Newsletter:
Vol. 12, Iss. 2
June 2014
Difficult Conversations About
Judaism, Anti-Semitism
and Palestine
Duncan MacPherson
Christianity, Islam and Judaism share a great deal in terms of beliefs, ritual
and ethics. Paradoxically, common ground has also been contested ground and
relationships between all three of the Abrahamic faiths have frequently been
problematic. In this essay, I will focus only on the problematic of the Christianity-Judaism
relationship. It has been said that the preacher should prepare his or her
sermon with the Scriptures in one hand and the newspaper—or today perhaps
the iPad—in the other. However both the Bible and the Newspaper will
highlight aspects of this problematic.
Consulting New Testament texts, the preacher finds that they speak of ‘the
Jews’ in ways that have been used to justify anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism
and have produced a supercessionist theology that sees Judaism as the Old
Israel now replaced by the new People of God, the Church. Turning from Bible
to the news—through whatever medium—the preacher is frequently
confronted by political and moral issues surrounding the modern State of Israel.
Following the full realization of the enormity of the crimes committed against
the Jews in the Nazi extermination camps a number of Jewish and Christian
thinkers began to discern the roots of anti-Semitism in allegedly anti-Judaic
verses in the Gospels, particularly in Matthew and John, where the Jews seem
to be represented as responsible for the Crucifixion.
The term ‘Jew’ (Ioudaios) in the New Testament refers primarily
to an inhabitant of Judaea or to someone originating from Judaea.1 By extension
it also came to refer to those who identified with the temple cult in Jerusalem
as opposed to the Samaritans whose focus of worship was at Mount Gerizim.2
However, the term came to refer to opponents of Jesus during his ministry.
This is particularly the case in the Gospel of John where the ‘Jews’
(Ioudaioi), are referred to no less than 39 times in a clearly pejorative
sense.3
Rejecting anti-Judaic and replacement interpretations of Scripture, the Second
Vatican Council’s Declaration on Non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate,
denied that the Jews were collectively cursed for the crucifixion of Christ
and stated that blame could not be laid ‘against all the Jews…
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...”4
Meanwhile some Jewish, Christian and post-Christian critics have identified
the New Testament itself as the source of the problem, seeing the role ascribed
to the Jews in the New Testament as part of a ‘culture of contempt’
leading directly from John’s Gospel to the gas chambers. Among these
critics, John Dominic Crossan, of De Paul University, Chicago, ex-Catholic
priest and former co-chair of The Jesus Seminar, praised Raymond Brown’s
disavowal of anti-Semitism but expressed regret at his acceptance of the historicity
of the passion stories, which Crossan believes fuelled centuries of Christian
anti-Semitism.5
Summarizing the views of biblical scholars who identify an anti-Judaic tendency
in modern historical-critical scholarship, Clark M. Williamson sees the root
of this tendency in the way in which Jesus was depicted ‘over-and-against’
the Judaism(s) of his time. Williamson breaks this tendency down into four
main areas. The first of these is the concept of ‘late Judaism’:
a degenerated Judaism, ‘preparatory for and inferior to Christianity.’
The second is the characterization of late Judaism as blindly legalistic in
its interpretation of the Scriptures so that only the Church can read the
scriptures (Legalistic Jews were ‘deaf to the gospel’: Jeremias).
The third area consists of the historical misrepresentation of the Pharisees
as the enemies of Jesus. The final area is seen as an affirmation of guilt
for the death of Jesus by his Jewish contemporaries,6 and it was the radical
difference between Jesus and the Pharisees that explains Jesus’ tragic
end.7 Against this anti-Judaic tendency among historical critical scholars
Williamson urges the view of Sanders that first-century Judaism ‘kept
grace and works in the right perspective,’8 citing passages in first-century
Jewish writings that emphasize grace as paramount. For Williamson, supercessionism
has been responsible, directly or indirectly, for “too many unconscionable
assaults upon Jews. History’s slaughter-bench is drenched with the blood
of those slain because they ‘obstinately’ refused in their ‘blindness’
to see that the Christian alternative was better.”
