Thread by @Delafina777

I see a LOT of pastors and other Christian clergy say they love Jews and they preach love for Jews but I always wonder if they've thought through what it would take to actually untangle anti-Jewish teaching from preaching the NT.

I mean, I keep talking about how much work that would be, but like, it would be a LOT of work.

Part of it's because I don't think Christians can usually HEAR the less obvious ways both the text itself and the sort of assumed, pop culture glosses on it perpetuate it.

So, like, when I was growing up, when we kids got especially loud, adults around us would sometimes say, "stop acting like wild Indians."

Now, do I think they were intentionally being anti-Native? No.

They couldn't HEAR it.

Hell, I didn't hear it until I was back in Wisconsin and heard a mother say it to her sons and I physically recoiled--and then was like, wait, I heard that all the TIME growing up. It wasn't until I was away from it that I was able to HEAR it for what it was saying.

And that's the thing about how tropes and traditions and idioms and cliches and all of those things work.

We don't hear them literally because we know the figurative meaning. We know what it means, so we cease hearing what it SAYS.

But at the same time, even though we're not paying attention to the literal meaning of idioms and tropes doesn't mean our assumptions aren't being affected by that literal meaning.

Do I think that when people hear the parables, other parts of the gospels, other parts of the NT read in church, when their pastors talk about them, that they're thinking about Jews?

Nah, not really.

But at the same time, do I think they're *unaware* that all these characters that they're hearing about in the NT are Jews?

No, I think they're aware of that, and I think it does influence how they see us, because it's still usually the main source of what they know about us.

And so when all those people arguing with Jesus are Jews?

When the bad examples being held up are Jews?

When the people Jesus is yelling at are Jews?

Yeah.

And I could go into some of the more egregious examples--La Domenica and Italian congregations praying for Jews to see the light and stop being so misguided or evil (in 2017, I believe?)--but what that does is make people who are unwittingly doing more subtle stuff feel okay.

And there's a handful of popular responses to it:

-Jesus was a Jew!
-The Gospels don't portray all Jews as bad
-I'm just saying what the Gospels said

As far as "Jesus was a Jew," that has been known for 2000 years and it hasn't stopped Christians from being antisemitic for 2000 years, so that's not really a good answer, especially when a lot of Christians portray Jesus as some sort of Jewish *reformer.*

As far as "the Gospels don't portray all Jews as bad"...

I mean, no, they don't. But the Jews they portray as good are usually either Jesus's followers or Jews that Christianity has historically assumed BECAME Jesus's followers eventually.

Or, put another way, Christianity tends to portray the "good Jews" as the ones that were proto-Christians. People that WOULD have been Christian had the option been available to them.

What, then, of Jews today who HAVE the option available to them and remain Jews?

And as far as "I'm just saying what the Gospels said"...

Well, no, you're not. Unless ALL you're doing, with regard to the Gospels, is *reading* them, if you're preaching any sort of sermon on them, you're interpreting.

There's the argument that the anti-Jewish stuff in the NT is kin to the prophets, who also yelled at Jews, and Jesus was a Jew yelling at Jews, and that's a very normal thing to do, so what's the problem?

Well, the problem is that yes, Jesus was a Jew yelling at Jews, just like the prophets, but A) genre matters and B) audience matters.

The prophets are polemic and we all know that going in. The gospels are narrative.

And more to the point, a Jew yelling at other Jews takes on a very different character when the text that preserves it is not the Jewish canon, but the canon of the gentile church.

It stops talking TO someone and becomes talking ABOUT them.

Put another way, it's a very different thing for me to disagree with you, even vehemently, in a meeting room when everyone who hears it is also a coworker

vs

publicly telling the story to others where I control the narrative about what you said vs what I said

When Jesus's words are no longer just a Jew talking to other Jews, but become Gentiles talking ABOUT Jews, they take on an air that's a lot more pernicious.

Talking about OUR failings can easily become talking about THEIR sins.

So when pastors are preaching the parables and other NT stories with villains or bad examples, the message is "don't be like them!"

and all the "thems" are Jews.

Do you think that doesn't affect how people see real Jews?

And the problem is often exacerbated--intentionally? probably originally, and now carried forward out of tradition--by the lectionaries in both the Catholic and the Protestant traditions.

Lectionaries don't cover the entire NT. They pick and choose excerpts and verses.

But which bits do they choose to read?

Well, the Catholic lectionary keeps Matthew 23:13-22, which talks about Pharisees turn converts into children of hell and are blind fools. 23-26, in which Jesus is yelling at them for being greedy and self-indulgent.

They also keep the parable of the wicked tenants. They skip a verse, but come back to specify that the Pharisees realized that Jesus was talking about them and wanted to arrest him.

They're willing to skip verses (e.g. the lectionary reading being Matthew 21:23-43, 45-46) but they make sure to keep the invective against the Pharisees.

Protestant lectionaries are sometimes actually worse.

Last year the Presbyterians paired Mark 12:1-11. That's the Marcan version of the same parable, the wicked tenants. It's paired with Chapter 2 of Lamentations, talking about how God has become the enemy of Israel.

The obvious connection between the two is that Jews murdered Jesus and God abandoned us and hates us because we were the sort of people who'd do that.

Like, that connection is not Advanced Literary Theory or a stretch or whatever.

It's the obvious implication of the pairing of those texts.

And again, if what you know about Jews is primarily coming from Christian texts, ancient Israel (and all the prophetic invective against it) is Jews and Pharisees are Jews.

And so we've got little Protestant children singing popular Sunday school and vacation bible camp songs like "I just wanna be a sheep"--you know this one?

So the examples of people/creatures you don't want to be like are:

-goats (reference to a parable usually read to reference the saved Christian sheep vs the unsaved Jewish goats)
-hypocrites
-Pharisees
-Sadducees

Romans are totes cool, though.

Then there's the Pharisee song:

Hypocrites hypocrites Jesus did say
These are the Pharisees
Do as they tell you but not as they do
For God they do not please
They want the praise of men
Phony as they can be
Greedy and ugly and wicked and lost
Not an example for me

🙃

And then there's the assumptions that don't get questioned.

Jesus dines with a Pharisee and this is usually an example of how gracious and forgiving Jesus was, that he'd dine with his enemies.

It never seems to be taken as an example of how gracious the *Pharisee* was, to invite this dude who's been yelling at him all the time (and then spends the dinner criticizing him) to dinner at his place.

And, like, look, I could go on for fucking EVER on this stuff, I could probably write a 9000-page book on this stuff

I could write a 9000-page book just on the need to revise the lectionaries

But there wouldn't really be a point.

The point of all of this is:

Just because you're not holding Passion Plays in which Pharisees and Sadducees dressed like Hasidic Jews gloat about killing Jesus doesn't mean you're not continuing to perpetuation anti-Jewish Christianity.

So what's to be done?

I mean, like I keep saying, it would take a lot of work.

And it would take a sort of self-contradictory approach to context.

I mean, one thing that would help would actually be taking the parables OUT of their textual context.

Because the thing is you can't actually hear the parables in their historical context unless you take them out of their textual context.

The gospel writers--remember, the gospels actually POST-date some other parts of the NT--were at pains to distinguish Christianity from Judaism, so there's a lot of couching the parables in contexts that make them look like screeds against Judaism or Jews.

And even leaving aside intentional anti-Jewish polemic, the gospel writers often put a gloss on them, like Luke identifying the story of the widow and the judge as a story about praying. Or Matthew saying the story of the wicked tenants was a story about the scribes & Pharisees.

But when the stories are told with these glosses on them, with a meta-narrator telling you What They Mean, you're NOT hearing them as Jesus told them, because he didn't have a narrator informing the crowd of what these parables meant.

These are Jewish parables. They're not Aesop's fables. They don't have one clear, obvious moral. They're designed to be PONDERED. To be somewhat enigmatic. Not to give answers, but to spark questions, and self-examination.

And given the lectionary's willingness to skip verses, pastors might consider skipping verses in the prophets that identify Israel.

It's another place where historical or textual context can actually get in the way of hearing the message.

Because the moment that gets heard, all of the ranting about mistreatment of the widow and the orphan is suddenly not directed to modern-day listeners but to the ancient Israelites.

At the same time, more historical context could help elsewhere.

When reading or discussing stories where Jesus interacts with Pharisees, it might be worth noting that debating Torah is (and was) a form of *worship* for Jews.

They're not showing enmity by debating with Jesus.

They're basically *praying with him.*

It's worth noting that the Pharisees mostly drop out of the gospel narratives when Jesus gets to Jerusalem (and gets crucified). It's worth noting that they warn him that Herod wants to kill him.

It's worth noting they were the party of opposition to the Romans and their puppet high priest (and that another Hellenized king and Sadducee partisan, Alexander Jannaeus had already crucified 800 Pharisees).

That the Roman general Varus had already crucified 2000 Jews.

That this was the context.

That the Pharisees weren't smug, powerful elitists but community-integrated members of a reform movement that had already lost a ton of people to torture and execution.

That Jesus, as a Jewish boy, likely wouldn't have been able to *get* the education he got or be raised with the Jewish identity he had, and his style of preaching wouldn't have been possible, if the Pharisees hadn't been fighting to preserve Jewish identity for a century.

I have my doubts about whether Paul was actually a Pharisee, but that's a different thread. Taking him at his word, it's worth noting that he sometimes celebrates his Pharisaic identity, which gave him the knowledge and flexibility to interpret law as he does.

It's worth understanding the Christian Old Testament as Jesus would have understood it--Christians so often understand Judaism and ancient Israel through the lens of the prophets and the Psalms, but that's not how Jews approach the text.

So it's worth actually taking time to talk about how for Jews--and thus, for Jesus--the Torah, not the prophets, was the primary scriptural text.

Anyway, this is already longer than I meant it to be, but I keep seeing Christian clergy talking about how they preach love for Jews, and I believe that they mean that.

I just always think about subtext.

I also have a whole rant about how the gospels' glosses on the parables declaw them and Christian tradition has doubled down on that until you can't even HEAR them anymore and that's a crying shame, but that's a different thread too.