Abraham

by Bruce Feiler

  The Gospels also find spiritual qualities of Jesus rooted in Abraham. In Luke 16, Jesus tells a parable about a rich man who dresses in purple and linen, and a poor man, Lazarus, who eats the crumbs of the rich man’s table and has his sores licked by a dog. The rich man dies and goes to hell. The poor man dies and is “carried away by the angels to be with Abraham.”

  Even from his abyss, the rich man pleads with Abraham for mercy, but Abraham says, “No, in your lifetime you received your good things” and Lazarus evil things. “But now he is comforted here, and you are in agony.” This passage shows clear debts to Jewish interpreters. It takes a contemporary Christian ideal—in this case, care for the downtrodden—and retroactively grounds it in the life of Abraham. Abraham, in other words, is being turned into Jesus.

  This merging of Abraham and Jesus reaches a climax in the Gospel of John. The fourth Gospel is sometimes called the Gospel of Gospels because it was written later than the others, around 85 C.E., and effectively attempts to synthesize the prior three. John is also the most spiritual of the Gospels. The text is less interested in Jesus’ humanity and more interested in his divinity. Jesus is always something other than human. He is the word of God incarnate in a historical person.

  This image is vividly on display in an arresting—and controversial—parable. In John 8, Jesus is teaching a group of scribes and Jewish sectarians in the Temple. “I am the light of the world,” he says. “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness.” The Jews resist, saying, “Your testimony is not valid.” Jesus says they should not judge him by human standards because he was sent by God. If you follow me, he continues, “you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

  But we are descendants of Abraham, the Jews counter, and “we have never been slaves to anyone.” (They apparently overlook, or are unaware of, the period in Egypt.) “I know that you are descendants of Abraham,” Jesus says, “yet you look for an opportunity to kill me, because there is no place in you for my word.” He adds, “Whoever keeps my word will never see death.” This incenses the Jews even more. “Now we know that you have a demon,” the Jews reply. Abraham is dead. “Are you greater than our father Abraham?”

  “Your ancestor rejoiced that he would see my day,” Jesus replies. “He saw it and was glad.” Suddenly Abraham knows the gospel thousands of years before Jesus was born.

  The Jews reply with outrage: “You are not fifty years, and have you seen Abraham?”

  And Jesus responds with one of the more contentious lines in the New Testament: “Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am.”

  The Jews react by picking up stones and hurling them at Jesus.

  Jesus’ statement at the end of John 8 is considered the clearest implication of his divinity in the Gospels. Jesus is now godlike in his ability to exist across time and space, and he expresses this by saying that he lived before Abraham. Jesus further suggests that he told Abraham who he was and that Abraham accepted. Jesus no longer supersedes Abraham; he precedes him. Jesus is not the seed of Abraham; Abraham is the seed of Christ.

  The Jews, not surprisingly, reject this union and are likened to the devil. For this reason, many scholars consider this passage the most anti-Jewish in the entire New Testament. As the Reverend Dr. Wood said, “This is tough stuff. It’s a theology of the end of the first century put into the mouth of Jesus. Would Jesus say that? I find it impossible to believe. It’s just so out of character with most of the rest of what we have reason to think he said.”

  Still, as he pointed out, John does have Jesus saying it, and the consequences are immense. The Jews’ response—throwing stones—captures their anger. The breach between Jews and Christians now seems irreparable. Dialogue has been replaced by fighting.

  And why? From the Christian perspective, Jews deny Jesus his right to be considered divine. From the Jewish perspective, Jesus denies Jews—or at least the Jews he’s arguing with—what for centuries has defined their identity: the right to be considered children of Abraham. As Jesus says during this argument, “ If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing what Abraham did, but now you are trying to kill me.” Without Abraham, the Jews have lost their connection to God. And, suddenly, Abraham is no longer the shared father of all humanity; he’s the expression of the rift between Christians and Jews.

  AND WHAT A RIFT it becomes.

  In the centuries after the Gospels were recorded, early Church writers continued to extend the rivalry between Christians and Jews. As in other areas, the destruction of the Temple in the late first century C.E. proved pivotal. Church fathers saw in the misfortune of the Jews more evidence of their own triumph and a vindication for their claim to be the true kingdom of Israel. The Church, which had been on the defensive toward Judaism, now went on the offensive.

  Prominent writers such as Justin Martyr and Irenaeus (from the second century) and Eusebius (from the fourth) began to argue that Abraham wasn’t Jewish after all but Christian. Justin, who was born in the town where Abraham first stopped in the Promised Land, was the first writer of any status to regard all Jews as enemies of Christ. Abraham, Justin claims, was actually called by Jesus in the same voice that summons all believers to Christ. As a result, Christians will inherit the Holy Land and are really “the nation promised to Abraham by God.”

  Now, not only have Jews been condemned by Jesus but they’ve actually been disinherited from the land and orphaned from God.

  Irenaeus goes even further, saying that Christianity is not a new faith at all but the original faith, the one that brought Abraham to his righteousness. “The Lord was not unknown to Abraham, whose day he desired to see.” In fact, it was through Christ, who appeared to Abraham in bodily form, that Abraham came to know God.

  The final rupture came with Augustine. The fourth-century theologian argued that Jews blindly and shamelessly look at history through fleshly eyes, not spiritual ones. The proper way to view time, he insisted, is through the eyes of the eternal Son of God. To prove his point, he relied on the inflammatory passage in John 8 in which Jesus says, “Before Abraham was, I am.” “Weigh the words, and get a knowledge of the mystery,” he writes. Jesus does not say, “Before Abraham was, I was,” because Jesus was never made. He simply is.

  As a result, believers in Christ constitute the superior religion, Augustine stated. Just as God prefers the younger sons to the older ones in the Bible, so he prefers the younger religion, Christianity, to the older one, Judaism. Jews can continue to exist, but only because their tradition provides the dark light out of which the white light of Christian truth emerges. Judaism, in other words, now serves Christianity. Abraham has a new nation, the nation of Christ.

  What John suggested and Justin reinforced, Augustine now locks into place for nearly fifteen hundred years of Christian history. Abraham, whom Paul called the “ancestor of all who believe,” has now become the ancestor for all who hate. When Nazi propagandists were looking for justification for their anti-Semitism, for example, they cited works from this period. They went so far as to call Justin Martyr the “greatest anti-Semite of Christian antiquity.”

  Still, what these Christian interpreters did is remarkably similar to what Jewish interpreters did: They took a biblical figure open to all, tossed out what they wanted to ignore, ginned up what they wanted to stress, and ended up with a symbol for their own uniqueness that looked far more like a mirror image of their own fantasies than a reflection of the original story. Abraham is now a Christian, who knew Jesus, heard the gospel, and passed down God’s blessing exclusively to those who embrace the body of Christ.

  Jews, as well as other biological descendants of Abraham, and indeed anyone who rejects the good news of Christ, are dispossessed, dislodged, and left to wither in oblivion. Abraham, initially used to justify the inclusion of Gentiles in God’s kingdom, is now used to certify the exclusion of Jews from their own heritage. Abraham may have stopped short of killing off his flesh and blood on Moriah, but Christians have now done
it for him.

  ONCE AGAIN, as an outsider encountering this hateful tradition, I was flummoxed. Abraham has been transformed so wildly by his own self-proclaimed descendants that he bears little resemblance to the portrait now left to fade in the Bible. The biblical story itself may have been doctored over time; it may have been altered immeasurably. But it still manages to convey a more generous message of God’s grace than does either of the portraits Abraham’s supposed spiritual inheritors were busily creating.

  Once more, I was left with a question: Why not reject these interpretations? Why not rebuff the Christian exclusive interpretation of Abraham as being as artificial as the Jewish one?

  “Because you can’t,” said the Reverend Petra Heldt. The Reverend Ms. Heldt is a German Lutheran minister who heads the Ecumenical Theological Research Fraternity in Jerusalem. A petite woman with a wide, serene face and hair tucked in a bun, she was born in Berlin but moved to Israel in the 1970s to improve Jewish-Christian relations. When I met her in the library of her office, she was days away from finishing her Ph.D. on the use of Abraham in early Christian writing.

  “Every story, the moment it’s written down, will be reread,” she said. “And every rereading will be a reinterpretation. In that sense, there is not an original story and there is not an original message.”

  As she spoke, she kept her hands tucked between her legs, as if not to draw too much attention to them. The reason is they are covered in grafts. In 1997 the Reverend Ms. Heldt was almost incinerated in a double suicide bombing in Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda Market. She was shopping for dinner when she heard a bomb explode a few stalls away. As she started to run, she noticed her friend Nissim, a fishmonger, shaking hands with a Palestinian. But instead of releasing Nissim’s hand, the man pulled him closer and detonated a second bomb. Another fireball erupted, sending her flying.

  By the time she landed, second- and third-degree burns covered her body, and pieces of the bomb were lodged in her legs and feet. Half an hour later, as she arrived at Hadassah Hospital, where she would spend the next six weeks in the burn unit, her eyes swollen shut by the burns, unable to eat or drink, a reporter stuck a microphone in her face. “Why do you think you survived?”

  Her answer was as miraculous as her survival: “To have an opportunity to speak about the greatness of God. We are his tools to bring reconciliation to this world.”

  “If you look at history,” she told me, “each religion, at different times, for different reasons, tried to establish itself as the dominant religion. Claiming Abraham for yourself is just one way to establish your authority.” This power grab usually occurs at historical turning points, she noted. For Jews it was after the Second Temple was destroyed and they had to buttress their sagging identity. For Christians it was after the fall of Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries, when they lost their political protection. “It’s a psychological need triggered by political circumstances. You use your culture to establish your triumphalism because your political power may be waning. You want to show that you’ve always been there. Abraham is a great way to prove that.”

  Given this history of using Abraham for political purposes, I said, “Do you think he’s a good vessel for reconciliation?”

  “I think he’s the best there is.”

  “Why?”

  “You can put everything into that vessel you would like. He’s open enough. He’s broad enough. Shakespeare couldn’t have thought of a better figure. He’s planted in that space of the world, so he precedes all of us, he’s therefore with all of us. He’s not identified as being beautiful, or Jewish, or Christian, or black, or white, or whatnot, so you can put everything into him that you want.

  “Also, he has this divine connection, which is wonderful, and all these divine promises, which are inspiring. You really can’t think of anyone else. He’s perfect.”

  “So you’re suggesting that one reason he’s a great figure is the lack of detail in Genesis.”

  “Exactly. And this is typical of a very good hero. Do you have a clear idea of Hamlet or Oedipus? No! Fairy tales provide great heroes. You don’t know if they’re old or young, have black hair or blue eyes. That’s why everyone loves them.”

  “So can you say to Christians, for example, that they should go back to the original story of Genesis and there they’ll find that hero?”

  “No Christian can see the story of Genesis without Paul; no Jew can see it without the rabbis.”

  “So how do you find that hero if you have all these interpretations between you and him?” This is exactly the bog I kept stumbling into, and I became so agitated I leapt out of my chair. We were seated between two long library bookcases. I went to stand at the end of one case, about ten feet from the Reverend Ms. Heldt. “Okay, I’m here,” I said. “I’m me. And you’re Abraham. And there are all these books between me and you. How do I find you? If I start reading through all these books, once I find an interesting one I’m going to stop, stay there for a while, and get waylaid. How do I get around these books and get back to Abraham?”

  “Very simple,” she said. “Kick them.”

  “Kick them?”

  “You can kick them away now because you know what you’re doing.”

  “I’m confused.” I returned to my seat.

  “Look, you first have to recognize that there are all these books between you and me. Which is already quite something because most people don’t know they’re there. Second, you have to find a way to free yourself from this kind of exclusivist thinking, which you’ll never do, but at least you should try as much as possible. Then, when you’re finished, we’ll come together—you’re a Jew, I’m a Christian—we’ll sit down and begin to draw a picture of Abraham. I’ll say, ‘What do you know?’ You’ll ask what I know, and we’ll come up with some basic features: He’s a man, he lives in the desert. And we start from there.”

  “And when we start from there, do we go back through those books?”

  “Of course, you’ll bring your books, I’ll bring my books. But we try to be critical toward each other.”

  “And what do we have in the end?”

  “A giant figure, who holds our joint expectations in his life, and whose character we both see as representing the best of ourselves. It’s beautiful. And it can happen.” She paused. A wry smile crept across her face. “Now let’s find a Muslim. The three of us will do the same, and we’re on the way to solving the problems of the world.”

  7

  * * *

  MUSLIMS

  * * *

  A FEW DAYS after the last Friday of Ramadan I walk hurriedly through the drizzly streets of the Muslim Quarter in the heart of Jerusalem’s Old City. The air is gray and the mood even grayer. I duck underneath a Mamluk bridge and step through a rarely used tunnel before arriving at a small stone staircase just steps from the Iron Gate to the Haram al-Sharif. Two Israeli guards are manning the entrance. They eye me suspiciously. Westerners don’t make this walk. A woman steps out of the doorway with her laundry, catches sight of me, and quickly retreats and slams the door.

  At the top of a narrow staircase I enter a small, whitewashed office, with a green-screen computer, a floor heater, a coffeemaker, and a copy of the multivolume Encyclopedia of Islam. The office belongs to Dr. Yusef Nadsheh, the head of the Department of Islamic Archaeology for the Palestinian Authority and curator of the Dome of the Rock. We chat for a few minutes and share a cup of tea. He shows me a chart of all the crescent shapes atop minarets across Jerusalem.

  Promptly at 10:45 A.M., a broad-shouldered man with a town-elder face and a businesslike manner walks through the door and greets me coolly but cordially. I offer him a seat next to me. He declines and sits down across the room.

  Sheikh Yusef Abu Sneina is the imam of El-Aksa Mosque, one of the most vocal Islamic leaders in Jerusalem, and the one who delivered the fiery sermon I overheard on the last Friday of Ramadan. He has dark hair and a salt-and-pepper beard cut close to his face. His black eyebrows are s
harply etched and remind me, against my will, of Ayatollah Khomeini’s, but his eyes crinkle in a gentle way. He is young, only forty-three years old. He is also nervous. This is his first interview with a non-Muslim reporter.

  “He is known for his knowledge of the Koran,” Yusef Nadsheh had said of the imam before he arrived. “He knows it by heart, as well as the hadith.” He was referring to accounts of what the prophet Muhammad said and did that were gathered in the centuries after his death and are considered the most reliable authority on his thinking. “He also speaks beautiful Arabic. He lived for five years in Medina, the center of Islamic learning.”

  Our conversation was stilted at first. I thanked the sheikh for taking the time to meet me, and asked a few questions about his life. His answers were perfunctory. In time I asked him about the importance of Abraham to Islam.

  “Abraham is a major figure,” he said, his voice stern, lecturing. “His descendants are like a spine along the generations. Among the twenty-five prophets in Islam, seventeen belong to the family of Abraham. And Abraham himself makes eighteen. Everything in Islam is bound to him.”

  I asked him why, of all the people in the world, God chose Abraham.

  “God didn’t just choose Abraham,” he said. “He tested Abraham. Abraham had problems with the king who worshiped idols, he had problems with his wife, he was old before he had children, God asked him to sacrifice his son. And every time he submitted to God. He was completely devoted to God. This is an example we all have to follow.”

  In the Torah, I mentioned, Abraham does not always obey God. He converses with God. He even argues with God. I asked him if he felt the same way about Abraham in the Koran.

  “Yes,” he said, and cited the example of Abraham and the birds, a story that is not in the Bible. In sura 2, Abraham asks God for proof that he can raise the dead. “Have you no faith?” God asks. “Yes,” Abraham says, “but just to reassure my heart.” So God tells Abraham to take four birds, cut their bodies to pieces, and scatter them over the mountains. Then he tells Abraham to summon them home. “They will come swiftly to you,” God assures him.