The Society for Biblical Studies

Newsletter: Vol. 12, Iss. 2
June 2014

Difficult Conversations, cont'd.

Duncan MacPherson

Against this perspective it should be noticed that the polemical language used against ‘the Jews’ in the New Testament is no more ferocious than the language used by Old Testament prophets against the Israel of their own times and that rabbinic Judaism provides many examples of an apologetic of contempt for Christianity. The Talmud apparently teaches that Jesus Christ was illegitimately conceived during menstruation, was a fool, a magician, a seducer; that he was crucified, buried in excrement in hell and worshipped as an idol by his followers. Although the identification of Jesus as the person referred to in these verses has been contested it is admitted by some Jewish scholars.9 However since it was the Christians who had the power, Jewish hatred of Christianity could not—with one possible exception—be translated into persecution.10

It is evident that, repeatedly down the centuries, the Gospel story was invoked to justify the persecution of those Jews who would not accept the Christian Gospel and that this played a part in the development of anti-Semitism. A key text that encouraged supercessionist or replacement theology hermeneutic is the parable of the tenants in the vineyard (Mark 12: 1-12, Matthew 21:33-46 and Luke 20:9-19). When Jesus tells the parable, the temple priesthood realises that the parable is told against them (verse 45), but Saint Jerome is just one of the Church Fathers for whom it is ‘the Jews’ who are the wicked tenants: ‘Hard as the hearts of the Jews were in unbelief, they yet perceived that he spake of them .’11 Centuries later, Luke 20: 18 (‘every one who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces....’) was interpreted as predicting the punishment and dispersal of the Jews.12 This theme of vengeance developing directly that of replacement reaches perhaps its most vitriolic with Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies and On the Holy Name and the Lineage of Christ, published in 1543, a text exploited by the Nazis in their campaign of persecution and genocide against the Jewish people. However it was twentieth century New Testament scholars of the calibre of Gerhard Kittel, Professor of Evangelical Theology and New Testament at the University of Tubingen, who encouraged Christian acquiescence with Hitler’s race laws, lending their considerable expertise in Biblical Studies to feed hatred of Jews and Judaism.13

So do we blame the text or its interpreters for the centuries of suffering inflicted on the Jews? Is the Bible a charter of liberation or of oppression? It will be evident from what I have written that I am opposed to interpretations of biblical texts which have been used to justify any kind of anti-Semitism, that I do not consider the any New Testament texts to be anti-Judaic and that although I consider that the Church is indeed the New Israel and that it is Christ, rather than the modern state of Israel that fulfils the law and the prophets. I also believe that this implies fulfilment rather than replacement of the Old Covenant.

Endnotes:

1 For example as in Acts 2:5 and 10.
2 See John 4:9 and 22,
3 E.g., John 7:1-9.
4 Section 4 of Declaration on the Relation of the Church to non-Christian religions, Nostra Aetate, October 28, 1965: http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html.
5 John Dominic Crossman, Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus, (San Francisco: Harper, 1995).
6 ‘Karl Rahner, in his ‘Meditations on St. Ignatius’ Exercises,’ states: ‘The crucified Lord is betrayed and abandoned by his friends, rejected by his people, repudiated by the Church of the Old Testament’’ cited in Charlotte Klein. Anti-Judaism in Christian Theology Edward Quinn, trans. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978).
7 James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue (New York: Meridian Books, 1961).
8 E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (London: SCM Press, 1977) , 247.
9 For example: ‘The Talmud contains a few explicit references to Jesus.... These references are certainly not complimentary.... There seems little doubt that the account of the execution of Jesus on the eve of Passover does refer to the Christian Jesus.... The passage in which Jesus’ punishment in hell is described also seems to refer to the Christian Jesus. It is a piece of anti-Christian polemic dating from the post-70 CE period.’ Hyam Maccoby, Judaism on Trial (London: Littman, 1982), 26-27. And David Kraemer, professor of Talmud and rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary, calls for honesty about hostile Jewish texts about Jesus. Stephen Greenberg, ‘Jesus Death Now Debated by Jews,’ The Jewish Week, New York (10 March 2003).
10 There is a possible exception to this with the massacre of Christians by Jews in Jerusalem in 614 as alleged by the seventh century monk Antiochus Strategos.
11 Newman, J. H., Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels Collected Out of the Works of the Fathers by Saint Thomas Aquinas, Volume 1, Saint Matthew, (Southampton: The Saint Austin Press, 1997, first published in English in 1941) , 736.
12 Newman, J. H., Catena Aurea,..Volume 3, Saint Luke (Southampton: The Saint Austin Press 1997), 659.
13 Robert P., Ericksen, Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emmanuel Hirsch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

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