Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 178:710 (Apr 2021)
Article: Anti-Semitism In The New Testament: New Scrutiny Of A Chronic Notion, Part 1
Author: S. David Mash

BSac 178:710 (April-June 2021) p. 143

Anti-Semitism In The New Testament: New Scrutiny Of A Chronic Notion, Part 1

S. David Mash

S. David Mash is Associate Director of Library Services, Lander University, Greenwood, South Carolina.

Abstract

Some see in the Gospels antipathy between Jesus and the Jewish people, even going so far as calling it anti-semitism. In this first of two articles, Gospel texts are analyzed to find out whether there was general antipathy between Jesus and the Jews. This study discovers that Jews are generally categorized as either leadership or the general population, and that the Gospels are consistent in their presentation of animosity between Jesus and the Jewish leadership—not the general population.

Why This Study?

University of Chicago historian David Nirenberg recounts a conversation he witnessed shortly after the September 11 destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City: “It happened in 2001, in mid-September. I was heading to New York City to give a talk at N.Y.U. It was the day George W. Bush was speaking at Ground Zero. There were only two other people on the subway car, and they were trying to explain to each other why this new kind of terror had struck New York. They had two answers for each other. One said that it was the Jews’ greed, and that the Jews had turned New York into a symbol of capitalism, and that’s why everybody hates us, and the other said, yes, and because they killed Christ.”1 Nirenberg explains that this experience spurred

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him to write the book Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition.2

Nirenberg demonstrates from the history of Christendom that anti-Judaism has been propped up through the centuries with texts drawn from the New Testament. He explains that anti-Judaism is conceptually broader than anti-Semitism, but his examples nevertheless chronicle a cultural and theological seedbed for frequently murderous anti-Semitism.

Today, we find scholars who conclude that indeed the New Testament is periodically soiled with an anti-Jewish/anti-Semitic mindset.3 Roy Eckardt is unambiguous: “All the learned exegesis in the world cannot negate the truth that there are elements not only of anti-Judaism but of antisemitism in the New Testament.”4 On the Gospel of John, Nirenberg states: “The most sharply drawn sketch of the Jew as enemy comes from the fourth gospel. . . . [O]f all Christian texts that have become canonical, [John is] the one most...