Anti Judaism In The New Testament

Jews and Anti-Judaism in the New Testament offers a balanced, sensitive, and erudite guide to the precarious issues of anti-Semitism, anti-Judaism, and supersessionism in the New Testament. Combining adept navigation of the relevant literature--both classics of the field and more recent forays--with a keen exegetical analysis of the Christian canon, Terence L. Donaldson maps the major New Testament writings across three axes: self-definition, degree of separation, and rhetorical intent. In doing so, he successfully brings his readers up to speed on this crucial discussion, even while pushing the conversation forward with intellectual force and exegetical savvy.

This volume is a systematic critique of the anti-Jewishness of the New Testament. Its primary purpose is to delineate what the New Testament authors intended to convey to their respective audiences concerning the Jewish people. That is, this volume is concerned with the initial meaning intended by the New Testament authors and how this intended meaning directly and with forethought contributed to Christian anti-Judaic1 thought and action. We will investigate how and why the New Testament authors created this anti-Judaic climate. Analysis of the Gospel stories demonstrates that anti-Judaism is woven into the fabric of a significant part of the New Testament narrative. This narrative has provoked bitter condemnation and persecution of Jews. The Jewish people were cast in the role of a dark satanic force as a systematic denigration and demonization of the Jews took place. It is to its harsh and bitter polemic against the entire Jewish people that one must ascribe the accusations of the Jews being Christ-killers and children of Satan and the later embellishments of Jews as host desecrators, ritual murders, and well-poisoners. Post-New Testament developments of Christian anti-Judaism are not central to this study. In pursuing our investigation we will make a distinction between what was originally intended by the New Testament authors and the usage made of their works to meet the anti-Judaic needs of the subsequent church. Conclusions reached by later interpreters that have often been attributed to the authors of the Gospels are not our primary concern. It is not a question of how, or to what extent, the New Testament passages concerning Jews and Judaism were misused or misread in later centuries, but of what they were meant to mean in the first place. Thus, our focus will be on what the authors meant to convey to their respective contemporary audiences about the Jews. What would the New Testament’s audience have understood from the information its various authors provided? What meaning would a reader derive from a particular text? Is the New Testament anti-Jewish or is it merely an accurate report of events as they took place? Answers can only come through an examination of the relevant passages in their specific literary contexts, as well as in the context of the struggles, aspirations, and theologies of the early church. Special attention must be paid to the relationship between the church and the Roman authorities, on the one hand, and the synagogue, on the other hand, at the time the various books of the New Testament were written and to polemics within the early church community. The New Testament was not written solely to condemn the Jews. But, in the process of developing the several story lines that evolved into the four respective canonical Gospels, the early church adopted a decidedly anti-Judaic stance. Consequently, in its final form, instances of anti-Judaic sentiment are found in much of the New Testament, the Gospels in particular. This animosity has to do as much with politics as with theological doctrine, relations with the Roman imperial authorities as with displacing Jews and Judaism. If pre-Gospel traditions already included anti-Judaic elements, they were now systematically exploited. There was a growing need to explain why Israel, God’s chosen people, had rejected Jesus and the message of his disciples. How could this be reconciled with God’s will? In presenting Jesus as the Messiah and Christianity as superseding Judaism, Paul and the authors of the Gospels and Acts, in particular, indict the Jewish people for the death of Jesus and spread antipathy of Jews and Judaism as part of a program to achieve Christian ascendancy. The historicized core myths that provide the basis for the New Testament missionary program were shaped and reshaped to show that the church possessed full authenticity and validity contra Jews and Judaism. The New Testament auth

Current scholarship in the study of ancient Christianity is now available to nonspecialists through this collection of essays on anti-Judaism in the New Testament and in New Testament interpretation. While academic writing can be obscure and popular writing can be uncritical, this group of experts has striven to write as simply and clearly as possible on topics that have been hotly contested. The essays are arranged around the historical figures and canonical texts that matter most to Christian communities and whose interpretation has fed the negative characterizations of Jews and Judaism. A select annotated bibliography also gives suggestions for further reading. This book should be an excellent resource for academic courses as well as adult study groups.

This is the first book since the canonization of the New Testament which studies its anti-Jewish contents on a thorough, systematic, verse-by-verse basis. The author identifies every misquotation and mistranslation from the Hebrew Bible and rebuts every antisemitic assertion in the Christian Scriptures. The book examines the historical background in which the Gospels and Epistles were written and how contemporary conditions affected their contents. The final chapter deals with the impact of the New Testament on Jews and Christians for the past two millennia and the possibilities of revising this trend through alternate interpretations. Contents: When and How it all Startted; The Tanakh According to the Gospel; On Reinventing Paul; The Letters that Started a Religion; The Law According to Paul; The View of the Jew in the Gospels and Acts; Where Do We Go From Here?; Bibliography; Indexes.

Although major New Testament figures--Jesus and Paul, Peter and James, Jesus' mother Mary and Mary Magdalene--were Jews, living in a culture steeped in Jewish history, beliefs, and practices, there has never been an edition of the New Testament that addresses its Jewish background and the culture from which it grew--until now. In The Jewish Annotated New Testament, eminent experts under the general editorship of Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Z. Brettler put these writings back into the context of their original authors and audiences. And they explain how these writings have affected the relations of Jews and Christians over the past two thousand years. An international team of scholars introduces and annotates the Gospels, Acts, Letters, and Revelation from Jewish perspectives, in the New Revised Standard Version translation. They show how Jewish practices and writings, particularly the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, influenced the New Testament writers. From this perspective, readers gain new insight into the New Testament's meaning and significance. In addition, thirty essays on historical and religious topics--Divine Beings, Jesus in Jewish thought, Parables and Midrash, Mysticism, Jewish Family Life, Messianic Movements, Dead Sea Scrolls, questions of the New Testament and anti-Judaism, and others--bring the Jewish context of the New Testament to the fore, enabling all readers to see these writings both in their original contexts and in the history of interpretation. For readers unfamiliar with Christian language and customs, there are explanations of such matters as the Eucharist, the significance of baptism, and "original sin." For non-Jewish readers interested in the Jewish roots of Christianity and for Jewish readers who want a New Testament that neither proselytizes for Christianity nor denigrates Judaism, The Jewish Annotated New Testament is an essential volume that places these writings in a context that will enlighten students, professionals, and general readers.

The Gospel of John presents its readers, listeners, and interpreters with a serious problem: how can we reconcile the Gospel’s exalted spirituality and deep knowledge of Judaism with its portrayal of the Jews as the children of the devil (John 8:44) who persecuted Christ and his followers? One widespread solution to this problem is the so-called “expulsion hypothesis.” According to this view, the Fourth Gospel was addressed to a Jewish group of believers in Christ that had been expelled from the synagogue due to their faith. The anti-Jewish elements express their natural resentment of how they had been treated; the Jewish elements of the Gospel, on the other hand, reflect the Jewishness of this group and also soften the force of the Gospel’s anti-Jewish comments. In Cast out of the Covenant, this book, Adele Reinhartz presents a detailed critique of the expulsion hypothesis on literary and historical grounds. She argues that, far from softening the Gospel’s anti-Jewishness, the Gospel’s Jewish elements in fact contribute to it. Focusing on the Gospel’s persuasive language and intentions, Reinhartz shows that the Gospel’s anti-Jewishness is evident not only in the Gospel’s hostile comments about the Jews but also in its appropriation of Torah, Temple, and Covenant that were so central to first-century Jewish identity. Through its skillful use of rhetoric, the Gospel attempts to convince its audience that God’s favor had turned away from the Jews to the Gentiles; that there is a deep rift between the synagogue and those who confess Christ as Messiah; and that, in the Gospel’s view, this rift was initiated in Jesus’ own lifetime. The Fourth Gospel, Reinhartz argues, appropriates Jewishness at the same time as it repudiates Jews. In doing so, it also promotes a “parting of the ways” between those who believe that Jesus is the messiah, the Son of God, and those who do not, that is, the Jews. This rhetorical program, she suggests, may have been used to promote outreach or even an organized mission to the Gentiles, following in the footsteps of Paul and his mid-first-century contemporaries.

When and under what circumstances did the Gospel texts begin to serve anti-Jewish ends? Can it be said, accurately and fairly, that the evangelists were anti-Jewish? Are there tendencies in the Gospels that were originally intended by the evangelists to injure the Jewish people or their religion, or to work against the interests of the Jewish people and/or their religion? These and other issues were addressed in a three-year research project that culminated in a fall 1996 convocation, at which five major research papers were presented with two respondents to each paper. The papers and responses are now made available for the first time in this volume. Major presentations include: • Anti-Judaism and the Gospel of Matthew -Amy-Jill Levine • Anti-Judaism and the Gospel of Luke -Daryl D. Schmidt • Anti-Judaism and the Gospel of John -David Regensberger • Something Greater than the Temple -Robert Louis Wilken • Anti-Judaism in the Critical Study of the Gospels -Joseph B. Tyson • Reflections on Anti-Judaism in the New Testament and in Christianity -E.P. Sanders "This book succeeds in giving a comprehensive view of the problem it addresses, and the papers are clear, forthright presentations that will help the reader see what the issues were when the Gospels were written and what they still are." -E.P. Sanders, Duke University William R. Farmer is Professor of New Testament at the University of Dallas and co-editor of Jesus and the Suffering Servant: Isaiah 53 and Christian Origins (Trinity 1998).

An examination and evaluation of the anti-Jewish polemic in the Gospels as reflected in the scholarly debate over the last 15 years.