Leader after Proto-Orthodox Christian leader rose up to denounce the Jews as demonic—as agents of Satan, enemies of the church and of God—a pernicious view that has had massive repercussions for the Jewish people over the ensuing centuries. Proto-Orthodoxy felt compelled to vilify Judaism, its leaders, and its people in its quest for self-identity. We have traced this history of deep antagonism in documents from the late first and early second centuries.
The charges against Judaism were easier said than enforced. Not everyone immediately changed their beliefs or behavior just because some leader or bishop said to do so. There were, of course, the holdouts, the Jesus Movement people, who continued the observance of Torah and thought of themselves as Jewish. They became increasingly marginalized from both Judaism and Proto-Orthodoxy, and for centuries, these Ebionites inhabited a strange no-man’s-land between the two evolving religions.
There were people within other ancient communities, the Proto-Orthodox included, who honored at least portions of Torah—circumcision, the dietary laws, Jewish festivals, and participation in Jewish Sabbath services, for instance. These believers were not, as is sometimes said, “Judaisers” or “re-Judaisers” who were backsliding into the ancestral religion. They were, rather, followers of Christ who held the view that Torah obligations were still in effect, despite the radicalizing of Paul’s letters and the Book of Acts. They did not understand why Torah and belief in the teachings of Jesus—synagogue and church—could not coexist. That moderate belief and those well-engrained ancient practices did not die easily.
It was not Judaising as a cultural force that was significant. That way of putting the matter presupposes that Paul’s Gentile Christ Movement was normative and the Torah-observant form of early Christianity was deviant, a lapsing back into Judaism.
The real problem with the early church was “Christification”—the attempt to make the religion conform in all aspects to the Christ teachings of Paul. The “Christifiers” tried to eradicate every other understanding of Jesus, especially the view that he was a human teacher of the Kingdom of God. They covered over that perspective with the message of the divine savior God-human and attacked every other form of early Christianity with this powerful message, Ebionites and Gnostics alike. As far as those who clung to Torah observance were concerned, however, they were upholding the authentic teachings of Jesus and the way it was understood by his earliest followers in Jerusalem. For them, it was Paul’s religion with its Christ message that was deviant. It had “Christified” the religion of Jesus.
The church emerged from this Christification process with anti-Semitic attitudes well entrenched. By 150, whatever links that had once existed with Judaism had been broken and a new infrastructure created, both within the Jesus and the Christ Movements. But every now and then, within third- and fourth-century writings, we get glimpses of continued Jewish observances. One remarkable insight comes from 387 in Antioch, that same eastern Mediterranean city that had witnessed the birth of the Gospel of Matthew and from which Ignatius went to his death in Rome. There John Chrysostom became incensed with Christians in his congregation observing Jewish practices. Perhaps they were resting from work on the Sabbath or circumcising their infants or following the dietary laws and so forth. We don’t know what triggered his tirade. Whatever set him off, Chrysostom preached eight vicious sermons against the Jews, whom he attacked personally as “vile,” “dogs,” and “fit for slaughter.” He reviled the synagogue, denounced the festivals, and accused Jewish leaders of understanding neither the Torah nor the prophets. Jews were “godless,” “mad” and “sick” individuals, he charged.1 Moreover, he inveighed, the Jews killed God’s Son, and, consequently, they do not know the Father. Their prayers are ineffective and their worship null and void.
Chrysostom’s hateful words were certainly designed to intimidate members of his own congregation into avoiding Jewish Sabbath observances in the synagogue. Perhaps his vehement language represented a desperate attempt to make them choose decisively, once and for all, between the practices of the two religions. But his forceful sermon was much more than a scare tactic, and his words cannot be whitewashed simply as internal pastoral advice. His words had a much greater impact as they spilled out into the larger community of Antioch and the surrounding region. Jews and Ebionites alike must have cringed under the weight of this Christian leader’s extremely harsh pronouncements. We do not know what effect these sermons had on his followers. Did his congregants abandon their Jewish practices as Chrysostom wished? The consequences for Jews, however, were much more devastating. As James Carroll points out, referring to Chrysostom’s sermons, “Such words inevitably led to actions: assaults on synagogues, the exclusion of Jews from holding public office, expulsions.”2
There are a number of positions that contributed to anti-Semitism within the early church. One prominent view concerns the often-repeated charge that the Jews killed Jesus. Once again, the source of the mischief was Paul. In 1 Thessalonians, his indictment was made clear:
For you, brothers and sisters, become 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. (1 Thessalonians 2:14-16)3
Paul’s language reflects an us versus them orientation. He does not use inclusive language—“us” or “some of us”—as if he himself were part of the Jewish people and blaming others within his ethnic group. Rather his language is “them.” They killed Jesus. This passage was penned by a person who clearly stood outside the Jewish circle and who wished to defame them, not the Romans. As we have seen, in light of Paul’s views on Judaism, it was highly unlikely that he considered himself Jewish when writing his various letters. Nor would he have been perceived by Jews as Jewish.
A few years after Paul, the Gospel of Matthew explicitly blamed the Jewish people for the crucifixion of Jesus: “His blood be on us and on our children” (Matthew 27:25). In this infamous passage, Matthew accused the Jewish people “as a whole”—not only then and not only for two generations (literally, they and their children), but, as it became interpreted, for all time. This “sound bite” shrouded an entire people in blame forever. When this passage is read, or presented in passion plays or a popular film, the historical context is typically omitted. “Just following what the text says” is the usual justification, as if that exonerates what was written in the original text itself. People are left with the general impression that this crowd comprised the Jews of that time. As we have noted, the members of the assembled mob were agitators, rounded up by the Sadducee high priest for the express purpose of convicting Jesus. That paints a somewhat different picture and references the political nature of Jesus’ arrest and trial. But the damage caused by one sentence cannot be undone by scholarly biblical exegesis or careful contextual analysis. The problem lies in the written text itself and what it has authorized by way of interpretation over the centuries by people bent on finding biblical support for anti-Jewish sentiments.
Written about 90 or later, some sixty years and several generations after the death of Jesus, the Gospel of John contains many passages that can be construed as anti-Jewish. He talked about Torah as “your law,” not “our law,” as one would expect from a Jewish writer (John 8:17). Later on he wrote of “their law” (John 15:25). He claimed that “the Jews” persecuted Jesus (John 5:16), and that they even tried to kill him on several occasions (John 5:18, 8:37). He portrayed Jesus as accusing Jews who do not accept him as children of the devil (John 8:44). The impression the Gospel of John conveyed is that all Jews are evil, opposing God’s Son, the Christian Jesus. The language John used indicated that the writer of this gospel stood well outside the Jewish family. It represents the language of radical dualism: the forces of evil (Satan, Jews) versus the powers of goodness (Jesus, his followers, Christians).
The tendency to exonerate Roman authorities and to fix the blame on the Jews increased with time as early Christianity moved into the Mediterranean arena. To make converts from the Gentile world, Roman involvement in the crucifixion was reduced to heighten Jewish culpability. This is evident in a popular writing, the Gospel of Peter, which was widely read and highly regarded in some circles of second-century Christianity but which was not eventually included in the New Testament.4 This gospel wrote that after the crucifixion, “the Jews, the elders, and the priests realized how much evil they had done to themselves and began beating their breasts, saying, ‘Woe to us because of our sins. The judgment and the end of Jerusalem are near.’”5 This last phrase echoes a charge that some Christians were later to make, that the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem represented a punishment by God upon the Jewish people for rejecting Jesus. The Temple, priesthood, and worship had migrated over into the church.
The Gospel of Peter showed the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, explicitly accusing the Jewish leaders of the killing, saying, “I am clean of the blood of the Son of God; you decided to do this.” They bear the full weight of judicial responsibility. Exonerating the Romans and blaming the Jews formed part of the task of the second and third centuries as Proto-Orthodoxy attempted to make converts among Roman citizens. Blaming the citizens for the death of the religion’s leader would not have been helpful in this endeavor.
As Jesus increasingly became viewed as a God-human, the charge that the Jews killed Jesus escalated into “the Jews killed God.” Around 190, Bishop Melito of Sardis uttered this terrifying accusation in a sermon on the Passover and the sacrifice of Christ.7 Attacks in this vein continued for centuries. Somewhat later than Melito, John Chrysostom attacked “the Jews” as serving demons because “they slew God.”8
The New Testament writings cannot be shielded from the charge that they contain anti-Semitic statements. They were not, after all, neutral, a representative cross-section or reference library of early Christianity. Out of a vast array of possible documents, the ones specifically included in the New Testament were written and selected by the Proto-Orthodox leaders with the express purpose of bolstering their understanding of their faith and empowering their community at the expense of other Christian groups. In light of the Proto-Orthodox attack on Judaism and the Jews, it is not surprising that their writings include such self-serving sentiments. Today, some interpreters and commentators are very careful to provide the historical context for these passages, but that in no way diminishes the use made of these texts throughout history in justifying persecution of the Jewish people. That many contemporary Christians, from all denominations, choose not to interpret these texts as reflective of the Jewish people today does not mitigate the fact that these passages still linger on in print, ready to be seized upon by those hostile to Judaism or ignorant of their social and historical contexts.
Another contributing factor to Christian anti-Semitism comes from the view that Christianity has “superseded” or “replaced” Judaism historically and is now heir to all God’s promises. This view denies legitimacy to Judaism as a viable religion and deprives the Jewish people of having a covenant with God. They have ceased to be the people of God. There is, on this view, one and only one covenant, namely, that between God and the church. If Judaism has no right to exist, then the next logical question is: What right do the Jewish people have to exist? Some Christian anti-Semitism takes the form of an answer to this question: none whatsoever.9
Supersessionism was invented by Paul in his Letter to the Galatians. There he said that followers of Christ should not observe Torah, that its time in history had passed. It once served a purpose—in the time between Moses and Christ—but now that Christ has come, Torah is obsolete. Hence there is no reason to follow Jewish law, or, for that matter, to be Jewish. Ideally, for Paul, Jews would cease being Jewish and would convert to his new movement. Later on, Justin Martyr also advanced supersessionist views in his Dialogue with Trypho. So, too, did Marcion and many other early church leaders. It was important to them that Judaism have no raison d’être whatsoever.
All these leaders could have taken a different stand. They could have said, “We have one covenant; Judaism has another,” and left it at that. But that is not the route they chose to take. They adopted a much more aggressive, usurping position. The Jews and Judaism simply had to be displaced. Interestingly enough, we hear no dissenting views within early Christianity. No one arose to champion the cause of Judaism or the Jews among the Proto-Orthodox. They were left to fend for themselves.
Neither the Jewish people nor Judaism withered away, however. Their continuity posed huge problems for Proto-Orthodox theology making replacement claims. How should their continued existence be understood? Why had they not crossed over into the new movement? Why hadn’t they embraced the truth of this new religion? Jesus had come to them first—why hadn’t they, in turn, flocked to Christ? This led to charges that the Jewish people were simply obstinate, blind to the truth, or just ignorant—just the type of accusations leveled against them in John Chrysostom’s sermons.
The charges of Jewish collective guilt and supersessionism are both contributing factors to Christian anti-Semitism.10 This phenomenon has, over the years, resulted in massive destruction of Jewish people: persecutions, killings by crusaders on their way to the Holy Land, expulsions from a large number of European countries, the creation of ghettos, inquisitions, pogroms in Russia and Poland, attacks on Jewish institutions and cemeteries; and, to some extent, Christian anti-Jewish sentiments fed into the Holocaust, which, in addition to killing six million individuals, denuded Europe of Jews and Jewish institutions.11 Many of these atrocities occurred long after the Proto-Orthodox had managed to achieve reasonable self-definition. What accounts for the persistence of such hatred over hundreds of years? Why do these sentiments shout across the centuries in Christian circles, lingering on long after the process of separation and self-definition was over?
Is it just a matter of putting texts in context? Would that allow us to overcome pejorative references to the Jewish people, Christian supersessionist claims, and blaming the Jews for the death of Jesus? Could Christian anti-Semitism be cleared up by honest, straightforward biblical exegesis? This “sorry, it was all a mistake” approach seems impotent in the face of such a powerful historical dynamic.
Moreover, why were early Proto-Orthodox leaders so fearful of Judaism? What was really at stake? None of the contributing factors mentioned above provides an explanation of why Proto-Orthodox Christianity thought it had to attack Judaism in the first place. None of these reasons, moreover, accounts for the comprehensiveness of the assault. Let’s remind ourselves of the totality of what was rejected or confiscated: Jewish leadership, its texts, its understanding of its own scriptures, oral law, its heritage, its mandate under the covenant, Torah observance, and its understanding of God. Everything it valued either got shredded or transported over into the Christian camp. This wide path of destruction vastly exceeded the requirements for launching a new religion, especially one that in its Proto-Orthodox form originated outside the Jewish family. These considerations do not account for the persistence, strength, and virulence of these angry attacks throughout the centuries by most forms of subsequent Christianity—Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant.
What is the underlying motivation that propels this continuing anger and hatred? Why the perpetual hostility? The Jesus Cover-Up Thesis takes us into another way of looking at continued Christian anti-Semitism.