A LIFE THREATENING DISEASE - I

The Gospels were theology, not history. Evangelizing documents that laid the foundation of a new faith. A faith that, by the end of the first century, was in sharp conflict with the one from which it had sprung. The refusal of the Jews to accept Jesus as their savior was regarded as a mortal threat to the early Church, and there were many attacks on the Jews.

Numerous critical biblical scholars and contemporary historians have concluded that the evangelists and their editors in the early Church consciously shifted the blame for Jesus’ death from the Romans to the Jews. This was in order to make Christianity more appealing to gentiles living under Roman rule, and less threatening to the Romans themselves.

Within a few short years of the crucifixion, the Jesus movement was in grave danger of being reabsorbed by Judaism. There was nothing the Church Fathers could do to change the fact that Jesus died a Roman death at the hands of Roman troops. But if they could suggest that the Jews had forced Pilate’s hand, the problem was solved.

The golden cross became the symbol of the new faith by Constantine, who was the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity.  For the Jews of medieval Europe,  the cross was something to fear. It had been emblazoned in red on the tunics of the Crusaders, who massacred the Jews they encountered  in the Rhineland on their way to Jerusalem. And it had hung round the necks of many of the murderers who fed millions into the flames at Birkenau, Treblinka, Majdanek, etc. With no  condemnation from their spiritual leader in Rome.

Even after the Jews were emancipated in Western Europe, they lived in a ghetto in the city controlled by the papacy.

The Church’s preference for monarchies and right-wing dictators over socialists or even liberal democrats is a well-documented fact. As well as the appalling anti-Semitism of many of the Vatican’s leading spokesmen and policymakers.

Pope Pius XII was ordained in the year 1939, at the outbreak of World War II and served until 1958. He overlooked wanted Nazi mass murderers; opposed the Nuremberg Trials; opposed the creation of a Jewish state;  opposed postwar attempts to reconcile Christianity with Judaism; and never explicitly expressed remorse after the death of six million Jews.

The Nazis were the ones who annihilated the Jews of Europe. But they could not have carried out the “Final Solution” unless Christianity had first prepared the way. Hitler’s willing executioners had been conditioned by centuries of Church teachings about the evils of the Jews.

The lethal combination of the theology of supersession (the New Testament in place of the Jewish Bible) and the myth of deicide made the Jews a permanent target for Christian hostility and contempt.

In his book “Christian Anti-Semitism”, William Nicholls writes: “Historical scholarship now permits us to affirm with confidence that Jesus of Nazareth was a faithful and observant [though not typical] Jew who lived by the Torah (Pentateuch). He taught nothing against his own people and their faith”. He certainly did not conceive the founding of a new faith.

Like the Corona virus, anti-Semitism is also a life-threatening disease.