My wife sometimes comes to church. Not for religious reasons — she is Jewish, as are our children. But I’m the priest and she comes to support me. And bakes the best Victoria sponge for my congregation.
But her presence makes me more than usually uncomfortable about the sort of things that the New Testament often comes out with concerning “the Jews”. The other Sunday, I was obliged to read out that Jesus-followers were locked into an upper room in Jerusalem “for fear of the Jews” — an odd thing to say given that they were Jews themselves. Perhaps I shouldn’t have read it out, but I did, with inner shame, hoping she wouldn’t notice. She was too polite to mention it.
The Church of England is currently undertaking a review of those monuments in its churches to people with connections to slavery. In the light of Black Lives Matter, glass windows, statues and headstones are all being scrutinised, many of which will be removed. But that’s the easy bit. What is the Church going to do about those passages within its core texts that have been used, for centuries, to justify the persecution of Jews?
And still are. Last weekend, at one of the ‘free Palestine’ demonstrations in London — and amongst those banners likening the state of Israel to the Nazis — there was one that showed an image of Jesus carrying his cross, with the words: “Do not let them do the same thing today again”. Them, eh? The claim that the Jews murdered Jesus has returned from what many of us had hoped was the dustbin of history and was being proudly proclaimed on the streets of London in 2021.
It’s a lie, of course. Only the Romans had the authority to put someone to death by crucifixion. It was their signature punishment. But whatever the historical reality, the Gospels themselves are far too keen to shift the blame for Christ’s judicial murder on Jews. Notoriously, Matthew’s gospel describes the Roman governor washing his hands of responsibility, declaring his innocence, with the Jewish crowd simultaneously chanting out, “his blood be on us and our children”.
So what if Matthew himself was Jewish and sought to make following Jesus compatible with the Jewish law? These words have resonated down the ages, a constant alibi for murder and genocide. Who can forget that polish villager, interviewed by Claude Lanzmann for Shoah (1985), calmly repeating Matthew’s text whilst standing outside their church just a few miles from the death camps? I don’t care where they come from, I won’t say those words in church.
It was only within my lifetime that the Roman Catholic church officially warned against “anything that could give rise to hatred or contempt of Jews in the hearts of Christians”, going on to specifically mention the crucifixion: “May [Christians] never present the Jewish people as … guilty of deicide.” But this was too much for some. Throughout the years-long process that came together in Nostra Aetate, the 1965 declaration of the Catholic Church’s relationship with Jews, there were warnings of a “Zionist plot” to “further the oppression of Palestinian refugees”, as one Egyptian radio station put it. There clearly remains pressure from Palestinian activists for Christians still to read the murder of Jesus as a Jewish collective responsibility. Shamefully, not enough Christians condemn it.
It was Haim Cohen — the founder of Israeli law and liberal legalist — that did most to set the trial of Jesus within its proper historical context. Published in 1968, just a few years after Nostra Aetate, his legal analysis of the subject concludes with these words: “Hundreds of generations of Jews have been made to suffer all manner of torment, persecution, and degradation for the alleged part of their forefathers in the trial and crucifixion of Jesus, when, in solemn truth, their forefathers took no part in them but did all that they possibly and humanly could to save Jesus, whom they dearly loved and cherished as one of their own, from his tragic end at the hands of the Roman oppressor.”
Christians all too easily forget that Jesus wasn’t a Christian. He was a kosher keeping, Temple going, Torah reading, synagogue preaching Jew. To blame “the Jews” for his death is yet another part of the Christian collective forgetfulness of its own origins — motivated by the desire not to upset the dominant political force of the day, and those actually responsible for his death: the Romans. Early Christians traded the truth of Roman responsibility for a seat at the imperial table. The consequences of that lie are as poisonous as ever.
Giles Fraser is an Anglican priest and broadcaster
