Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism refers to a negative attitude towards Jewish people or their culture. Some scholars have made the claim that the New Testament is an Anti-Semitic collection of documents. It's not hard to see why. Down the centuries, a number of texts have been quoted to support a negative attitude - and even violence towards - the Jewish people. The most notorious of these is Matthew 27.25, where ‘the Jews' cry that they are willing to be held responsible for shedding the blood of Jesus. This later developed into the idea that ‘the Jews killed Christ' and led to them being branded as God-killers (this saying was left out of the 2005 CE film The Passion of the Christ for that reason). Others have seen references to ‘the Jews' in the gospel of John (e.g. 8.44) as highly critical and promoting a ‘them and us' mentality.

However, following the Nazi Holocaust in particular, many scholars began to wonder if such interpretations were actually valid. The consensus among biblical scholars now is that since the New Testament was largely written by Jews, charges of Anti-Semitism in the Bible are a bit misplaced. As many see it, negative statements in the New Testament about Jews reflect tensions within the Jewish community of the first century CE - not Anti-Semitism from without. The references to bloodshed in the gospel of Matthew, for example, are also found in other Jewish texts of the time. Further, the gospel writer Luke, who wasn't Jewish, emphasised the equal role that non-Jews played in the murder of Jesus (Acts 2.23). For these reasons, the vast majority of Churches today would strongly oppose Anti-Semitism and reject the idea that the Bible is Anti-Semitic. In fact, some Christians are now very supportive of the state of Israel (see Zionism), because from their perspective the Jewish people have a key role to play in fulfilling Bible prophecy.