Anti-Semitism
The Passion and anti-Semitism
The Passion story has often been used to justify Christian anti-Semitism with cruel, tragic and shaming results. Mary Gordon points out that the Passion is...
a story whose very power to move the human spirit has been a vehicle for both transcendence and murder. To be a Christian is to face the responsibility for one's own most treasured sacred texts being used to justify the deaths of innocents.Mary Gordon, For one Catholic, 'Passion' skews the meaning of the Crucifixion, New York Times, 2004
And the gospel versions of the story clearly suggest that even if the Jews did not actually kill Jesus, some Jewish officials played a significant part in getting the Roman governor to sentence Jesus to death.
Some people claim that the Bible states that the Jews cursed themselves as Christ-killers. They base this on a passage in St. Mark's Gospel (27:25) where members of the Jewish crowd shout out, "His blood be on us, and on our children." This phrase was used for centuries to claim that Jews bore a 'blood guilt' that justified Church anti-Semitism and the murder of Jews.
In fact Jesus was not killed by the Jews, but by Roman soldiers on the orders of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor.
Jesus was crucified, and only the Romans used this method of execution.
Jesus was not primarily executed for blasphemy but because Pilate feared that he would incite public unrest.
Some of the Jewish leadership played a part in the death of Jesus, but the Jewish population as a whole had nothing to do with it.
The blame for Christ's death is unambiguously stated in the Christian Creed:
He was also crucified for us, suffered under Pontius Pilate and was buried.Christian Creed
The Roman Catholic Church brought a formal end to Church anti-Semitism at the Second Vatican Council when it declared in the document Nostra Aetate:
True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ, still what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.
Although the Church is the new People of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.
Nostra Aetate