THE THREAD OF HATE IN THE GOSPELS - JESUS PLOTS TO STIR UP THE SPILLING OF JEWISH BLOOD

Given record of all the Christian Churches on anti-semitism on both religious and racist grounds it is a disgrace that Christians can distribute and validate and claim divine inspiration for a man who clearly hated his fellow Jews.

Jesus accused his hearers in Matthew 23 of listening to and following hate mongers and that can be taken as indirect and crafty anti-Semitism both against the leaders, their families, their friends and their followers. Don't assume that these were rich Jewish leaders.  Some scribes and Pharisees had a poor income.   

Jesus is lying against the Jewish people. Jesus lets that slip when he says at the start of the chapter that the scribes and Pharisees may be hypocrites but their doctrine should be followed. He is hinting that he lied when he said they preached a doctrine of hate - as we shall see.  Or another view is that he thought they advocated hate and is making it clear here that he does not really have any objection to it despite what he says publicly. If the leaders were commanding hate in the name of God or their own name such a command or doctrine is no small thing. If somebody commands hate you simply do not send disciples to them to learn!

He ranted,

29 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous.
30 And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’
31 So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets.
32 Go ahead, then, and complete what your ancestors started!

COMMENT: He adopts the idea of collective responsibility. They are to blame just because they link themselves with the killers. They don't have to be personally responsible to be responsible. This doctrine says that Catholics must take a share of the blame for what their Church did.

They are to blame just because they say they are descendants! There the racism comes to the fore. If this is not racism then it is close to it. He ridicules, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ He is saying they are guilty not just because they are descendants but because they would have murdered if they could go back in a time machine. If there is a prophet today who they do not kill that does not matter. If they could they would kill those past prophets.

"Go ahead, then, and complete what your ancestors started!" This is telling them to dare to kill him. He is accusing them of being ready to kill him. He is saying violent attacks on them may be needed in his defence. You cannot say things like that and take no responsibility when somebody attacks their children and wives, the usual victims, in the name of defending you against their fathers and husbands.  You know what will happen.

He said you must judge carefully and righteously in Matthew 5. Yet he is telling us to agree with him just because he says so that they would slaughter the prophets if they went back in a time machine.   The Church says that he is God and only God can judge so if he tells us his judgement we must agree.  He is telling us to judge them for something we know we cannot know unless they do go back in time. That annuls any value in his warnings against unfair judgement.

In Matthew 5 Jesus said, "It is said you [the Jews] must love your neighbour and hate your enemy.  I say love your enemy." 

He tried to rouse hate against the Jews by making them out to be vindictive.  They are told that they came up with a command from God than he never gave.  There is no commandment to hate so Jesus is taken to be referring to the Jews teaching hate.  He blames them.  This is calling them hateful and he is calling himself superior.

You don't need to love your enemy, just don't retaliate. So why did Jesus say love? Are you using what the enemy did in order to work up love for the enemy in yourself? Why? Is it a sort of reward?  It is self-aggrandizement.  There is no real love if that is all you are after.  The love won't last when the enemy puts enough pressure on you.  If Jesus knew what he was doing here, he worked out a good way of driving people apart while seeming not to.

Jesus has long been suspected of anti-Jew hate and not only that but of a virulent type.  If that suspicion is simply right then the gospel writers in reporting what he says and calling him an example are just as vile.

Jesus famously bickered all the time with Jewish religious leaders.  The leader is nothing without his following so we reject the Christian lie that this was about the leaders and not the Jewish people.

A booklet trying to make out he was not a Jew hater says, "Modern scholarship has rightly emphasised Jesus' Jewishness - His attacks on the scribes and Pharisees are certainly no more vitriolic than the prophets of old berating recalcitrant Israel" - page 9, Are the Gospels Anti-Semitic? by John Redford - Catholic Truth Society.  Yet if you compare the rantings of say Amos who calls the women of Samaria cows of Bashan (Amos 4:1) it is different to how Jesus speaks of and to the Jews.

In the gospel of John, Jesus says to the Jews in John 8:44

You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

This is extreme hate.  You may say you do what you desire but you cannot make yourself desire so if your desires are evil then you are dangerous even if the desires are controlling you.  This is clear incitement to hatred and calling the Jews total liars.  Moreover the notion that there is good in a bad person which is why you should love the person and hate the sin is discarded at least in relation to Satan.  He is completely deceptive and bad.  This does not fit the doctrine of St Paul that Satan uses the truth and mixes it with error so you can take him for a good angel.  Jesus then goes on to complain that nobody is believing what he says on this subject.  It is no wonder!

The same hate turns up in the earlier gospel, the gospel of Matthew.

Jesus even said in the Sermon on the Mount that the people were told to love their neighbour and hate their enemy. He says love your enemy. It is falsely imagined that Jesus is fixing Old Testament teaching here. He is not for he is clear that not a dot of it is invalid. The commentators say that he is not referring to anything in the Old Testament scriptures for they never said to hate the enemy. He is blaming the Jewish leaders for preaching hate against enemies.

He clearly hated them. They are accused without evidence of advocating hate. Where are the names places and dates? There is no evidence that any Jewish religion teacher of that time really advocated hate. Yet the leaders are all tarred with the one brush.

Accusing rivals of hate is a cynical political type move. Then as now, accusations like that were used as weapons against them. It was about making people fear and mistrust them and thus hate them. It works so well for you are the hater and you need to project the hate on them to sound convincing. You are manipulating the tendency of people to oppose those who stand for hate. What Jesus did deflected from and distracted from the hate in himself. He wanted to hide it from himself and the fools listening to him.

You cannot tell people their leaders are hateful without implying they as the ones who look up to them are not any better. Who is paying those leaders and making them leaders?

The accusation of hating enemies was very dangerous in a culture which hated the Romans. To say so publicly that the Jews advocated hate is virtually encouraging the Romans to get even harsher with them than they were. The Romans feared being hated and reacted by littering the whole country with Jewish victims of crucifixion.

Jesus anyway to virtue signal commands love. Jesus then is effectively saying that God knows the big picture and the command to kill adulterous people and so on by stoning was not an act of hate but God saw it was necessary to discipline the people for he sees what is in the heart and knows how far people will go if they get away with it.

Jesus is clearly trying to incite the Jewish leaders and their followers to hate and violence by accusing them of hate and violence.  If people are told they are bad they will see no point in being good.  Or they can be so fearful and angry at the accusations they may do bad things to protect themselves.