Pope Benedict’s new book and the conversion of the “Jews"

by Michael Hoffman

The pope's new book on Jesus Christ and the Jews, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week, has been published. I will be reading it early next week and my full review will appear in "Revisionist History" newsletter.

From excerpts I have read online, the book is written in the classic mode of casuistry, the post-medieval Roman Catholic lawyer’s corollary to the Talmud’s lawyerly pilpul.

By means of this casuistry the pope is saying one thing to the Left and the rabbis, but provides enough cover for his thesis so that the Right and conservative Catholics can allow themselves to believe that he really didn't say what the rabbis and the Left are saying he did say.

What a tangled web! Whatever happened to plain speech? “Let your yes be yes, and your no be no; anything else is of the evil one” (Matthew 5:37).

The Vatican and the rabbis do not heed Christ's sage admonition, that's for sure. For example, Purim, the Talmudic feast of revenge, is just around the corner on the rabbinic calendar, Adar 14 (March 19-20). On Purim, every Judaic male is required to get so drunk he can't tell the difference between Haman and Mordechai. The Talmud obligates adult Judaic males to become intoxicated at Purim, then warns them of the potential dangers of such inebriation (Babylonian Talmud, Megila 7b). The Talmud provides a plausible denial loophole for its own command to Judaic males to become intoxicated with alcohol. Bottom line: for centuries Judaic males have gotten hopelessly drunk on Purim.

Pope Benedict's casuistry reflects the plausible denial stratagem exhibited in Megila 7b: while the pope does not affirm in Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week the theory holding that “Jews” will be saved independently of Christ, he does suggest the Church should not be targeting “Jews" for conversion efforts.

Observe this tangled web of papal casuistry: [1] "Don't convert the ‘Jews,’ [2] but they do need Christ to be saved."

[1] Don't convert the “Jews” — absolutely delights Pharisaic Judaism and the Left.

[2] "Jews" still need Christ to be saved — provides a face-saving escape clause for the pope’s Right-wing.

Benedict "approvingly quotes" Cistercian abbess and "Biblical writer" Hildegard Brem: “The church must not concern herself with the conversion of the Jews, since she must wait for the time fixed for this by God.”

I'm going to "approvingly quote" the founder of the Christian Church (just in case His words count for anything next to those of abbesses and pontiffs): “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (Matthew 15:24)

Let's see now, at the beginning of His ministry Jesus focused his conversion efforts solely on the House of Israel, but since then, that focus has been abrogated? Or would the casuists prefer to employ the word "derogated"?

The charge given by Jesus later in His ministry, to carry the Gospel to the gentiles, to the ends of the earth, Pope Benedict reverses, in favor of what the pontiff terms a “sequence": first the “full number” of the Gentiles comes to the faith, and only then the Jews.

So Jesus had it wrong. He sought to convert the Jews first. He wasn't aware of the "sequence"!

The pope quotes St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s advice to one of his predecessors, Pope Eugene III, that “a determined time has been fixed” for the conversion of the Jews “that cannot be anticipated.”

Clever! The pope has switched gears and is alluding to eschatology, the Pauline prediction of Judaic conversion in general, in some form and to some extent (we know not the particulars), at the end of time.

This process would, however, never forbid the conversion of individual "Jews" before the end time, and it never did. Ecclesiastic history testifies to militant missionary efforts toward Judaics.  Otherwise, what were Peter and Paul doing in the Church in the first place? Why didn't Christ just convert the Roman Centurion, the Samaritan woman and any other gentile He chose, and make them apostles and disciples, leaving His call to the Simons and Sauls to the time when the "full number" of the gentiles would be converted?

No doubt Dr. Scott Hahn and other august PhD. theologians beholden to the Novus Ordo Seclorum, will resolve these “seeming" contradictions and tie them into a neat traditional package, exactly corresponding to "what the Church has always taught."

But the Church has always taught that from motives of charity and compassion we should free Judaics from the shackles of bondage to the religious system based on the Babylonian Talmud, and lead them to the love, grace and mercy of Jesus.

Catholic Saints like Vincent Ferrer responded heroically to the call to convert Judaics. Among Protestants, international missionary organizations were founded, such as the London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews. In the space of a few decades of the 19th century, nearly 1800 Judiacs were converted and baptized in the Society's London chapel in Palestine Lane, and thousands more were converted throughout Germany and eastern Europe. One of the leaders of the Society, Rev. Dr. Alexander McCaul, warned of the sins which Judaics commit as long as they remain in Judaism:

"Every man who uses the prayers of the synagogue, there confesses himself to God as a believer in the oral law, and consequently ready to execute all its decrees of cruelty, fraud and persecution...That is his profession in the synagogue; when he then comes forth from the solemn act of Divine Worship and tells me that he is...charitable and that he abhors persecution, how can I possibly believe him?..so long as their words and their deeds contradict each other, a mist hangs over them...There is falsehood somewhere and the only possible mode of removing this appearance is by a public renunciation of the oral law...To their God they owe it, for by the blasphemies of the oral law, His character is misrepresented and His name blasphemed."

Judaism is an offense to God — now — at this moment! Pope Benedict XVI, by "suggesting" that Jews need not convert to faith in Jesus Christ "at this time in history," is abandoning them to their sins, and ultimately to damnation, for no one is saved by their race!

Who then is the "Jew hater"? Is it the Christian evangelist who converts Judaics, or the Catholic casuist who leaves them to die without Christ?

The rabbis claim to be the defenders of the "Jews." Are they not actually their worst enemies? And what of a pope who, by retarding missionary efforts, cooperates with the Christless agenda of rabbinic Judaism?

Michael Hoffman is the author of Judaism Discovered, an 1100 page textbook and reference work. He is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press.

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...Benedict sensitively touches upon a major problem that has plagued Catholic-Jewish relations all throughout history: converting Jews. This topic has been the focus of considerable discord in Catholic-Jewish relations in recent years...As a theological conservative, Benedict has written previously that the Jewish covenant at Sinai has been superseded. But his supersessionism has always been focused on the end of time, and he has maintained that Jewish unification with the church is “hardly possible, and perhaps not even desirable before the eschaton.” In his latest book, he expands this idea, insisting that for now “Israel retains its own mission” and that saving Israel “is in the hands of God” — meaning, presumably, not in the hands of Christian missionaries. Had Christians followed this doctrine throughout the millennia...Jews would have been freer to practice their faith with dignity. Benedict’s expectation of the future acceptance of Christian faith by everyone takes the practical threat out of Christian supersessionism for Jews today."

— Rabbi Eugene Korn, "Benedict’s ‘Jesus’ and the Jews”
Forward newspaper, March 9, 2011

(Korn is American director of the Israeli "Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding and Cooperation" in Efrat and Jerusalem, and editor of Meorot: A Forum of Modern Orthodox Discourse).

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