“The Jesus Mural through Jewish Eyes”

Judith Mendelsohn Rood

Professor of History and Middle Eastern Studies
Department of History Government and Social Science
Biola University
May 18, 2009

I have followed the controversy over the Jesus Mural with increasing
concern as an historian, a professor of Islamic history and Middle
Eastern studies who teaches about religious diversity and conflict
worldwide day in and day out, as the faculty adviser for the Jewish
Ministries Club, and as a Jewish follower of Yeshua whose great-
grandparents perished in the Holocaust. During this Spring Semester, I
was blessed to receive released time so that I could work on a research
project relating to the Holocaust, the Jewish People, and the Church.
Also this semester I have been teaching a course on
Jewish/Muslim/Christian relations, in which we explored the concept of
“tolerance” and religious identity in Europe and the Middle East. While
doing so, I have thought and prayed about why I believe that “The
Word” must be preserved. Based upon my research and teaching this
semester, seven ways of approaching the decision about the fate of
the mural have occurred to me:

1) Theologically: the relationship of the Church to the Jewish People

has been fraught with violence and hatred for centuries. Put in its
most radical form, destroying the mural would mirror the Nazi policy of
aryanization, the racist ideology that claimed that the Jewish Jesus was
not “white” enough and so had to be stripped of his Jewishness and
transformed into an idealized, mythic German whose Christianity was
most emphatically gentile. This theology of the official state church,
the Protestant Church, then also led the Nazis to embark upon
destroying “degenerate” art, which, in their view, threatened the purity
of the German volk as embodied in the Third Reich. This cultural
destruction culminated in the extermination of Jews and all people
deemed “non-Aryan.”

The Bible, the ultimate book, was not sacrosanct to the Nazis: reviving
the Marcion heresy they declared the Old Testament a Jewish book and
excised it from the German Bible. Hebraicisms, like Jehovah, Amen,
and Hallelujah were expunged from the New Testament, along with
any references to the Jewishness of Jesus. One of my favorite images of
Christ
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is a painting by the Jewish artist Marc Chagall, and used for the cover
of “Behind the Text”: History and Biblical Interpretation, (edited by
Craig Bartholomew, C. Stephan Evans, Mary Healy, and Murray Rae,
published by Zondervan in 2003). This Christ represents the idea that
Jesus has suffered with the Jewish people—and with all people— as
Emmanuel, Christ with us— throughout history, and that He still has a
promise and plan for mankind. This idea has borne great fruit for me
as I represent my people in the Church, and beckon my people to join
me at the feet of the cross. If our community rejects the Jewish Jesus,
we reject God’s promises to all of His people. Jay Gam, the model for
the mural, is a real person (Barry Krammes, “Problems with The Word,”
n.d.). In rejecting Jay as a model for Jesus, we reject Jay in his
humanity, and we reject our Lord, whose image Jay bears. If we seek
reconciliation with our neighbor, we must see God in him.

Genesis 33:10 Jacob said, "No, please, if now I have found favor in your sight,
then take my present from my hand, for I see your face as one sees the face
of God,
and you have received me favorably.

Effacing the mural would be correctly understood as reactionary by

outsiders eager to paint our community as both racist and anti-Semitic.

2) Missiologically: Biola’s roots are in missions to the Jewish people

and the affirmation of the fulfillment of God’s prophecies regarding
their role in the millennial kingdom; a renunciation of a Jewish Jesus
would be a renunciation of our founders’ commitment to Jewish
evangelism and their faithfulness to the biblical faith. Dietrich
Bonhoeffer wrote, “the Jews hold the question of Christ open”—
meaning that no single culture can claim him as its own, because Jesus
was a Jew, a member of a small, powerless people despised by all. By
recognizing God’s sovereign purpose for His miraculous preservation of
the Jews and their dispersion world wide was fulfilled missiologically in
two ways: the preservation of the Hebrew Bible and the role of Jews to
teach Hebrew to Christian Hebraists, like Tyndale and Luther, during
the Reformation, and through the conversion of individual Jews
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throughout history. Jewish Studies at Biola University should be

focused upon recognizing its roots in this history, and affirming Jewish
culture as a meaningful, ongoing source of for the development of
spiritual disciplines, public worship and praise, hermeneutics, and
education.

3) Ecclesiologically: Nazism culminated in the ejection of pastors or

congregants who, though members of the Protestant church, had
Jewish blood—even only one grandparent—on the basis of race, from
the Church. The Shoah, as the Jewish people call the Holocaust, was
the culmination of the deadly mixture of theological anti-Semitism and
Social Darwinism. As Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer’s biographer,
explained to Holocaust historianVictoria Barnett,
Recently, I wrote about Christology and the first commandment, and [my]
basic thesis is that Christ is Christ because, in Him, the first commandment is
realized. That’s why He’s Christ. That means that, when a different god is made
out of Christ—a Hellenistic or Teutonic or Jerry Falwell-made American god—then
the first commandment is being violated. The Jews have the continuing task of
reminding us of the first commandment. I’m trying, too, to describe how
Bonhoeffer could pray to Christ, and the difference between a prayer to Christ
that really worships a new god, or one that means the first commandment and
the dethroning of other gods. …I’m trying to establish how some could confess
the first thesis in Barmen (“Solus Christus”), and still be and remain anti-Semites.
There lies the deficiency, and there’s where the future work lies. The sociological
and political roots of the confessors at Barmen have to be examined closely. I
believe that Barth, too, was prepared to admit that even “Solus Christus” didn’t
erect any barriers against anti-Semitism. (Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the
People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998),
131).

4) Historically: It pleased God to create the Jewish people out of all the
nations in order to accomplish His soteriological plan of redemption in
time and space. Through their sin at Sinai, he promised the Hebrews a
kinsman-redeemer who would be their anointed king. But He did not
come as they expected.

Isaiah 53:2
He had no form or majesty that we should look at him,and no beauty that we
should
desire him.3 He was despised and rejected [2] by men;a man of sorrows, [3]
and acquainted
with [4] grief; [5]and as one from whom men hide their faces [6]he was
despised,
and we esteemed him not.

Looking back at the failure of the Confessing Church to oppose the

aryanization of the Protestant Church in Germany, one of its members
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wrote that this was “… a sin of our people, and since we are members
of our people and answerable before God for his people, it is our sin.”
The Jewishness of Jesus, as represented by this image of Christ, must
be affirmed by our community in faithfulness to our founders’
commitment to include the Jewish people in the Church. Our
generation can take this a step further, by affirming Jewish cultural
distinctiveness in the Body of Christ as a model for affirming cultural
diversity in the Church and in our community.

5) Politically/Culturally: Heinrich Heine, a German Jewish Protestant

wrote in his play Al-Mansur (1820-1822) about Muslims who had come
under Catholic rule and the Inquisition in Spain following the
Reconquista. In the play, as the Qur’an is being burnt, Heine has the
Muslim character, Hassan, chillingly predict the future, exclaiming,
“This was only the prelude. Where they burn books, they will also burn
people!” He was writing at the time of the Napoleonic wars, when anti-
Semitism was breaking out all over Europe.

Twitchell chose to depict the Scriptures anachronistically as a book,

the book which Heine extolled as the “written fatherland…of the
children of God; it is our sacred inheritance from Jehovah.” He
lamented that his “ancestors carried it about with them all over the
world; they endured much grief, misfortune, disgrace, and hatred on
its behalf.” (Stephan J. Whitfield, “Where They Burn Books,” Modern
Judaism 22(2002): 213-4.) To him, the Convivencia of Islamic Spain
represented a time of freedom that had ended in the flames of
intolerance and hatred. His play expressed his fears about the growing
intolerance of Germans toward the Jews, more than a century before
the Third Reich. Twitchell was honoring those “Bible Men” who had
worked so humbly and diligently to bring the Written Word to all
humankind, so that they might meet the Living Word. The two cannot
be separated. Twitchell understood the centrality of the Bible on our
campus, and affirmed the evangelical work that BIOLA stands for.

Today, accusations of intolerance and exclusivity mar the image of

BIOLA. As a Christian institution of higher learning, our community
celebrates multicultural diversity so that we might reflect the people of
God. The suggestion that it would be best to eradicate “The Word”
because its Jesus is “too white” veers too closely to the aryanization of
Christ by people who wanted Him to look like them. Our acceptance of
the humanity of a particular person, represented so compelling by
“The Word” as the Jewish Christ, is the hinge upon which the attitude
of our community to our neighbor opens or closes. To reject the mural
for its depiction of the “The Word” would signal the ignorance of our
campus about its historical origins, which centered on teaching the
Bible, which the artist references in his depiction of it as a black book
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(dare I say that it is was the Scofield Reference Bible, laid in the
cornerstone of the building at 6th and Hope?) dating from the era of the
founding of BIOLA.

6) Spiritually: Preserving this important work of art would allow our

community to embody the virtues of humility, gentleness, and respect
in dealing with the Other. We do not worship ourselves, we worship
another, one who is not like us, but who is one of us. We must learn to
recognize God, but He does not always enable us to see Him—he
vanishes from our sight, and hides in our neighbor.

Luke 24:31 And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. And he
vanished from their sight.

As we treat our neighbor, thus we treat God. As we embrace God in

the Other, we love as He has loved us.

7) Aesthetically: The beautiful, the good, and the true must be

recognized with the eyes of faith. To the artist, Biola is a community
founded upon the Word of God: the Logos, Christ, and His Word to us,
the Bible. His vision of our community spurs us to humbly come to
worship God, to feel His eternal, enduring presence, and to realize our
weaknesses and His love for us nonetheless. “The Word” reveals to us
the potentialities of art to convey beauty, goodness, and truth in
unexpected ways. Transcending what the eye sees, our souls
lead us to God through His love for us and our love of Him and our
neighbor.

As I have prayed through the hurts that this controversy has

uncovered, I thank the Lord for enabling me to think carefully about all
that I have heard and read about the feelings the mural has evoked in
others. I am deeply grateful to all of those who have participated in
the conversations about the mural, helping me to understand Kent
Twitchell’s intentions and the process of conception and execution that
he followed, the mural’s place in the history of art, and art’s role in the
history of Christianity. I am especially grateful for those who have
sensitized us to the reception of the mural over the years and from
many different perspectives, and to those who have shared their
thoughts about this essay with me before I completed it. I pray that
these seven ways of considering the issues raised by this conversation
will promote a further deepening of our appreciation for the mural, and
will help to forestall any effort to remove it from our campus.

Psalm 87 paints a picture of the peoples who will populate the

Kingdom. This picture includes Israel’s enemies and a diversity of
races. Our campus ought to include representatives of all of God’s
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people, citizens of the city of God. This summer I am going to be

working with Musalaha Ministry, which is devoted to Israeli-Palestinian
reconciliation in Christ. My joy and strength will come from what I
have learned as a member of the Biola community, a community which
I believe foreshadows that city, however imperfectly. “The Word”
represents to me the amazing and awe-inspiring promises that God
makes to His people expressed in that psalm, making us the channels
of His life-giving message.

87:1 On the holy mount stands the city he founded;

2 the Lord loves the gates of Zion
more than all the dwelling places of Jacob.
3 Glorious things of you are spoken,
O city of God. Selah

4 Among those who know me I mention Rahab and Babylon;

behold, Philistia and Tyre, with Cush [1]—
“This one was born there,” they say.
5 And of Zion it shall be said,
“This one and that one were born in her”;
for the Most High himself will establish her.
6 The Lord records as he registers the peoples,
“This one was born there.” Selah

7 Singers and dancers alike say,

“All my springs are in you.”