3. A Transitory and Defunct Religion

IN the final analysis, the Bible as Jews and Christians have conserved it for us constitutes a truly unique human document, pulsating with life. It bears witness on Yahweh’s behalf to His constant solicitude for men. He is either for or against mankind depending on whether it accepts or rejects the effort of conversion progressively demanded of it. Having begun in odious circumstances, in mud and blood, this incomparable progress of the people of Israel towards civilisation and holiness, leads in the end to a pure, spiritual and universalist religion, whose last monuments are resplendent with beauty.

It is difficult to say where the palm should be given. To the mysterious Poems of the Servant, written by the Unknown of the Exile, foretelling a suffering Messiah, redeeming the nations through His sacrifice (Is 53)? To the Book of Wisdom, introducing Greek immortality into the treasure of Jewish Revelation (70 b.c.)? Or rather to the Song of Songs, celebrating God’s unique Covenant with His people under the daring allegory of nuptial love!

WHAT IS ODIOUS IS NO MORE, THE DREAM IS YET TO COME

Yet our overall assessment of this Book proves to be impossible: it strikes against an unexpected difficulty.

On the one hand, there is no question in the 20^th century of accepting the fanaticism, racism and odiousness of the Mosaic theocracy. What is the point of even discussing it when the Bible itself condemns this state of affairs and frees itself therefrom as something providential in its time but now obsolete? We have noted how the Jewish religion wrought a great, necessary and delicate transformation from the 8^th to the 6^th centuries. It would ill become us to reproach it for its initial harshness when the religion itself corrected it. The odious aspect has disappeared; it is no more than a reminder now of the hardness of God’s combat against the slowness and malice of men.

On the other hand, what judgement are we to make of the very noble and pure intuitions of the post-exilic religion? For this religion has no real existence; it is only a hope. It is a utopia, an announcement, a promise of another Testament to come, whose project it reveals in a confused manner! One cannot judge a project, but only the accomplished work! And once we have said that the project is grandiose, we would still be saying nothing if it was not to have any consequence, or only disappointing and unhappy ones.

Thus it is with this other Moses who was to come (Dt 18:15-22). He makes us forget the first one and all the imperfections and horrors of his history; but what good is this ideal portrait as long as the real man has yet to appear? Thus it is with this son of David, the magnificent world conqueror of Ps 2, the just judge and shepherd of His people of Ps 72, the faithful and wise administrator of Ps 101, and even Son of God in Ps 110. How can we love Him if all we have is the foretelling of His coming? If He did not come at the expected time, or if He disappointed the hope placed in Him, then these Messianic psalms are pure literature, splendid but sterile.

Thus it is with this Jerusalem, an open city, holy and glorious, dreamed of by the repatriated exiles of Jerusalem (Is 60-62). It is magnificent, for sure, “a crown of glory in the hand of the Lord and a royal diadem in the hand of your God” (Is 62:3). Yes, but it is still only a dream.

“Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of Yahweh has risen upon you. For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but Yahweh will arise upon you, and His glory will be seen upon you. And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.” (Is 60:1-3)

What is the good of being enthusiastic for such a city when we know the disappointment of those who returned from the exile in 538? They deferred their dreams to the future, a future that would elude their children for many centuries! So, it is the future that will decide on this and not the promise alone. Likewise with this Temple, whose plan is given by Ezekiel, where he sees in vision Yahweh coming again in majesty. From the right of the altar there will spring a source of living water, and as this water become torrent goes down to the Dead Sea it will change the desert into an orchard and the sterile sea into one full of fish (Ez 43-47; Zc 13-14). How beautiful! It would be even more beautiful if these visions had become reality. For there is still no river flowing through Jerusalem (Ps 46:5)! and the Dead Sea still presents the same scene of desolation, reminding mankind of the chastisement of Sodom and Gomorrah.

It is therefore understood that the odious part of the Bible was pedagogically justified but is no more, and the Bible itself forbids any return to it. The admirable part of the Bible needs no justification but, as it is all promise, it is still to come or it is elsewhere than in the Jewish Bible and calls us to make other enquiries. It is on the side of the Gospel that we must look.

A DEAD RELIGION

Sacred History has an an admirable and complex unity. Its curve rises slowly, reaching heights of grandeur, then disperses in luminous cascades, like a firework, only to disappear like it suddenly into the night. Since the fall of Jerusalem, the last one, it has been a dead religion. For two thousand years the Jews have been able to recite in all its literal truth this verse from Psalm 74: “We do not see our signs; there is no longer any prophet, and there is none among us who knows how long.”

The fatal event, from which the Jews were entitled to expect their resurrection and the fulfilment of the promises, was the coming of Jesus Christ, foretold by the last of their authentic prophet, John the Baptist. Paradoxically, having become the “sign of contradiction”, followed only by the small number and rejected by the nation as a whole, the “Saviour of Israel”, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews” would cause the ruin of Jerusalem and the cessation of the Yahwist cult. Thereafter, elsewhere, Talmudic Judaism and the Kabbalah, the creation of carnal Israel, on the one side, and the Church of Jesus Christ, become the spiritual Israel, on the other, grew as rivals, in dramatic confrontation until the end of time.

THE MALEDICTION OF ISRAEL

The catastrophe of 70 a.d. marked the breaking of Yahweh’s Covenant with His people. It took the form of a “curse” (Dt 28). The sacrifice was interrupted, the Levitical liturgy ceased, theocracy was no more, the very existence of the nation, gathered on its land, around its Holy City and its Temple was definitively compromised by the outright annexation of Judea to the Roman empire and the capture of Jerusalem in the year 135 following the revolt of Shimon bar Kokhba. Jupiter, Juno and Venus would have their temples on the ruins of the old city! There followed an exodus and dispersion without hope, either human or divine.

This end is beyond dispute. In losing its land, its king, its priests and prophets, the tangible signs of divine blessings, Israel according to the flesh lost its force, its raison d’être and its identity even, although this is for the most part unavowed, (Dt 28). Insofar as carnal Israel still lays claim to being what it obviously no longer is, it creates resentment and exasperation with its pride, racism and unjustifiable pretentions, provoking the hatred of the nations.

THE CARNAL MEANING

As Pascal so magnificently saw and pointed out in his Pensées, in the chapter on the Old Testament, the Jewish people, in keeping the Bible are preserving a document of self-accusation. In order to justify themselves, they are obliged to show only its carnal side wherein they find themselves, but which is the element of the Bible that has become obsolete and has disappeared.

1. Such is circumcision, in which the Jewish people still finds a social bond in the dispersion. But it keeps silent about what Deuteronomy and the prophets had to say on the “circumcision of the heart” the only thing necessary! By basing its trust on carnal mutilation and not on the spiritual conversion demanded by the God of the Bible, this people makes itself odious to the nations and knowingly widens the gulf of difference between itself and the rest of mankind.

2. Such is the return to the Land of the ancestors, the only aspiration that the Jewish people keep from the vast Messianic and eschatological hope. It fantasises this return, just as a sick man fantasises his return home where he hopes to recover his former health and the life ebbing away from him, when it is not the land nor the house that gives Life, but the soul, the spirit and the grace of God alone! By chasing out the Palestinians and setting themselves up as a nation, modern Israel has recovered neither the joy nor the peace of the Old Covenant. It shows that nothing distinguishes it from other peoples and their politics except an unjustified pride that is dangerous for world peace.

3. Finally, such is the Bible, which the Jewisdh people claim to be their own exclusive Book. They have to expurgate it of all that surpasses and contradicts their historical being, their present condition and their claims. Everything that has accused them down the centuries and everything that surpasses them. What is left? The Bible’s life, charm, spirit and utopia are taken away; there remains a cold, lifeless history, as stifling as their Museum of the Book in Jerusalem. Whither the vast supernatural, mystical promises, of the Canticle of God’s love with the Shulamite? Nothing! The Jewish people return to things possessed and possessing: the flesh, wealth, pride of Jewish power, money. Go and see Tel-Aviv!

Whence the insuperable disgust that modern humanists feel towards this dead thing, this Book torn apart, of which all they are shown is the sordid and odious side. All their dream gnoses – Nazism, Communism, Hinduism – are superior to it by comparison. But that is not the Bible; it is only the death of the Bible.

A RELIGION TO COME

Only one solution, one attitude, remains with regard to the Bible. It can be summed up in three key words.

1. Conserve this masterpiece, unique in history and in the treasury of human literature; conserve it in its entirety. Consider it first of all as the Word of God heard by our Fathers, true and efficacious, eternal like its Author, to which no one has the right to modify, add or eliminate anything. It is a testimony to a history for ever inscribed in the memory of mankind as its fundamental experience. It is the history of the Covenant of the living God with a people chosen by Himself and its gradual transformation into the promise of another religious economy, of a new and eternal Covenant, open to all nations, better and definitive. No one has the right to touch it, because it belongs to all. And to God.

2. Remember this Old Testament as a bygone, vanished order, without being attached to its material form. There is no need even to formulate this prohibition, so obvious is it that its literal meaning has been alien to mankind for nearly two thousand years and its re-enactment has become impossible. But Old Testament must be more than just an object of archaeological science; it must become an object of religious meditation because every human generation at all times must find therein the origins of its own soul and the beginnings of its own destiny. Circumcision, animal sacrifices, the Mosaic Law, the curses against the wicked, the towns given over to anathema, all that was necessary and remains a lesson in the memory of peoples.

3. Transpose, that is to say, discover in the signs and oracles of the Old Testament, in figure form, the miracles and mysteries, foretold and prepared, of the perfect religion to come. This is clearly the true knowledge of the Bible, but a knowledge of faith, a supernatural reading. The religious spirit, thus considers that the same God already created the ancient figure on the model of the future reality that He was planning, and the type that came first, accessible to the senses, in view of preparing its spiritual antitype, its perfect replica, so that they eternally shed light on each other.

Such is our way of reading the Jewish Bible in the Christian Church. For us, the Old Testament is to the New Testament as the human body is to the head which gives it its meaning, both being to the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ as the flesh is to the soul which vivifies it and sanctifies it, and on the last day will transfigure it in Glory. Amen.

Father George de Nantes
Excerpt from The Religion of the Bible Odious, Justified, Obsolete,
Catholic Counter-Reformation no. 131, February 1981.

To be continued.