The resurrection of Christian antisemitism

It was a Sunday morning. As winter approached, the last vestiges of green were quickly turning brown. The newly appointed Christian preacher rose early, angered by unbelievers who, in God’s name, celebrated redemption and life in the Fall. In about six months, Easter would arrive, so too Passover. Even so, now was time the preacher believed to distinguish between the two, to assert the superiority of the one over the other; indeed, to reveal the implacable and nefarious nature of all Jews and their holy days, to entirely separate from these “killers of the Christ.”

Although not the first to make his arguments, the sermon series the preacher would initiate that morning institutionalized Christian antisemitism, an ideological doctrine justifying violence, theft, even genocide against fellow members of Jesus’ ethnic family; and, remarkably, in his name. Like the ocean tide, it is a doctrine that has waxed and waned over the centuries. For the last 70 years or so it has been in retreat, buried in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Today, in 2020, it is resurging, appearing in every expression of Christianity.

Evangelical newscaster Rick Wiles calls the impeachment of President Donald Trump a “Jew Coup,” says Jews are under divine judgment because they “oppose” Jesus, and asserts that the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic is a “plague” sent by God to the Jews, spreading from their synagogues to the entire world. His daily program is called TruNews.

Steven Ben-Nun (Denoon), founder of Israel News Live, claims to be a Jewish believer in Jesus. His daily YouTube posts regularly include rants against the Jewish state and Christians who stand with it. According to Ben-Nun, Israel has made a pact with “the beast” (the Antichrist) in order to build a third temple where, contrary to his interpretation of the New Testament, blood sacrifices will be reinstituted. Claiming fluency in Hebrew, he uses the Bible to assert that Israel today seeks to establish a theocratic state in which Christians will be beheaded for their belief in Jesus.

Both Ben-Nun and Wiles regularly advocate global conspiracy theories as hidden hands behind the coronavirus pandemic and the May 2020 outbreaks of violence across the United States. The ultimate hidden hand, they darkly imply, is the Jews.

Older expressions of Christianity, like Roman Catholicism and various Eastern Orthodox denominations, have kept a lid on their own essentially antisemitic convictions for several decades, even at times renouncing it. Instead of cooling the magma, however, those convictions have simmered just beneath the surface threatening to blow again one day.

That day might be soon. Painting in the classic style and known for portrayal of Christian-themes, Italian artist Giovanni Gesparao unveiled his latest work just in time for Passover, 2020. Naming it, “The Martyrdom of Saint Simon of Trent, For Jewish Ritual Murder,” it is based on a blood libel from the Middle Ages. Gleeful Jews are depicted in the slow bloodletting and murder of a Christian child, collecting its blood as an ingredient for the Passover meal.

These eruptions have not yet gone mainstream, but they are threatening to do so. In every venue of pro-Israel teaching, especially those that take the Bible seriously, the unholy resurrection of Christian antisemitism begs to be faced, renounced and fought. Not later, now. It is a counterattack that must begin with doctrines taught by the preacher. His name was John.

Endowed with a remarkable gift of well-developed oratory skill, some years earlier John had also made it his task to memorize the entire Bible; all of it: all of Torah, all of Tanach; and all the Christian portions too, especially the four gospels and the letters of the Jewish scholar, Shaul, who later took the Roman name of Paulus – better known today as Paul.

It is likely that John keenly identified with Paul. After all, John’s congregation was in Antioch, the same place where, hundreds of years before, Paul had visited on several occasions. Antioch was also where followers of “The Way” were first labeled “Christianios,” or “little Christs.” It was a somewhat mocking tease of zealous followers of the so-called “Nazarene,” a Jewish rabbi from the inauspicious region of the Galilee who had taken the known world by storm. Centuries later, on this Sunday morning in early Spring, he was regarded by many, perhaps most, especially in the West, as the Messiah. Eschewing the Hebrew designation, Moshiach (as they also did his Hebrew name), most used the Greek variant, Christos, chosen by Jewish translators of Torah, the Septuagint. More than just the Messiah, however, the Nazarine was lauded in the writings of Paul as God’s unique son “in whom the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form.”

John’s ministry in Antioch was had only just begun. In those early days, he made it his job to study the foibles and flaws of his congregation. The one that troubled him most was its reverent interaction with a meaningful segment of Antioch’s population that emphatically rejected the Galilean rabbi as Messiah let alone a man indivisible from God. Christian women were going to them for medical advice and a significant number of men and women were joining them on their holy days, celebrating with them.

As John saw it, this was anything but a spiritually healthy expression of tolerance and love; it was an existential threat to Christian faith.

The problem, John stewed, was the Jews. More than three centuries had passed since, several hundred miles south of Antioch, Jesus had ministered exclusively to fellow members of his Jewish family. Accordingly, and disconcertingly to the preacher’s sensibilities, all of the rabbi’s earliest followers were Jewish. Most of them, however, were diaspora Jews who lived outside the boundaries of Judea. Followers of The Way inside Judea, while Torah-observant, generally were not members of the priestly class. None, or virtually none, were members of the Sanhedrin, the governing parliament of Judaism based in Jerusalem. 

In the early years of what was a minority Jewish sect, there was hope that Jewish leaders would change their minds. Just the opposite happened. Although a significant minority of Jews embraced the Nazarene as the Messiah, his Jewish founders also embraced non-Jews into the fold. As the latter gained ascendancy and eventually control, there was emphatic rejection from Jerusalem that carried the day among the majority of Jews.

In John’s day, all these things had happened more than 300 years ago. Combined with his interpretation of Torah and Tanakh, this was more than enough time, he concluded, to irrefutably prove God’s judgment and rejection of all Jews.

Armed with this conviction, John the Golden-Throat (a.k.a. Chrysostom), ascended the pulpit in 347 CE where he began the first of eight sermons in a series titled, Adversus Judaeos; in English, Against The Jews. The homilies he preached 1,633 years ago must not be ignored. It is critically important for both Jews and Christians to identify and refute the charges that he made using the Bible and in Jesus’ name.

Why? Because the arguments he made, his exegesis of biblical passages and the judgments he proclaimed, would become the cornerstone of Christian antisemitism. In time and for centuries to come, they were expanded, expounded and expropriated to justify libels, pogroms, evictions, torture, murder and wholesale slaughter of Jews. It also became the cultural soil in which the plagiarized The Protocols of the Elders of Zion grew like a weed and gave birth to the Shoah, the Holocaust, Hitler’s so-called “final solution.”

Another reason Chrysostum’s charges must be addressed and refuted is that once again, in 2020, they compose a latent malady finding renewed expression in every branch of Christianity, including those that stand with the Jewish State of Israel. Today Chrysostum’s teaching is fueling the narratives of end-of-time Jewish cabal conspiracy theories, Christian Palestinianism, and an Inquisition-reminiscent charge that Christian Zionists are heretics.

The modern State of Israel is keenly aware of the global resurgence of antisemitism. Its low-profile Ministry of Strategic Affairs works with individuals and organizations to expose the disturbing array of almost-daily expressions of it. Examples include the diatribes of Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, Islamist communities’ demonization of Israel in countries around the world, symbols and vandalism by Western fascist groups, the emergence of anti-Israel policies in Western governments, relentless rants by Palestinian leaders, and of course the firehose of rabid anti-Israel rhetoric – with attending threats – from the imams of Tehran.

Evidence of efforts by the Ministry of Strategic Affairs can be found in The Jerusalem Post’s Antisemitism section of daily news; in several large non-profits organization, like the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (the JCPA) and its recent publication, Israelophobia and The West: The Hijacking of Civil Discourse on Israel and How to Rescue It; in several publications by the ministry, including The Virus of Hate: Delegitimization and Antisemitism Converge Around the Coronavirus.

One thing is missing from these efforts. The category of Christian antisemitism is nowhere to be found. Why it is absent can only be guessed. Regardless, the fact of the matter is, Christian antisemitism is the “fertile” soil in which all expressions of Jewish hatred has grown, and is growing, around the world.

However, it is not enough to simply identify it. Because Christian antisemitism has been fed by multiple arguments using the Bible, each of those arguments must be addressed and refuted, a task beyond the scope of this essay. Still, a few of Chrysostom’s can be noted along with fundamental flaws in his exposition and conclusions. 

Chrysostom began his diatribe against all Jews by attacking Christians who celebrated Jewish holy days honoring the same God as Christianity, agreeing to disagree about Jesus. “We must first root this ailment out,” he said, “and then take thought of matters outside. We must first cure our own.” They are sick, he said, “with the Judaizing disease...deserving stronger condemnation than any Jew.”

The antidote was to demonize all Jews, using the Bible and Jesus to do so. They are “children who became dogs,” he railed. “Untamed beasts” who reject God’s rule, they are “unfit for work,” but “are fit for killing, ...making themselves fit for slaughter.”

Their synagogue, he added, “is not only a brothel and a theater, it also is a den of robbers and a lodging for wild beasts, ...a dwelling of demons!” Indeed, “the Jews themselves are demons... forsaken by God.”

As Christians, he said, “we must both hate them and their synagogue. Shall I tell you of their plundering, their covetousness, their abandonment of the poor, their thefts, their cheating in trade? The whole day long will not be enough to give you an account of these things.”

“They slew the Son of your God!” Indeed, “they slew God!”

Chrysostom also claimed that, according to Torah and Tanach, Jews were forbidden to practice virtually all of the laws God had given to them outside of Jerusalem. This meant, he said, that any practice of Judaism, including the reading of Torah, was contrary to God’s command. 

And the argument that clinched it all? According to the preacher, God’s curse upon all Jews was proven by their irrevocable eviction from Jerusalem.

“There is no longer any hope that they will recover Jerusalem. For that city shall not rise up again in the future, nor will they return to their prior form of worship... That city is and will remain off-limits for them at all times.” In fact, he said, “God [has] ordered that Jerusalem remain forever in ruins.

The primary flaws in Chrysostom’s arguments are the same flaws made today. They include:

• Blaming all Jews for the misbehavior of a few;

• Explicit rejection of Paul’s warnings and affirmations in Romans, Chapter 11 (asserting that the primacy of God’s calling to, and covenants with, the Jews is “irrevocable”);

• Denial of God’s redemptive plan for “all Israel”;

• Advocacy of a non-historical Hellenized, dehumanized version of Jesus, rejecting him as a Torah-observant Jew, keeping all of its holy days and establishing none of the Christian ones;

• Ignoring Jesus’s primary and fierce advocacy for fellow Jews throughout his ministry, especially against religious abuse; and, of course,

• The assertion that ultimate proof for all charges against the Jews in God’s name was “Jerusalem, forever in ruins.”

IN SPITE of different narratives about Jesus, both Jewish and Christian advocates are equipped to counter these claims. However, it is not enough to do so just with quips, memes or three minute video clips. The biblical arguments Chrysostom made are deep. Accordingly, they must be extracted. It is going to take a lot of work, a lot of careful and deliberate effort.

Pro-Israel conferences, Bible studies, books, radio programs, blogs, articles and YouTube lessons must include in-depth teaching to counter Chysostom’s in-depth error. It is in these depths that Christian antisemitism hides and lives. Hence, it is only in these depths that it can be uprooted. Especially in such a time as this. n