The Rise of Christian Anti-Judaism, in a Nutshell
In addition to the question I dealt with in the previous post of how Christians understood their new religion in relationship to Judaism in antiquity, there is another matter of importance for understanding ancient Jewish-Christian relations: what did Christians, broadly speaking, think about their relationship to actual Jews who did not believe? This is a completely different issue and raises the question of how it is that Christianity eventually became an anti-Jewish religion. There can be no doubt that it eventually did so, even if there are debates among scholars about when and how thoroughly that happened. But the history of Christianity after the fourth century can largely be seen, in part at least, as a history of anti-Judaism—which eventually, in modern times, became a history of violent antisemitism. Already by the middle of the second century, as we will see in a moment, there were Christian leaders who were virulently anti-Jewish in their rhetoric. But why was this so? Jesus himself was Jewish, a Jewish teacher with Jewish disciples who learned from [...]
