Christianity and Antisemitism

Antisemitism is prejudice against and hatred of Jewish people. One of the most frequently made moral charges made against Christianity is that it is antisemitic. While Christianity teaches that Christians should love all people, many argue that Christianity actually produces hatred against Jews. If true, this would be a major contradiction within Christianity that would show it to be incoherent. 

It is an undeniable fact that throughout the history of the Church many Christians (or at least people who call themselves Christians) have expressed hatred against Jewish people. But were they doing so in accordance with the moral teachings of Christianity, or in contradiction to them? If we remind ourselves of a few basic facts about Christianity, we will clearly see that the latter is the case.

The entire Christian religion is centered around the worship of Jesus, and Jesus Himself is a Jew. Furthermore, Christians believe Jesus to be the Jewish Messiah who has brought about the fulfillment of the Jewish Scriptures, which, as the “Old Testament,” comprise the majority of the Christian Scriptures as well. Additionally, all of the Apostles and most of the authors of the New Testament were Jewish. In fact, very early Christianity was a form of Judaism that only gradually came to be regarded as a separate religion. The very early Church was entirely Jewish, and only gradually did the Church incorporate more and more non-Jews, until, eventually, the Church became overwhelmingly Gentile. 

Given the fact that Christianity itself is thoroughly Jewish, the idea that Christianity is antisemitic seems extremely unlikely. Nevertheless, there are a few New Testament passages that critics of Christianity point to as providing support for antisemitism.

Matthew 27

According to the Gospel of Matthew, Pontius Pilate wanted to release Jesus, but the Jewish crowd demanded that Jesus be crucified (Matt 27:15-23). Pilate then washed his hands and told them, “I am innocent of this man’s blood. . . It is your responsibility!” (27:24), to which the people responded, “His blood is on us and on our children!” (27:25). Some try to argue that in this verse, Matthew is trying to make every Jew bear the guilt of Jesus’s death, thus justifying hatred of the Jewish people in perpetuity. 

However, this interpretation does not make any sense. First of all, the Bible clearly teaches that children should not be punished for the sins of their parents (Deut 24:16; Jer 31:29-30; Ezek 18:1-4). Thus, the very idea that the first century Jews who were responsible for Jesus’s death could somehow pass along their guilt to their descendants just by saying, “His blood is on us and on our children,” is absurd. Secondly, the crowd who said this was a very small percentage of the first century Jewish population, so only a small portion of first century Jews were responsible for Jesus’s death, not the Jewish people as a whole. Thirdly, according to Matthew, this crowd was persuaded to ask for Jesus’s execution by Jewish leaders who were enemies of Jesus (Matt 27:20), so the real responsibility for Jesus’s death lies with these Jewish leaders, not the crowd. The author of Matthew (who was himself a Jew, if the traditional belief about the Gospel’s authorship is correct) was clearly not trying to teach that all Jewish people for all time are guilty of Jesus’s death. He was just recording something a particular Jewish crowd said.

1 Thessalonians 2

In his first epistle to the Thessalonians, the apostle Paul writes that the Jews “killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all mankind by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved–so as always to fill up the measure of their sins. But God’s wrath has come upon them at last!” (2:15-16). At first glance, this passage might seem to support hostility toward Jewish people.

However, we must remember that Paul himself was a Jew, and that he deeply loved his fellow Jews, to the point of being willing to be eternally damned if it would bring about their salvation (Rom 9:1-5). Paul is not at all trying to characterize all Jews as evil; he is just speaking of particular evil deeds of some first century Jews. It is not clear what Paul means when he says, “God’s wrath has come upon them at last!” He could be referring to some event that had recently happened in Judea. Or, he could be speaking of the future destruction of Jerusalem that Jesus prophesied, spoken of as having already come because it is so certain. In any case, it is clear that Paul held fast to Jesus’s teaching that Christians must love their enemies (Rom 12:14-21). Paul  commands Christians to “never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God” (Rom 12:19). Paul speaking about some evil Jews being recipients of God’s wrath thus does not in any way, shape, or form support the idea of Christians hating or harming any Jews. These Jewish evildoers are punished by God for sinful acts of persecution and violence; this clearly implies that it would be sinful for Christians to engage in any acts of persecution and violence against anyone.

John 8

The Gospel of John records a rather hostile conversation between Jesus and a group of Jews, during which Jesus says, “Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him” (John 8:43-44). Some argue that John here is putting words in Jesus’s mouth which “demonize” Jewish people, thus justifying hatred of them. 

The problem with this interpretation is that Jesus and all of his followers in the Gospel of John are Jews, so John cannot possibly be trying to demonize Jews in general. Furthermore, the fact that there are multiple references in the Gospel of John to Christians being expelled from the synagogue (9:22, 12:42, 16:2) provide good reason to believe that the Christian community in which the Gospel of John was written was largely Jewish, rather than being completely Gentile. Thus, any apparently hostile statements about “the Jews” in the Gospel of John cannot possibly be intended to express negativity towards Jewish people as a whole.

While there is a sense in which Jesus is “demonizing” this particular group of Jewish people, He has a good reason for doing so: they are seeking to kill Him (8:36, 40)! This makes them, metaphorically, “children” of the devil, who was a murderer from the beginning. Jesus is not at all saying that they are essentially children of the devil; He is just saying that, as long as they seek to use violence and refuse to truly believe in Him, they are acting as the devil’s children.

While the Gospel of John speaks of Jews who refuse to believe in Jesus in a negative light, it in no way endorses hatred of unbelieving Jews. One of the major themes of the Gospel of John is that, while the kingdoms of this world, ruled by the devil, operate based on lies and murder, Jesus’s Kingdom, which is radically different, operates based on love, truth, and self-sacrifice. While the Gospel of John does not include Jesus’s command to love one’s enemies which is recorded in the synoptics (Matt 5:43-44; Luke 6:27, 35), this idea is clearly implicit in Jesus’s teachings about the nature of His Kingdom (John 18:33-37). Thus, none of the negativity expressed in the Gospel of John regarding unbelieving Jews who persecute Jesus and His followers can reasonably be interpreted as supporting hatred of these persecutors, much less of Jews in general.

Conclusion

Absolutely nothing in the New Testament can reasonably be interpreted as providing any support at all for antisemitism. The roots of antisemitism lie not in Christian theology, but in the sinful human instinct to fear and hate outsiders and those who are different. For centuries, European Jews were a religious and cultural minority living within an otherwise entirely (nominally) Christian society. This social and religious status quo provided opportunity for sinful human instincts to produce antisemitic sentiment. This is a significant sin in Church history that the Church must confess and repent of, but it does nothing to call into question the coherence of Christian theology. 

Still, some critics of Christianity have claimed that the Christian belief that Jews need to believe in Jesus in order to be saved is inherently antisemitic. But this is absurd. As Christopher Wright puts it, “Jesus is the savior of the world because he is the Messiah of Israel. He cannot be one and not the other. If he is not the Messiah for the Jews, then he cannot be the savior of the Gentiles. So if evangelism among Jews (in the sense of graciously calling them to see in Jesus the Messiah who fulfills their historic scriptural faith) is disallowed, it cuts the nerve of all other evangelism. The Gospel has to be Good News for the Jews if it is to be Good News for anyone else. And if it is Good News for them, then to fail to share it with them is the worst form of anti-semitism.”^[1]Christopher J.H. Wright, Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995. Christian attempts to persuade Jews to believe in Jesus are not antisemitic; they are the highest expression of love for the Jewish people.