At perhaps no time in recent memory has the temptation to hopelessness been so great or the relative powerlessness of most of the world’s humanity so obvious. As I sit to write this essay, safely complicit in the “protection” afforded by the world’s richest and most powerful nation and yet strangely imprisoned by it, we appear to be careening ineluctably toward war—or escalating an ongoing war largely invisible to the public eye—against a country half of whose population is under the age of fifteen. Vast opposition in the United Nations is greeted with incredulity and incomprehension by President Bush on our half-willing behalf, and massive protests worldwide are countered simultaneously with piety about the blessings of free expression and an indifference which shows that such liberty is countenanced, such displays encouraged even, because sovereign power and a bland pluralism of purely private opinion have drained these expressions of any weight. This impotence is what we have learned to call freedom. In Washington, war protesters dutifully apply for permits to register their dissatisfaction. Could there be a clearer example of modern democracy’s ingenious capacity to domesticate dissent simply by permitting and embracing it?

It is particularly appropriate, as we are plunged helplessly and headlong into war, that we are also invited by the Ash Wednesday liturgy and the season which it announces to contemplate this powerlessness, to offer sacrifices of repentance worthy of it, by dwelling on the fact and meaning—or perhaps the meaninglessness— of our deaths. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Today, as in his own day, John Henry Newman (1801-1890) is a contested site, the name for different ways of being Catholic. Competing views of Catholicity still seek for legitimacy by appealing to the authority of Newman’s thought, of his intellect, and, not least, his Cardinal’s red hat, conferred on him by Pope Leo XIII in 1879. At the beginning of the last century, those known as Liberal Catholics or Catholic Modernists appealed to Newman as their patron saint. George Tyrrell (1861-1909) declared himself a ‘devout disciple of Newman’, and confessed to having been ‘brought into, and kept in, the Church by the influence of Cardinal Newman and of the mystical theology of the Fathers and of the Saints’. Today, however, it is not Catholic Modernism, but religious postmodernism that might be in want of Newman’s imprimatur.

Professor Terry Wright, for example, has recently suggested that Newman’s reading of the Bible offers a via media to postmodemity. For Newman recognised the ‘multiplicity of meanings’ to which a critical, open and historical reading of the Bible gives rise. ‘The All-wise, Allknowing God cannot speak without meaning many things at once’, Newman declared.

The question, who owns the Bible, forms a way of framing a theological debate between Judaism and Christianity. They both lay claim on the same Holy Scriptures, and each insists that it reads those Scriptures correctly. Here is a way, then, of conducting an interfaith disputation on the truth of conflicting claims set forth by competing religions.

Which Judaism, whose Christianity? By Judaism and Christianity we do not mean the public opinion of ethnic Jews and culture-Christians. Rather, we mean, the classical religious systems set forth in authoritative documents and practised by those who value those writings as holy. The Judaic claim on the correct meaning of Israelite Scripture conflicts with the Christian one.

The claim of Judaism to own the Bible rests on four facts, and one further claim. No reasonable person can deny the facticity of the facts I shall adduce in evidence of the Judaic claim of possession. The claim is a matter of interpretation of Scripture: who is right about its main point, as I shall explain.

The first fact is, Judaism takes seriously and keeps the laws set forth in Scripture. In contemporary Judaic life there are disagreements on details, but no one who affirms the authority of the Torah denies the commandments. Take the Sabbath for example. It is the seventh day of the week, sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. We keep that law. Christians do not. Take the matter of the covenant of circumcision, beginning with Abraham. We keep that law, Christians do not. Christians focus on their liberation from the law of the Torah; they do not keep the Sabbath as God commanded it; they eat forbidden food; they do not observe the laws of the Torah. Why should they even want to claim to own Scripture at all, if they do not keep important commandments that Scripture sets forth?

The second fact fundamental to the Judaic claim to own the Bible turns from law to theology, specifically, Scripture’s theology of Israel, defined as the people called by God to his service in the Torah. The Jewish people today as for all the centuries from the beginning of Scripture to the present finds in Scripture its story of itself.

In asserting his four facts, Professor Neusner also puts pointed questions to Christianity, every one of them both serious and telling. Answering them involves spelling out the facts of revelation as they are perceived and taught by the Church.

First, “Why should they even want to claim to own Scripture at all, if they do not keep important commandments that Scripture sets forth?” This question strikes accurately at a sensitive spot. During the second century a teacher in Rome, Marcion, insisted that the New Testament should stand alone as Scripture, and that anything connected with Judaism should be expurgated from the one Gospel he liked (Luke) and Paul’s letters. He has had pale imitators ever since, but the Church then and now has authoritatively rejected the idea that the Old Testament can be dispensed with.

The letters of Paul, which Marcion made the basis of his views, undermined his position. The teacher whom the Church regarded as “the Apostle”, once its primary constituency was non-Jewish, himself emphasized that Israel has a permanent place in the history of salvation. Why should that be the case? Because, he said, from the Israelites came “the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises” (Romans 9:5). If you want to know what these things are, you need the Scriptures of Israel. Paul understands that all these gifts are only fully realized in the final gift of Israel: the coming of “Christ according to the flesh” (Romans 9:6).