41845358-Antisemitism

18 ANTISEMITISM
CHRISTIANITY’S UNDERSTANDING OF ITS ORIGINS centers on the New
Testament, particularly the poetic rendering in the gospels of the arrest, trial,
and crucifixion of Jesus, which is traditionally known as the Passion. 5 In the
gospels’ rendition and as interpreted for centuries, the Jews are perceived as
“the Christ killers,” a people condemned forever to suffer exile and degradation.
This archcrime of “deicide,” of murdering God, turned the Jews into the
embodiment of evil, a “criminal people” cursed by God and doomed to wander
and suffer tribulation to the end of time. No other religious tradition has
condemned a people as the murderers of its god, a unique accusation that has
resulted in a unique history of hatred, fear, and persecution. When it came to
Jews, the central doctrine of Christianity, that Jesus was providentially sent
into the world to atone by his death for mankind’s sins, was obscured.
Ultimately, all antisemitic accusations and justifications for persecution
and discrimination spring from that primal act of deicide. In the words of the
Catholic biblical exegete J. D. Crossan, “the passion-resurrection stories [are]
the matrix for Christian anti-Judaism and eventually for European anti-Semitism,”
that “without that Christian anti-Judaism, lethal and genocidal European
anti-Semitism would have been either impossible or at least not widely
successful.” 6 In the late second century, Bishop Melito of Sardis had already
converted the crucifixion into the archstereotype of the criminal Jews when he
proclaimed, “God has been murdered; the king of Israel has been slain by an
Israelite hand,” preaching that provoked massive attacks on Jews. This
episode, comments the historian Robert M. Grant, shows what happens to
theology when it is divorced from history. 7 Almost every Christian writer in
the first five centuries of the church wrote an anti-Judaeos treatise or made
anti-Judaism a principal theme of other writings. Inferences drawn from the
Passion story by Christian theologians and apologists were developed into a
composite symbol of the Jew, one that combined the image of the Wandering
or Eternal Jew with that of the agent of Satan and the Antichrist. It is hard to
imagine a more destructive amalgam than this Christian myth of the Jew, rich
in its hydra capacity to be eternally transformed, secularized, adapted to
changing times and circumstances down to the present day, yet all the while
retaining its compelling religious appeal.
“JESUS RESEARCH”
New Testament scholarship has gone far to emancipate itself from theological
suppositions; in the process it has established that no such sequence of events
regarding the trial and execution of Jesus as the gospels recount could have oc-