Hugh J. Schonfield’s "The Passover Plot": Blaming the Victim

The rock face of Golgotha, the hill of skulls where Christ was crucified. See the eyes? Isn't it creepy?

Hugh J. Schonfield’s The Passover Plot: Blaming the Victim

Dr. Hugh J. Schonfield

Get set to be shocked. In the Sixties, Dr. Hugh J. Schonfield’s Bantam Books paperback edition of his bestseller The Passover Plot was, without question, the most famous book of popular Biblical scholarship at the time. As a teenager back then, I remember it was supposed to contain The Big Secret About Christianity that everyone was slavering for, and like everyone else, I was intensely curious about it.

The ossurary of Herod

As readers of my essay “The American Apocalypse” know, the two real Big Secrets about Christianity are that 1) John the Baptist, an Essene, was real founder of Christianity; he was Christ’s mentor, and therefore Christianity is really an Essene religion, and 2) St. Paul corrupted the young Jesus religion by injecting sexual guilt into it where none existed before, making the sins of the flesh more important than the sins of the spirit.

Imagine my surprise when I finally read The Passover Plot as a junior at Princeton in 1976—and learned that Schonfield was merely Mel Gibson in reverse. Read on and you’ll see.

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Hugh J. Schonfield’s The Passover Plot: Blaming the Victim

Albert Schweitzer remarked in The Quest for the Historical Jesus that nothing reveals a man so much as his interpretation of the life of Jesus. If it is true—and it probably is—then in his bestselling so-called "New Light on the History of Jesus," The Passover Plot, Dr. Hugh J. Schonfield certainly exposes the predilections of his personality, asserting that Jesus planned his own martyrdom deliberately with the help of his disciples.

Schonfield goes to great and unrealistic lengths to assert that a very few members of the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem—the Pharisees priesthood, particularly Caiphas—had no role whatsoever in Christ’s death. While there’s no questions that the vicious Roman occupiers must bear the ultimate blame for Christ’s death, there’s also no question that certain members of the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem, terrified of their brutal occupiers, played some role in helping the Romans eliminate an innocent man that nearly everyone regarded as a dangerous heretic and a potential political revolutionary. You just didn’t go around saying, “I’m the King—yes, I’m more important than the Emperor—and by the way, I happen to be the Son of God too.” It would be like a radical today say, “Yeah, I’m the real President of the United States, so let's overthrow the government—and by the way, I’m God too.” From their points of view, both the Pharisees and the Romans were understandably shocked by Christ’s assertions. But that doesn’t excuse the murder of an innocent, peaceloving man.

Let me make it very clear: I am not endorsing the vicious medieval blood-libel canard of Mel Gilson and his ilk that “the Jews killed Jesus.” But it’s also an irrefutable historical fact that a tiny minority of the Jewish priesthood in Jerusalem played a minor administrative role in Christ’s death by handing him over to the Romans to placate the unforgiving foreign occupiers.

A contemporary depiction of Herod Agrippa

Herod, the ranting tyrant

No, the Jews most definitely didn't kill Jesus. But for God's sake, Mr. Schonfield, don't say Jesus had himself killed!

Schonfield declares, "We must never let theology entice us away from the historical circumstances, so that we lose contact with the factors which Jesus had to take into account." Yet through his avowed purpose, stated publicly before he deals with the facts, and through his selection of evidence, he quite clearly reveals his own prejudices. In the process he commits such grave errors of inobjectivity that he renders his own interpretation useless.

Giotto's Christ Before Caiaiphas (1304-6)

For one hundred and thirty pages, Schonfield hems and haws through the accumulation of evidence he attempts to build up to bolster his theory that Jesus, seized with a violent messianic complex, plotted his own martyrdom and carefully planned to insure his crucifixion in order to guarantee his place in history. Up until page 130, Schonfield maintains a veneer of reasonability; while much of his evidence is tangential, not to say circumstantial, and while much of his hypothesis is questionable, still, he does not rave like a zealot.

Then comes the bombshell. On page 130, he steps forward and exposes himself. What we see is a shock, and yet we must thank him for being so forthright. Otherwise we might mistake him for a serious Biblical scholar, if he did not unashamedly declare the rationale for his argument. His revelation is so astounding, and its implications so disturbing, that it deserves to be quoted in full here:

We have evidence that the chief priests at the time were arrogant and high-handed, loving wealth and power and position. This has been true of hierarchies of different lands at many periods. But in Palestine just now they were responsible in the difficult conditions of alien domination for the maintenance of public order, for assuring the continuity of national existence and the survival of the Temple as the world-centre of Jewish faith. Their present fears were by no means ill-founded, as Jewish history of the following decades abundantly confirmed. Better that one man should die than multitudes, including innocent women and children. The liquidation of individuals was commonplace in those days, and notorious during the closing years of the reign of Tiberius. It is still tolerated two thousand years later with all our vaunted concern for human rights. We must beware of judging what happened in light of what Christians believe about Jesus. We have to see him as he appeared to the Council in their grave predicament. From their point of view the decision they arrived at was fully justified, and Jesus, well knowing what he was doing, had quite deliberately forced them to take it by his skillfully planned and calculated activities. If he had not presented himself as a claimant of the throne of Israel and a menace to national security he would have been completely ignored by the Sanhedrin. He had himself made doubly sure that they would proceed to extremes against him by goading them with his words and behaviour, so that any possible mitigation of their severity would be offset by the personal animus he had intentionally created. The Council might imagine they were exercising their own free will in determining to destroy Jesus, and Judas Iscariot might believe the same in betraying him; but in fact the comprehensive engineer of the Passover Plot was Jesus himself. Their responses were governed by his ability to assess their reactions when he applied appropriate stimuli. Thus it was assured that the Scriptures would be fulfilled. (2) [Regarding spelling and punctuation, Schonfield is British.]

"I have frequently been urged by numerous readers to set down my convictions about Jesus," Schonfield informs us in his introduction. "They were persuaded that, in my unusual position as a Jew who has devoted a lifetime to the sympathetic elucidation of Christian Origins and is not connected with any section of the Church, I ought to have seen things which have escaped the observation of those more directly involved." (3) "Here Schonfield reveals the reason for his peculiar (to say the least) view of the Passion. It is understandable why he as a Jew would resent the blame Christians have placed on Jews for the Crucifixion as an excuse for anti-Semitism (when the scapegoating is only a transference of guilt felt by Christians for the death of Jesus). As Schonfield himself says:

The calumny that the Jewish people were responsible for the death of Jesus has all along been an antisemitic fraud perpetrated by the Church when it became paganised, and has been a direct cause of untold suffering and persecution inflicted on the Jews down the centuries. The present-day qualified second-thoughts of the Roman Church on the subject of Jewish 'deicide' has come very belatedly and is a totally inadequate retraction. (4)

Yet however understandable Schonfield's anger is, it is not excusable that he rationalize the murder of a being who, if nothing else, was a totally innocent man. What compounds Schonfield's crime is that he shows an awareness of the moral questions at stake and then he chooses to ignore them. He admits that "the liquidation of individuals" "is still tolerated two thousand years later with all our vaunted concern for human rights," and yet he refuses to apply that principle in the case of Jesus, because Jesus, as a holy man so obscure that our knowledge of him is almost totally limited to the adulatory writings of his disciples, posed a lethal threat to the integrity of the Jewish state.

A "battlefield Christ" scarecrow from the hellish trenches of World War One

Schonfield justifies Christ's execution in terms of his "menace to national security," through what even Schonfield admits was a kangaroo court. But by doing so, ironically enough, he is invoking the same brand of paranoid hysteria that drove George W. Bush to invade Iraq, murder a million innocent people, and torture countless others.

Critic Dwight MacDonald once wrote that a true liberal or a true conservative supports a cause that conforms to his principles even if it contradicts with his personal feelings. By seeking to rationalize the murder of an innocent man, Schonfield is revealing the lack of integrity of his principles. When he asserts of the Pharisees, "From their point of view the decision they arrived at was fully justified," he does not seem to realize that Hitler acted out of the same sincerity in slaughtering six million Jews; at the bottom of his heart he believed he was defending the West from a pernicious threat. The best Schonfield can do is parrot (unconsciously, I hope) Caiaphas: "Better that one man should die than multitudes, including innocent women and children." Or as Caiaphas said, "For the sake of the nation, Jesus must die."

To draw another contemporary example, it might be pleasant to shoot Osama Bin Laden in the head. I’m sure Bin Laden wouldn’t object, since he doesn’t seem to mind killing people very much. The only problem is, then you’re adopting the same principles as Bin Laden, that is, killing for peace, and then your action entirely justifies the suppositions of moral intellects like your homicidal murder victim. By acting in such a fashion, you cancel out your moral imperative. We only hope Schonfield will someday understand.

This is unfortunate, because he has some interesting things to say. Jesus is quoted as having made some remarks that are very much in keeping with Schonfield's theory, that he knew of his approaching martyrdom and death. The problem here is these remarks could have been added later by adherents who realized that if Jesus indeed had been omnipotent and all-knowing, then of course he must have foreseen his coming end.

Golgotha

In this matter, Schonfield is in a dilemma, although he doesn’t understand it, for he cannot bring himself to decide whether he accepts the veracity of the New Testament. He often contradicts himself, but here I will only provide two outstanding examples.

The tomb of Herod

Many times Schonfield relies heavily on the literal wording of the New Testament, taking them to recount the exact truth of what Jesus did, particularly when Jesus is making statements alluding to the coming end of his ministry; for instance, "My hour is not yet come," which Schonfield takes at face value. (6) Yet on the same page he lambasts two Biblical scholars who hold an orthodox view of the divinity of Jesus, because their view "transfers judgement to the New Testament, whose views reflecting subsequent Christian opinion we are invited to endorse as the truth." (7)

The ancient ossuary that was recently thought to be "the tomb of Jesus"

He readily admits that one must judge "allowing for the exaggeration in the Gospel tradition," (8) and of the Apostles he writes, "In their zeal they even amplified and supplemented the account of his experiences, as certain texts appeared to require additional incidents which could fulfill them." (9) Yet he never questions the incidents in the Gospels that support his convictions.

The garden tomb of Jesus

Why do the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper, with their explicit message that Jesus had foreknowledge of his betrayal, death, and resurrection, necessarily have to be true, when the Synoptic Apostles even have difficulty agreeing on which night this incredibly important event in their lives took place? Who says Jesus rose from the tomb and talked to them? Considering the large number of religious experiences and visions experienced by the disciples, why could Jesus' ghost not have been a hallucination, a wish-fulfillment, if not an outright lie?

The supposed tomb of Jesus

Schonfield does not bother to ask these questions; he dare not doubt the hypothesis he has erected; and as a result of his lack of intellectual integrity, a serious reader cannot even begin to take his position seriously. The only regret I have is that his facile interpretation has reached an extraordinary audience, even for a popular religious work, and I fear that too many uncritical readers will accept his views without thinking. Such shoddy thinking, in a matter of such importance to the West as the life and death of Jesus, has no excuse.

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The brooding skull of Golgotha: notice how the eyes never leave you

NOTES

1. Dr. Hugh J. Schonfield, The Passover Plot (New York, 1966), p. 93.
2. Ibid., pp. 130-1.
3. Ibid., p. 2.
4. Ibid., p. 142.
5. Ibid., pp. 142-5.
6. Ibid., p. 37.
7. Ibid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Schonfield, Dr. Hugh J. The Passover Plot. Bantam Books, New York, 1966.

A fascinating Maori Christ

AFTERWORD

In 1976, at the same time I originally wrote this academic paper, fascinatingly enough, the Israeli film company Golan-Globus released a film version of The Passover Plot, directed by Michael Campus and starring Zalman King as Yeshua (Jesus), Donald Pleasence as Pontius Pilate, Harry Andrews, Scott Wilson, Dan Hedaya, and Hugh Griffith. Because of heretical nature of the film, it was allegedly suppressed (or deliberately ignored), and today it’s available by download from the Internet.

Zalman King as Jesus in the film The Passover Plot (1976)

Incidentally, I originally wrote this essay as an academic paper for a Princeton Religion course on “The Origins of Christianity” while a junior in May 1976 for the esteemed religious scholar Dr. Phillip Ashby. He praised the paper, commenting: “Very insightful critical analysis of Schonfield.”

A coin of the Knights Templar

The Beatitudes of Jesus

I originally wrote this paper in March 1976, in my junior year at Princeton, for a Religion course taught by Prof. Philip H. Ashby. Prof. Ashby liked the paper a great deal, and since he was a recognized authority on the history of religion, I was greatly honored.

The Beatitudes—or Blessings—of Jesus Christ are the core of the Sermon of the Mount, and therefore they’re the foundation of Christianity. Like Matthew 25, they are the foundations of Christian humanitarianism and are probably the most beautiful part of the religion.

A note of explanation: I talk about "the Q document." When Biblical scholars analyzed the New Testament, they noted that the three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which all tell the same story) shared some passages that were identical. From this, scholars deduced that there must have been a written record of Christ's teachings and acts that was circulated among the primitive Christian community before the authorship of the New Testament, and the three Gospels all copied passages from this Quelle, or Q document, as it came to be called ("Quelle" is German for "source").

At the end of this essay, I append John Donne's great Christian poems, "Annunication" and "Nativity," which I've always thought are the quintessence of Christian art, and which capture so much of the ecstatic joy, beauty, and transcendence that are present in the best of Christianity—a religion that, unfortunately, gets hijacked from time to time by an unloving, intolerant band of fanatics.

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Matthew 5:3-12

[3] Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

[4] Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

[5] Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

Of Barney Fife, Don Knotts' character on "The Andy Griffith Show," Billy Bob Thornton said, "Don Knotts gave us the best character, the most clearly drawn, most perfect American, most perfect human ever." This may seems like an astonishing statement to make at first glance, but think about it—was Don Knotts ever cruel or unpleasant to anyone in his onscreen roles? He was always a kind, giving, loving person whose gentleness was mistaken for weakness—like Prince Myuskin in Dostovevsky’s The Idiot, he was a perfect representation of the Lamb. In real life, he was alleged to be exactly the same

[6] Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

[7] Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

[8] Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

[9] Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

[10] Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

The children of Auschwitz

[11] Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

[12] Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

THE BEATITUDES OF JESUS

In The Gospel According to Matthew 5:3-12, Jesus begins his Sermon on the Mount with a recitation of the Beatitudes. They go as follows:

3 How happy are the poor in spirit; theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

4 Happy the gentle: they shall have the earth as their heritage.

5 Happy those who mourn; they shall be comforted.

6 Happy those who hunger and thirst for what is right; they shall be satisfied.

7 Happy the merciful; they shall have mercy shown them.

8 Happy the pure in heart: they shall see God.

9 Happy the peacemakers: they shall be called sons of God.

10 Happy those who are persecuted in the cause of right: theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

The Warsaw ghetto

11 Happy are you when people abuse you and persecute you and speak all kinds of calumny against you on my account.

The Warsaw ghetto

12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven; this is how they persecuted the prophets before you. (1)

Although it is not within the scope of this short paper to judge whether Jesus actually did utter these words or not, the author of the Beatitudes certainly had as his ultimate object nothing less than a major revolution in the ethics of his time and place. "Jesus clearly expects his teaching to be put into practice." (1) For the sake of simplicity, I will call the author of the Beatitudes Jesus, for even if the historical Jesus did not make the above pronouncement, the religious construct of Jesus as presented in Matthew certainly did.

The Beatitudes are so-called because they are Christ's penultimate blessings upon mankind. (In the King James Version, Christ begins them with the invocation of "Blessed are..." rather than "How happy are...") In effect, they are the headlines of his Good News.

The King James Version

[3] Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
[4] Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
[5] Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
[6] Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.
[7] Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
[8] Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
[9] Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
[10] Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
[11] Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.
[12] Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

Taken together, the Beatitudes represent perhaps the single greatest break Jesus made with the accepted morality of his age. How revolutionary they are can only be understood by first comparing them to three similar moral codes, the Ten Commandments of Moses, the Beatitudes as recounted in Luke 6: 20-23, and the Tao-Teh-King of Lao-Tse.

To comprehend the difference between the Beatitudes and the Ten Commandments, one must first realize the different circumstances in which they were formulated. Moses was a tribal leader laying down a stringent moral code in a time of severe crisis. In an age of cults and religious cosmopolitanism, Jesus was a self-proclaimed prophet who sought to revitalize Judaism, which he believed had strayed from its original intent, in the framework of his own radical interpretation of the Law. As a result, the Ten Commandments govern external modes of behavior, where the Beatitudes demand the presence of internal values to produce spiritual blessings. (2)

The Beatitudes of Luke vary from those of Matthew in two details; they are in much shorter form (lacking Matthew 5:4 and 7-10), and those blessed are referred to in the first person rather than the third. Their abbreviated form possibly indicates that Matthew drew and elaborated upon the same Q document of the sayings of Jesus as Luke; however, this is uncertain, and Matthew may have recalled details forgotten by Luke and the author of Q.

Certainly the terms in Matthew’s Beatitudes ("the gentle," "the peacemakers," " righteousness") reflect authentic Jewish religious concerns that Jesus could well have voiced. We cannot discount the authenticity of the Beatitudes that Matthew includes and that Luke lacks, because Matthew's aim is simply to stress Christ's continuity with Hebrew tradition, for Luke 6:33 goes out of its way to have Jesus tell his followers that in suffering for his cause, they will be following in the great tradition of the Hebrew prophets; presumably Q does this as well.

As for the change in persons between the two versions of the Beatitudes, in Luke, they are almost incidental remarks Jesus makes to his apostles; by changing the person and lengthening the list of those blessed, Matthew turns the Beatitudes into a wide-ranging liturgy of almost ceremonial solemnity that amounts to a dramatic statement of doctrine. In Luke, the Beatitudes are the seeds of an explosive idea; in Matthew, they flower.

Some five hundred years before Christ. Lao-Tse, the founder of Taoism, wrote a passage of the Tao-Teh-King that amazingly parallels the Beatitudes in "structure, subject, and spirit," (3) A sample will serve to illustrate the striking resemblance:

Whoever adaptheth himself shall be preserved to the end.
Whoever bendeth himself shall be straightened.
Whoever empieth himself shall be filled....
Whoever exalteth himself shall be abased. (4)

As one can see, the similarity between the two moral codes is amazing. Both Lao-Tse and Jesus see humility as the key to an exemplary life. It is in what the end result is of the adherence to such a life that the two differ. Lao-Tse sees humility as a private quality one should cultivate as part of one's personal responsibility.

In order to insure social harmony. Jesus urges us to practice the virtues of the Beatitudes in order to attain bliss with the coming of the kingdom of God on earth. Jesus' message is eschatological; and the incentive he gives for one's leading the Christian life is for one to survive the Apocalypse. Where for Lao-Tse Taoism is its own spiritual reward, for Jesus post-millennial salvation is the reward for observance of the Christian virtues.

The entire thrust of the Beatitudes is eschatological. They are structured simply to drive home Christ’s apocalyptic point. In addition to the fact that "they are poetic in form" (5) and that "Even the long ninth beatitude may be in accordance with the conventional forms of Jewish poetry," it is most important to note that every Beatitude is stated in a rigid two-part liturgical form. The first proclaims the virtue Christ favors; the second asserts how that virtue will rewarded when the Kingdom of God arrives.

Their message is plainly understandable; all those who follow Christ will survive the coming apocalypse, and those who do not will be annihilated. As bland as the verities Christ blesses may seem to us, the terms he used had powerful connotations for his audience; and they knew full well that what they were witnessing was a total overthrow of their existing ethical structure.

The first Beatitude (Matthew 5: 3)—“Blessed are the poor in spirit”—is unequivocal. The poor are spiritually blessed because, being poor, they have spiritual values that the wealthy, lacking the hardship that can induce compassion, are without. Jesus' was well-known for his sympathy for the economically oppressed of Palestine (as shown in the story of the widow's mite) and well-known for his antipathy for the comfortably rich (as seen in the story of the rich young man, Matthew 19: 16-22). His attitude was in complete opposition to the scorn the Hebrew religious hierarchy had toward the local peasantry, calling them "the folk of the soil."

This declaration repudiates the standards of his time that Jesus makes in subsequent Beatitudes. The poor are, of course, to be members of the kingdom of God to come upon earth, by virtue of their oppressed status. Jesus accepted the poor not only to enlarge his movement with the masses of the outcast. Because he was a radical interpreter of the Law who wished to return Judaism to what he thought were its traditions, he literally believed the Hebrew idea that all men are equal before the eyes of God, and so he believed they should have an equal opportunity to enter His kingdom.

"The gentle" of the second Beatitude (Matthew 5:4), "the meek" in the King James and RSV Bibles, are described in Psalm 37: 11; they are those whose natural spirit of temperance restrains them from pride and arrogance. However, Jesus takes this perfectly orthodox Old Testament term, well-known to his audience, and with it makes an astounding assertion; the gentle will inherit the earth not through force but by virtue of their gentleness, as a reward for their virtue at the End of Days.

Warsaw ghetto

In the third Beatitude (Matthew 5:5), "those who mourn" are those who do not ignore the sorrows of the world, but instead accept it; "they shall be comforted," presumably at the End of Time, when the other rewards are meted out. This Beatitude fits in perfectly with Christ's acceptance and endurance of human suffering, symbolized most directly by his Passion.

"Those who hunger and thirst for what is right" of the fourth Beatitude (Matthew 5:6) manifest a physical desire for spiritual needs. However, as the eschatological second part of the liturgy makes clear, "what is right" ("righteousness" in other versions, and loosely translated as "equity and humanity" and "justice held in love”) cannot be obtained through force. Like the gentle, the spiritually hungry will be rewarded by the grace of Christ in the Last Days because they exhibit Christian virtues with sincerity. (9)

"The merciful" of the fifth Beatitude (Matthew 5:7) pity the unfortunate and put their mercy into practice. This is perhaps the most revolutionary of all Jesus' teachings, for in his time, the Stoics, the Romans, and the Pharisees (see Matthew 23: 23) all ridiculed compassion as a sign of weakness. (10) But as Jesus makes clear, the merciful "shall have mercy shown them" during the Reign of the Lamb. As for "the pure in heart" of the sixth Beatitude (Matthew 5:8), both purity and heart carried sharp meanings in Christ's time. Purity was a single-minded purpose to perform God's will. "'Heart' in Semitic speech includes the mind as well as the emotions." Therefore, Jesus here was preaching to his audience to carry out with fanatic zeal God's will, which was, since Jesus indicated that he was probably God (“I’m not the , his own teachings. As a reward, the faithful "shall see God" when Christ's heavenly kingdom is fulfilled according to eschatological timetable.

Again, with "the peacemakers" of the Seventh Beatitude (Matthew 5:9), Jesus uses a loaded term. In the Old Testament, peace meant personal and social harmony brought about by "trust, love, and obedience toward God." The peacemakers then are those who strive for peace through personal action by involving themselves in the world. They shall be called the sons of God because they will love their enemies, just as He is generous to all his creatures, one of Christ's favorite themes. And when will they be called the sons of God? Come the Apocalypse, in return for their Christian faith.

Just as "the peacemakers" are "the pure in heart" who have put their "hunger and thirst for what is right" into terms of action, "those who are persecuted in the cause of right" in the seventh Beatitude (Matthew 5:10) are these same Christians, whose fate Jesus foresees, and whom he reassures. They are to suffer the injustices visited upon them for their faith because like the rest of the virtuous, they shall be rewarded in the kingdom of heaven, when the Lord sweeps away this earthly veil and in abolishing chronometrical time institutes hermeneutical time, or interpretive time.

The Mourning of Christ by Giotto

Jesus elaborates on this theme in the eighth and last Beatitude, whose first part is Matthew 5:11 and second part 5:12. Essentially it is the same as its predecessor, in praise of martyrdom for Christ, except that in Matthew 5:12 he makes an important addition; in linking the eschatological reward of his followers with the persecution of the renowned prophets from the Hebrew tradition, he is making a powerful claim that he has come to fulfill the promise of the Messiah foretold by the prophets and so close the book of Jewish temporal existence. (In the Lukan version of the Beatitudes Jesus does the same.) The message for his followers is clear; by making themselves microchristi, or imitata of Christ, they can participate in this great eschatological venture, and by following the moral dictates of the Beatitudes, become part of the post-millennial world Jesus is proposing.

Indeed, Jesus was able to create a new moral ethos out of the Palestinian Judaism of his environment, as we can see by examining the Beatitudes as a microcosm of the teachings of his ministry, but only by plucking terms out of the Old Testament ("the gentle," "righteousness," "the pure in heart," "the peacemakers," "the sons of God") and integrating them into his personal religious vision, whose elements of mercy, unqualified acceptance of the poor, and belief in the inevitable eschatological victory of humility ran directly against the teachings of traditional Judaism, contrary to his own belief.

Convinced he was the Messiah come to end time, he sought to impose his revolutionary worldview in absolutist terms on a social complex that, due to such forces as the Roman occupation and the rise of institutionalized priestly class of the Pharisees and Sadducees, had evolved far beyond that of the world of the traditional prophets. For that reason he was crucified.

* * * * *

The Yellow Christ by Paul Gaughin

Dali

ENDNOTES

1. George A. Buttrick, Exposition, "The Gospel According to St. Matthew," The Interpreter Bible, Vol. VII (New York, 1951), p. 200.
2. Ibid.
3. Joyce O. Hertzler, The Social Thought of the Ancient Civilizations (New York, 1937), p. 211.
4. Ibid.
5. Buttrick, op. cit.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., p. 282.
10. Ibid., p. 284.
11. Ibid., p. 285.
12. Ibid., p. 286.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Buttrick, George A. Exposition, "The Gospel According to St. Matthew," The Interpreter Bible, Vol. VII. New York, 1951.

Hertzler, Joyce O. The Social Thought of the Ancient Civilizations. New York, 1937.

The Jerusalem Bible. New York, 1969.

John Donne (1572-1631)

Annunciation

Salvation to all that will is nigh;
That All, which always is all everywhere,
Which cannot sin, and yet all sins must bear,
Which cannot die, yet cannot choose but die,
Lo, faithful virgin, yields Himself to lie
In prison, in thy womb; and though He there
Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet He will wear,
Taken from thence, flesh, which death's force may try.
Ere by the spheres time was created, thou
Wast in His mind, who is thy Son and Brother;
Whom thou conceivst, conceived; yea thou art now
Thy Maker's maker, and thy Father's mother;
Thou hast light in dark, and shutst in little room,
Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb.

---

Nativity

Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb,
Now leaves His well-belov'd imprisonment,
There He hath made Himself to His intent
Weak enough, now into the world to come;
But O, for thee, for Him, hath the inn no room?
Yet lay Him in this stall, and from the Orient,
Stars and wise men will travel to prevent
The effect of Herod's jealous general doom.
Seest thou, my soul, with thy faith's eyes, how He
Which fills all place, yet none holds Him, doth lie?
Was not His pity towards thee wondrous high,
That would have need to be pitied by thee?
Kiss Him, and with Him into Egypt go,
With His kind mother, who partakes thy woe.