SCHWEITZER POWER
Notable benchmark dates in 2006: It was the 150th anniversary of Freud’s birth, 50 years since “The Ten Commandments” movie, and 40 years since Time Magazine’s cover infamously asked “Is God Dead?”

One important centennial got overlooked. In 1906, a saintly European wrote the book “The Quest of the Historical Jesus,” accusing modern generations of making Jesus in their own modern image.

The book, by Albert Schweitzer -- medical missionary, musician, theologian, pastor, Bach specialist, Nobel laureate -- still haunts us. Images of Jesus that enliven pop culture -- Jesus as Republican or socialist or 70s rock star or stained-glass white guy -- say a lot more about us than about the mysterious Galilean born in a manger.

Schweitzer’s book surveyed the many “lives of Jesus” written in the 1800s, when the rage was to search the Gospels for clues to the original Jesus who is truer than the divine being later worshiped by churches.

Alas, Schweitzer noticed, all too often this “original” Jesus looked like a 19th century gentleman liberal reformer with no interest in miracles or Judaism. The real Jesus of history, foreign to the modern scientific spirit, always eludes us.

Schweitzer gave up looking for the Jesus of history and exalted instead the Christ of faith whose spirit lives even now, transforming lives. He transformed Albert Schweitzer, who dedicated himself to missions in Africa while he was writing his book.

This year’s big commercial Jesus story, the “Da Vinci Code” movie, proves Schweitzer’s old point. Both film and novel wanted to celebrate a renegade Jesus, keeper of mystic secrets, enemy of bureaucratic religion. Instead they exploited our appetite for conspiracy theories and lost gospels, without illuminating Jesus of Nazareth.

By contrast, a new book by Vanderbilt scholar A.J. Levine, “The Misunderstand Jew: The Church ad the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus,” forcefully reminds us of one thing about Jesus we can be sure of: he was Jewish. Yet over and over, Christian have minimized or denied the fact, leading to tragic misunderstandings and hostility to Jews.

Levine, a Jewish woman, makes a spirited plea for overcoming the mutual biases Jews and Christians harbor. (The book has jaunty moments: “ ... Jesus somehow looks ‘different’ from the Jews in the movies and artistic renderings … he is cute and buff and they need rhinoplasty and Pilates,” she writes. And: “Christians from Tanzania to Tennessee gain their dominant impressions of Jews and Judaism by combining selective readings from the church’s Scriptures with Fiddler on the Roof, current Israeli policies, and an occasional episode of South Park.”)

At Christmas, Schweitzer-like debates fall quiet. Believers ponder a silent newborn, not history’s controversies, and seek the golden thread that runs from anointed past to chaotic present.

“To those who obey Him,” Schweitzer wrote, “whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and as an ineffable mystery they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.”
(Columnist Ray Waddle can be reached at ray@raywaddle.com.)