The Role of Antisemitism in Early Christianity

“This most virulent form of the teaching of contempt is firmly embedded within our specifically Christian Scriptures, the New Testament, the foundation documents of our Christian Church. If it remains within the texts used in our public and private worship and devotional life, all of our church statements in which we have repudiated the charge of deicide and the vicious denunciation of the Pharisees and of all the Jews will not eradicate this teaching of contempt. This teaching of contempt will continue to appear in our Christian educational materials, in our Christian liturgies and sermons, and in our Christian passion plays. We can try to sensitize all of our fellow-Christians, we can watchdog all of our educational materials and liturgies, and we can object to negative portrayals of Jews in our passion plays, but the source of this teaching of contempt for Jews in our Christian foundation documents will remain” (Beck 1994, p. 88).

A review of modern Catholic-Jewish relationships still shows the wide gap between statements some Catholic leaders make to comfort Jews for their World War II Holocaust misfortunes, and statements to each other to preserve the New Testament mythology that led to antisemitism and kept it alive (Pawlikowski 2006, pp. 102–103).

Although it may seem conciliatory for Christians to claim that “sharing” the Jewish Scriptures with Jews tokens a comradely or benign relationship, Christian adoption and reinterpretation of these Scriptures is a brash revision of history to Jews (Notes #7, #18). These Scriptures were all written by circumcised Jews (non-Gentile “Israelites”) centuries before the appearance of Gentile Christianity. The people who transmitted these Scriptures — “Jews” —believed in the God Yahweh and in Scripturally proscribed practices and commandments, committing themselves to preserving these Scriptures by sharing language, rituals, culture, and a common history derived from these Scriptures. It seems hardly conciliatory for Gentile Christians with completely different theological notions, cultures, and traditions than those expressed in the Jewish Scriptures, to claim they are the “true Israelites,” replacing Jews as inheritors of the Jewish Scriptures. Gentile Christians never identified with Jews, insisted on abrogating basic laws and commandments of these Scriptures, and showed no historical ”Christian” presence prior to their first century C.E. appearance (see Note #7).

Christian religious education still imposes the past onto the present, so that antisemitic issues remain. “[O]ut of ignorance many pastors and religious educators strip Jesus from his Jewish context and depict that context in false and noxious stereotypes.…The association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada, the accrediting organization for these institutions [Christian Seminaries and Divinity Schools] does not as of 2011 recommend that candidates studying for the Christian ministry receive formal instruction in how to avoid anti-Jewish preaching and teaching” (A.–J. Levine 2011, p. 501). The theological obsession to replace Jews as the “True Israel” persists in the claim that Christianity supersedes Jewish understanding of the Jewish Scriptures. “Supersessionist views are still propounded — not only in homilies but even in documents from the [Catholic] hierarchy” (Boys, p. 109). Even “the reproaches of Israel as slayer of Christ … were until recently part of the Catholic Good Friday liturgy” (Moreschini and Norelli, p. 138).

Again, although the term antisemitism first appeared in nineteenth century Germany (Note #13), it should be obvious that one cannot restrict the origin of Jew-hatred to its nomenclature. From all shown in this monograph, Jew-hatred was embraced by Gentile Christianity from its earliest days. The claim by Malina (p. 6), “To find anti-Semitism (nineteenth century coinage) in the New Testament is certainly and totally anachronistic,” is a bland exoneration of Gentile Christianity’s long Jew-hatred history.

A. T. Davies (1979b, p. 203): [T]he religion which watered the cultural soil of the West throughout the centuries with its negative myth of Jewish existence was no minor factor in the success of Nazi propaganda, because of its grip on the popular as well as the ecclesiastical mind right down to our own generation. … To dismiss the Christian materials as irrelevant is to defy the immense weight of evidence as well as to support a Christian false consciousness that prevents any serious exploration of Christian responsibility.”

Ruether (1979, p. 248): “Without twenty centuries of Christian vilification of the Jews it would be impossible to understand why it was the Jews, rather than some other group, that became the particular sacrificial victim of Nazi nationalism.” Sandmel (p. 173) “‘Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon’ [but] the role of traditional Christian teaching about Jews and Judaism in creating the cultural climate in which Nazism could take hold and the participation of so many who considered themselves Christians in carrying out the Final Solution were a terrible shock to the world.”

Could a twentieth century anti-Jewish Holocaust have occurred without Christianity?