For the first time since Angela Merkel made that weird facial expression when George Bush tried to give her a massage, I can say: the Germans did something right. Recently, the German village of Oberammergau has revised its traditional “Passion Play,†a rite of passage that has gone on since 1633, to emphasize the historical Jesus.
Germany has had a long history of racial prejudice, the most obvious example being the Holocaust. Director Christian Stueckl has made a grand effort to not only treat the Jewish presence in the play more carefully, but to portray what seems to be the historical reality of Jesus’s situation. One of the issues he has chosen to emphasize is the Jewish oppression by the Romans.
Traditionally, the Gospels have shown the Jews to be the bad guys, hating Jesus out of their own petty resentment and condemning him to death. In reality, the Jews had been oppressed by the Roman government for decades prior to Jesus’s death. In an attempt to gain Roman-sponsored power, the king Herod, whose line usurped the truly Jewish Hasmonean dynasty, aligned himself with the rising powers of Roman imperialism. In the process, he went so far as to put pressing taxes on the people of Judea, including Jesus’s homeland of Galilee, and desecrated the Temple by putting a golden eagle, a symbol of Rome, on its ramparts.
The peasants at the time of Jesus’s message were severely depleted in resources from taxation. Looking for a message to sustain them spiritually, they found one in Jesus. The Gospels, as many have noted in recent years, target the Jews as Jesus’s enemies, but it is likely that the Romans were the ones who killed Jesus: after all, he was condemned as a Roman prisoner by a Roman method of execution, the crucifixion. For more information, check out Jean-Pierre Isbouts’s book Young Jesus, which aptly recounts the struggles of the Jews in the years before Jesus’s rise and the political and economic situation in which they found themselves.
For the Germans to take the Gospels not at face value and look deeper, especially in light of historical revelations about the real situation of Judea, is remarkable. Kudos to them for trying to change misperceptions of Jews in the story of Jesus’s Passion! The director has also attempted to emphasize Jesus as a true Jew, not someone who thought of himself as a founder of a new religion, but as one who was reestablishing Jewish values in a time of Roman corruption. Recent research has found this proposition to be the likely historical facts behind Jesus’s mission.
The Germans have a long tradition of questioning authority when it comes to religion: look at Martin Luther. The Catholic Church has the accepted doctrine of the Gospels and the priests’ interpretation of it being the “Gospel truth.†The “deeply Catholic†community has made an effort to change and realize the truth behind their beliefs, which cannot be easy. The effort they have made is commendable. If “half the population†is involved in this activity, as well, as the Associated Press reports, many of them might absorb the values put forth in the play. Surely the entire town and spectators will come to see the play. If truth is put forth instead of lies, then German-Jewish relations are indeed improving.
