Jesuit Organ in Rome Advances Pro-jewish Views on Crucifixion

The rejection of Jesus Christ by the Jews cannot be charged to the Jewish people as a whole, a German Jesuit, Dr. Ludwig V. Hertling, declared here today in an article apparently evoking great interest among the prelates attending the Ecumenical Council being held at the Vatican.

The article appeared in “Stimmender Zeit, ” official organ of the German Jesuits. The timing of the issue, while the Ecumenical Council is slated to discuss the very problem of Jewish “guilt” for Christ’s death, and the fact that the periodical was sold out on news-stands here within several hours, underscored the importance attached to the issue by the Council delegates, according to observers here.

First, according to Dr. Hertling, “decide cannot be charged against the Jewish people, because they had not recognized, nor acknowledged, Jesus’ character as being God. It would have been asking very much of a Jew, grown up in the spirit of the Old Testament, in the most severe monotheism,” writes the German Jesuit, “to understand that Jesus meant by his reaffirmation of being ‘God’s son’ as being One with His Father, or how God, who had revealed Himself in the old covenant as a purely spiritual being, could identify himself with a simple human being originating in Nazareth and whose parents were known to all.”

Dr. Hertling maintained further that the sentencing of Jesus to death by crucifixion cannot be charged “to the whole Jewish people.” “Neither can the High Priest, nor the Sanhedrin,” he wrote, “be considered representative of the Jewish people, nor the few thousand who cried ‘crucify Him.” These could not be considered representative of the “millions of Jewish people who then lived in and outside Palestine,” the scholar maintained.

The writer compared the “confused era” of the period with the later times of the Reformation, and held that a “judicial error” had taken place when the decision was made to crucify Jesus. The guilt, he stated, “was not of the whole people. The Church was founded and cemented by those Jews who did adhere (to Christ’s principles) and who hoped that the whole people would do the same.”