Anti-semitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present

282 NOTES TO PAGES 18–20
Doubleday, 1994), which seems to us greatly to exaggerate the historicity of the
gospels as sources; we prefer John Dominic Crossan, who says that the gospels
are 80 percent “prophecy historicized” and only 20 percent “history remembered”
and that Brown reverses the proportions: Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the
Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco: 1995); idem, The Cross that Spoke (San Francisco: Harper
& Row, 1988); John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 1 (New York: Doubleday,
1991); Paul Winter, On the Trial of Jesus, 2nd ed., rev. T. A. Burkill and Geza
Vermes (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1974); Haim Cohn, The Trial and Death
of Jesus (New York: KTAV, 1977); and the scintillating work by a nonprofessional
inquirer, Weddig Fricke, The Court-Martial of Jesus: A Christian Defends
the Jews against the Charge of Deicide, trans. Salvator Attansio (New York: Grove
Weidenfeld, 1990). In revision of earlier drafts of this chapter, we have made
much use of E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1985), masterful and up to date, and the series of articles on the historical Jesus
in Theology Today 51, 1 (April 1995): 1–97, especially the essays by Paula Fredriksen,
Howard Kee, and Stephen Patterson. See also Sanders’ review article, “In
Quest of the Historical Jesus,” New York Review of Books 48, 18 (Nov. 18, 2001):
33–36.
6. Crossan, Who Killed Jesus?, 32, 35.
7. Robert M. Grant, “The Trial of Jesus in the Light of History,” Judaism 20
(1971): 42; Jeremy Cohen, ed., Essential Papers on Judaism and Christianity in
Conflict (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 9–10; in Acts 2:23 and
3:15 Jews are said to have “killed the author of life”; cf. Paul, 1 Thessalonians
2:14.
8. “Even those Christian scholars who maintain that Jesus never existed concur
that the Jews crucified him” is Simon Bernfeld’s witticism expressing the emotional
traps that litter the field of New Testament studies, quoted in Jacob Katz,
“Was the Holocaust Predictable?” Perspectives on the Holocaust, vol. 1 of The Nazi
Holocaust: Historical Articles on the Destruction of European Jews, ed. Michael Marrus
(Westport, CT: Meckler, 1989), 133–34.
9. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, 15; Fricke, The Court-Martial of Jesus, 12–13.
10. In a perceptive essay, “Marcion and the Jews” in Separation and Polemic, vol. 2 of
Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity, ed. Stephen G. Wilson (Waterloo, Ontario:
Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1986), 58, Stephen G. Wilson argues that Marcion’s
radical disconnection of Christianity and Judaism, by which Judaism retained
its God, scriptures, messiah, and law, might have preserved peace and
tolerance, whereas Christianity’s appropriation of these resulted in irreconcilable
claims and conflicts. An example of the consequent antisemitism will be found in
Marcion’s near-contemporary “Melito of Sardis: The First Poet of Deicide,” so
called by E. Werner, Hebrew Union College Annual 37 (1966): 191–210.
11. James H. Charlesworth, Jesus within Judaism (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 26;
we disagree with him that the new documents and scholarship have gone far to
remedy the loss.
12. Crossan, Who Killed Jesus?, 78.
13. Sanders, Jews and Judaism, 110, thinks that Matthew 4:17 is a piece of church
editorializing and notes that some manuscripts omit “Repent,” that rather than
national repentance and forgiveness, Jesus’ call is for individual repentance and
forgiveness.