It is difficult to acknowledge that the New Testament contains antisemitic scriptures that exhibit hostility and prejudice against the Jewish people and indicts the Pharisees and Jewish leaders for the death of Jesus specifically and all generations of Jewish people since the death of Jesus generally. The antisemitism in the New Testament has had disastrous consequences in the history of the church, not only for the Jewish people but also for Islamic people (especially Arabic people) as well, from individual examples including Martin Luther's On the Jews and Their Lies to the unparalleled atrocity of the Holocaust. The New Testament is a human witness to the revelation of the Word of God in Jesus Christ, so it is possible to recognize and correct antisemitic scriptures that oppose the gospel with other scriptures that affirm the gospel of Jesus Christ. For instance, Wolfhart Pannenberg argues that uniquely bad examples of antisemitism such as in 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 may be corrected by other New Testament scriptures such as Ephesians 2:14-16:
1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 (NRSV): "For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, for you suffered the same things from your own compatriots as they did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out; they displease God and oppose everyone by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. Thus they have constantly been filling up the measure of their sins; but God’s wrath has overtaken them at last."Ephesians 2:14-16 (NRSV): "For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it."
In Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow, Hans Küng compiled a list of anti-Judaism examples in the New Testament that is sobering to read:
And it must be conceded on the Christian said, without any ifs and buts, that the christological exegesis of the Hebrew Bible brought an anti-Jewish exegesis in its train. Anyone who reads the New Testament writings will be able to note without having it pointed out to them:
— under the pressure of the need to legitimate itself, the young Christian community increasingly presented the official Judaism which rejected it as fallen, apostate Israel.
— priests and scribes are increasingly slandered as being not only uncomprehending but 'blind leaders', indeed as a 'generation of vipers', 'whitewashed sepulchres' and so on: (The sayings collected together by Matthew in ch. 23 beginning with 'Woe to you' are particularly bad: Matt 23:16ff)
— the Jewish people as a whole begins to be regarded as a 'wicked and faithless generation'; (Matt 12:39; 16:4)
— in particular the Pharisees, the dominant group after the fall of the Second Temple, are dismissed in the Gospel written by the Jewish Christian Matthew as 'hypocrites', as representatives of a pure legalism and formalism; ('hypocrites' is used just once in the earliest Gospel Mark 7:6, in the later Gospel of Matthew it is used 13 times, principally of the 'scribes and Pharisees'.)
— the Romans are exonerated as far as possible from responsibility for the death of Jesus, at the expense of the Jews; (This is particularly evident in the Gospel of John.)
— the term 'the Jews' in the New Testament increasingly takes on negative connotations, instead of being used purely descriptively, and the word 'Jewish' is constantly avoided as a designation of young Christianity as such;
— finally, with a reference to the alleged fate of earlier prophets, 'the Jews' are said to have a deadly intent and to have brought their fate upon themselves. Worst of all is the statement. 'Then all the people cried out (before Pilate), "His blood be on us and our children."' (Matt 27:25; pace. R. Kampling) This was to have the most pernicious results, but it is hardly historical. [1]
How do Christians today respond to the New Testament's antisemitic scriptures? By demythologizing the New Testament's antisemitism! First of all, the Gospel opposes antisemitism, racisim and all forms of xenophobia, as exemplified by Ephesians 2:14-16 (quoted above) because it is a universal gospel for all humankind and the entire world. And the human witness of the New Testament is the revelation of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and therefore any instances of antisemitism in the New Testament must be corrected by the greater, complete and true witness of the New Testament.
Additionally, it is important for Christians to acknowledge that antisemitism exists in the New Testament in order to reject it, to halt the perpetuation of anti-Judaism, and to seek reconciliation with Jewish people. Jürgen Moltmann is an excellent example of how a Christian may respond to the wrongful claim that the "Jews crucified Christ" regardless of whether the blame is placed on the first century Jewish people or in the horrific instances where Jewish people are blamed today.
Jürgen Moltmann said:
"The other point is that in one of the later letters we read that the “Jews crucified Christ”. I think this is wrong—the Jews were not allowed to crucify any person, they were only allowed to stone people. So the crucifixion was a roman affair and the Romans crucified God. The Jews are not the enemies of God, as I read in the Apostle Paul in Romans 9-11, about Israel and the future of Israel’s salvation and the whole of Israel, and I think this is closer to the truth that is obvious in Christ himself than this phrase is in the late letters. We call this material criticism. So I’m not criticism not based on what is going on or not going on in the human world, or humanism, or other things. I’m criticizing on the criterion that is in the Scriptures itself." [2]
I previously mentioned Wolfhart Pannenberg's response to antisemitism in the New Testament, and in the same location within Pannenberg's The Apostles Creed In Light of Today's Questions praises Vatican II's renunciation of anti-Judaism. (Hans Kung was a peritus at Vatican II and repeats the same sentiment in his Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow.)
Wolfhart Pannenberg writes:
In a similar sense the Second Vatican Council's declaration on the relation of the church to the Jewish people objected to the Jews being depicted as "rejected or cursed by God". But what has to be corrected today is not only the renunciation of solidarity with the Jewish people because of the cross of Jesus—which, after all, rather reconciled Jew and Gentile, according to Eph 2:14-16. It is just as important for the present discussion between Christian and Jews that Jewish people should not be identified as a whole and for all time with the actions of its leaders at that period. That is why the declaration of the Second Vatican Council runs: "Although the Jewish leaders and their supporters urged the death of Jesus, the events of his passion can nonetheless not be laid at the door of all Jews living at that time without distinction, or at the door of Jews today." [3]
Who specifically is to be indicted for the death of Jesus? As Karl Barth argued, the death of Jesus Christ was for the judge judged in our place, and therefore we all are to be indicted for the death of Jesus, so that we may all be saved by the death of Jesus. So all specific indictments whether anti-Jewish or antisemitic must be rejected as opposed to the gospel of Jesus Christ, even when they inexplicably appear in the New Testament itself.
Sources:
1. Hans Küng, Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow, pp. 355-6. Comment's in () are selections from footnotes references in location.
2. Jürgen Moltmann, 2009 Emergent Village Theological Conversation with Jürgen Moltmann.
3. Wolfhart Pannenberg, The Apostles Creed In Light of Today's Questions, Westminster Press, 1972, p. 83
4. Header features the "Yellow badge made mandatory by the Nazis in France" source: wikipedia.org
Related: antijudaism, Antisemitism, Hans Küng, Holocaust, Jewish people, Jews, Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow, Jürgen Moltmann, Martin Luther, On the Jews and Their Lies, R. Kampling, Second Vatican Council, The Apostles Creed In Light of Today's Questions, Vatican II, Wolfhart Pannenberg, yellow badge, yellow star
October 16th, 2019 - 05:55
I agree with everything you wrote here, everything these theologians wrote but there has been a dangerous tendency of Christians to take all of the blame for the Holocaust when the Nazis were as bent on destroying Christianity as they were committing genocide against the Jews. Their plans for destroying Christianity were different, they involved murders, too, but needed to take seriously the fact that most Germans were Christians to some extent, but that was their goal.
The Nazi antisemitism was far more influenced by the theory of natural selection mixed with linguistic-national theories derived from romantic-era pseudo-science. The explicit evocation of natural selection by Reinhard Heydrich during the Wannsee conference, planning the industrial murder of all Jews couldn’t be clearer. As it says at the Virtual Jewish Library site:
One of Heydrich’s subordinates, Adolf Eichmann, took minutes, thirty copies of which were evidently distributed among the participants and other interested parties in the following weeks. The only surviving copy, marked No. 16 out of 30, was found in March 1947 among German Foreign Office files by American War Crimes investigators. After that discovery, the minutes, or “Wannsee Protocol,” rapidly attained postwar notoriety.
The document’s resonance derived above all from the coldly bureaucratic clarity with which it articulated a pan-European plan of genocide. The minutes are summary rather than verbatim, so we cannot be sure of all that was said, but the principal element of the conference was evidently Heydrich’s lengthy exposition of past, present, and future policies. Some parts of the minutes were shrouded in euphemism, as when Heydrich discussed what the Protocol refers to as “new possibilities in the East.” A table slated 11 million European Jews, listed by country, for inclusion in these “possibilities.” Because of such euphemisms, Holocaust deniers among others have claimed that murder was not on the agenda, but elsewhere the Protocol is unequivocal:
In large, single-sex labor columns, Jews fit to work will work their way eastwards constructing roads. Doubtless the large majority will be eliminated by natural causes. Any final remnant that survives will doubtless consist of the most resistant elements. They will have to be dealt with appropriately, because otherwise, by natural selection, they would form the germ cell of a new Jewish revival.
—-
Christians should assume their share of the blame for that, to assume more than that, letting off other sources of the Holocaust is not only unjust, it is wrong because as long as everything from science to pseudo-science and everything else that was involved is not addressed, they certainly won’t be removed as continuing dangers.
It is another fact that the man who invented the word “antisemitism” was a raging antisemite, Wilhelm Marr. He invented the word to give sciency cachet to his hated of Jews and to his political program using hatred of Jews to gain power and to harm Jews. He hated Christianity about as much.
n one of Marr’s antisemitic pamphlets, The Victory of Judaism Over Germany: From a nonreligious point of view,** Marr identifies Christians as “new-jews” attributing to them one of the most vicious of perennial attributes given to Jews.
“The Roman world of the day as well as all of classical antiquity was in the throes of disintegration at the time the Jews were imported. Semitism therefore encountered fertile ground for its realistic approach and already in Constantine’s days the “new-Jews” (Christians) were the power behind the money.”
I’ve studied the origins of the Nazi antisemitism and have come to the conclusion that science and para-science – what is euphamized now, but not then as “pseudo-science” – have more of a hand in it than the quite different Christian sin that goes by the same name. Christians may have been guilty of wanting to convert the Jews, Nazis wanted to murder them, they murdered a number of Christian-Jews, afterall.