12 Alleged anti-Semitism in
the New Testament
Especially since the horrors
of the Holocaust, it has become fashionable among students of the New
Testament, Christian as well as Jewish, to speak of anti-Semitism in it. This
calls for close examination, since it is all too easy to be content with
imprecise statements, not least among Christians who are deeply ashamed not
only of the appalling wickedness that led to the death-camps, but also of the
centuries of persecution of Jews by Christians. Naturally, they are eager to
make whatever amends may be possible, by confessing Christian misdemeanours.
But what are the facts about
the New Testament? First, it is important to distinguish between hostility to
Semitic races as such, and criticism of Jewish convictions. The odious pride
and deliberate evil of those who have pretended that Semites are racially
decadent and contemptible over against a supposedly superior Aryan race—an
attitude for which the term anti-Semitic should, strictly, be reserved—is, of
course, nowhere to be found in the New Testament, which, indeed, is almost
entirely the work of writers who were themselves Semites. What critics of the
New Testament sometimes call anti-Semitism is, strictly speaking, hostility to
certain Jewish individuals or to certain convictions of Judaism. But,
obviously, that does not in itself constitute anti-Semitism.
The only words in the New
Testament that seem to constitute a sweeping condemnation of the Jews as such
are in 1 Thessalonians 2:15f., where Paul unleashes a ferocious attack on
Jewish persecutors of Christians (among whom he had himself once been, 1 Cor.
15:9; Gal. 1:13; Phil. 3:6; 1 Tim. 1:13; cf. Acts 8:1; 9:1f., 13f., 26; 22:4f.;
26:9–11), declaring that the ultimate wrath of God has begun to overtake them.
This can only be seen as an outburst of anger, inexcusable no doubt but
understandable perhaps, in view of the way Paul had been hounded all but to
death by his opponents. But his considered attitude towards his non-Christian
fellow-Jews is expressed at length in Romans 9–11, in which he rebukes Gentile
Christians for triumphing at the expense of Jews, and affirms the divine
promises made to Israel, and his confident expectation that Israel will realize
its glorious destiny. It is true that this optimism seems to depend on his
conviction that Judaism would ultimately be brought to confess Jesus as its true
Messiah—something that, to this day, has not been realized; but it is far from
a disparagement of Judaism as such. Admittedly, the Jewish olive tree in the
metaphor of Romans 11:16ff. has only Christian branches left in it (just as, in
Romans 9 also, St Paul reckons as part of real Israel only those Jews who
accept Jesus as Messiah); but the stock itself is still Israel, loved by God
and never to be abandoned (11:28).
What is, for Christians, as
against Judaism, a non-negotiable conviction, expressed by both Paul and the
writer to the Hebrews, is that the Covenant made by God with Moses has been
superseded by the new Covenant sealed by the death and resurrection of Jesus as
Messiah (2 Cor. 3; Heb. 8:13). It has become customary with many Christians,
out of courtesy, to avoid the use of ‘the Old Covenant’, over against ‘the
New’; but the fact remains that Christians cannot, as Christian believers, deny
the newness. But that newness is the newness not of negation but of fulfilment,
and, although that is still not acceptable to the non-Christian Jewish
believer, at least it is very different from the newness of negation.
Christianity is claimed to be the climax and realization of the essence of
Judaism, not its extinction. What Paul blames the Jews for, in Romans 10:1–4,
is not recognizing Jesus as the end (and goal?) of the Law.
In St Matthew’s Gospel
(27:25) there is the terrible cry from the Jewish crowd, in reply to Pilate:
‘His blood be on us and on our children’, misused by Christians down the ages
in their rejection of the Jews, as though it meant that the charge of deicide
attached, on the authority of Scripture, to all Jews. But all the evangelist
actually says is that this is what the Passover crowd shouted on that occasion.
It does not constitute evidence that the evangelist himself believed it, nor
does it lend the authority of Scripture to an all-time, universal sentence
against Judaism. It is in Matthew again that the fiercest attack by Jesus on
the scribes and Pharisees occurs (23), but what they are attacked for is not
being devout Jews!—in which connection one has to remember the extraordinary
words in Matthew 5:17–20:
Do not suppose that I have
come to abolish the Law and the prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to
complete. I tell you this: so long as heaven and earth endure, not a letter,
not a stroke, will disappear from the Law until all that must happen has happened.
If any man therefore sets aside even the least of the Law’s demands, and
teaches others to do the same, he will have the lowest place in the Kingdom of
Heaven, whereas anyone who keeps the Law and teaches others to do so will stand
high in the Kingdom of Heaven. I tell you, unless you show yourselves far
better men than the Pharisees and the doctors of the law, you can never enter
the Kingdom of Heaven. (neb)
The Gospel according to St
John is a special case. Notoriously, it frequently uses ‘the Jews’ as a general
term for the opponents of Jesus. It even goes to the length of representing
Jesus as in heated controversy with ‘the Jews’ in which he speaks of ‘your law’
(8:17; 10:34), as though he himself no longer shared it, and even calls them
children of the devil (8:44). Yet, it is this Gospel that shows us Jesus
telling the Samaritan woman that salvation belongs to the Jews (4:22). It is
John, too, who reports that many Jews had come to believe in him (2:23; 8:31;
11:45), including, evidently, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea (19:38–42). St
John’s Gospel, indeed, is in many respects the most Jewish of the Gospels, in
spite of the extraordinary dissertation in chapter 6, where Jesus insists that
the only way for a disciple to receive spiritual strength is to eat his flesh
and—a concept that could hardly be more un-Jewish—drink his blood.
It is worthwhile to note
that in the Acts ‘the Jews’ is a term used in much the same way as in John. In
the appropriate context, it denotes the Jews who were hostile to Christians
(Jewish and Gentile alike); but equally, in another context, it can denote
Christian Jews, like Paul himself (cf. Acts 21:20), or friendly non-Christian
Jews.
At any rate, what this adds
up to is that St John’s Gospel uses the term ‘the Jews’ in various ways, which
must all be taken account of in any fair estimate of its attitude to the
Semitic. It may be that St John’s Gospel has chosen to put into a narrative
framework, comparable to that of the Synoptic Gospels, language that belongs to
a later period in which a ‘high’ Christology, holding Jesus to be the divine
and glorified Son of God, is in conflict with non-Christian Judaism. If so, the
recognition of Jewish fundamentals already mentioned—‘salvation belongs to the
Jews’, for instance—becomes the more remarkable. The Gospel is not anti-Jewish
in an unmodified way, though severely critical, like St Paul and others, of
Jews who failed to see Jesus as the crown and climax of Jewish destiny. What we
have here is a basic, non-negotiable conviction of the Christian faith; but
this conviction is that Judaism is not negated but fulfilled and crowned by
Christianity.
Looking at the four
canonical Gospels together, it is sometimes urged that they misrepresent the
facts so as to implicate the Jews unjustly in the death of Jesus. It is indeed
true that it is impossible to piece together from the Gospels a fully coherent
story of the Last Supper, the betrayal and arrest of Jesus, and the trials
before the Sanhedrin and Pilate. Yet there seems to be nothing improbable in
the broad conclusion that the Temple aristocracy did hand Jesus over to Pilate
as a potential revolutionary. Even though Jesus himself constantly lived and
preached a pacifist attitude, identifying himself not with a militant Judas
Maccabaeus but rather with the Maccabaean martyrs, symbolized by ‘that Son of
Man’ who, in Daniel 7, symbolized non-resistant obedience to God, which would
be given the eternal kingdom, yet the majority missed the point. The story of
the so-called ‘triumphal entry’ shows how an enthusiastic crowd could hijack a
peaceful demonstration on a donkey and make it into an aggressively nationalist
occasion. The High Priest and his colleagues could well have decided that Jesus
was a liability to the delicate balance between themselves and Pilate: John
11:47ff. says as much. It is natural that they should have seized the
opportunity to shunt responsibility for removing him onto the shoulders of the
Romans. If so, the Gospels are condemning that particular Temple aristocracy:
it would not make them anti-Jewish in a general sense.
The Revelation is emphatic
in announcing that God is making everything new, including ‘Jerusalem’. If any
New Testament writing could be claimed as predicting the replacement of an
outworn Judaism by something different, it might be this. Yet, it is the more
striking that the ‘new’ city is still called Jerusalem, and that the elect are,
it would appear, somehow identified as the tribes of Israel (Rev. 7). It is
true that in Revelation 2:9 (the letter to Smyrna) and 3:9 (the letter to
Philadelphia) the Jews are bitterly called ‘the synagogue of Satan’; but (as in
John 8:44, already noted) this seems not to be a general term for Jews, but a
reference to the hostile Jews in a particular situation.
These reflections are
deliberately restricted to the canonical New Testament. A review of Christian
attitudes towards Judaism in early extracanonical writings, including, for
instance, the Epistle of Barnabas and Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho, would take
us far afield; but it would confirm, in varying degrees, a hostility, not to
Jews as such, but to a non-Christian Jew’s refusal to accept Jesus as Christ
and Lord. However regrettably harsh and heated, this is not itself
anti-Judaism. Hatred is always wrong; but the fact remains that religious
hatred is not the same as racial hatred. This is spelt out (but in terms not of
hatred but of loving regret) in Romans 10. (C. F. D. Moule, “Alleged
Anti-Semitism in the New Testament,” in Christ Alive and at Large:
Unpublished Writings of C. F. D. Moule, ed. Robert Morgan and Patrick Moule
[Canterbury Studies in Spiritual Theology; Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2010],
136-40)
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