The Sins of Scripture (19 page)

Our journey backward in time tracing the history of this ever-spreading anti-Semitism comes next to that bizarre period in our Western past that we call the Crusades. The desire to win eternal reward and the need to oppress a rising religious threat, combined with an obsession to free Christian holy places from the control of infidels—not Jews this time, not yet—fueled centuries of crusading fervor. The holy city of Jerusalem, which included such sites as the Mount of Olives, the Garden of Gethsemane, the hill of Calvary and the place of Jesus’ tomb in Joseph’s garden, was being “defiled” by Muslim control. Six miles away lay the little town of Bethlehem, the sacred birthplace of Jesus, also under Islamic auspices. Encouraged by the Vatican, local princes identified this external Muslim enemy and were easily able to rouse the population of Europe into a frenzy. Eternal reward was promised to those who led a contingent of followers to the Holy Land to kill the infidels and to free the holy places. Some battalions of Christian crusaders were large, led by the ruling kings of Europe. Some were smaller, led by a local duke or nobleman. Others were organized by a single citizen who frequently had more enthusiasm than wisdom. Militarily, all of them were quite unsuccessful: the Holy Land has generally remained under Muslim control until this day. However, the Crusades left a hatred deep inside the souls of the Islamic people and nations that still plagues the Western world at this very moment.

Because this present search of our past is for the origins of anti-Semitism, we need to note that most of these fervent Christian soldiers who set off on their “romantic” Crusades never actually made it to the Holy Land. They made it only to one or two villages or towns away from their homes, where in their frustration they acted out their vehemence against the only “infidels” they could find in these communities: these infidels were not Muslims but Jews. “One infidel is as good as another,” became the motto of the crusaders as the Jews were killed in village after village. “They deserved it,” the Christians said. “They not only killed Jesus, but they bragged about it and accepted the consequences for themselves and their children.” That is what the “Word of God” had stated. The echoes from Matthew’s words were never far from the minds of these Christian warriors.

This persecutory mentality had made itself obvious even earlier in European history after Christianity became the dominant religious expression in the empire. Heads of state, acting with papal authority, barred the Jews from owning land. To survive economically, Jews became bankers and jewelers. Christians, who were taught that usury was sinful, could not charge interest on loans, so banking was unprofitable for them. This opened a rich market that allowed Jews to become the dominant financiers of Europe. Kings borrowed money from Jewish bankers to underwrite their wars and even their Crusades. This enabled the Christians to feed stereotypical prejudices that portrayed Jews as money-grubbers. If there were any doubts about this, the story of Judas Iscariot was retold. Had he not betrayed the Lord for thirty pieces of silver? It all fit together. Christians needed the Jewish bankers, but they hated them simultaneously.

Banking time and again proved to be an unsafe haven for the Jews. Whenever a king’s debts to Jewish financiers became excessive, it was easy for him to begin another round of persecutions in which Jewish property would be confiscated. That property frequently included those paper assets called bank loans and the king’s debts disappeared into thin air! In time, the Christians would abandon their principles about the sinfulness of interest. Banking was too lucrative an enterprise to leave in Jewish hands. Another layer of anti-Semitism is thus laid bare.

Next we arrive at the period of Christian history in which the church celebrated its founding fathers—Polycarp, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Jerome, Tertullian and John Chrysostom, just to name a few. Not surprisingly, there were no founding mothers in this patriarchal world. These male figures were the key players as the church learned how to survive in a period of persecution and to prepare its faith tradition to become the dominant religion in the Roman Empire by the fourth century. It is fascinating to discover how deep and virulent the anti-Jewish rhetoric was in almost every one of these “fathers.” Their words, when read today, are still chilling. Jews were called “evil,” “vermin,” and “unclean.” They were said to be “unfit to live.” Christians were taught that it was a virtue to hate Jews actively. These religious leaders castigated and caricatured the Jewish tradition in ways that would have made it impossible for a faithful Jew to recognize it as his or her own sacred story. Jews were not to be trusted, not to be allowed access to power, not to be considered as potential friends, not to be consorted with in any common meal.

When we arrive at the second century, still searching for the origins of this prejudice that seems to have infected Christians at a very early stage, we come to a man named Marcion, who did his work around 140 CE. Marcion regarded the God of the Jews as a demonic figure. He proposed that Christians dismiss the Old Testament from what they considered sacred scriptures. He and his followers even began to edit out of “Christian” books—those that would someday form the core of the New Testament—all references to Jews. Marcion’s desire was to sever Christianity from its Jewish roots and allow it, even force it, to deny its own ancestry. He might be called the culmination of the first great wave of Christian anti-Semitism.

The church, to its credit, refused to go along with Marcion, eventually condemning him as a heretic, but Marcion’s anti-Semitism was destined to continue to exert its ugly influence in the life of the church. Marcion ultimately forced the early church to draw up its own canon of scripture, which quite specifically included the Old Testament. It could hardly have done otherwise, since the canonical gospels included thousands of references and allusions to the Hebrew scriptures. Those Jewish texts had long been the primary way through which Christians had portrayed Jesus as the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. Christians even began to appropriate Jewish concepts to themselves, calling themselves “God’s chosen people,” or “God’s elect,” and identifying themselves as the “new Israel.” Later the title selected for the Christian scriptures would be the New Testament. “Testament” was a poor Latin translation of the word for “covenant.” God’s first covenant had been made with the Jews; the second—the new and presumably the final—covenant was made with the Christians. These consciously adopted terms implied that the Jews no longer had a right even to their former claims as God’s chosen or covenanted ones. They were now defined by the Christians as God’s rejected, the ones who did not live up to their calling. “He came to his own and his own people received him not” is the way the Fourth Gospel described it (John 1:11).

The next step backward in this journey takes us into the New Testament itself. We Christians do not like to face the fact that anti-Semitism is present in our scriptures—especially in the gospels themselves—but it is. The book we call the “Word of God” actually teaches us to hate, so to the anti-Semitism in the New Testament portion of the Bible I now turn.

W
hen I was a child attending an Evangelical Episcopal (Anglican) Sunday school in North Carolina, I was taught that it was okay to hate Jews. If I doubted that, the Bible was quoted to validate that negativity. I never met a good Jew in all of my prepared Sunday school material. Jews were those evil people who were always out to get Jesus—and get him they did, I was told. I grew up never doubting that it was the Jews who were responsible for Jesus’ death. Like many in the early church and for centuries afterward, I exonerated the Roman officials of any guilt in the death of Jesus. I accepted the propaganda that was so deep in our faith tradition that it even found expression in the creeds. It was simply “under” Pontius Pilate, not “because of” Pontius Pilate, that Jesus suffered, died and was buried, those sacred documents proclaim. The Roman procurator was portrayed as little more than an innocent bystander. The Jews were the real villains. There is only a vague, understated note in the scriptures reminding readers that the Jews did not have the power to execute; all executions, other than those resulting from mob violence, had to be carried out by the Romans.

In the leaflets handed out weekly as part of my church’s Sunday school curriculum, it was easy to identify the Jews. They had names like Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes, Caiaphas, Annas and Judas Iscariot. Those names dripped with hostility as these stories were told. The Jews were sinister, evil people who were constantly plotting and scheming. When these Jews were portrayed pictorially, they were always painted in dark, negative colors, complete with scowls on their faces. Jews, I was taught, were people who had no principles.

In this same Sunday school no one told me that Jesus was a Jew. That seemed to have escaped their notice. When I saw pictures of Jesus, he certainly did not look like a Jew. He typically had blond hair, blue eyes and fair skin. I thought he was a Swede or at least an Englishman. It had also escaped my teachers’ notice that all of the disciples, as well as Paul and Mary Magdalene and Mary and Joseph, were Jews.

The Bible stories were presented to me as episodes depicting the good guys, who were Christians, against the bad guys, who were Jews. When Paul expressed his negative feelings about the Jews, it did not occur to me that Paul, a Jew, was saying these things about another part of his own people. Paul’s enemies were not the ethnic Jews, as I was taught by implication. They were rather the Jewish members of the orthodox party of Paul’s own religious tradition. That was, however, too subtle a distinction for my Sunday School material to grasp. To say it in a way that contemporary church people might understand, Paul’s enemies were simply the traditionalists, people that we today might call the “fundamentalist Jews.” Clergy might call them the “old guard.” Paul represented a challenging liberal party within Judaism that was composed of those Jews who believed that they had received a new vision of God in Jesus and that this new vision needed to be incorporated into their ongoing, ever-evolving faith story.

The heroes of the Jewish past, who were recognized as the mountaintop experiences in the Jewish tradition, had also been people who had a new vision that was destined to reform and reshape the Jewish story. There was Abraham, who left Ur of the Chaldeans to form a new people around a new idea; or Moses, who led the Jews out of slavery and stamped upon them a radical monotheism; or Elijah, who brought into a developing Judaism the role of the prophets; or Ezekiel, who reformed Judaism in the trauma of the Exile; or even Ezra and Nehemiah, who led a remnant out of the Exile to pick up the threads of their broken history and to rebuild the dream. There was also that enigmatic, shadowy figure, whose ideas were developed in Second Isaiah, as well as the writer of Second Zechariah, both of whom helped bring Judaism into a major new perspective in their times.
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So those revisionist Jewish followers of Jesus saw him as one more, perhaps even the greatest, in the long line of people who had kept the faith of the Jews open, living and growing. They thus challenged and destabilized that most traditional part of the Jewish community, which believed that it already possessed in its orthodox formulations the final truth of God and so needed no further expansion. What looks to the contemporary reader like a rather vehement anti-Semitic polemic in the New Testament was in fact a typical ecclesiastical dispute between traditionalists and visionaries, the closed tradition facing the new challenge. What we tend to forget today is that both parties in this instance were Jews.

That kind of face-off has happened thousands of times in religious history. It was not unlike the battle in Christian circles today between the fundamentalists and the modernists, in which epithets are hurled back and forth with little sensitivity to the feelings of the other. Fundamentalists are called ignorant, closed-minded security seekers who cannot embrace reality. Modernists are called atheists, secular humanists, traitors to the faith of their fathers and mothers. Religious battles are always visceral, emotional and exaggerated. That is because they are always about our deepest identity. Religious debates involve our sense of security and well-being. As such they are not unlike political battles where each side suggests that the ultimate disaster imaginable will occur if the opposite side or a different candidate is victorious at the ballot box.

What we have in the New Testament is primarily a story written by the Jewish revisionists, who were later to be called Christians, and who would in time open their revisionist Jewish faith story to the inclusion of gentiles. In that part of the New Testament called the epistles, we have letters attributed to such Jewish leaders as Paul, Peter, John, James, Jude and probably second-generation disciples at least of Paul, writers who were perhaps even more capable than the original Christians of making the transition into a universal vision. Then we have gospels written by the Jewish Mark, Matthew and John, who tell the story of how the meaning of Jesus broke the boundaries of Judaism to incorporate a radically new universal idea that relativized all of their previous conclusions and thus all of their religious security systems.

The one piece of this growing body of revisionist literature that did not follow this exact pattern is the narrative we call Luke-Acts. These two books, presumably authored by a man named Luke, but certainly authored by the same person, constitute the only parts of the Bible that were written by one who was not Jewish by birth. Luke appears to have been born a gentile. He seems to have been attracted to Judaism, as many first-century gentiles were, becoming one of those people who were called “gentile proselytes.” He appears ultimately to have converted to Judaism. Then, probably through the influence of Paul, he entered a new kind of religious community, shaped, its adherents claimed, by one called the Messiah (translated “Christos” in Greek and “Christ” in English), who was said to have called both Jews and gentiles beyond their original tribal identities into a new humanity. The battle that was thus waged inside first-century Judaism was between the traditionalists and the revisionists. It was a battle over how the future of Judaism would be defined. The new vision could not succeed unless the old vision died. This meant that the stakes were very high and the emotions were very real.

Over a period of time, probably less than a century, the revisionist Jews formed common cause with the influx of gentiles into Christianity and, as a consequence, loosened their own ties with Judaism. The barriers that proclaimed that Jews must stay separate and therefore could not eat or intermarry with gentiles faded under pressure from the revisionists, while among the orthodox Jews those very same lines were hardening. The division was inevitable and during the last years of the ninth decade of the first century of this Common Era an actual split occurred. Traditional Judaism could not and would not change. Anything that becomes so rigid it cannot adapt to a new reality will finally die. That is how Christianity, a new religion, but born in the womb of Judaism, came into being. In the sacred scriptures of that new religion there would linger eternally the echoes of those fierce battles fought between the revisionist Jews and the orthodox Jews. The New Testament was largely the product of the revisionist tradition. The animosity between the two groups was visceral and real. Echoes of their hostility are certainly heard in those words the revisionists hurled at the orthodox party that form much of the content of the New Testament. That hostility came to reside in the books that we call epistles and gospels. When those scriptures themselves came to be viewed as inspired and holy, their hostile words achieved a new status. Anti-Semitism as found in a book now called the “Word of God” conferred on this destructuve prejudice not only legitimacy but also holiness.

Of course, the words of the orthodox party were equally as hate-filled, but because no one was adding books to the Jewish scriptures, that brand of hostility did not enter their sacred text and so was not read over and over again through the centuries. Orthodoxy was not open to change. The traditionalists’ sacred scriptures were closed. The negativity of the revisionists, however, received enormous power from its inclusion in the Christian scriptures. If God had rejected the Jews, as the Christian scriptures implied, then the Christians’ continued rejection of Jews was validated. Throughout history these New Testament references would be read as if they reflected conflicts between Christians and Jews, not conflicts between liberalizing Jews and traditionalist Jews. The very Jewishness of Jesus would be forgotten. The legends of his miraculous birth, in which he was supposed to have been fathered by the Holy Spirit, would serve to make him appear to be less Jewish. His mother was just the sacred womb that nurtured the divine seed into life.

As the number of Jews in the Christian church began to shrink—a reality caused first by the influx of gentiles that reduced Jewish percentages of the whole and then by the fact that Jewish Christians more and more shed their Jewish practices and began to intermarry into the gentile world—the Christian church began to deemphasize its Jewishness. This can be seen in Luke’s gospel, for example, where Jewish celebration of Pentecost or Shavuot is given an entirely new Christian thrust. Shavuot celebrated the giving of the law, God’s greatest gift to the Jews. Christian Pentecost celebrated the gift of the Holy Spirit, which was said to be God’s greatest gift to the Christians. In the words of Paul, “Now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we are slaves not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit” (Rom. 7:6, NRSV). John’s gospel offered a similar contrast when it said, “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17, NRSV). In time the Jewishness of the early Christians would simply fade away. By the first quarter of the second century of the Common Era, Christianity had become overwhelmingly a gentile movement.

From that day to this, the primary readers and interpreters of the New Testament have been gentiles who have had no great sense of Jewish history, of Jewish writing styles or of the original Jewish setting of the Christian story. They identified the Jesus movement, about which the scriptures spoke, not as a movement made up of revisionist Jews but as one made up of Christians with no reference at all to their Jewish background. They identified the orthodox party in the New Testament with all Jews and thought of them as the enemies of Jesus. When they read the narratives of the Jesus movement in the Bible, they interpreted those texts not as negative comments that revisionist Jews had said to the orthodox Jews but as things that Christians, including Jesus, had said about all Jews. As these “sacred scriptures” were read through the ages in the churches of the Western world, the hostility of Christians toward Jews was reinforced anew in every century. The role of the Jews in the death of Jesus was recounted again and again as each Good Friday was observed. The presumed acceptance of the blame for this dark act of “deicide” was articulated in those scriptures by the Jews themselves. So the children of Abraham, the people who produced Jesus of Nazareth, suffered throughout Christian history, generation after generation, as the words of the Bible continued to wreak havoc against the Jews down through the ages. The face of anti-Semitism is now unmasked. It was and is a gift of the Christians to the world. It is the dark underside of the gospel of love. It is part and parcel of the Christian story. It is not a pretty, a noble or an inspiring picture.

There is one more strand of anti-Semitism, however, that must be traced before the story is complete. When the Christian gospel climaxed with the crucifixion, the antihero was pictured as a quintessential Jew. His name was Judas. He was called “Iscariot,” which means political traitor or assassin. In a real sense, anti-Semitism would focus through the ages on this character. He would be the linchpin, perhaps even the ultimate source of Christianity’s darkest chapter. To his story and his part in this dreadful bigotry we turn next.