Ignorance, Arrogance, and the Specter of Christian Antisemitism

Over the last week, I have watched with dismay and heartbreak as a hideous and virulent form of hatred towards Jewish people has reared its head on social media and in real life.

This recent wave of antisemitism did not occur in a vacuum. There is a baseline level (unacceptable but consistent) of antisemitic rhetoric being vomited into the public square from the usual suspects all the time, but we can reasonably trace the recent flare to the comments of a particular influential American celebrity. This man had had a very publicized conversion to Christianity a couple of years ago, which made the content of his tweets and interviews all the more disturbing to me. How could someone who claimed he accepted the Bible (a book written almost entirely by Jewish authors) as divinely inspired have such twisted views on who Jewish people are? How had the dubious doctrines of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement so displaced the simple gospel? I hoped he had embraced a path that would nourish and grow his soul, but the evidence seemed to indicate the opposite.

Christian Scripture is pretty straightforward in how Gentile Christians are meant to interact with Jewish people. In Romans 11, Paul (a Jewish Pharisee who went on to write at least a third of the New Testament) warns particularly about two significant pitfalls in Gentile approaches toward Jews who do not embrace Jesus as Messiah: arrogance (Romans 11:17-18) and ignorance (Romans 11:25). Sadly, I’m not exaggerating when I state that despite the clear warnings of Paul, arrogance and ignorance marks the majority of Gentile Christians’ attitude towards the Jewish people throughout the two millennia of church history up until the present day.

I am a Gentile Christian who has lived in the Middle East for the last six years, and I have lived in the state of Israel for four of those years. I frequently engage in interfaith dialogue with Jewish friends and neighbors, and every time a Jewish friend enters into a conversation with me without utter offense towards the way that the church historically (and on occasion, currently) has treated their people, it seems like a miracle of grace and graciousness. Given this terrible history, how Gentile Christians can approach dialogue with Jewish people any other way than extreme humility is beyond me.¹See the timeline below. But often, I find to my despair and heartbreak, the arrogance and ignorance of those who claim to accept the writings of Paul as divinely inspired Scripture defies the imagination.

Arrogance: Signs of the Times

One such case of surpassing even my worst expectations was, in response to this celebrity’s comments, a white supremacist group that hung banners on an overpass of the 405 in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, white supremacists seizing an opportunity to jump on an antisemitic bandwagon was hardly surprising, but what deeply pained me was that two verses of Christian Scripture, Revelation 3:9 and John 8:44, featured prominently on their signs. It’s one thing to draw your antisemitic hate from the antichrist system of white supremacy; it is another to justify your anti-Jewish worldview through the words of Scripture written by a Jewish man, John. Those Scripture references, however, have a long and bloody history of flawed interpretation with violent results, and their citation in this context has ample precedents.

Let’s look at each verse in turn.

Revelation 3:9 (2:9)

Behold, I will make those of the synagogue of Satan who say that they are Jews and are not, but lie—behold, I will make them come and bow down before your feet, and they will learn that I have loved you.

The key phrase in this above verse is “synagogue of Satan,” an epithet that has haunted Christian antisemitism for centuries. But what is the context of this verse? Who are these fake Jews?²Oh, the irony of those maliciously invoking this verse while claiming they are Jews when they are not!

This verse, and an earlier verse (2:9) that use the phrase “synagogue of Satan,” occur at the beginning of the book of Revelation when the apostle John is taking down dictation for letters from Jesus to seven different congregations in Asia Minor, the western portion of modern-day Turkey.

A quick note: most, if not all, English versions of Revelation use “church” to translate the Greek “ekklesia,” but this is a bit of anachronism. Ekklesia is a generic term for a gathering or assembly and was used to describe religious and secular groups of people in the Scriptures. (See Acts 7:38, 19:32) The church, defined as a primarily Gentile entity, was not yet in existence.

A similar consideration can be made with the Greek word “synagoge” found in the New Testament. While most uses of synagoge are about Jewish gatherings, it can also mean an assembly of those believing in Jesus as Messiah, like in James 2:2. Indeed, the distinction between a Jewish and Christian assembly would not have made much sense at this time.

Bearing this terminology in mind, the more neutral and less culturally/historically loaded “assembly” or “congregation” for ekklesia and synagoge might be more fruitfully employed in this context.

So what does Jesus mean when writing to the congregations in Smyrna and Philadelphia, telling them that the slander of those falsely claiming to be Jews will be brought to justice?

The historic Christian view is that this verse condemns Jewish people who did not embrace Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah of Israel. In rejecting Jesus, they lost their claim to true “Jewishness” but tried to infiltrate these fledgling Messianic communities through deceit. When viewed through this supersessionist lens, the “synagogue of Satan” accusation can (and has) become a demonically empowered justification for hatred towards the “rejected” Jewish race who still do not embrace Jesus as Messiah.

At this point, we must grapple with a hermeneutical fallacy that has proved utterly disastrous to Christian theology and has the blood of millions of Jews on its hands: the attempt to universalize highly specific situations in Scripture. Say the above interpretation of Revelation 3:9 was essentially correct (it isn’t, but bear with me). These are letters to specific congregations in Asia Minor at the end of the first century. Through mental and interpretative gymnastics, we find that the fake Jews were an insidious group in the Jewish diaspora teaching blasphemous doctrine among this new Jewish sect that claimed the Messiah of Israel had come. Why in the world would you think that this means all Jewish people everywhere for all time belong to the synagogue of Satan? Frankly, that’s absurd.

We see the same flawed interpretive logic applied to many passages in the Gospels and Apostolic writings that have been catastrophic for the Jewish community. For instance, “Crucify him!” is said by one specific group³The chief priests and rulers of the people in Jerusalem over the Passover holiday sometime around 33AD. And yet, the accusation of “Christ-killer” has rung out against Jewish people across the globe for centuries, up until this very day.⁴Never mind that it was ultimately an execution by the Romans—minor detail.

Revelation, written by a Jewish man under the instruction of his Jewish Messiah to a primarily Jewish audience, cannot fruitfully be understood with a Christian vs. Jewish framework. It must be read as a Jewish text, and condemnations, like the prophets’ condemnations to Israel, are inter-Jewish dialogue. How would a Jewish audience understand the Jewish imposters that John warned them about?

Ironically, they would have an almost opposite understanding of the identity of the fake Jews from the traditional Christian understanding.

Throughout the Jewish diaspora in the first century, there is abundant evidence that some Gentiles attended Jewish synagogues, abstained from work on the Sabbath, and cherry-picked other Jewish customs to integrate into their daily life. The book of Acts refers to these Gentiles as “God-Fearers.”⁵See Cohen, Shaye J.D. “‘Those Who Say They Are Jews and Are Not’: How Do You Know a Jew in Antiquity When You See One?” In Diasporas in Antiquity, edited by Shaye J. D. Cohen and Ernest S. Frerichs, 1–46. Brown Judaic Studies, 2020. In general, God-Fearers were incorporated into synagogue life, but there was a sense that they were trying to have their cake and eat it too. They could still offer incense to civil gods and be morally flexible where needed since they were not wholly committed to Judaism through complete and public conversion and were not members of the Jewish people. They were only “Jewish” when it was convenient.

The philosopher Epictetus, a contemporary of John, explains it this way: “For example, whenever we see a man facing two ways at once, we are in the habit of saying, ‘He is not a Jew, he is only acting the part.’ But when he adopts the attitude of mind of the man who has been baptized and has made his choice, then he both is a Jew in fact and is also called one. So we also are counterfeit “Baptists,” ostensibly Jews, but in reality something else.”⁶Arrian, “Dissertations of Epictetus” 2.19-21.

The “fake Jews” of Revelation 2:9 and 3:9 are like the double-minded Gentile God-Fearers who tried to straddle serving two masters: the God of Israel and the god of this world. They presented themselves as Jews to other Jews through outward performance. Still, inwardly they didn’t want to make the sacrifice required of complete identification with Jews and submission to Jewish law. This interpretation harmonizes perfectly with the rest of the letters in Revelation that condemn the lukewarmness and moral compromise that plague the other congregations in Asia Minor.

That is not to say that John means all Gentiles should convert to Judaism to relate to the Jewish Messiah. The Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 had already settled this question, and Gentile believers in Jesus’ messiahship were enjoined not to convert to Judaism through circumcision. Gentiles should remain Gentiles and follow the laws required of resident aliens in the land of Israel: abstaining from food sacrificed to idols, from eating blood, from eating meat from a strangled animal, and from sexual immorality. John, as a fully observant Jew, follows the strict interpretation of halakhah and calls out the breaches of dietary law and sexual purity in the congregations to whom he is writing.⁷See Revelation 2:14, 20-22

To use Revelation 2:9 and 3:9 as an accusation against the Jewish people either in the first century or today is to profoundly misunderstand the text as to have an opposite understanding of its meaning as the original audience would have understood it. The “Jews who are not Jews” are compromised and uncommitted people, who performatively align with the community of faith, but are unwilling to risk themselves or their livelihood for the God of Israel. Even if readers were disposed to read Revelation 3:9 with a supersessionist view that the Gentile church replaced the people of Israel as “true Jews,” to relate the “synagogue of Satan” to any Jewish person today is to stretch the text beyond the breaking point. Unfortunately, this violence to this Jewish text has often preceded violence towards Jewish persons.

John 8:44

The other Bible reference that made it onto those horrific signs was John 8:44. Yes, the same John who took down dictation from Jesus in Revelation is also the author of the Gospel where we find this verse.

Many of the same interpretive principles apply: this passage describes an inter-Jewish debate. We cannot take John’s reference to this specific group of Jewish listeners to this particular teaching of Jesus to apply to all the Jewish people for all time. We must be mindful of how the original audience would have received this text.⁸I concede that the Gospel of John confusingly refers to the hostile crowd as “the Jews,” throughout the book. Sometimes, however, the Jewish group is positive in John’s writings, such as in verse 30 of this passage, when many Jewish listeners believe what Jesus is saying. The usage is not universally positive or negative, which is what you would expect when describing real groups of people who react differently to situations, as opposed to straw men or stereotypes. Almost every interaction in this book is between Jewish people, so to contrast the “Jews” referred to in John with some other ethnic classification is a non-starter. There is a community of New Testament scholars who argue a better translation of John’s Ἰουδαῖος is “Judean,” living in the region around Jerusalem, rather than Jew. This is a more natural contrast in light of Jesus and his disciples being mainly Galilean.

We enter the scene with Jesus testifying to his identity as the Son of Man in the Temple on the Feast of Tabernacles and the crowd raising various objections to this claim. After some back and forth and increasing contentiousness, Jesus tells the group that if they were true descendants of Abraham, then they would be able to receive Jesus and his message as sent from God the Father. In being unable to accept the truth of what Jesus is saying, this crowd shows that they are not inheritors of the promises of father Abraham nor of God the Father. Rather,

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 does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

John 8:44

Whew! Quite the intense statement from Jesus. What can he mean?

This particular verse is one of the Gospel of John’s most challenging and ambiguous texts. Scholars have debated down the centuries on the exact way to render the Greek to convey the confusing father-son dynamic that is playing out. There are so many theories it isn’t a worthwhile rabbit trail to pursue here, but suffice it to say that this particular English translation presents interpretive conclusions that are not incontrovertible.⁹If you want to go down that rabbit trail, see Wróbel’s Who Are the Father and His Children in Jn 8:44?)

It is also worth acknowledging again that this vehement interaction has nothing to do with ethnicity; it has to do with belief. Everyone at this Temple talk was ethnically Jewish, including Jesus. Some of these Jewish listeners accepted Jesus’ words; some did not. The sub-group who rejected the message of Jesus is being addressed.

In this same vein, Gentiles are also described in the New Testament as needing to turn from “the power of Satan to the power of God.”¹⁰See Acts 26:18 If this passage is anti-Jewish in tone (I don’t think that it is, but for the sake of argument) and can be used in that context, then we can bring up many other passages that are anti-Gentile, in that they describe the Gentile condition as being “under control of the evil one.”¹¹See 1 John 3:8, 5:19

However, the idea of this being a passage about ethnicity didn’t arrive out of thin air. As soon as you bring Abraham into it, you are talking flesh and blood, tribes of Israel, a nation, and a covenantal people. Insidious supersessionist assumptions creep into the text, and suddenly we can depart from Jesus’ simple concluding statement a few sentences down in verse 47, “Whoever is of God hears the words of God. The reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God,” to the idea that the Jewish crowd is no longer “spiritually” Jewish (that is, true descendants of Abraham) because they rejected Jesus as Messiah.

This is the same interpretive misstep as with our first passage. Rather than understanding the unbelieving Jews divested of their inheritance, reading this passage in light of another text later penned by Paul might be more fruitful. In Romans 9:7, when trying to unpack the mystery of Jewish unbelief in light of Jewish election, Paul explains, “…and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but ‘Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.’” A child of promise was chosen, not by his own merit but by grace, to receive the inheritance of covenantal promises. Abraham had other children besides Isaac (Ishmael), but that child was not an inheritor of the covenant. Not all of Abraham’s children were Abraham’s children, and not all of Israel was Israel. This is not an isolated concept but is repeated over and over throughout Israel’s history. God had preserved for himself a remnant faithful to him during the time of Elijah.¹² See 1 Kings 19:18. Isaiah predicted, “Though the number of the sons of Israel be as the sand of the sea, only a remnant of them will be saved, for the Lord will carry out his sentence upon the earth fully and without delay.” ¹³See Isaiah 10:22-23.

So we see, the conversation above is not about rejection but the identity of the faithful remnant. Israel within Israel. Gentiles are simply not a part of the equation in this context.

It is not surprising, though, that later Gentile readers of the Bible would try and read themselves into the text and take the harsh condemnations of the Hebrew prophets towards Israel and the sharp rebukes of Jesus towards different Jewish sects and sub-groups out of their inter-Jewish context, and abusively misapply these verses.

Indeed, a millennium later, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, following the custom of Christian commentators, would apply the “father is the Devil” statement to all Jews for all time. A millennium later, Nazi leader Julius Streicher adopted the same dialectical device when he recommended ‘the extermination of that people whose father is the Devil.”

Though the text itself is not antisemitic, there are thousands of years where invocations of this verse have meant death for Jewish people. This painful fact cannot be ignored.

Ignorance: The Sins of Our Fathers

When I titled this article and decided to use the phrase “Christian antisemitism,” I anticipated that I would receive objections that “real Christians would never be antisemitic.” I was tempted to put the word “Christian” in scare quotes to show that I agree. To make the claims of Christianity is to, by definition, reject the hatred that fuels antisemitism.

However, when I was a teen, it became fashionable in certain segments of Christianity to not claim the title of Christian at all but instead identify as a “Jesus-follower.” As best I understand it, the reasoning for this was to shed the burden and stigma of the Church’s sometimes shameful history that directly contradicted its stated beliefs and values.

This impulse, while understandable, never made sense to me. A shameful history remains whether you claim it or not. Best to look the sins of our fathers squarely in the eye, confess, repent, and repair where we can, and pray that we will not fall in that same way. We don’t have the luxury of disavowing the past and risk repeating it by ignoring it.

That is why I decided against putting “Christian” in scare quotes in the title. We cannot look away and say that it is someone else’s problem. Neither can we view the antisemitic abuse of Scripture, both historically and currently, as harmless.

This timeline of Christian antisemitism is appalling and depressing. It often has a crushing effect on Jewish friends and a profoundly shaking impact on Christian friends, and I certainly have no wish to inflame hostilities. But when I saw people dismissing highway signs and tweets this week as ultimately harmless, I thought the time has come to write out the awful record, even if it is abridged.¹⁴The following is an abbreviated list mainly drawn from Joel Richardson’s “When a Jew Rules the World.”

What can be said at the end of such a list? The only possible response is mourning.

As Catholic priest, teacher, and author Hans Küng remarked, “Nazi anti-Judaism was the work of godless, anti-Christian criminals. But it would not have been possible without the almost two thousand years’ pre-history of ‘Christian’ anti-Judaism.” ¹⁵Hans Küng. On Being a Christian. Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1976.

”I wish I could say that the obvious depravity of the Holocaust ended the effects of Christian antisemitism, but we can see that it continues to bear fruit up to the present day. In 2018, the deadliest mass murder of Jewish people in United States history occurred at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 and injuring 2. The attacker, Robert Bowers, was a confirmed antisemite who described the Jewish people as “the children of Satan,” “an infestation,” “filthy,” and “evil,” echoing accusations from many a church father listed above.

The hate crime statistics gathered from the FBI show that the rate of hate crimes against the Jewish people far outstrips any other religious community. In 2019, 1032 out of a total of 1715 total victims of religiously motivated hate crimes were Jewish. They account for 60% of victims of hate crimes but are 2% of the US population.¹⁶See FBI 2019 Hate Crime Statistics. Can I say with certainty that each attack is influenced by Christian antisemitism? No, the FBI doesn’t track the ideology of the perpetrators. But certainly some of those attacks are, and that is too many.

Gentile Christians cannot be arrogant or ignorant when interacting with Jewish people. We cannot treat the threats towards Jewish friends and neighbors with indifference. We cannot allow our Scriptures to be wrongfully and abusively wielded against Jews, like on those signs over the 405, without fierce objection. We cannot pretend that the bloodbath of the last two millennia never happened and that it wasn’t instigated by some of the church’s most prominent leaders and thinkers.

We must carefully examine our own hearts and assumptions and prayerfully weed out the vestiges of the pervasive and subtle antisemitic interpretations in our Bible reading and theology.

The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.

Footnotes

• 1
  See the timeline below.
• 2
  Oh, the irony of those maliciously invoking this verse while claiming they are Jews when they are not!
• 3
  The chief priests and rulers of the people
• 4
  Never mind that it was ultimately an execution by the Romans—minor detail.
• 5
  See Cohen, Shaye J.D. “‘Those Who Say They Are Jews and Are Not’: How Do You Know a Jew in Antiquity When You See One?” In Diasporas in Antiquity, edited by Shaye J. D. Cohen and Ernest S. Frerichs, 1–46. Brown Judaic Studies, 2020.
• 6
  Arrian, “Dissertations of Epictetus” 2.19-21.
• 7
  See Revelation 2:14, 20-22
• 8
  I concede that the Gospel of John confusingly refers to the hostile crowd as “the Jews,” throughout the book. Sometimes, however, the Jewish group is positive in John’s writings, such as in verse 30 of this passage, when many Jewish listeners believe what Jesus is saying. The usage is not universally positive or negative, which is what you would expect when describing real groups of people who react differently to situations, as opposed to straw men or stereotypes. Almost every interaction in this book is between Jewish people, so to contrast the “Jews” referred to in John with some other ethnic classification is a non-starter. There is a community of New Testament scholars who argue a better translation of John’s Ἰουδαῖος is “Judean,” living in the region around Jerusalem, rather than Jew. This is a more natural contrast in light of Jesus and his disciples being mainly Galilean.
• 9
  If you want to go down that rabbit trail, see Wróbel’s Who Are the Father and His Children in Jn 8:44?)
• 10
  See Acts 26:18
• 11
  See 1 John 3:8, 5:19
• 12
  See 1 Kings 19:18.
• 13
  See Isaiah 10:22-23.
• 14
  The following is an abbreviated list mainly drawn from Joel Richardson’s “When a Jew Rules the World.”
• 15
  Hans Küng. On Being a Christian. Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1976.
• 16
  See FBI 2019 Hate Crime Statistics.