Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 14, 1990 TAG: 9004140059
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By GEORGE W. CORNELL ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Through twists of history, his death has been blamed variously on fellow Jews, Romans, or a combination of both.
A noted professor of ancient history, Paul L. Maier, says it is "beyond debate" that the Roman governor Pilate delivered the execution verdict, and bears the final legal responsibility.
Theologically, however, Christians themselves in recalling that event acknowledge that their own sinful failings brought about the crucifixion, necessitating it to redeem humanity.
They were involved. They "were there," a hymn for the day's services goes. Only through that confessed participation in the wrong do they find forgiveness for it through Jesus' suffering on the cross.
It's regarded as the "atonement," the laying down of a sinless life to make amends for universal offenses against that goodness. In that purpose, "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son," Scripture says.
The day is called "Good Friday" because the crucifixion is seen as absorbing the results of human wrongs in God himself, thus providing his pardon from them, his grace.
It is the great saving act in the belief of Christians, the essential key to their ultimate salvation.
Despite that basic theology, however, various slants, contentions and distortions about Jesus' death have sometimes made it a bitter legacy.
"Probably no issue in the history of religion has elicited more blind partisanship, misinterpretation, faulty logic, hostility or fad following," Maier writes.
The "pendulum has swung from one illogical - indeed, ridiculous - concept to another, from assuming Jewish generic involvement to arguing for no involvement at all," he wrote in the April 9 issue of the evangelical fortnightly, Christianity Today.
Maier, who teaches ancient history at Western Michigan University and who has written several books about first century Judaism of which Jesus was a part, says the early church often bent Scripture to blame Jesus' fellow Jews.
That notion of "Jewish collective responsibility" for the crucifixion had "horrifying results" through the centuries - ghettoization, pogroms, the Inquisition, centuries of anti-Semitism, the Nazi holocaust, Maier says.
Past labeling of Jews as "Christ killers" was "illogical, unethical and misinterprets the Gospels," Maier says. That falsehood has been repudiated by almost all churches, including the World Council of Churches and Roman Catholicism's Second Vatican Council.
However, he says that in trying to atone for the past, it's become "high theological fashion to argue that no Jews were involved on Good Friday in the manner set forth" in the Gospels.
These arguments blame only Pilate, but to deny any Jewish participation "flies in the face of historical fact," including traditions in the ancient non-biblical Jewish sources, Maier writes.
He says opposition to Jesus of the Jewish religious rulers, led by the high priest, is confirmed by the ancient Jewish historian Josephus' account of their later plotting the death of Jesus' kinsman, James.
by CNB