Are the Gospels Anti-Semitic?

In the spring of 2004, shortly before the release of Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ, a good many expressed concerns that the film’s portrayal of the Jews as those responsible for the brutal treatment and death of Jesus would result in an outbreak of anti-Semitism. Of course, it never happened. But it did call attention to the fact that a number of biblical critics do consider portions of the New Testament as anti-Semitic. It is claimed that Matthew’s Gospel, for example, is a Christian critique of Judaism. So the historical record of Christian anti-Semitism—repression of the Jews, forced conversions, and the like—is often connected with Jesus as He is presented in the Gospels.

With attention drawn to passages such as Matthew 21:43; 27:24–25; and the whole of chapter 23, I can understand how some Jewish persons might conclude that the Gospels are anti-Semitic. However, the same Jewish persons ought to look more carefully at their own prophets in their own Scriptures. If we define “anti-Semitism” as any polemic against Jerusalem or the Jews, then one of the most anti-Semitic books of all is the Old Testament—the Jews’ own Bible! A sample text is Isaiah 1:2–15, where the Jews are a “sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, offspring of evildoers, sons who deal corruptly” (verse 4).

This is exactly the same kind of prophetic critique we find on the lips of Jesus in the New Testament. In fact, Jesus draws statements right out of Isaiah’s prophecy and applies them to the religious leaders of His time. Jesus came in the spirit of the prophets. His polemical style strongly resembles theirs. He was that “Prophet like Moses”—the Prophet par excellence—who was the summation and fulfillment of all the prophets who preceded Him. So if the Gospels are anti-Semitic, so is the Old Testament.

But “anti-Semitic” is the wrong word. Scholars have noted that the strong polemical rhetoric Matthew attributes to Jesus—as in Matthew 23, for instance—is typical of Jewish polemics in ancient times. Davies and Allison offer helpful comments in this regard:

“The ferocity of rhetoric in Jewish texts, and especially the volatile language of the Dead Sea Scrolls, shows that Matthew’s polemic need not signal a break with Judaism. So far from that being the case, we indeed deny that Matthew is a Christian critique of Judaism. It is rather a Jewish-Christian critique of Jewish opponents—and therefore no more ‘anti-Semitic’ than the Dead Sea Scrolls” (W. Davies and D. Allison, The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, ICC, Vol. 3, pp. 260-61).