Loading...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
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The Rise of Christian Anti-Judaism, in a Nutshell
March 28, 2026
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Didn’t the destrucion of the Temple in 70 (or so) CE also shift Christian writers away from Judism (Matthew) and more toward making peace with Rome?
We have no solid evidence of that per se. We can see the movement against Jews who don’t believe in Jesus and toward Rome already in the writings of Paul, 15-20 years earlier…. It’s hard to say whether the destruction of the temple significantly furthered the attempt(s), but one can see how it could make sense that it did.
Bart, you would think once Christians assumed power in the Empire, there would have been retribution against the Pagans who once ruled the Empire. But I guess too many Christians were former Pagans.
There was retribution, starting with the reign of Theodosius I (who more or less made Xty the official state religion.)
Nobody was called Christian for the first several decades. The earliest Christians, who were Jews, did not abandon Judaism, but rather claimed Judaism as their own. Jews changed the meaning of messiah to fit their goals, and also reversed the meaning of resurrection so that it became symbolized by a Torah-violating meal rather than earned by strict Torah adherence.
The gospel story is about a specific conflict between Jews. A zealous Jew accused non-zealous Jews of disobeying Torah marriage law. In the narrative, the next martyr’s resurrection removed the need FOR JEWS to obey Torah.
If we don’t accept the supernatural, the natural explanation is that people behave in ways that they perceive to be in their best interests. Non-zealous Jews’ interest was to get a zealous minority to stop harping about other Jews not obeying Torah. The gospel, which some consider to be fictional, solved this problem for NON-ZEALOUS JEWS. Only a minority of Jews were so Torah-zealous that they fought against Rome. Roman-citizen Jews are primary NT characters.
An interest of mine is reducing Christian anti-Semitism. We might need to talk about what the NT is really about for that to happen. Jews retained cultural assets, minus Torah.
I don’t think calling someone a Christian in the early church meant “non-Jew.” It all depends on how we define “Christian.” I take it simply to mean “one who believes Christ in some way is the way of salvation.” I definitely am as well committed to reducing Christian anti-semitism, in no small measure because I don’t think there WAS anti-semitism until Christianity. (I actually don’t think we can talk about anti-semitism at ALL under the modern anthropological theories of race developed; opposition to Jews in the Middle Ages was based on “religion” rather than “blood lines.”)
I don’t know if this was ever a talking point in Early Christianities, but I was wondering if anyone back then claimed the laws found in the Torah and other parts of the Jewish Bible were Hellenistic responses (or altered via redactions) to literature like Plato’s book called Laws. Apparently, some contemporary scholars like Professor John Ahn make that case that there is overwhelming evidence of this on the YouTube channel History Valley!!
Do you mean responses by Hellenistic JEWS? There certainly are Hebrew Bible scholars who see Greek influence on the Torah (my one-time colleague John van Seters was one of them), but mainly, I believe, in the narratives. It is hard to see the laws themselves as a reaction to Greek philosophical traditions, let alone to Plato — who was writing well after the laws of Torah were in wide cirulation. (The final course, P, is post-exilic, but must be prior to the fourth century Plato)
That’s what I’m thinking!!! The problem is that he uses what he says is evidence which includes Elephantine worshipping being different and lacking Shabbat consciousness, as well as Daniel language of Late Hebrew being similar to other portions in the Bible ranging from Numbers to Deuteronomy, and that the formula of a rule of law, not by a king, but the law itself are such that the latest layers would have taken place after Plato because they are responding to him.
For reference, he says more about it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/live/BCDuJp_orBg?si=aWQzrp5MGCFQCNvK
I should also add to the initial post I made above that what is being argued is that the latest layers of the Jewish Bible were Hellenistic, not all of it. And some of the strongest evidence also mentioned in this video is due to how off Elephantine worship is (eg no Shabbat consciousness there), late Hebrew found in Daniel is found in other portions of the Jewish Bible, as well as the Hellenistic period being where Jews from the exilic and non-exilic periods are formally reconciled. What do you think?
I had long assumed that discrimination usually arises primarily from racial differences. However, in the case of the Jews, Jesus, Peter, Paul, and John were themselves Jewish. For that reason, I have often found it difficult to understand how later Christians came to develop such strong anti-Jewish attitudes. Your explanation has helped me begin to see this issue somewhat more clearly.
The Holocaust is, of course, the most extreme example of anti-Jewish persecution in history. Yet when one reads Hitler’s Table Talk, Hitler himself appears to have been quite skeptical of religion. At the same time, his hostility toward Jews seems to have been framed largely in racial terms rather than purely religious ones. This makes me wonder how historians understand the relationship between Hitler’s racial ideology and the much longer tradition of anti-Jewish sentiment that existed within Christian societies.
Shinji＠Tokyo
Hitler arose in a world under the influence of Darwin, or in many cases the misunderstanding or blatant misrepresentation of Darwin’s theory of evolution. For example, probably most people were led to believe that Darwin said that nature itself somehow approved the dominance of the strongest, most aggressive, or most intelligent individuals, and therefore, the species or races that arose from those earlier individuals. It was the law of nature. In fact, “survival of the fittest” only meant the predominance of organisms that best fit their environmental niche, not physical dominance over others.
Early European anthropologists spread around the world to study and measure groups of so-called “primitive people.” Pseudosciences like Phrenology were accepted as data supporting those prejudices. So, Hitler took an existing hatred based on culture, or even the choice of religion, into a supposed law of nature. A Jew could no longer survive by simply leaving their religion, which many Jews had done to survive living in Christian nations to that point.
A lot of ironies. In Acts, supposedly not long after Jesus was crucified, the Greeks in the Jerusalem church complained they weren’t getting their share – not a unified, supportive and loving community.
Constantine acknowledged a religion that it’s founder supposedly emphasized non-violence and love, to have helped him win a battle during which many soldiers must have died. The christian god wins battles for pagans?
As evidenced by the canonical and non-canonical gospels, Christians began hating and taking revenge against Jews, which was antithetical to how the gospels present Jesus’ message. Also antithetical to Paul’s message.
And on and on and on…