The New Testament is anti-Semitic, not incidentally, not implicitly, but fundamentally and thematically. Anti-Semitism is its purpose. From its very origins, the New Testament is quite literally “anti-Semitism.” The “New Testament” is a rebuttal to the “Old Testament” written at a time of holy war between the Jews and Romans.
Once it is highlighted, the New Testament’s overtly Roman perspective explains an entire host of otherwise completely inexplicable issues. One of them is Paul’s reference to personal contacts inside the house of the emperor and also to a powerful secretary of Emperor Nero himself. Suddenly, such offhand mentions by St. Paul, puzzling, braggadocios, and usually overlooked for these reasons, become deeply meaningful simply by taking them literally. (51)
We will shortly see that this last person, Epaphroditus, one of the highest-ranking secretaries of the Emperor Nero, may actually be the confidant Paul is referring to in his letter to the Philippians, which he concluded with: “All God’s people here send you greetings, especially those who belong to Caesar’s household.” (52) Paul’s reference to being in custody (53) in that same letter suggests that he wrote this letter from Rome.
We shall return to Paul’s relationships with this Roman official named “Epaphroditus,” and other high-ranking Romans, when we focus on the people who are involved in this story in Part II.
Already we have seen that the religious and political goals in the Gospels track perfectly with the agenda of contemporary Romans while clashing with popular Jewish attitudes on the very grounds that instigated the Jewish War—a war that was won by the Romans just prior to the Gospels’ writing.
In the Gospels, Jesus condemns the things that brought Jews into conflict with the Romans even as he expresses themes of hope, peace, charity, eternal salvation, joy, universal brotherhood, and the proclamation of world peace to the whole of the human race. All of these are distinctly Roman goals that they were actively disseminating far and wide at the time, as evidenced in their coinage. Indeed, Jesus personified all the social virtues that were the very currency of Roman imperialism in the wake of the calamitous Jewish War.
One might object to naming the New Testament anti-Semitic on these grounds: that it, especially the Book of Matthew, bases Jesus Christ’s claim as the Jewish Messiah in Hebrew prophecies and that Jesus was, after all, himself Jewish.
However, while it is certainly true that Jesus is said by the Gospels to have fulfilled some of the basic Jewish messianic prophecies, such as being born of the line of King David, the authors of the Gospels themselves seem to employ the whole of Hebrew Scriptures, including parts that have nothing to do with the messiah, to a haphazard variety of literary ends that hardly seems Jewish.
In order to depict Jesus as the new lawgiver, or a new “Moses,” for example, Jesus is shown delivering his sermon on a “mount” (just as Moses received the Torah atop Mount Sinai).
Additionally, just as Pharaoh ordered male babies slaughtered at the time of Moses’s birth, so Herod orders the “Slaughter of the Innocents” in Bethlehem at the time of Jesus’s birth, according to Matthew (though this is not backed up by the record of any contemporary historians or archeological evidence of any kind).
Detail from Vatican tapestry, Slaughter of the Innocents
And there are other instances of this kind of holistic and theologically curious sourcing to the Old Testament in the New Testament’s depiction of Christ. For instance, just as the “Joseph” of Genesis interpreted prophetic dreams in Egypt so, too, does Joseph, the husband of Mary, have prophetic dreams that compel him to take his family to Egypt. Though the text of the original Joseph story seems to have no necessary relation to the coming of the messiah, the story is recycled anyway in the New Testament, which seems to treat the entire Old Testament as prophetic of the Messiah as if to give the Gospels a generalized “Jewish” patina. As St. Paul describes his own experiences, just reading the holy words from a sacred scripture could send an interpreter into a state of ecstasy—and prompt new visions of the Messiah.
As the object of centuries of prophetic hopes, the Messiah became seen as the embodiment and physical manifestation of the Word of God. Yet, so dramatically did the Gospels’ Jesus seem to reverse traditional messianic expectations that he had to be shown to embody the whole of Hebrew scripture itself, even material having little or nothing to do with the idea of the messiah.
Scholars have long observed many more examples of Hebrew literature being oddly recapitulated in the New Testament in this “prophecy-fulfilling” fashion. We can be sure, for this reason, that one of the primary sources for the late 1st Century Gospel authors who depicted Christ was ancient Hebrew scripture.
However, Jesus does not fulfill the predictions of glory and rule that qualified one as a Jewish messiah. Instead, he only predicts that such glory and rule will be fulfilled during his imminent and decisive second coming in yet another jarring innovation to the concept of the messiah that markedly deviates from Jewish religion—even while it seems to be based on the Old Testament prophecy of Isaiah.
It seems that in order to support the departure from the messianic archetype of the delivering warrior, the Gospel authors based their accounts of Jesus’s life, in part, on the “expiation” required before the actual coming of the messiah, which must include a human sacrifice, as related in the prophecies of Isaiah.
The prophet Isaiah envisions a time when the people’s sins have accumulated to such a point that, this time, the messiah’s arrival will be impossible. To become worthy of the messianic advent, Isaiah predicts that a propitiation of human blood will have to be made. An animal sacrifice, such as a mere “lamb,” will no longer do. According to Isaiah:
Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.
We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away. Yet who of his generation protested? For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was punished.
He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.
Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.