Posts Tagged ‘Henry Wansbrough OSB’

Benedict XVI’s 360 Degree Vision Of The Gospel

Jesus Of Nazareth 2

The historical-critical method of looking at the Gospels is central to the Pope’s new book, Jesus of Nazareth II (being released tomorrow), but as Dom Henry Wansbrough explains, the Holy Father is proposing a new way of understanding them.

Pope Benedict claims in his book to use and build on the historical-critical method. However, his real aim is to produce a “faith hermeneutic”. What does this mean? It is superbly illustrated by the opening chapter on the Entry into Jerusalem. Benedict looks not only at the incident itself but forwards and backwards.

The example of a donkey

He looks backwards in that he delves profoundly into the overtones of the description which would be familiar to the original hearers of the account. The most obvious allusion is to the humble king who chooses a donkey as his mount, no warlike steed. This excludes any interpretation which sees Jesus’ entry into the city as a political revolutionary movement. But there is plenty that is kingly: the donkey itself is an allusion to the royal blessing on Judah in Genesis 49.

The requisitioning of transport is a royal right. Jesus is set on the donkey by his followers just as Solomon was set on his mount by his followers at his coronation. More than kingly, the praise of the children is reminiscent of Psalm 8, the praise to God “out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.” None of this could be seen at the time, but the account is no flat and factual recital, and all these overtones are described as ‘hidden in the prophetic vision’.

A vision of the future

He looks forward too, to the Church’s liturgy. The ‘Hosanna’ is an ‘anticipation of the great outpouring of praise’, for the ‘Hosanna’ enters the Church’s liturgy in the earliest liturgical document of all, the Didache. The entry into Jerusalem was not forgotten as “a thing of the past. Just as the Lord entered the Holy City that day on a donkey, so too the Church saw him coming again and again in the humble form of bread and wine.” This is what is meant by “a faith hermeneutic.”

Dom Henry Wansbrough OSB is Chairman of the Trustees of the Catholic Biblical Association and served on the Pontifical Biblical Commission.

You can pre-order the book and read all the pre-publication extracts here.

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Part 1Via DolorosaLent

Wednesday, 09 March 2011 13:42

The Pope Is “Re-shaping The Way We Read The Bible”

Jesus Of Nazareth 2

Fr. Robert Barron provides an excellent part review, part preview of the upcoming Jesus of Nazareth II on his Word on Fire blog:

“The second volume of Pope Benedict’s masterful study of the Lord Jesus has just been published. The first volume, issued three years ago, dealt with the public life and preaching of Jesus, while this second installment concentrates on the events of the Lord’s passion, death, and resurrection.”

Pope Benedict’s method

Fr Barron provides an interesting explaination of what he believes the Holy Father is attempting to do.

“As was the case with volume one, this book is introduced by a short but penetrating introduction, wherein the Pope makes some remarks about the method he has chosen to employ. What I found particularly fascinating was how Joseph Ratzinger develops a motif that has preoccupied him for the past thirty years, namely, how biblical scholarship has to move beyond an exclusive use of the historical-critical method.”

Continue reading…

Tomorrow we will post an article by Dom Henry Wansbrough on this same important subject, what the Pope is trying to achieve.

You can pre-order the book and read all the pre-publication extracts here.

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Part 1Light of the WorldPius XII

http://wordonfire.org/WoF-Blog/WoF-Blog/March-2011/Fr-Barron-comments-the-Popes-new-book-Jesus-of.aspx
Tuesday, 08 March 2011 16:00

Jesus and the Jewish Elite

Jesus Of Nazareth 2

Yesterday the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the Pope for his comments exonarating the Jewish people from blame for the death of Christ.

In a letter to the Pontiff, the Israeli leader said,

“I commend you for forcefully rejecting in your recent book [Jesus of Nazareth II] a false charge that has been a foundation for the hatred of the Jewish people for many centuries.”

He hoped the Pope’s,

“Clarity and courage will strengthen the relations between Jews and Christians throughout the world, and help promote peace and reconciliation for generations to come.”

With that aim, Biblical scholar Dom Henry Wansbrough looks at the wider points made by the Holy Father’s book, about the Jewish religious elite of Jesus’ time.

The Jews in the Pope’s book

One of the striking features of Benedict XVI’s new book, is its peacefulness and openness towards Judaism.

He points out that Christians have no mandate during our present ‘period of the gentiles’ for proselytising the Jews: ‘in the meantime, Israel retains its own mission…Israel is in the hands of God’

The Jews are not blamed for insisting on the execution of Jesus, and the grounds for this accusation are cut away by (quite wrongly, to my mind) interpreting St. John’s controversial expression ‘the Jews’ as ‘the Temple aristocracy’

The Pharisees

Interestingly, Benedict accepts St. John’s account that the Pharisees were involved in Caiaphas’ meeting at which, long before the Last Supper, it was decided to liquidate Jesus.

Apart from this, the Pharisees hardly appear in the book. According to the synoptic account, the Pharisees take no part in the condemnation, and do not appear at all in the Passion Narrative.

They are prominent enough in the legal controversies during the Galilean ministry, but it has often been suggested that these could be likened to in-house controversies about interpretation of the Law.

Appealing to scripture

Jesus consistently advocates a different view, but argues from scripture with impeccable Pharisaic reasoning, making full use of the contemporary rules of scriptural exegesis, enshrined in the codification attributed to Rabbi Hillel, as John Meier makes clear.

The most striking feature of Jesus’ exegesis is his appeal to the most basic texts of scripture, such as the creation story and the ten commandments.

The destruction of the temple

It cannot be denied that the Pharisees receive a very bad press in the gospels, especially in Matthew. Is this because, at the time the gospels were being written (after the Fall of Jerusalem in 70ad), the Pharisees were the only significant group of Jews to remain?

Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots and the priestly aristocracy had all been destroyed in the Sack of Jerusalem.

So by this time the Pharisees wholly represent the Jewish opposition to Christianity. It is the Pharisees who will ‘scourge you in their synagogues’ (Matthew 10.17).

It is good to see Benedict’s insistence that the cry ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children’ is to be understood as a non-historical reference to the sufferings of the siege of Jerusalem in the next generation, rather than as a self-condemnation of the whole race of the Jews.

Dom Henry Wansbrough OSB is Chairman of the Trustees of the Catholic Biblical Association and served on the Pontifical Biblical Commission.

You can pre-order the book and read all the pre-publication extracts here.

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Part 1Light of the WorldPius XII

Friday, 04 March 2011 13:30

“The Masterly Skill of a Saintly Teacher” – Jesus of Nazareth II Review

Jesus Of Nazareth 2

By Dom Henry Wansbrough

The first teaching Pope was Leo the Great, who wrote a cycle of sermons throughout the year on Christian doctrine. John Paul II was a saint and a media star. Benedict is a saint and a teacher, who still loves teaching.

It is amazing that he has managed to find time to write this second volume amid the press of endless audiences and reading papers on the Church throughout the world. He gave me a copy of the first volume on the day it was published, but that was in his first year as Pope!

Wide range of sources

His reading has been wide, not only Catholic authors but the great non-Catholic exegetes too. Not only in his own native German but in French, Italian and English too (the great English Protestant scholar Kingsley Barrett, and the great American Catholic John Meier). He also picks up on and discusses recent theories which he will have encountered in his previous job as head of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, cruelly nicknamed the papal Rottweiler.

The book covers the ground from Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem till the Resurrection. It is historically-based but is not a life of Jesus. It picks and chooses, selecting the moments which Benedict finds most rewarding.

Listening to Jesus’ disciples

With masterly skill he uses the tools of the historico-critical method, but dry, factual history is not his primary aim. He wants to produce a ‘faith hermeneutic’ by what he calls “listening to Jesus’ disciples across the ages”, to make possible an encounter with Jesus in faith. So his primary interest is to show how the events were seen and described by Jesus’ disciples. He reads the events from within the Church tradition.

There is no such thing as brute facts; the facts are always described from one point of view or another, and the evangelists were describing the last days of their Lord and Master. With great delicacy Benedict picks up the allusions in the accounts which show how events were seen and understood in the light of the Scriptures.

The Temple

The first two chapters are already captivating. The Entry into Jerusalem on ‘Palm Sunday’ is presented as the joyful welcome of the Davidic Messiah, but avoiding all political or revolutionary overtones. Then the Cleansing of the Temple constitutes Jesus’ demonstration that the misuse of the Temple is destroying it, just as the prophet Jeremiah tried to show Israel that it was hell-bent on destroying its first Temple half a millenium earlier.

From now on the privileges of Israel were to pass to the gentiles. The second chapter jumps to Jesus’ final prophecy of the future in Mark 13, which Benedict considers the most difficult passage in all the Gospels. Brilliant, original and convincing, but above all, lucid, with the calm touch of the mature master.

A masterpiece

And so on till the final chapter on the Resurrection. What can you say about the Resurrection in a short chapter of a dozen pages? But it is a masterpiece. Was the Resurrection a historical event? It ‘has left a footprint within history’, but it was an ‘evolutionary leap’ or an ‘ontological leap’ which opens up a new dimension. ‘Anyone approaching the resurrection accounts in the belief that he knows what rising from the dead means, will inevitably misunderstand those accounts’.

You can pre-order it here.

Dom Henry Wansbrough OSB is Chairman of the Trustees of the Catholic Biblical Association and served on the Pontifical Biblical Commission.

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Part 1Light of the WorldPius XII

Thursday, 03 March 2011 12:30

Catholic Controversy 2 – Pilate

New Book

Our Catholic Controversies series looks at important moments and figures in the Passion narrative, which forms the basis of the Pope’s new book Jesus of Nazareth Part II.

Here, Biblical scholar Dom Henry Wansbrough OSB tells us about Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Palestine at the time of Jesus.

Numerous attempts to reconstruct the character and motivation of Pontius Pilate have been made, often with the liberty of a historical novel.

Benedict XVI, in his new book, Jesus of Nazareth II, traverses this ground again with the help of Flavius Josephus and Philo of Alexandria.

These two Jewish sources present Pilate’s brutal repression of the Jews as the real cause of the bad blood between Romans and Jews which would lead to the Jewish Revolt 30 years later.

It is difficult to support another point of view. There are no other primary sources for Pilate. It is, however, worth examining more closely the biased allegations of Josephus and Philo. A different interpretation of the stories they tell is certainly possible.

Pilate can be represented as the dupe of the Jewish leaders. He tried to be helpful as governor, and avoid trampling on their complicated prejudices and incomprehensible susceptibilities, but he was repeatedly outplayed by them and made to look a fool.

Incident One: Graven images must not be seen in Jerusalem. Roman troops can’t march without their standards. Pilate’s solution: March the troops up at night in the dark! The standards were spotted and all hell broke loose.

Incident Two: Graven images must not be seen in Jerusalem. Pilate wants to honour the emperor. Solution: Put up not a statue but a simple inscription in gold lettering inside Pilate’s residence. They reported him to Rome for insulting the Holy City.

Incident Three: Jerusalem was expanding and needed a larger water supply. Pilate built an aqueduct, 27km long, to bring in the water – a brilliant piece of Roman engineering. It went over budget and they refused to pay.

Incident Four: In the ensuing riots Pilate used plain-clothes agents to control the mob instead of armed riot-police. ‘He wouldn’t even let us be martyred.’

A prophet from Galilee is denounced to me by the local rulers, involving some complicated theological argument which the locals claim is subversive. I can’t understand it myself and he doesn’t act like a subversive, but I have worked with Caiaphas for half-a-dozen years (his residence is just next to mine), so I’ll trust his judgement.

Final incident, 6 years later: Pilate puts down a messianic revolt in Samaria with too much severity. He is packed off to Rome by his superior, the governor of Syria. He has governed Palestine for a decade, instead of the usual two years, and there is now a new emperor; it is time for a change. Pilate disappears from history.

Dom Henry Wansbrough OSB is Chairman of the Trustees of the Catholic Biblical Association and served on the Pontifical Biblical Commission.

Buy the book here and enter the following discount coupon code when you are in the checkout: WECC. You will get you 15% off the retail price of this book!

Offer ends 28/2/2011.

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Thursday, 24 February 2011 08:55
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