Archbishop Bathersby is to be congratulated for giving the Archdiocese of Brisbane the opportunity to engage with the person and wisdom of Professor Larry Hurtado (CL 23/09/2007).
At the beginning of a two-day public lecture series, delivered at Upper Mt Gravatt parish centre, Archbishop Bathersby introduced his guest speaker by referring to a Jewish scholar Rabbi Jacob Neusner.
Rabbi Neusner’s book, titled A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, features large in the recent book by Pope Benedict XVI called Jesus of Nazareth.
I understood the Archbishop to be highlighting the significance of Professor Hurtado’s work by placing him squarely within the context of the Pope’s current thinking, which itself is squarely focussed upon the significance of the meaning of Jesus as Christian’s strive to understand the continuing importance of the Torah.
Professor Hurtado is quite clear that his task was the historical explanation and validation of the early, almost immediate and explosive devotion to Jesus as equal with God by hitherto believing, monotheistic Palestinian Jews.
Rabbi Neusner placed his own inability to follow Jesus as a complete believer due to what he saw as the unmitigated betrayal of the Torah that such a path would constitute for him and as it did, in his view, for Jesus.
Pope Benedict XVI described how Jesus enlivened the Torah through universalising its essential content and thereby providing a freedom that fulfilled the Torah in his own Person.
It was therefore rather providential that Professor Hurtado’s final lecture addressed the topic of slavery and freedom in the social context of early Christianity.
That freedom to reverence Jesus as divine within the monotheism of an orthodox biblical Jewish belief systems, forced upon the Christian community centuries of theological introspection.
However as Professor Hurtado has shown what came first was the devotion and response to the person of Jesus and the doctrine came as a necessary attempt to understand what was initially a way of living.
Pope Benedict and Archbishop Bathersby are reminding us that even they have much to learn from a contemporary Jewish Rabbi.
YHWH did not allow the Israelites to make their previous experiences absolute.
Jesus’ life, death and resurrection shows that He will certainly not allow it of the universal community of Christians.
Vince Hodge
Paddington, Qld
