If you have been reading this Substack for a while now, you have probably noticed that I write a lot about anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism in biblical interpretation. This is partly because of the way I was trained; as part of both my masters degree and my doctoral degree, I took most of my New Testament courses from Jewish scholars, and that experience imparted in me a sensitivity to Christian anti-Judaism that has really stuck. And it’s partly because of the kinds of things I have researched and written and taught over the years, on the topics of early Christian anti-Jewish writings, later Christian misunderstandings of figures like Paul, and the whole sweep of the history of Christianity that has been marked by violent words and actions against Jews. Once you begin to see how anti-Judaism is embedded in Christian thought and practice, it’s hard to ignore it again.
This Christian anti-Judaism takes many forms, some of which are more overt than others. On the most outright and obvious end of the scale, you find things like the claim that Christianity has superseded Judaism, and that Judaism is a dead or defunct religion. Many, many Christians make this claim, in one way or another, even though most of them ought to know better. It’s a claim that is unsupported by biblical texts, but Christian theology has wrapped certain parts of the Bible in a veneer of certainty that makes it seem like those texts support that perspective. One of those texts, Jeremiah 31:31-34, is in the lectionary for this week. More on that in a moment.
But there are many other forms of Christian anti-Judaism that are less obvious. For example, many conservative and evangelical Christians hold a strong support for the modern state of Israel that at first glance looks like interreligious solidarity, but upon further examination is actually a strange self-serving kind of prophetic matchmaking. (These Christians often believe that the modern state of Israel is key to the unfolding of prophecies that they have discerned in the Bible, and they think that they must support Israel in order to bring about the second coming of Christ or the end times, even if they simultaneously think that Judaism as a religion is bad or defunct). Mainline Protestant Christians and Catholic Christians often casually denigrate Jews and Judaism without even realizing it, emphasizing aspects of their own theologies that have been born out of polemics against Jews. A good example of this is the Protestant emphasis on faith, which was cast in the Reformation era as a contrast to the “works righteousness” of both Catholicism and Judaism. To many Christians, “faith” might seem like an uncontroversially good thing, but historically it has taken the form of attacks against Jews. And I have heard many Mainline Protestants engage in the practice of calling their theological or ecclesial enemies “Pharisees,” in a way that misconstrues the historical meaning of the word, taking the New Testament’s intra-Jewish debates as timeless verdicts on ancient people and applying those ancient biases to unrelated modern situations. (Unless you’re referring to an actual ancient Pharisee, it’s never a good idea to call anyone a Pharisee, for any reason).
Liberal or “progressive” Christians engage in anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic practices too, even if they might be doing it unawares, or even if they might deny that they do it. Christians of all kinds, but especially liberal ones, often emphasize that Jesus was a bringer of peace and love—that he was a religious reformer who came to correct or reset the Jewish tradition, or introduce some previously-unknown part of religion. I hear this from congregants and students all the time. Sometimes people talk about a “God of the Old Testament” and a “God of the New Testament,” as if the New Testament suddenly seized upon the idea that God might be benevolent, or as if the New Testament does not contain a great many horrifying things that are attributed to God (and Jesus). Even if this kind of claim, that the God of Jesus is a God of love, is made with good intentions, it is still anti-Jewish, since it paints Judaism’s God as a vindictive, bloodthirsty, violent God, and Judaism as devoted to that kind of a violent deity. In the past six months, I have heard a lot of left-wing Christians insisting that we must separate Jews from the state of Israel, because of Israel’s actions in Gaza. This undoubtedly comes from a place of good intentions, and it is a sentiment that I share. And yet, there are complicated ways in which such a sentiment undermines the religious identity of many Jews, strips Jewish identity of some of its most important forms of belonging, and reinforces some of the same harm that it’s meant to avoid.
Perhaps there is no way for a tradition like Christianity, which after all is founded by Jewish people based on Jewish traditions and Jewish scriptures and worships a Jewish messiah and the Jewish God, to avoid stepping on Jewish toes. To use the language of the modern left, Christianity will always be involved in the “appropriation” of Judaism at some level, and there probably isn’t much we can do about that fundamental problem. But I am convinced that there are ways we can be more ethical in the practice of Christianity, and do less harm to Jews and to Judaism. We can’t unwind the clock and keep Christianity from perpetrating its millennia of harm against Jews, but we can do our best to stop causing harm in the future. This is especially urgent in a moment when nationalist and Christian nationalist movements across Europe and the United States are resurrecting old anti-Semitic tropes, and when the war in Gaza has caused a tidal wave of casual anti-Semitism on social media.
So, the lectionary. The lectionary in Lent is always a minefield for anyone who is trying to be careful about anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, and this week’s fifth Sunday of Lent readings are a perfect example of why. Leaving aside the Psalms (which still have a lot of potential for anti-Jewish or supersessionist readings), the other texts in the lectionary this week all deal with the kinds of things that have historically led to Christian anti-Semitism. They all, in their own ways, represent one or more mines in that minefield of Lenten readings, where the unsuspecting interpreter can cause harm to Jews and to Judaism, purposefully or not. I’ll take them one by one, talking about what’s difficult about each one, and offering some thoughts on how to interpret them in less-harmful, more-ethical ways.
First, Jeremiah 31:31-34. This passage contains a phrase, “new covenant,” that is like catnip to Christians. If you are trying to premise your religious movement on supersessionism (the idea that God has chosen Christians like you to replace Israel as a chosen and favored people), nothing could be more promising than a “new covenant.” The Bible is full of covenants, large and small, and several of those covenants were made between God and Israel. In Jeremiah 31, God is promising to “make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah,” one that will be more durable than the covenant God made with the people of Israel as they exited Egypt. Christians somehow read this covenant, which again, is “with the house of Israel and the house of Judah,” to be a covenant not with Israel and Judah at all, but with gentile Christians. Christians see themselves in it—they understand the “new covenant” to refer to Christianity—even though the text of Jeremiah itself explicitly says that the “new covenant” is with Judah and Israel, and even though Jeremiah was written hundreds of years before Christianity even existed. This is textbook anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism: a Christian claim to ownership of a promise God made directly to Israel and Judah.
What, then, should Christians do with this passage when it shows up in the lectionary? I can imagine several options. First, you could notice that this passage presumes God’s faithfulness and perseverance—that God, here, is making new covenants even in the presence of earlier covenants. If God has been this faithful in the past, one might ask, who knows what forms of faithfulness God will display in the future? You don’t have to deny this covenant to Jews to come away with the idea that God is faithful, and will remain faithful into the future. Second, you could use this passage to talk about forgiveness. Christians tend to think that Jesus was the first one to ever imagine sin being forgiven, and that Christians have a corner on the idea, but this passage (and dozens of others) show us that it’s an old idea, one rooted in the Jewish experience of the divine. And it shows us that forgiveness (and forgiveness of sins) is an idea that’s much larger than the substitionary atonement scheme that so many Christians theologies presume. God does not require blood to forgive sin, as so many Christians have proclaimed; here in Jeremiah, God promises not only to forgive sin, but to forget it too.
What about the “epistle” text in this week’s lectionary, Hebrews 5:5-10? (Hebrews, although it is collected with the epistles in the New Testament and often called “Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews,” is not an epistle, nor was it written by Paul, nor is it addressed to the Hebrews). I love Hebrews, because it is so delightfully weird. It is like nothing else in the New Testament. It’s probably a homily (a short sermon) from first-century Rome, although scholars still debate this. Hebrews is fairly unique in the way it thinks about Jesus as a priest and sacrifice—as an extension of the Jewish temple’s sacrificial system and priestly hierarchy. And because of that, Hebrews dwells on the history of Israel’s priesthood in ways that nothing else does. (That’s why you’re probably rushing to look up “Melchizedek” in your bible dictionary this week).
Christians have sometimes used Hebrews’ logic—that Jesus belongs to a lineage of pre-Mosaic, pre-temple priests that begins with Melchizedek—as a way to argue that Jesus simply bypasses all of Israel’s history and tradition, and that Jesus represents a hard reset on God’s plan for Israel. That might have been what the author of Hebrews meant; scholars have long recognized Hebrews’ potential as an anti-Jewish tract. But there is nothing that says that Christians have to follow Hebrews’ logic here; there is nothing that dictates that Christians have to see Jesus as an end-run around Jewish tradition. Instead, we can read Hebrews’ grounding of Jesus in ancient Jewish tradition as an endorsement of Jesus’ own Jewish religious heritage, and as an expression of Judaism’s importance, rather than as an affront to it.
The final reading in the lectionary this week, the gospel reading, comes from John. John is consistently one of the most troublesome gospels for Jewish-Christian relations, because by the time it was written the community behind John seems to have been in a great deal of conflict with other kinds of Jewish people. While the other gospels speak of Pharisees and Sadducees, the Gospel of John conflates all of Jesus’ opponents into “the Jews” and flattens out the many textured differences within first-century Judaism into a singular “Jewish” opponent for John’s community. So, many modern readers of John (as well as many medieval readers, and many others along the way) have heard John’s arguments against “the Jews” of the first century as wholesale denouncements of all Jews everywhere. This is bad history and bad exegesis, but it’s shockingly common and persistent, across many different kinds of Christianity, both past and present. Some of the most damaging words in Christian scripture come from John, and over the centuries they have led to a lot of bloodshed. But this part of John, at least this narrow selection of it, is not overtly anti-Jewish.
But there is still room for trouble. The text specifies in 12:20 that this conversation is between Jesus’ disciples and “some Greeks.” And later on, in 12:29, we encounter the presence of “the crowd,” and we hear that crowd’s interpretation of what had happened. Both “some Greeks” and “the crowd” contribute to a sense that the action in this scene is playing out a drama about Jesus’ place in a larger swirl of identities and affiliations. “The crowd” in John and other gospels can often be a stand-in for Jewish people and Jewish concerns; gospels use “the crowd” sort of like a chorus in a Greek play, to express conventional wisdom that Jesus and the narrator can then oppose. Here, notice, the narrator tells us that “the crowd” is wrong about what they perceive. They think that the sound was thunder or an angel, when the narrator has told us that the sound was the voice of God. And, to return to the beginning of the passage, notice that it is not “the crowd” or even “the Jews” who approach Jesus’ disciples in the first place, with a desire to encounter Jesus. Instead, it was Greeks, gentiles, non-Jews, who initiate this whole sequence with their pious curiosity.
So, while the potential for anti-Judaism is subtle here, it’s still present, and it’s the kind of thing that can make its way into our interpretations in subtle but powerful ways. By emphasizing that it was Greeks and not Jews who were curious about Jesus, and by emphasizing how wrong “the crowd” was about what they saw, the text sets up an anti-Jewish reading. And if we don’t resist that reading, we can fall into the same trap. Especially in Lent, Christians have a long history of scapegoating Jews, and setting up our own stories and theologies as if they were challenges to Jewish stories and theologies. It doesn’t have to be that way. As you interpret all of these texts—and study them, and proclaim them—take care that your Christianity doesn’t come at the expense of anyone else.