The Sins of Scripture (18 page)

THE TERRIBLE TEXTS

T
he darkest and bleakest side of the Christian faith is revealed in the Christians’ treatment of the Jews throughout history. Anti-Semitism is a terrifying prejudice that is rooted so deeply in the church’s life that it has distorted our entire message.

Christianity was born in the womb of Judaism. Jesus was a Jew. Tradition tells us he was circumcised on the eighth day and presented in the temple on the fortieth day of life. The story of his journey to Jerusalem at age twelve has about it the marks of a bar mitzvah–type ceremony. The gospels refer to Jesus going to the synagogue “as was his custom.” The picture drawn of Jesus was that of a devout and God-fearing Jew who was deeply engaged in the worship tradition of his people.

The earliest disciples, beginning with the twelve and expanding rapidly after the Easter experience, were Jews. They were not called Christians until the second or third generation of the movement. The book of Acts suggests that this name was first used in Antioch (11:26). The date for the adoption of this label is not easily established, but it could be no earlier than the 50s, or at least twenty years after the events of the first Good Friday, and was probably later than that. The book of Acts is normally dated in the mid-90s of the first century. Even then the title “Christian” was somewhat pejorative. The word “Christ” was derived from the attempt to translate the Hebrew word
mashiach,
which literally meant “the anointed one,” into Greek. So “Christian” literally meant “follower of the anointed one,” which lent itself to a negative second meaning of the oily ones or the greasy ones. One recalls the derogatory putdown “greaser” that teenagers once used for those they regarded as “nerds” or social misfits. The name the disciples of Jesus first called themselves was “followers of the way.”

What is important, however, is that we recognize that these disciples of Jesus continued to be part of the worship life of the synagogue until well into the ninth decade of the Christian era. This becomes very obvious when we recognize how deeply Mark, Matthew and Luke, known as the synoptic gospels, were shaped by the liturgical life of the synagogue. The Christians told the Jesus story inside the context of the Hebrew scriptures. This demonstrates far more than we realize that it was inside the synagogue that the Jesus story unfolded, for that was the only place the Hebrew scriptures were read and expounded. Please recognize that the people in that day did not have their own copies of the scriptures. Books—and when we say that word we need to think ancient scrolls, not bound hard copies—were very rare and very expensive. Yet the Jesus story as revealed in the gospels is intimately bound up with the Hebrew scriptures. Even the heart of the Christian story, the passion narrative, which was probably the first part of the Jesus story to achieve written form, is deeply dependent on what were thought to be the validating texts from Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22. All of the titles that were used for Jesus—“Christ,” “Lamb of God,” “sin-bearer,” “Son of Man,” “Paschal Lamb”—came directly out of the liturgy of the synagogue. The synagogue is the place in which the Christian faith was born.

Yet something happened early on that poisoned the relationship between this Jesus movement and its Jewish place of birth, something that caused Christianity to become intensely hate-filled toward all things Jewish. That deeply destructive attitude continues to this day. Throughout the centuries the primary gifts that Christians have given to the Jews have been pain, death, ghettoization and unimaginable religious persecution. The words that were most frequently used to justify that negative behavior came time after time from the New Testament itself. The favorite text of anti-Semitism has been, historically, the words from Matthew’s story of the cross. In this narrative the Jewish crowd, prior to the crucifixion, is portrayed as responding to Pilate’s plea of innocence by saying, “His blood be on us and on our children” (Matt. 27:25).

I suspect that no other verse in all of Holy Scripture has been responsible for so much violence and so much bloodshed. People convinced that these words justified their hostility have killed millions of Jewish people over history. “The Jews asked for it,” Christians have said. “The Jews acknowledged their responsibility for the death of Jesus and even requested that his blood be placed upon the backs of their children in every generation.” In this way Christians have not only explained, but also made a virtue out of, their violent anti-Semitism. No other verse of the Bible reveals more tragically the “sins of scripture” or better earns for itself the designation of a “terrible text.”

This Matthean verse is not the sole textual justifier of anti-Semitism, even if it is the one most quoted. The Jews are denigrated by polemical Christians time after time in the New Testament. Paul, quoting Isaiah (29:10), refers to the Jews as those to whom God has given “a spirit of stupor, eyes that should not see and ears that should not hear down to this very day (Rom. 11:7–8).

John’s gospel quotes Jesus as saying that the Jews are “from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires” (8:44). Whenever the phrase “the Jews” is used in John’s gospel, there is a pejorative undertone. When John tells about the first Easter appearance of the risen Christ, he suggests that the disciples were in hiding behind locked doors, “for fear of the Jews” (20:19). The reason the tomb of Jesus had a detachment of temple guards placed around it, according to Matthew, was because the Jewish chief priests, together with the Pharisees, told Pilate that “this imposter” had predicted that “after three days, I will arise again” (Matt. 27:62ff.). The list could go on and on. The clear message portrayed in the gospels is that Jews are negative, sinister, anti-Christian characters who were responsible for the death of Jesus. That is the definition that has emerged from the Bible to infiltrate the minds of two thousand years of Christian history. Far more than Christians today seem to understand, to call the Bible the “Word of God” in any sense is to legitimize this systemic hatred reflected in its pages.

Anti-Semitism is not confined to the past. In this present century, called by many a “postmodern” and even a “post-Christian” world, the cancer of anti-Semitism is still spreading. Synagogues and Jewish gravesites and businesses are still defaced periodically with swastikas or hostile words. A noted American politician in the last decades of the twentieth century, seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, referred to New York City in a derogatory way as “Hymie Town.”
²
Another presidential candidate, this time a Republican, just to be nonpartisan, openly expressed his admiration for Adolf Hitler.
³
A national leader of a Southeast Asian nation, speaking at the end of the twentieth century, referred to the Jews as the source of all the ills in the world.
⁴
It has not been an easy journey through history for those whose national rhetoric, as portrayed in their sacred scriptures, defined themselves as “God’s chosen people.”

Starting with this recent history, I want us to walk backward step by step toward the period of time in which the New Testament was written, when the “followers of the way” were still all synagogue-worshiping Jews. I hope to accomplish two things in this process: first, to make us aware of how consistent anti-Semitism has been throughout Western history, and second, to see if we can locate and understand its origins. Until we embrace the depth of the problem and identify what it is in the Christian faith itself that not only gave anti-Semitism its birth but also regularly sustains it, we will continue to violate the very people who gave us the Jesus we claim to serve.

The obvious place to start this backward journey is with the Holocaust. This emergence of inhumane horror in the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century occurred in Nazi Germany when Reichschancellor Adolf Hitler inaugurated what he called “the final solution of the Jewish problem.” Its first eruption into public awareness in Germany came in the early thirties, but it was not until what came to be called Kristallnacht that the world took much notice. “Crystal Night” was a moment in 1938 when marauding bands of Nazi youth smashed windows in homes, shops and synagogues in Jewish communities throughout the Reich, terrorizing people and destroying property. It ended some six million deaths later in 1945 when the Nazi concentration camps in which Jews had been systematically exterminated were finally overrun by the Allied armed forces and the few remaining emaciated prisoners were set free. This tragedy occurred in a modern, well-educated, Western, ostensibly Christian nation with little protest from any branch of the church. Indeed, the Catholic Church’s Pope Pius XII, referred to by one author as “Hitler’s pope,” has been deeply implicated in these crimes.
⁵
He either actively supported the atrocities, if the worst-case scenario is correct, or simply acquiesced without opposition. Either way, it seems that Christian anti-Semitism played a huge role in the Holocaust.

Protestant Christian leaders did not cover themselves with glory either. The Protestant church within Germany accommodated itself to the Nazi agenda far more than anyone would like to believe. Those who spoke out were so few that their names are still remembered: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller come immediately to mind.

Revisionist historians like to suggest that this murderous prejudice was limited to Nazi Germany and did not affect the rest of the Christian world. However, the facts do not support this self-serving conclusion. The governments of Great Britain, Canada and the United States knew what was going on in Nazi Germany well before World War II began, yet none of them made efforts diplomatically or politically to bring pressure on the German nation to halt this violence, nor did they attempt military efforts such as bombing the rail lines that led to the extermination camps. They refused even to allow persecuted German or Polish Jews to enter their countries as political refugees. Anti-Semitism was strong enough in each of these nations that politicians were not willing to be perceived as pro-Jewish. This negative response to the greatest human tragedy in Christian history was one more manifestation of the underlying hostilities that had marked the relationship between Christians and Jews for two thousand years. Hitler was not an individual phenomenon that had no previous significant antecedents.

Part of what created Hitler and his regime was surely the work of Martin Luther in the sixteenth century. The great church reformer helped both to create the German nation and to advance the German language, yet he had a destructive, anti-Semitic blind spot. His rhetoric about Jews was unbelievably hostile. Jews were, for Luther, nothing short of evil by nature, lacking redeeming value and saving grace. He railed against them, publicly and privately, suggesting that they were, by their very being, demonic people who had compromised their right to live and so the world was well served by their deaths. Luther’s followers felt free to act out their anti-Semitism, given the permission they had received from their leader.

The story does not get brighter as we continue this backward trek and find ourselves in the fourteenth century, when the Black Death was decimating the population to such an extent that people began to think the human race itself might actually die out. Death was so prevalent during that plague that the people’s ability to bury the dead was strained to a breaking point and bodies were often left to rot in the streets. Disease at that time in history was both mysterious and fear-inducing. People knew nothing about the causative agents of sickness. The majority opinion, encouraged by the leaders of the church, was that illness was an expression of divine wrath. Something human beings were doing had infuriated God so deeply that God in this instance had sent the Black Death as God’s divine scourge. Whatever this human evil was, it had to be something in which the entire human population shared, for the punishment was falling indiscriminately on faithful God-fearing worshipers as well as on godless renegades. Given this perspective, the religious leaders sought to understand the mind of God so that repentance, prayer and resolve could root out this sinfulness and thus bring an end to their peril. The questions they asked rose quite naturally inside their frame of reference: “What have we done to incur God’s wrath that this plague has reached such unprecedented proportions?”—in other words, “What is our sin?”

It was in answer to that question that two movements developed in Christian Europe. The first, called “the flagellants,” about which I have spoken already in another context, sought to purge their sin through self-inflicted pain. The second moved beyond self-punishment and thus became far more destructive and far more evil. An areawide plague, in the minds of this group of Christians, had to be caused by some kind of behavior that was systemic. At last, as with a flash of insight, the cause was identified and it fitted: Christian Europe had tolerated “infidels” in its midst, and this toleration of false believers had incurred unspeakable divine anger. If Christians would only begin to purge these infidels from the ranks of its world, the argument went, then the wrath of God might be withdrawn. It was an emotionally satisfying solution. Latent prejudices could be revived and justified. The anger present in every tragic death experience could be focused. The enemy could be identified and “virtuous” hatreds could flow freely.

Who were these infidels? Why they were the Jews, of course! Slowly, there was a shift from self-blaming to blaming the Jews, a prejudice-enhancing shift. The Jews must have poisoned the wells, infesting the drinking water, people said. That is why the plague was so rampant and so indiscriminate. Rationality was a casualty of the fear and hatred people felt, as it often is when those emotions run rampant, and with its demise came the worst outbreak of anti-Semitic horror that the Christian world had yet seen. Jews were murdered, beaten, kidnapped, forcibly baptized, robbed of their assets, expelled from their homes and ghettoized. Even those Jews who had converted to Christianity were investigated and many were charged with continuing to observe Jewish rites in private. Jews were among the most prominent victims who faced the fires at the stake during the period of history we call the Inquisition. It was one more dark chapter in the continuing saga of anti-Semitism in the Christian church.