Abstract
The starting-point for any study of Christian texts must be the New Testament. As many have noted, the New Testament contains much to support the belief that the Jews have been rejected by God following their own rejection of Jesus. Indeed, the gospels of Matthew and John and the Epistle to the Hebrews contain many of the charges that ultimately made up the Christian teaching of contempt. Demonization of the Jews is anticipated in the statement attributed to Jesus in John 8:44 (“You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires”),1 an apparent admission of deicide is found in Matthew 27:25 (“His blood be on us and our children!”) and supersessionist theology is a leitmotif in Hebrews.
The idea of the Jew as a killer of God and in punishment thereof a member of a race forever on the run is so deeply engrained in the minds of persons raised in the Christian faith that even a man like Pascal, the French Catholic theologian and scientist, considered their miserable fate a just punishment.
Dagobert Runes, The Jew and the Cross
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Notes
See J. Christiaan Beker, “The New Testament View of Judaism,” in James H. Charlesworth, ed., Jews and Christians: Exploring the Past, Present and Future ( New York: Crossroad, 1990 ), 60–9; 61.
For a useful survey, see David Rokeah, “The Church Fathers and the Jews in Writings Designed for Internal and External Use,” in Shmuel Almog, ed., Antisemitism through the Ages, trans. Nathan H. Reisner (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988 ), 39–69.
Jacob R. Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World ( New York: Harper and Row, 1965 ), 111.
Leon Poliakov, The History of anti-Semitism, vol. 1., tr. Richard Howard (New York: Vanguard, 1965), 32. Poliakov notes that at this time the reference to “Jews and pagans” in Good Friday prayers for catechumens was changed, and the words “do not genuflect to the Jews” were added.
R. H. Popkin, “Some Aspects of Jewish-Christian Theological Interchanges in Holland and England 1640–1700,” in Jewish-Christian Relations in the Seventeenth Century: Studies and Documents, ed. J. van den Berg and Ernestine G. E. van der Wall ( Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988 ), 4.
See Stanley J. Grenz, The Millennial Maze: Sorting Out Evangelical Options (Downers Grove, Ill.: Inter Varsity Press, 1992), 46ff.
Cited in Rosemary R. Ruether and Herman J. Ruether, The Wrath of Jonah: The Crisis of Religious Nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict ( San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989 ), 81.
Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: anti-Semitism 1700–1933 (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 23. This discussion of Eisenmenger is based on Katz, 20–2.
See Tim Lahaye, The Beginning of the End ( Wheaton, Ill: Tyndale House, 1972 ), 43;
Hal Lindsey, There’s a New World Coming (New York: Bantam, 1973), 158.
Jack van Impe and Roger S. Campbell, Israel’s Final Holocaust ( Troy, Mich.: Jack van Impe Ministries, 1979 ), 57.
See Friedrich Heer, God’s First Love: Christians and Jews Over Two Thousand Years, tr. Geoffrey Skelton (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1970), 40ff.
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© 1995 Stephen R. Haynes
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Haynes, S.R. (1995). The Witness-People Myth in History. In: Jews and the Christian Imagination. Studies in Literature and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376199_3
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