The Passion Narratives and the Roots of Anti-Judasim

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Early in the spring of each year, Jews celebrate Passover and Christians celebrate Easter, though rarely on the same day. This may seem strange because the Christian Easter date, the feast of the resurrection of Jesus, is tied to the memory of the last meal of Jesus with his disciples on the eve of Passover and to his crucifixion and death on the day of Passover. Why is there now a difference in the date? Why does the day of Passover in the Jewish calendar begin on the eve of April 5 this year, while the memorial of the last meal of Jesus falls on April 8?

The difference in date is only the external sign of a division between Jews and Christians that has resulted in the darkest chapters of Christian history, namely the rejection and often murderous persecution of the Jewish people. In the beginning, there were many Christians who commemorated the death of Jesus on the eve of Passover according to the Jewish lunar calendar. But in the fourth century C.E., Christian bishops and synods enforced a different date for Easter—the Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox. It was no longer deemed desirable that Christians should celebrate the festival of the resurrection on a date dictated by Jewish rabbis, the successors of those who were believed to have been responsible for the death of Jesus.

Evidence for the complicity of the Jews in the trial of Jesus was found in the Gospels’ Passion narratives. A later Christian writing, a fictitious letter of Pilate to the Roman emperor Tiberius, even claims that the Roman governor Pontius Pilate was already a Christian in his heart and that he sentenced Jesus to death only because the Jews forced him to do so. For the Christians, whose Messiah had indeed been sentenced to death by a representative of the Roman government, it was expedient to shift the blame to the Jews and to exonerate the Romans.

The Passion narratives from the Gospels of Matthew and John will be read in many Christian churches during Lent and Holy Week. Is this anti-Jewish understanding of the narratives of the trial and death of Jesus justified? Is this shift of the guilt for the death of Jesus from the Romans to the Jews already evident in these Gospels?

The authors of Matthew and of John were both what we would call “Jews” today, men from the people of Israel. Both were also learned in the holy Scripture of Israel, which Christians call the “Old Testament.” Matthew writes his entire Gospel as a person who feels that he fully belongs to the nation of Israel. It is important to note that he uses the term “Jews” (perhaps better translated as “Judeans”) only once, when he says that the story of the theft of Jesus’ body “has been spread among the Jews until this day”(Matthew 28:15). But when he describes those who “took counsel against Jesus to put him to death,” he speaks of the “chief priests and the elders” (Matthew 27:1), that is, the leaders of the people in Jerusalem. When Matthew tells that the Roman governor Pontius Pilate was washing his hands in innocence while the people were crying “Let him be crucified!” (Matthew 27:24), he does not shift the blame for the death of Jesus to “the Jews,” but to the leaders of the people who had misled the crowd. Matthew 27:20 says, “The chief priests and the elders persuaded the people to ask for Barabbas and destroy Jesus.” It is this misguided crowd of Jerusalem that cries in its blindness, “His blood be on us and on our children!” (Matthew 27:25).

The accusation that the leaders in Jerusalem were responsible for the death of many prophets and righteous people is not new in the traditions of Israel. In the most striking example, the Essenes, the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, considered the Temple in Jerusalem polluted and its priests sinful and corrupt.

The case of anti-Judaism in the Gospel of John seems more complicated. It is clear, however, that John never uses the term “Jews” to mean all of Israel. In John 1:47, Nathanael is called “a true Israelite in whom there is no guile.” Elsewhere John distinguishes between Samaritans, Galileans and Judeans. When the Samaritan woman tells about Jesus, “many Samaritans from that city believed in Jesus” (John 4:39). He also reports that “the Galileans accepted Jesus, having seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the feast” (John 4:45). But the Judeans were hostile. They tried repeatedly to arrest Jesus John 5:18; 7:1, 19–20 and elsewhere). Their leaders, the chief priests and the Pharisees, finally make the decision that Jesus has to die (John 11:47–53).

However, in the Gospel of John the hostility between the “Jews” and the followers of Jesus is also informed by the history of the Johannine community. John’s Gospel is the only one in the New Testament that uses the term “excommunicated from the synagogue” (John 9:22, 12:42, 16:2) to describe the experiences of the disciples of Jesus.^a This has evidently also colored the terminology of the Johannine Passion narrative. The ones who accuse Jesus before Pilate are no longer only the chief priests and the elders but also “the Jews” in general (John 18:31, 19:7).

Indeed, “the Jews” warn Pilate that he would no longer be able to bear the title of honor “friend of Caesar” unless he has 046Jesus executed (John 19:12). When John writes about these Jews, sometime at the very end of the first century C.E., he seems to think not only of the people who put Jesus to death more than half a century earlier; he also knows that the Jews are a rival group of Israelites, namely the successors of the Pharisees who, at that time, tried to reconstitute Judaism in Galilee after the disaster of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple.

The beginnings of a history of enmity are clear in the Gospel of John. But after the Holocaust, it is time that Christians remember the facts of history: Jesus was executed by the Roman authorities, albeit perhaps with the complicity of Jewish leaders in Jerusalem, but not by “the Jews” Today the reading of the story of Jesus’ suffering and death should be an occasion to remember not only the innocent suffering of this prophet of Israel from Nazareth, but all those who have died innocently at the hands of the powers of this world, Jews and gentiles alike.

Early in the spring of each year, Jews celebrate Passover and Christians celebrate Easter, though rarely on the same day. This may seem strange because the Christian Easter date, the feast of the resurrection of Jesus, is tied to the memory of the last meal of Jesus with his disciples on the eve of Passover and to his crucifixion and death on the day of Passover. Why is there now a difference in the date? Why does the day of Passover in the Jewish calendar begin on the eve of April 5 this year, while the memorial of the […]