Finally getting back to this. I'll take up the question of Old Testament war in a follow up, but I want to start by making the perhaps tedious but necessary point that there is a difference between what a text actually says and how it is perceived. There is no doubt - no doubt - that some have rationalized their Jew hatred by appealing t…
Finally getting back to this. I'll take up the question of Old Testament war in a follow up, but I want to start by making the perhaps tedious but necessary point that there is a difference between what a text actually says and how it is perceived. There is no doubt - no doubt - that some have rationalized their Jew hatred by appealing to the New Testament text. But their appeal is incoherent and fundamentally in contradiction to the entire message of the New Testament. (Flannery O'Connor wrote in a note to a friend, that the best time for a writer was when he has finished his work, but before it is published and "begins to be misunderstood". The more I write and see responses, the more I'm team O'Connor on this question. ) Take, for example, your reference to the epithet "Christ-killers". Those who use(d) that pejorative are/were engaging in a kind of linguistic jujitsu which turned the actual words of Jesus himself on their head. "Christ-killer" introduces the pernicious idea that the circumstances around Jesus death involved his victimization. But that idea, as it happens, is precisely and explicitly the opposite of the way he himself described his death: "No one takes my life from me, I lay it down of my own accord." My only point here is that how malevolent people might have appealed to the biblical text as a way to justify their own malevolence, and what the text ACTUALLY says, are very often entirely different things. I could go on with this line of reasoning but no one who ever read the apostle Paul with honesty could come away without perceiving his deep love and longing for the Jewish people of whom, of course, he himself was a notable example, as was Jesus. The New Testament is only a manual for hatred in the same sense that the Koran presents Islam as a religion of peace, which is to say, not at all. And yet, to your point, people will still perceive things in precisely this way. Though I myself have never met anyone who has actually taken the time to read both books in their full context who then still came away with that perspective.
Finally getting back to this. I'll take up the question of Old Testament war in a follow up, but I want to start by making the perhaps tedious but necessary point that there is a difference between what a text actually says and how it is perceived. There is no doubt - no doubt - that some have rationalized their Jew hatred by appealing to the New Testament text. But their appeal is incoherent and fundamentally in contradiction to the entire message of the New Testament. (Flannery O'Connor wrote in a note to a friend, that the best time for a writer was when he has finished his work, but before it is published and "begins to be misunderstood". The more I write and see responses, the more I'm team O'Connor on this question. ) Take, for example, your reference to the epithet "Christ-killers". Those who use(d) that pejorative are/were engaging in a kind of linguistic jujitsu which turned the actual words of Jesus himself on their head. "Christ-killer" introduces the pernicious idea that the circumstances around Jesus death involved his victimization. But that idea, as it happens, is precisely and explicitly the opposite of the way he himself described his death: "No one takes my life from me, I lay it down of my own accord." My only point here is that how malevolent people might have appealed to the biblical text as a way to justify their own malevolence, and what the text ACTUALLY says, are very often entirely different things. I could go on with this line of reasoning but no one who ever read the apostle Paul with honesty could come away without perceiving his deep love and longing for the Jewish people of whom, of course, he himself was a notable example, as was Jesus. The New Testament is only a manual for hatred in the same sense that the Koran presents Islam as a religion of peace, which is to say, not at all. And yet, to your point, people will still perceive things in precisely this way. Though I myself have never met anyone who has actually taken the time to read both books in their full context who then still came away with that perspective.