Part 1 of a four part series tracing the world battle over “my God, your God”, starting with crucifiction of Jesus Christ. And what it really takes to reopen the space for coexistence
Rome Killed Christ, and the Church Blamed the Jews
History is very clear on one thing for sure – Jesus of Nazareth did not die in a synagogue. He died on a cross – set up and authorized by the Roman empire.
The whole idea of crucifixion and its execution was not a Jewish punishment. It was a Roman state technology for crushing who they thought were troublemakers. When the authorities found a non-conformist or rebel accouring to their rulebook, they used many such torturous methods of punishment and the authority to order that execution in case of Jesus Christ lay with ONE man in Judea – and that was Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect under the emperor Tiberius Caesar. It was the Roman soldiers who hammered the nails in. And it was the Roman law that backed it. It was also the Roman power which enforced such laws.
Yet for almost two thousand long years, the official Christian stance was to pin the sole cause of execution on Jews and they “the Jews” as the primary Christ killers. They did not consider the group of supporters and conspirators as a small group of collaborators in one city. They officially declared that it was the Jews. Everywhere. For all time…that were the guilty. Guilty for life. Guilty for eternity.
It is very important to make this point because this stance is not a footnote in the church’s history. It became the spine of European antisemitism, that spread across the globe in various colors and degrees.
In the last part of this series, it will become clear why we need to contemplate on this historic distortion.
From ONE governor in Judea to “the Jews killed God”
That escalation was not fast but was steady and started very early.
By the second century, many church writers were no longer speaking about ‘ only some leaders’ in Jerusalem pushing for Jesus’s crucifiction. They had already started talking about “Israel” and “the Jews” as a whole. The narrative was set – the cancel culture was initiated.
Justin Martyr, wrote around the mid-100s, of the Jewish people as responsible for killing the Messiah. Melito of Sardis, in an Easter sermon around 160–170 CE, went further by calling what happened in crucifiction initiated by Rome as “deicide.” They called it the murder of ‘god.’ And he explicitly laid that charge on “Israel.” Not on Rome.
This is how the concept of ‘deicide’ becomes a trope – it became initation of the anti semitic idea that Jews as a race, across generations, MUST now bear the mystical, eternal guilt for killing their god.
Let us take note of what happened here”
- The culprit, Pontius Pilate is still in the story, but his role is ‘softened’ by describing the gospel image of a morose, and hesitant governor washing his hands ‘off’, meant to suggest reluctant Roman involvement.
- That makes way for the Jews to take center stage as THE villains. A whole race was cast to play Caiaphas, whose job was to ‘placate the Roman authorities’. And this insinuation continued for 20 centuries.
It was the best-ever propaganda and the most terrible theological ground to build up.
The Gospel of John and the Power of that ONE phrase
The Gospel of John was written approximately 60-70 years after Jesus’s crucifiction event. This is the writing – author unknown – which poured fuel on the earliest anti- semitic feeling leading to canceling Jews enmasse.
In the Gospel of John, the Greek term hoi Ioudaioi is used very frequently – and is usually translated ‘the Jews.’ In fact, this particular term appears almost seventy times in that gospel, though I must admit that not every usage is meant to have a hostile tone. But in many sentences it has a ‘charged’ tone that lays direct or indirect blame on Jews for what happened to Christ.
Even though many modern scholars have argued that John is describing a local, intra Jewish conflict with specific Judean authorities, at the end of the first century, by that time such nuances appeared in discourses, medieval preachers and ordinary listeners had already heard something else –
“The Jews did this!!!”
So, when some verses by John show “the Jews” clamouring before Pilate, or Jesus saying to some opponents “you are of your father the devil,” somewhere slowly but steadily in history, those lines stopped being about one argument in one city. The lines became definitive theological statements about the entire Jewish race as such.
This is how a literary choice in one gospel turned into a license for treating every Jewish community in Europe as a ‘permanent mob outside Pontius Pilate’s balcony.’
The Liturgy, the Plays, and the Pogroms
Unfortunately, once that image that blurred the Roman hand in crucifiction hardened, it moved from theology into bloody battles. For centuries together, Good Friday liturgies used John’s passion account of the crucifiction. The congregation would take the part of ‘the Jews’ and shout “Crucify him!!” In Mathew 27.25, the crowd crying out and saying “His blood be on us and on our children!” became a cursed self-declaration supposed to be laid on every Jewish child born afterwards.
These were called Passions plays and they were staged across Europe with the same script – with more violence and less nuance. The Church’s priests preached about “Christ killers” in villages whose Jewish families lived in walled ghettos just down the road!
The results of these methodical categorization are pretty well documented.
- Pogroms triggered after the Holy Week services
- Massacres of Jews along the route of the Crusades
- Expulsions of Jews from England, France, Spain, Portugal
- Torture and forced conversion of Jews during the Inquisitions
The grave, theological accusation of deicide became a social permission slip – if ‘the Jews’ killed ‘god,’ what level of violence against them could not be justified!
The Official Story only breaks in the Shadow of Auschwitz
Here starts the obscenity –
The Catholic Church actually had the materials to correct this much earlier. The Roman Catechism after the Council of Trent in the 1500s already had stated that theologically ‘all sinners are responsible for Christ’s death, and that Christians who sin while claiming to know him bear heavier blame than the few people who demanded his execution.’
On paper, that was a rejection of the ‘collective Jewish guilt’ story. But ground reality was different – for ordinary Jews in Christian lands, nothing really changed. The cultural script and ostracization of the ‘Christ killers’ continued to run. Sermons, schoolbooks, popular piety kept repeating the idea that Jews as a race had rejected and brutally ‘murdered’ their messiah.
The real sad part of this whole history is that it took the industrial murder of six million Jews in Nazi Europe for the institutional church to finally ask the question:
“What did our teachings do to these Jewish people?”
It is then that the Second Vatican Council answered that question, in part, with the Nostra Aetate in 1965. This document explicitly repudiated the idea of collective, transgenerational Jewish guilt for the act of crucifixion. It stated that even if some Jewish authorities pushed for Jesus’s death, you cannot lay that blame on all the Jews even then, and certainly not on Jews today/future. It condemned antisemitism in any form. And that marked the correction of a two millenia old, cruel cancel culture.
Even the Protestant bodies like the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Episcopal Church issued their own statements rejecting the deicide myth.
So the official Church stance now says what common sense and basic ethics were saying all along:
- Rome authorized and executed Jesus.
- A specific circle of leaders and followers of the Jewish community was involved.
- You cannot curse an entire race, forever, for that event.
It is honest to also say this came very, very late.
SUMMARY
This is not about relitigating who stood where on a single day in Jerusalem. Very important day and so are the decision-making consequences
This is an effort to honestly name a structural lie…to begin the journey to a more cooperative world.
- The legal responsibility for crucifixion belongs to the Romans
- The church shifted the main blame in its imagination onto “the Jews” as a race
- That story was preached, sung, and staged for centuries, and it helped build the climate that made the Holocaust even thinkable
- Only in the 1960s did the largest Christian body formally drop the accusation
In Part 2, we will listen to the other two Abrahamic voices, and unpack some insights as to why Judaism and Islam do not accept the Christ that the churches build, despite sharing the same God of Abraham.
REAL FREEDOM! 