Antisemitism and the New Testament

The New Testament and Christian antisemitism

A. Roy Eckardt, a pioneer in the field of Jewish-Christian relations, asserted that the foundation of antisemitism and responsibility for the Holocaust lies ultimately in the New Testament. Eckardt insisted that Christian repentance must include a reexamination of basic theological attitudes toward Jews and the New Testament in order to deal effectively with antisemitism.

According to Rabbi Michael J. Cook, Professor of Intertestamental and Early Christian Literature at the Hebrew Union College, there are ten themes in the New Testament that are the greatest sources of anxiety for Jews concerning Christian antisemitism:

1. The Jews are culpable for crucifying Jesus - as such they are guilty of deicide
2. The tribulations of the Jewish people throughout history constitute God's punishment of them for killing Jesus
3. Jesus originally came to preach only to the Jews, but when they rejected him, he abandoned them for gentiles instead
4. The Children of Israel were God's original chosen people by virtue of an ancient covenant, but by rejecting Jesus they forfeited their chosenness - and now, by virtue of a New Covenant (or "testament"), Christians have replaced the Jews as God's chosen people, the Church having become the "People of God."
5. The Jewish Bible (the so-called "Old Testament") repeatedly portrays the opaqueness and stubbornness of the Jewish people and their disloyalty to God.
6. The Jewish Bible contains many predictions of the coming of Jesus as the Messiah (or "Christ"), yet the Jews are blind to the meaning of their own Bible.
7. By the time of Jesus' ministry, Judaism had ceased to be a living faith.
8. Judaism's essence is a restrictive and burdensome legalism.
9. Christianity emphasizes excessive love, while Judaism maintains a balance of justice, God of wrath and love of peace.
10. Judaism's oppressiveness reflects the disposition of Jesus' opponents called "Pharisees" (predecessors of the "rabbis"), who in their teachings and behavior were hypocrites (see Woes of the Pharisees).

Cook believes that both contemporary Jews and contemporary Christians need to reexamine the history of early Christianity, and the transformation of Christianity from a Jewish sect consisting of followers of a Jewish Jesus, to a separate religion often dependent on the tolerance of Rome while proselytizing among Gentiles loyal to the Roman empire, to understand how the story of Jesus came to be recast in an anti-Jewish form as the Gospels took their final form.

Some scholars assert that critical verses in the New Testament have been used to incite prejudice and violence against Jewish people. Professor Lillian C. Freudmann, author of Antisemitism in the New Testament (University Press of America, 1994) has published a study of such verses and the effects that they have had in the Christian community throughout history. Similar studies have been made by both Christian and Jewish scholars, including, Professors Clark Williamsom (Christian Theological Seminary), Hyam Maccoby (The Leo Baeck Institute), Norman A. Beck (Texas Lutheran College), and Michael Berenbaum(Georgetown University).

Jewish-Christian conflict in the New Testament

There are some verses in the New Testament that describe Jews in a positive way, attributing to them salvation^{[John 4:22]} or divine love.^{[Romans 11:28]} In the story of the crucifixion, meanwhile, Jews prompt Jesus' execution and say "His blood be on us, and on our children", ^{[Matthew 27:25]} referred to as the blood curse. In the Gospel of John, Jesus calls certain Pharisees "children of the devil".^{[John 8:44]}

According to the New Testament Gospels, Jesus, on his fateful entry into Jerusalem before Passover, was received by a great crowd of people. Jesus was arrested and tried by the Sanhedrin. After the trial, Jesus was handed over to Pontius Pilate, who duly tried him again and, at the urging of the people, had him crucified.

The New Testament records that Jesus' disciple Judas Iscariot,^{[Mark 14:43-46]} the Roman governor Pontius Pilate along with Roman forces^{[John 19:11][Acts 4:27]} and the leaders and people of Jerusalem were (to varying degrees) responsible for the death of Jesus.^{[Acts 13:27-28]}

Gospel of Mark

According to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus' crucifixion was authorized by Roman authorities at the insistence of leading Jews (Judeans) from the Sanhedrin.^{[Mark 15:1-15]}

Paul H. Jones writes:

Although Mark depicts all of the Jewish groups united in their opposition to Jesus, his passion narratives are not "overtly" anti-Jewish, since they can be interpreted as falling within the range of "acceptable" intra-Jewish disputes. To some readers, the "cleansing of the Temple" scene (11:15-19) framed by the "withered fig tree" pericopes confirms God's judgment against the Jews and their Temple. Most likely, however, the story explains for this small sect of Jesus followers that survived the Roman-Jewish War why God permitted the destruction of the Temple. It is an in-house interpretation and, therefore, not anti-Jewish. Likewise, the parable of the vineyard (12:1-12), by which the traditional allegorical interpretation casts the tenants as the Jews, the murdered heir as Jesus, and the owner as God, must be set within the context of an intra-Jewish dispute.

Gospel of Matthew

Matthew's Gospel is often evaluated as the most Jewish of the canonical gospels, and yet it is sometimes argued that it is anti-Judaic or anti-Semitic.

Matthew's Gospel has given readers the impression his hostility to Jews increases as his narrative progresses, until it culminates in chapter 23. In chapter 21, the parable of the vineyard, which is strikingly similar to Isaiah 5:1-30, is followed by the great "stone" text, an early Christological interpretation of Psalm 118:22-23: "The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone".^{[Matt 21:42]}. The OT allusions appear to suggest that the author thought God would call to account Israel's leaders for maltreating Christ, and that the covenant will pass to the Gentiles who follow Christ, a view that arose in intersectarian polemics in Judaism between the followers of Christ and the Jewish leadership. Then, in chapters 23 and 24, three successive hostile pericopes are recorded. First, a series of "woes" are pronounced against the Pharisees:

you testify against yourselves that you are descendants of those who murdered the prophets...You snakes, you brood of vipers! How can you escape being sentenced to hell?

Certain passages which speak of the destruction of Jerusalem have elements that are interpreted as indications of Matthew's anti-Judaic attitudes. Jesus is said to have lamented over the capital: "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it...See, your house is left to you, desolate" (Matthew 23:37-38). Again, Jesus is made to predict the demise of the Temple: "Truly I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down" (24:2b). Such visions of an end to the old Temple may be read as embodying the replacement theology, according to which Christianity supersedes Judaism.

The culmination of this rhetoric, and arguably the one verse that has caused more Jewish suffering than any other second Testament passage, is the uniquely Matthean attribution to the Jewish people: "His [Jesus's] blood be on us and on our children!" (Matthew 27:25). This so-called "blood guilt" text has been interpreted to mean that all Jews, of Jesus' time and forever afterward, accept responsibility for the death of Jesus.

Shelly Matthews writes:

In Matthew, as in many books of the New Testament, the idea that Christ followers are persecuted is pervasive. Blessings are pronounced on those who are persecuted for righteousness sake in the Sermon on the Mount; the woes against the Pharisees in Matthew 23 culminate in predictions that they will "kill and crucify, flog in synagogues, and pursue from town to town;" the parable of the banquet in Matthew 22 implies that servants of the king will be killed by those to whom they are sent.

Douglas Hare noted that the Gospel of Matthew avoids sociological explanations for persecution:

Only the theological cause, the obduracy of Israel is of interest to the author. Nor is the mystery of Israel's sin probed, whether in terms of dualistic categories or in terms of predestinarianism. Israel's sin is a fact of history which requires no explanation.

The term "Jews" in the Gospel of Matthew is applied to those who deny the resurrection of Jesus and believe that the disciples stole Jesus's corpse.^{[Matthew 28:13-15]}

Gospel of John

The Gospel of John has long provided anti-Semites with grist for their mill. There are 31 instances where the gospel uses the word Ἰουδαῖοι, the Jews in a hostile sense, among the 63 uses of the word in this gospel, and all Jewish groups are lumped together, with no distinctions made between them. The Sadducees, prominent elsewhere, disappear. The enemies of Jesus are described collectively as "the Jews", in contradistinction to the other evangelists, who do not generally ascribe to "the Jews" en masse calls for the death of Jesus. In the other 3 texts, the plot to put him to death is always presented as coming from a small group of priests and rulers, the Sadducees. John's gospel is thus the primary source of the image of "the Jews" acting collectively as the enemy of Jesus, which later became fixed in Christian minds. Some still see the use of anti-Semitic to describe his outlook problematical, if not an indeed anachronistic: John was a Jew, writing of his hero, a Jew, namely, Jesus, who is said to have declared that a house divided against itself cannot stand. John himself has Jesus tell the Samaritan woman that "salvation is from the Jews." For example, in John 7:1-9 Jesus moves around in Galilee but avoids Judea, because "the Jews" were looking for a chance to kill him. In 7:12-13 some said "he is a good man" whereas others said he deceives the people, but these were all "whispers", no one would speak publicly for "fear of the Jews". Jewish rejection is also recorded in 7:45-52, 8:39-59, 10:22-42, and 12:36-43. John 12:42 says many did believe, but they kept it private, for fear the Pharisees would exclude them from the Synagogue. After the crucifixion, 20:19 has the disciples hiding behind locked doors, "for fear of the Jews".

In several places John's gospel also associates "the Jews" with darkness and with the devil. In John 8:37-39; 44-47, Jesus says, speaking to a group of Pharisees:

I know that you are descendants of Abraham; yet you seek to kill me, because my word finds no place in you. I speak of what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you have heard from your father. They answered him, "Abraham is our father." Jesus said to them, "If you were Abraham's children, you would do what Abraham did. ... You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But, because I tell the truth, you do not believe me. Which of you convicts me of sin? If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? He who is of God hears the words of God; the reason why you do not hear them is you are not of God.

Though it has been claimed that the modern consensus is that the term Ioudaioi/Jews in John refers exclusively to religious authorities, the basis for this claim has been challenged and John's use of the term 'Jews' remains a complex and debated area of biblical scholarship. New Testament scholar J.G. Dunn writes:

The Fourth Evangelist is still operating within a context of intra-Jewish factional dispute, although the boundaries and definitions themselves are part of that dispute. It is clear beyond doubt that once the Fourth Gospel is removed from that context, and the constraints of that context, it was all too easily read as an anti-Jewish polemic and became a tool of anti-semitism. But it is highly questionable whether the Fourth Evangelist himself can fairly be indicted for either anti-Judaism or anti-semitism.

Reflecting the consensus that John's use of the term refers strictly to Jewish religious authorities, some modern translations, such as Today's New International Version, remove the term "Jews" and replace it with more specific terms to avoid anti-Semitic connotations. For example, the Jesus Seminar translates this as "Judeans", i.e. residents of Judea, in contrast to residents of Galilee, a translation which has not found general acceptance.

Later commentary

Successive generations of Christians read in the Gospel of John the collective guilt of Jews, universally and in all generations, in the death of Christ. John's use of the collective expression "the Jews" is likely explained by the historical circumstances in which and audience for which he wrote. With the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, the Jewish priesthood, and thus the class of the Sadducees was massacred and thus ceased to exist, due to its role in the First Jewish-Roman War. As John wrote his Gospel after these events, for a gentile audience, he spoke generically of Jews, rather than specifying a group within Judaism that no longer existed and that would have been unfamiliar to his readers.

First Epistle to the Thessalonians

Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 as follows:

For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of God’s churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus: You suffered from your own people the same things those churches suffered from the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out. They displease God and are hostile to everyone in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. In this way they always heap up their sins to the limit. The wrath of God has come upon them at last.

The text appears somewhat anomalous compared to the general tone of thanksgiving, in that we have a diatribe against persecutors identified as Jews. The text appears to flagrantly contradict what Paul writes in chapters 9 to 11 of his Epistle to the Romans. This has led several scholars to question its authenticity, and suggest that it is an interpolation. According to Pieter Willem van der Horst, there is an instance of antisemitic statements in one of the Pauline epistles; David Luckensmeyer maintains that it was not written with the intent to condemn all Jews, - Paul's letters reveal someone who lived his life within Judaism - but did at the same time have an anti-Semitic "effect". F. F. Bruce called it an 'indiscriminate anti-Jewish polemic' mirroring Graeco-Roman pagan attitudes to the Jews. Gene Green, Ernest Best,T. Holtz, Amy Downey variously argue that it resonates with Old Testament themes, plays on Jewish fears of being the "privileged people of God" and typical of an argumentative style shared by Greeks and Jews alike and thus, in Downey's words, exemplifying an intracultural clash between Paul the Jew and Jewish leaders opposing the propagation of Gospel ideas in both Judea and Thessalonia.

Epistle to the Hebrews

Most scholars consider the Epistle to the Hebrews to have been written for Christians who were tempted to return to Judaism. Lillian Freudmann thinks that it in trying to argue the superiority of Christianity to Judaism, it twisted Old Testament passages in a way that transmitted an anti-Torah antisemitism. John Gager reads it as a polemic against Judaism, not the Jewish people, and regards it as the most important anti-Judaising text of early Christianity. Samuel Sandmel asserts that rather than vilifying Judaism, or the Jews of that age, the Epistle to the Hebrews is an argument for the supersessionist notion that Christianity is the pinnacle of ancient Judaism. William L. Lane dismissed the idea that it contains an anti-Judaic polemic, its primary concern being simply to assert that the Old Testament prophecies had been fulfilled. Those who see in its discontinuities anti-Semitism are wrong William Hagner argued: there may be anti-Judaism, but no antagonism for Jews. While it promotes supersessionism it venerates the Hebrew saints, for Donald Bloesch, and therefore what it is exhorting is the replacement of Jewish institutions, not Jews. For Timothy Johnson, Christianity had to struggle to survive amid a majority of sects that were not Messianic, and whatever slander there is, is to be understood as the rhetoric of a marginal group against the majority of Jews. Such rhetorical vehemence was common in antiquity in religious and philosophical disputes.

Book of Revelation

In Revelation 2:9 and 3:9 reference is made to a 'synagogue of Satan' (συναγωγή τοῦ Σατανᾶ). At Revelation 2:9 we have:

I know your afflictions and your poverty--yet you are rich! I know about the slander of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan.

At 3:9 one reads:

I will make those who are of the synagogue of Satan, who claim to be Jews though they are not, but are liars--I will make them come and fall down at your feet and acknowledge that I have loved you

There is no certainty about who are those claiming falsely to be Jews: whether they are Jews hostile to Gentiles, Christian Jews persecuted by a Jewish majority or Gentiles feigning to be Jews. The traditional interpretation upheld until recently by a majority of scholars took this to denote Jews hostile to Christians, and specifically to the Jewish communities of Smyrna (2:9) and Philadelphia (3:9). In the Smyrna passage, according to Koester, those claiming to be Jews probably bore in their traits the usual markers of kinship, circumcision, dietary restriction and Sabbath observance, but are taken to task for denouncing the Christian community to the Roman authorities to get them arrested.

This has recently been questioned by Elaine Pagels, David Frankfurter, Heinrich Kraft and John W. Marshall. Pagels, reviewing the literature, argues that the author of Revelations, John of Patmos, was himself a Jew devoted to Christ, saw himself as a Jew, not a Christian. Unlike the other evangelists who blame Jews for Christ’s death, the author of Revelations, drawing on old patterns of late Jewish eschatological imagery, assigns responsibility for his death to Romans and says they are abetted by an internal enemy who feign to be God’s people while acting as agents of Satan, a theme also present in the literature of the Qumran sectaries. Pagels identifies most of these internal enemies as converts to the Pauline doctrine and teachings prevailing among gentiles. Taken literally the passage at Revelations 3:9 would refer to Gentiles upstaging Jewish followers of Jesus, feigning to be more Jewish than Jews themselves. Paul Duff on the other hand assumes they are Jews, like John himself, but Jews who are hostile to the Jesus movement. David Frankfurter has revived the old argument of Ferdinand Baur by endorsing the view that in fact the members of Satan's synagogue are mostly Gentiles, claiming Israel's legacy while rebuffing religious practices that are obligatory for Jews. Even those who, like David Aune, consider that the phrase indicates Jews, not Gentiles, allow that the Books of Revelations is virtually devoid of traces of the polemics between Christians and Jews typical of those times. Pagels concludes that the evidence weighs in favour of reading the 'synagogue of Satan' as referring to gentile converts to the Pauline version of the Jesus movement, who denominate themselves as 'those of Christ/Christians', a terminology never used by John of Patmos.

It has been argued that the idea of a Jewish Antichrist developed from these verses.

Christian responses

In the decree Nostra aetate in 1965, Pope Paul VI declared that

"True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures."

Norman Beck, professor of theology and classical languages at Texas Lutheran University, has proposed that Christian lectionaries remove what he calls "… the specific texts identified as most problematic …". Beck identifies what he deems to be offensive passages in the New Testament and indicates the instances in which these texts or portions thereof are included in major lectionary series.

Daniel Goldhagen, former Associate Professor of Political Science at Harvard University, also suggested in his book A Moral Reckoning that the Roman Catholic Church should change its doctrine and the accepted Biblical canon to excise statements he labels as antisemitic,- he counts some 450 such passages in the Synoptic Gospels and Acts of the Apostles alone-to indicate that "The Jews' way to God is as legitimate as the Christian way".