Article #204
Subject: Documents from an Abrahamic Forum Workshop on areas in our theologies and tradition
Author: Andrew W. Harrell
Posted: 8/18/2013 09:00:58 PM

Dr Marianne Dacy NDS

ICCJ Abrahamic Forum Workshop Thursday 26th June 2013 at 11.00 am.

5.





Anti Judaism in the New Testament and Christian Theology

1. New Testament: Matthew 27:25. His blood be upon us. John 7: Sukkot.

2. Early Church Fathers- Melito of Sardis-Jews killed God

3. John Chrysostom

4. Augustine

5. Later Middle Ages- blood libel- Good Friday liturgies- Pogroms.

6. Reformation : Luther tracts against the Jews

7. Luther on the Jews- treatise 11.

8. Charlotte Klein- Sisters of Sion

9. Supercessionism.

10. Way forward in twenty first century. Positive steps. The Golden Rule.



Justin Martyr attacked Judaism for its lack of a Passover offering. He said
that God does not allow the paschal lamb to be sacrificed in any other place
than where his name is invoked (that is, in the Temple at Jerusalem), for he
knew that there would come a time, after Christ‘s Passion, when the place in
Jerusalem (where you sacrificed the paschal lamb) would be taken from you by
your enemies, and then all sacrifices would be stopped. Moreover, that lamb
which you were ordered to roast whole was a symbol of Christ‘s Passion on the
Cross. Indeed, the lamb, while being roasted, resembles the figure of the
cross. (Dial. 40), He not only attacks the Jews on account of the Passover
offering but declares the Jerusalem Temple to be obsolete, showing the
biblical text to be fulfilled literally in Christ and superseded by
Christianity. This idea, also espoused by Melito of Sardis, was to be
perpetuated in Christian writings. Origen In Rom 2.13 (PG 14:906–907).

John Chrysostom condemned the practice of many ‗demi‘ Christians of running
to synagogues and rabbis in search of cures. However, it was evident that the
popular fascination arose from making an association between physicians,
magicians, and sorcerers. According to Chrysostom, Jewish therapy often
depended on the use of incantations and amulets.i In Antioch, John
Chrysostom, well-trained in the art of rhetoric, had railed against judaising
Christians in the late fourth century, devoting most attention in his eight
sermons to the autumn feasts. In 383 CE, these interdictions, possibly
through the influence of the church, received the status of civil law, with
Gratian‘s passing of a law forbidding Christians from participating in pagan,
Jewish, and Manichean cults. Disc. 8.7.1–5. See introduction to Saint John
Chrysostom: Discourses Against Judaizing Christians, trans. Paul W. Harkins
(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1977), xli. See also Disc.[
8.5.6–8; 8.6.11.

Augustine° (354–430), bishop of Hippo (North Africa) and outstanding *Church
Father of Western Christianity. Born in Tagaste in North Africa to mixed
Christian/pagan parentage, Augustine was educated at the University of
Carthage, abandoned his faith temporarily and fathered a son, was eventually
ordained and became the bishop of Hippo in 395. As an influential
ecclesiastic and prolific theological writer, Augustine attacked various
Christian sects and heresies and also took issue with Judaism. His religious
and philosophical views reveal the influence of a great variety of spiritual
movements and trends (Neo-Platonism, Manichaeism, the Stoics, Cicero,
Aristotle, etc.) but most of his major doctrines are completely opposed to
traditional Jewish teaching (e.g., his concepts of the innate sinfulness of
man, and predestination). Nevertheless, Jewish influences are also
discernible, thoughthese are mainly derived from the common biblical
background and from Hellenistic Jewish philosophy (Philo of Alexandria), the
Neoplatonic character of which had an obvious affinity with Augustine's own
thinking.

Augustine evinces in some of his writings (e.g., in his commentary on the
Psalms), and quite unlike the violently anti-Jewish diatribes of his
contemporary, John Chrysostom, a positive (i.e., missionary attitude) to the
Jewish people as being destined ultimately to join in the fullness of the
Divine promise as realized in the church. The definitely anti-Jewish tracts
circulating in the Middle Ages under the name of Augustine are later
compositions wrongly attributed to him.

Martin Luther

On the Jews

Title page of Martin Luther's On the Jews and Their Lies. Wittenberg, 1543

On the Jews and Their Lies (German: Von den Juden und ihren Lügen) is a
65,000-word antisemitic treatise written in 1543 by the German Reformation
leader Martin Luther.

In the treatise, Luther describes Jews as a "base, whoring people, that is,
no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be
accounted as filth."[ Luther wrote that they are "full of the devil's
feces ... which they wallow in like swine," and the synagogue is
an "incorrigible whore and an evil slut"

In the first ten sections of the treatise, Luther expounds, at considerable
length, upon his views concerning Jews and Judaism and how these compare
against Christians and Christianity. Following this exposition, Section XI of
the treatise advises Christians to carry out seven remedial actions. These
are for Jewish synagogues and schools to be burned to the ground, and the
remnants buried out of sight; for houses owned by Jews to be likewise razed,
and the owners made to live in agricultural outbuildings; for their religious
writings to be taken away; for rabbis to be forbidden to preach, and to be
executed if they do; for safe conduct on the roads to be abolished for Jews;
for usury to be prohibited, and for all silver and gold to be removed
and "put aside for safekeeping"; and for the Jewish population to be put to
work as agricultural slave laborers. The prevailing scholarly view since the
Second World War is that the treatise exercised a major and persistent
influence on Germany's attitude toward its Jewish citizens in the centuries
between the Reformation and the Holocaust. Four hundred years after it was
written, the Nazis displayed On the Jews and Their Lies.

Evolution of Luther's views

Luther and antisemitism

Luther's attitude toward the Jews took different forms over his life. In his
earlier period, until 1537 or not much earlier, he wanted to convert Jews to
Christianity; in his later period, the last nine years of his life, he
denounced them and urged their persecution.

Medieval Church and the Jews

Early in his life, Luther had argued that the Jews had been prevented from
converting to Christianity by the proclamation of what he believed to be an
impure gospel by the Catholic Church, and he believed they would respond
favorably to the evangelical message if it were presented to them gently. He
expressed concern for the poor conditions in which they were forced to live,
and insisted that anyone denying that Jesus was born a Jew was committing
heresy.

Luther's first known comment on the Jews is in a letter written to Reverend
Spalatin in 1514: Conversion of the Jews will be the work of God alone
operating from within, and not of man working — or rather playing — from
without. If these offences be taken away, worse will follow. For they are
thus given over by the wrath of God to reprobation, that they may become
incorrigible, as Ecclesiastes says, for every one who is incorrigible is
rendered worse rather than better by correction.

expelled from Saxony in 1537, and in the 1540s he drove them from many German
towns; he tried unsuccessfully to get the elector to expel them from
Brandenburg in 1543."

Michael Berenbaum writes that Luther's reliance on the Bible as the sole
source of Christian authority fed his later fury toward Jews over their
rejection of Jesus as the messiah. For Luther, salvation depended on the
belief that Jesus was the Son of God, a belief that adherents of Judaism do
not share. Graham Noble writes that Luther wanted to save Jews, in his own
terms, not exterminate them, but beneath his apparent reasonableness toward
them, there was a "biting intolerance," which produced "ever more furious
demands for their conversion to his own brand of Christianity" (Noble, 1-2).
When they failed to convert, he turned on them.

Wallmann, Johannes. "The Reception of Luther's Writings on the Jews from the
Reformation to the End of the 19th Century", Lutheran Quarterly, n.s. 1
(Spring 1987) 1:72-97. Wallmann writes: "The assertion that Luther's
expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment have been of major and persistent
influence in the centuries after the Reformation, and that there exists a
continuity between Protestant anti-Judaism and modern racially oriented anti
Semitism, is at present wide-spread in the literature; since the Second World
War it has become the prevailing opinion.

Some Supersessionist views from theologians summarized in:

Charlotte Klein ‗s Anti Judaism in Christian Theology (1978)Pg 7.

1. Judaism has been superseded and replaced by Christianity

2. Thus Judaism has scarcely any right to exist.

3. Passing judgment on Judaism

4. Only some specialists in Hebrew studies made fresh examinations of the
Jewish background. We find that some authors when speaking of Judaism have a
different approach from what they use when dealing with Christianity.





























ICCJ International Abrahamic Forum

International Conference

Combatting Our Teachings of Contempt;

Jewish, Christian and Muslim Introspection and Projection

27 June 2013, Workshop Session 1 Liturgy

Rabbi Ehud Bandel and Sheikh Ghassan Manasra

The Morning Blessings

1. Rabbi Yehuda says: A man is obligated daily to recite: “Blessed is God

who has not made me a Gentile, who has not made me a boor, who has

not made me a woman.” _________________________________Tosefta Berachot 6:18.

2. According to Diogenes Laeritus, a historian of the second century CE,

Socrates (or some other Greek sage) said said he had three blessings:

“that I was born a human being and not a beast, a man and not a woman,

a Greek and not a Barbarian” (Vit. Phil. 1.33

3. But before faith came, we were kept in custody under the law, being

shut up to the faith which was later to be revealed. 24 Therefore the Law

has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by

faith. 25 But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor. 26

For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. 27 For all of

you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.

28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man,

there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29

And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs

according to promise. Galatians 3

4. R. Meir used to say, A man is bound to say the following three

blessings daily: ‘[Blessed art thou . . .] who hast made me an Israelite ‘. .

. . who hast not made me a woman’; and ‘ . . . who hast not made me a

brutish man’ BT Menachot b

5. I bring heaven and earth to witness that the Divine Spirit rests upon a

non-Jew as well as upon a Jew, upon a woman as well as upon a man,

upon a maidservant as well as a manservant. ALL depends on the deeds

of a particular individual. (Yalkut Shimoni, Shoftim 42