The beginning of Christian antisemitism

Jesus was born to a Jewish mother from a town in Galilee. He was circumcised on the eighth day. He grew up obedient to the Hebrew Scriptures. He observed the Jewish feasts. He became a Jewish rabbi, with His own talmidim (disciples, that is.) He claimed to be the Messiah – literally, “the anointed one” - who was to come. He lived and died a Jew.

Many Jews believed on Him. They saw the provision of a Messiah as a continuation of the things that God had already done for the Jewish people. As well as believing in Jesus as Messiah, they continued to live as Jews. For some time, they were considered a sect within Judaism.

In AD 66, the Jews revolted against Roman rule. It is said that Jews who believed in Jesus moved to Pella at this time in obedience to Jesus’ instruction in Luke chapter 21 verses 20 to 24. There was war until AD 70, when the Romans conquered Jerusalem. They ravaged Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple.

In AD 132, the Jews again revolted. Jews who believed in Jesus are said to have fought alongside their fellow Jews until Rabbi Akiva, a revered Jewish leader, made the mistake of declaring Simon ben Kosiba, the general leading the fighting, to be the Messiah. They then felt unable to fight under a false messiah: ben Kosiba is said to have ordered “cruel punishments” for them. In AD 135, the Romans put down the revolt. Some 580,000 Jews are said to have died in battle, and countless thousands more through starvation and disease. The Jews blamed not Rabbi Akiva, and not ben Kosiba, but the Jews who believed in Jesus, for the failure of the insurrection.

After the revolt had been put down, the Romans banned Jews by law from Jerusalem, which became a pagan city named Aelia Capitolina, with pagan temples and theatres. The Jerusalem church became of necessity a Gentile church, led by a Gentile bishop.

Outside Israel, many thousands of Gentiles had been converted as Jesus’ disciples had been faithful to His command to preach the gospel to every creature. New Christian centres sprang up in Rome, in Antioch and in Alexandria, with Gentile leaders. The Gentiles saw the defeats of the Jews by the Romans as divine judgment: because the Jewish nation had rejected Christ, they said, God had rejected them.

The early Church Fathers – Justin Martyr, Ignatius, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian of Carthage and Origen – were united in their condemnation of the Jews. God’s covenant with Israel, they said, was no longer valid, and the Gentiles had replaced the Jews. “The true spiritual Israel, and descendants of Judah, Jacob, Isaac and Abraham,” said Justin Martyr (100 – 165), “. . . are we who have been led to God through the crucified Christ.”¹ He also said: “We who have been quarried out from the bowels of Christ are the true Israelitic race.”²

The Emperor Constantine’s conversion in AD 306 led to the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. In AD 321 Constantine substituted Sunday for Saturday as the official day of rest for all Christian believers – Jewish as well as Gentile.³ The Council of Nicea in 325, with Constantine presiding, changed the celebration of the resurrection from Passover to Easter. The council is said to have referred to the Jews as “odious people,” “polluted wretches,” “a most hostile rabble,” and “parricides.”⁴

Ambrose, bishop of Milan (c340 – 397), said “The Jews are the most worthless of all men. They are lecherous, greedy, rapacious. They are perfidious murderers of Christ. They worship the Devil. . . For killing God, there is no expiation possible, no indulgence or pardon. Christians must never cease vengeance, and the Jew must live in servitude forever. God always hated the Jews. It is essential that all Christians hate them.”⁵

Augustine (354 – 430) decided the promises to Israel should be interpreted symbolically and applied to the church, rather than being interpreted literally and applied to Israel. (There is evidence of this in our Bibles to this day. In Isaiah chapter 43 in the Authorised [King James] Version of the Bible, first published in 1611, God is speaking to Israel. “O Jacob. . . O Israel,” He says. The page heading says “God comforteth the church with his promises.”)

Professions of faith were designed for Jews desiring to join the church in which they were required to repudiate every connection with their Jewishness.

In the 11th century Jews, considered “vermin” who should be cut off from the rest of the population, were herded into areas of cities called ghettoes.⁶ Bernard of Clairvaux (1090 – 1153) said the Jews had “a stupidity more than bestial,” were “an evil seed,” and a race who had not God for their father, but were of the devil.⁷

It was in the 11th century the Crusades began, following a call to arms by Pope Urban II. Their stated purpose was to guarantee access to holy sites controlled by the Muslims, but everywhere they went the Crusaders massacred Jews. Thousands of Jews were killed in central Europe. Jews in Jerusalem fled to the Great Synagogue for sanctuary. The Crusaders set the synagogue on fire and sang “Christ, We Adore Thee” as the Jews burned to death.⁸

From the 12th to the 14th centuries were the Inquisitions, with massive attacks against Jews in Spain, France and England. Jews were murdered, synagogues destroyed and Torah scrolls burned. In 1288 was the first mass burning of Jews at the stake in France.⁹

In the 14th century came the Black Plague, which killed approximately a third of the population of Europe. The Jews were blamed. Rumour said they had poisoned wells. More than 60 Jewish communities were burned to the ground and their occupants killed. Jews were tortured and burned to death on bonfires.¹⁰

Christians may be surprised to learn that Martin Luther, a leader of the Protestant Reformation, was an antisemite. He may have hoped that Jews, freed from the bonds of Roman Catholic persecution, would join the reformed church. They did not. Luther called them “miserable, blind and senseless,” “thieves and robbers,” and “a brood of vipers,” whose synagogues were “a den of devils in which sheer selfglory, blasphemy and defaming of God and men are practised most maliciously.” He proposed setting fire to their synagogues and schools, destroying their homes, taking their money from them, and compelling them to manual labour.¹¹

Christian antisemitism paved the way for the Nazi Holocaust, in which six million Jews died. Raul Hilberg, one of the foremost scholars of the Holocaust, saw it as a progression. The Christian missionaries said: You have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed said: You have no right to live among us. Then the Nazis said: You have no right to live.¹²

David Reagan quotes Hitler as saying: “Martin Luther has been the greatest encouragement of my life. . . He saw clearly that the Jews need to be destroyed, and we’re only the beginning to see that we need to carry the work on.” Julius Streicher, who described himself as the “Jew-baiter Number One” of Nazi Germany, said at his trial at Nuremberg after the war: “I did not say anything that Martin Luther did not say.”¹³

There were, of course, many individuals who helped the Jews, often at great danger to themselves, but many of the Jews’ so-called Christian neighbours, alongside whom they had lived all their lives, helped the Nazis round up the Jews and send them to their deaths.

In one of his books,¹⁴ Michael L. Brown quotes one of the few Lithuanian rabbis to survive the Holocaust. Rabbi Ephraim Oshry says that on the evening of June 25, 1941, the Lithuanian fascists began “going from house to house, from apartment to apartment, murdering people by the most horrible deaths – men, women and children – old and young. They hacked off heads, sawed people through like lumber, prolonging the agony of their victims as long as possible.” Finding the rabbi of Slobodka studying Talmud in his home, they bound him to a chair, put his head on his open volume of the Talmud and sawed his head off. Then they killed the rest of his family.

Shortly I shall be writing further about Christian persecution of the Jews. I will be talking about the theology that made it possible, and what needs to be done about it. But first, let’s consider one more point.

¹  Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 135 ANF, 267 
²  Dialogue with Trypho123 ANF, 261
³  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_the_Great_and_Christianity
⁴  Dr David R. Reagan, www.christinprophecy.org/articles/the-evil-of-replacement-theology
 ⁵  ibid 
 ⁶ Ibid
⁷  Michael L. Brown, Our Hands Are Stained With Blood. Shippensburg, Pennsylvania: Destiny Image Publishers 1990, p12
⁸  Michael L Brown, pp92, 93
⁹  Dr David R. Reagan, www.christinprophecy.org/articles/the-evil-of-replacement-theology
¹⁰  ibid
¹¹  www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/Luther_on_Jews.html
¹²  Michael L. Brown, p8
¹³  Dr David R. Reagan, www.christinprophecy.org/articles/the-evil-of-replacement-theology
¹⁴  Michael L. Brown, p90