Antisemitism is in the eye of the beholder

I. Is The Passion Anti-Semitic?

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. What are we to make of this charge?

1. On the face of it, this is a rather odd reaction. After all, The Passion is a movie about a group of men and women who lived 2000 years ago. 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.

So the attack seems to say more about the critics than about the film. This looks like an exercise in mirror-reading. Let us remember how the Bible defines a Jew. God made a covenant with Abraham and his tribe. On the one hand, an apostate was cut off from the covenant community. On the other hand, a Gentile could always convert to the faith of Israel.

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. This is not to deny some continuity between the past and the present. But for someone living in the 21C to simply equate his identity with someone living in the 1C is quite a leap.

2. This brings us to another point. In filmmaking, geography dictates ethnicity. If you make a movie about the Third Reich, it will feature Germans. The bad guys will all be German. Does that make the movie anti-German?

II. Is the NT Anti-Semitic?

The truth of the matter is that critics are using The Passion as a stalking-horse to attack the Gospels. What they're really saying is that the Gospels—indeed, the entire NT—is antisemitic. What, then, are we to make of this charge?

1. On the face of it, this accusation is just as odd as the first charge. The hero of the Gos-pels (Joshua bar Joseph) is a Jew. His disciples are Jews. At least three of the four authors of the Gospels are Jews—Matthew, Mark, and John—as are the other NT writers. It's ar-guable that Luke is a Gentile who converted to Judaism (as a proselyte or God-fearer) before converting to Christianity. So he is also a Jew.

2. It is true that the Gospel authors often present their fellow Jews in a rather unpleasant light. But the Gospel authors are no more complimentary in their self-portraiture. What is more, the same could be said of the OT—which is a history of national apostasy. Is the OT antisemitic as well? For that matter, both the OT and NT paint paganism in pretty dark hues.

At the same time, there are some Jewish good guys as well as bad guys in the Gospels. 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. In the Bible, what distinguishes the good guys from the bad guys is not natural virtue but divine grace (Deut 9:6).

3. Some Christians are so defensive about the charge of antisemitism that they fall back into saying that we all killed Jesus. Well, this may be true in a very roundabout way, but it removes the offense of the Gospel.

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. He doesn't feel that he should share any responsibility in the matter. In the meantime, this ploy is apt to offend even more folks. How does a Hindu or a Buddhist feel complicit in the death of Christ? By trying to offend no one you offend everyone.

What is needed is a principled distinction. There's a difference between killing Christ and rejecting Christ. The death of Christ was a one-time event to which particular individuals were party. His execution was engineered by the Sanhedrin, facilitated by the local rabble, and carried out by Roman authorities. But complicity and culpability for rejecting our Lord are not limited in space and time.

What is more, there are degrees of responsibility. 1C Jews who repudiated their promised Messiah are guiltier than 1C Gentiles who never read the OT. 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. If anyone is antisemitic, it is a critic who presumes to savage such a thoroughly Jewish work as the NT.

III. Does either The Passion or the NT Promote Anti-Semitism?

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. And they are anxious that The Passion will have the same effect. Christians, so we are told, need to be sensitive to Jewish concerns. What are we to say to this argument?

1. The first thing needing to be said is that understanding is a two-way street. The Jewish critics say they feel they're being stereotyped and saddled with collective guilty. And yet they stereotype Christians and saddle us with collective guilt.

Not every theological tradition has the same track-record in Judeo-Christian relations. Calvinism and Fundamentalism are philosemitic. There were no pogroms in Scotland or Holland. And fundamentalists are more avidly pro-Zionist than many Jews. Conversely, some denominations with the worst track-record (e.g., Roman Catholicism; Russian Or-thodoxy) traditionally withheld the Bible from the laity. German Lutherans have a bad track-record, but Danish and Norwegian Lutherans have a heroic track-record.

1. Due to the "cuius regio, eius religio" formula, ratified at the Peace of Augsburg and reaffirmed at the Peace of Westphalia, pretty much every German was baptized in infancy as either a Catholic or a Lutheran. Citizenship and churchmanship were conterminous.

2. Given the nominally Christian identity of Germany, it was necessary for the Third Reich to co-opt the churches as best it could. And, indeed, it tried to form a unified Reichkirche under a Reichsbischof. That, however, provoked the resistance of the Confessing Church, beginning with its Barmen Declaration, and culminating in the plot to assassinate Hitler--involving the conversion of Bonhoeffer from pacifist to just-war theorist and regicide.

3. You had a number of nominal Christians (Deutsche Christen) who were only too happy to collaborate with the Third Reich. They excised the OT and Epistles of Paul, and edited out anything Jewish out of the Gospels. They concocted an Aryan Christ, and relocated the Holy Land to Germany.

What such drastic measures illustrate is not the Christian inspiration of Nazism, but, to the contrary, the necessity of a radically retrofitted "Christian" theology to accommodate Nazi ideology.

4. In our own day we are witnessing an ever burgeoning movement of Messianic Judaism. If these Jews thought for a moment that the NT was antisemitic, they would hardly be embracing Yeshua as their Messiah.

5. A witch's brew of toxic chemicals fed into the cesspool of the Third Reich, viz., Luther's antisemitic ranting and raving, Kant's agnostic religious epistemology, the Hegelian deification of the state, Wagner's antisemiticism and glorification of Nordic mythology, Nietzsche's Ubermensch ideology, the demotion of the OT under an evolutionary/Hegelian theory of religion, the higher criticism of the Bible, the comparative mythology of Max Weber, Social Darwinism, Victorian occultism, German ground-and-blood mysticism, the Concordant between Hitler and the Vatican, popular resentment over war reparations, an ingrown and inbred national Volksbewusstsein, &c.

To single out the abuses of the Christendom as the ground motive is special-pleading of a high order.

2. The critics would like to turn the record on its head. The NT is not an inspirational record of Christians persecuting Jews. To the contrary, the NT is an inspired record of es-tablishment Jews persecuting Messianic Jews. Indeed, Messianic Jews are second-class citizens in the modern-day state of Israel. Nothing has changed.

3. It is understandable that Jews feel insecure. They have good reason. But by that same token, they need to know their enemy. Too many Jews are still fighting the last battle. Even on that score, antisemitism antedates the Christian church. Pharaoh and Haman were genocidal antisemites. But who poses a threat to the survival of Jewry in the modern world?

i) There are hundreds of millions of Muslims who would like nothing better than to wipe Israel off the map. And Europe would not stand in the way. The only power that is standing in the way is America, and what sets America apart is its lingering Judeo-Christian heritage. It should go without saying that Muslims are not going to hurl the charge of deicide or Christ-killer inasmuch as Muslims deny the deity and crucifixion of Christ.

ii) The other enemy of Jewry is secular humanism. Ironically, many modern-day Jews are secular Jews. By and large, secular humanism takes the side of the suicide bombers. Secular humanism is sympathetic to the plight of the Jews as long as Jews are powerless and persecuted. As soon as the Jews fight back, secular humanism switches sides.

Secular humanism regards the OT Judaism as a primitive and barbaric religion—a slaughterhouse religion. It does not regard the Jews as, in any sense, a chosen people.

4. Some Jews regard evangelism as inherently anti-Semitic. This is, again, a paradoxical reaction. The question is whether Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. Is he the fulfillment of OT type and prophecy? How is such a question anti-Semitic? That's a Jewish question which invites a Jewish answer. (Cf. M. Brown, An-swering Jewish Objections to Jesus [Baker, 2000-2003]; W. Kaiser, The Messiah in the Old Testament [Zondervan, 1995]; J. Sailhamer, The Pentateuch as Narrative [Zondervan, 1992]; "Messiah," The Illustrated Bible, 2:987-995.)

To say that an evangelist is a Jew-hater is like saying that an oncologist hates his patients because he diagnoses their disease and proposes a voluntary course of therapy for their cure.

Tolerance is a two-way street. When Evangelicals are so tolerant of Jewish expression, Jews ought to be equally tolerant of Christian expression—especially when Christian expression builds on a Jewish foundation to begin with. After all, we worship a Jewish incarnation of God.