Are the Jewish People Responsible for Killing Jesus?: Part Two

As we discussed in part one of this series, many Gentile church leaders throughout church history espoused antisemitic sentiments toward the Jewish people, which eventually led to church-sponsored persecution and murder of the Jewish people throughout history.

How did the church devolve from a largely Jewish community who followed the Jewish Messiah, worshipped in the Temple and synagogues, and observed the Torah (Acts 3:1–3, 15:1–29, 21:17–26) into a predominantly Gentile community that persecuted the Jewish people?

Early in the church, after the Jewish apostles died, the doctrine of replacement theology surfaced among the primarily Gentile-led church of the patristic era (100–450 CE). This theology—that the church has replaced Israel and assumed all its promises—divorced the New Testament from its Jewish context, incorrectly interpreted Scripture, and eventually led to antisemitic attitudes in the church.¹

In this article, we will make the case that reading the New Testament should lead to a love and respect for the Jewish people rather than to antisemitism. We will show how certain passages of rebuke toward Jewish leaders in the New Testament have been wrongly interpreted in an antisemitic way and, instead, should be understood as a kind of inner family dispute among the Jewish people.

The New Testament: A Jewish Book

From cover to cover, the Bible—including the New Testament—is a Jewish book. Every author of the New Testament, with the possible exception of Luke, was a Jewish follower of Jesus as Messiah. The New Testament records the lives of Jewish people living during the Second Temple period and—most importantly—the life and ministry of the Jewish Messiah. Jesus and His apostles quoted the Hebrew Scriptures, observed the Law of Moses and the Jewish holy days, worshipped in the Temple in Jerusalem, and taught the Jewish people and non-Jews about the God of Israel and His Messiah.²

The New Testament affirms the continued chosenness of the Jewish people just as the Hebrew Scriptures do. The Jewish apostle Paul wrote,

For I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Messiah for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom belongs the adoption as sons, and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the Law and the temple service and the promises, whose are the fathers, and from whom is the Messiah according to the flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen. (Romans 9:3–5, cf. 11:28–29; Jeremiah 31:35–37; Psalm 105:8–11)

It also affirms God’s future restoration of Israel just as the Hebrew Scriptures do:

For I do not want you, brethren, to be uninformed of this mystery—so that you will not be wise in your own estimation—that a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in, and so all Israel will be saved; just as it is written, “The deliverer will come from Zion, He will remove ungodliness from Jacob.” “This is my covenant with them, when I take away their sins.” (Romans 11:25–27; cf. Luke 21:24; Acts 1:6–8, 3:18–21)

Nowhere does the New Testament claim the church has replaced Israel, that the Jewish people are guilty of killing Jesus (deicide), or that the Jewish people are cursed by God. Instead, it repeatedly affirms God’s continued love for and covenant with the Jewish people.

Problematic Passages

So, what do we do with New Testament passages that seem antagonistic to the Jewish people—the passages antisemites have misinterpreted and abused to persecute the Jewish people? We must remember the context within which the New Testament was written.

First, as mentioned, the New Testament was written by Jewish people and contains disputes among fellow Jewish people. These were internal Jewish family disputes, not Gentiles writing derogatory words about Jewish people. Second, these harsh passages of rebuke toward other Jewish people were characteristic of the Second Temple period, as evidenced from extra-biblical Jewish texts. Third, this type of rhetoric likewise matches that of the Old Testament, or Hebrew Scriptures, which affirmed God’s covenant with the Jewish people while still issuing harsh words of rebuke toward the disobedient, unbelieving, and unjust.

Second-Temple Jewish Disputes

Throughout church history, some Gentile Christians have taken Jesus’ words in Revelation 2:9 and 3:9, referring to certain assemblies as “a synagogue of Satan,” to persecute the Jewish people. We will visit these references in more detail in part three. Now, we want to show how this rhetoric was characteristic of Jewish disagreements within Second Temple Judaism.

For example, the Jewish community or sect that lived in the desert in Israel and compiled and wrote the texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls maintained that Jewish people who opposed their beliefs were part of the “congregation of Belial,” another name for Satan.³ The first-century Jewish historian Josephus called the Zealots of his day “blinded by fate”⁴ and enemies of God who “outdo each other in acts of impiety toward God and injustice to their neighbors.”⁵ Similarly, the talmudic sages, when disagreeing with one another, frequently called each other insults including, “first-born of Satan,” “one who has never studied the law,” “foolish Galilean,” etc.⁶

Old Testament Rebukes

Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, God and the prophets often rebuked the ancient Israelites (eventually called Jewish people) for their disobedience or faithlessness with harsh words in the same way that Jesus and the apostles did in the New Testament.

In Matthew 23:29–33, Jesus used stern words of rebuke to the Jewish leaders who opposed Him: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! . . . So you testify against yourselves, that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. . . . You serpents, you brood of vipers, how will you escape the sentence of hell?”

These words are not unlike those of the Hebrew prophets. The prophet Isaiah, writing to his fellow Jewish people, wrote, “Alas, sinful nation, people weighed down with iniquity, offspring of evildoers, sons who act corruptly! They have abandoned the Lord, they have despised the Holy One of Israel, they have turned away from Him” (Isaiah 1:4).

The prophet Nehemiah likewise wrote about his people Israel: “But they became disobedient and rebelled against You, and cast Your law behind their backs and killed Your prophets who had admonished them so that they might return to You, and they committed great blasphemies” (Nehemiah 9:26).

God even told the prophet Hosea to marry a harlot and name one of his children “Lo-ammi,” or “not my people,” to symbolically tell the people of Israel that they are not His people because of their rebellion: “And the Lord said, ‘Name him Lo-ammi, for you are not my people and I am not your God’” (Hosea 1:9). Yet even after this harsh repudiation of His chosen people, He immediately promised restoration in the following verse (Hosea 1:10).

Similarly, though Jesus and His followers in the New Testament issued harsh words of rebuke and condemnation to those who rejected their message, they also affirmed God’s continued covenant with the nation of Israel, in the same way the Hebrew Scriptures did.

In part three, we will thoroughly examine some specific passages of rebuke in the New Testament, in their Jewish context, which some Gentile Christians throughout church history have weaponized against Jewish people.

by Jennifer Miles

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¹ For a more thorough historical examination, read Thomas Fretwell, Why the Jewish People? Understanding Replacement Theology & Antisemitism (UK: Ezra Foundation Press, 2021) 54–55.

² To read more about the Jewishness of Jesus, read our article “Jesus is Jewish.”

³ Michael L. Brown, Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus: General and Historical Objections, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2000), 174.

⁴ Josephus, The Wars of the Jews 5.572, trans. William Whiston

⁵ Josephus, The Wars of the Jews 7.259, trans. William Whiston

⁶ Hershey H. Friedman, “Talmudic Arguments: The Use of Insults, Reprimands, Rebukes and Curses as Part of the Disputation Process,” SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, June 28, 2016), https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2801821.