IS THE New Testament Antisemitic?
FELDMAN, LOUIS
IS THE New Testament Antisemitic? LOUIS FELDMAN That the New Testament and quotations from it have been used by antis?mites for antisemitic purposes cannot be doubted. But that is a...
...they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark...
...In its search for affirmation, Christianity resorted to anti-Judaism as a defense against the Jewish claim that, once Christianity admitted gentiles without halachic conversion, Christianity was no longer Judaism...
...Isaiah 56:8-11, 57:3...
...He portrays one of them as a potential follower of Jesus (Matthew 8:19) and, in another reference, he mentions the scribes as martyrs in the cause of faith (Matthew 23:34...
...One of these documents tells its readers "to hate all the children of darkness, each according to the measure of his guilt, which God will ultimately requite" (Manual of Discipline 1.10-lla...
...They apparently looked upon this shouting as merely the outcry of an enraged mob and as a witness to crowd psychology...
...Especially since the Shcah, Jews have asked whether the New Testament itself is the source of the antisemitism that reached its climax in our own century...
...When the prisoners Jesus and Barabbas are brought before the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, the crowd of Jews gathered for Passover opts to release Barabbas rather than Jesus...
...Certainly this has been true of Christianity...
...Where Mark speaks of "the crowd" of Jews present at Pilate's presentation of Jesus and Barabbas (Mark 15:8,11,15), Luke, in a parallel passage, substitutes "the people" (Greek laos, Luke 23:13...
...In contrast to the Marcionite attempt to cut off the fledgling Christian community from its Jewish scriptural roots, John constantly quotes from or alludes to the Jewish Scriptures...
...the disputes are intramural, rather than anti-Jewish, and Paul is deliberately conciliatory...
...This theme repeats itself in the Book of Acts (2:36, 3:13, 3:15, 10:39, 13:27-28), which is also ascribed to the author of Luke...
...that is, it...
...That question requires us to look at the book—or, rather, collection of books—itself, and not just at isolated quotations...
...We worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews...
...Some scholars say these inconsistencies reflect different textual sources or editorial activity...
...In Achaia Jews beat Sosthenes, who was in charge of a synagogue (Acts 18:12-17...
...Matthew's Gospel is particularly antagonistic to the Jewish establishment...
...For example, in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, there are three dominant personalities, all Jews...
...This may imply that all Jews have responsibility for Jesus' death...
...On the face of it, this passage is an indictment of all the Jews, though "all the people" may refer to all of the crowd that was present rather than to all the Jews living in the land at that time, let alone all Jews of future generations...
...Indeed, in 1 Corinthians 2:8, instead of charging "the Jews" with responsibility for the death of Jesus, Paul blames "the rulers of this age" and adds that these rulers acted in ignorance...
...Indeed, Kaufmann Kohler, the well-known Reform Jewish scholar, called John "a Gospel of Christian love and Jew hatred...
...But that is a different question from whether the New Testament is in fact and by intention antisemitic...
...But, as I shall show, they are not directed against Jews qua Jews, as a group...
...My own examination of the New Testament has led me to the conclusion that, taken as a whole, it is not antisemitic...
...The most famous rhetorician during Jesus' lifetime was a Jew named Caecilius of Calacte...
...This, however, is a common motif in the Jewish pseudepigrapha and in rabbinic literature.* And the same Stephen prays that his persecutors' sin not be held against them (Acts 7:60...
...All you wild beasts, come and devour, all you beasts of the forest...
...Indeed, the Gospel writers themselves may be characterized as repentant betrayers...
...When Paul discusses what true religion requires, he speaks about who is a true Jew, not who is a true Christian (Romans 2...
...Moreover, in assessing the relatively few antijewish passages, we must understand the context and the use of rhetoric as practiced at that time...
...it is these Jews who are said to be seeking to kill him (John 8:37).John apparendy writes for nonjewish Christians—hence his need to explain, for example, "the Passover, the feast of the Jews" (John 6:4...
...Here Paul adds that God has not abandoned his ancient covenant with the Jews and speaks of his "brethren" who have not accepted Jesus as Christ: They are Israelites, and to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises (Romans 9:4...
...No passage in the New Testament has been used more frequently to justify and legitimate overt antisemitism...
...indeed, he is addressed as "rabbi" (John 1:38, 1:49...
...As the table at right shows, John uses the term "Jews" far more frequently than the other writers of the Gospels, while, by contrast, the other writers use "Pharisees" more often than John...
...Vituperative rhetoric exists in the Hebrew Bible, too...
...This definition excludes the description of events in which particular Jews act in a way that the author condemns...
...This is the Lord's doing...
...And how could the New Testament condemn Jews as a group, when it clearly acknowledges Jesus as a Jew—and also his predecessor John the Baptist, his 12 apostles and most if not all of his immediate followers...
...Any discussion of whether the New Testament is antisemitic naturally focuses on passages that seem most clearly antijewish...
...For example, when.the priests who followed Boethus beat Abba Joseph, Abba Joseph said, 'Woe is me because of the house of Boethus, woe is me because of their staffs" (Pesachim 57a...
...continued on page 50 ' Examples are numerous...
...I will gather yet others to him besides those already gathered...
...John alone notes the presence of Roman soldiers at the arrest of Jesus (John 18:3...
...Yet, it is John alone who stresses the political implications of Jesus' teachings and hence, by implication, the responsibility of the Romans for his execution...
...in the other three Gospels a crowd of Jews cries out against Jesus...
...In short, the New Testament, taken as a whole and understood in context, does not claim Jews as a group are evil or inferior...
...This bitter chapter is thus an indictment of Jewish Christians rather than of Jews...
...Because this passage is so untypical of Paul—it is much closer to Luke/Acts and Matthew both in style and content—many scholars believe it is a later interpolation...
...N In considering whether Paul's'letters are antisemitic, we must thus look not only at the questionable passage from Thessalonians quoted above which speaks of "the Jews who killed...Lord Jesus," but also at other philosemitic passages...
...This antijudaism may be contrasted with a later development in the second century, the Marcionite Christian heresy, which looked upon the Jewish Scriptures and the God of the Jews as evil...
...In his account of the trial and execution of Jesus, John appears to be the most anti-Jewish of the Gospels...
...Mark rather clearly limits his condemnation to Jewish religious leaders rather than to Israel as a whole...
...John makes the political nature of the charge against Jesus clear in the statement of the chief priests that they have no king but Caesar (John 19:15...
...This is, indeed, ironic: aside from the fact that the Sanhedrin apparendy did have such power, the Talmud, in texts uncensored by Christians in the Middle Ages (Sanhedrin 43a, the historical reliability of which has been debated), makes no mention of the role of the Romans in Jesus' execution and instead preserves a tradition that Jesus was actually put to death by the Sanhedrin on the religious charges that he practiced sorcery and had enticed and led Israel astray...
...Indeed, John specifically says that the Sanhedrin lacked jurisdiction to put anyone to death (John 18:31...
...The question is important for another reason...
...did not accept the basic premise that Jesus was the Messiah...
...But these passages are a distinct minority in the text...
...They may easily be balanced with philosemitic passages...
...But in assessing the New Testament as a whole, we must remember that it is a library of 27 books, written by various authors from various viewpoints in various places and times and for various purposes...
...Ezekiel 18...
...At this time, as we Jews try to understand and appreciate our Christian neighbors, as we ask them to understand and appreciate us, we must candidly explore this question, which for Jews stands at the heart of Scriptures sacred to Christians...
...Even when Jesus prophesies the destruction of the Temple, he refers to it as "my Father's house" (John 2:16...
...more likely they reflect different emotional reactions to different situations...
...Perhaps the most famous antijew-ish passage in Matthew comes from chapter 27...
...Paul assures them that they are like the churches in Judea who likewise suffered from their own countrymen: You suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Je^s, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all men by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they may be saved—so as always to fill up the measure of their sins...
...they oppose Judaism theologically...
...True, in a speech placed in the mouth of the proto-Christian martyr Stephen (who is stoned by som« Jews), Luke appears to include all earlier Jews as killers of the Hebrew prophets (Acts 7:52...
...The accounts of these incidents should not be termed antisemitic because they are not castigations of allJev/s as a group but only of those particular Jews who made the attacks...
...Pilate washes his hands and proclaims his own innocence of Jesus' blood...
...We must acknowledge and condemn such passages...
...That Paul received 39 stripes from Jewish authorities on at least five occasions (2 Corinthians 11:24) shows that he regarded himself—and, indeed, was proud to be looked upon—as a member of the Jewish community...
...In addition, he notes that those Jews who condemned Jesus acted out of ignorance (Acts 3:17) and that Jesus himself asked that they be forgiven "for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34...
...It is important to remember that for Jesus' followers, then as now, the Bible of the Jews was, a"nd is, sacred...
...Even some of the Jewish leaders believed in Jesus and gave him appropriate burial after his crucifixion...
...Could there be any more projewish statement than this...
...An important branch of rhetoric was the fine art of vituperation, which included hyperbole...
...We see a similar balancing of attitudes elsewhere in Luke's writing...
...See the references to the martyrdom of the prophets Hur in Exodus Rabbah 48.3, Sanhedrin 7a and Midrash Aggada on Numbers 30:15, Isaiah in Yebamot 49b and Martyrdom of Isaiah, and Zechariah ben Jehoiada in 2 Chronicles 24:20-22, Gtitin 57b and Sanhedrin 96b...
...they never have enough...
...In the end, he says, "All Israel will be saved" (Romans 11:26...
...On the other hand, Luke elsewhere refers to the "many thousands of believers" among the Jews (Acts 21:20...
...But you, draw near hither, sons of the sorceress, offspring of the adulterer and the harlot...
...Let us turn to Paul's letters...
...By contrast, the mainstream of early Christianity insisted that the Jewish Scriptures, if properly interpreted, were the forerunners of the New Testament...
...John alone does not mention the role of a Jewish Sanhedrin in the condemnation of Jesus...
...By antisemitism—the term, of course, has been taken over from the German-and is an absurdity, since it implies that the Jews are a race—I mean an irrational attitude condemning Jews as an inferior or evil group without regard to individual worth...
...and answers, "By no means...
...As Rabbi Lewis Browne once remarked, Jesus was not the founder but the foundling of Christianity, or, as the jingle would have it, "A man named Saul, later called Paul, came and spoiled it all...
...In a speech that he places in Peter's mouth, Luke declares that "all the house of Israel" crucified Jesus (Acts 2:36, 4:10, 10:39...
...Virulent vituperation was part of the skill of the rhetorician and was not necessarily intended to be taken literally...
...In Acts 18:6, Luke quotes Paul as saying to the Jews of Corinth in a moment of exasperation, "\ibur blood be upon your heads...
...Indeed Christianity went further...
...His watchmen are blind, they are all without knowledge...
...For Christianity, the daughter of Judaism, to be anti-semitic would be a clear case of matricide...
...Jesus looks upon himself as continuing the Jewish tradition of self-criticism...
...Though elsewhere Paul declares that only a remnant of the chosen people will be saved (Romans 9:6-8,15,18,27), he insists (Romans 11:28) that despite their opposition to the Gospel, they are still beloved for the sake of their forefathers, "because the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable" (Romans 11:28-29...
...and answers, "Much in every way...
...Finally, Matthew 13:52 (which has no parallel in Mark or Luke and which therefore is of special value) offers another positive portrayal of the scribes: Jesus declares "every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new or what is old...
...These passages are against Judaism as a religion...
...it took the offensive by claiming that it, and not its parent, was true Judaism...
...Here is an opportunity to blame the Jews for rejecting Jesus as the true cornerstone, but the author carefully avoids doing so, stating instead that the stone has been rejected by "men...
...Jesus undoubtedly regards his violent language as following the tradition of the prophets when they castigated fellow Jews of their day...
...Indeed, it is precisely Jesus' popularity among Jews that allegedly leads to the decision to destroy him (John 11:45-48...
...But God's wrath has come upon them at last...
...Finally, in the Gospel of John the chief priests and the officers are the only ones present at Pilate's presentation of Jesus and Barabbas...
...They were not used for antisemitic purposes with any frequency until the medieval period...
...Indeed, even those Church Fathers who wrote treatises against the Jews during the first three centuries of the Christian era did not use this passage...
...This analysis, of course, doesn't address the problem of antisemitism that Christians often learn from the New Testament...
...1 Thessalonians 2:14-16...
...The prophet Ezekiel tells us, "Your sister Sodom and her daughters have not done as you and your daughters have done" (Ezekiel 16:48...
...When Jesus' fellow Jews refused to acknowledge his gospel, his followers turned upon Jesus' brethren with vehemence...
...was Theodorus, teacher of the emperor Tiberius, who came from the city of Gadara, just east of the Jordan River...
...In fact, according to John, the Jews who attack Jesus most bitterly are those who believe in Jesus (John 8:30-31...
...In other words, it is a family quarrel...
...To a certain extent, Paul is remarkable for his lack of anti-Judaism...
...Let me explain why...
...But this clearly contradicts Romans 3:1-2, where Paul asks the rhetorical question, "What advantage has the Jew...
...Another calls the sect's opponents "prophets of deceit" (Hymns 4.10.20...
...But whatever the intent of this passage, Matthew nonetheless looks with favor on some Jews...
...Moreover, Luke often distinguishes between the Jewish people, all of whom hang upon Jesus' words (Luke 19:47-48), and their leaders, whom Luke condemns...
...On the other hand, in Acts Luke also follows John's pattern, using the term "Pharisees" nine times and the word "Jews" 79 times, a reversal of his own pattern in Luke...
...Paul himself, however, was proud of his Jewishness...
...In his letter to the Philippians (3:5-6), he boasts that he has been "circumcised on the eighth day," that he is "of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews...
...For example, in Thessalonica, where Paul has been preaching, Jews attack the house of Paul's follower Jason (Acts 17:5-9...
...To the extent that these books are addressed to Jews and Jewish Christians, they are hardly anti-Jewish...
...We must make a further important distinction: There are passages in the New Testament that can be characterized as anti-Judaism...
...Whether or not Paul actually intended to do so, he in effect invented a new faith when he viewed the old Mosaic covenant as a path to death as compared to eternal life granted by acceptance of Jesus (2 Corinthians 3:7) and when he no longer required halachic conversion (Acts 15:1-5...
...It is in John that the chief priests and the Pharisees declare: "If we let him go on thus, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation" (John 11:48...
...Hear the language of Isaiah: Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel...
...Indeed, in Mark 8:31 and 10:13, we are told specifically that Jesus taught his disciples that he was destined to For Jesus 'followers, then, ad now, the Bible of the Jews was, and is, sacred...
...But the beginning of an answer must surely lie in a better understanding—by both Christians and Jews—of the New Testament as a whole, the context of the relatively few anti-Jewish passages, the rhetoric of the times and situation being described...
...This verse has been taken as proof that the Jews took upon themselves eternal guilt for the death of Jesus...
...In the parallel passage in Mark relating to the release of Barabbas (Mark 15), the chief priests, not the crowd of Jews, stir up the crowd to ask for Barabbas's release instead of Jesus' release, so that even the crowd of Jews on the scene at the time is not the chief target of the con-demnnation...
...Or again: "They have committed adultery, and blood is upon their hands" (Ezekiel 23:37...
...dreaming, lying down, loving to slumber...
...And any strident of the Hebrew Bible knows that God punishes the sinner, not the sinner's children (Jeremiah 31:29-30...
...In Matthew 21:46, the author remarks that, although the authorities wanted to arrest Jesus, they did not, because "they feared the multitudes [of Jews], because they [the Jews] held him to be a prophet...
...If the final phrase in the quotation, "at last," refers to the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., Paul cannot be the author of the passage because he wrote his letters earlier...
...One of the most famous rhetoricians of the first century B.C.E...
...it is marvelous in our eyes...
...The anti-Jewish comments can be balanced by philo-Jewish comments...
...Let us look more specifically at the four Gospels and the Book of Acts, which describe Jesus' life, death and alleged resurrection...
...Moreover, John's Gospel also contains some philosemitic statements...
...In any case, John directs his bitterest comments not against those who remain Jews but against those who are Jewish Christians (former Jews who accepted Jesus as the Messiah), just as many centuries later the Catholic clergy will direct the Inquisition not against Jews but against the Conversos (the so-called Marranos), who had ostensibly converted to Christianity but who secretly maintained Jewish practices...
...More difficult to explain is Paul's address to the Thessalonian Christians who have suffered at the hands of their own countrymen in Greece...
...The New Testament, to be sure, contains a number of passages that are anti-Jewish and have been used to arouse hatred of Jews...
...Likewise, in the Talmud we find strong, rhetorical language...
...In John 4:22, Jesus tells a Samaritan woman, "You worship what you do not know...
...Because of the antisemitic uses to which isolated passages in the New Testament have been put, Jews have come to believe the New Testament is antisemitic...
...Moreover, Luke diminishes the Jews' responsibility for the condemnation and death of Jesus by noting that all those who had participated had acted according to a preordained divine plan (Acts 4:27-28...
...By common consent, the Book of John is the most anti-Jewish of the Gospels...
...In chapter 2, the author invites his audience to be born anew, to come to the Lord: Come to him, to that living stone, rejected by men but in God's sight chosen and precious (1 Peter 2:4...
...The shepherds also have no understanding...
...One of the major motifs of the Gospels is that if anyone betrayed Jesus, it was his own disciples...
...On the other hand, Luke notes that a number of Jews responded favorably to Paul's sermons (Acts 13:43) and that, indeed, the Jewish community was divided in its attitude toward Paul's message (Acts 28:24-25...
...Perhaps this reaction was inevitable...
...Moreover, John clearly identifies Jesus as a Jew (John 4:9...
...John became a favorite text of the Nazis...
...be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the scribes, presumably in contrast to the Jews as a whole...
...His point apparently is that even those who believe in Jesus have no guarantee against apostasy...
...When we turn from the Gospels, Acts and Paul's letters to other books of the New Testament, we find surprisingly little anti-Judaism, let alone anti-semitism...
...But when Jesus refers to the Pharisees as "hypocrites" (Matthew 23:13) and a "brood of vipers" (Matthew 23:33), he is berating fellow Jews...
...In a number of passages (e.g., Acts 17:1011, 18:17, 19:9, 28:24-25), Luke indicates that the Jews were far from uniform in their attitude toward Jesus...
...It is a common phenomenon—what we might call an Oedipus complex in religion—for challengers to a particular movement or school of thought to show special hostility toward the parent...
...On the other hand, the phrase translated "at last" could mean that God's wrath has come upon the Jews with utter finality...
...E. P. Sanders, a New Testament professor at Oxford University, correcdy observed that Paul's sole objection to Judaism was that it was not Christianity...
...Some have inferred from this that John has transferred to the entire Jewish people the blame the other three Gospels impute to the Pharisaic leaders...
...The battleground is a theological one, a religious one, characterized by the heightened, intense rhetoric typical of the time...
...This is a reference to Psalm 118: 22-23: The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone...
...When Pilate asks what he should do with Jesus, the crowd of Jews replies "Let him be crucified...
...And all the people answered, 'His blood be on us and on our children!'" (Matthew 27:25...
...In Romans 11:1, Paul asks rhetorically, "Has God rejected his people...
...and that as to righteousness under the law he is blameless...
...Rhetoric was the common denominator of higher education in antiquity...
...Take, for example, 1 Peter, which is addressed to a predominandy gentile audience...
...Vituperative rhetoric appears not only in the New Testament but also in contemporaneous documents, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls...
...The dogs have a mighty appetite...
...When Paul says the Jews are "enemies of God," he immediately adds the qualification, "as regards the Gospel," and he quickly adds that "as regards election they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers" (Romans 11:28...
...Likewise, though Matthew occasionally views the Jewish scribes negatively—when they are grouped with the Pharisees, for instance—he also views the scribes positively...
...Luke softens the impact of this accusation against the Jews, however, by indicating that the Jewish multitude later felt remorse, mourned for Jesus and beat their breasts (Luke 23:27-31,48...
...Anti-Judaism is much less prominent in Mark's Gospel than in Matthew's...
Vol. 15 • December 1990 • No. 6
