The Roots of Christian Anti-Semitism
As an undergraduate I attended many different Christian meetings, mostly pretty boring or irrelevant. But every now and then you go to a meeting that interests you solely because of the absurdity of the speaker’s thoughts. One such meeting was one on Christianity and other faiths.
We have had a tendency in the West to think of Christianity as being a body of doctrines that developed completely independent of any outside influence. This is not true. If we take the Bible as the centre of Christian life — as I do — then if we are sensible we can see influences from Judaic, Roman and Hellenistic (Greek) thought. Take for example the argument the writer of the letter to the Hebrews uses (Hebrews 8: 1–9) to show that Jesus is greater than Moses. It is quite simply an adaptation of a Greek argument from Platonic essences (the plan of the tent Moses saw at Sinai) to imperfect realities (the copy he made of this plan at the foot of the mountain). Christ however brings the real plan of God’s temple — a metaphor for how we should live in Christ.
This tendency, to treat Christianity as a set of beliefs which have not been influenced at all by the culture in which they were developed, was exemplified by the speaker at the meeting I referred to at the outset. He said: “Jesus during his time on earth came into contact with many religions other than his own, such as Judaism.” When taken out of context this quote may be unfair but the basic fact remains that for centuries Christians have been trying to de-Judaize Christ. Let me put this plainly: Jesus was a Jew. He was brought up as a Jew, he lived as a Jew, and most importantly his recorded answers to questions betray a distinctively Jewish style (for example, the clever, ironic answer he gave when asked about taxes — Mark 12: 13–17).
The de-Judaising of Christ has been compounded by what I see as a complete misunderstanding of Paul’s teaching. Paul, who wrote over a third of the New Testament, is characterised as the Jew turned Christian who renounced the Jewish law as legalistic, completely disassociated himself from his Jewish past and emphasised justification by faith over the Jewish idea of justification by following the Law. The problem here is that we see Paul through Lutheran, or more correctly, Augustinian, spectacles. It was Augustine who first developed the “Pauline” idea of justification by faith. Luther, an Augustinian himself until he broke with the Roman church, merely re-emphasised this. Paul’s letters are often applied theology — the meaning of Christ Jesus for a particular situation. To understand what Paul actually thought about the relationship between Jews and Gentiles we need to unpack Paul’s letters.
Firstly we need to understand who Paul was. He was a well-educated Jew who knew the Torah (Jewish law) better than most. He also persecuted the church in his zeal for Judaism. His “conversion” experience on the road to Damascus changed all this and he became a Christian who renounced Judaism. Or did he? What actually was Paul’s attitude to the Law?
Most would sum this up by quoting Paul’s letter to the Philippians: “I count everything [including my following the Law] as sheer loss, because all is far outweighed by the gain of knowing Christ Jesus as my Lord…” (Phil. 3: 8) To quote this out of context is irresponsible: Paul lists his qualifications as a Jew and then he says: “As to righteousness under the Law [I was] blameless.” (Phil. 3: 6); “All such assets I have written off because of Christ.” (Phil. 3: 7). That is, he counts compliance with the Law as an asset; he experiences no regret; he is rightly proud of his Jewish past. He never says he repents of being a Jew, only of persecuting the church — and that was his over-zealousness. He did not depart from Jewish institutional teaching on Christ because he felt legalistic Judaism was wrong. He departed because he felt Christ fulfilled the Jewish law.
The popular image of Paul as a man dissatisfied with Judaism is our picture and not Paul’s. He never felt a change in religion when he was on the Damascus road; instead it was a call to preach the Good News of God to the Gentiles. He experiences a new and special calling in God’s service — the same God of Israel — that is, that God’s message is now to be presented to the Gentiles. There is no break from the “before and after” — there is a continuum, a gradual realisation of how the God of the Torah now has a message, through the Messiah, to all humanity.
This alternative view I have outlined is, I think, truer to Paul than many Protestant theologians like to think. He was not dissatisfied with Judaism, he was proud of his Jewish heritage — arrogantly proud in places. Take for instance the great “justification by faith” epistle — Romans. People get to Romans 8 — after Paul has talked of justification by faith — and stop. But the most important part of Romans is chapters 8–11 where he talks of Gentile/Jewish relations and how though it is a mystery to him he cannot believe God’s chosen people — the Jews — are not sacred. Though they have rejected Christ, their salvation is still part of God’s plan. You read Romans — that is what he says. Now when people say Paul condemned the Jewish law they are quite simply missing the point. Paul saw the law as “paidagogos” (Galatians 3: 24) — a “schoolmaster” unto Christ. Strictly speaking Paul personalised the Law, making it the equivalent of the “slave who takes the children to school and teaches them basic skills” (that is what paidagogos means). The Gentiles did not know God as the Jews did, for they did not have the Torah. Now they could know God for the Messiah had come and God’s message was available for all. The Law was not “wrong”, merely inappropriate now Christ had come.
This misunderstanding of Paul (as a Jew-hater) compounds our white, good-looking image of Christ and our de-Judaising of Christianity. If we take Paul as rejecting Judaism for Christianity, we miss the historical point that Christianity was still closely aligned with Judaism in the first centuries after Christ. No-one really knows when the formal split happened. If we take Paul as having a conversion on the Damascus road we treat Christianity as a set of ready-made doctrines (which at Paul’s time it was not) and we miss the continuum he stressed in his life. This warping of Paul helps us ignore his thought on the question of the Jewish race — we miss out his belief that the Jews are also sacred, though he confesses in Romans 11 that it remains a mystery to him.
If we are truly to take the Bible as the basis of our faith, we must be prepared to let our understanding of it be guided by the spirit of understanding. If you read Romans 11 you will see how wrong an idea of Paul many Christians have. It is here, in our misunderstanding of the great character of Paul, that the roots of anti-semitism in Christian theology are based.