If you don’t have a strong stomach, go straight to the second paragraph of this story. Nathan Hannover, who survived the 17^th century Ukrainian pogroms, records in The Abyss of Despair how Bogdan Chmielnicki, libera­tor of his nation from the Poles, killed 100,000 Jews. He skinned some alive and fed them to the dogs; he buried others alive; he ripped open the bellies of preg­nant women and inserted live cats, after cutting off the women’s hands so they couldn’t remove them.

For centuries the Jews of Eastern Europe lived in terror of the cry “Christ-killers”, which heralded the arrival of the Christian mob intent on destruction, rape and murder. Usually engineered by the government of the day to distract the Christian majority from their own trou­bles, the pogroms were whipped up from the pulpits. Indeed, the church has an appalling record of persecution of Jewish people over the past millennium.

So it is little wonder that Jews regard the New Testament with deep suspicion. Jewish scholar Daniel Goldhagen, author of the controversial Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, has written a new book, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, in which he calls on the church to admit to its misdeeds and repent.

Goldhagen claimed recently in an interview that,

the Christian Bible is replete with the most damaging and inflammatory anti-Semitism. All you need to do is change the word ‘Jews’ in the Christian Bible to ‘blacks’ and say blacks are the children of the devil, that they no longer hear God because they reject Jesus, that they killed the son of God, and all blacks are forever guilty of doing so, and let’s hand this book to a billion people and say it’s the word of God.

Goldhagen is not the originator of this idea. It has been widely held in the Jewish community for centuries, as has the conviction that if this hatred is not present in the Bible, the Bible has certainly been used to justify it.

So is Goldhagen right? Is the New Testament virulently anti-Semitic? Or is it rather that the church over the centuries is guilty of misinterpreting its scriptures and taking verses out of context?

Goldhagen’s charge would have made little sense to the New Testament’s authors. After all, 25 of its 27 books were written by Jews (the exception is Luke) chiefly to Jews, arguing for what they considered the true Judaism against the orthodoxy of the day, represented by the Pharisees.

They opposed the contemporary Jewish religion, not the Jewish people — a vital distinction. In fact, they hoped to per­suade and con­vert the Jews, and Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, made a point of approaching the Jews first in every town he sought to evan­gelise. For “the Gospel of salvation ... is to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” (Rom. 1:16).

In the first two centuries of the church’s existence the persecution went in the other direction, from Jewish estab­lishment to Christian minority. Even after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70, Jewish communities were far more important in the Roman empire than Christian communities.

It was the stoning of Stephen (Acts 7) that caused the Christian Jews to flee and take the Gospel outside Judea. Before that the infant church had little theology of mission to non-Jews.

This battle for the “true Judaism” pro­vides the context in which the New Testament strictures later used to justify persecuting Jews should be understood. As early as the fourth chapter of Genesis humanity is divided into two streams, the lines of Seth and Cain, those who will serve God and those who rebel.

There are no stronger admonitions of the Jews than those in the Jewish Bible (Old Testament) when the authors per­ceive that the people are deserting God. Moses condemns them as a stiff-necked and rebellious people from their begin­nings as a nation (Ex. 33:3, Deut. 9:7). The prophets call them adulterers, idol­aters, rulers of Sodom, people of Gomorrah, covenant-breakers, and much more.

For example, in the eighth century BC Hosea wrote:

Hear the word of the Lord, O people of Israel, for the Lord has a controversy with the inhabitants of the land. There is no faithfulness or kindness, and no knowledge of God in the land; there is swearing, lying, killing, stealing, and committing adultery; they break all bounds and murder follows murder.Hosea 4:1, 2

The New Testament authors clearly saw themselves as writing in the same tra­dition with the same prophetic authority.

“Anti-Semitism” is a modern term, according to Graham Keith, author of Hated Without a Cause: A History of Anti-Semitism (1997). It was popularised by German journalist Wilhelm Marr in The Victory of Judaism Over the Jews (1879). Marr, an atheist, had no interest in religion but wanted to oppose Jews on social, economic, political and racial grounds.

But the concept, defined as hatred and persecution of Jews as a group — not the hatred of persons who happen to be Jews, but the hatred of persons because they are Jews — has a venerable history.

It is first documented in Exodus, when Pharaoh is frightened of the Hebrews, so persecutes them. Haman, in Esther, is a Hitler prototype who wants to extermi­nate every Jew. His defeat, and the salva­tion of the Jews, is celebrated each year in the Jewish feast of Purim.

This is very different to the sort of opposition found in the New Testament, where the fledgling Christian religion was fighting for its identity and in constant danger of being overwhelmed by ortho­dox Judaism. Early Christians wrote to defend their message to pagans and to Jews, and above all to reassure confused members of their own flock.

The apostle Paul writes his letter to the Galatians on this very subject. He had founded the small church there, but later Jewish-Christian teachers were saying that, besides keeping the faith Paul taught, the gentile believers should also be cir­cumcised and observe Jewish law.

'O foolish Galatians!' Paul pleads. 'Who has bewitched you ... Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law, or by hearing with faith?'Gal. 3:1, 2

This tension between Christian faith and Jewish law is a common Pauline theme. But no one could doubt Paul’s love for his people.

I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen by race.Rom. 9:2, 3

So does the Jews’ blindness about Christ mean they are now God’s ene­mies? Paul addresses that question two chapters later:

I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected the peo­ple whom he foreknew.

One of the texts often used to foment hatred is Matthew 27:25, when Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, is trying to pardon Jesus but the mob refuses. Pilate washes his hands and says “I am innocent of this man’s blood”. Verse 25 says: “And all the people answered ‘His blood be on us and on our children’.” This verse was soon regarded as the self-condemnation of the Jewish people for all time.

But, as Keith points out, this interpre­tation is hard to sustain. Without getting too technical, there is no verb in the Greek text. The word “be” is put in for sense in English, which makes it sound like a wish or even a prayer.

In the wider context, Matthew’s mes­sage — like the rest of the New Testament — is clear that it is Christians who, by their sins, are responsible for Christ’s death. He died to save us.

The charge against the Gospel of John, is more serious. John often speaks of “the Jews”, and sets them in opposition to true believers. But John speaks of “the Jews” in several contexts, sometimes in a geographical sense, sometimes of the Jewish leaders only, and sometimes favourably, as when Jesus is identified as a Jew, or when he says “salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:9, 22).

The letters of John show the same dis­tinction between those “of God” and “of the world” but in a new context. Some have left the Christian community for a new teaching, showing their allegiance is to the world. As Keith observes, it doesn’t matter whether they were originally Jews or Gentiles, it is their attitude to Christ that is vital.

The passage in John that has under­standably caused most concern comes in John 8 where Jesus is addressing some Jews in Jerusalem who reject him, and who pride themselves on being Abraham’s children.

Jesus says:

If you were Abraham’s children you would do what Abraham did, but now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth ... You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.John 8:44

Reading that today, this side of cen­turies of persecution and the Holocaust, one can see why it is considered a difficult verse. But it is surely not Jesus’ intention here to condemn all Jews, as some have understood it, for it is clear that these Jews are not beyond hope — there is a way of escape from Satan’s bondage, the same that is open to all.

The language is strong, but no stronger than the Old Testament prophets. It should be seen as hyperbole, a rhetorical device common at the time. For example, in showing how committed his disciples have to be, Jesus says that unless they hate their father and mother, wife, children, even their own lives (Luke 14:25) they cannot follow him. Yet he loves and upholds the law, including the command­ment to honour one’s parents, and repeat­edly teaches that love is the great commandment. Overemphasis to make a point is common in the Bible and con­temporary Semitic culture.

The event that changed Jewish-Christian relations was the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine in the fourth century. Christianity became the state religion — a mixed blessing. And from now on it would have power over the Jewish community.

For many centuries relations were rela­tively tranquil. Keith identifies the bureaucratic revolution at the end of the Middle Ages as the most important ele­ment in developing systematic anti-Semitism. The clerical class, envying the skill and influence of Jews at court, built a stereotype of the Jew as “dirty, downtrod­den, sinister but contemptible”. Drawings showed Jews with long hooked noses, and the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) segre­gated them by ordering them to wear spe­cial clothing.

The crusades, though theoretically against Muslims rather than Jews, made the latter a legitimate target as “enemies of God”. Some on the first crusade in 1095 even delayed leaving for the Middle East so they could murder Jews in Europe.

Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg says that since the fourth century,

 there have been three anti-Jewish policies: con­version, expulsion and annihilation. The second appeared as an alternative to the first, and the third as an alternative to the second ... The missionaries of Christianity had said in effect: You have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: You have no right to live among us. The German Nazis at last decreed: You have no right to live.

But after the Holocaust, the horrified world took a fresh look at anti-Semitism. The thawing between Christianity and Judaism was made explicit at the second Vatican Council in the 1960s, which formally repudiated the idea that the Jews were responsible for the death of Christ.

Protestants, though their hands are not nearly so blood-stained as the Catholic and Orthodox (and it could be argued that this is partly an accident of geogra­phy), cannot be complacent about their record. When it became evident to Luther that the Jews would not convert, his pen was dipped in vitriol. He advocated burn­ing their synagogues, their Torahs, even their houses.

But the picture would not be balanced without the heroic and sacrificial love of many Christians through the centuries and especially in World War II: sheltering Jews from the mobs and the Nazis. Many helped work for Jewish religious freedom and political emancipation and, finally, a homeland.