1 week Ago
The Jews did not kill Jesus. Let’s just say it that clearly at the outset. Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker was almost as clear in saying that the Jews did kill Jesus when he addressed the graduates of Benedictine College in his commencement speech this summer.
He claimed that "Congress just passed a bill where stating something as basic as the biblical teaching of who killed Jesus could land you in jail." Ignoring the other ways in which that statement is false, we must object to Butker’s bad biblical analysis. The Bible does not teach that the Jews killed Jesus.
Peter A. Pettit, teaching pastor for St. Paul Lutheran Church, Davenport.
There are four gospel accounts of Jesus’ death in the Bible, and they all point appropriately to the power of the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, in putting Jesus to death. The earliest creed of the church affirms this (“crucified under Pontius Pilate”) and no accepted Christian creed has ever indicted the Jews of Jesus’ day for his crucifixion. Still, the gospels and the story of the early church in the book of Acts do refer to conspiracies among Jewish leaders to do away with Jesus.
The writer of Acts attributes a speech to Peter in which he tells the Jewish leadership council, “The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree.” Are these not biblical teachings? Deacon Francis Agnoli, Diocese of Davenport. No; they are not.
They are biblical passages, with a long and varied history of interpretation. Biblical teaching is what readers and teachers make from biblical passages. In this case, the passages that present Jews as seeking or responsible for Jesus’s death must be understood in their literary and historical contexts.
Even if some in the Jewish community saw Jesus as a disruptive troublemaker, only Rome had the power of execution. Any interpretation of the accounts of the passion cannot overlook that simple fact. The four gospels, from earliest to latest, show an increasingly dramatic shift in focus from Pilate to the Jewish leaders and people.
This unwittingly laid the groundwork for a teaching of blame that has stretched on for nearly two millennia. At its worst, the teaching has led to anti-Jewish violence and murder. But it is not biblical teaching; it is a teaching of scapegoating and bigotry.
For faithful Roman Catholics, the corrective came in 1965, when Pope Paul VI promulgated the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration, Nostra Aetate. There, taking full advantage of the best Catholic scholarship around the world, the church stated clearly that “what happened in (Jesus’s) passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today ..
. . The Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.
” Every pope from 1965 to the present, together with the church offices in Rome and conferences of Catholic bishops around the world, has reaffirmed this corrective and elaborated on it extensively. While Protestants lack any central teaching office like the Vatican, most denominations and councils of churches have made the same affirmations, beginning already before the Second Vatican Council. In 1947, an international group of church leaders in Seelisburg, Switzerland, developed “Ten Points” on Christian representation of Jews.
Among them were: “Avoid presenting the Passion in such a way as to bring the odium of the killing of Jesus upon all Jews or upon Jews alone;” and “Avoid promoting the superstitious notion that the Jewish people are reprobate, accursed, reserved for a destiny of suffering.” Biblical teaching since the apostle Paul has been clear that the burden of Jesus’ death rests on humanity as a whole. His death is representative of every death that results from human arrogance, willfulness, injustice, negligence, or hatred.
Jews are no more susceptible to these sins than anyone else. Although Christianity did not invent anti-Jewish attitudes and bigotry, Christian cultural dominance in the Western world is probably the single most responsible factor in spreading the cancer of antisemitism throughout society and around the world. As Christians who know this tragic legacy, we feel obligated to speak up when a Christian teaching is repeated in a way that plays on and deepens the antisemitism we deplore and reject.
Our churches were wrong for many centuries on this; we regret that reality and repent of it. Now, it is Harrison Butker and those who agree with him who are wrong. The Jews did not kill Jesus.
Deacon Francis Agnoli, Davenport Diocese, and Pastor Peter A. Pettit, St. Paul Lutheran Church.
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