![]() ![]() Christians, so we are told, need to be sensitive to Jewish concerns. And they are anxious that The Passion will have the same effect. However, it's also possible for the critic to say that what's antisemitic is not the NT, per se, but the use to which it has been put in the course of church history. Does either The Passion or the NT Promote Anti-Semitism? If anyone is antisemitic, it is a critic who presumes to savage such a thoroughly Jewish work as the NT. What would be the modern analogy? Well, one good parallel would be theological liberals who accuse the Gospels of being antisemitic! These are Gentile apostates, having turned their back on the faith in which they were raised. 1C Jews who repudiated their promised Messiah are guiltier than 1C Gentiles who never read the OT. What is more, there are degrees of responsibility. But complicity and culpability for rejecting our Lord are not limited in space and time. His execution was engineered by the Sanhedrin, facilitated by the local rabble, and carried out by Roman authorities. The death of Christ was a one-time event to which particular individuals were party. There's a difference between killing Christ and rejecting Christ. What is needed is a principled distinction. How does a Hindu or a Buddhist feel complicit in the death of Christ? By trying to offend no one you offend everyone. In the meantime, this ploy is apt to offend even more folks. He doesn't feel that he should share any responsibility in the matter. If a modern-day Jew is offended by the NT, it isn't clear how spreading the blame around will make him feel any less offended. ![]() Well, this may be true in a very roundabout way, but it removes the offense of the Gospel. Some Christians are so defensive about the charge of antisemitism that they fall back into saying that we all killed Jesus. In the Bible, what distinguishes the good guys from the bad guys is not natural virtue but divine grace (Deut 9:6).ģ. Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, John the Baptist, Simeon, Anna, Elizabeth, and the blind man (Jn 9)-to name a few-are all shown to be godly Jews. Is the OT antisemitic as well? For that matter, both the OT and NT paint paganism in pretty dark hues.Īt the same time, there are some Jewish good guys as well as bad guys in the Gospels. What is more, the same could be said of the OT-which is a history of national apostasy. But the Gospel authors are no more complimentary in their self-portraiture. It is true that the Gospel authors often present their fellow Jews in a rather unpleasant light. It's ar-guable that Luke is a Gentile who converted to Judaism (as a proselyte or God-fearer) before converting to Christianity. At least three of the four authors of the Gospels are Jews-Matthew, Mark, and John-as are the other NT writers. The hero of the Gos-pels (Joshua bar Joseph) is a Jew. On the face of it, this accusation is just as odd as the first charge. What, then, are we to make of this charge?ġ. What they're really saying is that the Gospels-indeed, the entire NT-is antisemitic. The truth of the matter is that critics are using The Passion as a stalking-horse to attack the Gospels. If you make a movie about the Third Reich, it will feature Germans. In filmmaking, geography dictates ethnicity. But for someone living in the 21C to simply equate his identity with someone living in the 1C is quite a leap.Ģ. This is not to deny some continuity between the past and the present. It is unclear how a movie about observant, 1C Palestinian Jews is somehow a movie about, let us say, a modern-day Marxist Jew of Eastern European extraction. On the other hand, a Gentile could always convert to the faith of Israel. ![]() On the one hand, an apostate was cut off from the covenant community. God made a covenant with Abraham and his tribe. Let us remember how the Bible defines a Jew. This looks like an exercise in mirror-reading. So the attack seems to say more about the critics than about the film. Why would some modern-day Jews automatically assume that the movie is about them? Modern-day Italians don't attack I Claudius as anti-Italian, even though it presents the Romans in a pretty unflattering light. After all, The Passion is a movie about a group of men and women who lived 2000 years ago. On the face of it, this is a rather odd reaction. For over a year before its release, a gang of theological liberals and secular Jews have accused Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion of the Christ, of being antisemitic.
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