Jews and Christians in Conflict
One of the ironies of early Christianity is that Jesus himself was a Jew who worshiped the Jewish God, kept Jewish customs, interpreted the Jewish law, and acquired Jewish disciples, who accepted him as the Jewish messiah. Yet, within just a few decades of his death, Jesus's followers had formed a religion that stood over-against Judaism. How did Christianity move so quickly from being a Jewish sect to being an anti-Jewish religion?
This is a difficult question, and to provide a satisfying answer would require a book of its own.7 Here, I can at least provide a historical sketch of the rise of anti-Judaism within early Christianity as a way of furnishing a plausible context for Christian scribes who occasionally altered their texts in anti-Jewish ways.
The last twenty years have seen an explosion of research into the historical Jesus. As a result, there is now an enormous range of opinion about how Jesus is best understood—as a rabbi, a social revolutionary, a political insurgent, a cynic philosopher, an apocalyptic prophet: the options go on and on. The one thing that nearly all scholars agree upon, however, is that no matter how one understands the major thrust of Jesus's mission, he must be situated in his own context as a first-century Palestinian Jew. Whatever else he was, Jesus was thoroughly Jewish, in every way—as were his disciples. At some point— probably before his death, but certainly afterward—Jesus's followers came to think of him as the Jewish messiah. This term messiah was understood in different ways by different Jews in the first century, but one thing that all Jews appear to have had in common when thinking about the messiah was that he was to be a figure of grandeur and power, who in some way—for example, through raising a Jewish army or by leading the heavenly angels—would overcome Israel's enemies and establish Israel as a sovereign state that could be ruled by God himself (possibly through human agency). Christians who called Jesus the messiah obviously had a difficult time convincing others of this claim, since rather than being a powerful warrior or a heavenly judge, Jesus was widely known to have been an itinerant preacher who had gotten on the wrong side of the law and had been crucified as a low-life criminal.
To call Jesus the messiah was for most Jews completely ludicrous. Jesus was not the powerful leader of the Jews. He was a weak and powerless nobody—executed in the most humiliating and painful way devised by the Romans, the ones with the real power. Christians, however, insisted that Jesus was the messiah, that his death was not a miscarriage of justice or an unforeseen event, but an act of God, by which he brought salvation to the world.
What were Christians to do with the fact that they had trouble convincing most Jews of their claims about Jesus? They could not, of course, admit that they themselves were wrong. And if they weren't wrong, who was? It had to be the Jews. Early on in their history, Christians began to insist that Jews who rejected their message were recalcitrant and blind, that in rejecting the message about Jesus, they were rejecting the salvation provided by the Jewish God himself. Some such claims were being made already by our earliest Christian author, the apostle Paul. In his first surviving letter, written to the Christians of Thessalonica, Paul says:
For you, our brothers, became imitators of the churches of God that are in Judea in Christ Jesus, because you suffered the same things from your own compatriots as they did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and persecuted us, and are not pleasing to God, a nd are opposed to all people, (1 Thess. 2:14-15)
Paul came to believe that Jews rejected Jesus because they understood that their own special standing before God was related to the fact that they both had and kept the Law that God had given them (Rom. 10:3-4). For Paul, however, salvation came to the Jews, as well as to the Gentiles, not through the Law but through faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus (Rom. 3:21-22). Thus, keeping the Law could have no role in salvation; Gentiles who became followers of Jesus were instructed, therefore, not to think they could improve their standing before God by keeping the Law. They were to remain as they were—and not convert to become Jews (Gal. 2:15-16).
Other early Christians, of course, had other opinions—as they did on nearly every issue of the day! Matthew, for example, seems to presuppose that even though it is the death and resurrection of Jesus that brings salvation, his followers will naturally keep the Law, just as Jesus himself did (see Matt. 5:17-20). Eventually, though, it became widely held that Christians were distinct from Jews, that following the Jewish law could have no bearing on salvation, and that joining the Jewish people would mean identifying with the people who had rejected their own messiah, who had, in fact, rejected their own God.
As we move into the second century we find that Christianity and Judaism had become two distinct religions, which nonetheless had a lot to say to each other. Christians, in fact, found themselves in a bit of a bind. For they acknowledged that Jesus was the messiah anticipated by the Jewish scriptures; and to gain credibility in a world that cherished what was ancient but suspected anything "recent" as a dubious novelty, Christians continued to point to the scriptures—those ancient texts of the Jews—as the foundation for their own beliefs. This meant that Christians laid claim to the Jewish Bible as their own. But was not the Jewish Bible for Jews? Christians began to insist that Jews had not only spurned their own messiah, and thereby rejected their own God, they had also misinterpreted their own scriptures. And so we find Christian writings such as the so-called Letter of Barnabas, a book that some early Christians considered to be part of the New Testament canon, which asserts that Judaism is and always has been a false religion, that Jews were misled by an evil angel into interpreting the laws given to Moses as literal prescriptions of how to live, when in fact they were to be interpreted allegorically.8
Eventually we find Christians castigating Jews in the harshest terms possible for rejecting Jesus as the messiah, with authors such as the second-century Justin Martyr claiming that the reason God commanded the Jews to be circumcised was to mark them off as a special people who deserved to be persecuted. We also find authors such as Tertullian and Origen claiming that Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman armies in 70 C.E. as a punishment for the Jews who killed their messiah, and authors such as Melito of Sardis arguing that in killing Christ, the Jews were actually guilty of killing God.
Pay attention all families of the nations and observe! An extraordinary murder has taken place in the center of Jerusalem, in the city devoted to God's Law, in the city of the Hebrews, in the city of the prophets, in the city thought of as just. And who has been murdered? And who is the murderer? I am ashamed to give the answer, but give it I must.... The one who hung the earth in space, is himself hanged; the one who fixed the heavens in place is himself impaled; the one who firmly fixed all things is himself firmly fixed to the tree. The Lord is insulted, God has been murdered, the King of Israel has been destroyed by the right hand of Israel. (Paschal Homily, 94-9 6)9
Clearly we have come a long way from Jesus, a Palestinian Jew who kept Jewish customs, preached to his Jewish compatriots, and taught his Jewish disciples the true meaning of the Jewish law. By the second century, though, when Christian scribes were reproducing the texts that eventually became part of the New Testament, most Christians were former pagans, non-Jews who had converted to the faith and who understood that even though this religion was based, ultimately, on faith in the Jewish God as described in the Jewish Bible, it was nonetheless completely anti-Jewish in its orientation.
Anti-Jewish Alterations of the Text
The anti-Jewishness of some second- and third-century Christian scribes played a role in how the texts of scripture were transmitted. One of the clearest examples is found in Luke's account of the crucifixion, in which Jesus is said to have uttered a prayer for those responsible:
And when they came to the place that is called "The Skull," they crucified him there, along with criminals, one on his right and
the other on his left. And Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing." (Luke 2:33-34)
As it turns out, however, this prayer of Jesus cannot be found in all our manuscripts: it is missing from our earliest Greek witness (a papyrus called P75, which dates to about 200 C.E.) and several other high-quality witnesses of the fourth and later centuries; at the same time, the prayer can be found in Codex Sinaiticus and a large range of manuscripts, including most of those produced in the Middle Ages. And so the question is, Did a scribe (or a number of scribes) delete the prayer from a manuscript that originally included it? Or did a scribe (or scribes) add it to a manuscript that originally lacked it?
Scholarly opinion has long been divided on the question. Because the prayer is missing from several early and high-quality witnesses, there has been no shortage of scholars to claim that it did not originally belong to the text. Sometimes they appeal to an argument based on internal evidence. As I have pointed out, the author of the Gospel of Luke also produced the Acts of the Apostles, and a passage similar to this one can be found in Acts in the account of the first Christian martyr, Stephen, the only person whose execution is described at any length in Acts. Because Stephen was charged with blasphemy, he was stoned to death by a crowd of angry Jews; and before he expired he prayed, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them" (Acts 7:60).
Some scholars have argued that a scribe who did not want Jesus to look any less forgiving than his first martyr, Stephen, added the prayer to Luke's Gospel, so that Jesus also asks that his executioners be forgiven. This is a clever argument, but it is not altogether convincing, for several reasons. The most compelling is this: whenever scribes try to bring texts into harmony with each other, they tend to do so by repeating the same words in both passages. In this case, however, we do not find identical wording, merely a similar kind of prayer. This is not the kind of "harmonization" that scribes typically make.
Also striking in conjunction with this point is that Luke, the author himself, on a number of occasions goes out of his way to show the similarities between what happened to Jesus in the Gospel and what happened to his followers in Acts: both Jesus and his followers are baptized, they both receive the Spirit at that point, they both proclaim the good news, they both come to be rejected for it, they both suffer at the hands of the Jewish leadership, and so on. What happens to Jesus in the Gospel happens to his followers in Acts. And so it would be no surprise—but rather expected—that one of Jesus's followers, who like him is executed by angry authorities, should also pray that God forgive his executioners.
There are other reasons for suspecting that Jesus's prayer of forgiveness is original to Luke 23. Throughout both Luke and Acts, for example, it is emphasized that even though Jesus was innocent (as were his followers), those who acted against him did so in ignorance. As Peter says in Acts 3: "I know that you acted in ignorance" (v. 17); or as Paul says in Acts 17: "God has overlooked the times of ignorance" (v. 27). And that is precisely the note struck in Jesus's prayer: "for they don't know what they are doing."
It appears, then, that Luke 23:34 was part of Luke's original text. Why, though, would a scribe (or a number of scribes) have wanted to delete it? Here is where understanding something about the historical context within which scribes were working becomes crucial. Readers today may wonder for whom Jesus is praying. Is it for the Romans who are executing him in ignorance? Or is it for the Jews who are responsible for turning him over to the Romans in the first place? However we might answer that question in trying to interpret the passage today, it is clear how it was interpreted in the early church. In almost every instance in which the prayer is discussed in the writings of the church fathers, it is clear that they interpreted the prayer as being uttered not on behalf of the Romans but on behalf of the Jews.10 Jesus was asking God to forgive the Jewish people (or the Jewish leaders) who were responsible for his death.
Now it becomes clear why some scribes would have wanted to omit the verse. Jesus prayed for the forgiveness of the J ews? How could that be? For early Christians there were, in fact, two problems with the verse, taken in this way. First, they reasoned, why would Jesus pray for forgiveness for this recalcitrant people who had willfully rejected God himself? That was scarcely conceivable to many Christians. Even more telling, by the second century many Christians were convinced that God had not forgiven the Jews because, as mentioned earlier, they believed that he had allowed Jerusalem to be destroyed as a punishment for the Jews in killing Jesus. As the church father Origen said: "It was right that the city in which Jesus underwent such sufferings should be completely destroyed, and that the Jewish nation be overthrown" (Against Celsus 4, 22)."
The Jews knew full well what they were doing, and God obviously had not forgiven them. From this point of view, it made little sense for Jesus to ask for forgiveness for them, when no forgiveness was forthcoming. What were scribes to do with this text, then, in which Jesus prayed, "Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing"? They dealt with the problem simply by excising the text, so that Jesus no longer asked that they be forgiven.
There were other passages in which the anti-Jewish sentiment of early Christian scribes made an impact on the texts they were copying. One of the most significant passages for the eventual rise of anti-Semitism is the scene of Jesus's trial in the Gospel of Matthew. According to this account, Pilate declares Jesus innocent, washing his hands to show that "I am innocent of this man's blood! You see to it!" The Jewish crowd then utters a cry that was to play such a horrendous role in the violence manifest against the Jews down through the Middle Ages, in which they appear to claim responsibility for the death of Jesus: "His blood be upon us and our children" (Matt. 27:24-25).
The textual variant we are concerned with occurs in the next verse. Pilate is said to have flogged Jesus and then "handed him over to be crucified." Anyone reading the text would naturally assume that he handed Jesus over to his own (Roman) soldiers for crucifixion. That makes it all the more striking that in some early witnesses—including one of the scribal corrections in Codex Sinaitius—the text is changed to heighten even further the Jewish culpability in Jesus's death. According to these manuscripts, Pilate "handed him over to them [i.e., to the Jews] in order that they might crucify him." Now the Jewish responsibility for Jesus's execution is absolute, a change motivated by anti-Jewish sentiment among the early Christians.
Sometimes anti-Jewish variants are rather slight and do not catch one's attention until some thought is given to the matter. For example, in the birth narrative of the Gospel of Matthew, Joseph is told to call Mary's newborn son Jesus (which means "salvation") "because he will save his people from their sins" (Matt. 1:21). It is striking that in one manuscript preserved in Syriac translation, the text instead says "because he will save the world from its sins." Here again it appears that a scribe was uncomfortable with the notion that the Jewish people would ever be saved.
A comparable change occurs in the Gospel of John. In chapter 4, Jesus is talking with the woman from Samaria and tells her, "You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, because salvation comes from the Jews" (v. 22). In some Syriac and Latin manuscripts, however, the text has been changed, so that now Jesus declares that "salvation comes from Judea." In other words, it is not the Jewish people who have brought salvation to the world; it is Jesus's death in the country of Judea that has done so. Once again we might suspect that it was anti-Jewish sentiment that prompted the scribal alteration.
My final example in this brief review comes from the fifth-century Codex Bezae, a manuscript that arguably contains more interesting and intriguing variant readings than any other. In Luke 6, where the
Pharisees accuse Jesus and his disciples of breaking the Sabbath (6:1-4), we find in Codex Bezae an additional story consisting of a single verse: "On the same day he saw a man working on the Sabbath, and he said to him, 'O man, if you know what
you are doing, you are blessed, but if you do not know, you are cursed, and a transgressor of the Law.'" A full interpretation of this unexpected and unusual passage would require a good deal of investigation.12 For our purposes here it is enough to note that Jesus is quite explicit in this passage, in a way that he never is elsewhere in the Gospels. In other instances, when Jesus is accused of violating the Sabbath, he defends his activities, but never does he indicate that the Sabbath laws are to be violated. In this verse, on the other hand, Jesus plainly states that anyone who knows why it is legitimate to violate Sabbath is blessed for doing so; only those who don't understand why it is legitimate are doing what is wrong. Again, this is a variant that appears to relate to the rising tide of anti-Judaism in the early church.
Pagans and the Texts of Scripture
Thus far we have seen that internal disputes over correct doctrine or church management (the role of women) affected early Christian scribes, and so too did conflicts between church and synagogue, as the church's anti-Jewish sentiment played a role in how those scribes transmitted the texts that were eventually declared to be the New Testament. Christians in the early centuries of the church not only had to contend with heretical insiders and Jewish outsiders, they also saw themselves embattled in the world at large, a world that was for the most part made up of pagan outsiders. The word pagan in this context, when used by historians, does not carry negative connotations. It simply refers to anyone in the ancient world who subscribed to any of the numerous polytheistic religions of the day. Since this included anyone who was neither Jewish nor Christian, we are talking about something like 90-93 percent of the population of the empire. Christians were sometimes opposed by pagans because of their unusual form of worship and their acceptance of Jesus as the one Son of God whose death on the cross brought salvation; and occasionally this opposition came to affect the Christian scribes who were reproducing the texts of scripture.
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why Page 20