Is Christianity an Anti-Jewish Religion?

[IndianaGreen]

Is Christianity an Anti-Jewish Religion?

Christianity has some particularly embedded anti-Jewish orientations.
The New Testament canonizes some horrible attitudes toward Jews.

Judy Andreas

I know practicing Christians are not thinking this today, and I’m quite aware of the many important contributions by well intentioned and social-justice minded Christians throughout the ages. I’m trying to define the systemic emotional/social dynamic that was created when Christianity broke from Judaism. I feel that dynamic is one of the deep ways anti-Jewish prejudice and bigotry have become so pervasive in our world.

When a group of gentile Romans decided they could take the ancient Jewish writings — the Torah, Prophets, etc.— and include them as part of their Bible, they were engaged in the kind of supremacy that fuels all cultural appropriation. “We know more about you than you do. We know the Truth.”

Because Christianity became focused early on Jesus as Messiah, there’s very little distance to, “and the Jews were wrong in not recognizing him.” In fact, under those circumstances, it’s hard to create a theory that makes Judaism okay. I’m pointing this out as a way of explaining that the masses of Europeans were not merely being irrational in attacking Jews. Because Europe/Christendom was so thoroughly steeped in the religion, this demonizing orientation to Jews became absorbed personally without any intention to hate on the part of individual Christians. That’s one reason I admire “Unlearning Oppression theory,” which acknowledges that prejudice and stereotyping happen to us without our conscious participation.

Unlearning Oppression theory was developed by Ricky Sherover Marcuse, Herbert Marcuse’s widow, who studied at the Frankfurt School in Germany in the 1960s. It applies the psychological dimension that the Frankfurt School added to Marxism, by positing that we are all influenced by oppressive stereotypes against minority groups. Without our even intending to do so, we passively absorb bigoted attitudes and beliefs, and we must actively examine ourselves and our reactions to stop inadvertently participating in prejudice. The Website www.unlearningracism.org gives an inspiring account of Ricky’s life (she died in 1988) and of her work.

Read more on pages 13-14:

http://www.meretzusa.org/ih200501.pdf

[roguevalley]

1. They diverged, the Jews and the Judao-Christians pretty early.

I just think a lot of the things that pass as dogma are politically motivated and unnecessary to the belief in God and the teachings of Jesus. Peel the onion back and somewhere in the core is the truth.

It is my personal belief that the death of Jesus is the locus of the hatred, because someone had to be responsible for the 'death of God' and the Romans certainly didn't want that stain on their hands. Who better to blame? There was never any instance of Roman authorities letting the crowds choose between prisoners for release on festival days. Nice story to shift the blame.

Shame is a terrible burden and out of a lot of powerful and competing emotions - politics, economics and power - came the religion that we have now.

I find it TERRIBLY amusing that people slavishly worship the words as innerent of people they wouldn't hire to wash their own car. The ancient people of Bible times wouldn't get anything but grief from the people who say their stories are innerent.

[CindyDale]

10. I think the moral is that we are all responsible for evil

just as we are all responsible for what is happening now. We should actually be riding public transportation or bicycles if we want to stop this administration. I am as guilty as everyone else, except maybe the Mennonites and the Amish.

If Jesus came back now, we'd probably kill him again or try to kill him. He'd attract followers and disrupt the whole damn country, can you just imagine it?

[President Jesus]

2. Is Judaism an Anti-Christian Religion?

I don't know, you tell me.

I will tell you that both are anti reason.

[Lexingtonian]

3. Buber wrote some good stuff about this

He considered Marcionism/the Marcionite fallacy-heresy to be a basic and enduring problem in Western Christianity. Looking at the American Christian Right, there's a lot of it still out there- different in form from the morally grossly derelict and ugly variety present and politically dominant among German Protestants in 1933 and some years thereafter, but flagrantly nasty in other respects.

I think Judy Andrews has barely scratched the substance of things. Buber's essays in "On Judaism" are the lectures he gave Jewish audiences in the 1910's and 1920's- I look at them and...everything he points out is still true and politically relevant today, in Europe and the U.S. and in Israel too. The flaws and potential errors and fundamental errors he identified then are the terrain-defining features of today's arguments.

Robert M. Price (check infidels.org) thinks, as a theologian, that Christianity is in some fashion structurally incomplete, which is why it seemingly can't maintained in pure form. (Something I can agree to from experience.) This implies that it requires elements of some other religion(s) be built in for Christian Believers to consider their belief system solid. What (the Apostle) Paul did was clear all the distinctively Jewish elements (circumcision, pilgrimages, kashrut, etc) from the religion; the congregations he founded put in elements of their earlier religions in where there were gaps. Paul apparently wrote a lot of letters telling them how far they could go, being careful not to point out the exact syncretisms involved a lot of the time. Some of these add-ins were pretty incompatible with the Jewish values in the overall system that Paul taught.

The Christian Right basically represents the choice to emphasize the pagan religious elements to the point that they suffocate the Jewish values within original Christianity. These people consistently think that 'Judaizing' is the worst possible thing that could happen to Christianity, and they're sure not to let it happen. Liberal Christians are in something of a quandry; once you say that accepting Jewish values and interpretations is okay in a Christian context, the theological slippery slope right up the edges of Judaism is almost inevitable. Then the trouble of the warrants for Christianity (vs Judaism) and how to maintain a sufficiently meaningful distinction and religious authority arises.

Once you've seen the nearly unsoluble problem that creates up close, you will realize that a certain amount of anti-Semitism is easily the most efficient and teachable way for Christian clergy to maintain the barrier/claim to superiority and undercut the sorts of questions and thinking that washes out the foundations of the barrier. On the other hand, Christianity doesn't work without admitting a certain amount of legitimacy to Judaism as the 'mother' religion. But it's not a kindly daughter to it, as we know.

[SHRED]

4. Yes

But not on the surface.

Many Christians really do believe the Jews killed Jesus.
There are a lot of Mel Gibson types out there.

One good thing about organized religion...it keeps our mental hospitals from being overrun by affording people a place to gather, share in their group dellusions, and really convince themselves that they are sane. A support group for those fearing death.

[TomClash]

5. No

And the jews didn't "kill" Jesus. It was preordained by God. Jesus says this through the Gospels many times.

If you want to blame someone for Jesus' death, don't blame the jews, blame God.

By the way, is the antipode also true? Is there a type of supremacy associated with a group that calls itself the "Chosen People?" I don't think so. Articles of faith are not articles of dominion in this world for christians or jews.

[kiraboo]

6. Say what you will about how Jesus was actually sentenced to die

I have a massive, extended Catholic wing of my family who "know" that the Jews killed Jesus, and regard the Jews accordingly. In fact my mother-in-law actually took my two oldest children aside when they were tiny and informed them about the Jews' sin. What Christians should believe, and what they do believe are two entirely different matters.

[TomClash]

8. Horrible - they should read the New Testament

It says in all four Gospels that Jesus was to fulfill his prophesy. Paul sanctifies the sacrifice in Romans, Hebrews and Corintians.

Catholics who blame Jews or Romans do not know their own religion.

[kiraboo]

13. Old fashioned Catholics don't read the bible.

Modern Catholics do, of course.

[infusionman]

21. We all killed Jesus.

It was our sins...our transgressions...our desire for that of the world rather than the focus on the prize that is killing Jesus. I say is killing jesus because for him, all time exsists in the here and now and everytime we do something contrary to God's will Jesus is screaming out in agony on the cross because he gathered all sin to him in this one special point in time that we may be forgiven and have everlasting life.

The Bible says: "He who knew no sin, became sin."

[IndianaGreen]

23. Well, that's a matter of interpretation

The fact that Jesus was executed by the Romans under a political charge of sedition makes him a Jewish martyr, just like thousands of others that fought the Roman occupation.

The inscription "King of the Jews" is a good clue. Israel was an occupied province of Rome. Its "king" was a puppet of Rome, much as Iraq's Allawi is a puppet of the US. Israel had no Jewish king. The Hasmoneans were Hellenized and as such were not seen by the observant Jews as real Jews.

[mitchum]

27. Not me, my friend (I had nothing to do with it)

And if his death was a GIFT, why do I owe anything? Sounds like coercive obligation to me.

[fedsron2us]

7. Funny, how the followers of so many religions regard themselves

as God's 'Elect' or God's 'Chosen People'. The unspoken implication is that the rest of humanity be they Hindu, Muslim, Jew or Christian are somehow not 'Chosen' and therefore inferior. From this single fallacy flows so many of the world's evils. Of course, identifying oneself so closely with ones God leads to the the ultimate sin of assuming that your own will and the divine will are the same. Putting one self on God's throne is the crime that caused Lucifer to be cast out of heaven and is one of humanities prime routes to perdition.

edit for spelling

[TomClash]

9. Yes

the ultra-religious think there is only one path to salvation and it is their path. But the truly spiritual know this notion is so obviously a sham as to render it absurd. After all, if God is a muslim, will she really accept Osama bin Laden over the Catholic Mother Teresa?

[CindyDale]

11. Here is a link to an interesting discussion

between a Christian and a Messianic Jew:

http://www.tetrahedron.org/articles/info_schedule_battle/christian_reflections.html

I don't know about this Leonard Horowitz. Some of this ideas seem way out to me, but here he is right on.

He has a lot of political theories, too.

[CindyDale]

12. PS What's really funny is how the Christian is able to accept Jews in

heaven, but seems to be reluctant to accept Muslims. Sheesh.

[BrklynLiberal]

24. True. And thousands of years ago men killed each other in the name

of Zeus and Hera, and today the leaders of today's great religions consider that mere mythology; meaningless fairy tales.

[Igel]

14. And Nebuchadnezzar didn't sack Jerusalem.

It was preordained by God.

Oh. But Jerusalem was sacked by real people. Hmmm ... an insoluble paradox?

[TomClash]

16. But Nebuchadnezzar . . .

. . . was not upheld as the son of man.

[Igel]

17. The point is that in the Biblical narrative

lots of things God does are through people.

So God caused Jerusalem's downfall; Nebuchadnezzar got the loot.

You said "And the jews didn't "kill" Jesus. It was preordained by God. Jesus says this through the Gospels many times.

"If you want to blame someone for Jesus' death, don't blame the jews, blame God."

By that logic, we can't blame Nebuchadnezzar; God ordained it, blame God. I don't buy the Dostoevskian Great Inquisitor reasoning. Nobody's off the hook.

Sanhedrin condemned Jesus; Pilate gave the order. Saying the Jews didn't kill Jesus is literally true (although they certainly had a role in it), but just because it was preordained doesn't mean God forced anybody, Pilate or Caiaphas, to do their parts.

Else some of Christ's last words were simply deranged babbling: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

(I'm one of those folks that views predestination and foreknowledge the same way he views statistics: it depends what you know when you know it, in other words, where you're sitting at the time.)

[TomClash]

18. I get the point

God was punishing the jews for their idolatry when Nebuchadnezzar sacked Jerusalem. Nebuchadnezzar was at fault and he doesn't get off the hook.

And his descendants weren't burnt at Buchenwald.

My point is that Jesus was God and he wanted the Jews to commit this act - they were powerless to deny it or to deny their own participation. To persecute them 2000 years later is simply absurd.

[simcha_6]

19. All religions are anti-other religion

The problem with religion is that they are mutually exclusive. Jews are the chosen. Christians are the followers of the Messiah. Acknowledging the teachings of Buddha will probably lead to you enlightenment more quickly. The Baha'i faith- all teachers are good, worship/respect Jesus, Muhammad, Abraham, Buddha, because we all return to the one G-d via Bab. Well some are better than others, more inclusive than others, Baha'i for instance, but overall, all religions have their own aspect which makes it better than others. Even I, a Deist, feel like my faith is more tolerant than others, but that's me thinking mine's better than others. No escape within religion from superiority. Too bad.

[ikojo]

20. Jews don't see themselves as a chosen people in supremacist

sort of way. When an observant Jew thinks about the chosen people thing (and it is not very often..this is brought up by CHRISTIANS more than Jews) it is by way of having a greater responsibility to make the world a better place. At the heart of Jewish practice is tikkun olam (at least where I go to synagogue which alternates between conservative and reform). If you look back in US history most of the early unionists came out of Russia and the Jewish community.

Also, Jews are not taught that Judaism is the one true faith and that if one is not Jewish one will go to hell. Jews are taught that Judaism is right FOR JEWS but that there are truths in all faiths. That is why, within orthodoxy, many who seek to convert are often directed to the Noahide movement which instructs a non Jew to live according to the seven Noahide laws found in Genesis, for info go here http://www.auburn.edu/~allenkc/7laws.html

[TomClash]

22. Of course not

But there is a difference between saying "their is truth in all faiths" and "all other faiths are just as valid as Judaism." No religion, including Judaism, says the latter. And it is obvious that jews would find some truth in Christianity - it is a religion based in large part on the torah, yet another fact that makes Christian anti-semites look all the more stupid.

Actually, I have never heard "the chosen people thing" from a Christian, but rather from jews, though you are right in saying it is hardly the most important article of the jewish faith.

None of this means that Judaism is any worse than any other religion. But it isn't any better either.

[Igel]

15. Which Christianity?

A lot of traditional Xianity has great gobs of mystery religions and Gnosticism in it.

But there are strains that have less, possibly no, portions of mystery religions or Gnosticism. These don't think Paul did away with kashrut and such. And are frequently termed Judaizing. They're anti-Jewish in that they believe Christ was killed by Romans to satisfy the demands of at least some Jews; they don't hold Jews responsible for his death any more than they view Saami responsible.

[The Magistrate]

25. Certainly, My Hoosier Friend

At its beginnings its ideologues were at great pains to convince the Roman authorities the sect was entirely seperate from, and hostile to, Judiasm, in order to avoid involvement in the efforts by Rome to break the Messianic strains involving the Jewish people in rebellion against Rome.

[mitchum]

26. They worship the same Hebraic magic man in the sky...

so maybe it's like hostilities in the same very fucked up family