The Legacy of Abraham

(5 of 9)

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem is arguably the most Christian place on earth, and the gray rock mass of Golgotha (or Calgary) inside, the most Christian place in the church. Traditions dating back to the 300s A.D. record that Jesus was crucified here. Just above the rock's Plexiglas-protected expanse is a chapel shared by the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. The Catholic side boasts three mosaics. In the center is Mary Magdalene; to the left is Christ, removed from the Cross; and to the right is none other than ... Abraham, about to slay Isaac. Notes Feiler: "The image of Jesus sprawled on the unction stone is nearly identical to the image of Isaac on the altar." The New Testament book Romans proposes Isaac's binding and release as a prophetic foreshadowing of the Resurrection.

The man credited with that insight is the Apostle Paul. Jesus mentions Abraham in the Gospels, but it was Paul who did the fine mortise work, citing the patriarch in his New Testament epistles more than any other figure exceptChrist. Perhaps the most strongly self-identifying Jew among the Apostles, Paul clearly felt an urgency to connect his new movement with the Jewish paterfamilias. He did so primarily through Abraham's original response to God's Call and through the old man's embattled faith, or "hope against hope," as Paul famously put it, that God would bring him a son. Such faith, Paul wrote, made Abraham "the father of all who believe."

Yet Paul's Abrahamic bouquet to his birth religion contained poisoned thorns. One of his themes was that a believer no longer needed to be Jewish or to follow Jewish law to be redeemed--the way now lay through Christ. Abraham's story served these arguments well. His Covenant long predated the Jewish law as brought down from the mountain by Moses, and so, wrote Paul, "the promise to Abraham and his descendants ... did not come through law."

Nor, Paul argued, did it come through tribal inheritance. The God of the Hebrew Bible deemed Abraham to be "righteous" years before his circumcision, he wrote, which meant that his listeners didn't need to become circumcised Jews to be Abraham's inheritors. Baptism in faith would more than suffice. Paul waffled as to whether Christianity rendered Judaism's Abrahamic Covenant null and void. But his successors assumed so. The 2nd century church father Justin Martyr wrote that far from an indication of grace, circumcision marked Jews "so that your landmight become desolate, and your cities burned," something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bereft of a divine warrant for their well-being, Jews were at the mercy of their neighbors' worst instincts. In a remarkably frank assessment, the Greek Orthodox bishop of Jerusalem tells Feiler, "What the church did with Abraham was bitter and cruel."

ABRAHAM THE MUSLIM