I think it is important not to confuse the positive message of christianity with the fantasy that it is all goodness and light. The massive contribution of christianity is that it spread elements of jewish ethics in a way that judaism couldn’t. This was a massive improvement on the ethical thought and conduct of people in the ancient world and we owe it our modern concepts of ethics and rights. However, christianity also contains terrible flaws.

Like you I am not a card carrying religious practitioner, like you my main preoccupation/activity is within the arts and the names with which you conclude I also highly esteem.

I find that passage in your Url very moving, and not in the slightest bit antisemitic. He is arguing with the religious establishment of his time.

But these things go so far back into history. The present – in theory – is a time of religious tolerance, whatever mistakes may may have been committed in the past.

Since I am not an adherent either of Judaism or Christianity. I find the whole discussion fascinating. Israel was the birth place of two great religions, and Yeze is returning to the cradle of his religion. What cultural richness. The two should live side beside in peace.

I admit, I’m not keen on conversion, and am allergic to the voice that tries to persuade, though I have to admit that I was a terrible unwitting converter in younger days, not to a religion but to the right way of thinking about poetry, music and society. I wrote endless letters telling people where they were wrong and betraying the future of mankind. I made visitors leave their newspapers on the landing outside my door, because I didn’t want lies to be brought into my home. Fortunately my friend David T’s father was spared this phase of my life.

I gave up that approach completely: not that I think my ideas were all wrong, but I now introduce them here and there. lightly touched on in essays. Most of My inspiration came from Jewish Germans, Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Mahler, Heine, Mendelssohn, Schoenberg, Zemliinky, Karl Kraus, Else Lasker-Schueler, Rosa Luxemburg.

The idea that when John says “jews” he means “pharisees” sounds unlikely, but is in any event unprovable either way. Whatever the intention of the original author(s), which is inaccessible to us, the jews as christ-killers are featured in the new testament and this is the ideological foundation of christian antisemitism, the crusades, autos-da-fe, blood libels and genocides leading up to and including the nazi era atrocities.

Ideology isn’t the only factor in those crimes, but it is an important component. And all of that is part of christianity, part of its darkness; and the depiction of christ-killer jews is, if you like, christianity’s satanic verses.

The most explicitly antisemitic NT passage is I think in John.8 from verse 31 where he has Jesus tell the jews that they are children of the devil:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/k/kjv/kjv-idx?type=citation&book=John&chapno=8&startverse=31&endverse=47

Atleast we are discussing and not throwing insults at each other

St John:
“It is said that none of the Jews do (what is written in) the Torah.”
Here J. is condemning whoever(Pharisees, Jews) for not following the commandments of Moses. Hardly anti-semitic. Many such complaints may be found in Isaiah and other prophets. I complain about the fact that Christians are not Christian – just think of the way Catholics and Protestants slaughtered each other.

“The Jews are said to be thieves and robbers.”
I found nothing of this kind in the cited passage.

Sometimes the compiler of these citations substitutes Jews for Pharisees. St. John does have references to ‘the Jews’, which is disconcerting from our point of view. Logically they represent the Pharisees. There’s no doubt that Jesus was at odds with the religious establishment of his time, with orthodox Judaism as it was then being practised.

You’ll never convince me that the New Testament is by definition anti-semitic. People who are anti-semitic, be they Christians, secularists, Muslims etc. are just bad people. Fullstop.

That site you quoted seems like a ‘clever’/ revolting piece of conspiracy theory.

Whatever you think happened at the time, the texts depicting jews killing jesus is the unequivocal foundation of christian antisemitism.

Christianity is a religion that has always defined itself as morally superior to an Other, and the canard about christians who do bad things not being real christians is a manifestation of this.

Isaiah contains a much more explicit condemnation of the Jews, but it cannot be construed as antisemiticism, because it is self critcism of his own people who have gone astray and are – at that point – not being true to their own religion.

The polemics of Jesus were with the Pharisees not with the Jews as such (how could they be?). There may well have been a phase in which the Pharisees were rigid old fogeys and Jesus was rebelling against these. However, it is true that he created a new religion in contradistinction to Judaism.

The Jews killed Jesus is an ambiguous phrase. Here it was Jews as opposed to Romans, as Pontius Pilate did not really want the crucifiction. Probably the Pharisees wanted to see him dead, but the desire for his death came also from his previous followers, the Zealots, who wanted to see him as a political freedom fighter (from Roman tyranny) and he told them they had misunderstood him. he was festively greeted on his entry into Jerusalem as the King of the Jews, but after saying no to this, he ended up pretty isolated. I think there might have been a bit of mass hysteria such as can happen in any country when people wanted to see Jesus crucified.

The argument about The Jews killing Jesus is a ridiculous non-argument, like saying the English killed Oscar Wilde.

Alas I have to go. I did not look at the citations from the Acts of the Apostles, because I think it is there that Christianity begins to go wrong.

And I don’t think this thread is being followed much any more.

Nietsche disliked the New Testament because of its submissive aspects and he wanted instead to develop his idea of the superman, which many took as a precursor of Nazism. But Nietsche wasn’t stupid and he would have been horrified by the Nazis. He also told his housekeeper that the things he wrote were not intended to be taken literally.

I repeat, in answer to a few letters above:
1. Many people who call themselves Christians have no right to do so.
2.The appalling history of the Christian churches had nothing to do with the New Testament, conceived by Jews who could hardly be antisemitic.
3. Such persecutions of minorities have occurred in several other contexts, also non Christian ones. They are due to inhuman nature not to Christ.
4. Sophia, your sister-in-law is not a Good Person, neither are the pseudo christian friends who call you a ‘typical Jew,’ There are also secularists who are antisemitic.

Oh fuck (lol – I can’t say “Oh God” in this context can I :p) The problem with the BNP is they have no way to send drooling radical Christians back to Saudi.