About a week ago Christians celebrated Easter. It is a wonderful holy day on which we celebrate the miracle of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. For me, however, this Easter was marred by bigotry.
I have been aware of at least two incidents in past weeks in which a pastor on or near campus blamed “the Jews” for Jesus’s death. To witness such tropes among Christians at Drake was terribly dismaying. In this letter I seek to explain that pointing the finger at “the Jews,” as such, for the crucifixion of Christ is sloppy at best and malicious at worst, and that doing so is a failure to understand the truth of the Easter story.
The Gospels in the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) provide the only detailed accounts of Christ’s death and resurrection. Christians accept the truth of these accounts on faith, and for the discussion that follows, I will do so. My purpose is to argue that, within a Christian framework, blaming the Jews is wrong, so I will necessarily proceed on the basis that the Gospels are true. I do not contend that non-Christians must accept that the Gospels are historically accurate.
The story, very briefly, is thus: Jesus Christ was the Son of God incarnate as a man in first-century Judea. He was, in commentator Kevin Williamson’s words, a “Jewish man from a Jewish family who lived, until the advent of an extraordinary career, an ordinary Jewish life in a Jewish land.” He had a ministry, preaching to the people, healing the sick, and explaining that He was the Son of God and the Messiah prophesied in Hebrew scripture. Jesus’s teachings were subversive of the authorities in Judea, who arrested him, brought him to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, and demanded his crucifixion. Pilate assented and Christ was crucified. On the third day, as all Christians know, He rose from the dead.
You may notice I wrote that “the authorities” in Judea demanded His crucifixion. Who were the authorities? According to Mark, they were “the chief priests, with the elders, the teachers of the law and the whole Sanhedrin [a governing assembly].” Ancient Judea was theocratic; Judaism there was both a faith and a political order. The authorities were Jewish, as was Jesus Himself. What’s important in the story is that they were figures of political authority, not that they were Jewish.
This is an essential distinction. To illustrate it, consider a modern example. Suppose that an Israeli strike kills a civilian. While the Israeli officer who orders the strike may be Jewish, he is not acting as a Jewish person, but as an officer. To describe this event, saying “Commander X killed a civilian” or “an Israeli strike killed a civilian” would be appropriate. To say “the Jews killed a civilian” would be antisemitic, and obviously so, because one is collapsing the distinction between specific individuals who are Jewish and Jews as a collective. The collapsing of the individual-collective distinction by interpreters of the Gospels, who blame “the Jews” collectively for the actions of specific Jewish officials in first-century Judea, has been responsible for two millennia of Christian antisemitism.
The second reason it is wrong to blame the Jews — or to blame anyone — for the crucifixion of Christ is that it fails to heed one of the main lessons of Christianity. To blame one group of people is to imply that others are innocent. But Christians know that this is a mirage. The truth is that we are all guilty. Christ suffered and died on the cross to expunge humanity’s sins, making possible our salvation. No one alive is free of sin, which means that each of us carries a share of the responsibility.
The right reaction to Christ’s death is to rejoice in His Resurrection, to have gratitude for the forgiveness He offers us, and to do our best (which will never be perfect) to follow His example. It is not to look for scapegoats.
Signed,
Mitch Davis
