I am a non-religious Jew. I grew up in a very mixed, assimilated environment near Boston. My friends have always been a mix of Jews and non-Jews. At my bar mitzvah, among my handfull of friends I invited, I think there were more non-Jews than Jews. Anyway, I am not a Christian-hater nor do I like or want to live the more insular, wary kind of Jewish life. This Christmas eve my Catholic friend invited me to attend the Midnight Mass with him at the local Catholic church. It was really nice and inspiring.

It warms me to hear real Christians in this forum help dispel my (and I'm sure other Jews') worst fears that the NT really is interpreted by many Christians to foster some Jew-hatred, and that some anti-Jewish feeling is intertwined in it's message. I've read most of the NT and I believe that there are harsh, unfairly prejudiced lines against “Jews” in there which could be (and have been) used easily by those with some OTHER, pre-existing tilt or strong context lending toward Jew-hatred, be it socio-economic, cultural, ethnic, political, etc.

I always wonder what a Martian landing from outer space would make of the NT and Jews if landing on Earth and reading the book cover to cover. I really do believe that overall, in it's totality, if one steps back and distills the core, central bedrock message of Christianity- OF COURSE it's not about Jew-hatred nor does it say that “all Jews” are uniformly bad or evil. That would be patently insane for a major religious text, and especially one where the aforementioned group was the origin of the person (Son of God), belief system, culture, original language and initial followers/apostles of the new religion.

In fact, I noticed many of the harshest condemnations and threats (esp in the messages to the 7 churches in Revelations) are for Christian believers, gentiles, “the world,” fallen churches, apostates, etc. Yet Jew-haters will never want to see or acknowledge that.

This I believe, is the deal, historically: There is a lot of hate and prejudice in the world. Against groups that look different (i.e. are “darker”); are very successful and rich; are very unsuccessful and poor; have different religions or language or customs; are viewed as colonizers/empirialists; are viewed as elites; are viewed as clannish or separatist; are viewed as unphysical or cowardly; are viewed as overly tough and martial, etc. While different groups have been accused and hated for one or more of these alleged transgressions, “The Jews” have been accused of ALL of those things at one time or another- and still are, by different hate sources (neo-Nazi, Islamo-fascist, radical leftists, conspiracy theorists, “Patriot” militia types, anti-Israel people etc.)

What is UNIQUE about Jew-hatred are the accusations, which filter down through history even to people who are ATHEIST or don't care for Christianity per se- that Jews are killers (MURDERERS, actually) of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who IS God. And that ALL JEWS forever are stained and cursed, by blood, with the act of KILLING GOD, (which seems 100% irrational and imposssible to me- you can't “kill God” anymore than you can “kill air” or “kill time” or “kill the word 'is'”.) And also that somehow “all Jews rejected Christ, defamed Christ, tortured/attacked his followers, defamed his name, etc.”

These Jew-haters, in this context, are saying, by absolutely irrefutable implication, that the crucifixion of Christ was NOT pre-ordained, desired above all else by God and Jesus as the voluntary atonement of one man for the sins of every person on Earth, the sacraficial holy lamb, the precipitating event for Christ's resurrection, ascendance and the creation of a new covenant, in which followers are instructed- by Him, beforehand- to drink his symbolic shed blood and eat his sacraficed body.

No, to the religio-centric Jew-haters, of whom there are HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS industriously posting all over the Internet, making fringe radio shows, etc.- many claiming to be real believing Christians, some not- Christ's crucifixion must be a horrible, totally lamentable involuntary defeat, resulting in a purely excruciatingly negative, worthless, nonsensical death which should not only be solemnly mourned as a horror, but avenged by visceral, violent angry retribution, like the second half of a huge Hollywood shoot-em-up action movie or white hat/black hat Cowboy western.

I agree with all of you real Christians- this is absolutely UPSIDE DOWN from the NT's message and what constitute the very cornerstones of Christianity- as attested by TONS of quotes from Paul, Jesus, various apostles, etc etc etc and even all the early church leaders, etc.

These Jew-hating Christians turn the Good News into the Bad News. Anyway, what's hard to figure out these days is: Does the prejudice and poison originating with the distortion of the NT's sometimes extrememy harsh portrayal of “Jews” then morph into racial anti-Jewishness, economic anti-Jewishness, ultra extreme anti-Israeli bias, etc., or do individuals who have more “real world,” temporal, non-scriptural reasons for their anger or hatred of Jews then pick up traditional Biblical or religio-based prejudices (i.e. Christ-killer, enemies of Christ, etc.) and use them as handy weapons?

As with any group, individual Jews can certainly display activities, actions and behavior which are annoying, aggressive, morally questionable or just plain wrong, even evil. And so some prejudices do arise for understandable reasons at certain times and places- although unfairly applied to those in the group who are innocent- as they do for Asians, blacks, Latinos, Italians, Irish, Muslims, Arabs, etc etc.

But I believe that the uniquely powerful, systematic, obsessive, far-reaching and vociferous Jew hatred that exists (just Google any combination of “Jews” “Christ” “satanic” “hate” “filthy” “conspiracy” “guilty” etc etc and see how many HUNDREDS or THOUSANDS of jam-packed Jew-hating websites come up) unfortunately comes out of some very primal mentions of “Jews” in religious, spiritual uncerpinning of Western culture and civilization- the New Testament, and has in many cases been absorbed by nominal Christians (and now Muslims through their own religions picking up of these early prejudices) who don't even KNOW why or where these prejudices or images of Jews come from.

I ask that good, real Christians on here speak up and voice their good, loving, spirit-filled, Biblically inspired convictions to their fellow Christians- of both the real and the fake, Jew-hating variety- and to their church leaders, and every and anyone else, simply expressing the knowledge that God and Jesus don't hate Jews, Jesus was and is a Jew (by family and early education), all non-believers have exactly the same standing in Christianity regardless of race or ethnicity, that Christianity promotes love, understanding, fairness, compassion, decency and a banishing of hate against other humans, and that Jews 2,000 years ago who “rejected” Christ and thought he was a zealous religious nut claiming to be God were doing EXACTLY their job, and what almost any Christian mob today would do to a guy on the street who radically claimed to be the Second Coming of Jesus, and that Jesus and Pilate and Romans and the mob and everybody was doing EXACTLY their job as it was FORETOLD in the OT and the NT earlier in Matthew.

I am not asking for Christians to be rabid philo-semites and say that Jews are better or we're super-chosen or any of that; I just think we're no worse and shouldn't be marked for hate, violence and the blame for every single thing that has ever happened or will ever happen basically on Earth. And yet that is what I see on SO many rabid, extreme websites it is off the scale.

It is easy to understand why Jews are wary of Christianity- because those primal, theological Jew-hating images/protoypes were spread in certain quarters of Christianity, by certain leaders at certain times (in great part out of political convenience vis a vis the frightening Roman Empire), as a scapegoat for Kings and leaders, etc.) It is also easy for good, spirit-filled true Christians to find such Jew-hating talk so nonsensical, fringey and completely disconnected from their experience, that they believe it to be a much more marginal, insignificant phenomenon than many Jews and others claim it to be.

The truth, I believe, lies somewhere in between. But let good open-hearted, non-hateful Jews and Christians continue in educational dialogue about this, because the malicious blending of a true faith with extremist, hateful, violent and fascistic agendas is unfair and perhaps harmful to all people and all believers and possibly, in the very long run, even not beneficial to the angry, hypocritical haters themselves.

I am a non-religious Jew. I grew up in a very mixed, assimilated environment near Boston. My friends have always been a mix of Jews and non-Jews. At my bar mitzvah, among my handfull of friends I invited, I think there were more non-Jews than Jews. Anyway, I am not a Christian-hater nor do I like or want to live the more insular, wary kind of Jewish life. This Christmas eve my Catholic friend invited me to attend the Midnight Mass with him at the local Catholic church. It was really nice and inspiring.

It warms me to hear real Christians in this forum help dispel my (and I'm sure other Jews') worst fears that the NT really is interpreted by many Christians to foster some Jew-hatred, and that some anti-Jewish feeling is intertwined in it's message. I've read most of the NT and I believe that there are harsh, unfairly prejudiced lines against “Jews” in there which could be (and have been) used easily by those with some OTHER, pre-existing tilt or strong context lending toward Jew-hatred, be it socio-economic, cultural, ethnic, political, etc.

I always wonder what a Martian landing from outer space would make of the NT and Jews if landing on Earth and reading the book cover to cover. I really do believe that overall, in it's totality, if one steps back and distills the core, central bedrock message of Christianity- OF COURSE it's not about Jew-hatred nor does it say that “all Jews” are uniformly bad or evil. That would be patently insane for a major religious text, and especially one where the aforementioned group was the origin of the person (Son of God), belief system, culture, original language and initial followers/apostles of the new religion.

In fact, I noticed many of the harshest condemnations and threats (esp in the messages to the 7 churches in Revelations) are for Christian believers, gentiles, “the world,” fallen churches, apostates, etc. Yet Jew-haters will never want to see or acknowledge that.

This I believe, is the deal, historically: There is a lot of hate and prejudice in the world. Against groups that look different (i.e. are “darker”); are very successful and rich; are very unsuccessful and poor; have different religions or language or customs; are viewed as colonizers/empirialists; are viewed as elites; are viewed as clannish or separatist; are viewed as unphysical or cowardly; are viewed as overly tough and martial, etc. While different groups have been accused and hated for one or more of these alleged transgressions, “The Jews” have been accused of ALL of those things at one time or another- and still are, by different hate sources (neo-Nazi, Islamo-fascist, radical leftists, conspiracy theorists, “Patriot” militia types, anti-Israel people etc.)

What is UNIQUE about Jew-hatred are the accusations, which filter down through history even to people who are ATHEIST or don't care for Christianity per se- that Jews are killers (MURDERERS, actually) of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who IS God. And that ALL JEWS forever are stained and cursed, by blood, with the act of KILLING GOD, (which seems 100% irrational and imposssible to me- you can't “kill God” anymore than you can “kill air” or “kill time” or “kill the word 'is'”.) And also that somehow “all Jews rejected Christ, defamed Christ, tortured/attacked his followers, defamed his name, etc.”

These Jew-haters, in this context, are saying, by absolutely irrefutable implication, that the crucifixion of Christ was NOT pre-ordained, desired above all else by God and Jesus as the voluntary atonement of one man for the sins of every person on Earth, the sacraficial holy lamb, the precipitating event for Christ's resurrection, ascendance and the creation of a new covenant, in which followers are instructed- by Him, beforehand- to drink his symbolic shed blood and eat his sacraficed body.

No, to the religio-centric Jew-haters, of whom there are HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS industriously posting all over the Internet, making fringe radio shows, etc.- many claiming to be real believing Christians, some not- Christ's crucifixion must be a horrible, totally lamentable involuntary defeat, resulting in a purely excruciatingly negative, worthless, nonsensical death which should not only be solemnly mourned as a horror, but avenged by visceral, violent angry retribution, like the second half of a huge Hollywood shoot-em-up action movie or white hat/black hat Cowboy western.

I agree with all of you real Christians- this is absolutely UPSIDE DOWN from the NT's message and what constitute the very cornerstones of Christianity- as attested by TONS of quotes from Paul, Jesus, various apostles, etc etc etc and even all the early church leaders, etc.

These Jew-hating Christians turn the Good News into the Bad News. Anyway, what's hard to figure out these days is: Does the prejudice and poison originating with the distortion of the NT's sometimes extrememy harsh portrayal of “Jews” then morph into racial anti-Jewishness, economic anti-Jewishness, ultra extreme anti-Israeli bias, etc., or do individuals who have more “real world,” temporal, non-scriptural reasons for their anger or hatred of Jews then pick up traditional Biblical or religio-based prejudices (i.e. Christ-killer, enemies of Christ, etc.) and use them as handy weapons?

As with any group, individual Jews can certainly display activities, actions and behavior which are annoying, aggressive, morally questionable or just plain wrong, even evil. And so some prejudices do arise for understandable reasons at certain times and places- although unfairly applied to those in the group who are innocent- as they do for Asians, blacks, Latinos, Italians, Irish, Muslims, Arabs, etc etc.

But I believe that the uniquely powerful, systematic, obsessive, far-reaching and vociferous Jew hatred that exists (just Google any combination of “Jews” “Christ” “satanic” “hate” “filthy” “conspiracy” “guilty” etc etc and see how many HUNDREDS or THOUSANDS of jam-packed Jew-hating websites come up) unfortunately comes out of some very primal mentions of “Jews” in religious, spiritual uncerpinning of Western culture and civilization- the New Testament, and has in many cases been absorbed by nominal Christians (and now Muslims through their own religions picking up of these early prejudices) who don't even KNOW why or where these prejudices or images of Jews come from.

I ask that good, real Christians on here speak up and voice their good, loving, spirit-filled, Biblically inspired convictions to their fellow Christians- of both the real and the fake, Jew-hating variety- and to their church leaders, and every and anyone else, simply expressing the knowledge that God and Jesus don't hate Jews, Jesus was and is a Jew (by family and early education), all non-believers have exactly the same standing in Christianity regardless of race or ethnicity, that Christianity promotes love, understanding, fairness, compassion, decency and a banishing of hate against other humans, and that Jews 2,000 years ago who “rejected” Christ and thought he was a zealous religious nut claiming to be God were doing EXACTLY their job, and what almost any Christian mob today would do to a guy on the street who radically claimed to be the Second Coming of Jesus, and that Jesus and Pilate and Romans and the mob and everybody was doing EXACTLY their job as it was FORETOLD in the OT and the NT earlier in Matthew.

I am not asking for Christians to be rabid philo-semites and say that Jews are better or we're super-chosen or any of that; I just think we're no worse and shouldn't be marked for hate, violence and the blame for every single thing that has ever happened or will ever happen basically on Earth. And yet that is what I see on SO many rabid, extreme websites it is off the scale.

It is easy to understand why Jews are wary of Christianity- because those primal, theological Jew-hating images/protoypes were spread in certain quarters of Christianity, by certain leaders at certain times (in great part out of political convenience vis a vis the frightening Roman Empire), as a scapegoat for Kings and leaders, etc.) It is also easy for good, spirit-filled true Christians to find such Jew-hating talk so nonsensical, fringey and completely disconnected from their experience, that they believe it to be a much more marginal, insignificant phenomenon than many Jews and others claim it to be.

The truth, I believe, lies somewhere in between. But let good open-hearted, non-hateful Jews and Christians continue in educational dialogue about this, because the malicious blending of a true faith with extremist, hateful, violent and fascistic agendas is unfair and perhaps harmful to all people and all believers and possibly, in the very long run, even not beneficial to the angry, hypocritical haters themselves.

http://www.theliberalspirit.com/?p=1206

My additional discussion pertains to the historical factors that account for the partial and biased treatment of the Pharisees in the New Testament. I mentioned the hostility between Paul and the Jerusalem Jewish church that accounts for much of his seemingly anti-Jewish rhetoric and the Jewish civil war and the ensuing re-emergence of the Pharisees as rabbinical Judaism in conflict with the now mostly gentile church of Jesus.

We must remember, however easy and gentle and kind we want to be toward the Jews, especially considering the way Christianity the Religion has treated them, climaxing in the Sho'ah, the Holocaust, that Jews, as Peter the Jew said, are saved, justified, sanctified and redeemed, in the unique Jewish way of salvation, the Lord Yeshua' Messiah, just as we Gentiles are.

Look back, consider the history of the Church: How often do you think the Lord's been really pleased with us?

Then look back, consider the history of the Hebrews in the Old Testament: how often was the LORD really happy with them? Not very often. He threw them out of his Land twice…

If the only folks our beloved Jewish Lord Jesus was ever publically furiously angry with, the Religious Right of his day, the Pharisees, he had a reason.

One morning in Jerusalem Peter the Jew preached a Jewish sermon to a Jewish crowd in which he said 'There is salvation in no other, for there's no other name given among men by which we must be saved.'

Modern Judaism is the descendant of those Jews who did not acknowledge the Messiah freely given them by the LORD God of Israel, even following his Resurrection the third day after his death (At the hands of a diabolical three-way conspiracy of Jewish Pharisees and Sadducees and Roman Gentiles, all of whom hated each others' guts.)

The Rabbis to this day will tell you a Jew can do anything at all and remain a Jew EXCEPT 'confess with his mouth that 'Jesus is YHWH,' and presumably 'believe in his heart that God has raised him from the dead.'

In fact the only person who can become a Christian WITHOUT giving up his old religion is a Jew. Did any of the Apostles stop being a Jew? Did Jesus?

These are hard sayings. May we deal in God's own love and grace and wisdom with the ancient People he still loves more than his own life.

<3 TV2

You may have answered your own question. For openers, Israel, for millennia an “oppressed” people, once it got some power, turns around and does the oppressing, similar to the Boers in South Africa toward blacks in that country; it's no surprise that even Jimmy Carter considered that situation analogous to apartheid. Second, in the process it holds itself to a higher standard. Third, it gets billions annually in American aid.

Besides, the post really had virtually nothing to do with modern Israel.

And let's keep in mind theological ramifications, as well. The Scriptures are clear in that Israel was constantly disciplined for disobedience. Are we Christians now supposed to ignore that just because they're Jews?

Paradoxtor you are quite right , this statement has bo Bibical basis .

According to Jesus there was no one greater then John the Baptist . And he would be the least in the kingdom of God . His disciples were taught that he himself was unfit to being the same category of Christ . That group of followers are the ones Jesus kept closest to Him and many of them followed Him .

John the Baptist was not being modest . Jesus spoke of the evil thoughts the Pharisees , Herodians, and Sadducee's used . Love your God with all our hearts , love your neighbor as yourself . Thats regardless of who they are , political differences or ideologies.
I would think that covers diversity , and diversity is not greater then Love according to Christ.

Caiaphas promoted religion , while playing with the politics of Rome in the background . He sacrificed his Godly knowledge and principles to improve his relationship with Rome .

“Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has risen no one greater than John the Baptist; yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he..”

The Pharisees and Saducees are found in most religious institutions. In fact in ourselves. Myself at times anyway . That part of me is bunk.