Is The Bible Anti-Semitic?
The Old Testament, I mean. Not the New.
This year for Christmas, I was given some audio CDs of a verse by verse commentary on the Torah by Dennis Prager. The series is quite good, and has given me some much needed perspective on some otherwise difficult or obscure passages in Scripture. If you are lame enough to like such things (and lame is the new cool, I’m told) then I would certainly recommend it.
One of the things Prager repeatedly notes in the series is just how negatively Jews as a group tend to be portrayed in Scripture. The Jews are constantly be depicted as ungrateful unfaithful complainers, constantly failing to live up to even the bare minimum of God’s expectations. Not only that, but many of the heroic figures in the Torah, the Egyptian midwives, Pharaoh’s daughter, Jethro, Caleb, are not Jewish. Not only that, but Moses, the great Jewish hero of the Torah, wasn’t raised Jewish. As Prager says, if the Torah weren’t the Jews’ holy book, it would probably be condemned as anti-semitic. For Prager, this counts as an argument in favor of the reliability of the Scripture accounts, as no group would ever make up a historical narrative about their people that showed them in such a negative light.
This got me thinking. It is a sad fact, but a fact nonetheless, that antisemitism has tended to be most prevalent among Christians, Muslims, and/or post-Christian or post-Muslim societies. Could these negative attitudes toward the Jews have something to do with the negative portrayal of Jews in the Old Testament? Could it be that, in the words of the old joke, antisemitism is a Jewish plot?
It’s an intriguing idea, but fortunately also an easily refuted one. There is today no Christian group on the planet more deeply familiar with the Scriptures, including the Old Testament, than Evangelical Christians. If reading the Bible made one an anti-semite, then we would expect Evangelicals to be raving anti-semites. Yet precisely the opposite is the case. Few groups are more friendly in there attitudes towards Jews and Judiasm than are Evangelical Christians. In fact, one of the best arguments against the claim that the Gospels are anti-semitic is the fact that the more a given Christian reads the Gospels, the less likely he is to harbor anti-semitic attitudes. The Jewish people might come off looking pretty bad in the Old Testament, but the lesson to draw from this is not that the Jews are especially wicked, but that all human beings, even God’s chosen people, are fallen creatures, desperately in need of redemption. Likewise, when the Apostles are shown in the Gospels as being uncomprehending and venal, the correct conclusion to draw is not that Christ should have picked better people to surround himself with, but that all of us are prone to the same sorts of incomprehension and venality.
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First off, anti-semitism refers to prejuduce against Semites, not just those professing the Jewish religion. Arabs are semites too. And this kind of anti-semitism is vicious among many of the evangelicals.
Second, you ignore the source of the evangelical’s purported pro-Jewish stance. It is in fact nothing of the sort, as they believe Jews are destined for damnation. What that part of evangelical culture that adheres to the man-made doctrines ultimately deriving from John Nelson Darby believe is that Christ cannot return until the Jewish people have complete temporal control of the ancients lands dubbed Judea and Samaria. For that reason, McCain’s best friend John Hagee not only opposes a Palestinian state but believes that God will punish those who work against what amounts to an occupation by the state of Israel. Of course, this “neo-land-grant” theory arises from a flawed reading of the OT, one which divorces it from Christ and the fact that he created a Church that is truly Catholic, abrogating all “theological land grants”.
First, antisemitism refers to prejudice against the Jews.
Second, as someone who has known lots and lots of evangelicals (and used to be one himself), I can assure you that evangelicals tend to have very positive views about the Jews, and that this has little to nothing to do with the idea that they need to be gathered in Israel to bring about the end times.
Do they or do they not hold this perncious theology? That is the question. And are their “positive views about the Jews” completely unrelated to their Calvinist view of the world, especially the middle east?
MM,
One might question whether it’s ever appropriate to use a monolithic “they” about a group as necessarily splintered as Evangelicals. I am assured by various news reports that some Evangelicals hold to the “pernicious theology” you cite. Of the Evangelicals I know, none of them do, but I don’t really doubt that some must.
Surely you would not yourself be engaging in a dualism in which all Evangelicals hold evil views about the Middle East?
Some Evangelicals hold to the “pernicious theology” you mention. Many don’t (not all Evangelicals are Calvinist either, btw). Even most of those who do believe that Israel will have a special role during the end times will tell you that their support for Israel and for the Jews is not based on such beliefs.
Second, you ignore the source of the evangelical’s purported pro-Jewish stance. It is in fact nothing of the sort, as they believe Jews are destined for damnation.
I’m pretty sure that some evangelicals believe that when Christ returns, Jewish people will acknowledge him as their Messiah and will NOT be “destined for damnation.” In any even, evangelicals are divided on whether Christianity should be preached to Jewish people or not. Oddly enough, John Hagee has come under some criticism precisely for his oft-stated position that Jewish people do not need to convert to Christianity. (But then, I’ve always thought of Hagee as more of a fundamentalist than an evangelical — do you know the difference?)
It’s pretty funny, really — MM claims that all evangelicals think a certain way, and in support cites John Hagee, who isn’t an evangelical and who doesn’t think that way.
The parallel would be if a Protestant who knew next to nothing about Catholics claimed that Catholics are all trying to make people worship in Latin, and then cited Richard McBrien in support.
Sbuck tries once again to nitpick his way out of the core issue: the flawed and awful theological underpinnings of the US position on Israel.
No. That issue is YOUR hobbyhorse, which you bring up at every opportunity, but it’s not the “core issue” in this post.
And you can’t even get the details about your own hobbyhorse right. Had you even heard of John Hagee before the past couple of weeks, when the story of McCain and Hagee broke?
And enough with the attempted “gotcha attacks”. We all know what fundamentalism means. We also know that the diverse “evangelical” movement– with its hyper-emotive personalism– often gets its theology from fundamentalism, as it itself lacks a solid intellectual basis (and no, I’m not talking about the Lutheran tradition that also uses the term “evangelical”). How does getting side-tracked into this debate shed any light on dispensationalism that underpins American evangelicalism? How many of these people believe in the “rapture”?
And for the record, Hagee’s church dubs itself “non-demoninational” which is typically code for evangelical– and indeed, Wikipedia uses the “e” word.
It’s not to be a “gotcha,” as much as it is to point out that when you discuss Protestants, your arguments are usually sloppy, as shown here by the 1) claim that evangelicals all think that all Jews are damned, and 2) the citation of John Hagee to make this point (whereas Hagee, whatever his flaws, is on record many times as saying the opposite). All you seem to care about is a “gotcha” against McCain.
“non-demoninational which is typically code for evangelical”
Sometimes but certainly not always. Non-denominational often refers to more fundamentalist and charismatic churches. I grew up attending exactly such a church. Your experience of them, beyond Wikipedia, is what?
Morning’s Minion,
Stuart is right. My post has nothing to do with U.S. policy towards Israel. Israel isn’t even mentioned.