Pope Benedict: Jews must never be blamed for crucifixion

The second volume is due to be published worldwide on March 10, 2011 and it includes a gripping theological assessment of who was culpable for the death of Jesus Christ. The Pope takes a significant step forward in furthering the cause of Jewish-Christian reconciliation by explicitly exonerating the Jewish people from all blame for the crucifixion and death of Jesus. In the forthcoming second volume on Jesus, the Pope dedicates three pages to the famous passage in Saint Matthew’s Gospel in which “the Jews” demand the execution of Christ and shout to Pontius Pilate: “Let his blood be on us and on our children.” He uses both scholarship and faith to explain that the mob does not represent the Jewish people, but sinful humanity in general.

Furthermore, he offers theological insights to say that the blood of Jesus is not used in the purposes of vengeance but is poured out to reconcile mankind to God. It was not “poured out against anyone, it is poured out for many, for all”, the Pope writes in “Jesus of Nazareth – Holy Week: From Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection”.

In 1965 the Vatican rejected the idea of the collective culpability of Jewish people for the death of Christ in the Second Vatican Council document Nostra Aetate. By his remarks Pope Benedict is re-stating and consolidating the now accepted teaching of the Church in continuity with the attempts of his predecessors to build bridges with the Jewish people. Commentators who have seen extracts from the book released by the Vatican this week, however, say that the Pope, a respected scholar and theologian in his own right, is also offering a unique theological insight into the New Testament texts. The new book is the long-awaited sequel to Jesus of Nazareth: From Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, which became a best-seller when it was published in 2007.

See HaAretz article on new book here