The Real Pharisees

Unless you’re well versed in Jewish history and Judaism, most people who hear the term Pharisee have the knee-jerk reaction to associate that label with “ hypocrite”. If that is the case for you, dear reader, I'll bet your notion of a Pharisee is from the New Testament. That definition is not compatible with the Jewish history version of their lives and legacy. New Testament doctrine demonized them because they refused to abandon the eternal covenant (testament) of Torah to worship a Hellenized man/god and assimilate into the Roman empire.

 Their depiction in the New Testament is hardly flattering to say the least. I doubt that my information regarding the Pharisees will be taken seriously by Christians for whom their New Testament is believed to be infallible. The Christian Bible presents Jesus as having a great conflict with the Pharisees. I cannot assume that Jesus had such a problem with the Pharisees, especially since so many of this most popular "quotes" are the precise teachings of the Pharisees who came before him!

 I think that it was the writers of the New Testament who had the problems with the Pharisees and their strict adherence to Torah’s commands to not add new deities and their refusal to assimilate into the Roman Empire.  The Pharisees were also a political threat to the Romans because they promoted equality and literacy for all classes.

 The Pharisees were the members of the sect of Judaism that promoted education and literacy for all classes, not just the wealthy or elite that were literate across the Roman Empire.  They believed that Torah should be able to be read and understood by all people. The Pharisees also accepted converts as fully Jewish and some other sects did not.  Ironically,  the one sect so often mentioned as being one that Jesus perhaps had received training from, the Essenes, did not accept converts.  The Pharisees were self-named because they wanted to keep Torah *separate* from pagan, foreign influence (Hellenized and Roman man/gods).  

The name Pharisee comes from the Hebrew word perushim, the plural of  פָּרוּשׁ  the Hebrew word parush, meaning set apart or separate.  They arose as a separate group of Jews during the Greek occupation; a time when the Greek rulers were working to assimilate the Jewish people by mixing their deities with Judaism. For some, their efforts worked. There were quite a few Hellenized Jews, so impressed with Greek philosophy and literature that they believed it superior to the ways of the conquered Israel.  Greek philosophy still even managed to influence Judaism despite the Pharisees.

 The legacy of the Pharisees writings and the Jewish history of their lives do not indicate they were hypocritical elitists the New Testament depicts, but Jews dedicated to keeping the covenant of Israel intact without corruption from idolatry. The Pharisees of the New Testament are depicted as people for whom observance of rote custom and ritual were all important.  They were viewed as going through the physical motions and outward observances without emphasizing the ethics and justice underlying the reason for the customs or conveying the deep spiritual meanings or connection. The New Testament depicts them as being spiritually devoid.

 It is in fact that Judaism the Pharisees sought to protect centers on the Torah's precepts that teach that each individual rich or poor, Jew or Gentile, connects to God directly without intermediary in a very real, living relationship.  It is the Pharisees that taught that how we live toward one another and care for the world around us is a reflection of our connection to our faith. The Pharisees did not demonize other nations because they did not believe the same as they do, but they would speak out just as the Jews of today are obligated to do, the modern day actual Pharisees speak out when we are told that we must accept AS JEWISH, beliefs and practices that are directly forbidden by the eternal covenant of Israel.

 Some Christian missionaries preach the libelous fallacy that the Pharisees and later the Rabbis who came from them corrupted Torah by adding to it.

It was not Pharisees who sought to either add to or take away from law. They rejected any and all attempts from any who would try to do such a thing. It is because they REFUSED to add and take away from the law of Torah  that they were hated by first the Hellenists and Romans, and then the Christians whose concepts of Jesus as an incarnate manifestation of the Divine and of human sacrifice to atone for sin are also forbidden by the Torah to separate the Jew from the eternal covenant.

 The Sadducees were the elitists and among whom were the greatest number of collaborators with Rome and whose followers included many of the most Hellenized Jews. The Pharisees were the group that included the common people and the convert. The Pharisees did not have the attitude of being separate from other Jews adherent to the covenant, or from the common people, but to be separate from FOREIGN (Hellenizing) influences.

The most egregiously mistaken notion promoted about the Pharisees and their purpose for SEPARATION is that they were elitist who held themselves above others, including other Jews!.  The Pharisees taught that Torah put forth that God was not a distant deity that only spoke to emperors and kings or became one Himself ..but taught that our Creator is a personal deity that ALL can connect with directly. The very identity of the covenant nation was established when every man woman and child who left Egypt had a personal divine revelation at Sinai.  “You have been shown in order to know that God, He is the Supreme Being. There is none besides Him. From heaven he let you hear His voice in order to teach you, and on earth He showed you His great fire, and you heard His words amid the fire.” (Deut. 4:32-36) That is just one of several passages in Torah that refer to this collective and personal Divine revelatory experience.

 The Pharisees were demonized in the New Testament by the new religious sect that was created to try to replace Judaism.  What do groups that try to justify replacement of another tend to do to the group they're trying to replace? They blame every ill of the world on the other and assign to them (projections) undesirable attributes that they themselves possess or that they know can evoke fear and loathing so that the demonized group will be viewed with disdain and their words not taken seriously.

 Hellenized Jews and Romans believed the philosophy and wisdom of the Greeks could and should be combined with Torah. The Pharisees ..then and today.. reject this as it is forbidden to alter the covenant and its purpose.

 "The conflict between the high priesthood and the people led to the split between the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The elitist Sadducees (who generally controlled the high priesthood) were supported by the Hasmonean royal family and later by the Romans." 

 "The Pharisees. These were mainstream Jews who wanted nothing to do with the Romans, but they were pragmatic. They wanted Judaism to survive and short of giving up their religious principles were willing to make the best of the Roman domination. They disapproved of the other Jewish factions - those that tried to curry favor with the Romans and those that advocated open rebellion. " < this from http://www.aish.com/jl/h/cc/48943421.html

Here are just a few words of some Pharisees:
"They said of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai that no man ever greeted him first, even idol worshippers in the market" [i.e., Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai was the first to greet every person, even idol worshippers](Berachot 17). ( This is the FIRST Pharisee to be given the title Rabbi)

"[it is proper to] support the idol worshippers during the sabbatical year …. and to inquire after their welfare [commentators: even on the days of the holidays of their idols, even if they do not keep the seven Noahide commandments] because of the ways of peace." (Shevi'it4,3)

'We support poor Gentiles with the poor people of Israel, and we visit sick Gentiles as well as the sick of Israel and we bury the dead of the Gentiles as well as the dead of Israel, because of the ways of peace." (Gitin 61a)

Paul is often brought up as an example of a Pharisee. Let's just see how that holds up to scrutiny.
**No Jewish writings of the 1st or 2nd century so much as mention a renegade student of Gamaliel who had a faith altering vision. No mention of a star pupil of Gamaliel who became a heretic and urged his followers to disregard Torah's laws of diet and Sabbath observance. No mention of a former student who pronounced the Law and circumcision obsolete. Surely such a renegade could not have completely escaped the attention of the scribes? No writings attributed to Gamaliel or his later students refer to such a man.**(paraphrasing from an article I read by Kenneth Humphries)

A claim that such a thing was removed or hidden is unlikely since from the Torah onward, no Jewish writings have evaded the wrongdoers or those who stray or violate Torah as the Tanakh so clearly reveals.

An more unbiased view based on the evidence would more likely indicate that NT claim was a latter insertion to support Paul’s self proclaimed status.

The writings of Paul don't support that he was a master pupil of Gamaliel. Paul clearly had difficulty with the Hebrew language: all his scriptural references are taken from the Greek translation of Jewish scripture, the Septuagint. The only portion of what is now commonly called the Septuagint translated by “the 70” Jewish scribes was the Torah, the Prophets and Writing were translated over the course of several hundred years by unknown translators. The evidence of Paul's own writings reveal he was a Hellenized, apostate Jew.

"Nothing in his letters suggests that Paul had any official standing in his treatment of Christians ... Hence, in opposition to what Luke says, he could not have used arrest, torture or imprisonment as a means of forcing Christians to recognize that they had been misled." – Murphy O'Connor, Paul, His History, p19

The writings of the Pharisees that were handed down over the generations to us today reveal lives that are collectively the opposite of the nefarious depictions of them in the NT replacement theology.

 The history of the Pharisees is the living legacy of the eternal Torah that they preserved by refusing to assimilate idolatrous concepts into Jewish practices. 

 Unfortunately, for millions of people who believe their New Testament to be inerrant, its fallacious demonization and depiction is also believed to be inerrant, no matter what evidence may exist to the contrary. The authors of the New Testament libeled the Pharisees in to discredit their rejection of introduction of Hellenized and Romanized god/man concepts that God forbids in the Torah.

 I thank God that not all Christians have focused on the hundreds of demonizing passages in the New Testament and actually focus on the more Jewish (and Pharisee taught Hillel school of thought) teachings regarding teshuva. An example of that would be the Sermon on the Mount including the portion they call the Lord's prayer.

 Are there people who fit the false New Testament depiction of the Pharisees today?

 Examine the Hebrew Christian evangelicals that claim Jewish identity and who give all outward physical appearance of strict adherence to Torah. They’ll wear kippot and tallit and keep kashrut and other observances and claim to be "Torah observant" Messianic Jews, while forcing foreign and forbidden beliefs and contradictory meanings to the rituals and laws of Torah to violate core precepts of faith of Judaism. That fits the New Testament definition of Pharisee precisely to give lip service to observance while living in complete contradiction to the ethical precepts and faith of Judaism.

Those are people who claim to be righteous and claim to honor the customs and holidays of Judaism, yet in reality have only outward and superficial posturing appearance as Jews and go through altered forms of Jewish rituals without any spiritual connection to the Creator who commanded them when they do them in the name of a false incarnate god and rely upon human sacrifice instead of the Torah’s path for repentance.

  It is utmost hypocrisy to claim Torah observance if your *observance* or acting out of a rituals is done to honor a contradictory belief to the precepts and ethics that the rituals and customs were commanded in Torah to honor for eternity, or even those that later arose through practice in Diaspora lands to honor Torah and God exclusively.

 Imposing Jesus into any Jewish custom or Torah commanded holy observance is the antithesis of Torah observance, thus they are complete hypocrites and fit that common vernacular definition of "Pharisee" in their own religions usage.

 http://www.aish.com/literacy/jewishhistory/Crash_Course_in_Jewish_History_Part_28_-_Greek_Persecution.asp

 A good place to get background on Pharisees and Sadducees.

 http://www.jewfaq.org/movement.htm < another EXCELLENT page to help you

 Judaism survived and Jews exist today primarily because the Pharisees refused to abandon Torah and dishonor God’s commands for the eternal covenant people.

 A quote from the jewfaq site above:

 "The Pharisaic school of thought is the only one that survived the destruction of the Temple. The Zealots were killed off during the war with Rome. The Sadducees could not survive without the Temple, which was the center of their religion. The Essenes, who were never very numerous, were apparently killed off by the Romans (they were easily recognizable in their isolated communities).

 For many centuries after the destruction of the Temple, there was no large-scale, organized difference of opinion within Judaism. Judaism was Judaism, and it was basically the same as what we now know as Orthodox Judaism. There were some differences in practices and customs between the Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe and the Sephardic Jews of Spain and the Middle East, but these differences were not significant. See Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews"

 Even though Christianity demonizes the Pharisees for its rejection of the replacement of the eternal covenant, Christianity is also *dependent* on a concept that was taught by the Pharisees. Belief in the eventual resurrection of the dead is a fundamental belief of traditional Judaism. It was a belief that distinguished the Pharisees from the Sadducees.

 There is no mention of the Pharisees in the Tanakh and the reason being that the sect of the Pharisees, or separatists, did not yet exist. They originated in the third century BCE long after the last of the texts of Tanakh appeared. They were trying to keep the Torah "separate" from outside influence being imposed upon it by the Greek and later Roman conquerors who wanted the Jews to add their Emperor mangods and other deities into Jewish belief, after all, that‘s what other nations conquered by the Greeks and Romans did! Religion and rule were inseparable.

 Modern day Pharisees continue to be a thorn in the side of those who want us to assimilate out of existence by abandoning our eternal covenant to take upon ourselves, beliefs and forms of worship forbidden by God's commandments in the Torah for the Jewish people.

 I am proud to be of the legacy of the real Pharisees.

Am Yisrael Chai!

More About Antisemitism And It's Reasons

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.

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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