In my previous post, I discussed the tense relationship between Israeli religious leaders and the Catholic Church in light of the fear in Israel that the Gaza war might revive the Christian antisemitism of past centuries.  In this post, I will look into the reality of Christian antisemitism and its roots which can be traced back to statements in the Christian Bible and the way they have been interpreted by non-Jewish Christians.

The Roman Catholic Church explicitly denounced its own antisemitic past when, in a 1965 document, it stated that it was committing itself to the “Gospel’s spiritual love” which made no room for “hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”  Accordingly, Pope Francis has been stating that a true Christian cannot be antisemitic.  But that raises the obvious question: Why were Christians antisemitic in the first place?

Christianity was born as an offshoot of Judaism and the earliest Christians were Jews, even though the term “Messianic Jews” might have been more appropriate to identify them.  In time, the differences between orthodox Jews and Messianic Jews became more pronounced while Gentile followers of Jesus were rapidly outnumbering Jewish ones.  The Gentile converts apparently took advantage of the New Testament statements that seemed to paint orthodox Jews derogatively to feed their own prejudices.  In the following sections, I will examine that history and its New Testament roots by reviewing the material provided by John Shelby Spong in his book The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible’s Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love.  But in so doing, I will also point out that while recognizing that the biblical texts lend themselves to misinterpretation, I mostly put the blame on the Gentile interpreters themselves, while Spong firmly blames both the texts and the interpreters.

In the early decades of the faith, Christian teaching was transmitted by word of mouth and there was no such thing as a book called the New Testament.  The earliest documents available were letters, such as Paul’s letters, that were circulated among the churches.  The gospels were written later and a biblical canon resembling the New Testament did not appear before the end of the second century.  It took even longer for the canon to become widely accepted by church leadership.

Church leaders who were recognized for ensuring the transmission of the teaching of Jesus and his apostles are usually referred to as the founding fathers.  Some, like Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, were said to have received instruction from the apostles.  These founding fathers have been held in high regard in church history.  However, many of them were Gentiles who harbored negative feelings about the Jews.  Listing Polycarp, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Jerome, Tertullian and John Chrysostom as just a few examples of Christian leaders with anti-Jewish tendencies, Spong writes:

“These male figures were the key players as the church learned how to survive in a period of persecution and to prepare its faith tradition to become the dominant religion in the Roman Empire by the fourth century. It is fascinating to discover how deep and virulent the anti-Jewish rhetoric was in almost every one of these ‘fathers.’ Their words, when read today, are still chilling. Jews were called ‘evil,’ ‘vermin,’ and ‘unclean.’ They were said to be ‘unfit to live.’ Christians were taught that it was a virtue to hate Jews actively. These religious leaders castigated and caricatured the Jewish tradition in ways that would have made it impossible for a faithful Jew to recognize it as his or her own sacred story. Jews were not to be trusted, not to be allowed access to power, not to be considered as potential friends, not to be consorted with in any common meal.”

From the above description, it seems that the disdain these Gentile Christians felt for Jews was similar, perhaps worse than the disdain that Jews, who saw themselves as God’s chosen people, had previously had for Gentiles and had expressed by their refusal to associate with them.  However, Jewish separation from Gentiles was not inconsistent with Jewish law.  Gentile disdain of Jews, on the other hand, violated Christian teaching:

“So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” (Galatians 3:26-29)

This makes the Gentile Christians guiltier since they knew better.  Indeed, the Bible, and the New Testament in particular, considers those who have knowledge more accountable than those who do not (See for example Luke 12:47-48).  These Christian leaders were, in fact, reversing major progress that had been brought about by their new faith.

In the second century, the Marcionite controversy arose within the church.  Marcion, around 140 A.D., was arguing that the God of the Old Testament was not the same as the one revealed by Jesus but was an evil God he called Demiurge.  Marcion proposed to ban the Old Testament from the canon and his followers proceeded to edit references to Jews from Christian books.  To its credit, the church declared Marcionism a heresy.  But according to Spong, Marcion’s antisemitism was a reflection of a lasting trend according to which Gentile Christians increasingly saw themselves as the new “chosen people” while the Jews had lost God’s favor.  He writes:

“Christians even began to appropriate Jewish concepts to themselves, calling themselves “God’s chosen people,” or “God’s elect,” and identifying themselves as the ‘new Israel.’ Later the title selected for the Christian scriptures would be the New Testament. ‘Testament’ was a poor Latin translation of the word for ‘covenant.’ God’s first covenant had been made with the Jews; the second—the new and presumably the final—covenant was made with the Christians. These consciously adopted terms implied that the Jews no longer had a right even to their former claims as God’s chosen or covenanted ones. They were now defined by the Christians as God’s rejected, the ones who did not live up to their calling. ‘He came to his own and his own people received him not’ is the way the Fourth Gospel described it (John 1:11).”

These negative feelings about the Jews persisted in later centuries, and Spong examines the state of affairs after Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire.  At that point, Christians were able to use the power of government to enforce their preferences.  Spong writes:

“Heads of state, acting with papal authority, barred the Jews from owning land. To survive economically, Jews became bankers and jewelers. Christians, who were taught that usury was sinful, could not charge interest on loans, so banking was unprofitable for them. This opened a rich market that allowed Jews to become the dominant financiers of Europe. Kings borrowed money from Jewish bankers to underwrite their wars and even their Crusades. This enabled the Christians to feed stereotypical prejudices that portrayed Jews as money-grubbers. If there were any doubts about this, the story of Judas Iscariot was retold. Had he not betrayed the Lord for thirty pieces of silver? It all fit together. Christians needed the Jewish bankers, but they hated them simultaneously.”

It is well known that the Middle Ages were an era of considerable moral decline in Western Christianity.  Christians who were no longer driven by the teaching of Jesus did not limit themselves to despising Jews.  They also persecuted them and shamelessly took advantage of them.  As Spong puts it,

“Banking time and again proved to be an unsafe haven for the Jews. Whenever a king’s debts to Jewish financiers became excessive, it was easy for him to begin another round of persecutions in which Jewish property would be confiscated. That property frequently included those paper assets called bank loans and the king’s debts disappeared into thin air! In time, the Christians would abandon their principles about the sinfulness of interest. Banking was too lucrative an enterprise to leave in Jewish hands.”

The first Crusade was launched in 1099 following a sermon by Pope Urban II in which he asked Western Christians to help their fellow Christians in the East and free the holy places in Palestine.  Other Crusades followed the first one during a period that lasted till the middle of the fourth century.  They represented the ultimate acceptance of Christian violence by the church.  My thoughts about the Crusades can be found here.

Even though the Crusades were primarily a reaction against Muslim advances, they also brought violence against other non-Christian communities such as Jewish ones.  According to Spong,

“Because this present search of our past is for the origins of anti-Semitism, we need to note that most of these fervent Christian soldiers who set off on their ‘romantic’ Crusades never actually made it to the Holy Land. They made it only to one or two villages or towns away from their homes, where in their frustration they acted out their vehemence against the only ‘infidels’ they could find in these communities: these infidels were not Muslims but Jews. ‘One infidel is as good as another,’ became the motto of the crusaders as the Jews were killed in village after village. ‘They deserved it,’ the Christians said. ‘They not only killed Jesus, but they bragged about it and accepted the consequences for themselves and their children.’ That is what the ‘Word of God’ had stated.”

In the fourteenth century, Europe was devastated by the Black Death, the bubonic plague pandemic that killed about 50% of the population.  In this period of despair, during which the plague did not discriminate between the good and the bad, people were looking for answers.  With the Old Testament belief that calamities were divine punishment for sin, some put their hope in self-flagellation as a means of appeasing God and escaping his wrath.  Others chose to blame the plague on the presence of non-Christians in their midst, which led to persecution of the Jews.  Spong explains:

“At last, as with a flash of insight, the cause was identified and it fitted: Christian Europe had tolerated ‘infidels’ in its midst, and this toleration of false believers had incurred unspeakable divine anger. If Christians would only begin to purge these infidels from the ranks of its world, the argument went, then the wrath of God might be withdrawn. It was an emotionally satisfying solution. Latent prejudices could be revived and justified. The anger present in every tragic death experience could be focused. The enemy could be identified and ‘virtuous’ hatreds could flow freely.

Who were these infidels? Why they were the Jews, of course! Slowly, there was a shift from self-blaming to blaming the Jews, a prejudice-enhancing shift. The Jews must have poisoned the wells, infesting the drinking water, people said. That is why the plague was so rampant and so indiscriminate.”

Having “discovered” the cause of the plague, Christians proceeded to purge their surroundings from it and took action against the Jews:

“Jews were murdered, beaten, kidnapped, forcibly baptized, robbed of their assets, expelled from their homes and ghettoized. Even those Jews who had converted to Christianity were investigated and many were charged with continuing to observe Jewish rites in private.”

The sixteenth century was the century of the Protestant Reformation.  While the reformers addressed many of the failings of Catholicism, they did not bring about a change of attitude towards the Jews.  Martin Luther, the man credited for setting the Reformation into motion, was apparently quite anti-Jewish.  Spong describes him as follows:

“Part of what created Hitler and his regime was surely the work of Martin Luther in the sixteenth century. The great church reformer helped both to create the German nation and to advance the German language, yet he had a destructive, anti-Semitic blind spot. His rhetoric about Jews was unbelievably hostile. Jews were, for Luther, nothing short of evil by nature, lacking redeeming value and saving grace. He railed against them, publicly and privately, suggesting that they were, by their very being, demonic people who had compromised their right to live and so the world was well served by their deaths. Luther’s followers felt free to act out their anti-Semitism, given the permission they had received from their leader.”

Of course, the Holocaust that occurred in Germany under Adolf Hitler is remembered today as the worst display of antisemitism in history.  Spong suggests in the above statement that the attitude of Germans such as Luther helped set the stage for this horror.

Historians often argue that the depiction of the Roman procurator Pilate in the New Testament is not consistent with what is known of him from other sources.  These sources describe Pilate as a ruthless leader whose use of violence was not restrained by moral considerations.  The New Testament writers, on the other hand, present him as a reluctant judge who went along with Jesus’ Jewish accusers against his own best judgment.  It is argued that Pilate had the power to exonerate Jesus if he had wanted to do so.

It is argued that the New Testament texts exclusively put the blame on the Jews for the killing of Jesus, thereby providing justification for hatred of Jews by Christians.  In this regard, a verse such as Matthew 27:25 is particularly problematic.  Its context is the trial of Jesus during which the Jewish crowd, at the instigation of the chief priests and elders, asks for the release of Barabbas and the crucifixion of Jesus.  While Pilate then declares himself innocent of the blood of Jesus, the crowd shouts: “His blood is on us and on our children.”  Regarding Matthew 27:25, Spong writes:

“I suspect that no other verse in all of Holy Scripture has been responsible for so much violence and so much bloodshed. People convinced that these words justified their hostility have killed millions of Jewish people over history. ‘The Jews asked for it,’ Christians have said. ‘The Jews acknowledged their responsibility for the death of Jesus and even requested that his blood be placed upon the backs of their children in every generation.’ In this way Christians have not only explained, but also made a virtue out of, their violent anti-Semitism. No other verse of the Bible reveals more tragically the ‘sins of scripture’ or better earns for itself the designation of a ‘terrible text.’”

Spong’s use of the expression “sins of scripture” reflects his understandable questioning of the notion that the Bible is “God’s word.”  It is well-known that many Christians even go as far as calling the Bible God’s Inerrant Word, and those familiar with my writings know that I do not agree with them.  But I would like to explain a difference between my position and Spong’s position, which probably comes, to a great extent, from a difference in background.

Spong, in his book, explains that he grew up in a church where vilifying the Jews was the norm.  With regard to the crucifixion of Jesus, Roman innocence and Jewish culpability were taken for granted, and the teaching materials and rituals were, in fact, designed to emphasize Jewish guilt.  He writes for example:

“In the leaflets handed out weekly as part of my church’s Sunday school curriculum, it was easy to identify the Jews. They had names like Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes, Caiaphas, Annas and Judas Iscariot. Those names dripped with hostility as these stories were told. The Jews were sinister, evil people who were constantly plotting and scheming. When these Jews were portrayed pictorially, they were always painted in dark, negative colors, complete with scowls on their faces. Jews, I was taught, were people who had no principles.

In this same Sunday school no one told me that Jesus was a Jew. That seemed to have escaped their notice. When I saw pictures of Jesus, he certainly did not look like a Jew. He typically had blond hair, blue eyes and fair skin. I thought he was a Swede or at least an Englishman. It had also escaped my teachers’ notice that all of the disciples, as well as Paul and Mary Magdalene and Mary and Joseph, were Jews.”

It seems to me that Spong, when he rose from this darkness, should have blamed his teachers much more that the biblical text.  In contrast, I grew up in Central Africa and my background did not make me inclined to hate Jews.  My reality was more shaped by the colonial misdeeds of Western Europeans in the African continent.  On the matter of the crucifixion, my reading of the gospel narrative did not lead me to overly blame Pilate, but at the same time, I could not exonerate the Romans: The horrible suffering and death of Jesus on the cross had to be blamed on the Romans since they, not the Jews, were the ones who crucified people.  Furthermore, even though I blamed the Jewish leadership and perhaps the “crowd” that participated in the event, I don’t think I ever assumed that the entire Jewish nation was present and complicit.  I knew that Jesus and his disciples were Jewish and that, in fact, gave me some feeling of gratitude for the Jews.  Of course, that does not keep me from being greatly disturbed when I see Jewish brutality against others such as the Palestinians today.

My website is about Jesus’ kingdom of God, but I find myself often writing against attitudes and deeds of Christians.  Here is one reason: Jesus, on the cross, forgave his killers, whether they were Jewish or Romans.  Before that, he taught his disciples to love their enemies and pray for those who persecuted them.  He and his disciples urged his followers not to repay evil with evil but live in peace with everyone.  How is it possible that Christians would, later, decide that the right thing to do is to hate Jews and go around the world, killing other human beings for the same Jesus?  I believe there is, for those who approach Scripture with a clean heart, enough material in the biblical texts to neutralize the potential effect of verses such as Matthew 27:25.

The next biblical passage brought up by Spong as a source of antisemitism comes from Paul’s thoughts about his fellow Jews who rejected the Gospel of Christ.  According to Spong,

“The Jews are denigrated by polemical Christians time after time in the New Testament. Paul, quoting Isaiah (29:10), refers to the Jews as those to whom God has given ‘a spirit of stupor, eyes that should not see and ears that should not hear down to this very day’ (Rom. 11:7–8).”

The entire passage, as it appears in the NIV Bible, is reproduced below for clarity:

“What then? What the people of Israel sought so earnestly they did not obtain. The elect among them did, but the others were hardened, as it is written:

‘God gave them a spirit of stupor,
eyes that could not see
and ears that could not hear,
to this very day.’”

Here, Paul is separating Jews who accepted the Gospel, the elect, from those who did not.  It is with sadness that he accepts the fact that many Jews did not accept Jesus as the Messiah promised by Jewish scriptures.  Indeed, he earlier says: “Brothers and sisters, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved.” (Romans 10:1)

From the Jewish perspective, it is understandable that such a passage may be considered offensive since they believe they have remained on the right track.  However, Spong knows – and he explains this issue quite well later – that Paul’s words merely express his thoughts about a debate between the old and the new strands of Judaism.  Paul believes the visions of the Prophets have been fulfilled in Christ and the orthodox Jews do not.  Paul is proud to be a Jew and is not promoting antisemitism given that he was one of those who preached against repaying evil with evil and living in peace with everybody.  He cannot be blamed for believing what he believes, but even today, Jews get uncomfortable when they see such passages.  They complain about supersessionism which they see as close to antisemitism.  I have to say I am a supersessionist in the sense that I believe the Gospel of Christ is superior to the Law of Moses, and I do not apologize for it.  That does not make me hate Jews or anybody else who does not believe what I believe.  On the contrary, it is because of the Gospel that I learned to look at all humans as God’s creation.  The Old Testament, by contrast, carries the notion that Jews are God’s chosen people while others are unclean.  Sorry, that is just what I read!

Here is the reality Paul had to deal with: Before his conversion, he persecuted Christians and that was perfectly consistent with his beliefs and his fervor for Jewish law (Philippians 3:4-6).  After his conversion, he would have never thought of persecuting anybody.

Therefore, again, I have to put the blame on those Gentile Christians who used Romans 11:7-8 to promote hatred.  Along the same line, Spong, like many others, blames the Gospel according to John for providing justification for antisemitic attitudes.  He writes:

“John’s gospel quotes Jesus as saying that the Jews are ‘from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires’ (8:44). Whenever the phrase ‘the Jews’ is used in John’s gospel, there is a pejorative undertone. When John tells about the first Easter appearance of the risen Christ, he suggests that the disciples were in hiding behind locked doors, ‘for fear of the Jews’ (20:19).”

My earliest readings of the Gospel according to John did not lead me to identify the entire Jewish nation as enemy of Christ, perhaps because I did not isolate the narrative in John from the ones in the synoptic gospels.  I assumed that Jesus’ adversaries were powerful Jews whose disagreements with him were so serious that they were willing to kill him.  I also knew, from his teaching, that Jesus did not want to kill them.  Therefore, I was later surprised when I heard suggestions that the entire gospel was anti-Jewish.

However, as I said above, Spong has full knowledge of the fact that the debates in John were debates between differing strands of Judaism and do not belong in the category of antisemitism since both sides were Jewish.  But perhaps it is best to refer to the explanation provided by Eli Lizorkin-Eyzenberg, a Jewish scholar who happens to be a follower of Jesus and has great fondness for the Gospel according to John.  The statements below are extracted from his book The Jewish Gospel of John: Discovering Jesus, King of All Israel, in which he explains in great detail what the word translated as “the Jews” in John would have meant to First Century Jews:

​“The Gospel of John was initially written for a particular audience consisting of a variety of intra-Israelite groups, one of the main ones being the Samaritan Israelites. To them, unlike for us today, the word Ἰουδαῖοι (pronounced Ioudaioi and translated as ‘Jews’) did not mean ‘the People of Israel,’ i.e. ‘the Jewish people’ as we call them today. For these people, the people I propose are one of the main audiences for the Gospel of John, the Ioudaioi, meant something different.”

“Therefore, using a similar analogy, those who acknowledged the Jerusalem-approved authorities in Kfar Nahum (Capernaum) and Cana, which were far from Jerusalem, were also referred to by the principal name for the Jerusalemite formal rulers and leading sect – the Ioudaioi. All members of the Jerusalem-led system became the Ioudaioi in the Gospel of John.”

In other words, there were various Jewish groups and the term Ioudaioi was used primarily for the authorities in Jerusalem, but also for Jewish groups outside of Judea, in places such as Capernaum and Cana, that identified with the Jerusalem authorities.  Eli Lizorkin-Eyzenberg also often refers to Samaritan Jews who probably were the main target audience of John’s gospel.  The important point, of course, is that it is a mistake to assume that John was referring to the entire Jewish nation when he used the word Ioudaioi.

Spong also goes into some detail in explaining that the story of Judas Iscariot as the betrayer of Jesus played a significant role in Gentile justification of antisemitism since the name Judas, or Judah, can be thought of as representing the entire Jewish nation.  Whether he is right or wrong on his speculation, my position remains that such biblical material can only be used for bigotry by those who are naturally inclined to embrace prejudice towards others.  Therefore, why I fully agree with him in denouncing the Gentile Christians who promoted this perversion of the Gospel, I do not believe the perversion was an inevitable result of an honest reading of the biblical texts.