The protests over the war in Gaza that roiled many college campuses in the United States this past May and June raised once again the ancient specter of anti-Semitism. This year’s version of the prejudice arose from Israel’s vigorous response to Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023, which slaughtered 1,200 Israelis and took 251 hostages. Jewish fears of such prejudice are understandable, given their long history of suffering from violent anti-Semitism. But peaceful and clearly articulated campus protests against Israeli military actions are, of course, legitimate, to be expected and even welcomed.
Christian protesters, however, may not be fully aware of the bloody history of anti-Semitism that was fueled in part by Christian anti-Judaism going back to the origins of Christianity. And the Catholic protesters among them may not be aware that their church invites them in these opening years of the third millennium to a new and positive relationship with their Jewish neighbors.
Already in the beginning
How did anti-Judaism arise among Christians? To a large extent, the answer lies in the period when the New Testament was written down—the latter part of the first century. It is often forgotten that it took 20 years after Jesus’ death circa 30 C.E. for the first Christian writings to appear—St. Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians in 50 C.E. Nearly all of the other books of the New Testament were composed in the form we now have in the half century that followed.
During those five “writing decades,” leaders of the Jesus movement had to explain to themselves and their fellow Jews why mainstream Judaism was not accepting Jesus as messiah and was opposing Christian outreach to Jews. In those five decades, conflict between Christians and the Jewish synagogue greatly intensified, and writers sometimes adopted the rough and tumble language of the prophets as they fulminated against opponents and presumed their ill will. Inevitably, Christian gospels and letters often reflect disappointment and frustration over their dashed hopes for Jewish acceptance.
For example, the Gospels nearly always portray the Jewish religious guides of that time, the Pharisees, as hypocritical foes of Jesus; and the Gospel of John’s use of the term “the Jews” suggests that all Jews, not just some leaders, rejected Jesus and arranged for his death. The first-century conflict was to a large extent an intra-Jewish conflict, for Jesus, his family and his earliest followers were Jews, deeply disappointed that their co-religionists did not accept what they themselves so ardently embraced.
Conflict was inevitable, for Jesus’ followers from the start gave divine honor to Jesus and interpreted the Scriptures (especially the Psalms, Isaiah and Deuteronomy) in a more urgent and immediate way than did mainstream Judaism. By the end of the first century, the die had been cast, and many Christian writings defined their movement by its differences from Judaism. Christian attitudes were woven into the already existing Greco-Roman criticism of Judaism for its distance from civic religious ceremonies.
Adversus Judaeos
It is not surprising that the Latin phrase Adversus Judaeos, “against (or ‘distinct from’) the Jews,” has come to characterize a whole body of Christian literature that responded to real or imagined Jewish accusations against Christ, Christians or Christianity. The Adversus Judaeos literature argued for Jesus’ messiahship, God’s rejection of the Jews as God’s chosen people and the rejection of Jewish law measured against a supposed new and spiritual revelation. As the scholar Andrew S. Jacobs has written in The Encyclopedia of Ancient History, “The fierce rhetoric of Adversus Judaeos was highly effective…. By the Middle Ages, the Christian image of the Jew—intransigent, murderous, misanthropic, diabolical, and deicidal—had hardened into the chilling stereotype that would eventually feed into the racialized anti-Semitism of the modern era.”
In assessing patristic authors, one must be nuanced, however. The authors regarded the Old Testament as inspired. Origen, for example, devoted enormous labor to establishing a critical Greek text, and John Chrysostom wrote commentaries on Genesis, Psalms and Isaiah as well as commentaries on New Testament books.
Unfortunately, what had been for the most part conventional Christian anti-Judaism during the first millennium changed in the second millennium into something far worse. Around the time of the First Crusade in the 11th century, Jews began to suffer violent attacks, often influenced by Christian preachers; in some places entire communities of Jews were massacred. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council forced Jews to wear distinctive clothing. Once isolated, Jews were easily demonized, subject to false accusations such as desecrating the host, murdering children or poisoning the water supply. In 1556 in Rome, Pope Paul IV forced Jews into the ghetto (the Venetian dialect word for “island”).
Jews did not fare much better under the Protestant reformers. Failing to gain widespread Jewish conversions, Luther urged Protestant princes to expel them or impose restrictions. The 18th-century Enlightenment brought some toleration, but many Christian leaders, including popes, remained reactionary and aggressively promoted conversion to Christianity. In the 19th century, anti-Judaism took on its modern racist cast. Racist anti-Semitism got fully under way in Europe, coming to an unspeakable climax in the 1930s and 1940s with the Holocaust, a carefully planned genocide of six million Jews, almost two-thirds of the Jewish population in Europe.
In the post-World War II mid-20th century, the shock of the Holocaust spurred many Christian leaders to re-examine the Christian anti-Judaism that fueled anti-Semitism and to make amends. One example of the change in Catholic attitudes was the 1965 “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions” (“Nostra Aetate”) of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). This declaration was the first conciliar document that expressed genuine appreciation for non-Christian religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and especially Judaism, to which it devotes the most space. It declares: “Since Christians and Jews have such a common spiritual heritage, this sacred Council wishes to encourage mutual understanding and appreciation. This can be obtained, especially, by way of biblical and theological enquiry and through friendly discussions.”
“Nostra Aetate” marked a turning point in Roman Catholic attitudes toward Jews. A fresh start in Christian–Jewish relations in the third millennium seemed possible.
A 21st-century response
Roman Catholic responses to pastoral issues often include appeals to official documents from the Vatican or other church bodies. Non-Catholics can be puzzled by such habitual attention to documents, but for a church that respects tradition as much as the Catholic Church does, such attention is a time-honored way of moving forward.
Three official documents are necessary for understanding contemporary Christian relationships to Jews. One has already been mentioned, “Nostra Aetate.” The other two are concerned with how Christians should read the Scriptures they share with Jews—the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures. The first document, “The Word of God” (“Dei Verbum”), is a dogmatic constitution issued by Vatican II. Its fourth chapter evaluates the Old Testament from an exclusively Christian perspective, emphasizing its predictive function with regard to the New Testament and focusing on messianic passages. It restates the scholarly consensus of the mid-20th century without breaking new ground. Chapter Four honors and appreciates the Old Testament as the word of God, but it does so largely on the basis of its foreshadowing of the New Testament.
The third document is more promising. “The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible” was published in 2002 by the Pontifical Biblical Commission, a Vatican group made up of internationally recognized Catholic biblical scholars. A striking paragraph compares Christian and Jewish reading and makes an extraordinarily important point:
Christians can and ought to admit that the Jewish reading of the Bible is a possible one, in continuity with the Jewish Sacred Scriptures from the Second Temple period, a reading analogous to the Christian reading which developed in parallel fashion. Each of these two readings is part of the vision of each respective faith of which it is a product and an expression. Consequently, they cannot be reduced one into the other [emended last sentence of the faulty Vatican translation].
The document notes the continuities in Jewish and Christian readings of the Hebrew Scriptures, but it does not disguise the ruptures of the Christian reading. The document also lists significant ruptures in the course of Jewish interpretation: the Levitical priesthood of the Jerusalem Temple; animal sacrifice; dietary and purity rules; and the practice of the ban on annihilation of enemies in war. Such Jewish reinterpretation over the centuries, notes the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s document, “makes clear that the shift of emphases accomplished in the New Testament was already begun in the Old Testament and constitutes a legitimate potential reading of it.” The document explains the word “potential” by a metaphor from developing photographs. “Like a ‘developer’ [the chemical solution] during the process of photographic development, the person of Jesus and the events concerning him have caused to appear in the Scriptures a fullness of meaning that could not be hitherto perceived.”
Major differences in Jewish and Christian readings remain, however. The most obvious is the New Testament’s reinterpretation of traditional monotheism by incorporating into it the divine status of Jesus, the view that human beings are created in the image of God defined by Christ (Col 1:15), and the recognition that God’s people, already in possession of an irrevocable covenant, are offered a “new covenant” (Jer 31:31) established through the blood of Jesus.
One of the virtues of “The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible” is that it takes seriously early Christian interpretation within the first-century Judaism of the Sadducees, Pharisees and groups like Jesus’ earliest followers. It recognizes that Jesus and his disciples embraced the Scriptures as their own Jewish heritage and read the Scriptures using exegetical practices of their culture. Last but not least, the document acknowledges that Jesus and his followers were “siblings” of other minority groups within first-century Judaism.
Two common views that need revision today
The current view that Christianity is the offspring of Judaism–that is, the child of its parent Judaism–needs to be revised. The first reason for revising is historical. Modern Judaism took its rise from rabbinic Judaism of the second century C.E., whereas Christianity arose earlier, in the first century C.E. The rabbi-founders were Jewish sages who flourished in Palestine after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. and became responsible for editing and interpreting the Scriptures.
Judaism is thus not the parent of nascent Christianity, but its sibling. Christianity should no longer be regarded as a child struggling to differentiate itself from Judaism, its parent, but as a sibling in a friendly and respectful relationship.
A good example of a sibling and respectful relationship is presented in a book co-authored by two professors at Harvard Divinity School, Kevin J. Madigan, a Catholic, and Jon D. Levenson, a Jew, The Power of God for Christians and Jews:
Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity are not parent and child but siblings, sister religions whose parent was Second Temple Judaism and whose more distant ancestors were still earlier phases of the religion of Israel…. Whereas Christians have traditionally affirmed a theology in which their religion replaced Judaism, this was never the case historically. Judaism continued to live, to develop, and to spread long after Christianity appeared; and it survives, often flourishing, to this day. Moreover, Christianity can acquire an accurate view of the way their religion originated in Judaism only if they familiarize themselves with the rich Jewish literature of the late Second Temple and early rabbinic periods of Jewish history.
The second view that needs to be revised is the common description of Judaism and Christianity as two covenants and the argument about whether one supersedes or replaces the other. Rather, we ought to follow “Nostra Aetate” and join with both the prophets of the Old Testament and the apostle Paul of the New Testament in “awaiting the day, known to God alone, when all people will call on God with one voice and serve him ‘shoulder to shoulder’ (Zeph 3:9).” Focusing on the hope shared by both Jews and Christians for God’s consummation of history lifts all eyes toward God and God’s work of bringing history to its appointed goal, moving the discussion away from superiority of covenants to a commonly shared hope.
The start of the third millennium provides just such an opportunity for Catholics to appreciate their Jewish neighbors.
