It turns out the New Testament is enormously complex

Various threads below are touching on the relationship between Christians and Jews. On some threads (namely, those critical of Israeli butchery of civilians and children), I can generally expect that sooner or later somebody will call me an anti-semite for failing to endorse everything Israel does merely because Israel did it and then assured us all it was fine.

Meanwhile, on threads pertaining to SSPX kookery and Bp. Williamson’s attempts to minimize the slaughter of the Holocaust while maximizing whatever helps the cause of Jew hatred, I can generally rely on the fact that somebody will scold me for being a Judaizing heretic and one of those awful Jew lovers.

It’s fun being me.

So it was sort of a refreshing tangent to get a question from a reader who appeared to actually want to know what I thought rather than simply volunteering to tell me what I thought. Here is our brief correspondence:

Some, maybe many, Jews might feel certain passages in the New Testament express hostility towards Jews. Are they as mistaken as Catholic traditionalists?

I replied, “Yes” and reference this article (though I should have been more thorough since the mistake lies not in seeing hostility toward Jews in the New Testament, but in misunderstanding what it means and how Christians are to live in obedience to Scripture). Because I was not clear, my commenter asked a perfectly reasonable question:

So how would one explain to a Jew that an expression like “synagogue of Satan” doesn’t imply enmity to those Jews who rejected Jesus?

(Not trying to goad or bait, just curious.)

I reply:

It does imply hostility. It’s pretty characteristically Jewish polemic because John is a characterically Jewish writer engaging in what he regards as an internecine fight between Jews who have remained faithful to God’s revelation and those who have refused to acknowledge it. Jewish literature is absolutely chockablock with this sort of thing. Think Moses and the Levites after the sin of the Golden Calf. Think Phineas. Think Joshua saying “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” not to a bunch of pagan, but to fellow Israelites. Think the the prophets. In short, John regards himself and those who have followed Jesus as the real Jews and (very typically for John) sees those who have not followed Christ in light of earlier Old Testament examples of apostasy.

The reference to “Satan” (that is, Accuser (cf. Job)) is telling given that it is written by somebody in exile for his faith in Jesus. He will later (Rev 12) link the phenomenon of accusation against the faith with the Devil, precisely because (like Paul) he understands the reality of his suffering to be caused, not by flesh and blood, but by powers and principalities using human agents. And it is simple, documentable fact that many Jews were active persecutors of Christians in this period.

It should be noted that one finds samples of this sort of thing on both sides of the aisle in ancient Christian/Jewish polemic. John is, ironically, a very typical Jew of his time in argument with those who bitterly oppose Jesus and who have done a bang up job of hating and hurting him and his community. The very phrase “synagogue of Satan” is written, mind you, to buck up the spirits of Jewish Christians who have suffered excommunication and persecution from brother Jews who have accused and exiled them as “minim”. The Jews would have had no particular interest in what Gentiles were doing. John is writing to assure his Jewish Christian brethren that their ostracism is not a sign of divine disapproval, but a sign that the same spirit of accusation which unjustly rejected their Lord is still at work in their own experience and that they are, in fact, still in union with God.

The question is not, “Are there expressions of internecine hostility between believing and unbelieving Jews in the New Testament?” Of course there are. The question is: “How are we to understand these in terms of what God wants us to do?” On this, the Church is really pretty clear:

http://www.vatican.va/archive/hi…- aetate_en.html

There are two basic mistakes we can make here. The first is pretending that the only Jew present at the crucifixion was Jesus and that the apostles were hallucinating when they fancied that they were being hounded, jailed, beaten and killed by Jews or those acting on Jewish instigation.

The other is to pretend that the millions upon millions of Jews who received the gospel do not exist and that Jews are uniquely guilty of the death of Christ. Compounding this error is the false notion that we should attribute to all Jews living today the sins committed by some Jews in the past. The latter error is especially pernicious for Gentile Christians because it subtly excuses us from the fact that *we* are just as guilty since Christ’s death was because of our sins too. If we try the “Jews did it, not me” defense at the Pearly Gates, I shudder to think of the consequences. God would have every right to say to the anti-semitic Gentile “Since you deny that you are responsible for the death of my Son, then you shall have none of the benefits of his death.”