NEW YORK - Less than a month ago, at the end of a meeting in the White House, in which Jacob ("Jack") Neusner briefed President George Bush in advance of his audience with the pope, the president asked the scholar and rabbi if he would like him to convey his regards to the pope. Neusner, who has never met Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) in person, but has conducted an intellectual relationship with him for the past two decades, welcomed the opportunity. "I told him sure, why not," Neusner, 74, recalls in an interview at his home in the town of Rhinebeck, New York. "Actually, he invited me some time ago to drop in on him in Rome, but that was before he was made pope. I was in Rome last January, but didn't call him. I didn?t want to be pushy."
Neusner may not have imposed himself on Benedict XVI in a physical way, but he has forced the pontiff to relate to him and his arguments. Over the years, close relations and a high mutual regard developed between the professor and Cardinal Ratzinger, which two months ago reached a surprising peak: In his new book, "Jesus of Nazareth," the pope devotes no fewer than 18 pages to a deep theological discussion that he has carried on with Neusner. The headline of an article about the book in the Catholic News Service says it all: "After saints, most-quoted author in pope?s new book is a U.S. rabbi."
This is no small thing. Judeo-Christian dialogues in which the head of the Catholic Church takes part personally are rare indeed. In fact, since the Middle Ages, when the Church, for its own reasons, organized theological debates - known as disputations - between Christian and Jewish clergy (the identity of the winning side was, of course, known in advance), no such public, theological exchange has taken place between Judaism and Christianity.
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But the controversial writer and scholar, who currently teaches at Bard College on the Hudson River north of New York, is not just another professor of Judaic studies (the study of Judaism as a religious system, as contrasted with Jewish studies). His affable grandfatherly exterior conceals a brilliant intellectual who can claim a positively frightening list of achievements, set forth in a 51-page resume. Neusner, who received ordination at the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary but does not wear a skullcap, is considered to have single-handedly altered the status and form of Judaic studies in American universities, and the approach of Jewish communities to the study of Judaism and Jewish culture in recent decades.
"Before Neusner, other than in yeshivas, Judaism was studied mainly in Christian seminaries, where its only value was as a connecting link to early Christianity," explains Prof. Alan Zuckerman, of Brown University in Rhode Island, where Neusner taught from 1968 to 1990. To which Brown University Prof. Emeritus Calvin Goldscheider, currently a scholar-in-residence at American University, in Washington, D.C., adds: "He brought the field into the universities and made it part of the humanities. His greatness lies in having made Judaic studies far more accessible than it was before him. It didn't matter to him if someone had a background of 15 years in biblical Aramaic; with him, everyone could learn about Judaism."
Talking with Jesus The news that the pope had chosen to devote such attention to him in his theological biography of Jesus caught Neusner unawares. He got a call from a senior official at Doubleday Books, who informed him that Ratzinger had devoted a chapter of his new book to Neusner's writing on Jesus. Neusner says he was "quite surprised," and that if the pope had devoted only a footnote to him, "I would have been very pleased."
The roots of the theological dialogue between the American rabbi-professor and the German cardinal lie in a provocative book Neusner published in 1993, bearing the presumptuous title "A Rabbi Talks with Jesus." In that book, Neusner imagines himself present among the crowd that gathered at Capernaum, above the Sea of Galilee, to listen to the charismatic Nazarene. He then proceeds to pick apart Jesus? teachings there, and find holes in them from the viewpoint of a practicing Jew.
Neusner says that his goal in that book was to explain why, if he had been present at the Sermon on the Mount, "I would not have become a follower of Jesus." The reason is that the criterion Jesus himself lays down - "Think not that I have come to destroy the law, or the prophets. I have come not to destroy but to fulfill" (Matthew 5:17) - according to which the sermon he delivers on the mount gives him a status equal to that of Moses, is in contradiction to the Torah, Neusner explains.
He argues that Jesus contradicts his own declaration, and of course the Torah, by forgoing the sanctity of the Sabbath and placing himself above the commandment to honor one's parents. Beyond this, Neusner views Jesus? formulation (invoked insistently in the Sermon on the Mount), "You have heard that it was said [in the Torah] ... But I say unto you ..." as the most grievous sin of all: Jesus puts himself above the Torah and, it follows, above God.
In his book, Neusner, after listening to Jesus? formative sermon, engages in a dialogue with an imaginary spiritual mentor, reporting to him about what he heard Jesus say. The rabbi's point is that Jesus may have left nothing out on that occasion, but he added one thing: himself. Neusner's conclusion is that Jesus abandoned the Torah in the Sermon on the Mount. Moreover, he maintains, by resting its case on the Torah, Christianity is flawed by the very standards it puts forward.
Newsner says that if he had succeeded in the mission of that book, Christians would have adopted Judaism. "That won't happen overnight, but it will happen at the End of Days," Neusner says, with a faint smile in the corner of his mouth. "The Torah says that if one treats it as a criterion for truth - as Christianity and Islam do - Judaism is bound to triumph."
Parve dialogue
Such a fierce offensive by a Jewish theologian is hardly an everyday occurrence. Following the Holocaust and the Second Vatican Council, which convened in 1962, the Catholic Church began to reexamine its attitude toward Judaism. Representatives of the two faiths concentrated on finding common ground instead of focusing on what separates them. Judaism certainly did not want to anger the Church establishment too much. But Neusner, who calls the dialogue that emerged between the two "parve," was never one for political correctness.
The Judeo-Christian dialogue, he says, was not sharp, "but apathetic and apologetic," whereas Neusner was interested in forging a theological discussion of the medieval type. "I thought it would be good for Jews to know that their religion is judgmental toward another religion, and that it has the ability to create a self-maintaining system and structure," he says. And when Jacob Neusner has thoughts about a subject, he generally translates them into the written word.
Neusner, with his perceptive and discerning gaze, is one of the world's most prolific authors. He has published more than 950 books, whether as writer or editor. His legendary iron discipline enables him to produce words in incomprehensible numbers. He has written volumes of philosophical thought, textbooks, children's books and has published collections of his articles. He is also translating into English both the Babylonian Talmud ?(46 volumes?) and the Jerusalem Talmud ?(35 volumes?). And no, the 81 volumes of that prodigious project are not included in the number cited above. Along the way, he has written innumerable newspaper articles and articles that have appeared in learned journals. He wrote "A Rabbi Talks with Jesus," a 170-page book, in six weeks. "A chapter a week. That?s about my normal pace," he says dryly.
Goldscheider, a sociologist who worked with Neusner at Brown University, offers a glimpse into the Neusnerian working method, which engendered their joint 1990 work, ?Social Foundations of Judaism?: ?We were good friends from the first time we met,? he recalls in a telephone interview from Washington. Goldscheider says that he had just returned from a stay in Israel, and the first thing Newsner said to him was that he didn?t like Israelis. "Instead of making a fuss, I told him right off that I don't like Americans." Goldscheider reckons that Neusner was impressed with his rejoinder, as the two began to meet daily over lunch. "We talked about a host of subjects − about work, about politics - the things people talk about over lunch." After one lunch meeting, Neusner showed up at Goldscheider?s office, and suggested, since their conversation that day had been especially interesting, that the two should collaborate on a book. "What book? What are you talking about?' I replied. He said he would talk to a publisher and that I shouldn?t make a big deal out of it."
Neusner returned to his office, and 10 minutes later, came back and informed Goldscheider that he had spoken with a publisher, who was interested in the idea, and with whom he planned to meet the following week to finalize a contract. "I told him I wasn?t at all sure what the book was supposed to be about, that I was working on two other projects and I didn?t know whether I would have time for another. But Jack said it would be all right."
A few days later, Neusner told him the contract had been signed and that the authors had received an advance. He was about to begin his part, and expected his partner to get cracking. "A few weeks later, he came to see me with a large stack of something like 130 pages, put it on my desk and said he had done his part and now it was my turn. It took me a few months to do my work, and when I brought it to Jack, he barely remembered what I was talking about. He was already deep into something else completely, and our joint book was of no real interest to him."
The man of whom cynics say that he has never had a thought that he didn?t publish evokes his childhood when asked whether writing comes easily to him. "I grew up in a newspaper," says Neusner. His father was the founder and publisher of a Jewish paper in Connecticut, and from the age of 13 until his departure for college, the son was already doing writing on deadline. "As a youngster, I wrote editorials. When our editor went on vacation, I would put out the paper. The only thing I didn?t do was sell ads."
Two theologians
Ratzinger, it turns out, was deeply impressed by what Neusner had to say, and not in the least offended by the frontal attack on the founder of Christianity. On the contrary: After reading the manuscript of "A Rabbi Talks with Jesus," he sent Neusner his compliments, which were used to publicize the book. "He wrote that it was the best book written within the framework of the Judeo-Christian dialogue in the past 10 years and he recommended it to his students when he taught at the Vatican. That was very generous of him," Neusner notes. At the same time, he adds, the impact at the time of his book - which was translated into Russian, German, Swedish, Italian and Polish - is nothing like what it is now, after it has been so extensively quoted by the pope in his new work.
Like Neusner, Pope Benedict XVI also has no fear of confrontation. And although it may have taken almost 15 years since Neusner threw out his theological bombshell, in April the response arrived. "He, too, is a theologian," Neusner says of the pontiff, and he wants the various faiths to express themselves through their underlying ideas and the principles they support, rather than exclusively via discussions of public policy.
In his new book, the pope terms Neusner "a great Jewish scholar" and adds that the rabbi's arguments aided him in his personal search for the answers embedded in the Scriptures. Neusner, according to the pope, is conducting the theological dialogue "with profound respect for the Christian faith."
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