Why the Pope's Rejection of Jewish Blame Matters

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When Pope Benedict XVI writes that the Jews were not responsible for the death of Jesus, what's important is less the passage itself than the man who set it down on paper.

By tackling the subject in a book to be published March 10, Benedict, who has struggled in his relations with the Jewish community, doesn't so much state something new — the affirmation that the Jewish people as a whole were not responsible for the crucifixion is an old one, uncontroversial in the modern Catholic Church — as lend the idea the ecclesiastical equivalent of a celebrity endorsement. "The significance is in the author," says Joseph Sievers, professor of Jewish history at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. "He brings together an awareness of the issues in the texts themselves with the history of how these texts have been interpreted through the last 2,000 years."