I’m a huge fan of Daniel Silva’s series of books about Gabriel Allon, a fascinating character who is both a highly skilled Israeli intelligence agent/spy and a renowned art restorer with an ability to paint outstanding original works.
I limit myself to reading just four pages from one of the books in this series in bed before I turn off the light and go to sleep, because without that limit I’d be tempted to keep on reading. Silva is an amazing author who has written the best thriller books I’ve ever come across. And I’ve read a lot of them.
In The Order, which I just finished, Allon investigates the murder of a pope at the hands of the Order of St. Helena, a shadowy organization determined to elect a new pope who will support far-right causes and reverse the liberalization of the Catholic Church.
Reading the book, which is founded on Silva’s typical solid research, I learned about something that I was surprisingly ignorant about: nine words in the New Testament that have been the foundation of anti-semitism, including violence against Jews.
Here’s a paragraph from The Order that is spoken by Archbishop Luigi Donati, the murdered Pope’s private secretary. He’s describing part of the 27th chapter of Matthew.
“Pilate, the ruthless Roman prefect, washes his hands in front of the Jewish crowd gathered on the Great Pavement and declares himself innocent of Christ’s blood. To which the crowd replies, ‘His blood shall be on us and our children.’ It is the most consequential line of dialogue ever composed. Two thousand years of persecution and slaughter of Jews at the hands of Christians can be traced back to those nine terrible words.”
Gabriel Allon asks Donati why the words were written. And gets this reply.
“As a Roman Catholic prelate and a man of great personal faith, I believe the Gospels were divinely inspired. That said, they were composed by human beings long after the events took place and were based on stories of Jesus’ life and ministry told by his earliest followers. If there was indeed a tribunal of some sort, Pilate undoubtedly spoke very few, if any, of the words the Gospel writers put in his mouth. The same would be true, of course, of the Jewish crowd, if there was one. Let his blood be upon us and our children? Did they really shout such an awkward and outlandish line? And with a single voice? Where were the followers of Jesus who came to Jerusalem with him from the Galilee? Where were the dissenters?” Donati shook his head. “That passage was a mistake. A sacred mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.”
Allon and Donati continue discussing the passage from Matthew, which shifted the blame for Jesus’ death from the Romans to the Jews. Allon asks why. Donati says:
“Because within a few short years of the Crucifixion, the Jesus movement was in grave danger of being reabsorbed by Judaism. If there was a future, it lay with the gentiles living under Roman rule. The evangelists and the Church Fathers had to make the new faith acceptable to the Empire. There was nothing they could do to change the fact that Jesus died a Roman death at the hands of Roman troops. But if they could suggest that the Jews had forced Pilate’s hand…”
“Problem solved.”
Donati nodded. “And I’m afraid it gets worse in the later Gospels. Luke suggests it was the Jews rather than the Romans who nailed Jesus to the cross. John makes the accusation straight out. It is inconceivable to me that Jews would crucify one of their own. They might well have stoned Jesus for blasphemy. But the cross? Not a chance.”
Since I’m not all that familiar with Christianity and the Bible, until I read The Order I was clueless about those nine words in the New Testament that have caused so much grief for Jews over the centuries: His blood shall be on us and our children.
This shows the craziness of religious belief. Nine words that were almost certainly made up by someone who had no direct knowledge of Jesus or his crucifixion have had immense effects on Jews. In the Author’s Note that Silva includes at the end of all his Gabriel Allon books, there’s this:
The culmination of John XXIII’s bid to repair relations between Catholics and Jews in the wake of the Holocaust was the milestone declaration of the Second Vatican Council known as Nostra Aetate. Opposed by many Church conservatives, it declared that Jews were not collectively responsible for the death of Jesus or eternally cursed by God.
The great historical tragedy is that such a statement had to be issued in the first place. But for nearly two thousand years, the Church taught that Jews as a people were guilty of deicide, the very murder of God. “The blood of Jesus,” wrote Origen, “falls not only on the Jews of that time, but on all generations of Jews up to the end of the world.”
Pope Innocent III wholeheartedly agreed. “Their words — ‘May his blood be on us and our children’ — have brought inherited guilt upon the entire nation, which follows them as a curse where they live and work, when they are born and when they die.” Were such words spoken today, they would rightly be branded as hate speech.
The ancient Christian charge of deicide is universally regarded by scholars as the foundation of anti-Semitism. And yet the Second Vatican Council, when issuing its historic repudiation, could not resist including the following words: “True, authorities of the Jews and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ.”
But what source did the bishops use to justify such an unequivocal declaration about an event that took place in a remote corner of the Roman Empire nearly two thousand years earlier? The answer, of course, was that they relied on the accounts of Jesus’ death contained in the Four Gospels of the New Testament — the very source of the vicious slander they were at long last disavowing.
So, yeah, religions in general and Catholicism in particular, have crazy beliefs that can lead to great human suffering. I’m glad that as a young child, my mother only made me study Catholicism up to my first communion, allowing me to ditch the Catholic Church before I went through the confirmation process.
Isn’t a central tenet of Christianity that God loved the world so much he sent his Son to die for our sins? So wasn’t the crucifixion part of that divine plan, since this was how Jesus died? Why have Jews been blamed for accomplishing what God wanted? All that makes no sense. Like religion itself.
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” It is inconceivable to me that Jews would crucify one of their own.”
Donati has apparently never read the OT. It’s full of accounts of Jews killing other Jews, and offers a litany of offenses that deserve the death penalty. Donati also seems unaware of the NT passage where Jews are intent on stoning a woman to death, and that before his conversion, Paul was a mortal persecutor of Jews who targeted Christians, e.g., the stoning to death of Stephen. See Acts 7:54.
“The culmination of John XXIII’s bid to repair relations between Catholics and Jews in the wake of the Holocaust.”
Fun historical fact: Germany was only 1/3 Catholic in the 1930s. Most Germans were Lutheran, and Nazis were overwhelmingly Protestant. Yet, somehow, popular blame for the Holocaust is pinned solely on Catholicism and the Vatican — despite the Vatican never supporting any acts of antisemitism, and despite legions of Catholics being put to death by the Nazis.
Wow, I feel so much better about religion now!
Religion is a rorschach test. You see in it what you wish to see. There is enough there to reconstruct opposing opinions.
But within most religions are also some of the most sublime standards of compassion and humanity that we have yet to live up to.
Here are. to me, the ten greatest words ever written or spoken. For all the advancements in science and culture, no society has yet achieved this standard. When they are understood and lived, all wars, all violence, all hatred ends. And then naturally, introspection, and meditation, begins.
These words are so high, so great, to live this way is still a divine mystery. But like all good mysteries, well worth investigating and solving.
These, then, the ten greatest words ever spoken, thanks to Jesus Christ:
“Let one who is without sin cast the first stone. “
History shows that Jews were hated before Christianity. Muslims have also hated the Jews, more so in recent decades. Yes, perhaps those ‘Nine terrible words’ are the main cause of Christian hatred, but I’d reckon that without them, people would still find cause to hate. And not just Jews. People find reasons to hate and be against almost any religion, including any group or individual that they take against.
“Blaming Jews for the death of Jesus shows the craziness of religiosity” It also shows that human nature has always looked for justifications for their beliefs and behaviour, perhaps all in order to diminish their own doubts about themselves and their beliefs.
We like to think that we have free will, that we can judge on moral issues and be ‘right’, but perhaps the reality is that our choices and judgements are generally driven by reasons that are lurking in the unconscious ground formed from cultural indoctrination, genetics, upbringing, poverty, past trauma and other mind-forming programming.
It seems a necessary part of human nature to have an enemy, someone, or some group that is identified as ‘them’. In doing so, it has the effect of bolstering one’s own ego, one’s illusory sense of being a separate, autonomous self. No matter what the belief or what one’s chosen group is, the unconscious result is the further obscuring of the reality of who/what we truly are.
@ Ron E.
Humans created an artificial nature by the name of culture and society.
In this artificial nature humans too have to survive in surroundings were one species flourishes, feeds itself upon the life force of another.
It is that simple .. there are social-cultural predators .. identity, the form with which humans identify themselves and hide behind are the different skins, in which in nature life appears as animal.
Thanks for pointing out that there’s a lot more reasons to hate Jews than just that. And it’s not all the Jews , it’s just the Netanyahu Zionists. And these days with the Internet it’s more of a mindset than a nationality or race . Historically Jesus threw the first stone by just saying that. But remember he was only the son of God, not God Itself.
Actually Ron Jesus stopped the stoning of the woman accused of being caught in the act of adultery. On a larger scale this teaching applies to humanity,, who has yet to live up to it.
On a small scale, when the Nag Hamadi scrolls were discovered in the dead sea decades ago, further evidence of Jesus’ wisdom emerged. It turns out that among the priesthood was a law stating that only an individual who had no record of sin could be an acceptable witness to a capital offense where the punishment would be death. No one in modern times knew about this law until the dead sea scrolls were discovered and translated.
Jesus was a masterful attorney in the service of compassion. He got the woman off the hook on a legal technicality.
And, by the way, if she was caught in the act, where was the man?
Typically adultery requires two participants.
One by one each of the priests dropped their stone and walked away.
It was a brilliant defense that indicted all of them.
Christ did not demand that the woman serve him or show any commitment to follow his teachings. He didn’t try to convert her. He didn’t condemn her. In fact he said he was not qualified to judge her. A remarkable model for us all.
He just told her to go and sin no more… Do better.
So much here. It is true some scholars insist he was only taking to the Jews.
But he was speaking to all of us. Every one of us.
It is for us to realize this truth of universal brotherhood and compassion within ourselves.
Jesus could have claimed to be an authority. Instead he dispensed with authority.
HINES ADMITS: “I’m not all that familiar with Christianity and the Bible”
-——-
RESPONSE: Then an honest person with some humility would read and research more before weighing in on a subject matter he knows he is unfamiliar with.
. . .
HINES ADMITS: “until I read ‘The Order’ I was clueless about those nine words in the New Testament…”
-——-
RESPONSE: As previous ‘response’. Viz. Reading and researching a bit more would be the response of someone interested in truth, accuracy and intellectual fairness. Immediately writing an op-ed based on reading one book of fiction (one person’s view) is a sign of someone uninterested in truth and accuracy, and interested in self-promotion.
Silva grew up in a Catholic home, married a Jewish CNN correspondent, and converted to Judaism. 1. He is not an unbiased source. 2. His claims regarding the sentence are based on a logical fallacy. 3. The earliest writings all support the understanding that The Sanhedrin, the Jewish council had Jesus arrested, accused of blasphemy and other offences, judged him guilty and handed him over to the Roman authorities requesting his execution by them for sedition. 4. The Talmud contains ample evidence that jews have hated Christians, Christianity, Jesus and his mother Mary for centuries.
. . .
HINES CLAIMS: “…almost certainly…”
-——-
RESPONSE: 1. That is an oxymoron. 2. There is nothing of any “certainty” that can be said about the life of anyone who lived 2000 years ago. Hines is (as usual) peddling ill-thought misinformation with a very clear pro-jewish bias.
Jesus rose from the dead and did what, point fingers and call for revenge? Nope.