Posted on 03/06/2004 8:17:26 AM PST by Joblie
MEL GIBSON says that his film, The Passion of the Christ, is a faithful representation of the biblical story of Jesus' trial and execution. He also says the movie isn't anti-Semitic. He cannot be right on both counts.
The New Testament is, among other things, an anti-Semitic tract. It is the source of the anti-Semitism which has characterised Christianity for two millennia.
If the film isn't anti-Semitic, it's out of line with the Gospel. In face of complaints from US Jewish leaders, Gibson removed from the film's sub-titles - although not from the Aramaic sound-track - the response of the Jews to Pilate's hand-washing disavowal of blame for sending Jesus to be crucified: "His blood be upon us and our children."
But why? The quote is there in Matthew 27:25. Its meaning is clear and has been fulfilled in unspeakable ways down the ages.
Luke 23:28-29 gives the same point a more vicious twist, depicting Jesus telling weeping women he encounters on the Way of the Cross: "Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me but for yourselves and your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, 'Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never gave suck!'"
Better for Jews that they'd never been born, then.
There's been no shortage of Christians ever since to ram this murderous message home to Jewish neighbours.
John's Gospel (8:44) has Jesus telling the Jews they are descended neither from God nor from Abraham but are children of the Devil.
The early Fathers of the Church took inspiration from the Bible as they preached hatred of the Jews.
In the works of Tertullian, Justin, John Chrysostom, etc., Jews are relentlessly libelled... the obscene Jew, the Satanic Jew, the murderer-of-God Jew, the whoremonger Jew, etc.
And so it continued. Pope after Pope, Council after Council, confirmed and codified the subhuman status of the Jews.
Every century is pock-marked by examples. (Council of Toledo, 694: Jews living in Spain declared slaves, possessions confiscated, all children removed from them at seven and prepared for marriage to Christians.)
Hitler didn't suck the idea of Jews wearing yellow badges out of his thumb. He took it from the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.
The Nazi persecution can be seen as a practical expression of traditional Christian attitudes to Jews.
"From the beginning until the end of Hitler's rule, the bishops never tired of admonishing the faithful to accept his government," Guenter Lewy recalled in "The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany."
Individual Catholic clerics who opposed the Nazis' anti-Semitism were a tiny minority, totally unrepresentative.
Catholic apologists concede now that the Vatican and the German bishops should have given stronger, more courageous leadership.
But this is dodging the issue. One of the reasons they didn't is that, by and large, they agreed with the Nazis.
From its beginning, Protestantism was as bad. The editor of the Nazi hate-sheet "Der Sturmer," Julius Streich, cited Martin Luther, reasonably, in a plea of justification at Nuremberg.
In his disgusting treatise "On the Jews and their Lies" in 1543, Luther had called for the fire-bombing of synagogues, the demolition of Jewish homes, the silencing of rabbis, the banning of Jews from public places, the confiscation of Jewish property and the enslavement of "all strong young Jews and Jewesses."
Christian hymns provided the theme music for the Holocaust.
Even after the gates were flung open on the horrors of Auschwitz, Christian teachers, in Ireland as elsewhere, continued to instruct infants that the scattering of the Jews and the persecutions they endured were punishment for the killing of the Christ.
Argument over Gibson's blockbuster gore-fest diverts attention from what's important.
If the film fuels anti-Semitism, it's to be condemned, irrespective of its merits as a movie.
But let's not allow a satisfying controversy obscure the fact that the founding text of Christianity is bloodily sodden with hatred of Jews.
This is a bunch of pap.
So you think you are talking to the Lutherans today, who will be on your list tomorrow?
There must be a Methodist to his madness....
Sorry, I couldn't resist....
If we had been able to point to an organised working class movement - the unions most importantly, and the Labour Party - with a clear record of fighting vigorously for an end to the oppression of Catholics, it might have been possible to point to the working class as the force which had the power to remedy the ills we were campaigning against.
But that wasn't the case. The realistic possibility we did have, and didn't take, was of recruiting relatively rapidly from the masses of angry, urgent working class youth whom we had helped bring onto the streets, and perhaps entering 1969 with a revolutionary socialist organisation a few hundred strong.
The task of building such an organisation remains.
So what inspired anti Semitism before Christ?
Luke 23:28-29 gives the same point a more vicious twist, depicting Jesus telling weeping women he encounters on the Way of the Cross: "Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me but for yourselves and your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, 'Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never gave suck!...'"
Seems to me Christ is speaking to those present, Jews, about the coming universal curse of socialism that despises the burden of children on sexual hedonists.
John's Gospel (8:44) has Jesus telling the Jews they are descended neither from God nor from Abraham but are children of the Devil…
Figurative speech should never be taken literally. Strange, that a non believer uses it to make his point. Well maybe not.
The early Fathers of the Church took inspiration from the Bible as they preached hatred of the Jews….
For the first three hundred years they are being thrown to the lions. Christians were hardly in a position to effect brutality on anyone. They preached against it. It was the pagans and Platonic, sexual hedonists who hated the Christians as they (the Christians) believed in Jewish law that set God above all. This irked the Platonists to no end as they thought the statist elites should have the final authority. This is the real anti Semitism.
Hitler didn't suck the idea of Jews wearing yellow badges out of his thumb. He took it from the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.
The Nazi persecution can be seen as a practical expression of traditional Christian attitudes to Jews.
Actually, Hitler learned more from the Muslims. From the Turks he learned Genocide. From the Mufti of Jerusalem, he got spiritual support to kill the Jews.
But let's not allow a satisfying controversy obscure the fact that the founding text of Christianity is bloodily sodden with hatred of Jews.
Ahh. This all sounds like babble from a failed socialist writer living in a pub.
True.
The record disputes that.
20 Some of them, however, men from Cyprus and Cyrene, went to Antioch and began to speak to Greeks also, telling them the good news about the Lord Jesus.
21 The Lord's hand was with them, and a great number of people believed and turned to the Lord.
22 News of this reached the ears of the church at Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas to Antioch.
23 When he arrived and saw the evidence of the grace of God, he was glad and encouraged them all to remain true to the Lord with all their hearts.
24 He was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and faith, and a great number of people were brought to the Lord.
25 Then Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul,
26 and when he found him, he brought him to Antioch. So for a whole year Barnabas and Saul met with the church and taught great numbers of people. The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch.
27 During this time some prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch.
28 One of them, named Agabus, stood up and through the Spirit predicted that a severe famine would spread over the entire Roman world. (This happened during the reign of Claudius.)
29 The disciples, (this would be the ones in Antioch. Those horrible, mean Jew hating Gentile Christians) each according to his ability, decided to provide help for the brothers living in Judea. ( that would be JEWISH Christians)
30 This they did, sending their gift to the elders by Barnabas and Saul.
Acts 11:20-27
Oh the hate! I mean, what kind of evil bunch would take up a collection to feed their starving brethren? Shouldn’t they have, at the very least, left them to starve if not gone and snatched the food right out of their mouths?
True.
Disagree. It is a misreading and abuse of the texts, much of it by Christians, that have contributed in large measure to the persecttion of Jews.
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