Jewish deicide is a belief that places the
responsibility for the death of Jesus on the
Jewish people as a whole.
This deicide accusation is expressed in the
ethnoreligious slur "Christ killer".
Responsibility of Jewish authorities
According to
Jeremy Cohen, "[e]ven before the
Gospels appeared, the apostle
Paul (or, more probably, one of his disciples) portrayed the Jews as Christ's killers ... But though the
New Testament clearly looks to the Jews as responsible for the death of Jesus, Paul and the evangelists did not yet condemn all Jews, by the very fact of their Jewishness, as murderers of God and his messiah. That condemnation, however, was soon to come."
According to the New Testament accounts, the Jewish authorities in
Judea charged Jesus with
blasphemy and sought his execution (see
Sanhedrin Trial of Jesus). However, the Jewish authorities lacked the authority to have Jesus put to death, according to yet records them ordering the
stoning of
Saint Stephen and also
James the Just according to
Antiquities of the Jews . The
Jesus Seminar's
Scholars Version translation notes for : "
it's illegal for us: The accuracy of this claim is doubtful." They brought Jesus to
Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor of
Iudaea Province, who "consented" to Jesus' execution.
Pilate is portrayed in the Gospel accounts as a reluctant accomplice to Jesus' death. Some modern scholars have questioned the historical accuracy of such a portrayal. These historians suggest that a Roman Governor such as Pilate would not have hesitated to execute any leader whose followers posed a potential threat to Roman rule. However, the Gospel accounts indicate that there could be hesitation on the part of both Jewish and Roman authorities to act immediately or needlessly in the face of potential popular opposition (; ; ). These scholars also suggest that the Gospel accounts may have downplayed the role of the Romans in Jesus' death during a time when Christianity was struggling to gain acceptance in the Roman world. Yet the four Gospel accounts uniformly portray the Roman Governor Pilate as partly responsible for Jesus' execution, rather than exonerating him, and it is not clear that blaming Pilate completely, decades after his reign, would have diminished Christian acceptance.
Deicide charge against Jews in general
An early documented accusation that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus came in a sermon in 167 AD attributed to
Melito of Sardis entitled
Peri Pascha (
On the Passover). This text blames the Jews for allowing
King Herod and
Caiaphas to execute Jesus, despite their calling as God's people. It says "you did not know, O Israel, that this one was the firstborn of God". The author does not attribute particular blame to
Pontius Pilate, but only mentions that Pilate washed his hands of guilt. The sermon is written in Greek, so does not use the Latin word for deicide,
deicidas. At a time when Christians were widely persecuted, Melito's speech is believed to have been an appeal to Rome to spare Christians.
According to a Latin dictionary, the Latin word
deicidas was used by the fourth century, by
Peter Chrysologus in his sermon number 172, where he wrote
Iudaeos ... fecit esse deicidas, i.e., "Jews... committed deicide".
The
Great Friday liturgy of the
Eastern Orthodox Church and
Byzantine Catholics uses the expression "impious and law-breaking people", but the strongest expressions are in the
Great Thursday liturgy, which includes the same chant, after the eleventh Gospel reading, but also speaks of "the swarm of deicides, the lawless people of the Jews", and, referring to "the gathering of the Jews", prays: "But give them, Lord, their requital, because they plotted against you in vain." A liturgy with a similar pattern, historically using the term "perfidous Jews", can be found in the
Improperia of the
Roman Catholic Church. In the Anglican Church, the first Anglican Book of Common Prayer did not contain this formula, but has emerged in later versions, for example, the 1989 Anglican Prayer Book of the
Anglican Church of Southern Africa, as the “The Solemn Adoration of Christ Crucified" or The Reproaches.
Though not part of
Christian dogma, many Christians, including members of the
clergy, preached that the Jewish people were
collectively guilty for Jesus's death.
More generally accepted today among Christians as theologically accurate is the idea that collective guilt must lie, in a spiritual sense, at the feet of all humanity in our common sinfulness. Otherwise, the salvific power of God's act of self-sacrifice and redemption through Jesus' taking human sin onto himself, his suffering, forgiveness, death and ultimate resurrection would be either meaningless, or would atone for the sins of only a small group of Roman and Jewish authorities held to be specifically responsible for his death at that time. Furthermore, certain people have argued that any condemnatory use of the term "Christ-killer" or "deicide" logically entails that one is of the opinion that Christ should not have been killed, therefore of necessity meaning that God's plan for salvation through his death and resurrection should not have been carried out, and also that the divine forgiveness manifested through the act itself should not be respected or imitated. This basic contradiction demonstrates the essentially anti-Christian stance embodied in these terms.
Repudiation
As a part of
Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the
Roman Catholic Church under
Pope Paul VI issued the declaration
Nostra Aetate ("In Our Time"), which in part repudiated the traditional belief in the collective Jewish guilt for the
Crucifixion.
[ Nostra Aetate stated that even though some Jewish authorities and those who followed them called for Jesus' death, the blame for this cannot be laid at the door of all those Jews present at that time, nor can the Jews in our time be held as guilty.]
On January 6, 2004, the Consultative Panel on Lutheran-Jewish Relations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America issued a statement urging any Lutheran church presenting a Passion Play to adhere to their Guidelines for Lutheran-Jewish Relations, stating that "the New Testament . . . must not be used as justification for hostility towards present-day Jews," and that "blame for the death of Jesus should not be attributed to Judaism or the Jewish people."[ January 6, 2004]
In 2007, a group of twelve Orthodox Christian priests representing five different national churches, some in open defiance of directives from their church leadership, issued a ten-page declaration calling for the removal of all passages suggesting Jewish collective guilt from their liturgy, calling them anti-Semitic.See also
