It’s not my personal belief - but it is taught to many Christians. I wasn’t aware the dying part etc wasn’t in the Old Testament. OK - so Jews are not expecting their Messiah to be a sacrificial lamb thing. But my point was that Christians were/are, so it is ironic - as another poster stated - for someone professing christian belief to slam jews for “killing Christ” when according to their religion/doctrine/interpretation/belief Christ was supposed to die to save their sins.
My other point being that it doesn’t really matter who killed Jesus - if indeed he was killed at all - because it was a hell of a long time ago, and most world religions have past killings they would not associate themselves with today. Such as witch-burning.
The ‘black Jesus’, while it is thought-provoking, doesn’t seem likely to be any more accurate than the European Jesus with which we’re all so familiar; I’d have thought that olive skin would be more likely; something like this perhaps.
I’m not sure if this is a bad thing or not, but I don’t see the point of the cartoon. How are the Israelis killing Jesus again by their current actions?
The Palestinians aren’t Christian, by and large, but Muslim. I don’t see the connection.
Anti-Semitism makes Baby Jesus cry, but so do incomprehensible political cartoons.
/Kinky Friedman singing voice/ I said “Has it occured to you, you nerd, that that’s not very nice. We Jews believe it was Santa Claus that killed Jesus Christ.”
Weeeeeel, the authors of the New Testement quite explicitly blame “the Jews.” Many recent authors have tried to explain it away but it is right there in black and white. If one is not burdened by an excessive “revealed Word of God” view of the Bible you can see that there was an apparent political battle going on between the Jews who followed Jesus and those who did not and, as more Gentiles were converted to Christianity, the divide became bigger. And the warm, fuzzy, and ineffectual rendering of Pontius Pilate in the Bible goes against every other portrait of him. It looks like there was a whitewashing of the Roman role to make conversion of Gentiles easier combined with a besmirching of those Jews who had already rejected Jesus as the Messiah.
The source of the Jews = Christ - killers idea comes from the Gospels itself. Whenever the subject comes up, Matthew 27 is quoted to me. The relevant parts (bolding mine) are:
From this verse, the lunatic fringe blames all Jews (including today’s Jews) for Jesus’ death.
Of course, this is all hogwash. Please consider the following:
Can you assign blame for your actions to your children?
Of course not. The very notion is ludicrous. Suppose one of these lunatic fringe types had a great-great grandfather who murdered someone 150 years earlier, and before he committed the murder, he said “Let his blood be on me and on my children!” Would he then agree to be tried for the murder of this person over a century earlier. Would he happily accept responsibility and go to prison (or the death chamber) for the actions of his ancestor five generations removed? I highly doubt it. Yet, this same person will hold Jews responsible for something that (even if it was their fault) happened two thousand years ago and in which the actual Jews who exist today had no part in.
Can you assign blame to a contemporary who wasn’t present?
While there were Jews living in Israel at the time, a large percentage of the Jews at the time were living in the Diaspora (primarily in Babylonia, where the main Talmudic acadamies were set up). Can these Jews be responsible for the actions of the Jews in Israel even thought they had no knowledge of what was happening?
What if Tim McVeigh, when he committed his crime said “I’m doing this for all conservatives. Let the blood of the people in the Murrah building be on us and our children!” Does that make all conservatives everywhere responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing? Does that make conservatives’ children responsible 500 years from now? Would these selfsame lunatics surrender to the authorities for the April 18, 1995 bombing? I highly doubt it. Yet, this same person will hold the Jews in Babylonia (and their descendants) guilty for the murder of Jesus.
Since a significant percentage (maybe even a majority) of Jews at the time were not living in Jerusalem, and could not have had any knowledge of the happenings in Jerusalem until they were over, how can one hold them responsible for Jesus’ death?
So, even if you accept that the Jews at that time, in that place, were responsible for Jesus’ death (which is not neccesarily true either), I always failed to see how anyone could hold Jews today responsible.
[sub]I realize, of course, that my arguments will mean nothing to those who are truly hell-bent (pun intended) on blaming the Jews for Jesus’ death. But, nonetheless, I will still argue the points to any who are willing to listen (and sometimes to those that aren’t).[/sub]
Bear in mind also that the Jews didn’t actually execute Jesus. The Romans reserved police powers to themselves and kept the Judean leaders on a very short leash, even to the point of keeping the High Priest’s robes and regalia in a chest in the governor’s palace. Jesus was tried by the Roman governor and executed by Roman soldiers. If somebody should be blamed for the blood guilt of Jesus’s death, it’s the Italians, which would make for an even more embarrassing position for the Roman Catholic Church.
Well, yes, that too. But I wanted to focus on the point that even if you accept the Gospel version as… well, Gospel, there is still no reason to blame Jews today.
Let me see if I have this straight… You are saying that there were a group of people known as Christians who were sitting around waiting for somebody who could be their messiah to be sacrificed? Man how lucky did they get that the one guy who fit the bill had the last name Christ? :rolleyes:
Just chiming in to say that I too am a Christian and I too was raised to believe that the whole “Jews killed Jesus” thing is crap. Some of the individuals who procured His death were undoubtedly Jewish, but others were Roman, and as has already been noted, nobody uses that as an excuse to hate Italians.
As a Christian, I believe each person is judged (will be judged) on his or her own merits. The idea that an entire religion would be blamed (eternally, apparently) for the death of Christ is offensive to my personal concept of God and what He stands for.
