willingly carry out your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in truth, because there is no truth in him.


John 19:15

And he said to the Jewish authorities, "Behold, your king!"
They cried out, "Take him away, take him away! Crucify him!"

John 20:19

On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the authorities

There is nothing lost and everything gained from the proposed change. Jesus is still Messiah. Christian moral teaching is still grounded. No doctrines have been altered and the violence that existed in previous translations has been overcome.

As we examine the various possible translations of a Gospel, we need to remember that each Gospel did not fall from the sky ready to interpret itself. In each of the communities that produced a Gospel, the community acted under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in re-telling the stories of Jesus that related to their situation in life. Each Gospel was the product of a tradition of communal reflection. The community would ask, as I am asking, what words of Jesus will help us to live life fully—and that means justly—today, and the words of Jesus most relevant then as now are love and metanoia.

The change that metanoia brings is intellectual, moral and religious and one of the intellectual changes that Christians most need is to accept that inspiration does not mean that the word of God was divinely dictated to each evangelist. Each evangelist was in most cases a representative of a community that reflected on the meaning of the life of Jesus in relation to their communal living. In the case of the Fourth Gospel, the community reflected on the meaning of the life of Jesus and developed the awesome theology of Jesus as “the word” that became flesh. Some of the most moving theology in the Christian tradition is found in the Gospel of John, but there is another element of that Gospel. It was the product of a community that had suffered a wound—they had been turned away from Jewish synagogues because of their belief in Jesus. They then did what many human beings do—they wrote their resentment into a text—the Gospel text. They were Jews who had come to believe that Jesus was divine and were now grappling with being rejected from a community to which they had belonged. It was at that point that they decided to re-write the history of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus and to blame his death on the community that had rejected them—“the Jews.” Every Catholic teacher explains that, as Vatican II explained, the Bible is “the word of God in the words of human beings.” There is a divine element to scripture and a human element to scripture. “Hoi Ioudaioi” is a product of the sinful human element of resentment. As such, it is not essential to the word of God. Because of this, the Universal Magisterium, through synod or otherwise, should adopt this new translation.

In this paper, since I am not an ecclesiologist, I will not consider what the proper limits of Magisterial authority are. I will simply make the case that the Bishops of the Catholic Church have the authority to adopt this new translation. We have interpreted scripture in the context of a dynamic tradition for 2000 years. The community, in prayer, debate, and reflection took 330 years to agree on which early Christian writings it would consider to be inspired. In the meantime, Christian Bishops and theologians were busy defining doctrine. For example, in 325 at Nicea, “homoousion,” which is not a Biblical term, was introduced into the creed. The term defines how Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox Christians understand Jesus—that he is “one in being with” the Father. This occurred 42 years before the Council of Hippo Regius defined the canon. The Church’s use of homoousion helped the community to understand the meaning of the Gospel even before the Church had finally agreed on which books should be included in the New Testament canon. Hence, the authority of the magisterium has in many ways translated the meaning of the Gospel to the community. For this reason, the magisterium can make a decision regarding the proper translation of a Biblical term which has produced such turmoil in our attempt to imitate Christ.

For all of these reasons, at this time, having heeded Pope John Paul II’s insights regarding the Shoah, having listened to the Bishops and theologians of the Church at Vatican II and having prayed with Pope Benedict over the reality that God is love and that love is lived, I urge a more loving, more living translation of the Gospel of John. The term “the Jews” must be removed from the Gospel and “Hoi Ioudaioi” must be translated as “the crowd” or “the authorities.”I hope now, as I pray with the Gospel of John, that as I enter into the resurrection scene, my fears might better connect with the fears of the early disciples. We all have fears and we are all surprised when the risen Lord enters our scene and blows them away. I have fears, but I do not fear Jews, nor do I even want to imagine that there is any reason to fear a people as forgiving, as intelligent, as generous, and as helpful as the Jewish community.


[1] L'Osservatore Romano, 1 November 1997, p. 6.
[2] Reported by Jeremiah Marquez, SFGate, online service of the San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, July 31, 2006, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/07/31/entertainment/e143903D69.DTL&type=politics#ixzz0RlbPByMC (accessed October 24, 2009).
[3] FOXNews.com, Wednesday, June 10, 2009, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/10/wright-suggests-jews-white-house-wont-let-speak-obama (Accessed October 24, 2009).

[4] Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, Chapter XVI, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/justinmartyr-dialoguetrypho.html.

[5] St. Augustine, Against Faustus, Chapter 11 (Translation by Richard Stothert), http://www.logoslibrary.org/augustine/faustus/1211.html.

[6] St Augustine, On the Psalms, 63:4,5, quoted in Fr. Vasile Mihoc, St Paul and the Jews According to St John Chrysostom’s Commentary on Romans 9-11, http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/religious_studies/SBL2007/Mihoc.pdf, September 30, 2009.

[7] Medieval Sourcebook: Saint John Chrysostom: Eight Homilies Against the Jews, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/chrysostom-jews6.html#HOMILY_I.