The PREFACE to John Dominic Crossan's Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995, (paperback 1996), pp. ix-xii.



Anti-Semitism means six million Jews on Hitler's list but only twelve hundred Jews on Schindler's list. This book is about anti-Semitism, not, however, in its latest European obscenity, but in its earliest Christian latency. It is about the historicity of the passion narratives, those terribly well-known stories about Jesus' arrest and trial, abuse and crucifixion, burial and resurrection. It is about the accuracy and honesty of Christian scholarship in its best reconstruction of those ancient yet ever-present events. Biblical exegesis and historical analysis may often seem but distant murmurs from an ivory tower. Why should ordinary people care about discussions and debates among scholars? Two examples, one very small and one very large, indicate why the historicity of the passion narratives is not a question just for scholars and experts but for anyone with a heart and a conscience.

In the gospel of Mark, Jesus is tried by both a Jewish and a Roman tribunal, and each juridical process concludes with physical abuse and mockery. After the Jewish trial in Mark 14:65, "some began to spit on him," mocking him as a pseudo-prophet. After the Roman trial in Mark 15:19, "the soldiers...spat upon him," mocking him as a pseudo-king. If you are being scourged and crucified, being spat upon or even slapped may seem a very minor indignity and hardly worth consideration then or now. But, as Father Raymond E. Brown, S.S., notes in his...The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave --- A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels, those mockeries were recalled by "the Passiontide ceremony in the 9th-11th cents. in which a Jew was brought into the cathedral of Toulouse to be given a symbolic blow by the count --- an honor!" (575 note 7). No Roman, one notices, was accorded a like honor.

Brown insists that his "commentary will not ignore the ways in which guilt and punishment for the crucifixion of Jesus have been inflicted on Jews by Christians, not the least in our own times" (7). Yet, despite that statement and a long section on anti-Judaism (383-97), the best he can say about the historicity of those twin spittings is this: At the Jewish trial, "Such abuse is not at all implausible historically" (586). At the Roman trial, "There is no way of knowing whether this happened historically; at most one can discuss the issue of verisimilitude.... The content of what is described in the Gospels about the Roman mockery is not implausible, whether historical or not" (874, 877). Is that really the best that historical scholarship can offer?

It is not a question of certitude, a word that Brown uses regularly to avoid final decision: "there are severe limitations imposed by method and matter in our ability to acquire certitude about that history.... Certitude about the historicity of details is understandably infrequent" (22). Or again: "Absolute negative statements (e.g., the account has no historical basis) most often go beyond the kind of evidence available to biblical scholars" (1312). But historical scholarship is not called to absolutes or to certitudes but only to its own best reconstructions given accurately, honestly, and publicly. Even in our courts, with life and death in the balance, our best judgements are given "beyond a reasonable doubt." We seldom get to beyond any doubt. But, in the end, judgements must be made, and most historical reconstructions are based on "this is more plausible than that" rather than "this is absolutely certain" or "that is absolutely wrong." None of this allows us to hedge or to fudge or to hide behind double negatives like "not implausible" or "not impossible." Who Killed Jesus? shows how we can get beyond that impasse by beginning, for example, with a biblical text like this:

I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who
pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting.
(Isaiah 50:6)


Does the abuse of Jesus come from history remembered, or from prophecy historicized? Does it come from Christians investigating their sources to know what happened as historical event, or does it come from Christians searching their Scriptures to create what happened as prophetic fulfillment?

Consider that small spitting or slapping scene from Mark, and widen it into the following far more terrible scene:

When Pilate saw that he could do nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he
took some water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, "I am innocent
of this man's blood; see to it yourselves." Then the people as a whole answered,
"His blood be on us and on our children!"
(Matthew 27:24-25)

Brown is, once again, very aware of the latent anti-Semitism in that passage. "In commenting on this passage, one cannot ignore its tragic history in inflaming Christian hatred for Jews" (831), and he agrees (I presume) with a quotation that describes it as "'one of those phrases which have been responsible for oceans of human blood and a ceaseless stream of misery and desolation'" (831 note 22). Yet he can go on to describe it as "the most effective theater among the Synoptics, outclassed in that respect only by the Johannine masterpiece" (832), and his best historical judgement is that it is "a Matthean composition on the basis of a popular tradition reflecting on the theme of Jesus' innocent blood and the responsibility it created.... There may have been a small historical nucleus; but the detection of that nucleus with accuracy is beyond our grasp" (833). I ask, once again, is that the best we can do? Who Killed Jesus? proposes a flat alternative to Brown's The Death of the Messiah and argues that we can and must do much better. If, in my smaller example, we must assess the role of prophecy in creating history, we must, in this larger one, assess equally the role of apologetics and polemics in continuing and expanding that creation.

Here is the question at the heart of my book. Jesus stands before a Roman governor who declares him innocent and wants him released while a Jewish crowd declares him guilty and wants him crucified. The crowd wins. Is that scene Roman history, or Christian propaganda? When I am speaking of those first centuries, by the way, I use terms like Christians or Christianity exactly as I would use terms such as Essenes, Pharisees, Sadducees, or Zealots. These are groups with different and differing Jewish options about the best vision, program, and leadership for the Jewish future in a very dangerous age. History or propaganda, then, that is the question. It will take my entire book to answer it adequately, but, here to conclude the preface, I present two passages that appear later in the book to emphasize their importance:


For Christians the New Testament texts and the gospel accounts are inspired by God. But divine inspiration necessarily comes through a human heart and a mortal mind, through personal prejudice and communal interpretation, through fear, dislike, and hate as well as through faith, hope, and charity. It can also come as inspired propaganda, and inspiration does not make it any the less propaganda. In its origins and first moments, that Christian propaganda was fairly innocent. Those first Christians were relatively powerless Jews, and compared with them the Jewish authorities represented serious and threatening power. As long as Christians were the marginalized and disenfranchised ones, such passion fiction about Jewish responsibility and Roman innocence did nobody much harm. But, once the Roman Empire became Christian, that fiction turned lethal. In the light of later Christian anti-Judaism and eventually of genocidal anti-Semitism, it is no longer possible in retrospect to think of that passion fiction as relatively benign propaganda. However explicable its origins, defensible its invectives, and understandable its motives among Christians fighting for survival, its repetition has now become the longest lie, and, for our own integrity, we Christians must at last name it as such.

Externally, records of pagan contempt and records of pagan respect for Judaism started as soon as Greek culture and Roman power integrated the eastern Mediterranean into a somewhat unified whole. Internally, divergent groups within Judaism opposed one another in those same centuries with everything from armed opposition through rhetorical attack to nasty name calling. Read, for example, Josephus on any other Jews he dislikes, or read the Qumran Essenes of Dead Sea Scrolls fame on those other Jews they opposed. Christianity began as a sect within Judaism and, here slowly, there swiftly, separated itself to become eventually a distinct religion. If all this had stayed on the religious level, each side could have accused and denigrated the other quite safely forever. But, by the fourth century, Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire, and with the dawn of Christian Europe, anti-Judaism moved from theological debate to lethal possibility. Think, now, of those passion-resurrection stories as heard in a predominantly Christian world. Did those stories of ours send certain people out to kill?

Daniel,

Do you think that contemporary accounts such as this 2004 report in The Guardian have any relevance to the author's deliberations?



Any idea what might explain the remarkable persistence of this practice?

In the late winter of 1968 an American claiming to be a Christian minister stood before a pulpit in what represented itself as a Christian church and made the following statements as part of his Sunday sermon. This was no isolated incident, and still today this man and what he preached are looked to as inspirational by some.


...........for our story we turn to the Book of Matthew for the tremendous indictment by Jesus against these deadly and devilish people. Not only was Jesus creating by this indictment, Judgment, but He also said: "Upon you shall come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth." Hear this now....what a tremendous indictment out of the lips of Christ. Matthew 23:25: "Upon you shall come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth. From the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias,...whom ye slew between the Temple and the Altar." ...Therefore God said that all His believing offspring who would be murdered, put to death on the face of the earth, that He would require all of their blood at the hands of this certain people. A people that were bloodthirsty who would seek to kill and destroy.

We can go further back in the Book of Matthew where Jesus was talking to the False Pharisees.... But Jesus looked at the false Pharisees and He said in Matthew 23:24‑25: "Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. Woe unto you scribes, and false Pharisees, ye hypocrites, for ye make clean the outside of the cup, and the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess." You see, they never change, they were doing all kinds of crooked things in those days as well. And this was the policy of Jewry then, and it continues unto this day.... [Jesus] accused them of murder, and of secrecy, and even so He said: "Outwardly ye appear righteous to men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity. Woe unto you scribes, and false Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous.

"And then you say: if we had lived in the days of our fathers we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. By this ye are witness that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets.

"....Ye bear witness unto yourself that ye are the children of those who killed the prophets, so fill ye up then the measure of your father. Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of judgment and perdition? Wherefore I sent unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes, and some of them ye kill, and ye crucify some, and some of them ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city: that upon you shall come the righteous blood shed upon the earth."

Thus Christ clearly identifies the chicanery and the utter evil of the children of this bloodline which was organized Jewry.......

..........Jesus had to walk in Galilee because the Jews sought to kill Him. He couldn't walk in Judea because always they sought to kill Him, always they had blood upon their hands. Thus Jesus established that this was one of the great mysteries, that the Luciferians walked the earth and sought to kill Him.

....So Jesus turned to the Jews and said: you do the work of your father, and I am out of my father, and I do the work of my father. So what does this mean? Jesus said: I am out of the father, I am out of the fulfillment of God in the flesh, but you are out of the fulfillment of the devil. Hear this now...you progeny, the offspring, the people of the devil. So Jesus who understood this thoroughly said: why do you seek to kill me just because I have told you the truth? He said, ye do the work of your father, and they said: we were not born of fornication, we have one father, even God. John 8:41. Even in the Talmud of today they tell you that they have one God who is Lucifer and that Jesus is the devil. We know that Jesus is the embodiment of God, and that they do lie.... Therefore Jesus called them the children of a murderer, and said that they also do the work of their father who was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth because there was not truth in him. When he speaks, he speaks a lie, and he speaks of his own. He is a liar and the father of it.

.......We are dealing with a people whom Jesus said could not understand the truth, because their capacities were evil, they are the murderers, and were to blame for all the righteous blood shed upon the face of the earth....

......We turn then to the Book of Revelation and we are told that one of the great last situations will be the rise of Mystery Babylon the Great. This is an evil system, a political system, a religious system, and an economic system, that Jews control and use. This is Mystery Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots. This system controls crime, vice, and everything that is evil operates out of this system. Their mysterious design is to gain control of labor, of the money systems of the world, and to utilize this power in their hands....

Now make no mistake about this:...Here in this Book of Revelation The Christ proved to John that organized Jewry, which He denounced in Matthew 23, and Mystery Babylon are one and the same. That Organized Jewry and its Priesthood control Mystery Babylon. That they are behind world communism, they are behind the International Monetary design to confiscate the money of the world. They are behind the complete conspiracy of utter evil, utter immorality, of other depravities, and their design is to destroy the nations of this world.

........Now an intelligent person who loves God and believes in Jesus the Christ are going to be against organized Jewry, but oh, how they look for the day when they are going to kill you. Remember here that they have been involved in every basic war which you have been in.... They are getting wealthy and fat off the great weapons you make to kill yourselves with.

.....Your sons by the thousands are fighting and dying in an Asian war while those making all those profits are laughing as they are murdering your sons....

Hi Daniel

I notice that you've posted again to this topic, which is located in the Philosophy > Debates section.

Do you intend to debate? Or are you just providing us with reading material?

Incidentally, this latest extract would be more useful if you told us who was the speaker and provided a source.

Dear Sidney,

I notice that you've posted again to this topic as well. You're correct -- it is indeed located in the Philosophy > Debates section.

Thank you for advising us what "would be more useful" regarding "this latest extract." However, in keeping with my newfound adherence to Forum guidelines I believe what's important are the views expressed by the speaker. My topic is "Christianity and Anti-Semitism" and the views expressed are quite extreme manifestations relevant to that topic.

What I intend in this thread I started is to address a topic that is important to me. That may well include debate, to the extent I have time for it, if someone posts anything relevant to the topic of the thread -- and if their views are not demented. If you're assuming that your first post was relevant, or assuming that I regard your views worth debating, I can assure you that these assumptions are mistaken. I can also assure you that you are badly overmatched in this territory.

If you feel the need to debate you know you can always get Len going, and you and your partner can engage to your heart's delight in a macabre form of Jew-pulling.

In the meantime, watch and pray.

Your friend in Jesus,
Dan

Daniel,

The accusation of 'Jew-baiting' is repugnant.

I do not feel it is justified. To the extent that you, however, believe it is justified, I regret that. If you can show me where I've 'baited', I'll certainly apologize.

To me, ANY form of 'baiting' on the basis of creed, ethnicity, skin colour or any other cultural or biological trait is repugnant. In that respect - as in so many others - we are all equal.

I have no desire to 'deny' or belittle all Jewish suffering in the past, or to paint Jews as villains in every (or most) circumstances.

We just need a balanced debate about our common history on this planet if we are to understand it. When I say 'we', I mean humanity as a whole.

In most relationships there are at least two sides to the story. You seem to feel justified in insisting that only a one-sided narrative of Jewish - Christian relations is acceptable. It is a rather charicatured narrative in which Jews always suffered persecution and Christians always behaved as bigots and / or villains.

The truth is more complex. Read the late Professor Israel Shahak's Jewish History, Jewish Religion; The Weight of 3000 Years.

It's true that Jews, considered as a distinct, self-identifying subset of humanity, have had a tough history.

So has humanity as a whole.

The most important thing, IMO, is to work together for a better future for all.

GOSH !!!!! Does this mean that Sid was only pretending to be a Nazi after all or is he actually a representative of a "self identifying subset" of the very stupid end of humanity who have very clumsily mistaken free speech for the freedom to spread foul and offensive lies about the past???
I think we ought to be told

Sid,

Very nicely put. Very nicely worded. This is your argumentation at it's most persuasive. I agree that "the truth" is more complex, as I hope to demonstrate as time will allow over the coming weeks or more likely months. Sadly, I have a real job, and can only attend to these things in my spare time.

My intention in this thread is to present an argument about how one writer transformed the Gospel of Matthew with some extremely vindictive language, and how that language and his point of view helped in a most serious way to create and encourage antisemitic attitudes in Christians for nearly two millenia.

Given that this is my intention, your own reflexive, automatic responses have been most revealing, as you evidently felt that such a thread that starts with a Preface to a book written by a New Testament scholar and continued with an antisemitic harangue by a lunatic preacher might be "all about you." I assure you that is far from being the case. The only other conclusion I could draw was that you felt the need to "block me" from having people read what I had posted......... I seriously doubt that my name attached to anything gathers all that much attention, but still it's flattering anyone might think so.

So fear not: this thread poses no threat to Christians, except to the extent that thinking presents a threat.

This has already been educational, since I've had to reconsider my original intentions in starting this thread.

On the one hand, I think I can demonstrate something about the text of the Gospel of Matthew that is fairly important, could be helpful, and is not "beyond" or "over the heads of" most people. But to do so would take a lot of my free time, as it will involve typing out large parts of the text of Matthew to show what I'm talking about. So one question is whether it would be worth it (in various ways). Wouldn't my interests be better served by holding back "publication" instead of "giving it away for free"? Not entirely a selfish consideration, since there's some possibility that people who are not very conscientious might take my material (ideas, arguments) and publish it as their own work.

On the other hand, since my first two posts seem to have inspired a bit of foot-stamping and harumphing, and lately there've been indications of what some might hope are symptoms of the early stages of a conversion experience, I have to consider that those two posts may be enough in themselves. Anything I add might only be extraneous to the main topic, and people could accuse me (with some justification) of pontificating and "holding forth" needlessly. More importantly, it's entirely possible that people who don't want to deal with this issue or to have this issue explored (thought about, discussed) might like nothing better than to see such a thread develop into a 17-page experiment in digression that no one has the time or patience to bother with. In other words, the original two posts would be buried when they may be the most important things in the thing.

So I'm grateful, Sid. Thanks for giving me reason to reconsider my original intentions. The following represents the introduction to what I'd planned on pursuing.
-------------------------------------
-------------------------------------


Assuming that there's a serious problem involved in this issue, how do Christians reconcile the disconnect between the problem and their faith? Or how does anyone deal with this issue, whether they see themselves as people of faith or not?

I will assume most people can agree that the views expressed in the "sermon" quoted in my second post are extraordinarily appalling, and the issue there may not seem too complicated. The preacher's entire body of work reveals extreme paranoia, fear-mongering and incitement to hatred. So we could label this "crazy," and we can even note that there is a definite psychological fixation in which Jews have become the singular embodiment and representative of Evil On Earth, helping account for all other evils threatening to overwhelm the White Christian (like Communism, Socialism, Negroes, the United Nations, the National Council of Churches, the World Council of Churches, the Federal Reserve System, the One World Order, Eleanor Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, and whatever else gets in our way). In essence, then, this can be "understood" in a psychological sense: the embodiment of evil might have been any scapegoat, and this preacher just happened to be fixated on Jews.

And yet our preacher was not entirely "misquoting the Bible" in the excerpts from that sermon.

The Preface that John Dominic Crossan wrote for his book Who Killed Jesus? strikes me as being very reasonable and as non-controversial as possible in addressing a controversial subject. One of the benefits of studying works of biblical scholarship, particularly those over the last couple of decades which are more generally accessible to laymen, is the recognition that sacred texts do not often come into being all at once. Instead, most developed over time and passed through any number of earlier versions before some completed version became canonized (by some official body) as an inviolable text. (See, viz., Burton L. Mack's Who Wrote the New Testament?)

Moreover, given that Jesus and his earliest followers were most likely people of the "lower classes" (i.e., the vast, vast majority of people in ancient societies), much scholarship argues that the most original information about Jesus was probably passed on in oral traditions that were themselves developed and expanded on over time until they were set down in written form. There is some consensus among many scholars that the most reliable information we have about what Jesus said is found in the very earliest layer of a text some call the Q Gospel. (Burton Mack proposes his own reconstruction and translation of this earliest layer in The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q & Christian Origins [San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993], pp. 73-80. Cf. John Dominic Crossan's The Historical Jesus [San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992], pp.xiii-xxvi, and The Birth of Christianity [San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1999], pp. 587-91[Appendix I]. Around 30% of the material in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas has parallels in the Q Gospel, an overlapping which seems critical for understanding both texts and a "common sayings tradition" that may lie behind them [Crossan, Birth, p.587].)

The Q source is referred to as a "sayings gospel," as other examples of "sayings literature" have been discovered over the past century. The characteristic of this literature is that, in memorializing a revered teacher, a list of his sayings were written down with little in the way of narrative elaboration. Viz.,

"Jesus said: Blessed are the poor.......

"Jesus said: etc."

This does not mean a later source (like the Gospel of Mark from the 70s A.D., which provides what we take as an historical account of Jesus' life), is automatically less reliable than what we find in the Q Gospel, or that a much later narrative source (the Gospel of Luke from the 90s A.D. or later) could not contain very original, historically accurate information of its own. But as a working hypothesis, the earlier text is presumed to be more reliable as it is closer to actual events and there is less chance of additional (non-original) interests being injected into the story. As one can gather from Dr. Crossan's Preface, wholly apart from addressing the issue of how Christian texts may have helped produce antisemitic ideas and attitudes, it is controversial enough to discover and attempt to make clear to what extent a Christian Gospel might be based on the "literary creativity" of early Christians, searching their (Jewish) scriptures as they tried to make sense of the fate of Jesus of Nazareth, and "making" a biographical account with striking parallels to their scriptures. Fortunately for me, it won't be necessary to go into much further depth on that subject in order to address the topic of this thread.

My main premises at the start are that various sources were used in the creation of the text of the Gospel of Matthew, and that there is a possibility this creation involved more than one hand in the writing before the text became canonized as the Matthew we have known for nearly two millenia. I assume as a given the validity of the standard two-source theory accepted by most scholars -- that the Gospels of Luke and Matthew were each (separately) created by using two main sources, a version of the Gospel of Mark and a version of the Q-source (Q Gospel). This essentially means that somewhere along the line two separate writers had before them some text of Mark and some text of Q and composed their own Gospels by direct copying from those sources. (See Mack's Lost Gospel, pp. 3-4, 15-27 and passim for background; a good summary is at Mack's Who Wrote the New Testament? pp. 47-53.)

But once Mark and Q are eliminated from the texts of Matthew and Luke, there is considerable extra information in each text -- viz., the Nativity episodes and the lists of Jesus' genealogical descent, or a number of parables spoken by Jesus, etc. Much of this can be understood as coming from other sources (beyond Mark-Q) that the composers of Luke and Matthew used. But some of this would tend to reveal what the actual (main) author "had to say" about various issues. In the case of Matthew, it's fairly easily recognizable that "the Matthew author proper" was very concerned with and predisposed to arguing that the fate of Jesus fulfilled prophecy in many ways. The question I will try to address is whether that (main) author is the same writer that injected a good deal of spite into the text.

I believe it's possible to demonstrate that this is not the case, and that what is surely a later hand ("voice") makes a very distinct appearance, transforming the text of Matthew into something which seems far from its origins as a work of "Jewish Christian" followers of Jesus of Nazareth. I believe recognition of this can help us understand how a religion traditionally so identified with the concept of love could also contain much that has inspired hatred (and fear, suspicion, victimization, etc) of Jews.

From William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1962, pp. 326-330.



....The more fanatical Nazis among [German Protestants] organized in 1932 "The German Christians' Faith Movement" of which the most vehement leader was a certain Ludwig Mueller, army chaplain of the East Prussia Military District, a devoted follower of Hitler who had first brought the Fuehrer together with General von Blomberg when the latter commanded the district. The "German Christians" ardently supported the Nazi doctrines of race and the leadership principle and wanted them applied to a Reich Church which would bring all Protestants into one all-embracing body....

....It is difficult to understand the behavior of most German Protestants in the first Nazi years unless one is aware of two things: their history and the influence of Martin Luther. The great founder of Protestantism was both a passionate anti-Semite and a ferocious believer in absolute obediance to political authority. He wanted Germany rid of the Jews and when they were sent away he advised that they be deprived of "All their cash and jewels and silver and gold" and, furthermore, "that their synagogues or schools be set on fire, that their houses be broken up and destroyed...and they be put under a roof or stable, like the gypsies...in misery and captivity as they incessantly lament and complain to God about us"...

In what was perhaps the only popular revolt in German history, the peasant uprising of 1525, Luther advised the princes to adopt the most ruthless measures against the "mad dogs," as he called the desperate, downtrodden peasants. Here, as in his utterances about the Jews, Luther employed a coarseness and brutality of language unequaled in German history until the Nazi time. The influence of this towering figure extended down the generations in Germany, especially among the Protestants. Among other results was the ease with which German Protestantism became the instrument of royal and princely absolutism from the sixteenth century until the kings and princes were overthrown in 1918. The hereditary monarchs and petty rulers became the supreme bishops of the Protestant Church in their lands.... In no country with the exception of Czarist Russia did the clergy become by tradition so completely servile to the political authority of the State. Its members, with few exceptions, stood solidly behind the King, the Junkers and the Army, and during the nineteenth century they dutifully opposed the rising liberal and democratic movements. Even the Weimar Republic was anathema to most Protestant pastors, not only because it had deposed the kings and princes but because it drew its main support from the Catholics and the Socialists. During the Reichstag elections one could not help but notice that the Protestant clergy -- Niemoller was typical -- quite openly supported the Nationalist and even the Nazi enemies of the Republic. Like Niemoller, most of the pastors welcomed the advent of Adolf Hitler to the chancellorship in 1933.

....In July 1933 representatives of the Protestant churches had written a constitution for a new "Reich Church," and it was formally recognized by the Reichstag on July 14. Immediately there broke out a heated struggle over the election of the first Reich Bishop. Hitler insisted that his friend, Chaplain Mueller, whom he had appointed his adviser on Protestant church affairs, be given this highest office. The leaders of the Church Federation proposed an eminent divine, Pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh. But they were naive. The Nazi government intervened, dissolved a number of provincial church organizations, suspended from office several leading dignitaries of the Protestant churches, loosed the S.A. and the Gestapo on recalcitrant clergymen.... The intimidation was highly successful. Bodelschwingh in the meantime had been forced to withdraw his candidacy, and the "elections" returned a majority of "German Christians," who in September at the synod in Wittenberg, where Luther had first defied Rome, elected Mueller Reich Bishop.

But the new head of the Church, a heavy-handed man, was not able to establish a unified Church... On November 13, 1933, the day after the German people had overwhelmingly backed Hitler in a national plebiscite, the "German Christians" staged a massive rally in the Sportpalast in Berlin. A Dr. Reinhard Krause, the Berlin district leader of the sect, proposed the abandonment of the Old Testament, "with its tales of cattle merchants and pimps" and the revision of the New Testament with the teaching of Jesus "corresponding entirely with the demands of National Socialism." Resolutions were drawn up demanding "One People, One Reich, One Faith," requiring all pastors to take an oath of allegiance to Hitler and insisting that all churches institute the Aryan paragraph and exclude converted Jews. This was too much even for the timid Protestants who had declined to take any part in the church war, and Bishop Mueller was forced to suspend Dr. Krause and disavow him.

....By the beginning of 1934, the disillusioned Pastor Niemoller had become the guiding spirit of the minority resistance in both the "Confessional Church" and the Pastors' Emergency League. At the General Synod in Barmen in May 1934, and at a special meeting in Niemoller's Church of Jesus Christ at Dahlem, a suburb of Berlin, in November, the "Confessional Church" declared itself to be the legitimate Protestant Church of Germany and set up a provisional church government. Thus there were now two groups -- Reich Bishop Mueller's and Niemoller's -- claiming to legally constitute the Church.

It was obvious that the former army chaplain, despite his closeness to Hitler, had failed to integrate the Protestant churches, and at the end of 1935, after the Gestapo had arrested seven hundred "Confessional Church" pastors, he resigned his office and faded out of the picture. Already, in July 1935, Hitler had appointed a Nazi lawyer friend, Dr. Hans Kerrl, to be Minister for Church Affairs, with instructions to make a second attempt to co-ordinate the Protestants. One of the milder Nazis and a somewhat cautious man, Kerrl at first had considerable success. He succeeded not only in winning over the conservative clergy, which constituted the majority, but in setting up a Church Committee headed by the venerable Dr. Zoellner, who was respected by all factions, to work out a general settlement. Though Niemoller's group co-operated with the committee, it still maintained that it was the only legitimate Church. When, in May 1936, it addressed a courteous but firm memorandum to Hitler protesting against the anti-Christian tendencies of the regime, denouncing the government's anti-Semitism and demanding an end to State interference in the churches, Frick, the Nazi Minister of the Interior, responded with ruthless action. Hundreds of "Confessional Church" pastors were arrested, one of the signers of the memorandum, Dr. Weissler, was murdered in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the funds of the "Confessional Church" were confiscated and it was forbidden to make collections.

On February 12, 1937, Dr. Zoellner resigned from the Church Committee -- he had been restrained by the Gestapo from visiting Luebeck, where nine Protestant pastors had been arrested -- complaining that his work had been sabotaged by the Church Minister. Dr. Kerrl replied the next day in a speech to a group of submissive churchmen. He accused the venerable Zoellner of failing to appreciate the Nazi doctrine of Race, Blood and Soil, and clearly revealed the government's hostility to both Protestant and Catholic churches.


The party [Kerrl said] stands on the basis of Positive Christianity, and
Positive Christianity is National Socialism...National Socialism is the
doing of God's will...God's will reveals itself in German blood...Dr. Zoellner
and Count Galen [the Catholic bishop of Muenster] have tried to make clear
to me that Christianity consists in faith in Christ as the Son of God. That
makes me laugh...No, Christianity is not dependent upon the Apostle's
Creed...True Christianity is represented by the party, and the German
people are now called by the party and especially by the Fuehrer to a real
Christianity...The Fuehrer is the herald of a new revelation.

It’s taken forty years for me to get round to reading one of my History Tutor’s (Rev. J.L.Houlden) theology books, and I chose probably his simplest: “Jesus: A Question of Identity”.

One of the points he makes in the book is that the attempt by biblical scholars to find ‘the historical Jesus’, to strip away the miraculous and get to the bare human truth, failed, because they were inextricably mixed. However, your attempt to strip the apparent anti-semitism out of Matthew sounds a more limited goal, and I await your findings with interest.

One or two historical points occur. How far were the Nazis, how far were the German people in general, influenced by the Scriptures to be anti-semitic? How much was the influence of Luther a factor? My own feeling, if I may be Devil’s Advocate so to speak, is that European anti-semitism in the Middle Ages had much to do with economics, perhaps with early stirrings of nationalism, and very little to do with biblical authority, while in the 20th century anti-semitism seems to be connected with the rise of nationalism.

There is a danger here of looking at 1st Century anti-semitism through a 20th century lense. The Roman authorities in the 1st century occasionally turned on the Jews, but didn’t in general seem to have used ethnic tensions as a tool in policy. Nation states as they emerged in Europe in the 19th and 20th century, on the other hand, were very racially conscious, and by the time of the Treaty of Versailles the idea that every people was entitled to a homeland had taken over. This, it seems to me, was the background to European anti-semitism in the 20th Century.

Matthew, whoever he was or they were, lived in a world where the singling out of a racial group for criticism didn’t instantly apark off racial riots. A more typical example of racial attitudes would be in the later Roman Empire when Roman patricians famously lamented the introduction of trousers – a Germanic fashion.

Even if a later editor of Matthew’s Gospel wanted to make the Gospel more gentile-friendly his target was clearly (admittedly not so clearly in the case of Matthew 27 v.25) some of the Jewish religious authorities in Jerusalem, not the entire Jewish race.

Norman - since when was the quality of 'Jewishness' a racial trait?

Have you perhaps been misled by reading too much Nazi (or Zionist) propaganda?

To my knowledge, these are the only two ideologies that have ever made such a claim.

Sid, large numbers of people use the term race inaccurately or misleadingly. Including, it appears, me on this occasion: I should perhaps have put quotation marks around the term 'racial group'. To be fair, I was describing what the Romans didn't do , and pointing out the contrast with what later people sometimes did - and in so doing repeated their thought pattern - which as a matter of fact isn't mine. If my words, even after this further explanation, still appear to smack of Nazism or Zionism, please let me know.

Norman,
You always make excellent points to consider. Unfortunately I've had to put my original plans on hold, for reasons mentioned at the beginning of post #9, and also because I have way too many other things to do (the most critical being going to work and trying to earn a living). While it might be a good idea to publish my thesis here and get it vetted by interested parties, as of right now I can't even imagine when I would find the time to do so.

The only immediate further contribution I may make in this thread would be to manually transcribe (type out) excerpts from the book The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI, by way of a companion piece to Shirer's account of German Protestants' reactions to the rise of the Third Reich and giving some idea of the equivocations involved in contemporary reactions of Catholic officialdom (and in general the intellectual acrobatics involved in Christian thinking about Jews). But again, I don't know when I will find the time to do that.
I think you would find Crossan's Historical Jesus of interest on this point. In his analysis he makes a distinction between the healing miracles performed by Jesus and "physical miracles" like walking on water, etc. My recollection is he argues that for the most part the physical miracles may be "Church doctrine" stories (sometimes displaced to an earlier time, viz, during Jesus' career) meant to convey official teaching on the point of who had primacy and authority, and/or by way of providing comfort to Christians under persecution. (So, viz, a fishing vessel full of Apostles is in danger of sinking from a storm until Jesus appears walking on the water and calms the sea; and the Transfiguration episode might be a post-Resurrection event, a story about an appearance by the resurrected Jesus, which serves to confirm the authority of Peter and the brothers James and John, the original leaders of the "Mother Church" in Jerusalem.) Conversely, the healing miracle aspects are in Crossan's analysis integral to the "mission-as-such" of Jesus and his followers (with some emphasis on exorcism, ie, a holistic therapeutic approach to various psychological disturbances that people suffered from).

Your second question (Luther's influence) is not something I can comment on, as I've not read much on Martin Luther. Beyond the excerpt from Shirer's book, in which Luther is briefly quoted as to some of what he had to say about Jews in Germany, I'm only aware of Erich Fromm's analysis of Luther and John Calvin in Escape From Freedom, which has nothing to say about their attitudes toward Jews or influence on antisemitism per se.

But I think this is linked to your first question, which is the very reason for my starting this thread; it has less to do as such with Nazism much less the German people than with all of us in Christian culture or civilization -- ie,.how far are any of us influenced to believe things in anti-Jewish terms? As I remarked in post #9, the antisemtic preacher of my second post was not exactly "misquoting the Bible." And while it might be nice to think that only some vindictive rhetoric here and there resulted in some isolated incidents of violence (or discrimination, persecution, etc), the simple fact of the matter to me is that the "official" Christian belief system is formative in creating and encouraging anti-Jewish beliefs and attitudes. Simply put, how are we supposed to feel and what are we supposed to think about Jews as such and in toto when exposed for a couple thousand years to a refrain of the-Jews-"rejected"/murdered-the Savior/God Incarnate?

You might agree that possible results of the Roman-Jewish War of the 60s and 70s AD would have been certain negative attitudes (in Roman "good society") toward Jews (a rebellious people) and some distancing of themselves from Jews on the part of Christians. At some point polemical battles among first century Jews might tend to veer sharply in the direction of the canonical Gospels' apologetic stance of "Rome/Romans are innocent in our drama," if understood as forms of self-censorship in the interests of self-preservation. (This was later in the drama, and it's reasonable to assume that once Christianity had spread to literate society there might have been some falling away from the examples of courage displayed by the Founder.) But if things like that occur, and become combined with overarching theological polemics and perspectives (the Jews rejected their Messiah/King), I believe the stage is set for Jews becoming a focus for much in the way of slander, suspicion, discrimination, persecution and slaughter.

Economics, nationalism, politics, "scientific racial theories," etc are incestuously linked in all this, but the question at bottom is how much is the overall belief system and not just some of the rhetoric conducive to or formative for overall anti-Jewish attitudes, beliefs, actions? If you take the Gospel accounts as Gospel Truth, you could conceivably make a movie and depart from the (Gospels) script by depicting some of Jesus' followers pleading with Roman soldiers to save Him from the hands of the Jews after He was arrested, and having the wife of Pontius Pilate offer the Virgin Mary a towel to wipe off the blood from the Body of her Son (the Son of Man and the Son of God). And you could make an awful lot of money off a movie like that, particularly if you indulge people's voyeuristic fascination with cinematic depictions of extreme violence (although your people are ironically to be "shielded" from seeing too much "real-life" violence in the news, particularly when it results from your own government's policies). I think it's important for people to have a better awareness and appreciation of the extreme forms of brutality Jesus was subjected to (as in The Passion of the Christ), but when the argument is made or suggested that although Romans were actually in charge of all the inflicting of violence it was really Jews who were behind it all, then we are confronted with issues of conscience that go beyond questions of historical inaccuracy or even simple dishonesty.

And so I believe there's less of a danger of our "looking at 1st Century anti-semitism through a 20th century lens" than in continuing to obscure our sacred literature's formative influence in creating and encouraging antisemitic beliefs and attitudes for all these centuries and on into the 21st century.

Today, and for the past century, some have had the luxury of cloaking antisemitism in a reasonable opposition to Zionism and the policies of the Israeli nation-state. But the Zionist movement came in response to antisemitic pogroms occurring in central and eastern Europe and was given an immediate push from the Dreyfus affair, when Jewish people had to recognize that even in France (the supposed representative of culture and civilization in a good sense) there were certain realities about "the status of Jews" that had to be faced. The Zionists came to the conclusion that the only secure option was a "national homeland" for the Jewish people. That this might become an instance of western colonialism or imperialism (ie, "white people" going to Palestine and taking land away from "natives") obviously and unfortunately was not much of a consideration for Zionists at the time. And that a better option would have been assimilation of Jews in multicultural societies sounds great, but this had occurred to any significant degree only in "Anglo-Saxon" countries or those which were developing some adherence to principles of liberal democracy (the Low Countries). All very complicated, of course, but one of the more objectionable phenomena of today is that in Arab and Islamic cultures antisemitic ideas are being encouraged and even inculcated among the young; this did not come from Islam or the Qu'ran or the Prophet Muhammad (far from it) -- its origins lie in our own culture and is being encouraged by extremists in our own societies. In essence, people of "the Third World" are now feeding on our own intellectual sewage.......

By way of concluding this overly long and typically rambling reply, I once more make an effort and type out some pertinent excerpts. The first is from Crossan's Who Killed Jesus?, in which he makes some distinction between theological anti-Judaism and what he elsewhere calls "genocidal anti-Semitism." The second excerpt provides some contrast. In closing I would say I think the issue of whether Jewish people are defined as following a different creed or as somehow being a different race begs the question when we're fundamentally talking about "minority groups" and how they are treated or "tolerated" by dominant populations in any society. Recognition of that may help people to be able to criticize bigotry and "majority-population-supremacy" in general (much including Israeli attitudes toward and treatment of Arabs), without getting lost in intellectual arguments and potentially being forced into positions of serving as dishonest apologists. As Job said, "It is all one."



"At the start of [this Prologue -- dwd] I asked this question, and I now repeat it: what is at stake in all of this? Why should the interested reader, as distinct from a scholarly specialist, care about how many sources we have for the passion-resurrection stories, whether they derive from prophecy or history....? The answer, which was already given in my preface earlier, involves the passion-resurrection stories as the matrix for Christian anti-Judaism and eventually for European anti-Semitism. I distinguish those two terms because anti-Semitism only arrives in history when anti-Judaism is combined with racism. Anti-Judaism is religious prejudice: a Jew can convert to avoid it. Anti-Semitism is racial prejudice: a Jew can do nothing to avoid it. They are equally despicable but differently so." (JDCrossan, Who Killed Jesus? pp. 31-32)



"It is considered proper, these days, to emphasize that the theological anti-Judaism handed down by Christian tradition since the Patristic period has nothing in common with anti-Semitism. This dissociation generally serves to reduce to the status of simple spasms deriving from an ancient religious quarrel the episodic hostile excesses with regard to Jews that could be imputed to the Church as an institution.

"On a theoretical level the distinction is perfectly justified. One is nonetheless led to question its pertinence as soon as one considers the particulars of any given historical situation. Particularly when one is examining the history of La Civilta' cattolica [the official journal of Italian Jesuits -- dwd] up to the Second World War, the boundary seems very fluid between the "average" anti-Semitism of the period, on the one hand, and on the other the anti-Judaism constantly manifested by the editors of that review in all the battles in the course of their long-term war against what they considered to be the various political expressions of modernity: liberalism, Garibaldism, republicanism, Freemasonry, socialism, bolshevism, etc....

"On 12 October 1922, discussing the 'worldwide revolution and the Jews,' an anonymous writer [for the Jesuit journal -- dwd] drew up the following clinical balance sheet of his period:


"The world is sick. [...] Everywhere peoples are in the grip of inexplicable
convulsions [...] and the filthy element, as uninterested in work as it is avid
for money and unattainable pleasures, seems to be amusing itself in a
frenetic and tragic dance of tumults and strikes, waiting to proclaim the
communist republic tomorrow, while the politicians, the wise men of the
nations, frightened, frantically search for a peace that is no more than a
perpetual disillusion. Where are we going? [...] Who is leading? [...] Who
is urging on this rabble of parties, leagues, and lodges, and guides this
movement of universal revolution which is turning human society's head
from one end of the world to the other? [...]

"Who? The Synagogue, the author answers, after having 'demonstrated' that in Russia, the source of world subversion, and in the communist International, all the levers of power were in the hands of 'Jewish intruders.'

"In the same vein, on 25 September 1936, another anonymous writer formulated the 'Jewish question' in the following terms:


"Two facts that seem contradictory are both verified through the Jews
dispersed in the modern world: their control of money and their
preponderance in the socialism and communism [that][sic]
constitute a grave and permanent peril for society.

"....The same theme reappeared...in May 1937, in a series of articles on the 'Jewish Question' in relation to Zionism, conversions, and Catholic apostleship. In the first of these articles, the anonymous writer, basing himself especially on 'the clear and illuminating exposition of the illustrious English Catholic writer' Hilaire Belloc, asserts at the outset that it is 'an obvious fact that the Jews are a disruptive element because of their dominating spirit and their revolutionary tendency. Judaism is [...] a foreign body that irritates and provokes the reactions of the organism it has contaminated.

"'The whole question consists in finding the most appropriate way of getting rid of the irritation and re-establishing, on a durable basis, the social organism's equilibrium and tranquility. There are only two possible solutions: elimination or segregation....'"
(Georges Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky, The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI. Translated from the French by Steven Rendall. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1997, pp. 123-127.)

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