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On Friday I had the painful privilege of sitting in on an adult class led by Reform Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain for people coming to or renewing their commitment to Jewish faith and practice. The evening’s topic was the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, and how the Christian Church(es) had treated the Jewish people down the ages. It is a story which shames us Christians, and made for some uncomfortable listening.
It was also interesting that the class as a whole seemed surprised by the story: they carried an assumption that Christianity and Judaism would get on better than other faiths because they had so much in common. In particular they were caught on the hop by the way in which historically Islamic lands were more hospitable for Jews than Christian ones. The way in which Muslims now regularly perpetuate the worst of European anti-Semitic lies like the Protocols is a betrayal of that history about which most people today seem entirely ignorant.
Listening to his historical recital — the broad brush strokes of which I knew and could hardly dispute — I was, perhaps for the first time, more puzzled than anything by why Christendom went down that path. Perhaps human fallen-ness or evil are the only adequate ultimate “explanations” but they do not excuse the social and practical.
Part of the explanation clearly resides in the origins of many New Testament texts as a fairly robust family feud over the same scriptures and their meaning. In some cases, most notably the Johannine literature, that feuding spills into the seeds of bitter sectarianism. Various later developments build on that.
Jonathan Romain suggested that those included the two faiths competing with each other and with Mithraism to be a more satisfactory religion for people disillusioned with traditional religion. He also suggested that Christians needed to distinguish themselves much more clearly from Jews in the aftermath of the Jewish revolt and adopted the language of Roman anti-Judaism to do so.
I’m less persuaded of the first of those, and not sure just how important the second is. In the Roman era as today Jewish identity was complicated. To what extent a Roman would have identified a Greek God-fearer as a Judean must be open to question. It is hard to see how much the breaking of the religiously Jewish from the ethnically Judean (if I may put it like that) which was happening socially in the new Christian communities was already disconnecting the Church from Judaism. Certainly, to note one pertinent example, Pliny is quite clear that the Christians are something different.
One contributing feature, I think, which may be underestimated is the way in which the various sectarian groups which were competing in a fractious Second Temple Judaism largely fell away leaving two very different groups as the dominant children of the same historical parent, both asserting a claim to be the true heir, while both looked very different from the other. Larger families squabble differently to small ones.
I suppose one of the ways in which my story as a Christian might differ from the one Jonathan told as a Jew would be my view that Rabbinic Judaism differs greatly from the religion of the Second Temple. The other is what I think is a fairly commonly accepted understanding that as the church became almost entirely Gentile, the earlier inter-familial insults with all their harshness became something quite different: no longer a fierce squabble between the same, but a means of establishing a wicked image of the other.
I’m not sure that that fully explains the lengths to which later Christendom took its anti-Judaism, but it does, to my mind provide the seed-bed of the later evil.
The other thing that struck me about the conversation is how often, if I had not deliberately been – and been asked to be – a more-or-less silent observer, I would have wanted to discuss the options of reading texts differently. I think Jonathan gave a very fair summary of things, but one of the things I did say to him afterwards was how it seemed to me that he overlooked the way Luther in particular re-inscribed the Pharisees as mediaeval Catholics and elided them into grace-deprived, works obsessed enemies of God.
There are some more interesting ways of reading some of these texts which have been opened up by more recent scholarship. I suspect that one of the more fruitful ways forward might lie precisely in those sorts of discussions, certainly of our shared texts, and perhaps also of those other texts which lie at the roots of our interpretative traditions. I see one interesting project with Jewish scholars doing just that with the New Testament has just been published (HT Theophrastus) and I look forward to getting a copy soon.
