There’s an interesting discussion about the New Testament story, its depiction of “The Jews”, and the perspectives on Jews that this narrative has fostered in the thread below. As the subject has moved on from the EAPPI/Synod issue, I thought I might post my comments into a new thread.
Apologies for their rather preliminary and rambling nature, and observations which are presently unsourced – I may put some links in later. In any case, I’m interested in your thoughts.
My starting point is that Jews, including senior “Pharisees” are the heroes of the NT story.
Traditional Christian theology established Jews as deicides from pretty early on. However, that really isn’t generally supported by the text. Rather, what the NT story suggests it that Jesus was the victim of a pretty transparent plot by the High Priest and the Temple establishment, which was by definition aligned with Rome.
This did not amount to a battle between “Christians” and “Jews”. Rather, it took place within the context of the bloody fraternal feuding that preceded and led to the First Jewish War.
Positive depictions of Jews in the NT
Quite apart from the Jewishness of Jesus, his family, all his followers, the NT is full of Jews who are positive about Jesus and his followers, or benign and neutral at the very least.
For example Rabbi Gamliel basically saves Paul’s life. There are various accounts of Pharisees who are supportive of Jesus, and Pharisees save Jesus’ life by warning him of “Herod’s” plot to kill him in Luke 13. There is an Ananius (not the High Priest, but described as “a devout man according to the law, having a good report of all the Jews”) who Paul says restores his sight after the Damascus blindness. Even Agrippa makes an appearance and basically gives St Paul the thumbs up.
None of this sits well with the ‘Jews killed God’ narrative, and the fact that it is preserved in a NT that is to some degree overwritten with general hostility to “the Jews” indicates that general Jewish culpability for deicide is most unlikely to have been the understanding of most of the Gospel writers. It is chiefly in John that the generalised depiction of ‘the Jews’ as opponents of Jesus is the most prominent. But that’s just not the story of the NT, on its face.
How Jesus fits into 1st Century Judean Politics
What we know about 1st Century Judean politics from pretty much all sources is that it was bloodly, unstable, and riven by sectarian politics. A generation after Jesus’ death it erupted into open civil war. The Jewish tradition says that sinat chinem – baseless hatred between Jews – was the cause of the loss of the Temple, and what happened to Jesus is entirely capable of being understood in this context. He was not the only Jew to die as a result of internicine conflict between the Roman/Herodian supporting Temple establishment, and their opponents.
The reason that Jesus is executed, I’d suggest, has more to do with who he is rather than what he says.
Jesus comes from a family that already contains one religious leader who is executed by the Herodian pro Roman establishment: his cousin, John the Baptist, whose role Jesus essentially takes over. So, he was a marked man.
Jesus is constantly in conflict with the Herodian/pro-Roman Temple establishment. This is, emphatically, not ‘the Jews’. Indeed, conflict over the Temple was a feature of the period that Jesus lived in. The fundamental problem was that the Temple had been beautifully expanded by Herod, but was increasingly seen as problematic. Herod was the son of a convert, Antipater, who owed his position to cunning alliances first with Mark Anthony and then with Augustus, and was also a client and tax farmer. He killed a number of prominent Hasmoneans during his reign, including Mariamme his wife, her brother, and his two sons by her. The Hasmoneans were the descendants of the Priest-King national liberators, the Maccabees.
Much of the conflict with Rome centred around the Temple. There had been an attempt to displace an Eagle from the Temple: i.e. the symbol of Rome. There was the Temple Wall business, where attempts were made to stop the Herodians having physical oversight of the sacred business of the Temple. There was also wrangling over Roman sacrifice in the Temple and attempts to bring Roman symbols into the Temple. Even Agrippa ends up putting his life on the line to stop Caligula putting a statue in the Temple.
Then, remember, the First Jewish War starts when the lower priests rebel against the establishment and stop prayers and sacrifices for the Emperor. Thereupon, the whole city erupts into civil war.
So, Jesus’ expulsion of the moneychangers and other fights with the Temple authorities are all part and parcel of this struggle over Jerusalem’s relationship with Rome: something which had both a religious and political dimension.
Ultimately, Jesus’ brother James – according to Hegesippus – goes into the Temple to offer up prayers in the Holy of Holies, which indicates that he thought of himself as a High Priest. Given that he wasn’t part of the pro-Roman Temple Establishment, this was yet another a direct challenge to the prevailing and controversial political religious authority that was aligned with Rome.
This is the context within which Jesus is executed, and it is easy to see why.
Neither the Jews who collaborated with the Herodian establishment, nor those who challenged it are considered to be outside Judaism, even though both fought against each other. They’re part of Jewish history. This conflict was the sinat chinem that Jews have traditionally identified as the reason for the destruction of the Temple.
What was Jesus’ “offence”?
It is notable that early attempts to trap Jesus involve trying to get him to come out as anti-tax: something at the root of earlier revolts against Roman authories: cf Judas the Galileean. But Jesus won’t fall for that trap and talks himself out of trouble. Then, an attempt is made to get him to say that he is the Son of God, to which Jesus replies by pointing out that his position is consistent with Psalm 82:6.
Jesus goes on to portray himself as a person set asisde since birth – ie with a life long vocation – to forgive sin and thereby heal the sick: sin and illness being thought to be the same thing. But this isn’t an inherently blasphemous or unique thing to say. Geza Vermes points to Honi the Circle Maker, who similarly claims direct authority from God, with the power to mediate God’s will, and who argues fiercely with, and rebukes other religious authorities. But, although he is treated as a bit unconventional, he is both tolerated and revered.
Neither was claiming or being claimed to be the Messiah a capital offence in Jewish law. I mean, Jews are always being identified as such, even as recently as the Lubavicher Rebbe. Rabbi Akiva’s reputation survived his endorsement of Bar Kokhba.
Honi’s death in interesting. Josephus says that he is killed by Hyracanus’ faction in the civil war – the Talmud says that he went into a sleep. He is buried in Israel, and his tomb is a place of pilgrimage.
Had the Church not decided to dejudaise Jesus, and – ironically – use his story as a way of attacking and persecuting Jews, and had Jews not been anathematised by the Greek Church, as a deliberate policy choice, Jesus would similarly be remembered in the Jewish tradition as a tzadik and martyr.
So, a few conclusions.
The choice was made to cast the Jesus’ story as one of ‘the Jews’ (Herod, ‘the Pharisees’, Judas) killing a man-deity who transcends his Jewishness.
The problem – the tension – is that this account is very hard to square with the NT text. We’ve seen quite how many Jews, who appear as incidental characters in the NT story, are heroes not villians. It is also notable that in the Epistle of James and Acts, Jesus’ brother takes a recognisably Jewish position, insisting on full law keeping, and with only a peripheral interest in non Jews. Even St Paul, engaged in an argument about the relationship of the Jesus movement to non Jews, continues to stress the centrality of God’s supposed covenant with Jews. Jesus has almost nothing to do with non Jews, except when they’re executing him. Jesus’ one major interaction with a non Jew is the Syrophonecian Woman, whose daughter he cures, but not before likening her to a ‘dog’ – to which the responds that she deserves the crumbs from the table of God’s ‘children’: i.e. the Jews.
In short, Jesus’ position was that of the early Jewish Church: i.e. that the Jews were central to the story, and were fully obliged to observe every aspect of the Law, while non-Jews were essentially expected to do no more than “abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality”.
As Christianity spread, in the aftermath of the near-complete destruction of Jewish life in AD 70 and the concomitant decline of the Jewish Jesus movement (plausibly led by the “Desposyni” who were related to Jesus), I’d suggest that political necessity, envy and fear resulted in the anathmatising of Jews as deicides.
Political necessity was driven by the fact that the very last thing that a sensible person in the Roman Empire would do is to associate yourself with rebellious Jews in Jerusalem. But equally important was the fact that the OT and NT is all about Jews, and non-Jews essentially have walk on parts, only. So, when the Church became an institution run by non-Jews, it was natural that the intensive focus of the texts on Jews would provoke a degree of envy.
I really do wonder if part of the hostility towards Jews, incubated from the early (but not the first) days of the Church, isn’t an expression of fear. Fear that Jews might claim Jesus back.
What is interesting is that Jewish theology is just silent about Jesus. It would have been impossible, in any case, for Jews living in Christian states either to claim Jesus on their own terms, or express hostility towards him. It is notable that a mainstream of fringe anti-Jewish Christian polemic involves attempts to find ‘coded’ insults to Jesus in the Talmud, which frankly aren’t there.
Had it not been for the concerted attempt to write Jesus’ Jewishness out, and turn him into a victim and enemy of the Jews, I really do think he’d have occupied a position as an important martyr in the Jewish tradition.
In summary: I don’t think that ‘the Jews rejected Jesus’, at all. Rather, I think that the Church took Jesus away from the Jews.
