Yeshua ben Yosef (Jesus) (6-4 BCE to 30 CE) was the eldest son of a working-class Jewish family in the Galilee. Historians tell us that the only confirmable historical facts about Jesus are, his existence, his baptism by his cousin; John the Baptist; and his death by crucifixion order of Pontius Pilate. The rest of the information about his life comes from the four Gospels (moderate-sized histories) Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John which are the holy Scriptures of the Christian church. Little is known of his early life.
In the last three years of his life, Jesus became an itinerant Jewish preacher and faith healer in the synagogues and Jewish communities of the Galilee. He was a compelling personality fostering help for the poor, the infirmed and the underprivileged. Jesus drew many supporters, including 12 Jewish apostles who helped formed a Jewish Sect in his support, and occasionally regaled him as Messiah and King of Israel. In Jerusalem, the Romans, mindful of his popularity, tried him as a threat to their rule, and with the result that he was consequently crucified. Up to this point the only parties involved were the Jews and ultimately the Romans who crucified him. Yeshua (Jesus) was born a Jew, he lived as a Jew, and he died as a Jew.
Several years after Jesus’s death, Saul of Tarsus (Paul), who never met Jesus, became active in the Jewish sect and induced many Gentiles to enter and ultimately control it. The sect, while under the dominion of the Gentiles, declared Jesus to be the son of God, which resulted in a departure from the sect of the monotheistic Jewish membership. About 130 years after the death of Jesus, the Gentile-controlled sect decided to make it a formal religion based on the life of Jesus. However, it was too late for personal recollections and there was no real transcribed data upon which to support it. There were, however, a few anonymous personal Gospels, written between 40 and 80 years after the death of Jesus from unknown authors, with no confirmed knowledge or history of Jesus. Four of them were selected by one man Irenaeus, a Greek bishop, to constitute the four pillars of the Christian church. Among the pages of those Gospels it shows an alleged transcript of Jesus, 130 years after his death, articulating the most vile, vicious and ugly slanders against all Jews who do not recognize who he is. Those slanders, encapsulated and iterated in religious Christian doctrine, started the Genesis of 2000 years of ungodly Christian anti-Semitism, which exists to this very day. There is a simple solution at the conclusion of this article, which can ultimately silence the scurrilous accusations against the Jews and their clergy, give some peace to the millions who have been the victims of it and begin a new era of amistad under God.
Judea Under the Heavy Hand of Rome
To understand the first half of the first century CE, the period in which Jesus lived, it is vital to know the political and religious environment of the time.
In 63 BCE, Jerusalem was captured by the military forces of Rome led by Gen. Pompeii. Lands captured by Rome were generally ruled by a Roman Client King who allowed free religious practices in the captured territories. After the capture by Rome, Second Temple Israel was named Judea by the Romans.
The Written Torah, which contained a formal code of laws, earlier arrived with Ezra from Babylon in 440 BCE. It allowed a transition from individual responses to a Jewish tribal god to ultimately become a formal religion, and the religious law of the land which was uniformly applied to all residents. It was that national and religious environment in which Jesus, his family, the apostles, and John the Baptist were born and lived.
John the Baptist
Yochanan ben Zechariah (John the Baptist) was a devoted, ascetic Jew, who concluded that a Jew could be spiritually cleansed by being immersed in, or sprinkled with water accompanied by prayer. John the Baptist’s ministry took place in the period between 26 and 30 CE. He was devout in the application of the rules of the Torah, even regarding the political leadership. That devotion to Torah cost him his head when he criticized the reigning Herod Antipus, Client King, for marrying his brother’s wife in violation of Leviticus 18 (16) and Leviticus 20 (21).
There was a great deal of mutual respect between John and his cousin Yeshua ben Yosef (Jesus). They learned from each other and were respectful of their mutual roles in Judaism. John’s baptism of Jesus was a significant event in Jesus religious life.
In the last three years before his death, Jesus served as a charismatic preacher (Magid) and faith healer who traveled mostly through rural communities in the Galilee. Most of his fame was accredited to reports of his healing the sick, and at least in one instance, restoring life to a decedent. His teachings were focused on the religious law of the land, the Torah, with special emphasis on the needs of the poor, the infirmed and the underprivileged.
Neither Jesus nor John renounced his commitment to the Written Torah and to the Judaism of the day in favor of any other faith. The same was true of 10 of the 12 original Jewish Apostles that followed and assisted Jesus in his preaching journeys. Paul and Simon Peter were the exceptions. Simon Peter served as the first Christian Pope. Saul of Tarsus (aka Paul) became an apostle after Jesus’s death and insisted on bringing the Jesus’s preachings and an altered commitment to the Old Testament to the Gentiles. All the others were born Jews, lived as Jews and died as Jews.
Mary, the Mother of Jesus
In some Christian churches, Mary, the mother of Jesus, had been raised to virtual adoration under the title of Virgin Mary. That is a title which, for some, is difficult to contemplate given that she and her husband Joseph were the birth parents of several children: Jesus, James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas. See Gospel according to Matthew 13:55. Within Christendom, her title as Virgin is justified on the notion that she was allegedly with God’s child before she and Joseph consummated their marriage vows.
Honors Conferred
Jesus, during his three years of preaching, encountered many people who witnessed his compassion, his dedication to Torah and Judaism, and perhaps most important to them, his ability to cure and restore the sick. Especially in rural communities, reputations grow quickly. He was honored by the people with two gratuitously granted honorary titles: Messiah and Melech Yisrael (King of Israel).
Who and What is a Messiah?
In both Judaism and Christianity, the word Messiah means an anointed one. The word “anointed” refers to a savior, one who has been selected for a prime leadership post for his people, and upon whose forehead has been placed a special oil to consecrate the appointment. God would not be obliged go through the process of selecting himself and anointing himself. God may well be the instrumentality that sends the Messiah to resolve an earthly issue. That was a title occasionally granted by the Jews in appreciation, as it was with the Persian King Cyrus, who helped in the reconstruction of the Second Temple after the Babylonian conquest.
Melech Yisrael (King of Israel)
It was the second honorary title granted by the Jewish community, “Melech Yisrael” (King of Israel), which was probably the procuring cause of Jesus’s death by the Romans. The Romans would brook no competition with their sovereign rule over Judea.
Jesus and His Apostles Dutifully Follow Jewish Law by Being Present in Jerusalem for Passover
It is noteworthy, that the presence of Jesus and his apostles in Jerusalem during that fateful Passover was not casually chosen by them. It was consistent with the Jewish religious law of Shalosh Regalim (the three pilgrimage festivals). The Torah instructs all Jews to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem three times a year: in the spring before Passover, in the summer for Shavout and in the fall for Sukkoth. Deuteronomy 16 (1, 9-10, 13, 16-17). Even a few short days before his crucifixion by the Romans, Jesus and his apostles were following the mandates of the Torah. Jesus rode into Jerusalem astride a donkey. Crowds of Jews greeted him joyously as Messiah and King of Israel.
Jesus and the Temple Moneychangers
Noteworthy events occurred in Jerusalem when Jesus visited the holy Temple. There, in the outer courtyard, he found a series of moneychangers and animal vendors. Moved by the presence of raw commerce so close to the holy temple of God, Jesus reacted by overturning the tables of the moneychangers. To say the least, that was impolitic for a number of reasons. The moneychangers and the animal vendors were absolutely essential to the function of the temple, as well as the worshipers. Many Jews would come to the temple during the festival holidays from peripheral areas outside of Judea. They brought with them their own local currency, which was not useful in the markets of Judea. If they wished to make a sacrifice of a food animal in the temple, they would be unable to do so without the presence and help of people who changed foreign currency into shekels. With an opportunity for currency exchange, purchasing an animal for sacrifice made the presence of the moneychangers and the animal vendors absolutely necessary. To say the least, the temple administrators and the other persons present viewed the assault on the moneychangers as an act of outrageous vandalism.
According to the New Testament Gospels, Jesus was then taken into custody and a hearing was held before the Jewish religious authority. He was then delivered over to Pontius Pilate for a trial before Roman authority. It was following that second trial that Pontius Pilate ultimately condemned Jesus to crucifixion. Assuredly, Pilate did not retry Jesus for violation of Jewish religious law. We are informed of the subject matter of the second trial by the actions of the Roman soldiers as they carried out the sentence. They dressed Jesus in a scarlet robe, and placed a crown of thorns on his head and mocked him as King of the Jews. The jeopardy to the continuum of Roman control over Judea was the obvious issue of the trial.
After the death of Jesus, his sect of followers, who resided in Jerusalem and Galilee, continued to actively support him under the name Nazarenes. James, Jesus’s brother, led the Nazarenes as an accepted Jewish sect within Judaism for the next 30 years. However, the Jewish-Christian sect did not remain long in the hands of the Jews and the Nazarenes.
Saul of Tarsus, Paul
One of the most important people in the history of Christianity was Saul of Tarsus, also known as Paul. Paul was born to a Jewish family in the Roman controlled city of Tarsus in Turkey, which qualified him as a Roman citizen. Paul never met Jesus, nor in all likelihood, ever heard him preach. He started out as an antagonist of the Christians until, on his way to Damascus, he had a dream in which he was confronted by the already-deceased Jesus, who asked why Paul was persecuting him. From that moment on, he became devoted to the Christian cause. Perhaps, because of the origin of his birth in Tarsus (Roman controlled Turkey) he became a great advocate of bringing the Old Testament (Mosaic law) to the Gentile world. While some of the original apostles were not in favor of that mission, he nevertheless traveled to many neighboring countries lecturing about Jesus’s promise of a brighter future, his miracles, and the gift of Mosaic law.
Most Gentiles contacted by Paul were willing to accept Mosaic law, but they were unwilling to become circumcised or to follow Jewish dietary restrictions and other unique aspects of the law. Paul’s position was that Gentile converts did not need to become Jews, get circumcised, follow the dietary laws, or celebrate biblical festivals in order to be saved.
Christianity’s Fateful Transition from Jesus, as Jewish Messiah, to Jesus, as Genetic Son of God
As long as Christian thought and beliefs venerated the devoted and charitable life of Jesus as worthy of anointment as a Messiah, it hovered for several decades inside the periphery of Judaism. When, however, it became evident that Christian thought had moved Jesus from a Messiah or Christ to the son of God, making him a deity, it was alien to the Jewish world and no longer acceptable. After all, the patriarchs of Judaism: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, as well as Moses and Joshua, had each pledged, directly or indirectly, to the oneness of the God of Israel. There was no way, that they could have accepted another deity. Furthermore, the first of the Ten Commandments provides, “you shall have no other gods before me.”
The concept of Jesus as the genetic son of God, and thus an additional deity, did not arrive without problems in a Gentile Christian world. Like Judaism, and later the Muslim faith, Christianity viewed itself as a monotheistic, Abrahamic faith. However, one original God and one son of God makes two Gods and defeats any claim of monotheism.
Where then could Christianity find an answer? One of the first solutions was proposed by Tertullian, who was born around 152 to 160 CE (AD). He expressly designed a Trinity as the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. He did, however, note that the majority of believers in his day found issue with his doctrine. An updated version of the same doctrine exists today with a similar response. It was a formula for dividing God into three entities and then reassembling God to qualify Christianity as a monotheistic religion.
Until 312 CE, Rome had persecuted Christians within their domain. In that year, Constantine, the Roman Emperor, converted to Christianity and issued the Edict of Milan. That edict indicated that Rome was now favorably disposed to the Christian faith within its territorial limits. During the lifetime of Jesus, Rome’s territories included virtually all of Europe, portions of North Africa and the Middle East. In 380 CE, Roman Emperor Theodosius declared Christianity the official state religion of the Roman Empire. It was not by a mass spiritual calling that all of the populations of the Roman Empire became Catholic, but by official decree of the Emperor of Rome. It was, in essence, religion by fiat, not by faith. Today, more than 1,800 years after the Theodosius decree and 1,700 years after the fall of the Western Roman empire, Catholicism is still known as the Roman Catholic Church and is physically administered out of Rome and not the holy land.
Rome was in a Uniquely Hostile Relationship with Judea
Rome was the ruling force in Judea from 63 BCE, when it was captured by Gen. Pompeii. By 65 CE, the Jews had long tired of Roman control and were ready to put up a fight for their own independence. In 66 CE, a battle broke out in the provincial capital of Caesaria, which led to a seven-year unsuccessful effort by the Jews to remove the yoke of Rome. By 70 CE, the revolt led to the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and continued without success through 73 CE. Discontent continued until a second revolt was initiated under Bar Kokhbar.
There were extremely heavy losses by the Roman military. To their embarrassment, they were obliged to bring reinforcements from distant commands in order to ultimately prevail against a small nation that had been under their control for many years. The damage to Rome’s military ego was not easily accepted or repaired, nor its ire easily assuaged. It sold captive Jewish prisoners in the slave markets of Rome for less than the price a horse. It changed its relationship with Judea by dissolving it as an existing conquered nation and incorporated it as a province of Rome. It changed the name of the land from Judea to Palestina, naming it after the Philistines, the arch enemies of the Jewish people.
All of this occurred as the “Jewish Christian sect” passed out of exclusively Jewish hands into the control of the Gentile world, and Jesus transitioned from Magid to Messiah to Christian God. The Romans, who had early-on opposed the growth and development of Christianity had not been idle.
This writer has often wondered how and why the Jews, who respected Jesus’s humanity and regaled him as a Messiah and even an honorary King of Israel, in the same week could be accused of his death.
The “why” is fairly easy. The unification of interests that took place when the Roman Empire agreed to make Christianity the state religion was of critical importance to both parties. Christianity could not, in good conscience, seek unity and sustenance from an entity that deliberately killed their God. Rome could not endure the embarrassment of having adopted a state religion after having first deliberately killed the Godhead of that religion. The continued unity of Roman Christianity would have little promise of success.
The “how” was a little bit more difficult given the fact that Rome had openly crucified Jesus in the manner it customarily used for executions. Its only option, and a poor one at that, was that the Roman Empire, in total control of Judea, got talked into something that it didn’t want to do by a nominal group of Jewish spectators, who had earlier that week expressed their regard for Jesus as he entered Jerusalem.
Who was Doing the Killing and Who Were the Victims?
Yeshua ben Yosef (Jesus) was crucified in 30 CE at Golgotha upon the order of Pontius Pilate, Roman Prefect (Governor of Judea).
Yochanan ben Zechariah (John the Baptist) was beheaded upon the order of Herod Antipus, Roman Client King of Judea.
St. Paul (Saul of Tarsus) was beheaded in Rome between 62 to 64 CE.
St. Peter (Simon Peter) was crucified in Rome in 64 CE.
Four of the most vital members of the Jewish Christian sect were murdered by the Romans before the Romans decided to make Christianity the state religion of the entire Roman Empire.
Transition from Sect to Religion
As the interest in Jesus grew in the Gentile community and the numbers increased, a new religion with Jesus at the center became inevitable.
There existed little, if any, documentation to support a viable Christian religion based on the life of Jesus. Present were the Judaic sacred documents: the Old Testament and the subsequent histories of the Prophets and the Scribes, which were received while the interest in Jesus was still in Jewish hands, but few, if any, actual transcriptions of Jesus’s life and teachings. Memories were getting vague about the years of Jesus’s preaching. Where they could find them, the Gentile Christians sought individual accounts of the life of Jesus
The Greatest Story Never Told
Christians were determined that four histories (Gospels) should be acquired in order to constitute the four pillars of a New Testament. One of the first things that was done was to seek out individual accounts of the life of Jesus.
Four Gospels were selected out of several by Irenaeus (130 to 202 AD), a Greek bishop. Although all four Gospels were written between 70 CE and 110 CE, the date of their selection by Irenaeus seems somewhat more elusive. I could find no date of selection of the Gospels. The estimate of between 170 and 180 CE seems reasonable since that would make Iraneaus, then a Bishop, 40 to 50 years old and the selection of the Gospels between 140 to 150 years after the death of Jesus. History does not reveal that Irenaeus had any assistance in selecting the four critical Gospels, nor does it advise who selected Irenaeus to make that incredibly consequential judgment.
The Four Gospels: Mark, Matthew, Luke and John
What is known about the selection of the four Gospels by Irenaeus is that names of the original “authors” were simply unknown, or concealed. Whether that was by design or inadvertence remains, to this day, a mystery.
According to Bart D. Ehrman (author of the Hidden Contradictions of the Gospels), Professor, scholar, and author of more than a dozen books on the origin of Christianity, the Canonical Gospels, as they were called, were written anonymously, but later ascribed to the names of evangelists.
The Jesus Seminar, McMillan, 1993, comprising 135 New Testament scholars, confirm author anonymity, and that authoritative names were later assigned to the Gospels by unknown figures in the early church using guesses, or pious wishes. There are still a number of “conservative scholars” who tie the Gospels to the names later provided by a means that can only be described as cultural and religious hearsay.
The lack of an author’s name, referring to the Gospels, had to be the subject of much confusion. To correct the problem, the Church assigned the name of a Christian to each of the Gospels, concluding, I assume, that it was better to refer to them by a name than a number. Those four names were Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. To the credit of the Church and to avoid misrepresentation, the Gospels were denominated by those four names in an unusual manner, i.e., The gospel according to Mark, The gospel according to Matthew, The gospel according to Luke, The gospel according to John. Conventional identity of authorship would use the word “by” to identify an actual author.
These were Gospels written 40 to 70 years after the death of Jesus, by unknown persons of no confirmed connection with Jesus, which were being relied upon as the sole source to describe Jesus’s life, his preaching, his religion and his nature.
Although it is possible that one or more of the anonymous Gospel authors may have met Jesus or heard him preach, biblical scholars believe that is highly unlikely, given the sizable passage of time from the crucifixion to the authorship. Koine, an elegant form of the Greek language in which the proffered Gospels were written, was not a regular form of communication in the world between Jesus and the 12 Jewish fishermen and carpenters that accompanied him on his preaching ventures.
Three out of the selected Gospels are joined together under a single heading called synoptic Gospels. The name suggests that they cover similar periods of time and events in the life of Jesus and that they used each other as a source and a resource. They are:
- The Gospel according to Mark which was written on or about 70 CE.
- The Gospel according to Mathew which was written on or about 70 CE.
- The Gospel according to Luke which was written between 63 CE and 85 CE.
- The gospel according to John which was written between 85CE and 110 CE is deemed unique and occupies a category of its own.
Undoubtedly, it must have troubled the churches’ fathers to realize that in the absence of earlier transcription, how could Gospels written 36 to 67 years after the death of Jesus, by unknown persons of no confirmed connection to Jesus, accurately be relied upon as the sole source to describe his life, his teaching and his religion.
For some time after the death of Jesus, the church fathers had sought a history of Jesus in support of their faith, but were unable to do so. Over 130 years after his death, in the Greek language, Ireneaus found not only one, but four anonymous Gospels, which tracked similar histories of Jesus and recounted events in such exquisite detail that they appear to be transcribed with the accuracy of a modern-day court reporter.
Provenance
Every religion is responsible for the provenance of its Holy Scriptures. It is those Scriptures that speak to each congregant with the voice of its spiritual beliefs. Christianity, as an emerging religion dedicated to the life of Jesus, decades after his death, recognized that it had a paucity of information about his life.
Because of the significant passage of time after the death of Jesus, the real authors of any biographies that did exist most likely never personally knew Jesus. Their Gospels, or short histories, comprised a potpourri of generally accepted events, positions, “creative dialogues or monologues” and a smattering of the Gospel author’s own dispositions on those matters. Significant all four Gospels that were chosen were selected by only one man, Irenaeus. Since the Gospels were authored anonymously, nothing was known about the real author’s background or religious convictions, nor, for that matter, the views of Irenaeus, himself.
The Authenticity of the Four New Testament Gospels and Their Content
The four Gospels selected by Irenaeus, which became the four pillars of the New Testament, do not start life with an abundance of reliability. It is especially so when readers discover that they were written anonymously, and therefore the sources of their histories are unconfirmable. The confidence ratio is also affected by the Church naming the anonymous Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, randomly chosen Christian names to give them an aura of authenticity.
The first Gospel in the New Testament, the Gospel according to Matthew, starts out with a verbatim recitation of the more than 2000 word “Sermon on the Mount,” reportedly given by Jesus, at the Beatitudes during his lifetime. Without a modern electronic recording device, or a highly skilled scribe in Hebrew and Aramaic shorthand, that would be a very difficult transcription to achieve. The fact that the sermon does not appear in any of the other three Gospels, nor is there proof of the actual presentation by Jesus, has led biblical scholars, including Dr. Bart Ehrman( in his October 26 2022, article “Did Jesus give the Sermon at the Mount?)” to conclude that he does not think that Jesus ever gave the Sermon on the Mount. Given that fact, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the Sermon on the Mount might well have been authored by the unidentified, anonymous author of the Gospel accordingto Matthew, years after Jesus’s death.
The gospel according to Matthew 23 (drafted in 70 CE, placed in the mouth of Jesus) (who died in 30 CE) a screed against all Pharisees and all Scribes, accusing them of the following:
- Not practicing what they preach
- Being showy and loving to be called Rabbi
- Being hypocrites
- Being “sons of those who murdered the prophets
- Being serpents
- Being a brood of vipers
- In addition, it inquires how the Pharisees and scribes can escape being sentenced to hell
In the Gospel of Matthew 27 (24-25), it describes Pontius Pilate washing his hands and declaring that he is innocent of the blood of Jesus and it reports that some people in the vicinity then declare “his blood is on us and our children.”. “A ruse is a ruse is a ruse.” No Jew or Gentile would ever place the blood of a victim of Roman rule on themselves and especially their children. It was through this media that Rome sought to escape the tragic irony of having killed the God of the religion that it later adopted.
The crucifixion of Jesus, was totally consistent with previous Jewish Christian murders of John the Baptist, Saul of Tarsus and Simon called Peter when Rome opposed the church. The rate, however, diminished as they slowly approached a union in the Roman Catholic Church.
The Gospel according to John 8 (44-47) Has Jesus (himself a Jew) saying to the Jews
- You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires.
- He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him.
- When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar, and the father of lies.
- The reason that you do not hear me is that you are not of God.
Is there any wonder why the “Jesus Seminar, a 200 member group of mainline biblical scholars in the 1990s, after six years of voting on authenticity in the gospel ruled out 80% of words attributed to Jesus?
The Gospels, especially that of John, contain other instances of patently anti-Jewish statements.
The foregoing slanders of all Jews placed in the mouth of Jesus, himself, a religious Jew, decades after Jesus’s crucifixion is a sad story. How can they put in the mouth of the one they call sweet Jesus such a vile, ugly form of self-hatred? How can they teach this to their children, packaged as a form of religious ideation? What kind of a dark cloud does this place on the verity of the Gospels which they claim are divinely inspired?
By the time of the creation of the Gospel according to John, in 110 CE, Gentile Christianity was largely in the majority and committed to a path of deifying Jesus.
The following numerical data was obtained from public resources.
- There are in excess of 2 billion 600 million Christians in the world today
- There are 37 million Christian churches in the world today,
- There are 14.8 million Jews in the world today, fewer than the 16 million which existed before the Hitler regime.
- While these numbers obviously varied over the 2000 years of coexistence of Judaism and Christianity, a ratio might be useful for any given time period.
- The Gospels are the most fundamental element of the New Testament and of the Christian faith, and portions are read during daily, weekly and on special occasion Masses. When the anti-Jewish Gospels are read, they are received by the congregation, not only as information, but with the authority of religious conviction
Finally, dear reader, you will get to contemplate and perhaps determine whether the Gospels described herein had a real direct effect on the tragic history of the Jewish people over the 2000 years since the dawn of Christianity.
Treatment of Jews as a Vulnerable and Targeted Underclass
In the not-so-distant past, Jews in Europe lived in isolated communities known as ghettos, which were locked at night to avoid fraternization with the Christian community. Frequently, these ghettos were invaded by mobs of Christians who took the lives and property of the Jewish inhabitants while shouting as justification “Christ killer” or “you killed our God.” Intermarriage between a Christian and Jew was often prohibited and punished by the host Christian country. The ownership of land by Jews, an originally agrarian people, and the right to hold public office were denied. Because Jews had no homeland of their own, they were treated as an underclass. Yet, they counted themselves lucky as they recalled some of the other treatment they received at the hands of members of the Christian population.
- The death of thousands of Jews that resulted from the call of Pope Urban II, in 1095, to recapture the holy land from the Muslims (The Crusades). Mobs of ill-equipped and ill-supplied Christians crossed Europe raiding and killing thousands of Jews in Jewish communities to steal enough supplies for the next day’s journey, and to sharpen their skills as warriors.
- Being blamed as a scapegoat for the bubonic plague in the 14th century, and suffering the wrath of the Christian community for the devastating illness that took Jews as well as Christians. It is estimated that 100,000 Jews were burned alive for this and other false accusations including the blood libels.
- In 1492, Queen Isabella of Spain issued an edict requiring all Jews to convert to Catholicism in order to remain in their home in Spain. Their other alternatives were to leave Spain (the home of their families for over a thousand years) with virtually nothing, or to remain on pain of death. Of those that remained and converted to Christianity, approximately 35,000 were burned at the stake in Spain and in the New World upon suspicion that they had reverted to their own religion.
- Martin Luther, the Christian community leader of the German Protestant Reformation, urged his followers to set fire to synagogues or Jewish schools. He counseled that Jewish houses should be razed and destroyed, and that Jewish prayer books and writings should be taken from them. Luther also urged that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them. See Martin Luther’s pamphlet published in 1545 and entitled “Jews and their Lies.” The Nazis reprinted the pamphlet in 1935.
Consider also the following excerpted reports from Wikipedia’s article on “Anti-Semitism in Christianity”:
As early as April 26, 1933, in a meeting with Roman Catholic Bishop Wilhelm Berning, Hitler reported that he had been attacked because of the handling of the Jewish question. He stated that he recognized the representatives of that race as pestilent for the state and for the church, and that perhaps he was doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of the schools and public functions.
Archbishop Robert Runcie (Archbishop of Canterbury) asserted that without centuries of Christian anti-Semitism, Hitler’s passionate hatred would never have been so fervently echoed.
Conclusion
The packaged hate of the Jews in the Gospels is available in any home that has a Christian Bible. It is in multiple copies of the 37 million Christian churches throughout the world. It is available to young Christian children in Sunday school as they learn the rules of their faith. It is available for readings daily, weekly and holiday at church masses. It is indeed a self-priming pump of anti-Judaism, a perpetual motion machine that makes available anti-Judaic screeds to its 2,600,000,000 membership.
It has resulted, during my lifetime alone, as a major factor in the murder of 6 million Jewish men, women and children at the hands of a country where Christianity has been and is today the traditional and dominant faith.
In addition to the devotion to Jesus, Christianity credits the ethos of its faith to love, compassion, empathy, “doing unto others” and virtue. Yes, inscribed in the most sacred of its religious documents, the four Gospels, the pillars of its creed, is violent, hateful language about those Jews that did not accept Jesus as a deity. The language is so diminishing as to suggest that those Jews were altogether beyond redemption.
How ironic it is that from those selfsame disparaged Jewish people, the Gentile community joyfully accepted their Christianity and the person to whom they elevated as God.
One can only wonder why it was so necessary to show the origin of Jesus, as a descendant of King David, royalty of the Jewish people, a people the Gospels demean. Or, why they now choose to refer to the Christain faith as Judeo-Christianity if Jews are as they picture them in the Gospels.
Anti-Judaism (Antisemitism) will never end until the vile, invidious, and insidious language is removed from the New Testament.
We Cannot, and Will Not, Endure Another Holocaust
The Christian community knows what it needs to do in removing all vile and offensive language against the Jews in the Gospels and where else it appears in the New Testament.
Gentile Christians moved forward to make Jesus a deity, and the Jews withdrew because of their steadfast pledge to the one God of Israel. While belatedly seeking to construct the elements of a formal Christian religion, Gentile Christians found a site to store their frustration with the Jewish commitment to monotheism. They inserted it as a cancerous screed in the Gospels that they were obliged to adopt in order to establish a historical basis for the Christian religion. Admittedly, during the ensuing 60 generations it
served quite handily in blaming the Jews for every natural disaster, pestilence, war, depression, blood libel, fraud, attempt to control world politics and economic markets and a host of other accusations.
Within 10 years after the Holocaust (which some construed as a (mea culpa) the Catholic church issued a document entitled Nostra Aetate in regard to the question of Jewish culpability in the death of Jesus. The language of the document was highly contested by the conservative elements within the church, and resulted in a statement to the effect that the death of Jesus cannot be charged against all Jews, certainly not those who became Christians, then and since, nor the Jews of today.
While that went a substantial way in alleviating contemporary Jews from fault in the death of Jesus, it did not, as many thought exculpate the Jews and place the issue of deicide firmly at the feet of Rome.
While the Nostra Aetate was certainly a step in the right direction. The significant contemporary increase in anti-Semitism in the United States and elsewhere in the world teaches us that you cannot treat a cancer by lecturing to it. The cancer of anti-Semitism that is contained in the Gospels can only be treated by excision. That is the vile language in the Gospels against the Jews in the Christian churches must be identified and summarily removed. One would imagine that such an act of purification of religious doctrine would bring joy to the church and those who wish goodwill to all humanity.
The church, however, needs to be mindful that its failure to remove the anti-Semitic language from its Gospels will compel a conclusion that anti-Semitism is the sine qua non (that without which a thing cannot exist) of Christian doctrine.
Douglas Kaplan