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Is it possible, J. H. H. WEILER asks, that in the famous trial in Jerusalem, everyone was following God's path?
For the last four years, I have been conducting, at New York University's School of Law, a seminar on the trial of Jesus. The Wall Street Journal inveighed against it as educational inanity: if not exactly corrupting the youth, then at least leading them astray and squandering their tuition dollars. Happily, the seminar has been oversubscribed since inception. Christians and Jews enroll in roughly their proportions at the law school, with the seminar split more or less evenly among the religiously committed, those committed to being nonreligious, and the generally uncommitted. For Jewish students, with few exceptions, the seminar marks the first time they have actually read the gospels; their knowledge of the trial's narrative derives from hearsay and Hollywood. They are surprised to discover how much of our general cultural idiom derives from the New Testament, and they are surprised, too - and somewhat troubled, in complex ways - by their unmediated encounter with the highly sympathetic Jesus narrative, just as they are shocked by the fierce anti-Jewishness of John. The newness of that encounter makes it hard for them to comprehend the equanimity with which the others in the seminar relate to it. They feel discomforted by the underlying cultural "you did it" sentiment.
For Catholic students, the seminar often marks the first time they have read the gospels systematically. They are mostly uninterested in the normative issues of who is responsible for the judicial death of Jesus, and they are genuinely surprised at how it dominates the rich trial literature. Nostra Aetate seems to have sunk in.
Protestants typically arrive with real command of the text, but they, in their turn, are surprised by the critical tradition that is so pervasive in scholarly analysis of the trial. Something like the mirror image of their Jewish classmates, they tend to hold a clear view of Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus, although they feel guilty for holding that view.
Historically, since it was not Jewish hands that physically nailed Jesus to the cross, it is the trial that became the responsibilizing act and, hence, the source of the deicide charge....