Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen

Jeremy Cohen has performed a great service in writing "Christ Killers." It's an exploration of the cultural history of the Jew-as-Christ-Killer myth, from the New Testament to the recently-released "Passion of the Christ." Cohen begins with the texts of the Gospels. He follows John Dominic Crossan's scholarship in maintaining that the references to "the Jews" in Matthew and John's gospels were intra-Jewish polemics. At the time, the Christian community was still largely a Jewish sect. At the same time, after the destruction of Jerusalem, when the Romans were persecuting the new sect, the writers probably felt the need to downplay Roman culpability in the death of Jesus. Cohen notes that the first one to explicitly articulate the Christ Killer myth was Melito of Sardis, who lived in the middle of the 2nd century. In his "On the Pascha," he writes: "Hast it not been written for your benefit: 'Do not shed innocent blood lest you die a terrible death'? Nevertheless, Israel admits, I killed the Lord! Why? Because it was necessary for him to die. You have deceived yourself, O Israel, rationalizing thus about the death of the Lord." Whatever the reasons for this, Melito set a dangerous precedent. The next major development came with St. Augustine, who wrote that the Jews collectively killed Jesus. Nonetheless, he felt that they did so in ignorance, and that Jews still had a useful role to play- through their blindness and adherence to the Old Law, they implicitly show the truth of the Gospel. Unfortunately, this took an even more sinister turn in the Middle Ages. Once the Talmud developed and became the theological norm of Judaism, then Christians began to believe that not only were Jews at the time of Jesus responsible for his death, but all Jews were, including those contemporaneous to them. Specifically, since they believed in the Talmud, and no longer in the Torah, they were rejecting the very basis for Christ, and so were willfully complicit in his death. Thomas Aquinas taught that the Jews were willfully ignorant of the identity of Christ; that is, though they did not kill him out of malice, they did not want to know that he was the Son of God. So in all but the most technical terms, the Jews killed him willfully. This line of thought had disastrous consequences. For example, the blood libel and ritual murder charge entered the popular imagination, and encouraged everyone to view the Jew as "the other." Second, in the First Crusade, Pope Urban encouraged the Crusaders to take revenge on the enemies of the Cross. Though he did not mention Jews, many of the Crusaders thought, "Why travel all the way to the Middle East when there are the true enemies of the Cross, the Jews, right here in our midst." And so, thousands of Jews were killed in the Rhineland. Especially interesting is Cohen's discussion of how the Jews responded to the Christ Killer charge. First, they noted that if it was God's will that Christ suffer and die, then how could they b

I've read other books by Mr Cohen, he is a good writer but feels no need to make Christians feel somehow better about some of the awful history he's documented. The lessons of history still apply and today's world is ripe with manipulations and perceptions by so many special interest groups. Knowledge concerning accusations like "Christ killer" are essential if it will ever filter into public perceptions. Read his other books too especially Living Letters of the Law for an appreciation of history from the "other" side. Especially disturbing is how some Jewish people have been driven by despair to use the crucifixion image in their own experiences. This is a sad commentary on the good news of Jesus the Jew. I'm more optimistic than him in that he regards the Christian gospel documents are un-redeemable. In large part this is due to the passion story and how Jews of the 1st century are described in those events. There clearly are some very strong statements made, but how literally we should read them is an open area for research. Whether they can be read in an Israelite prophetic mode is an open subject that hasn't generated enough study. More studies of the Gospel documents are needed. After reading related material concerning the apostle Paul and what's called the New Paul I hope there are students and scholars that will apply those same insights to this most critical of questions. Of interest to Mr Cohen is how later generations of Christians have been led to regard these accounts as deserving of continuing, unrelenting vengeance by Christian society. This deserves much more attention by Christian scholars who will present their theological justification for the NT documents without accounting for the results of those justifications. Mr Cohen presents the results from a Jewish perspective and it's sobering for this Christian.

This book is a stunning achievement. In clear and elegant prose, Jeremy Cohen traces the the origins of the belief that Jews, at all times and in all places, share in the collective responsibility for the Crucifixion of Christ. Applying his own insights and interpretation of the sources, and making use of the latest scholarly research, he astutely shows how the Christ-killer myth originated with the Gospels and has become so embedded in the Western mind and Western culture that it persists till the present day. This book makes a significant contribution to understanding how Christians and Jews perceive each other and the way in which the Christ-killer myth fueled anti-Semitism and led to the horrors of the Holocaust.