The crowd in Jerusalem that demanded Christ’s crucifixion did not in any way represent the Jews of the city of Jerusalem and its environs. They were a relatively small crowd of people who had been purposefully rounded up by the Sanhedrin in order to silence, and eventually put to death, the one Man who was undermining their strangle-hold power in Jerusalem and beyond.
Why on earth do you think Caiaphas and his cadre so desperately feared this man? They feared His influence for four main reasons:
(1) Jesus was an itinerant preacher who was engendering ever more receptiveness to His teachings from the Jewish population. He was not a priest, a scribe, or a Pharisee, and yet so many people [Jews] were listening to, and beginning to follow, His teachings. Many of them were beginning to believe that He was indeed the Messiah.
(2) He performed miracles, such as curing the blind and raising people from the dead.
(3) He spoke against the hypocrisy of the very same high priests, scribes and Pharisees who were now calling for His crucifixion.
(4) He sometimes did things that were forbidden by Pharisee law, such as healing on the Sabbath.
To extrapolate the politically-motivated hatred exhibited by these high priests and hypocrites and lay blame for the death of Christ on an entire people (when the allegiance to Him of so many of those very people was the reason for the Sanhedrin’s fear) is ludicrous.
Large numbers of Jews openly wept along the road to Calvary as Christ passed by them. Veronica offered Him water. Simon of Cyrene helped Him to carry the cross and defended Him against the Roman lashes.
We also cannot blame the Jews for His death for the simple reason that His death was foretold many centuries before through the prophet Isaiah. You yourself excerpted a few such scripture verses. So, in that sense, it was an inevitability. And, if one would want to take that even a step further, since He died for your and my sins, in a roundabout way, we are just as responsible – in a passive way – for His death as those relative few who so brutally called for His crucifixion.
Although I am a Protestant, the Catholic catechism contains an excerpt that I believe to be a beautiful description of who is really responsible for Jesus’ death. It reads, in part:
We must regard as guilty all those who continue to relapse into their sins. Since our sins made the Lord Christ suffer the torment of the cross, those who plunge themselves into disorders and crimes crucify the Son of God anew in their hearts (for He is in them) and hold Him up to contempt. And it can be seen that our crime in this case is greater in us than in the Jews.
As for them, according to the witness of the Apostle, ‘None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.’ We, however, profess to know Him. And when we deny Him by our deeds, we in some way seem to lay violent hands on Him.
So, by blaming the Jews alone for Christ’s death, we would in effect be saying, ‘Jesus did not die to cleanse me from my sins. He died because of those vile, vicious people over there ... back then.’ A Christian, by definition, acknowledges that Christ’s purpose in taking on human form was to die as He did … for us. How then can a Christian turn around and lay blame for that death on another group of people? Such behavior smacks of both scapegoating and religious hypocrisy. For Christians, the truth is that all sinners were the authors of Christ’s Passion.
As for your continued references to the later persecutions of Paul by other Jews, once again you are confusing a few [with political motives] with a people. And you are also refusing to recognize those few who were used as simple tools to fulfill yet more prophesy. Christ Himself, both in the movie and countless times in scripture, warns His followers that they will continue to suffer persecution. Who among His later apostles was more faithful than Paul, the author of most of the books of the New Testament?
To take, as you have, scriptural accounts of the crucifixion of Christ, and the persecution of Paul, by a handful of Jewish leaders who were generally driven by political motives and assert that the Jewish people in general are to be held responsible for the (prophesied) results – or, worse yet, to label their actions as ‘always wanting to kill someone’ is the kind of behavior that plants the kinds of anti-Semitic seeds that breed unfounded hatred. Even your own excerpt from Acts 23 reads that ‘more than forty men were involved in this plot [to kill Paul]’ You neglected to print that portion in bold. Nor did you comment that forty men [no doubt under orders from the high priests] does not a people make. Once again, it was the Sanhedrin that feared Paul’s teachings and the inroads they were making as regards their power among the Jewish people in general.
This movie has been unfairly accused of doing what you are at least intimating in your own post. Where the movie is concerned, the accusation is unfounded.
~ joanie
Bump. This is what I was trying to say. Jews as a nation are not to blame.
BTTT!