When I was young, I did not know that Jesus was a Jew. In fact, well into my adult years, I did not realize this basic fact about him. This ignorance lasted despite a religious education that was long and detailed. As far as I can remember, none of my teachers made explicit the ethnic origins of the central figure in my Christian faith.

Probably I considered Jesus to have been a Catholic, the first person to bear that title. After all, he was the founder of the Church and the one who chose apostles to carry on his mission. That all of these men were themselves Jewish was also a fact not present to my naïve awareness.

It was only with the arrival of the Second Vatican Council in 1963 that I began to think differently about the origins of my Christian tradition. In particular, the Council’s Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, published two years later, helped me better appreciate my religious roots. That document refers to “the son of the Virgin Mary” and states that “from the Jewish people sprang the apostles, her foundation stones and pillars, as well as most of the early disciples who proclaimed Christ to the world.”

At a remove of 35 years, this message seems obvious now and its language already old fashioned, but for Catholics like me it came as a memorable breakthrough. Among other things, it established a new way for us to think about who Jesus was and who are the people from which he came.

But now, by this stage of my life, I have come to appreciate the Jewishness of Jesus. It has become a fact that I wish to learn more about. Far from detracting from the value of my own religious tradition, this knowledge has added to its richness. I find it stimulating to reflect on these origins and welcome what Jewish scholars have to say about this subject.

This brief account of personal history has been prompted by a statement issued by people calling themselves an interdenominational group of Jewish scholars and published on a full page of the New York Times on Sunday, September 10. Entitled “Dabru Emet” (Hebrew for “Speak the Truth”), it was written by professors at the Universities of Chicago, Toronto, Virginia, and Notre Dame and endorsed by more than 150 other academics and rabbis.

This path-breaking document is intended as a thoughtful response to efforts by official Catholic and Protestant church groups to express regret and repentance for Christian mistreatment of Jews and Judaism.

I find it to be a fine piece of work, bold in its expression of religious principles and generous toward Christians. In that spirit, the authors say  “we believe it is time for Jews to learn about the efforts of Christians to honor Judaism.”  They then go on to make eight brief statements “about how Jews and Christians may relate to one another.”

Rather than attempt to summarize here the whole text, I urge interested readers to look for it themselves, either in the New York Times edition mentioned above or at the Internet site www.beliefnet.com.  Let me instead simply list the main headings of the eight paragraphs and draw your attention to two of the paragraphs that I find most striking.

1. Jews and Christians worship the same God.
2. Jews and Christians seek authority from the same book – the Bible.
3. Christians can respect the claim of the Jewish people upon the land of Israel.
4. Jews and Christians accept the moral principles of Torah.
5. Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon.
6. The humanly irreconcilable difference between Jews and Christians will not be settled until God redeems the whole world as promised in Scripture.
7. A new relationship between Jews and Christians will not weaken Jewish practice.
8. Jews and Christians must work together for justice and peace.

The fifth statement, the one about Christians and Nazism impressed me for its assertion that despite the involvement of too many Christians in Nazi atrocities against Jews, “Nazism itself was not an inevitable outcome of Christianity.” In view of the sorry history of widespread acceptance of Nazi ideology and practice among Christians, this amounts to a crucial distinction and one that makes it possible for Jews to respect Christianity as a faith.

The sixth paragraph also strikes me as a model for mutual respect. It calls upon each faith community to be faithful to its own tradition, not claiming  the more accurate interpretation of Scripture nor seeking to exercise political power over the other community. “Jews can respect Christians’ faithfulness to their revelation just as we expect Christians to respect our faithfulness to our revelation.”

I feel grateful for having lived long enough to see these bold, yet reconciling affirmations from leaders who share kinship with Jesus, the person who lived and died as a Jew.

Richard Griffin