Published in Open Access with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation Historical criticism of the Bible emerged in the context of protestant theology and is confronted in every aspect of its study with otherness: the Jewish people and their writings. However, despite some important exceptions, there has been little sustained reflection on the ways in which scholarship has engaged, and continues to engage, its most significant Other. This volume offers reflections on anti-Semitism, philo-Semitism and anti-Judaism in biblical scholarship from the 19th century to the present. The essays in this volume reflect on the past and prepare a pathway for future scholarship that is mindful of its susceptibility to violence and hatred.

This volume engages with antisemitic stereotypes as religious symbols that express and transmit a belief system of Jew-hatred. These religious symbols are stored in Christian, Muslim and even today’s secular cultural and religious memories. This volume explores how antisemitic religious symbol systems can play a key role in the construction of group identities.

A range of scholars have concluded that genocide itself is disturbingly rational and is grounded in more than atavistic, ancient prejudice. This significant conclusion challenges biblical scholars to re-examine the historical, hermeneutical and theological problems posed by biblical mass violence.

This book charts the shifting boundaries of Judaism from antiquity to the modern period in order to bring clarity to what scholars mean when they claim that ancient texts or groups are “within Judaism,” as well as exploring how rabbinic Jews, Christians, and Muslims have negotiated and renegotiated what Judaism is and is not in order to form their own identities. Belief in Jesus as the Messiah was seen as part of first-century Judaism, but by the fourth or fifth century, the boundaries had shifted and adherence to Jesus came to be seen as outside of Judaism. Resituating New Testament texts within first- or second-century Judaism is an historical exercise that may broaden our view of what Judaism looked like in the early centuries CE, but normatively these texts remain within Christianity because of their reception history. The historical “within Judaism” perspective, however, has the potential to challenge and reshape the theology of contemporary Christianity while at the same time the long-held consensus that belief in Jesus cannot belong within Judaism is again challenged by the modern Messianic Jewish movement.

Exploring the link between German biblical interpretation and anti-Semitism, this book is a fresh, comprehensive study of leading German exegetes, concluding that although Nazism brought anti-Semitic exegesis to a head, age-old thought structures provided powerful legitimation for oppression.

The point of this book is simple: to make Christians aware of a story that they have not been told—the story of relations between Christians and Jews. This involves tracing the church's anti-Judaism to its source in the gospels and the Book of Acts and describing the development of the church's displacement-replacement theology according to which we new Gentiles, spiritual, universal, inclusive Christians replace the old, carnal, ethnocentric legalist and works-righteous Jews in the favor of God. The story also details the actions of the churches, specifically a long chain of canons (laws) governing relations between Jews and Christians, all the way from banning Christians for socializing or dining with Jews, marrying Jews, and asking rabbis for blessings, to requiring all Jews to live in ghettos. This history of actions comes down to the present and its consequences in the Holocaust in which all the killers were Christians and in the Nazi laws governing Jewish behavior. Each such law took its precedent from a canon law passed by a council of the church. The recent rash of bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers and synagogues reminds us of how deeply this bigotry is embedded in people. The point of making people aware of anti-Judaism is to prompt them not to shrug if off when scripture readings regularly teach contempt for Jews with the rhetoric of vilification. Words are important. Teaching contempt should be called out and rejected. This can be done pastorally and gently, but it should be done. Otherwise the church's language reinforces a deeply embedded bigotry. Most Christian pastors are unaware of this reality and prone to thinking that anti-Judaism is not a serious problem for the church. Hence most anti-Judaism in Christian preaching is unintentional. Awareness of the story of Christian anti-Judaism prods us to move from unintentional anti-Judaism to intentional teaching of respect for Jews and Judaism.

Current scholarship in the study of ancient Christianity is now available to nonspecialists through this collection of essays on anti-Judaism in the New Testament and in New Testament interpretation. While academic writing can be obscure and popular writing can be uncritical, this group of experts has striven to write as simply and clearly as possible on topics that have been hotly contested. The essays are arranged around the historical figures and canonical texts that matter most to Christian communities and whose interpretation has fed the negative characterizations of Jews and Judaism. A select annotated bibliography also gives suggestions for further reading. This book should be an excellent resource for academic courses as well as adult study groups.