Ever since his election, John Paul II has wanted one thing: to walk where Jesus walked, preach where Jesus taught and pray where Jesus was crucified, died and was buried. This week the pope finally gets his chance. Weary in body but ecstatic in spirit, John Paul makes his long-anticipated pilgrimage to the Holy Land. For him it is a personal “journey with God”; there will be no intruding television cameras when, lost in prayer, he communes alone at Christianity’s holiest shrines. But the land of his heart’s desire is holy to Jews and Muslims as well. And so the pope will visit the Western Wall, Judaism’s most sacred site, and the Mosque of El Aqsa atop the Temple Mount. He will also meet with Muslim and Jewishc religious leaders and–in one particularly resonant moment–pause to pray at Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to victims of the Holocaust.
Like his powerful plea for forgiveness a fortnight ago, the pope’s trip is also an exercise in religious reconciliation. More than 90 times since he took office, John Paul has acknowledged past faults of the church and begged pardon from others–Muslims and Jews, as well as Protestant and Orthodox Christians–for sins committed in the name of Catholicism. Like the sound of one hand clapping, however, his efforts have brought few echoing responses. Now, at the high point of this jubilee year for the church, he comes to Jerusalem, the city of peace, hoping to erect bridges among the three monotheis- tic faiths.
There are, of course, important commonalities among these three religious traditions. All three believe in one God who has revealed his will through sacred Scriptures. They all look to an endtimes when God’s justice and power will triumph. And they all recognize the figure of Abraham as a father in faith. What is often overlooked, however, is another figure common to the three traditions: Jesus of Nazareth.
The Christ of the Gospels is certainly the best-known Jesus in the world. For Christians, he is utterly unique–the only Son of God and, as the pope puts it, the one “mediator between God and humanity.” But alongside this Jesus is another, the Jesus whom Muslims since Muhammad have regarded as a prophet and messenger of Allah. And after centuries of silence about Jesus, many Jews now find him a Jewish teacher and reformer they can accept on their own terms as “one of us.”
Jesus has become a familiar, even beloved, figure to adherents of Asian religions as well. Among many contemporary Hindus, Jesus has come to be revered as a self-realized saint who reached the highest level of “God-consciousness.” In recent years, Buddhists like the Dalai Lama have recognized in Jesus a figure of great compassion much like the Buddha. “I think as the world grows smaller, Jesus as a figure will grow larger,” says Protestant theologian John Cobb, a veteran of interfaith dialogues.
Perhaps. Each of these traditions–Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism–is rich in its own right, and each has its own integrity. As the pope calls for better understanding among the world’s great religions, it is important to recognize that non-Christian faiths have their own visions of the sacred and their own views of Jesus.
JUDAISM That Jesus was a Jew would seem to be self-evident from Gospels. But before the first Christian century was out, faith in Jesus as universal Lord and Savior eclipsed his early identity as a Jewish prophet and wonder worker. For long stretches of Western history, Jesus was pictured as a Greek, a Roman, a Dutchman–even, in the Germany of the 1930s, as a blond and burly Aryan made in the image of Nazi anti-Semitism. But for most of Jewish history as well, Jesus was also a deracinated figure: he was the apostate, whose name a pious Jew should never utter.
Indeed, the lack of extra-Biblical evidence for the existence of Jesus has led more than one critic to conclude that he is a Christian fiction created by the early church. There were in fact a half dozen brief passages, later excised from Talmudic texts, that some scholars consider indirect references to Jesus. One alludes to a heresy trial of someone named Yeshu (Jesus) but none of them has any independent value for historians of Jesus. The only significant early text of real historical value is a short passage from Falvius Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian. Josephus describes Jesus as a “wise man,” a “doer of startling deeds” and a “teacher” who was crucified and attracted a posthumous following called Christians. In short, argues Biblical scholar John P. Meier of Notre Dame, the historical Jesus was “a marginal Jew in a marginal province of the Roman Empire”–and thus unworthy of serious notice by contemporary Roman chroniclers.
Christian persecution of the Jews made dialogue about Jesus impossible in the Middle Ages. Jews were not inclined to contemplate the cross on the Crusaders’ shields, nor did they enjoy the forced theological disputations Christians staged for Jewish conversions. To them, the Christian statues and pictures of Jesus represented the idol worship forbidden by the Torah. Some Jews did compile their own versions of a “History of Jesus” (“Toledoth Yeshu”) as a parody of the Gospel story. In it, Jesus is depicted as a seduced Mary’s bastard child who later gains magical powers and works sorcery. Eventually, he is hanged, his body hidden for three days and then discovered. It was subversive literature culled from the excised Talmudic texts. “Jews were impotent in force of arms,” observes Rabbi Michael Meyer, a professor at Hebrew Union Seminary in Cincinnati, “so they reacted with words.”
When skeptical scholars began to search for the “historical Jesus” behind the Gospel accounts in the 18th century, few Jewish intellectuals felt secure enough to join the quest. One who did was Abraham Geiger, a German rabbi and early exponent of the Reform Jewish movement. He saw that liberal Protestant intellectuals were anxious to get beyond the supernatural Christ of Christian dogma and find the enlightened teacher of morality hidden behind the Gospel texts. From his own research, Geiger concluded that what Jesus believed and taught was actually the Judaism of liberal Pharisees, an important first-century Jewish sect. “Geiger argued that Jesus was a reformist Pharisee whose teachings had been corrupted by his followers and mixed with pagan elements to produce the dogmas of Christianity,” says Susannah Heschel, professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth. Thus, far from being a unique religious genius–as the liberal Protestants claimed–Geiger’s Jesus was a democratizer of his own inherited tradition. It was, he argued, the Pharisees’ opponents, the Saducees, who became the first Christians and produced the negative picture of the Pharisees as legalistic hypocrites found in the later Gospel texts. In sum, Geiger–and after him, other Jewish scholars–distinguished between the faith of Jesus, which they saw as liberal Judaism, and the faith in Jesus, which became Christianity.
The implications of this “Jewish Jesus” were obvious, and quickly put to polemical use. Jews who might be attracted by the figure of Jesus needn’t convert to Christianity. Rather, they could find his real teachings faithfully recovered in the burgeoning Reform Jewish movement. Christians, on the other hand, could no longer claim that Jesus was a unique religious figure who inspired a new and universal religion. Indeed, if any religion could claim universality, it was monotheistic Judaism as the progenitor of both Christianity and Islam.
The Holocaust occasioned yet another way of imagining Jesus. If some Jews blamed Christians–or God himself–for allowing the ovens of Auschwitz, a few Jewish artists found a different way to deal with the horror of genocide: they applied the theme of the crucified Christ to the Nazis’ Jewish victims. This is particularly evident in harrowing paintings of Marc Chagall, where the dying Jesus is marked by Jewish symbols. And in “Night,” his haunting stories of the death camps, Elie Wiesel adopted the Crucifixion motif for his wrenching scene of three Jews hanged from a tree, like Jesus and the two thieves on Golgotha. The central figure is an innocent boy dangling in protracted agony because his body is too light to allow the noose its swift reprieve. When Wiesel hears a fellow inmate cry, “Where is God?” the author says to himself: “Here He is. He has been hanged here, on these gallows.” “There’s no lack of suffering in Judaism,” says Alan Segal, professor of Jewish Studies at Barnard College and Columbia University, “and no reason why Jews shouldn’t pick up an image central to Christianity.”
Today, the Jewishness of Jesus is no longer a question among scholars. That much of what he taught can be found in the Jewish Scriptures is widely accepted by Christian as well as Jewish students of the Bible. At some seminaries, like Hebrew Union, a course in the New Testament is now required of rabbinical candidates. Outside scholarly circles, there is less focus on Jesus, and most Jews will never read the Christian Bible. And, of course, Jews do not accept the Christ of faith. “They see Jesus as an admirable Jew,” says theologian John Cobb, “but they don’t believe that any Jew could be God.”
ISLAM At the onset of Ramadan last year, Vatican officials sent greetings to the world’s Muslims, inviting them to reflect on Jesus as “a model and permanent message for humanity.” But for Muslims, the Prophet Muhammad is the perfect model for humankind and in the Qur’an (in Arabic only), they believe, the very Word of God dwells among us. Even so, Muslims recognize Jesus as a great prophet and revere him as Isa ibn Maryam–Jesus, the son of Mary, the only woman mentioned by name in the Qur’an. At a time when many Christians deny Jesus’ birth to a virgin, Muslims find the story in the Qur’an and affirm that it is true. “It’s a very strange situation, where Muslims are defending the miraculous birth of Jesus against Western deniers,” says Seyyed Hossein Nasr, professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University. “Many Westerners also do not believe that Jesus ascended into heaven. Muslims do.” Indeed, many Muslims see themselves as Christ’s true followers.
What Muslims believe about Jesus comes from the Qur’an–not the New Testament, which they consider tainted by human error. They also draw upon their own oral traditions, called hadith, and on experts’ commentaries. In these sources, Jesus is born of Mary under a palm tree by a direct act of God. From the cradle, the infant Jesus announces that he is God’s prophet, though not God’s son, since Allah is “above having a son” according to the Qur’an.
Nonetheless, the Muslim Jesus enjoys unique spiritual prerogatives that other prophets, including Muhammad, lack. Only Jesus and his mother were born untouched by Satan. Even Muhammad had to be purified by angels before receiving prophethood. Again, in the Qur’an Muhammad is not presented as a miracle worker, but Jesus miraculously heals the blind, cures lepers and “brings forth the dead by [Allah’s] leave.” In this way Jesus manifests himself as the Messiah, or “the anointed one.” Muslims are not supposed to pray to anyone but Allah. But in popular devotions many ask Jesus or Mary or John the Baptist for favors. (According to one recent estimate, visions of Jesus or Mary have occurred some 70 times in Muslim countries since 1985.)
Although Muhammad supersedes Jesus as the last and greatest of the prophets, he still must die. But in the Qur’an, Jesus does not die, nor is he resurrected. Muslims believe that Jesus asked God to save him from crucifixion, as the Gospels record, and that God answered his prayer by taking him directly up to heaven. “God would not allow one of his prophets to be killed,” says Martin Palmer, director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture in Manchester, England. “If Jesus had been crucified, it would have meant that God had failed his prophet.”
When the end of the world approaches, Muslims believe that Jesus will descend to defeat the antichrist–and, incidentally, to set the record straight. His presence will prove the Crucifixion was a myth and eventually he will die a natural death. “Jesus will return as a Muslim,” says Nasr, “in the sense that he will unite all believers in total submission to the one God.”
HINDUISM The gospels are silent about the life of Jesus between his boyhood visit to the Jerusalem Temple with his parents, and the beginning of his public ministry at the age of 30. But in India there is a strong tradition that the teenage Jesus slipped away from his parents, journeyed across Southeast Asia learning yogic meditation and returned home to become a guru to the Jews. This legend reveals just how easily Hinduism absorbs any figure whom others worship as divine. To Hindus, India is the Holy Land, its sacred mountains and rivers enlivened by more than 300,000 local deities. It is only natural, then, that Jesus would come to India to learn the secrets of unlocking his own inherent divinity.
As Gandhi was, many Hindus are drawn to the figure of Jesus by his compassion and nonviolence–virtues taught in their own sacred Scriptures. But also like Gandhi, Hindus find the notion of a single god unnecessarily restrictive. In their perspective, all human beings are sons of God with the innate ability to become divine themselves. Those Hindus who read the Gospels are drawn to the passage in John in which Jesus proclaims that “the Father and I are one.” This confirms the basic Hindu belief that everyone is capable through rigorous spiritual practice of realizing his or her own universal “god-consciousness.” The great modern Hindu saint Ramakrishna recorded that he meditated on a picture of the Madonna with child and was transported into a state of samadhi, a consciousness in which the divine is all that really exists. For that kind of spiritual experience, appeal to any god will do. “Christ-consciousness, God-con- sciousness, Krishna-consciousness, Buddha-consciousness–it’s all the same thing,” says Deepak Chopra, an Indian popularizer of Hindu philosophy for New Age Westerners. “Rather than “love thy neighbor,’ this consciousness says, ‘You and I are the same beings.”
BUDDHISM The life stories of Jesus and the Buddha are strikingly similar. Both are conceived without sexual intercourse and born to chaste women. Both leave home for the wilderness where each is tempted by a Satan figure. Both return enlightened, work miracles and challenge the religious establishment by their teachings. Both attract disciples and both are betrayed by one of them. Both preach compassion, unselfishness and altruism and each creates a movement that bears the founder’s name. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk with a large Western following, sees Jesus and Buddha as “brothers” who taught that the highest form of human understanding is “universal love.” But there is at least one unbridgeable difference: a Christian can never become Christ, while the aim of every serious Buddhist is to achieve Buddhahood himself.
Thus when Buddhists encounter Christianity they depersonalize the Jesus who walked this earth and transform him into a figure more like Buddha. “Buddhists can think of Jesus Christ as an emanation or ’truth body’ [dharmakaya] of the Buddha,” says Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman of Columbia University. For Tibetan Buddhists, Jesus strongly resembles a bodhisattva–a perfectly enlightened being who vows to help others attain enlightenment. But to reconfigure Jesus as a Buddhist is to turn him into something he was not. Jesus, after all, believed in God, the creator and sustainer of the universe, which Buddhists do not. He believed in sin, which is not a Buddhist concept. Jesus did not teach compassion as a way of removing bad karma, nor did he see life as a cycle of death and rebirth. In short, says the Dalai Lama, trying to meld Jesus into Buddha “is like putting a yak’s head on a sheep’s body.” It doesn’t work. Indeed, nothing shows the difference between the Jesus and the Buddha better than the way that each died. The Buddha’s death was serene and controlled–a calm passing out of his final rebirth, like the extinction of a flame. Jesus, on the other hand, suffers an agonizing death on the cross, abandoned by God but obedient to his will.
Clearly, the cross is what separates the Christ of Christianity from every other Jesus. In Judaism there is no precedent for a Messiah who dies, much less as a criminal as Jesus did. In Islam, the story of Jesus’ death is rejected as an affront to Allah himself. Hindus can accept only a Jesus who passes into peaceful samadhi, a yogi who escapes the degradation of death. The figure of the crucified Christ, says Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh, “is a very painful image to me. It does not contain joy or peace, and this does not do justice to Jesus.” There is, in short, no room in other religions for a Christ who experiences the full burden of mortal existence–and hence there is no reason to believe in him as the divine Son whom the Father resurrects from the dead.
Even so, there are lessons all believers can savor by observing Jesus in the mirrors of Jews and Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. That the image of a benign Jesus has universal appeal should come as no surprise. That most of the world cannot accept the Jesus of the cross should not surprise, either. Thus the idea that Jesus can serve as a bridge uniting the world’s religions is inviting but may be ultimately impossible. A mystery to Christians themselves, Jesus remains what he has always been, a sign of contradiction.
HIS ROOTS: Christian and Jewish scholars accept that much of what Jesus taught can be found in Jewish scriptures, but Jews still see Christ as an ‘admirable Jew,’ not the Son of God.
A MAN OF LOVE: Buddhists depersonalize the Jesus who walked this earth and transform him into a figure more like the Buddha. Some regard him as a bodhisattva, a perfectly enlightened being who vows to help others.
A VIRTUOUS MAN: Many Hindus are drawn to Jesus because of his compassion and his devotion to nonviolence, but they find the notion of a single god unnecessarily restrictive
A TRUE SAVIOR: The Christ of the Gospel is the best-known Jesus in the world. For Christians, he is unique - the only Son of God.
