Thomas Kleinert
Most of you know John, Paul, George and Ringo — some of you sing along by heart, and even if their songs haven’t been part of the soundtrack of your life, you still recognize the tunes.
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — that’s a different story. They each sing the gospel song, but each of them plays a different tune. Matthew, Mark and Luke can sound quite similar over long stretches, but they each include material unique to them, and where Mark keeps it swift and short, Matthew likes to linger and elaborate.
John, though, really stands out. In John, Jesus talks, a lot, and yet, there’s not a single story in all of the Fourth Gospel that begins, “The kingdom of God is like…” Reading John in my late teens and early twenties, I remember thinking, “that doesn’t sound like Jesus at all,” and I went back to the three who had shaped my hearing, back to the Sermon on the Mount, and the Good Samaritan, and the Rich Man and Lazarus.
In our 3-year lectionary, each of the three gets a year — we follow Matthew in Year A, Mark in Year B, and Luke in Year C. John doesn’t get his own year, but not a Christmas goes by without him. We can do without Mark on Christmas, but we want Luke’s angels and shepherds, as well as Matthew’s wise men from the east — and we rise to our feet in the dark sanctuary for the glorious poetry of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…” And John gets a lot of play during Lent and Easter.
In my second year of ministry with a robe on, my colleagues decided that it was my turn to read the passion story in the Good Friday service. So I read through John 18 and 19, and I groaned: How was I to read this text with its relentless naming of “the Jews” as Jesus’s opponents, leaving no room for nuance or differentiation, but slapping the same label on all of them? How was I to read this text that to me sounds like a prequel to the speeches of Hitler and Goebbels with their relentless blaming of “the Jews” for everything that was wrong in the world? I thought it best to plan a Bible study after Easter on anti-Jewish texts in the New Testament, and on Good Friday I read John’s words — but in several instances I quietly changed “the Jews” to “the people” or “the crowd.”
David Nirenberg, in his great study of anti-Judaism in the western tradition, writes,
The most sharply drawn sketch of the Jew as enemy comes from the fourth gospel, the one “according to John.” This is the gospel most explicitly focused on the Jews (the word itself occurs some sixty-seven times in the text, far more than in all the [other Gospels] combined). It is also, of all early Christian texts that have become canonical, the one most thoroughly saturated by the theme of enmity.
In this gospel, we “see a cosmic battle taking shape, one in which word, light, and life confront world, darkness, death, and the Jews in a struggle to the finish.”[1] At the same time, though, John makes abundant use of the Hebrew Bible, quoting it directly or alluding to it, and interpreting some of its key characters and symbols, as well as drawing on other Jewish sources and practices. Because of this, “John’s Gospel has been called the most Jewish and the most anti-Jewish of the Gospels.”[2]
Not even once is the term “the Jews” used to refer to Jesus’ disciples who are certainly Jewish with regard to their ethnic and religious backgrounds, and Jesus himself is called a “Jew” only once — by the Samaritan woman at the well, who wonders how Jesus, a Jew, would ask a Samaritan woman for a drink.[3] Adding to the sharp contrast, Jesus calls Nathanael not a Jew, but “an Israelite in whom there is no deceit,” and Nathanael in turn declares Jesus to be “the King of Israel” — an acclamation repeated by the happy crowds who greet Jesus as he enters Jerusalem before his final Passover.[4] “The effect,” writes Adele Reinhartz, “is to distance the reader from any group designated as [the Jews].”[5]
Who are the people who reject Jesus, persecute him, seek his death, and persecute his followers? John’s answer is consistent throughout: the Jews.[6] Those who believe in Jesus are associated with light, life, spirit, salvation, and God — and those who do not accept him, “the Jews,” with darkness, death, flesh, damnation, and Satan.
And yes, you heard it, in John 8:44 Jesus says to his Jewish audience, “You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires.” Surely our Jesus wouldn’t say anything like that…!? Not the Jesus we know — but there it is, printed in red, as they say. “You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires.” The word hits me in the pit of my stomach like rock that’s been tumbling down the mountain for hundreds of years, crushing faith, crushing compassion, crushing the lives of so many Jewish human beings, and still rolling on — unless I decide, it stops here.
On August 11 and 12, 2017, when white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, for their Unite the Right rally, somebody took a picture of one of them. On his right shoulder he carries the Confederate flag, with his right hand clutching the pole, and in his left hand he holds a poster. “Jews are children of Satan” it says, written in black marker, and he’s even added his source, John 8:31-47, like its a memory verse from Sunday school.[7]
On October 27, 2018, a gunman attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing eleven people and wounding six. Last year he was sentenced to death, and I will not speak his name. I mention him because he regularly posted anti-Semitic threats, memes and conspiracy theories on Gab, a social media platform that proudly promoted itself as a haven for free expression that major social networks wouldn’t allow. His user profile at the top of the page stated, “jews are the children of satan.”[8]
Almost 2000 years of Christian proclamation did not prevent this hateful appropriation, mostly because few Christians ever tried. From early on, the dichotomies between spirit and flesh, light and darkness, truth and falsehood, grace and damnation began to be projected on the opposition between Church and Synagogue until the Jewish people became the embodiment of all that is unredeemed, perverse, stubborn, evil, and demonic in the world. The association of Jews with Satan became pervasive, especially after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire: theological claims were translated into imperial law that excluded Jews from the body of society, and the Church’s theological negation of Jewish existence found expression in political terms.[9]
In medieval art, “the Jew’s affiliation with the devil might be signaled by placing him in hell, perching a demon on his shoulder, giving him subtly beast-like features, wrapping a snake around his eyes, having him give an obscene kiss to a cat, or depicting him with a goatee, tail, and/or horns.”[10] And those depictions didn’t remain hidden away in the margins of hand-copied volumes, they were widely distributed, beginning with early modern prints, copied from generation to generation, an unbroken chain from the anonymous illustrator of a sacred text in some European monastery to the anonymous member of the Goyim Defense League printing flyers for his trip to Nashville.
How do we read a text that quickly evolved into a tool of terror? Clearly, “Jesus said it and that settles it” is not only lazy, but irresponsible.
The Gospel of John was written in response to a deep crisis and conflict. The destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans in 70 CE was a traumatic event that necessitated a profound reorientation of Jewish religious life. Priests, Pharisees, surviving nationalists, and other Jewish groups, including Christian Jews, were struggling over religious identity and power. With the Temple gone, Judaism was forced to reconstitute itself around a different center, and the Torah, the Jewish Scriptures, became that center. The places where Scripture was studied and taught, the synagogues, now took on more importance. To the Jews who believed in Jesus, those same Scriptures also were crucially important, and they studied them carefully, because to them, Jesus was the fulfillment of God’s promises “according to the Scriptures.”
In the Gospel of John, there are repeated references to Christians’ being cast out of the synagogue — and most likely that’s a reflection of the fear and lived experience of John’s community.[11] Sometime in the last quarter of the first century, a rupture with the synagogue occurred. Prior to that decisive break, members of John’s community were able to hold together their participation in the liturgical and cultural world of Judaism and their faith in Jesus. Once it had occurred, they “understood themselves to be outcasts,” people whom the emerging Jewish mainline “no longer considered to be Jews, a community forcibly removed from its roots and the symbols that formed its identity.”
The wealth and depth of Jewish scriptural allusions and themes in John clearly show that the Fourth Evangelist is not antagonistic to Jewish traditions. No, on the contrary, he is antagonistic to the political forces that have attempted to cut his community off from these traditions.
Outnumbered and without political resources at their disposal, John’s community “had no power to take any actions comparable to their own exclusion from the synagogue. …Their only ‘power’ rested in the force of their rhetoric, in their ability to denounce those who had excluded them.”[12] And in John’s gospel, Jesus gave voice to their anger and their pain, affirming that they belonged to him, and therefore, to God — exclusively.
Our situation as believers in Jesus today is obviously very different, and has been for hundreds of years, but it’s just been so very convenient to adopt John’s language about “the Jews” as a dark mirror for all that Christians are not:“the Jews” are blind and can’t properly read their own Scriptures, but we see; “the Jews” refuse to hear the Shepherd’s call, but we know and follow his voice; “the Jews” cling to earthly things, but we abide in spiritual truth.
It’s time we learn a better lesson from John. In our own struggles for “the soul of America” and the largely fear-driven battles over who belongs and who doesn’t, perhaps we can learn from the Fourth Gospel and ask ourselves what Gail O’Day considers the “primary question”:
Is it necessary to exclude others so absolutely and hatefully in order to establish community identity?[13]
Paul the Pharisee and Apostle, writing before the destruction of Jerusalem and the predominance of gentiles in the church, never aligned the Jews with Satan. He also struggled with the relation of the developing Christian community and Judaism, but he envisioned a beloved community emerging, not from within fortified walls, but from the breaking down of barriers. So, rather than defining each other out, why don’t we see who we might become together by letting each other in?
[1] David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 78; my emphasis.
[2] Adele Reinhartz, in: The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible Translation (United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, 2017), 152.
[3] John 4:9
[4] John 1:47, 49; 12:3
[5] Reinhartz, JANT, 156.
[6] John 1:11; 5:16; 8:40; 16:2
[7] https://x.com/ianbremmer/status/896423542727872512
[8] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/robert-bowers-gab-pittsburgh-shooting-suspect-today-live-updates-2018-10-27/
[9] Gregory Baum, in the introduction to Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (United States, Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1996)
[10] Sara Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (United States, Henry Holt and Company, 2014), 7.
[11] John 9:22; 12:42; 16:2.
[12] Gail O’Day, “The Gospel of John,” in: The New Interpreter’s Bible, 9:493-865 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995), 647-648.
[13] O’Day, 650.