Is the New Testament Anti-Semitic?
From the blog "Monday with Mounce" at billmounce.com
This is a question that has been turning up in my Substack inbox lately and when this article appeared in my email inbox from another (non-Substack) blog I follow, I thought it worth passing along. It comes from people vastly more qualified to comment than am I, although we reach the same general conclusion: No!1
The post can be found here—it is technical but not terribly so. It is simple, as these kinds of questions go. The page is public as far as I can determine. If the link fails, please let me know and try Monday with Mounce, looking for the article “Is the NT Anti-Semitic?“.2
I will quote here just the final paragraph:
In the current culture, this is something that we must be sensitive toward. The entire Jewish nation did not kill Jesus. The Jewish leaders and some of the Jews did. Punctuation should reflect this.
I agree.
Bill Mounce is one of the translators of the New International Version (NIV) and the English Standard Version (ESV).
With the Gospel of John the question is not as simple. This is noted in Mounce’s blog post with the remark “John does say ‘the Jews,’ and it's an added level of interpretation to determine if it was a subgroup of the Jews“. I have considered that matter as well, and it certainly is an added level, but the conclusion remains that it was a subgroup.
Gotta be honest, things like this exhaust me. Obviously, "the Jews" is not an exhaustive description of every Jew. Are some Jews responsible for Jesus's death? Clearly. Those chanting "Crucify him!" were Jews. But clearly the disciples and followers of Jesus were also mostly Jews and they didn't kill him. And Paul got attacked by many Jews for preaching the gospel in the synagogues, so many Jews took to violence against Paul, but also many Jews believed. So, when I see the Bible saying "the Jews" doing anything, I always think of that as being the elites and the religious leaders. Those are the ones that also killed the Jewish prophets when they brought bad news and confronted the king's sins. But clearly, if you meet a Jew today, he or she is not guilty of the death of Jesus, just as many Jews were not responsible for his death on the day of his crucifixion. But I would also note that on that day, the gentiles, represented by Pilate, found Jesus guilty of nothing and wanted to let him go. So, where does that leave us? In the end, it doesn't matter who actually killed Jesus, because the sin of humanity was what really did it. Jesus didn't have to die if he didn't want to. He is God Almightly, able to create or destroy the universe at his whim. He came in the form of a man to die to save EVERYONE from sin. That's the only reason he was hanging on that cross. So, as I write here, https://simplechristianity.substack.com/p/who-drove-the-nails, we all killed him.
Not sure why I had to enter some code sent to My email to reply... Anyway, irrespective of the group involved, the Ones in control were surely psychopaths. Like today. Money promotes psychopaths to power, so any civilization that uses it will see psychopaths in control, buying things and People to Their agendas.