Chapter Twenty-Eight

The New Testament’s Anti-Jewish Slander and the Conventions of Ancient Polemic

The scurrilous language used about Jews in the earliest Christian writings is a hurdle neither Jew nor Christian can easily surmount. It is a source of shame (finally) to Christians, and a well-grounded source of fear to Jews. A few remarks on my approach to this delicate subject may be helpful.1 First, I am not doing theology or making a direct contribution to Jewish- Christian relations. I do not worry about what to do with this language so much as about what the language was doing. My examination is historical and literary. Second, I do not attempt to solve any specific textual prob- lems. I suggest instead a perspective for viewing a whole series of texts. I may appear to move too quickly over troubled terrain, but my object is to reach a high place from which to view that terrain and assess its troubled condition. Third, I am not dealing with subtle issues. I do not engage the question whether any truth claim (particularly a religious truth claim) necessarily involves hostility to other truth claims or hatred of the people who make them. I do not ask whether any Christology, for example, is intrinsically anti-Semitic,2 or whether a supersessionist theology leads inevitably to the holocaust.3

1 This article began as a lecture sponsored by the Institute for Biblical and Literary Criticism at Indiana University and is dedicated to Henry Fischel, who introduced me to the Talmud and whose pioneering work on Judaism as part of the Hellenistic world is a model. 2 See R. Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Seabury, 1974) esp. 246–51. Ruether’s position is made thematic by A. Roy Eckhardt, Jesus and Christians: The Contemporary Meeting (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) e.g., 82–87. Eckhardt speaks easily of Christianity’s “christological idolatries” (153). 3 Eckhardt states; “. . . the finding that the traditional Christian attitude to Jews and Judaism helped make the Abomination possible and perhaps even inevitable has become a truism of recent historical scholarship” ( Jews and Christians, 63 [emphasis added]). Because of its “supersessionist theology,” Luke-Acts has recently been targeted as the NT’s most anti-Semitic writing; so J.T. Pawlikowski in a review of N. Beck’s Mature Christianity: “Acts is by far the most anti-Jewish book in the New Testament, posing far more difficulties in the long run than the celebrated Fourth Gospel” (CBQ 49 [1987] 138). Something of a rhetorical nadir is reached by J.T. Sanders when he says, “. . . the Gentile mission therefore served to attest the truth displayed in the martyrdom of Stephen, which Paul finally and for the last time announces at the end of Acts. A final solution of the Jewish problem has been indicated” (“The Salvation of the Jews in Luke-Acts,” in Luke-Acts: New Perspectives 516 chapter twenty-eight

My topic is simply the rhetoric of slander that is directed against Jew- ish opponents by Christians even when it is sometimes placed in the mouth of Jesus. A classic example is Matt 23:1–39 (par. Luke 11:37–52). Jesus attacks scribes and Pharisees, calling them hypocrites (23:13, 15, 23, 25, 27, 29), blind guides (23:16), white-washed tombs (23:27), serpents, brood of vipers (23:33), and children of hell (23:15). They are portrayed as vainglorious (23:5–7), posturing (23:27–28), preoccupied with trivia rather than real religion (23:23–24), concerned for outer not inner righteousness (23:25–26), the murderers of the prophets and of Jesus’ own emissaries (23:32–36). It is also Matthew who has the Jews answer Pilate at the trial of Jesus, “his blood be on us and on our children” (27:25). Luke adds that the Pharisees and lawyers “rejected God’s plan for them” (Luke 7:30) and in an apparently gratuitous aside calls the Pharisees “lovers of money” (16:14). John’s Gospel contains a number of such passages. In disputation with those termed simply “the Jews,” for example, Jesus says, “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. . . . He who is of God hears the words of God; the reason you do not hear them is that you are not of God” ( John 8:44–47). John explains why Jesus was rejected: “. . . many even of the authorities believed in him, but for fear of the Pharisees they did not confess it, lest they should be put out of the synagogue, for they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God” ( John 12:42–43). Johannine Christianity also contributes from the book of Revelation: “Behold I will make those of the synagogue of Satan, who say they are Jews but are not and lie—behold I will make them come and bow before your feet and learn that I have loved you” (Rev 3:9). Some such statements occur also in Paul. He can say, “even if our Gos- pel is veiled, it is veiled only to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ who is the likeness of God” (2 Cor 4:3). A part of Israel, he says in Romans, is, “as regards the gos- pel, enemies of God, for your sake” (Rom 11:28). In Philippians, he speaks of “enemies of the cross of Christ, their end is destruction, their god is the belly, they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things” (Phil 3:18–19). He tells the Thessalonian congregation which was experiencing persecution: “You suffered the same things from your countrymen that they [the churches in Judea] did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord from the Society of Biblical Literature Seminar [ed. C.H. Talbert; New York: Crossroad, 1984] 115 (emphasis added])!