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The Alienation of Judaism and Christianity
Biblical scholars since the Holocaust have tried to tackle the difficult question as to how far the horrors of antisemitism have their origins in the New Testament. Throughout Christian history, Jews were blamed for the death of Jesus; they were regarded as the ones who rejected and killed their own Messiah. While the New Testament texts include many inspirational passages and the gospel message of salvation in Christ, they have also left an unintended and unfortunate legacy which modern interpreters cannot ignore.
The New Testament texts were probably written by Jews but at the very least Gentiles with an extremely good knowledge of the Jewish tradition and its scriptures. There is little evidence, despite the language chosen being Greek, of substantial Hellenistic or Roman cultural legacies. Nor are the gospels pro-Roman, as has been suggested. Yet, while antisemitism is perhaps an anachronistic term to use about the New Testament in its origins, it has certainly been read in ways that have encouraged antisemitism through the centuries. The gospels and Acts were written in a time when Christians were suffering rejection and banishment by the Jewish authorities, and they reflect this sense of alienation.
This is particularly true of the Gospel of John which, unlike the synoptic gospels, refers to Jesus’ enemies as ‘the Jews’ (except at 4.22, when Jesus identifies himself as a Jew, and where Jews are followers of Jesus at 11.31–45 and 12.11). John 16.2 has Jesus telling the disciples that ‘they will put you out of the synagogues’. It has been mooted that the Greek word Judaioi could mean Judeans rather than Jews in general, and that John’s Gospel has its origin in a time when the Judeans in general were seen as opponents of Jesus’ Galilean movement. This theory is unproven, however. It cannot be denied that the result of the negative impression of the portrayal of the ‘Jews’ in John’s Gospel has not helped the cause of protecting Jews from Christian persecution through the centuries.
In terms of the origins of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, the answer is simple: Jesus was an observant Jew. This fact is not challenged in the New Testament. Jesus’ critical attacks were not made upon Jews in general, but on particular parties. Therefore, biblical interpretation needs to separate the ministry of Jesus from later contexts in which there was antagonism between Jews and Christians in general.
Most crucially in the argument for the anti-Jewish nature of the gospel narratives, many scholars have pointed out that the shift of blame for the crucifixion passes from the Romans, whose method of execution it was, to the Jews. All four gospels include the story of Jesus’ condemnation by the Jews who tell Pilate to crucify Jesus; they choose the criminal Barabbas to be released in his place, despite the fact that Pilate finds no fault in Jesus. This does not seem to conform to Pilate’s reputation as a ruler unafraid to mete out harsh punishment (recorded by Philo and Josephus but also in evidence at Luke 13.1). In Matthew, Pilate washes his hands of the responsibility for Jesus’ death and the people take it on themselves: ‘Then the people as a whole answered, “His blood be on us and on our children!”’ (27.25). This has been a proof text for antisemitism.
Nevertheless, critical readings of the New Testament’s portrayal of events can run the risk of being antisemitic by overlooking the fact that the Christian message which has changed the world and inspired millions is Jewish at its very core. A typical modern argument goes like this: Jesus was unyielding in his zeal for the Torah and probably a Nazirite, maybe a Zealot revolutionary; the New Testament downplays this aspect and presents Jesus in an inaccurate way as a peaceful man who was critical of Jewish practices and accepting of Rome. There are several problems with this. First, it overlooks the several subtle references in the gospels that show the early Christian traditions to have been critical of Rome. The very fact that Jesus was proclaimed divine Son of God was itself a challenge to the imperial cult. Second, it presumes that a non-violent stance could not have emerged from the Jewish people of the period. Third, it misses the point that other groups, such as the Essenes, were likewise critical of the Temple and its priesthood without thereby being anti-Jewish. Fourth, the prophetic tradition in the Hebrew Scriptures shows that Jews were not afraid to speak out against their leaders when they seemed to be taking the nation in the wrong direction. Fifth, there was a variety of Jewish interpretations of the Torah, some of which were close to Jesus’ own. Sixth, a critique of religious hypocrisy and manipulation is a universal phenomenon; while Jesus’ opponents were Jewish, a critique of religious leaders is not anti-Jewish per se and one can see the references to them in the New Testament as caricatures which apply well to many religious functionaries, including Christian ones.
The image of a man who stands up to the misuse of religion and for a faith that is centred upon love of God and neighbour, the central tenets of the Jewish tradition, is inspiring across different cultures and religions, including Judaism. Of all religions, one could not accuse the Jewish people in particular of blind and unthinking observance. And that is the point: it was Jesus the Jew who presented this great vision of a God for whom social justice, the spirit and not the letter of the law, and love and forgiveness of others were central to faith. At no time in the gospels does Jesus decry circumcision, the synagogue, Jewish prayers or scriptures, but he does – like the prophets before him – denounce a misuse of faith that is self-serving and results in the oppression of people rather than their liberation.
E.P. Sanders’ work (as in The Historical Figure of Jesus) demonstrates that the popular image of Jews as particularly fastidious and obsessed with purity is inaccurate. While this view is derived from certain passages in the New Testament, historical research shows that Jews were not particularly unusual in the ancient world in the mode of their adherence to rules and customs. Jewish lay people, the Pharisees in particular, were involved in interpreting the Law and debating it from different perspectives. The Pharisees were an influential Jewish group founded in the second century BCE; they interpreted the spirit rather than the letter of the Jewish Law, the Torah, and respected oral as well as written traditions. Thus, it is not unreasonable to regard Jesus’ approach to Jewish tradition as aligning with that of the Pharisees. This makes unlikely that any disagreement with Jesus’ understanding, for example, of food laws and the Sabbath, would lead for demands from the Pharisees for him to be executed as the New Testament suggests.
A similar characterization of the Jews to that in John’s Gospel can be found in the Acts narrative after the point where Paul is converted; here Jews are often referred to collectively as the enemies of the Church, although occasionally also as converts (and Paul, like Jesus in John, identifies himself as a Jew). Paul’s letters also contain a couple of references where Jews are treated collectively as enemies: 2 Corinthians 11.24 and 1 Thessalonians 2.14. So clearly, the idea that the Jews in general were opponents of Christianity evolved in the earliest Church, but it is not evident everywhere in the New Testament. In the synoptic gospels, the word ‘Jews’ appears mainly in terms of Jesus being called ‘King of the Jews’. The opponents in the synoptics are more specifically described: scribes (the religious lawyers of the period), Pharisees, chief priests, and Sadducees (a priestly faction, usually wealthy and aristocratic, with a conservative view of Jewish Scripture). The ‘scribes and Pharisees’ are denounced throughout Matthew 23 and in Luke 11.42–44 and 20.45–47. It could be said that these are also generalizations; they act as foils so that Christian arguments can be expressed through the mouth of Jesus.
There are exceptions where such figures were presented positively. In Acts, Paul identifies himself as ‘a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees’ (23.6; see also 26.5) and enjoys some support among the Pharisees (23.9). Nicodemus (John 3.1) and Gamaliel (Acts 5.43) were also Pharisees. Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea come together as members of the Sanhedrin to bury Jesus (John 19.38–42); John’s Gospel has already told us that his supporters included members of the authorities (12.42–43), although these as well as Joseph and Nicodemus were concerned for their safety and not prepared to confess Jesus openly. Jesus himself praises a scribe in Mark 12.34 and there are scribes who follow Jesus in Matthew 8.19 and 13.52. However, there is one group for whom there are no exceptions: the gospels always present Jesus in opposition to the priests.
Overall, we can deduce that the gospels and Acts were written in a time when the Pharisees and scribes no longer had any standing among Christians, probably because in general they would have rejected any movement that integrated with Gentiles so freely, and so they are caricatured in the texts as self-seeking hypocrites, but there is a memory that some among them were supportive of the early Christian tradition. There is also plenty of material that cuts against generalizations and confirms that Jews, including some members of the authoritative and scribal classes, were among the original supporters of Jesus. Therefore, the generalized terms ‘Jews’, ‘Pharisees’, ‘scribes’, and so on, in the gospels and Acts should be read as representatives of the influential people within Judaism who rejected the Christian faith. There may have also been many who rejected it but after a dalliance, represented by the unproductive seeds in the parable of the sower (Mark’s version is in 4.1–20). The hostility to those Jews who had been supportive but then changed their minds can be illustrated in John 8.31–59: the group of Jews to whom Jesus is talking seem to have been followers, but this segues into their being people out to kill him.
The Mission to the Gentiles
In his lifetime, it is reasonable to suppose that Jesus saw his ministry as primarily reaching out to his fellow Jews. This can be concluded on the basis of Matthew 10.5–6: ‘These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”’ In Matthew 15.24, Jesus says to the Canaanite woman with the possessed daughter, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ On the other hand, the overall impression the gospels give is that the Gentiles were more responsive to Jesus’ mission than his own fellow Jews. So perhaps these little hints in Matthew, which seem to contradict the general trend, go back to Jesus himself and indicate that Jesus was more exclusive to the Jewish community than the gospels suggest, and that this continued into the very earliest Church. This possibility is supported by Paul’s statement in Galatians 2.7–9, where we learn that:
when they [the Christian leaders in Jerusalem] saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel for the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been entrusted with the gospel for the circumcised … they gave to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship, agreeing that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised.
Therefore, Paul was instrumental in taking the new faith to the Gentiles. Evidence for the growth of Gentiles participating in Christianity can be found in Acts 10.28, when Peter’s vision of creatures that he is now permitted to eat leads him to say: ‘You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.’ It would be difficult to conclude that Jesus had already established a ministry to the Gentiles based on these passages. It seems that the mission to the Gentiles began with Paul and not with Jesus. So, at the very least, we can conclude that Jesus’ ministry, while it may have encountered Gentiles, was not ready to approach them in earnest.
However, in the New Testament, the story of Jesus is associated with an opening up to the faith of the Gentiles, which reflects the journey of the Church in its initial decades. Gentile converts receive special praise from Jesus and obtain favour in contrast to Jews in the gospels. Jesus is amazed at Gentile faith in his healing power, for example, the faith of a centurion:
‘Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from east and west and will eat with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the heirs of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’
(Matt. 8.10–12; see also Luke 7.9)
It will have been hard for Jews to read an account in which a centurion of the occupying Roman army gets special attention from Jesus. This centurion does not appear in the earlier gospel, Mark, but there a centurion at the cross recognizes Jesus as God’s Son (15.39). The Syrophoenician or Canaanite woman, too, is praised (Mark 7.29; Matt. 15.28) for her asking for Jesus’ help despite him telling her that the Jews should come first.
The gospels are critical of the Jews’ lack of response to Jesus and so they are very quick to identify not only Gentiles but also Samaritans (the remnants of the Israelite tradition who retained local shrines against the Jewish mainstream tradition with its emphasis on the Jerusalem Temple) as paragons of faith and response to Jesus. This was polemical: it would have annoyed Jews to think that Roman centurions and Samaritans, of all people, are praised in the gospels as having greater faith than them.
All this is not to deny the possibility that Jesus did attract some Gentiles into his movement, even if he did not actively seek to do so. While the identification of genuine faith among Gentiles in the gospels probably reflects the development of the early Church, it may have some basis in Jesus himself. These stories may have had origins in experiences of actual Samaritan and Gentile converts, both during the ministry of Jesus and afterward. However, the likely conclusion is that, during Jesus’ lifetime, they were exceptions.
Early Jewish Christianity and James, the Brother of Jesus
Most of the New Testament emerged from certain strands of the early Church, those in which the numbers of Gentiles had overtaken those of Jews, and the members of which followed Paul in not expecting Christians to adhere to the Jewish Torah in practices such as circumcision and table fellowship. Many Jews were included in this strand of the Church, indeed they initiated it, but there were also other Jewish Christians who continued to follow their age-old traditions, and a minority Jewish Christian Church survived for some centuries. We can identify at least three distinct and divergent groups emerging from Jewish society in the time before and after the Jewish War: 1. Christians (Gentiles and Jews), who did not follow the Torah; 2. Jewish Christians (some of whom may have been Gentile converts) who recognized Jesus as Messiah but did follow the Torah; 3. Jews who did not recognize Jesus as the Messiah. The provenance of most of the New Testament is the first of these three, and therefore the Jewish Christians were gradually marginalized. The possible exceptions where Jewish Christian perspectives are more faithfully preserved are the epistles of James and Jude, attributed to the brothers of Jesus, and the book of Revelation.
The importance of this for our purpose is that the family of Jesus were prominent in the Church before the period of the gospels and they belonged to the second group, the Jews who continued to adhere to the Torah. James, the brother of Jesus (as identified in Gal. 1.19), is associated with those Christians who want to keep to the Torah, although he accepted Paul’s mission to the Gentiles (Gal. 2.9). James was a dominant figure in the early Church, as is confirmed by Galatians 1–2 and Acts 15, and is traditionally known as the first bishop of Jerusalem. Recent scholarship generally accepts the theory that the leadership of the very earliest Church was dynastic, that is, passed on from Jesus to his brother James after the crucifixion. This is not made explicit in the New Testament which for the most part followed Paul, but it is stated clearly in one of the earliest non-canonical Christian writings, the Gospel of Thomas.
In Galatians 2.11–12, we read about Paul’s indignation that Cephas had been talked out of a more liberal stance towards table fellowship with Gentiles:
But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction.
Acts 15.1–35 describes a harmonious compromise between James, Peter, and Paul on the question of the obligations of Gentiles becoming Christians. The epistles of Paul, particularly Galatians and Romans, suggests that this was a much harder-fought argument. The disagreement between James and Paul on the question as to how much a Christian needed to live by the Torah was remembered in the Jewish Christian tradition: Paul is rather surprisingly described as the ‘enemy’ of James in the fourth-century Pseudo-Clementines.
It is not clear how strict James was in relation to the Torah. In Galatians 2.11–12, cited above, he appears to be associated with the ‘circumcision faction’. However, in the same chapter, verses 7–10, he agrees that Paul can evangelize the ‘uncircumcised’. In Acts 15.19–29, he asks that Christians ‘abstain only from things polluted by idols and from fornication and from whatever has been strangled and from blood’. This would be a lighter requirement than the full range of Jewish table customs and food laws. Raymond Brown and John Meier, in the introduction to Antioch and Rome, suggest that Jewish Christians followed a range of approaches to conversion, from insisting on circumcision, to asking that food laws be maintained, to a more liberal position on these practices, to abandoning the Jewish cult altogether. While James would not have been in the last of these camps, considering Galatians and Acts together does not fully clarify his exact position. What we can infer from Galatians 2.6 is that Paul did not respect the authority of James in his letters quite as much as Acts 15.1–35 and 21.17–26 suggest that he did publicly when visiting Jerusalem.
To reconstruct a history of James, we also have the historical record compiled by Flavius Josephus.1 Josephus was a Jewish commander against the Romans, but after the defeat of the Jews in Galilee in 67 CE, Josephus accepted the inevitability of Roman victory and defected, becoming a Roman citizen and advisor to the Roman general and future emperor Titus who stormed Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple. He wrote a history of the Jewish people in two works, the Antiquities of the Jews, narrating the whole history of Israel until the beginning of the Jewish War (66 CE), and The Jewish War, covering the period between the conquest of Jerusalem by Antiochus IV Epiphanes provoking the successful Maccabean revolt (167–160 BCE) to the end of the Jewish War (73 CE).
Josephus describes the martyrdom of James with detail which gives us the possible date of 62 CE. He tells us more than we know about James from the New Testament. He writes (Antiquities of the Jews, Book XX: 9.1) about the decision made by Ananus the high priest to execute ‘the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others’. This act angered those Jews who disliked injustice and unlawfulness. This account is controversial, as some scholars argue that it was inserted by Origen in the third century to add a Christian element to Josephus’ history, or at the very least the reference to James being the brother of Jesus might have been added to the original text.
The fourth-century Church historian Eusebius adds more information about James in his History of the Church (Book 2: 1, 23; Book 7: 19). Eusebius quotes Clement of Alexandria, Outlines, Book 8 (the Outlines did not survive) in saying that James had been ‘thrown down from the parapet and beaten to death with a fuller’s club’. He also refers to Hegesippus’ fifth book (no works of Hegesippus have survived) in saying that James was a Nazirite who was allowed to enter the Sanctuary of the Temple (normally reserved for high priests alone). He was executed by being clubbed to death after being stoned first. After his death, the fall of Jerusalem was believed to have occurred as a result; here Eusebius quotes Josephus but it is not in surviving manuscripts, although Origen quotes it too and so it must have existed in one version. Eusebius then refers to the letter of James, although he says that ‘admittedly, its authenticity is doubted, since few early writers refer to it’, which shows us that biblical criticism was not unknown in the early Church while the canon was still being formed. Finally, Eusebius tells us that the episcopal throne of James in Jerusalem was still preserved and venerated there.
The testimony of the writers in the early centuries of the Church confirm that James was unanimously acknowledged as the first Christian leader in Jerusalem and referred to as ‘James the Just’. But the gospels lack anything more than a passing reference to James, containing only critical passages about the role of Jesus’ brothers in general. This suggests that the gospels downplayed the brothers’ importance in the early Church. The lists of twelve disciples do not include the brothers, that is, James, Joses or Joseph, Judas, and Simon (Mark 6.3; Matt. 13.55), at least not explicitly: there is a second James, Simon, and Judas in them but no mention of them being Jesus’ brothers. Mention of the most important disciples does not include James the Lord’s brother, but the central group of three in the synoptic gospels are Peter, James the son of Zebedee, and his brother John. Eusebius (quoting Clement, Outlines, Book 6) says that these disciples ‘did not claim pre-eminence because the Saviour has specially honoured them, but instead chose James the Righteous (or Just) as Bishop of Jerusalem’. This led to the belief that Jesus’ brothers were late converts to belief in Jesus, something that appears to be corroborated by Paul’s list of the resurrection witnesses in 1 Corinthians 15, in which James comes after the twelve disciples and more than five hundred other believers. However, recent scholarship2 has concluded that James and the other brothers were determined to retain adherence to the Jewish Torah among Christians, and this led to them being sidelined in the gospel tradition, which followed Paul in seeking freedom from these obligations. If this is true, then we have to read the gospel references to the family of Jesus with that in mind.
It is not necessary to regard this acknowledgement of the bias against Jesus’ brothers as implying condemnation of the gospel writers. We can simply accept that, following Paul, they felt that the spread of the gospel message among the Gentiles required a strategy of challenging any overestimation by new Christians of the brothers of Jesus as the primary heirs to his heritage. In this respect, the evangelists are echoing Paul’s complaint about hero worship of the apostles:
What I mean is that each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul’, or ‘I belong to Apollos’, or ‘I belong to Cephas’, or ‘I belong to Christ.’ Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?
(1 Cor. 1.12)
In other words, Christians should not look to mediators of the message but to the one to whom the message points: the Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God. Nevertheless, we can see the tendency to downplay the Jewish Christians in the context of a general negativity in the New Testament towards Jews who do not accept Jesus, but also against Jews who insisted that being a Christian means following the Torah in the same way as any Jew. The most prominent of these were members of Jesus’ own family. Mary was the senior member of this family, and so reservations about the authority of the family, and what that meant in terms of the Christian understanding of the Torah, will have affected how she was viewed in the period of the writing of the gospels. We now return to her story as it is recounted in the Gospel of John.
Notes
1 For more detail, see the article by Nicholas Allen in Journal of Early Christian History 7.1.
2 This includes Pierre-Antoine Bernheim, James the Brother of Jesus; Bruce Chilton and Jacob Neusner, The Brother of Jesus; and Patrick Hartin, James of Jerusalem.