Falsely Accused

“On the day of Pentecost, Peter said to the Jewish people, ‘Let the whole house of Israel know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”  This is how the first reading from Acts begins (2:36-41).   As I noted yesterday, the Jews as a people – the “whole house” of Israel – are blamed for Jesus’ crucifixion, and that has led to anti-Semitism throughout the centuries.    

Consider the seldom referred to 1965 Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate) proclaimed by Pope Paul VI who said: “True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.  Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.  All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ.”

Pope Benedict reinvigorated that 1965 declaration in his book “Jesus of Nazareth-Part II” in which he explained that biblically and theologically there is no basis in Scripture for the argument that the Jewish people as a whole were responsible for Jesus' death.   He concluded that only a few Temple leaders and a small group of supporters were primarily responsible for Christ's crucifixion.   Just by having to make this clarification, Pope Benedict acknowledged Catholics have incorrectly and tragically believed for centuries that Jews were responsible.

In John Dominic Crossman’s 1995 book “Who Killed Jesus?  Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus” he asks an important question that has an unsettling answer for those willing to answer truthfully: “…by the fourth century, Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire, and with the dawn of Christian Europe, anti-Judaism moved from theological debate to lethal possibility.  Think, now, of those passion-resurrection stories as heard in a predominantly Christian world.  Did those stories of ours send certain people out to kill?”

They did.

Deacon David Pierce