Lenten Violence
Reflections on the Lectionary for March 16th
The season of Lent stands out in the Christian year as a time of special focus on a few different things. It’s a time when many Christians think a lot about mortality, for example, and it’s a season of contemplation on the relationship between personal piety and salvation. For many people, Lent is a season of repentance, or of generosity to others, or divine mercy. But historically, Lent has also stood out in another way: it has been a time of increased anti-Semitism on the part of Christians and a season of intensified persecution of Jews.
Christians are not always aware of this, and sometimes we object when someone points it out. Many Christians would reject the idea that Christianity is opposed to Judaism at all, and many or most Christians probably don’t see their own religious practices as contributing to the marginalization or persecution of others. But the historical pattern is clear: the season of Lent has tended to lead to trouble for Jewish communities that live in proximity to Christians. Lent, and especially Easter, have been times when Christians have committed acts of violence against Jews, instigated pogroms, attacked synagogues, and openly criticized Jews based on old stereotypes.
Why is this true? The simplest answer is that the biblical texts that get read and preached during Lent are the ones that put Jews and Judaism most squarely in the crosshairs of the Christian story, and Christians hear those stories and sermons in church and then go out and act violently. Think about it—Lent includes the stories of Jesus’ trials, suffering, and death, as well as many stories leading up to those events. The way the gospels tell those stories, this was a time when tension was ratcheting up around Jesus, and he found himself increasingly at odds with the religious and political authorities around him. The gospels tell the story of Jesus’ last days as a story of a righteous outlier standing up to a corrupt system—a hero being unjustly persecuted by an ensemble cast of villains. Different gospels do this differently. The Gospel of John, for example, mostly uses the Greek word Ioudaioi, which can translate Jews or Judeans, to describe all the people around Jesus with one blanket term. That’s probably because the Gospel of John was written after the Jewish War, when many of the important distinctions between sub-groups of Ioudaioi had been erased and subtlety was less important. The synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) though, were likely written earlier, and they use the names of specific groups of Ioudaioi—groups like the Sadducees and the Pharisees—because when those gospels were written those groups were still important. To some scholars, the Gospel of Luke seems to have a special agenda of placating Roman authorities and casting Jesus as an innocent man who was made to suffer unjustly. The different gospels all have different agendas and different ways of telling the story of Jesus, but all of them in one way or another use Jews (or Judeans) as a foil for Jesus and as antagonists for telling Jesus’ story. I’ll say more below on why that is.
Those stories get read out loud and preached in churches during Lent, and historically that has been bad for Jews. Church audiences, not understanding the ways the gospels were using Jews as characters in a story and not understanding that the Jews of their own place and time were not the same as the Jews in the story, sometimes launched attacks on their neighbors. One of the most consequential modern examples was the Kishinev Pogrom, which began in what’s now Moldova on Easter Day of 1903 and led to the deaths of dozens of Jews. A modern Spanish tradition called Matar Judíos, which translates as Killing Jews, began in the high Middle Ages as a tradition of committing violence against Jews. The 1920 Nebi Musa riots, which saw both Jews and non-Jews killed, began around Easter and are a reminder that the current violence in Palestine has very old and deep roots. This article is a good introduction to why Good Friday, in particular, was a dangerous time to be Jewish in Europe in the Middle Ages. For centuries, the Christian season of Lent and its culmination at Easter have been a pretext for Christians to hurt and kill Jews.
What does that have to do with us? Well, we who call ourselves Christians today are the heirs and inheritors of those traditions, even if we don’t want to be. If we claim Christianity, then we also must claim the legacies of violence that have been carried out in the name of Christianity, which include (but are hardly limited to) violence against Jews. It’s tempting to say things like the people who did those things weren’t really Christians, or violence is never a truly Christian response. But the history of Christianity is a violent one, and violence is very much a Christian practice—especially violence against Jews.
But it doesn’t have to be. That’s where the gospel reading for the second Sunday of Lent comes in. On the surface, this is exactly the kind of passage that has usually spelled bad news for Jews any time it has been read aloud or preached in a Christian community. All the big pieces are there. The Pharisees show up in the passage, who the gospels usually depict as Jesus’ enemies. There’s talk of Herod—the king of the territory that included Galilee—wanting to kill Jesus. Jesus seemingly refers to his own death in the context of Jerusalem’s history of killing its own prophets (though the Bible is thin on stories of that actually happening). The whole passage is a part of that ratcheting-up of tensions that I talked about earlier—the quickening sense in the latter halves of the gospels that Jesus was heading toward a violent confrontation with his opponents. Hearing these verses read aloud, many people would jump to the conclusion that this passage is about Jesus preemptively identifying his killers—his Jewish killers—and people would have felt driven to exact vengeance by attacking Jews in their own time and place.
But that is not at all what this passage is about.
The first thing to notice here is that the Pharisees are acting like Jesus’ friends, not his enemies. While many of the New Testament passages depict Jesus and the Pharisees as opponents, many scholars think that this is partly due to the circumstances of the gospels’ composition. The gospels were all written during or (probably) after the Jewish War, when there would have been big incentives for the nascent Jesus-movement to distance itself from the Judeans and Jews who had just launched a big rebellion against Rome. It made sense for gospel writers in the 70s or 80s to depict Jesus and Jews as each others’ opponents, but it was far more likely, 40 or 50 years earlier, that they would have seen each other as fellow travelers or kindred spirits. (My own opinion, for which there is scant evidence either for or against, is that if pressed Jesus probably would have identified himself as a Pharisee, or at least as aligned and allied with them). Indeed, that is precisely what we see in this passage: the Pharisees are acting like Jesus’ friends. They are the ones who find Jesus and tell him to be careful; they tip him off to a pending danger to his life. That is not the action of an enemy. If the Pharisees wanted Jesus dead, they simply could have said nothing, and Herod could have done his work. But the Pharisees intervened on Jesus’ behalf.
We should also notice the role of Herod. The Herod in question here is Herod Antipas, who was the tetrarch of Galilee and Perea. This Herod was the son of Herod the Great—the same Herod the Great we meet in Jesus’ birth narratives. It is easy for 21st century Christians to make the mistake of dividing the people in the gospel stories into Jesus-followers, Romans, and Jews, and therefore making Herod Antipas the captain of the Jewish team. But that is wrong, and it oversimplifies things far too much. In reality, almost all the Jesus-followers we meet in the gospels were Jews, including Jesus, and Herod himself was much more closely aligned with Roman governance and administration than with the perspectives of the Jewish people. (In fact, many Jewish people of his day hated Herod for a variety of reasons, one of which was the persistent charge that he wasn’t really Jewish at all). Herod Antipas was the sort of local ruler that the Roman Empire often used as a buffer between the local populations and their own imperial functionaries; in this case, Herod’s job was to make the job of Pontius Pilate (the Roman governor of Judea) a little bit easier. So when the Pharisees told Jesus that Herod was trying to kill him, it was really a case of Jews telling Jesus (also a Jew) to be careful of how the Roman apparatus was out to get him.
Because of the circumstances in which the gospels were written—in the wake of the Jewish War and as the early Jesus movement was trying to distinguish itself from Jewish groups—we have to read between the lines of the gospels if we want to get an accurate sense of what might have been the case historically. Perhaps a helpful analogy would be to imagine trying to understand a presidential election based only on what was said and done in the primaries. Lots of things get said and done in presidential primaries that don’t reflect the dynamics of the general election—and vice versa. If we focus on only one moment in a larger story, people who ended up as allies might look like enemies, or people who ended up as enemies might look like allies. Or imagine something like the NCAA tournament; rooting interests shift and evolve as the tournament goes on, and fans of traditional rivals might find themselves cheering for a team they would otherwise cheer against—and if you saw one of those fans cheering for a team in one of those games, you might get the wrong idea about where their true loyalties lie. Those are very imperfect analogies, but they capture one of the key problems with interpreting the New Testament, and interpreting the gospels in particular: we are looking at only one snapshot of one moment in time, and we are not seeing the whole story. The gospels were written at a time when tensions between the Jesus movement and Jewish communities were high, and when it made sense for the gospel writers to emphasize the differences rather than the similarities. But we can see, under the surface in passages like this week’s lectionary gospel reading, that there were more similarities than might first meet the eye.
If we read between the lines of Luke 13:31-35, we can see that the story of the relationship between Jesus and the Pharisees (or Jesus and Jews as a whole) was much more complicated than many gospel stories suggest—and likely friendlier. The gospels often depict Jesus and the Pharisees (or Jesus and other groups of Jews, like the council) as enemies or opponents, but that’s an emphasis that might come more from the late first century than from Jesus’ own day. The gospels have a persistent bias against Jews, and especially against Pharisees, but if we read them responsibly and with an eye to historical nuance, we can find a more complicated history.
That more complicated history, in turn, helps us do more justice in the present. If we understand that stories of Jews and Pharisees are filtered through later conflicts, and if we understand that we are viewing a particular moment in time that might not represent other moments in time, we can escape the Jews vs. Christians narrative that so often dominates Christian readings of the New Testament. If we understand that Jesus might have been more of a friend to the Pharisees than an enemy, we can gain a new appreciation for the sources of some of his ideas and for the kinds of conversations they had together. And most importantly, if we take a broader view of the history of Jews and Christians, and if we understand their history together as one of ongoing conversation and even mutual aid, we can turn away from the histories of persecution that Christians have enacted against Jews for centuries. It’s too late to undo the violence that has been done in the past, but it’s not too late to live differently in the future.