On the one-year anniversary of the attack by Hamas on Israel on Oct. 7, Pope Francis released a public “Letter to the Catholics of the Middle East” to reassure and thank this defenseless minority “for being able to pray and love despite everything” they are enduring during the present warfare. He urged them to “become sprouts of hope, because the light of faith leads you to testify to love amid words of hatred, to encounter amid growing confrontation, to unity amid increasing hostility.”
Given the awful tragedies currently unfolding in many parts of the world, which rightly are of urgent concern to Pope Francis, the issue I raise here might seem picayune. However, when viewed through the lens of a nearly two millennia habit that the church is trying to unlearn, perhaps its significance is greater than might first appear. I would like to comment on the following sentences in the pope’s letter:
As Christians, we must never tire of imploring peace from God. That is why, on this day, I have urged everyone to observe a day of prayer and fasting. Prayer and fasting are the weapons of love that change history, the weapons that defeat our one true enemy: the spirit of evil that foments war, because it is “murderous from the beginning,” “a liar and the father of lies” (Jn 8:44). Please, let us devote time to prayer and rediscover the saving power of fasting!
In asserting that it is the devil who is behind all the bloodshed, Pope Francis draws upon Chapter 8 of the Gospel of John, in which Jesus engages in a fierce exchange with “the Jews who believed in him” or “who had believed in him.” Jn 8:44 reads in full (italics denote words the pope has quoted): “You belong to your father the devil and you willingly carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in truth, because there is no truth in him. When he tells a lie, he speaks in character, because he is a liar and the father of lies.”
It is perilous to cite polemical words out of context, particularly words that have consistently sparked enmity toward Jews for centuries. A parallel would be if a preacher employed the text of Matthew 27:25, where a Jewish crowd demands Jesus’ crucifixion, to urge Christians to pray that Jesus’ sacred “blood be on us and our children” without mentioning Jews at all.
Indeed, Jn 8:44 and Mt 27:25 are the two New Testament passages that in tandem have perennially “othered” Jews as Christ-killing spawns of the devil. Even though the pope’s citation of the former was unquestionably meant to promote fasting and prayer as a weapon against evil, one wonders if in these polarized times readers who know the full passage, or who look it up, will take the wrong message. There is also something peculiarly surreal about this in a letter dated Oct. 7—as our Jewish friends were themselves about to fast and pray as they observed Yom Kippur.
The “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions” (“Nostra Aetate”) of the Second Vatican Council, of course, repudiated such hostile understandings, and the1974 Vatican document designed to help implement it took special note of the problems presented by the Gospel of John, in which the term “the Jews” appears with a negative connotation dozens of times. The consensus in biblical scholarship is that this animus was the result of “controversies [in] Christian-Jewish relations long after the time of Jesus,” as a1985 Vatican text observed.
Importantly, the late American biblical scholar, Raymond E. Brown, S.S., who studied that Gospel throughout his career, gradually came to a crucial conclusion about it. He is cited in Sonya Shetty Cronin’s Raymond Brown, “The Jews,” and the Gospel of John thusly:
The audience of the finalized work [~100 CE] … would hear [“the Jews”] in reference to the Jews they knew at the end of the first century in their own area. And they would connect any hostility they encountered from those Jews with the hostility manifested toward Jesus in John’s account… [As John Ashton notes,] ‘it is the Jewish people as a whole who are made the symbol of human shadow.’ Uncomfortable as that may make modern readers because of the horrible history of anti-Jewish persecution in subsequent centuries, it is what John meant.... In other words, for John the hostile ‘Jews’ of the evangelist’s time are the heirs of the hostile Jewish authorities and crowds in Jesus’ time. (Italics added.)
Thus, Father Brown concluded that the authors of the Gospel of John intended for their readers to see why it was proper for them to feel hostility toward their Jewish contemporaries. This aim has reverberated down through generations of Christians, going far beyond the vision of the original Gospel.
Clearly, more than a simple “plain sense” reading of Jn 8:44 is required in a post-Shoah, post-“Nostra Aetate” church. As thePontifical Biblical Commission has cautioned, it is necessary “to avoid absolutely any actualization of certain texts of the New Testament which could provoke or reinforce unfavorable attitudes to the Jewish people.”
Beyond the risk of inadvertently stoking animosity in today’s hyper-polarized climate, making a point about evil by proof-texting the polemical Jn 8:44 does not provide a good model for Catholics about how to read the Bible. As Father Brown cautioned in his 2003 book,An Introduction to the Gospel of John, “Regarding the Bible as sacred does not mean that everything described therein is laudable.”
The pope’s “plain sense” citation is even more regrettable since it runs contrary to the esteem in which he holds Jewish spiritual life. In his 2013 apostolic exhortation “Evangelii Gaudium” (a text with the highest magisterial authority since “Nostra Aetate” itself), he wrote, “God continues to work among the people of the Old Covenant and to bring forth treasures of wisdom which flow from their encounter with his word.”
