Posted on 02/25/2004 11:17:10 AM PST by Salem
Christian History Corner: Why some Jews fear The Passion
Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ gives Christians the chance to disavow a shameful history of anti-Semitism.
| posted 02/20/2004
The Passion of the Christ scares Abraham Foxman. The Anti-Defamation League's national director, currently cast in the role of reluctant film critic, has spent months warning anyone and everyone that The Passion will dramatically strain Christian-Jewish relations and revive age-old Christian hatred for Jews. While most Christians in the West balk at this suggestion, Foxman cannot be dissuaded. He knows the grim history.
"For almost 2,000 years in Western civilization, four words legitimized, rationalized, and fueled anti-Semitism: 'The Jews killed Christ,'" Foxman told the ADL national executive committee during a February meeting. "For hundreds of years those four words—acted out, spoken out, sermonized out—inspired and legitimized pogroms, inquisitions and expulsions."
When Foxman envisions Christ's crucifixion, he does not think about love, forgiveness, or hope. He recalls the Holocaust and Hitler's chilling praise for the famed Oberammergau Passion Play in 1934. He does not weep with unexplainable sadness and joy at the sight of humanity's Savior suffering an undeserved death. He'll never forget the horrifying tales of czarist-era Russian Jews fleeing bloodthirsty gangs bent on Holy Week revenge.
"Read the e-mails, read the Web sites encouraging people to see the film," Foxman warned. "How fragile it is out there. What a reservoir of hatred!"
Hatred? Can we possibly be thinking of the same event? How can he watch Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, the ultimate triumph over death and evil, and think of hatred? The answer to this question is impossible for Christians to fully understand. Sadly, the history of Passion play depictions has been marred by shocking violence against Jews.
"The menace of Jewry"
With the bubonic plague once again sweeping across Europe in 1633, the town leaders of Oberammergau, a Bavarian village, gathered together to beseech God for a miracle. If the Lord would spare little Oberammergau, they promised to thank him by performing a play every 10 years to commemorate Jesus' crucifixion.
After this vow, not one Oberammergau villager died of the plague. The town first performed the play in 1634. More than 350 years later, Oberammergau still remembers its promise. In 2000, nearly half of the town's 5,000 residents participated in the fortieth Oberammergau Passion Play, which drew nearly a half million tourists from around the world.
Yet in the late 1970s, Oberammergau began to draw the ADL's ire. Sensitized by the Holocaust, Jews, especially in Germany, turned a more skeptical eye on Passion plays. Oberammergau, in particular, had been a source of tangible pain. Adolf Hitler had visited the 1934 performance, giving it his eager blessing. "It is vital that the Passion play be continued at Oberammergau; for never has the menace of Jewry been so convincingly portrayed as in this presentation of what happened in the time of the Romans," Hitler had said. "There one sees Pontius Pilate, a Roman racially and intellectually so superior, that he stands out like a firm, clean rock in the middle of the whole muck and mire of Jewry."
To make matters worse, the Dachau concentration camp had performed its horrific duty not far from Oberammergau. While Hitler's brand of murderous anti-Semitism owed far more to scientific determinism than Christianity, he preyed on a history of faith-based persecution. When convenient, Hitler and his Nazi henchmen dredged up the anti-Semitic writings of an elderly Martin Luther to justify their hatred for Jews.
Hitler employed Oberammergau in a similar fashion. He remembered that during and immediately following the Middle Ages, enraged Passion play spectators sometimes invaded the ghettos to exact revenge on Jews for killing Jesus. He hoped Christians would react similarly after viewing the Oberammergau Passion Play. This and other Nazi overtures to the racism simmering barely below the surface of German religious culture produced mixed results, with some churchmen eagerly advocating Nazism and others opposing Hitler on Christian grounds.
Yet as Pope John Paul II acknowledged in 1997, many sincere Christians looked the other way during the Holocaust because in their estimation the Jews were getting what they deserved for rejecting Christ. "The erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people and their presumed guilt circulated for too long" and "contributed to a lulling of many consciences at the time of World War II, so that, while there were 'Christians' who did everything to save those who were persecuted, even to the point of risking their own lives, the spiritual resistance of many was not what humanity expected of Christ's disciples," the Pope told a group meeting to discuss "The Roots of Anti-Judaism in the Christian Milieu."
Guilty blood?
The Pope may have had the Slovakian papal nuncio in mind when making his remarks about the "lulled consciences" during World War II. When asked in 1942 to intervene on behalf of Jewish children slated by the Nazis to be deported to concentration camps, the nuncio refused. "There is no innocent blood of Jewish children in the world. All Jewish blood is guilty. You have to die. This is the punishment that has been awaiting you because of that sin [of deicide]," he replied. Deicide, which means "to kill God," is the foremost "erroneous and unjust" interpretation of Scripture that has incited so much hostility. In Passion plays, a difficult forum for conveying the theological nuance of humanity's collective culpability, the Jews have often become an inviting target.
Unfortunately, deicide has not been the lone charge directed collectively against Jews. As recently as the early twentieth century, pogroms sometimes erupted during Holy Week in Eastern European nations when rumors spread about Jewish crimes. Inflamed by outlandish accusations, such as the claim that Jews killed Christian children and used their blood to make matzo bread for Passover, unruly gangs searched out Jews to kill and maim.
This style of pogrom dates back to the First Crusade. Until this point European Jews largely eluded organized violence, but marauding crusaders on their way to the Middle East in 1096 stopped to slaughter Jews in the Rhineland. One crusader's account recalls, "Behold we journey a long way to seek the idolatrous shrine and to take vengeance upon the Muslims. But here are the Jews dwelling among us, whose ancestors killed him and crucified him groundlessly. Let us take vengeance first upon them. Let us wipe them out as a nation."
Outbreaks of Christian anti-Semitism related to the Passion narrative have been so numerous and destructive that theologian and Holocaust survivor Eliezer Berkovits concluded, "the New Testament is the most dangerous anti-Semitic tract in human history." But neither the New Testament nor The Passion of the Christ is about Jewish deicide or revenge. Each is about God placing the iniquities of us all on his one and only son, who suffered unspeakable brutality to redeem his estranged children. Now is the time for Christians to disavow the history of Passion-linked hatred and show Jews "how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ" (Eph. 3:18).
Collin Hansen is editorial resident for Christian History magazine.
The pope has gone senile.
It appears to me that the author of the screed you linked does not understand the Bible, nor God.
Shame.
Apparently the website owners do not agree with the presentation because they put up a disclaimer. However it is certainly possible for someone to have a knowledge of scripture and a deep faith in G-D without being a Christian.
May the Jewish People, the people eternally chosen by G-d to serve mankind in the capacity of a priesthood, speak words of G-dliness and assuredness to all mankind and shine so brightly that there will never be any doubt that HaShem is G-d, the Torah is His Word, and Israel is His holy people.
Explain this.
To me, it is not the Christians that have rejected Jesus.
End of discussion.
I might agree that it is a legitimate concern, but do not agree that what happened should be defended as a current problem nor should Jews be collectively blamed then or now.
As to now, having seen the film, I believe that if you went in antisemitic, you would come out that way.
If you went in without any hate, you would come out that way.
Gibson, in no way guided the viewer to consider blaming anyone this in the film. No, quite the contrary, he guide the viewer to understand that Jesus died for our/my sins and forgave those who contributed in any way to his death. He forgave all, individually and collectively.
Especially me!
Believe me, as one who understands where you stand and how what I wrote must have wounded you, your words here are the highest compliment I could receive.
To tell non-Jews that Devout Jews want them to believe that religion doesn't matter is unconscionable. If I have accomplished nothing else in the years I have been on this forum at least let it be known that the reason Torah True Jews reject chr*stianity is for the sake of Heaven, just as you accept him for what you feel is the same reason.
The country... no, scratch that. The world is poised at a precipice not unlike that of 1939, or 1914... or perhaps an amalgam of both incredibly awful periods.
I'm trying to avoid saying "Can't we all just get along together", but really, folks (I'm not talking to "everyone", but the few I'm addressing know who you are), we're about to fall over the cliff, and we're too busy bickering over doctrinal purity.
At the risk of sounding trite, let's save the world first, and then bicker over who helped the most after the nightmare's over.
Note: "save the world" is meant in the colloquial sense, not the spiritual sense, OK? I really do see the world facing the kind of instability it did in the months leading up to WWI, with the kind of horror waiting in the wings that WWII delivered.
Well, maybe; but I don't see how you could make that determination on the basis of the text you quoted. Am I missing something here?
When did that happen?
My bad.
I think a lot of it is blowback from the ACLU/Hard Left attack on Christianity in all quarters in America over the last four decades. "The Passion" has put that which the cultural Marxists have fought so hard to bury right back in the middle of the American consciousness. It is at the core of the Culture Wars—and it is indeed a war, and American Christians fight back.
"I know that viewing this movie is not going to make me doubt my own religion and run out to become a Christian. What an insult to my faith and my commitment, to claim that it could be swept away by a movie and therefore I shouldn't be allowed to see it!"
I applaud your objectivity and caliber. The entrance of this movie into the American cultural experience has perhaps presented some risk to the Jewish/Christian alliance in advocacy for the Nation of Israel. But it also has provided opportunity to overcome that. May we choose wisely. I know we will.
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