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Neusner on On Point: Jewish vs. Christian Beliefs

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Long before he was Pope Benedict the 16th, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was already a fan of Rabbi Jacob Neusner. He called his book "A Rabbi Talks with Jesus," "by far the most important book in Jewish-Christian dialogue in the last decade." Now that he's Pope, they're still talking, in the exalted dialogue and debate of theologians.

This is history-making. It's the first time in centuries that a Pope and a rabbi have talked like this. And it's not all sweet talk. We couldn't get the Pope on the line, but we've got the rabbi.

This hour On Point:  a conversation with the Pope's rabbi, Jacob Neusner.

Guests:
- Jacob Neusner, professor of the history of theology at Bard College, senior fellow at the college's Institute of Advanced Theology, and author of more than 900 books. He has corresponded with Pope Benedict for more than a decade.
- Father Richard Neuhaus, prominent Catholic priest and writer, and editor-in-chief of "First Things," a monthly journal of religion, culture and public life.

Neusner: A Rabbi Talks with Jesus featured in Jesus of Nazareth review

History's Greatest Liar
By Lisa Fabrizio
The American Spectator, June 13, 2007

We all think we know him, or at least we're forever trying. Every Christmas and Easter, documentary makers seek to redefine him, or simply to find him. But who is the real Jesus Christ? In the Catholic Church's tradition of sharpening doctrine by answering its critics, Pope Benedict XVI has taken on the task of pushing back decades of reconstruction of the "historical" Jesus with Jesus of Nazareth, his first book since his election to the episcopal see of Rome.

At the age of 80, when most men are taking a well-deserved rest, Pope Benedict -- who in 2005, after a half-century of service to the Church desired only to retire to a quiet life in his beloved Bavaria -- has released these first ten chapters of a two-part work that has been four years in the making, because, as he states, "I do not know how much more time or strength I am still to be given."

His urgency stems from his fear that modern historical-critical attempts at finding Jesus have resulted in the common belief that "we have very little certain knowledge of Jesus." He laments that recent scholarship has detached Jesus from God so that he has been reduced to an "anti-Roman revolutionary working -- though finally failing -- to overthrow the ruling powers; at the other end, he was the meek moral teacher who approves everything and unaccountably comes to grief."

Students of the Baltimore Catechism know why we were created: to know, love and serve God. But who is he? Mankind has always feared the unknowable, how much more so the unknowable Creator? How can man possibly approach such power and majesty as he sees daily in the created nature of the world? How can we love a God of pure power unless we are convinced that he is also pure love?

This book, taken in conjunction with his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love), is Pope Benedict's answer. This work, he stresses, is not one of official teaching but the culmination of his "personal search for the face of the Lord," and one that is intended for the illumination of all those who also seek him. As such, although there is a glossary included, it resounds not with complex theological jargon but sings in the language of love.

He begins by explaining that Jesus is new; the new Adam, and even the new Moses. He cites the Old Testament pledge that "The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your brethren -- him you shall heed" (Deut 18:15). He then recounts that although Moses had friendship with God, he was not allowed to see his face (cf. Ex 33:18-23), implying that the promised "prophet like me" will be granted what Moses was denied: "No one has ever seen God; it is the only Son, who is nearest to the Father's heart, who has made him known" (Jn 1:18).

With this new Moses comes a new Torah; the essence of which is contained in the Beatitudes. And in delivering them in the Sermon on the Mount, he alarms the people because he was "teaching them as one having authority, and not as their Scribes and Pharisees" (Mt 7:29). In other words, he is not only proclaiming the law but claiming equality with the Lawgiver. At this point, Benedict begins a fascinating discourse; almost a dialogue with the Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner, author of A Rabbi Talks with Jesus.

Neusner's book is itself a dialogue where he is present at the Sermon on the Mount and then follows Jesus to Jerusalem where he speaks with him about what he feels are exhortations to ignore two or three of God's commandments concerning the Sabbath and familial relationships, both of which are at the heart of the Jewish social order. The pope's response -- which fills 25 pages -- is a must-read for Jews and Christians alike and makes one ardently wish to be a fly on the wall at a mythical sit-down between Benedict and Neusner.

There are many such exchanges and references to writers such as Rudolf Bultmann, Joachim Jeremias, Pierre Grelot, Romano Guardini and Hans-Peter Kolvenbach that fill this book with insights and inspirations from all sides of the exegetical spectrum. And all these Pope Benedict explores with the utmost humility and compassion in this 335-page volume. Yet he returns over and over to the main thrust of the question of the identity and mission of Jesus of Nazareth:

What did Jesus actually bring, if not world peace, universal prosperity and a better world? What has he brought? The answer is very simple: God. He has brought God. Now we know his face, now we can call upon him. Now we know the path that we human beings have to take in this world. Jesus has brought God and with God the truth about our origin and destiny: faith, hope, and love.

Christian teaching suggests that Jesus Christ was either everything he said he was -- most notably the son of God -- or the world's most prolific and pathological liar. Those for whom this question remains unanswered would do well to begin their search anew by sharing in this profound meditation of the "Servant of the Servants of God."

Lisa Fabrizio is a columnist who hails from Connecticut. You may writer her at mailbox@lisafab.com.

After saints, most-quoted author in pope's new book is Rabbi Jacob Neusner

By Cindy Wooden
Jewish Ledger
Tuesday, May 29, 2007

VATICAN CITY (CNS)-After the Gospel writers and the apostle Paul, the author most quoted in Pope Benedict XVI's new book is Rabbi Jacob Neusner, a U.S. professor of religion and theology.

In his book, "Jesus of Nazareth," released April 16 in Italian, German and Polish, Pope Benedict joined the literary dialogue that Rabbi Neusner invented for himself in his 1993 book, "A Rabbi Talks With Jesus."

The pope said that Rabbi Neusner's "profound respect for the Christian faith and his faithfulness to Judaism led him to seek a dialogue with Jesus."

Imagining himself amid the crowd gathered on a Galilean hillside when Jesus gave his Sermon on the Mount, Rabbi Neusner "listens, confronts and speaks with Jesus himself," the pope wrote.

"In the end, he decides not to follow Jesus," the pope wrote. "He remains faithful to that which he calls the 'eternal Israel.'"

Pope Benedict said Rabbi Neusner makes painfully clear the differences between Christianity and Judaism, but "in a climate of great love: The rabbi accepts the otherness of the message of Jesus and takes his leave with a detachment that knows no hatred."

The pope praised Rabbi Neusner for taking the Gospel of Jesus seriously and, in fact, more seriously than many modern Christian scholars do.

Jesus is the Son of God, the unique savior, and not simply a social reformer, a liberal rabbi or the teacher of a new morality, the pope said.

Pope Benedict wrote that in trying to understand who Jesus was and his relationship with his Jewish faith and with the Torah, the law given to Moses, Rabbi Neusner's book "was of great help."

Rabbi Neusner, a prolific author and professor at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., told Catholic News Service in Rome that he did not want to talk about the pope's book until he had seen it. The English edition has just been released.

In the introduction to the revised and expanded 2000 edition of his book, Rabbi Neusner wrote, "If I had been in the land of Israel in the first century, I would not have joined the circle of Jesus' disciples. ... If I heard what he said in the Sermon on the Mount, for good and substantive reasons I would not have followed him.

"Where Jesus diverges from the revelation by God to Moses at Mount Sinai, he is wrong and Moses is right," Rabbi Neusner wrote.

In Pope Benedict's treatment of the Sermon on the Mount, 18 of the 25 pages refer to Rabbi Neusner's book.

"More than any of the other interpretations of the Sermon on the Mount with which I am familiar, this debate between a believing Jew and Jesus, son of Abraham, conducted with respect and frankness, opened my eyes to the greatness of the word of Jesus and to the choice the Gospel places before us," the pope wrote.

Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna, presenting the pope's book at an April 13 Vatican conference, said reading Rabbi Neusner's book was "one of the reasons" Pope Benedict decided to write his.

"What Pope Benedict says about the book (by Rabbi Neusner) is so essential for understanding his own book about Jesus," the cardinal said.

"More than discussions about exegetical methods" used to understand what the Scriptures say about Jesus, Cardinal Schonborn said, the pope has "at heart the discussion with the rabbi."

"Rabbi Neusner is so important for the book of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI" precisely because he accepts what Jesus says about himself in the Gospels, the cardinal said.

German Father Joseph Sievers, director of the Cardinal Bea Center for Judaic Studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, where Rabbi Neusner has been a guest speaker, said the rabbi "takes very seriously the extraordinary claims of Jesus: He is not just a rabbi teaching the golden rule."

Both Rabbi Neusner and Pope Benedict, Father Sievers said, "have a high Christology," emphasizing the divinity of Christ even if Rabbi Neusner cannot accept Christ's claim.

"(Rabbi) Neusner, even when he spoke here, did not try to find easy solutions or to bridge gaps" between Christians and Jews, Father Sievers said.

In his book, Rabbi Neusner said he hoped to contribute to Christian-Jewish dialogue by taking Christian teaching and Jewish teaching seriously.

"It is one model for a starting point for dialogue -- to recognize differences and not try to make them disappear or to hide them," Father Sievers said.

Father Sievers said Pope Benedict's new book is a further sign that he "is strong on Judaism, he respects it and he knows the contemporary scholarship."

"Basically, he loves a good discussion and so does (Rabbi) Neusner," he said.

Neusner: My argument with the pope

Jacob Neusner
The Jerusalem Post
May 29, 2007

In the Middle Ages rabbis were forced to engage with priests in disputations in the presence of kings and cardinals on which is the true religion, Judaism or Christianity. The outcome was predetermined. Christians won; they had the swords.

But in the post-WW II era, disputations gave way to the conviction that the two religions say the same thing and the differences between them are dismissed as trivial. Now a new kind of disputation has begun, in which the truth of the two religions is subject to debate. That marks a return to the old disputations, with their intense seriousness about religious truth and their willingness to ask tough questions and engage with the answers.

My book, A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, was one such contemporary exercise of disputation, and now, in 2007, the pope in his new book Jesus of Nazareth in detail has met the challenge point-by-point. Just imagine my amazement when I heard that a Christian reply is fully exposed in Pope Benedict XVI's reply to A Rabbi Talks with Jesus in his Jesus of Nazareth Chapter Four, on the sermon on the Mount.

POPES INVOLVED in Judeo-Christian theological dialogue? In ancient and medieval times disputations concerning propositions of religious truth defined the purpose of dialogue between religions, particularly Judaism and Christianity. Judaism made its case vigorously, amassing rigorous arguments built upon the facts of Scripture common to both parties to the debate. Imaginary narratives, such as Judah Halevi's Kuzari, constructed a dialogue among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, a dialogue conducted by a king who sought the true religion for his kingdom. Judaism won the disputation before the king of the Khazars, at least in Judah Halevi's formulation. But Christianity no less aggressively sought debate-partners, confident of the outcome of the confrontation. Such debates attested to the common faith of both parties in the integrity of reason and in the facticity of shared Scriptures.

Disputation went out of style when religions lost their confidence in the power of reason to establish theological truth. Then, as in Lessing's Nathan the Wise, religions were made to affirm a truth in common, and the differences between religions were dismissed as trivial and unimportant. An American president was quoted as saying, "It doesn't matter what you believe as long as you're a good man." Then disputations between religions lost their urgency. The heritage of the Enlightenment with its indifference to the truth-claims of religion fostered religious toleration and reciprocal respect in place of religious confrontation and claims to know God. Religions emerged as obstacles to the good order of society.

For the past two centuries Judeo-Christian dialogue served as the medium of a politics of social conciliation, not religious inquiry into the convictions of the other. Negotiation took the place of debate, and to lay claim upon truth in behalf of one's own religion violated the rules good conduct.

In A Rabbi Talks with Jesus I undertook to take seriously the claim of Jesus to fulfill the Torah and weigh that claim in the balance against the teachings of other rabbis - a colloquium of sages of the Torah. I explain in a very straightforward and unapologetic way why, if I had been in the Land of Israel in the first century and present at the Sermon on the Mount, I would not have joined the circle of Jesus's disciples. I would have dissented, I hope courteously, I am sure with solid reason and argument and fact.

If I heard what he said in the Sermon on the Mount, for good and substantive reasons I would not have become one of his disciples. That is difficult for people to imagine, since it is hard to think of words more deeply etched into our civilization and its deepest affirmations than the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount and other pronouncements of Jesus. But, then, it also is hard to imagine hearing those words for the first time, as something surprising and demanding, not as mere clich s of culture. That is precisely what I propose to do in my conversation with Jesus: listen and argue. To hear religious teachings as if for the first time and to respond to them in surprise and wonder - that is the reward of religious disputation in our own day.

I WROTE the book to shed some light on why, while Christians believe in Jesus Christ and the good news of his rule in the kingdom of Heaven, Jews believe in the Torah of Moses and form on earth and in their own flesh God's kingdom of priests and the holy people. And that belief requires faithful Jews to enter a dissent from the teachings of Jesus, on the grounds that those teachings at important points contradict the Torah.

Where Jesus diverges from the revelation by God to Moses at Mount Sinai that is the Torah, he is wrong, and Moses is right. In setting forth the grounds to this unapologetic dissent, I mean to foster religious dialogue among believers, Christian and Jewish alike. For a long time, Jews have praised Jesus as a rabbi, a Jew like us really; but to Christian faith in Jesus Christ, that affirmation is monumentally irrelevant. And for their part, Christians have praised Judaism as the religion from which Jesus came, and to us, that is hardly a vivid compliment.

We have avoided meeting head-on the points of substantial difference between us, not only in response to the person and claims of Jesus, but especially, in addressing his teachings.

He claimed to reform and to improve, "You have heard it said... but I say...." We maintain, and I argued in my book, that the Torah was and is perfect and beyond improvement, and the Judaism built upon the Torah and the prophets and writings, the originally-oral parts of the Torah written down in the Mishna, Talmud, and Midrash - that Judaism was and remains God's will for humanity.

By that criterion I propose to set forth a Jewish dissent from some important teachings of Jesus. It is a gesture of respect for Christians and honor for their faith. For we can argue only if we take one another seriously. But we can enter into dialogue only if we honor both ourselves and the other. In my imaginary disputation I treat Jesus with respect, but I also mean to argue with him about things he says.

WHAT'S AT stake here? If I succeed in creating a vivid portrait of the dispute, Christians see the choices Jesus made and will find renewal for their faith in Jesus Christ - but also respect Judaism. I underscore the choices both Judaism and Christianity confront in the shared Scriptures. Christians will understand Christianity when they acknowledge the choices it has made, and so too Jews, Judaism.

I mean to explain to Christians why I believe in Judaism, and that ought to help Christians identify the critical convictions that bring them to church every Sunday. Jews will strengthen their commitment to the Torah of Moses - but also respect Christianity. I want Jews to understand why Judaism demands assent - "the All-Merciful seeks the heart," "the Torah was given only to purify the human heart." Both Jews and Christians should find in A Rabbi Talks with Jesus the reason to affirm, because each party will locate there the very points on which the difference between Judaism and Christianity rests.

What makes me so certain of that outcome? Because I believe, when each side understands in the same way the issues that divide the two, and both with solid reason affirm their respective truths, then all may love and worship God in peace - knowing that it really is the one and the same God whom together they serve - in difference. So it is a religious book about religious difference: an argument about God.

WHEN MY publisher asked for suggestions of colleagues to be asked to recommend the book, I suggested Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Rabbi Sacks had long impressed me by his astute and well-crafted theological writings, the leading contemporary apologist for Judaism. I had admired Cardinal Ratzinger's writings on the historical Jesus and had written to him to say so. He replied and we exchanged offprints and books. His willingness to confront the issues of truth, not just the politics of doctrine, struck me as courageous and constructive.

But now His Holiness has taken a step further and has answered my critique in a creative exercise of exegesis and theology. In his Jesus of Nazareth the Judeo-Christian disputation enters a new age. We are able to meet one another in a forthright exercise of reason and criticism. The challenges of Sinai bring us together for the renewal of a 2,000 year old tradition of religious debate in the service of God's truth.

Someone once called me the most contentious person he had ever known. Now I have met my match. Pope Benedict XVI is another truth-seeker.

We are in for interesting times.

The writer is distinguished service professor of the history and theology of Judaism at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Time Magazine: The Pope's Favorite Rabbi

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

Jacob "Jack" Neusner photographed at
his home in Rhinebeck, New York on May 10, 2007.

Gillian Laub for TIME





"I'm not offended when Christians eat pork," says Jacob Neusner. At least not usually. The brilliant--and none too patient--Jewish scholar does recall a religion conference where so much of the other white meat was served that he was reduced to a diet of hard-boiled eggs. One day on the food line something snapped, and he rhymed aloud, "I hope you all get trichinosis/And come to believe in the God of Moses." A fellow conferee instantly replied, "And if we don't get such diseases/Will you believe in the God of Jesus?" Neusner cackles. "That's an example of the right way to do Judeo-Christian dialogue," he says. "If religion matters, and it does, then it's not honest to be indifferent to the convictions of others."

Doggerel aside, Neusner, 74, lives by the story's moral: confrontation is part of his makeup, take it or leave it. One might expect many Christians to leave it. But at least one has not. In his new book, Jesus of Nazareth (Doubleday; $24.95), Pope Benedict XVI devotes 20 pages to A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, a 161-page grenade Neusner lobbed in 1993. In that volume, the professor (now at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.) and noncongregational rabbi projected himself back into the Gospel of Matthew to quiz Jesus on the Jewish law. He found the Nazarene's interpretation irredeemably faulty. In his 14-years-delayed response, Benedict not only compliments Neusner as a "great Jewish scholar" but also recapitulates the thesis of A Rabbi Talks and spends a third of one of his 10 chapters answering it.

There is no real precedent for this. The last time Christianity and Judaism had knockdown debates was during medieval "disputations" convened by Christian authorities and decisively rigged against the Jews. Although the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 renounced the Roman Catholic teaching that Jews were Christ killers and John Paul II acknowledged Jews' ongoing presence by visiting a synagogue, postwar papal discourse has focused on Christianity's view of Judaism, not the reverse, and steered serenely around fundamental controversies. Jesus of Nazareth takes the next huge step: "a Pope taking seriously what a Jew says--and says critically--about the New Testament," marvels Eugene Fisher, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' liaison for Catholic-Jewish relations. "Wow. This is new."

In choosing Neusner as his muse, Benedict selected a man as formidable and controversial in the field of Jewish studies as the Pope is in Catholicism. An expert on the sprawling literature of the 1st through 6th century rabbis who shaped modern Judaism, Neusner is an empire builder, a central figure in wrestling an examination of Judaism into America's universities. He accomplished this through brilliance (he developed his own secularly comprehensible synthesis of rabbinics), superhuman productivity (he has written more than 950 books, although he will admit to a certain reprocessing of material) and a knack for grooming gifted protégés who now run Jewish studies at top schools. He is equally famous for alienating many of his disciples with what came to be known as "Neusner's drop-dead letters." (Neusner calls the complaint "overstated.") He can keep friends--Harvard classmate John Updike wrote a fond 1986 short story featuring a "Josh Neusner"--but as Neusner admits, he remains one of the most contentious people he knows.

Contention was the very soul of A Rabbi Talks. Neusner based his book on the common scholarly understanding that the New Testament's Gospel of Matthew was written as an invitation to Jesus' fellow Jews, trying to convince them, by dint of purportedly predictive passages in the Jewish Bible and Jesus' striking interpretations of Jewish Scripture, that he was Israel's longed-for Messiah. His claim in the Sermon on the Mount that he came "not ... to abolish the Torah and the [writings of the] prophets ... but to fulfill them" is one of the great hinge sentences connecting Western monotheisms.

But Neusner insists it doesn't parse. A Rabbi Talks argues, for instance, that Jesus' line that "he who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me" defies the commandment to "honor thy father and mother" and that his liberties with Saturday rules on grounds that "the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath" flout the one that explicitly orders all humans to observe the day. Most important, Neusner read Jesus' repeated rhetorical formula "You have heard that it was said [in the Torah] ... But I say to you ... " as his claim to be not merely the religio-military Messiah some Jews hoped for at the time but also above the Torah and hence God. Neusner imagined having a dialogue with a Jesus-era Jewish "master" about Jesus' Torah teaching:

"He: 'What did he leave out?'

"I: 'Nothing.'

"He: 'Then what did he add?'

"I: 'Himself.'"

Neusner asserted that any thoughtful Jew must conclude that Jesus was actually "abandoning the Torah" and reject him. He also suggested that insofar as Matthew's arguments are based in Jewish law, Christianity may be flawed by its own standards.

Such open theological aggression is rare in post-Holocaust interfaith parley--or buried amid affirmations of commonality and practical issues like those impacting the state of Israel. But Neusner had collected an interesting fan. He and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had struck up a professional correspondence after the rabbi wrote the Cardinal an admiring note about something he had published. Ratzinger blurbed A Rabbi Talks as "by far the most important book for the Jewish-Christian dialogue in the last decade."

Still, Neusner was "amazed" when he heard that Ratzinger, now Pope, has revisited it in detail--and in print. When a papal confidant told the Catholic News Service that it was "one of the reasons" Benedict had undertaken his entire two-volume Jesus of Nazareth project, the somewhat puzzled but delighted professor called it "an academic love letter!"

In fact, a close reading of the Pope's chapter suggests more a marriage of convenience. Benedict is preoccupied with what he sees as the Gospel's overriding message of Jesus' divinity, even in passages that liberal Christians read primarily as straightforward injunctions to help the poor and powerless. Having a rabbi help make that case is novel and convenient. Regarding one verse, Benedict writes that "Neusner shows us that we are dealing not with some kind of moralism, but with a highly theological text, or, to put it more precisely, a Christological one." He acknowledges the rabbi's point that Jesus is offering the Jews a transformation rather than a continuation of the Torah but maintains that the trade-off is worth it, provided Jesus is not merely "a liberal reform rabbi" but "the Son." That Neusner and other Jews regard that very Sonship as a deal breaker does not bother him much. "It would be good for the Christian world to look respectfully at this obedience of Israel," he writes, "and thus to appreciate better the great commandments" as universalized by Jesus.

Neusner, in his Rhinebeck, N.Y., home, is equally unfazed by the Pope's repurposing of his argument. "You can't expect him to get circumcised," he says. "He's still a Christian, and I'm still a practitioner of Judaism. But the two positions can consider the same text and identify where they converge and where they part company. I think it's terrific."

So do other players in the Jewish-Christian conversation. "'Pope Takes Seriously What Rabbi Has to Say' is a message that will be picked up by anyone who reads their diocesan paper," says Fisher of the Bishops' conference. Amy-Jill Levine, a Jew who teaches New Testament studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and has her own Jesus book, The Misunderstood Jew, says both undergrads and interfaith experts can profit from the Neusner-Benedict exchange. Rabbi James Rudin, senior interreligious adviser to the American Jewish Committee, says it is in some ways "the full maturation of the modern Catholic-Jewish encounter." But perhaps it may mature further still. Asked what he would like to write next, Neusner says, "I'd like to do a book with the Pope about Paul," whose letter, Romans, contains verses that have long bedeviled Jewish-Christian relations. He is half-joking. But what if the Pope said yes? What new wonder might emerge when two smart men agree to disagree but then keep talking?

The Quill & Quire: Jacob Neusner, A Rabbi Talks with Jesus

Divine luck for McGill-Queen’s

by Scott MacDonald, The Quill & Quire

May 18, 2007: The big event in international publishing this week is the release of Jesus of Nazareth, a study of the life and teachings of Jesus by Joseph Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict XVI. The originating publisher, Doubleday U.S., is expected to do blockbuster business with it, but at least one Canadian house – McGill-Queen’s University Press – is likely to see some benefits as well.

In the lead-up to the book’s release, a number of media outlets – most notably Time magazine – have run articles on a New York rabbi named Jacob Neusner, who is reportedly quoted in Jesus of Nazareth more often than any other author, save the gospel writers and the apostle Paul. Specifically, Ratzinger quotes Neusner’s A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, a work he once described as “by far the most important book for the Jewish-Christian dialogue in the last decade.” Though the book was originally published by Random House U.S. in 1993, it is now published exclusively by McGill-Queen’s, and no one is more excited about that than McGill-Queen’s executive director Philip Cercone.

According to Cercone, the first and most tangible benefit is simply that every publisher of Jesus of Nazareth will have to fork over excerpt royalties. “[Doubleday] wanted the rights for free, and I said, wait a minute, not even water’s free these days,” he explains. “And it wasn’t a small fee, either, because it was based on their print run, which is in the hundreds of thousands.”

But the second and possibly more lucrative benefit is, of course, that sales of the Neusner book are expected to increase enormously. Before all the hubbub began, McGill-Queen’s had actually let the book go out of print, but once word came of the Time article, they put a new cover on it and rushed it back in. “We’re hoping to sell it as a companion volume to [Jesus of Nazareth],” says Cercone. Though Cercone wouldn’t say how large the print run is, he would say that it is “by far the largest print run we did this fiscal year.”

McGill-Queen’s came into possession of the rights in 2000, after Random House U.S. let them lapse. “We did another book with Neusner in 1999 – The Theology of the Oral Torah – and it was then that he asked us if we’d be interested in picking up A Rabbi Talks with Jesus. We jumped on it, and it did very well for us in Canada and the United States,” says Cercone. “I think Random House realizes that they let it go too soon. They’re kicking themselves now.”

In the wake of all the Pope-related attention, McGill-Queen’s has sold rights to Neusner’s book in Italy, Spain, Brazil, Poland, Germany, and Sweden, with more rights sales expected in the future.