Helen Fry
Christian Views of Jews, Part 1: Image of the Jews in the Gospels

Dr Helen Fry - Christian Views of Jews, Part 1: Image of the Jews in the Gospels

- So today, we’re going to look at images of Jews in the New Testament. I mean, it’s a huge subject. I’ve picked out some of what I consider to be some of the most contentious and we’ll look at those shortly. I’ve also as way of a beginning, actually going to look at some givens and some of the backdrop to some of the texts and also to look at the four gospels so we understand when we are coming to look at some of the difficult texts, their background when they were written. So some basics about that. And of course, antisemitism has been described by that giant of a scholar, the late professor Robert Wistrich as the longest hatred. In fact, one of his books was titled “The Longest Hatred.” He did awesome scholarship in his lifetime and he wrote quite true. We know so much today with the rise of antisemitism that no other prejudice has displayed such intensity and historic continuity nor resulted in such devastating consequences as antisemitism. So I’m going to look, go way, way, way back to the early foundations of the early Christian Church. Next slide please. And if we look at what happened in the aftermath after Jesus’s death in around 30 CE, CE of the common era, you may want to go back and look at some of my lectures on the partings, plural, deliberately plural, the partings of the ways between Judaism, Christianity that I’ve done previously because this will fill in some of the summaries that I’m making at the beginning of this lecture today. So in much, much more detail. But what we have to understand is the diversity of Judaisms in the first century, some of you’ll remember me talking about this before, we also have to remember the diversity within the early Christian community, the early Jewish Christian community, even before it had a mission to the Gentile world.

So those early Christians, what we do know, and this is a result of Jewish and Christian scholarship studying often New Testament texts together that those early Christians met in houses for prayer. They still attended synagogue services, they still saw the temple as the focal point of worship. And why this background is important because we’ll start to see over the course of the next three lectures today, tomorrow, and next week, how the perception and the dreadful images which begin to emerge of Jews within Christianity. It’s a historic development. We’re going to try and understand that. So there’s early Christians, those early Jewish Christians and they were not a uniform group. There were several of them or some linked around the brother of Jesus. There were others linked around Peter, one of the apostles, they saw no reason to break with Judaism. So they were firmly within the Jewish traditions of the day. And I actually locate within the Pharisee tradition and the Jewish communities of the day did not see them as a new separate religion. And they’ve observed all the Jewish laws and practises of the day. They reflected on the Hebrew Bible, on the Jewish scriptures, Torah, and prophets. And it’s within that framework that they try to understand the ministry of Jesus because those in the early church, so many of them had actually met the historical Jesus. They were profoundly affected by this prophet, his message. Next slide please. In a time of great turbulence of Roman occupation and at a time when they believed that the end was near, the end days. So we understand then a lot of what develops in that early thinking is against the urgency that the end of time is near.

That there’s going to be some huge apocalyptic battle, some kind of heavenly battle against good and evil against you know, where God will triumph and against Satan. But what marks these Jewish Christians out as different from other Jewish groups, and you have the Sadducees, the Pharisees, again, I look at those, you have those involved in Sada and the density scroll communities. I look at those in one of my other courses which you can get online. But what marks them out as different is their belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead. And of course, resurrection for the Pharisee tradition was part of their belief system. The Sadducees did not believe in resurrection, but it didn’t take them outside of the Judaism of the day. It was perfectly okay for them to believe that in some sense how everyone wants to describe it, they had this belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead. No ideas of divinity, nothing linking Jesus as being part of, in some way part of God, part of like trinity. And the early Christian understanding its mission, if you like, it’s preaching to other Jews was that belief that Jesus had been raised and the end is near. Take on his message, the kingdom of God. And that through that resurrection, whatever it was they experienced, they believe this confirmed for them that at now God has, if you like press the button, and we’re about to inaugurate the last days. Of course, we know 2,000 years later, it didn’t happen and the church ever since has been trying to adjust for the fact that whatever was supposed to happen then actually didn’t the belief at that time. Next slide please. So the belief in Judaism, these are basic parameters, really important for us to understand at this stage. Belief in Jesus did not supersede Jewish teaching or tradition. Supersede being sort of taking over replace because later, we’ll see how of course the church very much later sees itself as superseding replacing Judaism and that becomes part of the anti-Jewish tradition.

Early Christianity, those early Jewish Christians had no over mission to the Gentile world. That’s quite a hard one for many Christians to take on board. But if you look at the historical circumstances in the years immediately after Jesus’ death and the event that was experienced as a resurrection, there’s no overt mission to the Gentile world. There were “Gentiles” who continued to be attracted to both Judaism and Jewish Christianity. In the early church, those early different groups of Jewish Christians were tolerated within the numerous Judaisms of the day. And a kind of sign of acceptance of that message was a baptism, but this is not really, really important. This is not conversion to a new religion. This is actually as the Apostle Paul later believed, that in going under the water or in the waters of baptism, you’re sort of born again if you like, but it’s not into a new religion. You’ve put aside your old life and you’re following the message of Jesus which is bound up with the imminent kingdom of God whether that’s a physical kingdom coming in, end of Roman occupation or the inauguration of a new era, some sort of heavily ethereal world. It is not always clear, although it’s almost certain the very earliest Christians thought something physical would happen on earth. Next slide please. So when we come to the early Christian writings, it’s really important to understand that originally, and this might sound obvious, I guess, but originally, the traditions about Jesus were passed on orally. They were not written down until at least 30 years after his death and in sometimes quite a bit, in some cases, quite a bit later. So what do we have?

We have floating around in those early years in which the church is establishing itself, it’s still going to synagogue, it’s still seeing the temple as central to its traditions. It hasn’t rejected anything and its Jewish past. It’s understanding Jesus within the context of what they already have been practising . And within that, there are oral traditions going around about some of the parables that Jesus told some of the stories with the meaning almost like Halakha if you like. And also about his life itself and his mission trying to understand what has happened. So then, gradually, you get the writings and I’ll come to them individually shortly. Amongst the earliest, although they don’t appear in this order in the New Testament, is Paul’s letters. So he is an apostle who actually had a sort of conversion on the road to Damascus, whatever he saw some religious experience, which means he stops persecuting the Jewish Christians. He’s actually a diaspora Jew and he actually converts, if you like, that’s probably not the right word, becomes a Jewish Christian but not as we’ll see shortly with the ideas of divinity. Then you have the Gospel of Mark, Luke. Mark is the first book of New Testament to opens with the Gospel of Mark, the Gospel of Luke, Acts of the Apostles, Gospel of Matthew and Gospel of John. There are other books within the New Testament. I won’t go into the book of Revelation because that’s so esoteric and obscure. I think it needs a probably a separate section. So we try and understand what’s happening once these communities decide to start writing down their traditions. And there’s a good space of a minimum of 30 to 40 years between the historical Jesus and the actual writing downs of the into the New Testament.

And it’s not formalised as the New Testament until about 500 years later as does it become part officially of the Christian canon. There were lots of other writings, Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Mary that for whatever reason , the church fathers decided not to include in what Christians understand as the scriptures of the New Testament. Next slide please. So what about the Gospel of Mark? Well it’s deemed to be the earliest written down dating to around 60 CE of the common era. And so importantly, and this is reflected in what he says throughout the gospel, it’s prior to the destruction of the temple, but during the first war with Rome. So these are incredibly turbulent times. The early Jewish Christians are actually being persecuted and they’re trying to understand their status, their situation against a backdrop of Roman occupation. And the Gospel of Mark tells of Jesus’ life starting at his baptism. We’ll come to virgin birth stuff in a moment and goes right the way up to his resurrection. And it firmly places Judaism. It’s really clear Mark does not take Judaism out of Jesus’ messages. It’s a lot of his parables and sayings are linked back to the Hebrew Bible. Jesus is firmly within, as I’ve put there, the diversities of Judaisms of his day. And the Gospel of Mark has no narrative whatsoever of the virgin birth. Jesus is a teacher, preacher, a wandering prophet. He is not quote unquote “Son of God” in the sense of divine. So Mark’s community that’s writing at least 30 years after Jesus’ death, excuse me. Understands Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. But Messiah in the sense, not in any divinity. That’s much, much later when we get the influence of the Greek or Roman world and the Gentile world. Marks community understands Jesus as the Messiah, as a suffering servant. Next slide please. And what about the sources for Mark?

And these are really important because we’re going to compare some sources of some of the difficult texts shortly. And this is why this background is really, really significant. And one of the bishops, we don’t hear a lot about, Hierapolis, who lived around the time that Mark is writing down his gospel and he died in around 130 CE. He lived in what is modern day Turkey. Now although the full earliest version of his manuscript is now lost, we know that Papias, or some of the other church fathers quote him that Papias has his own early Christian tradition that he’s drawing on and he on, he’s one of the few scholars who actually attributes the Gospel of Mark to a companion of the disciple of Peter. Peter being one of the 12 disciples of Jesus and arguably, one of the closest to him. Of course later, the Roman Catholic Church who still does believe that Jesus founded his church on Peters a story later in Matthew about that, but not in the Gospel of Mark. So we don’t really know of all of the four gospels, who has actually written them. In some cases, it’s believed that it could be more than one hand that’s actually written down these oral traditions. They are writing down oral traditions. Oral traditions, which are probably developed in their own right as well, and we’ll see that shortly.

But most scholars today continue to believe the Gospel of Mark was actually written anonymously. We don’t actually know unless anything new comes to light in a jar somewhere in Israel or elsewhere or in Egypt, maybe. We don’t know who the gospel was written by but we know he does have, he’s drawing on a very, very early tradition. The messages we get about the 12 disciples is that they don’t really understand who Jesus was. This is a message sort of coming through Mark and there is this sort of denial. And interestingly the women, and I’ll come back to the women, are the witnesses in Mark’s gospel. They are the witnesses to the resurrection, not the disciples. So is that historically accurate? Could well be. So Mark, as with later gospels, will be beginning to address concerns in his community. And Mark has a community that is finding that non-Jewish Christians are not accepting the message of Jesus. Whatever those Jewish Christians have experienced, other Jewish groups around are not accepting the message and the church is going to start, and the early Jewish Christians are struggling with that. And he starts, it’s a very gentle attack actually, in his gospel, But he’s starting to attack and who is he attacking? He’s actually attacking a Jerusalem church. The Jerusalem church which is founded around Jesus’s own brother James. Interestingly, his tradition doesn’t survive the brother of Jesus. I find that absolutely fascinating. So there’s resistance by the Jerusalem church to extend their message or their mission to the Gentile world. Next slide please. And if we look at the Gospel of Luke written at least 20 years after the Gospel of Mark, and that’s on the most conservative of estimates but possibly later, but they think anywhere up to as late as 110 CE. You know, amazing.

And it’s two parts. You’ve got the Gospel of Luke, but you’ve also got the Acts of the Apostles. So the Gospel of Luke is about the lifetime of Jesus and his message and then the Acts of the Apostles is the only real account we have surviving of what happened in the early church immediately after Jesus’ death. So that’s interesting in its own right and it does reflect a debate between Jewish Christians, the Hebrew Christians and what are known as Hellenists, they’re known as Hellenist in Acts of the Apostles. And there’s this friction, and again the Hellenist are those which are going out to the Gentile world. They’ve grown up in the diaspora, the diaspora Jews. So there’s two part history which is important, but we have no original text for the Gospel of Luke or Acts of Apostles earlier than the third century, even the late third century. And some scholars have even argued because of the prominence of women, and particularly the mother of Jesus, that this early tradition that Luke has written may well have come from the mother of Jesus herself. So that would be oral tradition. We’re not saying that Mary, the mother of Jesus, wrote the book would’ve been a male scribe, but that his community is drawing on an earliest strand of Jewish Christianity that was linked very closely to Mary, the mother of Jesus or Miriam as she is in her Hebrew name. But this is interesting because by the time you’ve got Gospel of Luke, circa 80 at the very earliest, you now have miraculous birth.

You have the virgin birth. You have trying to make Jesus out of something other than he is. Historically, his ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension. They’re all accounts which depart from Mark’s earlier gospel and there is a focus yes, on the kingdom of God. It’s a central theme. But he starts to introduce ideas of New Israel and he’s developing his community’s own identity and view it’s own brand if you like, of Christianity as distinct from Mark. Now if Luke’s community agreed wholly with Mark, they would’ve just adapted Mark’s scriptures but doesn’t. They’re starting to write down their own oral traditions and into that, weaving their own understanding of Jews and Judaism. Next slide please. And when we come to the Gospel of Matthew, which is the closest to the Gospel of Luke, and I’ll do a comparison to show you shortly, it’s written kind of almost smack bang in the middle. Possibly starting around the same time as Luke. It’s written independently of the Gospel of Luke. Some scholar have even argued that it’s pre-destruction of the temple. I don’t think that it is given some of the very harsh debates with the Pharisees in particular. And it’s very clear that the Gospel of Matthew, if you compare the scripts draws on Mark and Q. Now I’m going to come to the Q source separately in a moment. Q is a very early tradition. So these gospel writers are drawing on early material. They are oral traditions which are circulating, which they’re preaching and teaching within their communities, still within the Judaisms of the day at this point. The whole partings of the ways, it’s beginning to happen in Matthew and Luke, but it’s not totally there yet. Matthew has new material that’s not in Mark and not in Q. An anonymous author written in Greek.

It’s very polished, it’s very different style from Mark and Luke. But it does show that this community who’s the gospel of Matthew shows a very thorough understanding of Judaism, of Jewish practises and of synagogue. And it does reflect an increasingly hostile struggle. Those terrible woes to the Pharisees which only appear in such extended form don’t appear in Mark, all but extended form in the gospel of Matthew, reflects this increasing historical struggle with Pharisaic Judaism after the destruction of the temple. So this is not, in the words of Jesus, as view of the Pharisees which have been used in anti-Jewish tradition going forward in the church is a debate, is a conflict, a clash of identities and a clash of communities historically at that time. And so it is not a woe to all Jews of all time. The kingdom of God according to Matthew that Jesus had preached about this imminent kingdom that’s coming, it’s going to overturn the current order has been taken away from Jews and from Judaism in favour of the Christian community, the early church. And this is really the first time we get strong attitudes coming in about the Jewish rejection of Jesus. And that does come through the Gospel of Matthew. And of course, that gets taken up later by the church fathers with devastating consequences for the Christian view of Jews. Next slide please. So just to summarise, Matthew’s community is a Gentile Christian community. It’s having far more success with mission to the Gentile world. It’s woe to the Pharisees for traversing the earth and for a single proselyte.

But actually, they’re working within. It’s one of the woes in Matthew’s gospel. It’s competing against a pharisaic tradition. Matthew himself was very much in the Jewish Christian tradition. He’s not a Gentile. None of these gospel writers are ever believed to have been Gentiles. Still, he’s still operating within Judaism but he’s struggling. His community is struggling and they’re writing down their traditions and their interpretations to try and make sense of their experiences. And as I’ve put this, so some of the redactions, some of the changes to his text as we’ll see some of the anti-Jewish polemic were made by the final Gentile writer or scribe. So what starts out as a Jewish Christian tradition later. It’s believed that you can see a hand of a later scribe that’s actually sort of added a few bits right towards the end of when the gospel’s completed. And it is, I’ll come back to that coping with the destruction of the temple, it’s trying to answer. And this will be a recurrent theme. And while some of the polemic becomes so intense in some of the gospels, particularly Matthew, and particularly John later, and around the passion narratives around Easter time, and I’ll cover those too, trying to answer in their view, the Jewish rejection of Jesus as the Messiah. We’ve been promised as long awaited Messiah, Jews have been waiting for this fall millennia. It’s come in the person of Jesus, the end is nigh, but the majority of the Jewish people are not taking up this message. And that for Matthew and his community is problematic. They cannot understand it and are trying to make sense of it. And of course much of that has tipped into some aspects of Christian thinking today as well. So we have to understand Matthew’s gospel in the context of the end is near.

They believe the Messiah’s come and they then, because the Messiah doesn’t come in the time given, they then start to believe in the second coming, which we’ve still got today. The occupation I’ve put there by Rome has a lot to answer for. They are struggling against this world where the kingdom of God has not happened with Roman occupation. They don’t understand why it’s obvious to them as Jewish Christians that Jesus is fulfilling in some way that promises that were made in the Hebrew Bible. And why aren’t Jews accepting this? And unfortunately, the tragedy is that much of their response gets woven into these gospels and then they become scripture and then they become part of Christian canon law. Next slide, and we’ll look at that in another session. Another session. So I thought it’d be really interesting given that backdrop and we understand, I’ll come to John’s gospel later. John said totally different from these three. MAT, Matthew, in the middle, Mark, on the end, Luke. And these are known as the synoptic gospels ‘cause they are the closest to each other. And when I was at university, one of the things we’d study, we studied numerous texts that actually pretty much all of the gospels, the synoptic gospels, we had a book where each of the stories were parallel next to each other like this. And we had to study if we are trying to uncover the original message of the historical Jesus or the original message of the church, we had to parallel each of them and look at the differences. Next slide please. I think I seem to have missed out a Q tradition.

Can we go back one please? Have we missed that? I’ve just missed out a… Yeah, I think it’s accidentally got deleted. Okay, that’s fine if we keep it on. Tim, can you go down two more please? Yeah, no that’s fine. If we go back to the first one. That’s it. Lovely, thank you. Sorry, I think it’s accidentally been deleted. So I’ll explain Q and I’ll put it up for you next time because it’s a really good diagram to understand Q. So we have Matthew, the Gospel of, sorry, the Gospel of Mark, the earliest, written down. Mark, Matthew and Luke. Matthew and Luke having stories, sharing stories which don’t appear at all in Mark. And then Matthew and Luke having stories which they don’t share with each other occasionally. And it’s led scholars to strip back the differences between Matthew and Luke and to see that they’re drawing on an early oral tradition, which scholars have just called Q. I mean Q is sort of, it’s an unknown really, but it’s a source and these early Christian traditions were circulating, they’re being transmitted but they were too important. There’s no connection physically between Matthew and Luke’s communities. They’re independent communities so there’s no crossover but both of them are drawing on an early tradition Q that’s not in Mark. Occasionally, they’re drawing on traditions which Mark has inherited, so it’s quite complex.

And then if you compare we can see what the changes are. So if we go to the next slide, so I’ve just marked this in yellow here. So you can see some of the subtle differences and you can see some of the, well want of a better word, theology started to creep in. And this is important when we come to the passion narratives. So you can see that Luke has added full of the Holy Spirit. So we’ve got whatever the Holy Spirit is and his understanding. We’ve got Mark not mentioning 40 days, 40 nights being famished. We’ve got Matthew on the left, they’re just embellishing a bit. And in the middle there I put a huge question mark because only Matthew and Luke you can see, has this temptation, Luke calls it the devil. Matthew just uses the word for tempter. If you are the son of God, not necessarily meaning in a divine sense, but in the same sense as Isaiah as a suffering servant, command this stone to become a loaf and the other one has loaves of bread. Okay, we can understand the plural. And Luke says it is written, “One does not live by bread alone.” And on the other one we’ve got the extra confession of faith but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. So what we had to do as students was to try and work out whether this was an experience for Jesus, whether this was originally words which came from the earliest tradition or whether those communities have actually started to embellish the stories. And you can see that quite clearly in some of the parables and some of the teachings of Jesus. And it serves their own community if you like. And they wouldn’t see it as being any in any way, dishonest. Next slide please. So we’ve got another example here and this is much more complex, don’t worry, I’ve done my scribble on the next one. So I’ve even got, we’ve got John occasionally where you have an overlap. In fact, interestingly his is the shortest. And this is the what we Christian’s call Palm Sunday. Next slide please.

Where Jesus processes into Jerusalem on a donkey. It’s not clear whether it’s actually Passover or not, but the closest in this case interestingly, are Mark and Luke. So I’ve generally, but not totally, the ordering’s slightly different but I’ve highlighted in yellow the major sort of differences. But in Matthew’s case, you can see I’ve put my writing at the side, they’re prophecy added. So he’s linking. There’s no reason to think Jesus didn’t go on a donkey into Jerusalem with crowds processing behind him. Maybe it was some kind of gesture, prophetic gesture. We don’t need to get into that interpretation, but we have to look at the differences. And this is important when we come to the passion narratives 'cause that’s where we start to get each of the communities sometimes vitriolic, anti-Jewish sayings. And in Matthew there on the left, you’ve got that prophecy. Tell the people of Israel, “Look, your king is coming to you, he is right humble riding on a donkey,” etc. And you’ve got a little bit of that in John but not the same degree. You’ve got no prophetic works in Mark or Luke. So you can begin to see how the gospels are starting. Some of them are having an extra layer added later and that’s why it becomes problematic if we just take sayings out of context from one gospel or another.

Particularly where it comes to anti-Jewish sayings. And if you look on the right, John, John’s gospel has clearly placed this at the time of Passover that the others don’t. So you know, we could have an argument over whether it was Passover or not at the time, but he’s got that sort of proclamation. Next slide please. So you can see, I think traditionally, people tend to think that it’s all Christian tradition as a uniform, but they’re not. Even within the gospels, there are major theological differences starting to emerge. Gospel of John written possibly completed before Matthew, if Matthews is late as 110 CE, but most scholars believe that go the Gospel of John is the latest, it was the last to be written. Around 80 or 90, the destruction of the temple has happened. The split with Judaism or Judaisms and even Jewish Christianity is complete and total. Total severance. Now, John’s form of Christianity no longer sits. Within any of the Judaisms of the day, there it is now on the road to becoming completely new religion. And it has completely taken in, it’s got a huge Gentile following. It has taken in a Gentile we call Hellenistic interpretation. You can see in the way it begins, it doesn’t begin with the virgin birth, it doesn’t begin at Jesus’ baptism. It says in the beginning was the word and . I always remember that from the Greek we had to learn at at university. In the beginning was the word, this obscure philosophy and the word was with God and the word was God.

The same was in the beginning with God. What on earth does that mean? You know, we’ve been arguing that for years since the scholars, the interpretation. But now John’s gospel has taken some those early traditions, some that have been developed, they’re theologically moving away, and there isn’t a single early Jewish Christian community that would recognise anything, I would argue, in the Gospel of John. He is using Greek language from the Greek or Roman world to appeal to explain their message of Jesus to that world. Acculturation, we would call it. So culturally, explaining the message. Next slide please. And it’s a different style from the others which leads many scholars as I’ve put there, to conclude its interpretation. John’s gospel is theological interpretation, not the words of the historical Jesus. So we have to be careful, particularly when we come to anti-Jewish sayings, the vitreal statements against Jews. We have to be careful that they are not pinned as the words of Jesus, the historical Jesus. John’s community now believes of all of the communities, it has the correct interpretation of scripture. It believes that it has superseded not only Judaism but it’s the correct interpretation that superseded Jewish Christianity and this new relationship, this new community is now irreconcilable. Judaism Christianity at this point, these communities are irreconcilable. But as I’ve put there tragically actually, it’s John’s understanding of Judaism and his picture of Jews that goes on to purvey 2,000 years of Christian thinking about Jews and Judaism.

He’s the one that’s most quoted when Christians, some evangelical Christians in particular preach about Jesus and why Jews have rejected Jesus. Next slide please. So we come on onto Paul and then shortly, we’ll be doing the passion narratives themselves and looking at the difference. So mixed amongst that because often, there’s a misunderstanding about the Apostle Paul and a lot of later interpretation is superimposed, particularly what some of the thinking we find in John’s gospel is superimposed or interpreted by Christians onto the Apostle Paul. I’ve done more about Paul in that series I did on the parties of the ways and it really might be worth you revisiting that. But Paul’s understanding is interestingly not like the Gospel of John. And in a way, not even like the Gospel of Matthew, he doesn’t see his faith, his belief in Jesus is replacing Judaism at all. He likes to refer back to Isaiah 3, that passage of the suffering servant. And Jesus’ death is understood as the death of God’s servant. It’s a sacrificial death in the way that it tones the sins of a nation but it’s not exclusive. And he uses the language of expiation, which is temporal language actually. And again, I’ve looked at that in more detail. But as I’ve put there, it belongs to Jewish martyrdom texts. So Paul is placing Maccabees in particular for Maccabees. He places Jesus’ death within the tradition of Jewish martyrs and in some way, the death of a Jewish martyr of a righteous person can atone for a wicked nation or for wicked people. It’s not a replacement of the temple system.

There is no way that Paul, the temples still up and running. Paul does not in any way say that the temple has been replaced. Really, really significant. So I hope that’s given you a bit of a backdrop. Next slide please. So expiation, as I said used in the temple the Lid of the Ark of the holy of Holies in the temple is referred to. It’s often used in the Greek, in the Septuagint in the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible. So he uses the Christian version of the Hebrew Bible. He uses temple language throughout his letters, actually, redemption to put forward meaning bringing a sacrifice. He’s clearly still operating within that framework. And people experience some kind of righteousness, some kind of new life through their belief that Jesus is, in some sense, the promise Messiah. And it’s a renewal of the covenant at a time when the end is coming. Next slide please. But all that of course is turned on its head shortly with the destruction of the temple. And for Paul, prior to that, the death of Jesus does not jeopardise the sacrificial system. And within Christianity, that whole belief has been completely subverted in many ways. For Paul, whatever happened in Jesus’ death, it’s renewing a covenant that has been broken, in some sense. It’s not replacing, it’s not supersessionism as the early church fathers developed. It’s to be understood in sacrificial terms, in martyrdom terms. He’s faithful to Torah. He argues that quote, “One who dies for Torah can cleanse the nation.” So I’ve quoted there from 4 Maccabees 17, “The blood of the faithful in their deaths are an expiation.” If you like, a sort of a cleansing can help to forgive a nation but it’s not a replacement in any way whatsoever. Next slide please. So I think I’ve lost my picture. Yes, sorry. Destruction of the temple is as I’ve put there, a cataclysmic event not only for the early Jewish Christians but also for the Jewish community. Can we put that screen?

• [Speaker] Your camera’s gone to the wall so you’ve taken your face off.

• [Helen] I don’t know what’s happened. I’ve got some tech issues today.

• [Speaker] Okay, no worries.

• [Helen] don’t worry if you can’t see me, I’m not sure what to do. I don’t want to just crash out of the session by accident. Has happened once last week. So this cataclysmic event which creates this huge tension between the various Jewish Christians, the various Gentile Christian groups as well as Judaism itself have to adjust. They have to survive the destruction of the temple without temple worship. And we start to get new interpretations, particularly in the Gospel of John. Jesus follows us still has been functioning within Judaism, but now, Christianity after the destruction of the temple is on the root to becoming a new religion. Next slide please. And we know the Pharisees survive, but the Sadducees don’t for example. It brought that destruction of the temple brought an end to diverse Judaism. So both Judaism and what develops Christianity start to develop a normative interpretation that becomes sort of what we know as Judaism, if you like, in Christianity, although it’s still diverse. These early believers are on both sizes, early followers, after the destruction of the temple, there could no longer be diverse interpretations of Torah. It led to normative Judaism, as I said, the Sadducees vanished and the loss of the sacrificial system. Now interestingly, if the temple had never been distracted and never been destroyed by the Romans, how different things would’ve turned out, the Sadducees would probably still have been the foremost group that went forward. Pharisaic Judaism it was formed at Yavna and what you know, is aligned to, to the various Judaism today may well not have actually survived. And the same with early Jewish Christians. It may be that the Gentile world had did not survive in the same way, but there’s a massive reinterpretation going on. Next slide please. And no more so than in the passion narratives.

So coming to those now. And the passion narratives are to put there, those are really this group of narratives that encompass Jesus’ death and resurrection. And this is where we get some of the most difficult sayings, including John’s gospel. The fact that the early Christians or the Jewish Christians, the followers of Jesus, couldn’t go to temple because of quote unquote “fear of the Jews.” You’ve started to get things like that coming in which, you know, are incredibly difficult texts. So the passion narrative are actually covered by all four gospels, but there are major differences. And this is what I think we need to understand and Matthew’s gospel I’ve listed there, has things that are not in any of the other gospels. In his version, Judas commits suicide, Pilate’s wife warns Pilate have nothing to do with Judas. I mean, the whole image of Judas Iscariot is problematic in Christian tradition. And Matthew has that saying, “His blood be upon us and upon our children.” And I’m going to come back to that shortly. It’s arguably… Scholars in Christian Jewish relations have argued that is arguably the most dangerous of all the anti-Jewish traditions because it places, it leads eventually today aside the charge of deicide by the church fathers. But I’ll come back to that, I’m getting ahead of myself. So it’s a nighttime interrogation by the Sanhedrin. The Sanhedrin 70 elders around the temple. And a guard, he says, was posted at the tomb of Jesus ‘cause there was fear that his body would actually be snatched. But none of those points appear in any of the other gospels.

So if we’re doing our comparison, we’d have to start to say, you know, is Matthew’s gospel, not saying they’re all additions by Matthew, but if they’re not additions, have the other three gospels consciously taken them out? You’ve got that. And what’s unique to Luke’s gospel and not the others is Jewish authorities colluding in Jesus’ death. And we have to ask, and this is how we begin to unpack, the views of Jews in the New Testament, and there’s so many we could be picking. We have to look if the Jewish authorities are being blamed for colluding with the Romans in the death of Jesus, we have to ask which ones. We cannot say all Jews at that time. And this is the problem with Christian interpretation going forward and with interpretation today. Are we talking about the Sadducees? Are we talking about the Pharisees? Almost certainly, if there’s any support of the Romans in subduing a revolt at the time. ‘cause they were concerned about the huge crowds following Jesus or anyone that could possibly upset the Roman occupation was likely to be the Sadducees of anyone who were known to be already in collusion to keep the power. Certainly not the Pharisees, but unfortunately, of course, in Matthew’s gospel, it’s the Pharisees, those that are closest to the Jewish Christian community that get the woe under the Pharisees, that dreadful section. And in Luke’s gospel, the Sanhedrin meets actually in the morning. So interrogation is taking place in the morning. They can’t both be correct. Next slide please. And then we’ve got this.

Again, a very, very difficult text in the New Testament. I’ve actually put it in its full. Pilate took water and washed his hands before the crowd say, “I am innocent of this man’s blood. See to it yourselves.” And all the people answered, “His blood be upon us and on our children.” Upon us and our children. And as I’ve put there, I mean it’s devastating because it’s found the flames of hatred more than any other, I would argue, text in the News Testament. It was used at the time to shift the blame to Jews for killing Jesus at a time when the word Jewish Christian groups at that time that were being persecuted by the Romans. And one explanation is that in weaving into this, Matthew is very clearly not wanting to blame the occupying Romans. He doesn’t want his community to be targeted. So if you shift the blame for the death of Jesus, this rabble rousing prophet, who was deemed a security risk to the Romans. Yes, we’ll blame him, blame Jews at the time and not the Roman empire. It places the accusation in perpetuity on Jews of all generations and that they will suffer a punishment. The church now of course, through a number of statements, have acknowledged that Jesus died at the hands of the Romans. His death was a Roman execution. So how do we deal with this text? And I think we’ve just got time to do a bit more on this today. Next slide please. As I said, one of the most difficult and it’s imperative to understand the history. And I think that’s what we’ve been trying to do as I started today and understand the history and the backdrop. We cannot just take that completely out of context. And later as the church fathers developed the charge of deicide that, you know.

And of course, in Nazi Germany, one of the responses in the early 30s was it was perfectly okay for Jews and political dissident to be cut off to concentration cows, but particularly Jews to be persecuted because they killed Christ, Jesus Christ. Well you have to understand today, we have to continually educate and understand that saying. Why does it only appear in Matthew’s gospel? Is it historical? Did it actually happen? Did the crowd at that time really say, “His blood be upon us and upon our children?” It’s not in Q, that wonderful source of diagram that disappeared. It’s not in the early tradition on which Matthew and Luke have drawn themselves. The early tradition that they both share independently. It’s not in Luke’s gospel, it’s not in Mark’s gospel. And an obvious comment, Pilate would not have washed his hands of the crucifixion in public. I think this is really important because it would’ve shown him to have been a really weak man at the hands of the mob. He would not have given over this rabble-rousing prophetic figure that for him was a security risk. He would not have given him over to the crowd to decide what happens. Crucifixions, I put there is a Roman execution during a period of insurrection and the consequences were brutal. Jesus alongside others was crucified. But certainly, those early Jewish Christian traditions do not have the blame being placed on Jews or Jews in perpetuity. So I believe, we can firmly say that that quote has been added by Matthew for whatever his purposes are, potentially to protect his community just so the Roman community thinks he’s little more loyal and not a threat to the community at a time of persecution.

And would that crowd, think about it honestly and logically. Would a crowd have taken responsibility for Jesus’ death And on subsequent generations? It most certainly wouldn’t. And I think these are the kind of considerations that we need to think about when we just plainly read a text and just assume that it might be historical, which so many in the Christian world would do. Next slide please. I’m going to round off after this one because I want to go into more detail tomorrow. That leads nicely into the church fathers on how we deal with particularly the anti-Judaism, some will call it antisemitism in John’s gospel. But when we look back at the passion narratives and that one in Matthew, his blood be upon us and upon our children, unique to Matthew. But it’s not the only difficult text within the passion narrative. So I picked it because it is the most serious and difficult to deal with. But what influence, if we think again logically, about that, what influence did the Jewish authorities have? Sanhedrin? Question mark. What did they really have in terms of that final sentencing and crucifixion? Reiterating that crucifixion was very firmly a Roman form of execution. And to place even the crowd at that time and certainly not in perpetuity, to level Jesus’ death as being the result of some kind of collusion, some kind of decision by the crowd is clearly not historically true. Were left with it in unfortunately what is part of Christian scripture. And I raised this question, sorry excuse, was Pilate. So it got carried away there when I was doing the preparing is, was Pilate so noble and righteous but weak? Now he was known for his tyranny.

And we know during the Jewish wars in the middle ‘60s, '66, he spared no one to protect his own position and power. He hesitated, not jotter. Jitter jotter, not a jot, he didn’t spare a moment to put down an insurrection that anything which could destabilise his power over the region at that time what was then Palestine. The early struggles. Unfortunately, this is what we need to understand and need to sort of get into our education systems and into understandings in the Christian world. But those gospels, and for me, I think it’s far richer that those gospels, yes, they’re a product of the historical time, they’re a product of an internal Jewish struggles. Jewish Christian struggles within the early church. And for me, that makes this whole study so much more interesting to understand the historical backdrop. Of course, it could have gone any way, that could have been other communities at that time that won out. It was basically a power struggle and the and the most powerful ultimately one. And that would be when it was taken good and proper into the Gentile world. And of course, with Constantine in 325. But for now, for me, I think when we understand the backdrop, we look at the differences in the gospels, we don’t assume that they are historically true word for word, but so many people do. And that’s a problem I think in our understanding of scriptures.

And it’s also problematic in the history of Christian treatment of Jews. So just to conclude, a few final thoughts for today, and as I say, I’ll start off with John’s gospel a bit more in John’s Gospel tomorrow leading to the church fathers, Jesus was seen at that time, was believed to be a prophet, some as the long-awaited Messiah. He was about to usher in a kingdom at a time of intense oppression, of persecution, of occupation by the Romans. It was so oppressive. And the taxation, you know, they wanted their freedom. It was freedom from oppression, the age old fight and struggle from oppression and he suddenly executed at the hands of the Romans. So all of those early texts are a response to Roman occupation. They are woven through with a message and very scant historical life of Jesus. And that for me, is fascinating to uncover. But these are apocalyptic times. The end is near. This is only a temporary time. Their suffering is only temporary because all this is going to be overturned.

So who we’re moving away from, the death of Jesus, the resurrection, the longer the time gap between those historical events, those communities have to start readjusting. The end hasn’t come. We’re still under occupation, we are still being persecuted. Who’s responsible for the death of our Messiah? They can’t blame the Romans as I’ve put there because it would lead to those communities being persecuted if they were vocally preaching that their Messiah had been killed by the Romans. And so you start to get the blame in the text, particularly Matthew, not in the others, but being transferred to Jews of the day, but also horrifically, of subsequent generations. It is, I think, very difficult history and one that I still struggle with. It’s a painful history, but I think it is important that we address it head on and when we can, start to look at these difficult texts and understand them and maybe that will be some kind of breakthrough. So I look forward to seeing you same time tomorrow when we’ll have a look at some more difficult texts that have certainly contributed to Christian view of Jews and anti Judaism leading, sliding into of course, the 2,000 years of Christian antisemitism. So I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.