Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

THE NEW TESTAMENT RECONSIDERED:
RECENT POST-HOLOCAUST SCHOLARSHIP
CLARK M. WILLIAMSON
Contemporary scholars seek to correct an intepretive error
made a century ago.
First, let us make our presuppositions clear. Whether there is
anti-Judaism in the New Testament or in certain selected documents or
passages within it is a matter of serious scholarly dispute today. It is not
the purpose of this essay to enter into this dispute. What is not in
question is that there are strongly negative images of Jews and Judaism
in the New Testament and that what we may fairly call "anti-Judaism"
has long constituted a frame of reference in terms of which these images
and the larger New Testament have been interpreted. It is this
interpretive scheme which is being decisively challenged by several
recent scholars. This challenge to the anti-Judaic hermeneutical model
arose before the period of Hitler's Holocaust against the Jews (1933-45);
it is only since the Holocaust, however, that it has been picked up and
renewed within the discipline of biblical scholarship. The purpose of
this essay is to indicate the character of the alternative proposal in the
hope that ministers of the gospel will familiarize themselves with it and
make use of it in their preaching and teaching.
Before depicting the constructive alternative, we must describe the
anti-Jewish model of New Testament interpretation. In the light of
this description, the significance of the emerging new paradigm will
be more clearly visible. Three twentieth-century Christian scholars,
Charlotte Klein, George Foot Moore, and E. P. Sanders, have
delineated the structure of anti-Jewish biblical scholarship.
Essentially, Klein's work focuses on four areas of concern: the
so-called "late Judaism," law and legalistic piety, the Pharisees, and
Clark M. Williamson teaches at the Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis, and wrote
Has God Rejected His People? Anti-Judaism in the Christian Church, published in 1982. One of his
recent periodical contributions was an article on theodicy, "Things Do Go Wrong (and
Right)," which appeared in Journal of Religion, January, 1983. His current research interests
include a rethinking of christology after the Holocaust.
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