Human nature being what it is, it is not difficult to demonize "the other".The doctrines chosen by the Church were intended to be a way to eliminate the Jewish people, it also helped to make sense of the various waves of antisemitism and persecution since then. It goes in cycles but the underlying justification for the past 2000 years plus..has been based on eliminating the Jew justified by their righteous belief that they are placating their deity ( by whatever name called).
The believers of the polytheistic religions of the ancient world were somewhat "used" to their political leaders telling them what gods were to be venerated during their rule and which deity their ruler was representative of in human form. Adding a new deity or giving a new name to an ancient deity whose belief was already established was not that big a deal for most of the Gentile population. Tanakh recorded that any time such a practice of a Jewish king telling the Jews that they were to worship a foreign deity...the entire Jewish people suffered, and most often at the very hands of the people whose deity they had left God to serve! That lesson is told right in our Jewish Bible, the same one the Christians have as an adaptation of their Old Testament, yet they rarely see this in the story because their New Testament also imposes topsy-turvy meaning to the context of the stories in so many places.
Christians did not want their flock to know the Paschal lamb represented a false man-god of Egypt, so they changed it into a sacrifice for sin to justify human sacrifice (or deicide depending on whether or not they are calling Jesus God in human form). Rather than his blood expiating sin, the blood on the door was an act of defiance showing the Egyptians that the life force (blood) representing their deity was spilled by the Hebrew slaves and their god was powerless over the God of Israel to do a thing about it. It was an act of rejection of the gods of Egypt and alliance to the God of Israel, and that’s in the Torah in Exodus in context. Rather than show that Isaiah was slamming a man for calling himself a man/god, Christian dogma personifies and makes a proper name for their Latin translations word for star and turns that story into something about a fall of angels (no where mentioned in that narrative at ALL) and justifies creating of the "name" Lucifer for a demi-god of the underworld Devil. (That isn’t in the Tanakh but fits the underworld described in Plato’s narrative recalling the ancient the Myth of Er) Every aspect of Jewish belief is given a new spin. Things that I once thought must have been fabricated outright I later discovered were beliefs of the ancient Greeks and Romans. This was the longstanding battle for souls going on; the Hellenized Jews, those who had become apostate to Judaism, desired to entice other Jews to worship as the Greeks that they believed superior in philosophy and knowledge, so they created texts that tried to say, see,this is what it was supposed to have been all along. However, reality was that those beliefs were identical to the beliefs and practices that the Torah demonized (Baal, Tammuz and Mithras worship and customs play most frequently)
Once one begins an in-depth study of the religious practices and beliefs of all the peoples surrounding the Jews in the centuries just preceding the beginning of Christianity, one can see these developments take place. It was a concerted effort to do away with Israel and Judaism. When Hadrian renamed Judea, Palestina, a Latinized version of the name of the Philistines, it was only done to insult the Jews. The Philistines had long since completely assimilated into the surrounding peoples, and the only vestiges of those ancient Agean seafaring people were artifacts and place names by the year 135 when Hadrian changed the name of Judea. The Philistines were not only the ancient enemies of the Jews, but the Jewish people had demonized their practices and deities to the extent that the name of their primary deity became the name of a type of demon. Beelzebub is a name now associated with evil or the Christian devil..but it had it's origina as the Philistines' "Lord of the Flies".
Do you think that Christians would be focused on Jews at all if their doctrine was not created to replace and do away with the Jewish people?If you are indoctrinated to believe that the eternal covenant was replaced by a covenant of belief in a Jew as a deity, you then begin to see the people who hold to the Torah precept that God condemns the very notion of men as deities as blasphemy against your deity.If you are indoctrinated to believe that Jews are blinded to your god and that the eternal covenant of Israel has been superseded by a different covenant your perspective is one of the Jew as "the other". If you believe Jews refuse to follow the way of God from that perspective and therefore deserve punishment because of that, you can easily justify any behavior done to Jews.
It is that sort of thinking that fueled the Holocaust. It is that sort of thinking by people in your own communities now that show that Germany was no different than small-town America. Jews everyone are living alongside people who believe that we should suffer torture and death because we do not abandon our God for what they offer.
Or at the very least, turn your back in apathy when others do so , saying to yourself that, if only they had believed in Jesus, this wouldn‘t have happened to them. History has shown this time and again. Personal encounters with Christians who tell me they love me to try to convince me to abandon my faith for theirs and then turn vicious with insult when I politely decline reveal this, too. Religious Jews believe that abandoning the faith of God through the eternal Torah, the relationship that is believed to have kept Israel alive through all such previous attempts, would be worse than anything that anyone could do OR HAS done to Jews.
I believe that there is sincerity in the heart of many Christians when they claim that they try to convert us out of love and concern for our souls, but it is a misguided love at best. If you love someone, you would not ask them to abandon the very thing that makes them who they are and the thing most dear to them, and my faith in God is most dear to me. The path of Judaism is such a part of me that I will never abandon it.
When we refuse to recognize their "truths" and abandon Judaism to embrace their replacement theology, history has shown that this love often allows many Christians to act out in hatred or turn a blind eye to others who do because of a belief that is repeated from church pulpits, "Jews deserve to be punished for rejecting Jesus and only when they come to embrace him will their suffering end." Not only have I heard this sentiment come straight from the mouths of Christian clergy in person and on television, I’ve read this virtually hundreds of times from people who professed their Christian belief all over Yahoo in the past 10 years. If you think this is not a socially acceptable attitude among a significant number of Christians, one has only to look at the enormous success of the "Left Behind" series and their horrid video game that has children at their TV sets, torturing the Jews and Muslims and other "non-believers" who were not taken up in their "rapture".
Jewish philosopherm, Emil Fackenheim, who spoke several years ago at the West End Synagogue, put it this way. "The Holocaust was the culmination of a 2,000-year campaign by the Christian world against the Jews. It began early on with them telling us, `You cannot live here as Jews.' And in country after country, they forced us to convert. Later the message became, `You cannot live here.' And in country after country, they forced us to leave. Hitler's message was, `You cannot live.' And they exterminated one-third of our people." Christianity was a rallying cry to justify what the Nazis were doing in Europe. Every soldier wore a belt buckle emblazoned with "God is with us" in German. To deny this abuse and perversion of the "Great Commission" is to deny the darkest chapter in Christianity’s history. I bring this up not to condemn Christianity, but to condemn using ANY religion’s tenets to justify demonizing "the other" and declare that any other people deserve eternal torture and punishment. And my HOPE is that by TEACHING YOUR Christian children how your religion was so HIJACKED in the past in Nazi controlled Europe, that you may better guard against the possibility of it ever happening again.
Right now in the world I see fundamentalist Islam using the self-same methods to entice their followers to believe in the rigtheousness of the violence they perpetrate on civilians.
My spirit soars in hope for humanity when I see Christians working together to speak out against those of their own fold who try to justify intolerance and bigotry with their religion.
When Christian groups form to combat the Wesboro Baptist Church fringe element, or when Christian groups speak out against the white supremacist Christian Identity movement, that speaks of a path of righteousness. When Christians promote the "Left Behind" series and encourage children at public schools to read them, promote an agenda of divisivness that all who don’t worship Jesus are of the devil and deserving of punishment, that tells this Jew, they are the kind of Christian that would have been easily swayed by the message of the "positive Christianity" of Nazi party. It was largely Christians who were their downfall, but make no mistake, it was largely a Christian fervor that allowed that atrocity to happen in the first place.May a narrow fundamentalist belief that others deserve torture or punishment NEVER again take hold in the world as it did in my parents generation. Already I’m witnessing Jew hate increasing to a degree I never hoped to see in my life and I’m witnessing people justify suffering in Israel once again, because of a "refusal to accept Jesus".
It was "godlessness" of the Communists that were the greatest political enemies of the Nazis and they focused on that by presenting themselves as the "positive Christian" alternative. They had the support of both Catholic and Protestant leaders and across Europe, where they took over areas formerly occupied by the Communists they were hailed as being sent by God to restore God to their communities. I ALSO recognize that it was LARGELY CHRISTIANS who were Hitler's DOWNFALL and I thank God for that! I do not intend to demonize Christianity in this answer..I intend to look at the harsh reality of what happened so that by examining it..people can RECOGNIZE when any leader tries to use ANY religion to incite hatreds and injustice to any group.
While there were Christian religious protests and movements against the Nazi party, it did not represent the majority opinion and they had often been former supporters who came to a realization too late of what atrocities they actually enabled. As one pastor's life gives witness: On 5th June 1945 pastor Martin Niemöller gave a press conference in Naples. He admitted that he had offered to join the German Navy in 1939. He also confessed that he had "never quarrelled with Hitler over political matters, but purely on religious grounds". This resulted in a savage attack on Niemöller from those newspapers that had presented him as a symbol of resistance to Hitler's government. In 1946 Niemöller wrote a poems that illustrated the role that the Church played in the development of Nazi Germany:First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist;Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a socialist;Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist;Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew;Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Now back to my own words. The presence of the Jews in the world and that of the eternal covenant still before their presence attests to the futility of a claim I've seen repeated quite often in Y/A, that it was "nailed to the cross". From ancient times until the present, every attempt to obliterate the eternal covenant and the people of the covenant has failed. It shall continue to fail. If nothing else is believed from the Tanakh, that message is crystal clear thousands of years after the beginning of this covenant, when Tanakh states until heaven and earth and the sun and stars pass away, that’s what it meant. Each time Israel strayed from the covenant for adoption of foreign beliefs, turned their heads when wicked kings were perverting Torah, bad things happened to the Jewish people, often at the hands of people who were supporting the very causes and beliefs that Jews had forsaken Torah to take up. This has been a clear message to those of Israel who have read Torah in each generation.
The Tanakh represents God as the Creator of all humanity and every human can connect directly to God without need for mediator, and in fact, explicitly forbids praying to or through anything on earth or in heaven before God. The righteous of all nations merit blessing and a place in the world to come. The Christian notion is that unless one believes in a particular manner and prays to or through Jesus, they merit eternal torture in a fiery underworld hell "ruled" by a demi-god of that underworld, the devil.The terms of the covenant between God and Israel mean that in every generation, this does not change. Jews have often been demonized and persecuted because as a people, we do not and shall not ever bow to or pray through any man/god deity. That fact is not going to change. You would think that nearly after the covenant people saying this to the world for 5000 years they would get it. Prophecy in the Tanakh tells us that one day the world will get it and everyone will recognize each other as brethren and all know God. The state of the world and the existence of missionaries are a de-facto admission that the Messianic age has not arrived. No one will need a sales pitch to know when it happens. Jews aren’t awaiting anyone like Jesus since the eternal covenant and the prophetic vision of the Davidic Messiah are as different between the two religions as the very nature of God is. Right now, humanity is living as a dysfunctional family that doesn’t yet recognize that we are all family, even those who don’t want the Jewish part of their family to be around. We’re not going away so you might as well get used to it.
The importance of acknowledging that passages in the New Testament exist that demonize Jews for being of the Jewish faith is really is not as much about concern of angering the Jews, but MORE so about what has been done and said to Jews in every generation since those texts appeared. While it is upsetting to see Jewish belief demonized in a book supposed to be holy, the critical thing to recognize is that those passages have been used and continue to be used to Jews to justify antisemitism.
Ever since the first appearance of the New Testament, Jews have been persecuted with violence in waves every few decades or so, by groups of fundamentalist believers who use these passages to justify that they are doing God's will.From the Crusades, to the Inquisition, to the Blood Libel charges, to the ghettos of Italy, to the Black Plague charges, to acts of violence inspired by Martin Luther's On Jews and Their Lies, to the Pogroms to the Shoah, those passages were used. My own Great Grandfather Rabbi Yoshpe was beaten by a mob led by priest. They had just left Easter services, and then the angry mob drug him to his doorstep and beat him to death in front of wife and children because he was a Rabbi. This was several decades before the Nazis arrived on the scene. Is there any doubt their acts were not fueled by the charges that Jews killed their savior?
In addition, do not forget the hundreds of speeches of Adolph Hitler who peppered them with references to the New Testament. He used them to great effect to justify the antisemitism and his "Final Solution" among a German populace who believed themselves to be God fearing Christians. He was enormously popular because he spoke against his greatest political enemies he characterized as Godless Communists. While those Communists in Russia had also victimized Jews, the German Propaganda was that they were allied with the Communists to destroy Christianity!
I will only post a couple of the hundreds of speeches I have read with similar reference to Christianity in Hitler's speeches: "My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.... "And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.... When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom to-day this poor people is plundered and exploited."
Adolf Hitler, in his speech on April 12,1922 [Note, "brood of vipers" appears in Matt. 3:7 & 12:34. John 2:15 depicts Jesus driving out the money changers (adders) from the temple.]
Hitler addressed the world at the passion plays of Oberammergau in 1942
He said: "his blood be on us and our children... [Matt 27:25], maybeI’m the one who must execute this curse... I do no more than joinwhat has been done for more than 1,500 years already. Maybe I renderChristianity the best service ever!" (Adolph Hitler)
Lastly, take some time to research the q's and a's asked of Jews in Yahoo Answers and you will often see antimerism directed to Jews often using those same passages.
In Yahoo Answers we have people even trying to turn commandments forbidding the leaving of Torah as a topsy turvy justification for condemning us because we have not! Take this one example of many:
"The NT clarifies that all true believers are now considered God's chosen people: this includes Messianic Jews and gentile Christians. Since unbelieving Jews have refused to accept the New Covenant (Jer. 31:31-36) brought by Jesus (Matt. 26:26-28), they are condemned by God (Deut. 28) and are no longer considered "chosen." (In fact, Deut. 28:62-63 explains why God permitted the Holocaust: because the Jewish people have disobeyed Him by refusing their Messiah.)"
Thankfully, when that comment was made, both Jew and many Gentiles present loudly condemned that attempt to justify one of the worst atrocities of humanity as rabidly antisemitic. The scary thing is there were also others, believing themselves to be God-fearing and decent, who support that view. And still, people ask HOW could the Germans have allowed it.
Yahoo Answers is a good place to learn how.
THAT's why Jews see Jew hate in the New Testament..because Christians in large numbers HAVE seen it and ACTED on it repeatedly and they still quote us those passages today. You may also better learn what it is Jews really believe from a Biblical context by navigating through http://www.whatjewsbelieve.org/
I'm not here to demonize Christians or the faith Christians have thorugh their new covenant of the Christian Bible. Judaism doesn't teach a thing about Christian dogma; it is simply insignificant to the eternal covenant of faith of Israel. It isn't a part of Jewish teaching at all..any more than the Quran is to a Christian.
Thankfully, when that comment was made, both Jew and many Gentiles present loudly condemned that attempt to justify one of the worst atrocities of humanity as rabidly antisemitic. The scary thing is there were also others, believing themselves to be God-fearing and decent, who support that view. And still, people ask HOW could the Germans have allowed it.
Yahoo Answers is a good place to learn how.
THAT's why Jews see Jew hate in the New Testament..because Christians in large numbers HAVE seen it and ACTED on it repeatedly and they still quote us those passages today. You may also better learn what it is Jews really believe from a Biblical context by navigating through http://www.whatjewsbelieve.org/
I'm not here to demonize Christians or the faith Christians have thorugh their new covenant of the Christian Bible. Judaism doesn't teach a thing about Christian dogma; it is simply insignificant to the eternal covenant of faith of Israel. It isn't a part of Jewish teaching at all..any more than the Quran is to a Christian.
Christianity appears to require justifying it's beliefs by negating and turning Judaism topsy-turvy. Judaism is a complete and fulfilling faith without Christianity. I cannot see the opposite to be the case since the first 2/3 of Christianity's holy scriptures are an ADAPTATION of the Tanakh.Countless times, those who have ACTED on Jew hate have justified and given reason for their actions of Jew hate on those passages. It is not for me to decide their reasons FOR them.
I am thankful that a majority of Christians do NOT take those passages at face value and use them in that manner. I am thankful to know and connect to many Christians who do not do this. I pray that more Christians will become aware of how those passages have been used for 2000 so that such abuses stop. It is important to recognize that for any belief system, not just Christianity, religious fundamentalism can be used to incite people to do uncivilized things in a civilized nation. The Christian majority populace in Europe who gave him massive popular support did so because they believed they were also serving the interests of THEIR faith. If millions can be brainwashed by such things, we need to KNOW HOW it happened! Denial that he used Christianity is so dangerous in my view. Denial that people are using Christian doctrine today to create and spread antisemitism is dangerous, too.
For any Christians reading this, it is my sincere hope that now that you've become aware of the history and the antisemitism that exists in the New Testament that you will help to dispel the hate through your own individual actions and then help to inspire others.
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