Skip to main content

The Gospel of John is Irredeemably Antisemitic

Christianity started as a Jewish sect. Despite this, or in some ways because of this, there is a strongly anti-Jewish message very early on in Christian history. What started as a debate between different Jewish communities became something different as Christianity became Gentile, and then became an imperial religion with considerably power.

How Christianity shaped European antisemitism is something that Christians needed to seriously address after the Holocaust, and to a certain extent have done, though not nearly enough.

In looking at this many Christians have noted how the Gospel of John has particularly troublesome phrases. There's constant negative references to "the Jews". Even though Jesus and the disciples are Jewish, the phrase "the Jews" always refers to those against Jesus. As I say, this insight is in no way original to me. But I think I've come to the view that the problem is much much worse than most Christians want to admit, because the consequences would be too big for Christianity.

I've come to think that the primary purpose of the Gospel of John is to be an anti-Jewish text. 

Written much later than the other Gospels, John comes from a time when there is a definite Christian split from Judaism, and the author really wants to make the point that God's revelation is now in the path of Christ and not in the Jewish religion. 

I think the key passage is 5:39-40, "You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf.  Yet you refuse to come to me to have life."

This is the message of the whole of the Gospel of John, repeated again and again.

Think of the famous prologue, "In the beginning was the Word" so adored at Christmas services. But we miss that the whole point of that passage is that, "he came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him."

And another famous passage: "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father except by me." What this primarily means is that no gets to the Father through Jewish religion.
God's relationship with the Jewish people has ended. That's what the author wants to tell you.

Throughout the Gospel "the Jews" are the baddies, the ones to be feared, the ones who finally kill Jesus. This is despite the fact all the goodies in this story are Jewish too. And despite the historic fact that the Romans killed Jesus.

I'm not a New Testament scholar (and if you want to direct me to good resources on this, please do) but all this has led me further and further to the conclusion that the Gospel of John is irredeemably antisemitic, and despite being very well written and somewhat beautiful in times in its language, has done more harm than good to Christianity.

It's irredeemably antisemitic. It's the primary source of Christian antisemitism. And that's exactly what it was trying to be.

Let's bin it.

Or at least, let's radically decentre it from Christianity, and only very very rarely include it in worship.*

The good news is the Gospel of John has almost nothing to do with Jesus of Nazareth. Almost no words in John's Gospel coincide with Jesus' recorded words in other Gospels, so we must assume were made up by the writer of John's Gospel.

When we exclude John and get our picture of Jesus from Mark, Matthew, Luke, and Thomas then what emerges is a much more compassionate, much more human, much more wise, and much more Jewish Jesus.

It begins to redeem Christianity of its antisemitism. It creates a Christianity that still affirms God's revelation in the Jewish religion, and by extension in other religions as well. It solves a lot of our most difficult theological problems. It makes it harder for people to claim to be Christian while ignoring the needs of the poor and oppressed.

Binning the Gospel of John makes Christianity a lot better. There, I said it.


*The one exception I'd make to this is the story of the woman caught in adultery. But actually that's an "orphan story" that was floating around on its own that later got edited into the Gospel of John. It doesn't really belong there, which kind of reinforces my point. 

Comments

Francis said…
Stephen, I'm very glad to read this and I'm sorry to say it's not just John that is troubling. Reading the Parable of the Tenants post-holocaust is horrific. You're absolutely right that the church has not gone far enough in addressing this, Nostra Aetate addressed the Blood Curse but did nothing about Replacement Theology, then congratulated itself, said 'job done' and moved onto other issues. When the penny dropped for me I concluded that Christianity was intrinsically antisemitic and couldn't be redeemed, but I've since come to the view that it can be rethought without antisemitism - but only within the sort of freedom that Unitarianism gives you. You mention resources: I'd recommend Mark D Nanos for his work on the Paul within Judaism movement, which goes much further than the New Perspective on Paul, associated with EP Sanders and NT Wright. https://marknanos.com/ http://www.lionelwindsor.net/publications/ephesians-and-colossians-after-supersessionism/
JoJames said…
The Marriage at Cana is a wonderful parable: it sets into train the ministry of Jesus and raises up the counter tensions of the spiritual and the domestic spheres; it's a specifically sacred event at which a domestic incident comes into the centre of the frame - we 've run out of wine! With the first miracle,(in John's account) John seems to be saying a lot: not only is the domestic somehow implicit in the sacred and vis versa but also wine (perhaps as a token of the extraordinary) is important in a wedding (also a token of a different kind of extraordinary), lots of wine is evidently important. His miracle is one of abundance: there is lots. As Bill Darlison has pointed out the wedding guest gives us a clue when he says that this wine is better than ordinary wine; he offers us an indication that it isn't really wine at all. It is a metaphor. The miracle of Jesus (John seems to be saying) is to re-envision the ordinary as extraordinary. Now we can see critically the evident factionalism and power-play of the Johannine community in the 2ndC religious world which sought to distance it's truth claims from the claims of others - and we can abhor its anti-semitic tactics. I don't seek to diminish the awful historical outcomes of such tactics, and you're right to hate anti-semitism and to criticise it in Christian scripture. But if we can understand it critically we can also locate this anti-semitism in its historical and political context, isolate & contain it there and move beyond it, because we can see that it is neither true nor truthful. But we can't move beyond the metaphor of the wine, because it shows us the truth of spiritual understanding - that the extraordinary arises, by grace, from the ordinary.

Popular posts from this blog

Radical?

When I started this blog nearly 4 years and nearly 300 posts ago one of the labels I used for it/me was "radical." Perhaps I used it a little unreflectively. Recently I've been pondering what radical means. A couple of things have made me think of this. Firstly this blog series from my friend Jeremy, which explores a distinction between "radical progressives" and "rational progressives." There is also this definition of radical, liberal and conservative from Terry Eagleton quoted at Young Anabaptist Radicals : “Radicals are those who believe that things are extremely bad with us, but they could feasibly be much improved. Conservatives believe that things are pretty bad, but that’s just the way the human animal is. And liberals believe that there’s a little bit of good and bad in all of us.” What interests me is finding a way to express the tension I feel sometimes between myself and the wider Unitarian movement. One way to express this is to say I tend

What does it mean to be non-creedal?

Steve Caldwell says "The problem here isn't humanism vs. theism for theist Unitarian Universalists -- it's the non-creedal nature of Unitarian Universalism" This is a good point. We need to think much more deeply about what it means to be a non-creedal religion. The first thing I want to say is that there is more than one possible understanding of non-creedalism. The Disciples of Christ are a non-creedal church, they say here : " Freedom of belief. Disciples are called together around one essential of faith: belief in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Persons are free to follow their consciences guided by the Bible, the Holy Spirit study and prayer, and are expected to extend that freedom to others." Quakers are also non-creedal and say here : Quakers have no set creed or dogma - that means we do not have any declared statements which you have to believe to be a Quaker. There are, however, some commonly held views which unite us. One accepted view is that th

What is Radical Christianity?

Radical Christianity is about encountering the God of love . It is first and foremost rooted in the discovery of a universal and unconditional source of love at the heart of reality and within each person. God is the name we give to this source of love. It is possible to have a direct and real personal encounter with this God through spiritual practice. We encounter God, and are nourished by God, through the regular practice of prayer, or contemplation.  Radical Christianity is about following a man called Jesus . It is rooted in the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish prophet living under occupation of the Roman Empire two thousand years ago. It understands that's Jesus' message was the message of liberation. His message was that when we truly encounter God, and let God's love flow through us, we begin to be liberated from the powers of empire and violence and encounter the  "realm of God" - an alternative spiritual and social reality rooted in love rather th