Resisting Christian anti-Judaism
Jews, Judeans and Ioudaioi in the New Testament
Featured Contributor: Wes Howard-Brook
The Problem
One of the deepest causes of anti-Judaism (a religious opposition, in contrast to “anti-Semitism,” a racial/ethnic opposition) is Christianity.
It is essential that anyone concerned with Jesus, the Gospels and working together toward a just and sustainable planet for all hear this loudly and clearly: the single biggest historical source of anti-Judaism is Christianity. When one hears “anti-Judaism,” one’s thoughts might well turn to the Nazis. But the anti-Judaism of Hitler found its theology in Luther, as Luther did from those who went before him. My own Jewish forebears escaped Russia in the late 19th century to avoid the pograms supported by the Russian Orthodox Church. It was not until after Vatican II in the mid 1960s that the Roman Catholic Church officially gave up the view that Jews-as-Jews were all condemned to “hell.”
This is, as they say, a “feature,” not a “bug.” The Jewish Jesus had no intention to “start a new religion.” In fact, such a concept itself was unimaginable to someone in his cultural context. His intentions—as the Gospels reveal so clearly—were to inspire a “God’s reign now” movement among any who would listen, using the Hebrew Bible and his mystical experience of the One as his sources. Saul of Tarsus understood this perfectly well. He never refers to “Christianity” or “Christians.” Rather, he sees Jesus as YHWH’s eschatological prophet, following Daniel in proclaiming—and then embodying—the hope for resurrection for “the wise,” i.e., anyone who resisted empire without violence. There are three uses of Christianos in the New Testament: Acts 11.26; 26.28 and 1 Peter 4.16. The first and third show the term as an accusation by others; the second is put into the mouth of Herod Agrippa by the author of Acts.
How It Came About
So what happened to generate an explicitly anti-Jewish, “new religion” in the name of Jesus? It’s a complex story, one which I tell (in part) in my book, Empire Baptized: How the Church Embraced What Jesus Rejected, 2nd-5th Centuries (Orbis 2016). Here’s the short version.
The Roman elite world was highly suspicious of philosophical or political “novelty.” Its deeply conservative view of itself and society was based on a loose analogy between the empire and a human body: as a body tended to deteriorate over time unless “preserved,” so, too, a social order. For example, the educational/propagandistic program in which young Roman elites were formed known as padeia had a reading curriculum that had been maintained for centuries. If you are sick of texts about and by “dead White dudes,” imagine experiencing something like that for hundreds of years!
Christianity did not arise from something called “Judaism.” Rather, it was created by elite Greco-Roman philosophers steeped in the work of Plato and his followers. They took the indigenous wisdom of Jesus and converted it into an imperial “philosophy.” We know today all too well the course of imperial appropriation (or suppression) of indigenous traditions!
But these elite Greco-Romans had a credibility problem: how could they deny the obvious truth that “Christianity” was a freshly minted invention, and thus highly suspicious to their fellow imperial elites? The “answer” was turning the Hebrew Bible into the “Old Testament.” That is, they forced an allegorical reading method on the ancient texts that turned them into “predictions” of Jesus, rather than what they really were: texts written by and for ancient Israelites and Judeans as they grappled with the empires around them over time. The new “Christian” reading concluded that the “Jews” were too stubborn and ignorant (often using the biblical prophets against them) and therefore, God took away their stance as “Chosen People” and gave it to the Christians. Thus, Christianity was no longer “novel.” It was the expression of what God had always intended, but which had been hidden because “the Jews” were too stupid to comprehend their own stories.
Key to this process was equating the people in Greek called Ioudaioi with “the Jews.” Of course, the word “Jews” is part of the English language, and was not part of the ancient conversation. What happened was that the “Ioudaioi” were understood as the people who filled the pages of the Old Testament and who resisted Jesus-as-messiah and all their successors across the ages.
Many scholars have shown how wrong this identification was from the beginning. In my own work in the 90s on John’s gospel, I tried to show how the Ioudaioi were “Judeans,” i.e., people in Judea, as opposed to “Galileans” or “Samaritans.” But in the ideological/theological world of John, they become a symbol for the Jerusalem-supporting people who saw Jesus as a threat to their economic security, given his open challenge to the Temple’s system (John 2.13-25).
Since that time, others have joined the discussion and widened it. Jewish scholar Shaye Cohen shows how the whole concept of “Jewishness” is anachronistic in the first century CE. Similarly, Steve Mason reviews all the uses of Ioudaioi in extant Greek literature, showing how it never means what “Jews” means today. While some continue to resist the translation of Ioudaioi as “Judeans” throughout the New Testament, it is long past time to stop referring to “the Jews” as the opponents of Jesus. With no small irony, it would be more accurate today to refer to “the Christians” as his opponents. But that’s a discussion for another day.
How Christian Leaders Can Reduce the Harm
whenever you read “the Jews” in worship replace the word with “Judeans”
this practice is important all year round but it is particularly impactful during Holy Week when
readings from the Gospel of John are in high rotation
include a note in the bulletin and your congregation’s website about what you are doing and why
speak explicitly against Christian anti-Judaism in preaching and teaching
no “Christian seders” it expresses an unauthorized cultural appropriation of a sacred tradition
Sources and Resources
Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
Wes Howard-Brook, Becoming Children of God: John’s Gospel and Radical Discipleship (Wipf and Stock reprint, 2003).
Steve Mason, “Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period, Vol. 38, No. 4/5 (2007), pp. 457-512.
Jon M. Sweeney, editor. Jesus Wasn’t Killed by the Jews (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2020)
Author Bio
Wes Howard-Brook has been teaching and writing on the Bible for nearly 40 years. After 20 years teaching at Seattle University Wes retired in 2021 to create the “Radical Bible” YouTube channel, a free, word-by-word, video commentary on the Bible (https://www.youtube.com/@radicalbible). Wes and his partner Sue Ferguson Johnson share the ministry, Abide in Me (John 15), seeking to interweave the mystical and prophetic, the personal and the political, the human and the nonhuman in the name of Jesus. They dwell in the Issaquah Creek Watershed, traditional and unceded land of the Issaquah Band of the Snoqualmie people. They are blessed to have three of their five adult children and three of their four grandchildren in the same watershed.