This just in: the Jews aren’t to blame for killing Jesus after all. Whew! I bet they’re relieved.

A new book by Pope Benedict XVI, just in time for Lent, does a “scientific” analysis of the Gospels and concludes that despite the pretty plain meaning of verses like “Then answered all the people, and said, ‘His blood be on us, and on our children,’” it was actually just a few politicians who were to blame. He wanders pretty far, though, when he claims that “read in the light of faith … these words are not a curse, but rather redemption, salvation.” In other words, “in the light of faith,” words mean whatever the Pope wants them to mean, and not what they really mean.

At bottom, of course, the Pope is right: it is absurd to blame “the Jews” as a whole, much less their descendants, for any particular death. What’s interesting is why this blame arose in the first place.

As best we can piece together from 1^st and 2^nd century writings, there probably was a fellow named Jesus, who came to lead a somewhat puritanical sect within Judaism that is sometimes called the “Essenes.” John the Baptist was a leader of this group before he was killed. After Jesus was killed too, his brother James took over, but he was killed as well, to be followed by Jesus’ great-nephew Simeon, who was also killed – this was not a desirable job. Sometimes known as “Jewish Christians,” sometimes known as “Ebionites” (meaning the “poor ones”), this little sect lasted for hundreds of years. In fact, when Muhammad married his first wife in the 7^th century, the ceremony was performed by an Ebionite.

Ebionites did not believe Jesus was divine in any way, but believed that he was the prophet promised by Moses in Deuteronomy. They followed the 613 commandments of Jewish law rigorously, adding other rules such as vegetarianism, teetotaling, baptism in place of temple sacrifice, and refusal to take oaths. Our knowledge of Ebionite practices is the best guide we have to what Jesus actually preached.

The religion of Jesus would have ultimately faded as quietly as the religion of Mani had it not been for an odd duck named Paul. Paul began his career as a muscle-man for the Jewish high priests, the richest politicians in Roman Palestine, who did not like their authority being challenged by the Essenes or any other upstart sects. He persecuted them, and was responsible for at least one murder (and probably many more); at some point he switched sides, though, and sought to join them. The Ebionites claimed this was because the high priest declined to give Paul his daughter in marriage, but this might be just sour grapes. Anyway, James and the rest of the Ebionite leadership in Jerusalem had no use for their “reformed” persecutor, and at one point even tried to kill him. Now hated by both sides, Paul did the smart thing – he hit the road.

There were substantial Jewish communities all over the eastern Mediterranean, who were denied the opportunity to be fully Jews because they were so far away from the official temple. According to the official Jewish God experts, only sacrifices performed there (proceeds from which went into their own pockets) really counted with God. Moreover, there was another large group of near-Jews, sometimes called the “God-fearers,” who liked the idea of an ethical monotheism but who couldn’t quite bring themselves around to the whole Jewish law – circumcision, in particular, was a real stumbling block. So when Paul came waltzing into town, proclaiming “Good news, straight from Jerusalem! No more circumcision! You can even eat shrimp!”, he started raking in money and converts.

When word trickled back to Jerusalem about the lies Paul was spreading, the Ebionite leadership went ballistic. To think that a fellow who had never actually seen or spoken to Jesus should be profiting by such a perversion of his teaching was more than they could bear. They even went so far as to send out “truth squads” to the cities Paul had visited, correcting the misimpressions he had left. The epistle of John even appears to refer to Paul as the anti-Christ. After many years Paul returned to Jerusalem for a showdown, but it did not pan out. In fact, a riot erupted, in which Paul would very likely have been killed, but for the intervention of Roman troops. He was then shipped off to Rome for a trial, but the Acts of the Apostles ends before he got there (if he ever did).

This occurred in the 50s AD. Paul’s little colonies would probably have faded away, but for the great Jewish rebellion of 70-74 AD. This uprising was incomprehensible to most of the Roman world – why would anyone want to rebel against such a peaceful, prosperous, tolerant Empire? The fact that it dragged on so long and cost so much Roman treasure and blood only made things worse. Suddenly, being Jewish became very unfashionable; just as suddenly, the ability of Paul’s followers to say “Oh, we’re not Jews – the Jews actually hate us” became a precious commodity.

So valuable, in fact, that all sorts of anti-Jewish propaganda began working its way into the Gospels, which were written after the Jewish rebellion, and edited extensively before attaining the form they have today. Not only were Jews blamed for killing Jesus, but they were depicted as being ignorant louts who could not understand what he was saying. Mark has them calling Jesus a blasphemer and plotting to kill him from the get-go; he is especially vitriolic about Jesus’ family, who were then leading the Ebionites. He has family members say of Jesus that “He is out of his mind,” while having Jesus in turn disown his mother and brothers; when told they are waiting for him outside, he replies that his real mother and brothers are his followers, not his kin. Later, Mark has Jesus whine about being “without honor … among his own kin, and in his own house.”

Mark has little use for the Jewish apostles outside the family, either. He shows them terrified by a windstorm, failing to understand the miracle of the loaves “because their heart was hardened,” failing to understand parables, confusing Jesus with John the Baptist and Elijah, unable to perform a routine exorcism, disputing among themselves who should be the greatest and seeking preferential treatment, being mean to women and children, and utterly falling apart at Jesus’ hour of need in Gethsemane: “And they all forsook him, and fled. “ In the earliest known versions of Mark, Jesus does not even bother appearing to his disciples after his resurrection, but only appears to the women at the tomb.

It all smacks of a disinformation campaign to discredit Jesus’ initial band of Jewish followers, with the coup de grâce canard that “the Jews” killed Jesus. At the same time, the New Testament sucks up to the Roman victors; it is a Roman centurion who exclaims that “Truly this man was the Son of God!”, and it is Paul himself who tells his Roman readers that “the powers that be are ordained of God.”

The Pope is certainly correct that it was the Roman governor, not the Jews, who executed a troublemaker for calling himself a king. While he’s at it, though, how about giving us a “scientific” analysis of why the religion invented by Paul, who never saw or heard Jesus, is a more accurate rendition of “Christianity” than the religion practiced by those who did?

Luis Granados

The Jesuits are bankrupt again. At least, some of them are. Is there any chance that the current bankruptcy will have as devastating a consequence for the entire order as the first time this happened, almost 250 years ago?

Two weeks ago, thirty-seven lawsuits totaling about $3.1 million were filed in a Portland, Oregon bankruptcy court against organizations affiliated with the Jesuit province covering the northwestern United States. Two years earlier, that province had filed for bankruptcy, claiming assets of approximately $4.8 million and liabilities of nearly $62 million, after having paid out some $25 million in settlement of sex abuse lawsuits since 2001. The current round of lawsuits seeks to recover payments made by the province to various affiliated organizations shortly before the bankruptcy filing. The plaintiffs aren’t necessarily alleging that these payments were fraudulently hiding assets from creditors, but our laws do permit the recovery of even some above-board pre-bankruptcy payments, and the plaintiffs naturally want to leave no stone unturned.

The critical question here is, who exactly are “the Jesuits”? Consider Spokane’s Gonzaga University, an asset-rich organization that is run by the Jesuits of the northwestern province. Its advertising for decades has proclaimed it to be a Jesuit institution; now that there’s money on the line, it quite vociferously asserts that it is not really “owned” by the Jesuits at all. As one plaintiff’s attorney put it:

The Gonzaga argument about it’s not really part of the Oregon Province is like Pontiac arguing it’s not really part of General Motors. Yeah, it may be a separate corporation, but it functions as part and parcel of the same organization.

Ultimately a court will decide just how separate Gonzaga University and a number of other Jesuit outfits (such as a $7 million retreat for priests at Hayden Lake, Idaho) really are from “the Jesuits” who have the $62 million liability. My completely uninformed guess is that the sharp lawyers who set up the intricate web of connected corporations will be found to have done their jobs competently, and that the losers will be the people who are owed the $62 million. They will end up with only a few cents on the dollar, and most of the Jesuit empire will roll along unscathed. But no matter how badly things turn out in this case, they won’t be as catastrophic as the first time the “Who are ‘the Jesuits’?” issue arose, in 1764 France.

The “Company of Jesus” had been established by Ignatius Loyola in 1534 as an elite, ultra-disciplined corps of counter-revolutionaries with a single mission: support the Pope, God’s mouthpiece on earth, in his struggles against Protestant heretics. Education of the upper classes was an early mission; cementing relationships with the future rulers they tutored, Jesuits worked their way into the position of “confessors” – priests who heard the sins of kings, forgave them on God’s behalf, and whispered in their ears what God wanted them to do. They developed a reputation for laxity on matters of morality, overlooking the sexual foibles of the powerful who did their political bidding. Father Benzi, for example, wrote that “It is only a slight offense to feel the breasts of a nun.”

Though Jesuits didn’t use “the end justifies the means” as a mantra, they may as well have. One Jesuit document noted that “Actions intrinsically evil, and directly contrary to the divine laws, may be innocently performed by those who have so much power over their own minds as to join, even ideally, a good end to the wicked action contemplated.” Loyola himself wrote that: “We must see black as white, if the Church says so.” Political assassination became a favorite Jesuit technique; the king of France and the Stadholder of Holland fell to Jesuit conspiracies, and the Queen of England nearly did as well.

Jesuits were also encouraged to lie, whenever doing so would advance their cause. For example, “A man may lawfully say he did not kill Peter, meaning privately another man of that name, or that he did not do it before he was born.” Enterprising Spanish Jesuits busied themselves in fabricating ancient documents and relics to make Spain’s Catholic heritage appear far more embedded in its culture than it really was. When the Pope in 1680 ordered the Jesuits to stop teaching this doctrine, the Superior General chose not to communicate the Pope’s decree to his subordinates.

Loyola had prescribed vows of poverty for his followers, but after the Pope gave the Company the right to engage in banking and commerce it grew immensely wealthy, with its fingers in commercial enterprises around the globe. In 1760, a Jesuit slave-trading business on the island of Martinique became unable to pay its bills. Angry creditors back in Marseilles did not appreciate being offered satisfaction in the form of a Mass to be said on their behalf rather than cash; they filed a lawsuit against the Company itself, claiming it was a single entity, responsible for the bills of each of its subsidiaries – exactly the argument of today’s plaintiffs in Oregon. Though the Jesuits argued that their Martinique representative was acting beyond his authority, and that anyway they were doing God’s work and should be considered above petty commercial law, they lost. They then committed the colossal blunder of appealing the verdict to the Parliament of Paris, even though they knew it to be sympathetic to a Church faction that Jesuits had been persecuting for decades.

The Parliament of Paris proceeded to launch a thorough investigation of the hitherto secret governing documents of the entire order, to determine just how independent the Martinique operation really was. Revelation after revelation piled up, not only about Jesuit business operations but about their disdain for government officials who did not carry out God’s will as they saw it. The ultimate outcome was a shocker. After Parliament confirmed every claim of the Marseilles merchants, a special council concluded that for promoting “a doctrine authorizing robbery, lying, perjury, impurity – all passions and crimes; inculcating homicide, parricide, and regicide; overturning religion, in order to substitute in her stead superstition; and thereby sanctioning magic, blasphemy, irreligion, and idolatry,” the Jesuit order must be banned from France. Its schools would be closed, its wealth nationalized.

When their hearts resumed beating, French Jesuits assured themselves that the very Catholic king would never allow this order to stand. As indeed he would not have – but for the fact that precisely at this time, Voltaire was bombarding Paris with letters, pamphlets and books about the horrendous evil the clergy had committed in Toulouse in the Jean Calas case (about which I’ll be writing more in October), and getting the opinion-makers of Europe to join in his campaign. Although the Company actually had little or no direct involvement with the events in Toulouse, it drowned in the tsunami of Voltaire’s abuse, which proved that it was possible for common sense to prevail over even the most powerful of God experts. A visiting German princess wrote that “At Paris, among the clergy or laity, I do not believe there are a hundred persons who hold the true faith.”

The king let the dissolution order stand.

Voltaire expressed his views on the Jesuit plight in his Treatise on Tolerance:

In like manner, if these latter have been found to teach the most reprehensible doctrines, and if their institution appears contrary to the laws of the kingdom, it becomes necessary to abolish their society, and of Jesuits to make them useful citizens; which, in fact, so far from being an oppression upon them, as has been pretended, is a real good done for them; for where is the great oppression of being obliged to wear a short coat instead of a long gown, or to be free instead of being slave? In time of peace whole regiments are broken without complaining. Why, then, should the Jesuits make such an outcry, when they are broken for the sake of peace?

Other countries soon followed suit; in 1773, Pope Clement XIV dissolved the Company of Jesus altogether. It was only reconstituted in 1814, after the forces of reaction had dismantled revolutionary France.

So no matter what happens in Oregon, it won’t hold a candle to 1764. By a sublime irony, though, there is one more connection between the time when Toulouse brought down the entire order, and the current siege. Most of the $62 million in Jesuit liabilities arose from sex abuse verdicts and settlements, the chief villain of which was a Jesuit priest who began raping boys in 1950 and continued doing so until 1970, despite attention being drawn to his activities by a pistol-wielding parent. Instead of having him arrested, the Jesuits simply moved him from spot to spot; he wound up at Jesuit-run Seattle University, where after his death a lectureship in philosophy was established in his name. The name? Father Toulouse.

Luis Granados