JACOB NEUSNER AND THE POPE DEBATE JESUS:

CAN THE TORAH BE AMENDED?
Pope & Rabbi Square Off Over the Teachings of Jesus

May 2009By Hurd Baruch (New Oxford Review)

Hurd Baruch, a retired attorney living in Tucson, Arizona, is the author of Light on Light: Illuminations of the Gospel of Jesus Christ from the Mystical Visions of the Venerable Anne Catherine Emmerich (MaxKol Communications, 2004).

Lives there a man who actually deplores Jesus' Sermon on the Mount? Yes, there does. His name is Jacob Neusner, and he is a highly esteemed and scholarly orthodox rabbi and professor, with more than 900 books to his credit, including several that take Jesus to task for His teachings. Rabbi Neusner views the teachings of Jesus as contrary to the Torah, which he regards as the ultimate and final expression of God's will and commandments. (The Torah is God's revelation to Moses at Mt. Sinai as set forth in the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch.) Neusner considers that measuring stick fair and appropriate, given Jesus' statement that He came not to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them (Mt. 5:17-20).

The culmination of Neusner's negative analyses, A Rabbi Talks With Jesus, drew the comment from Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger that it was "by far the most important book for the Jewish-Christian dialogue to have been published in the last decade." That was in 1993 -- so why bring it up now? Because Cardinal Ratzinger is now our Holy Father, and he has written his own book, Jesus of Nazareth, in which he frames his sixty-page analysis of the Sermon on the Mount ("the new Torah brought by Jesus") partially as a rebuttal to the imagined dialogues Neusner would like to have had with Jesus and His disciples, had he been alive in their time. Referring to Neusner's dialogues from A Rabbi Talks With Jesus, Pope Benedict writes, "More than other interpretations known to me, this respectful and frank dispute between a believing Jew and Jesus, the son of Abraham, has opened my eyes to the greatness of Jesus' words and to the choice that the Gospel places before us."

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UPDATE (18 May): One correction to the above: Rabbi Professor Neusner was ordained a rabbi by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the seminary of Conservative Judaism, in 1960 and therefore is not an Orthodox rabbi. Also, there's another review of the two books here. (Heads up, Joseph I. Lauer.)