The New Yorker:

The Gospel narratives of the passion and death of Jesus have, across centuries, framed how Jews are perceived.

By James Carroll

This Sunday, Christians around the world will celebrate the peace and renewal promised by Easter, but at the heart of Holy Week liturgies leading up to the feast are a set of texts that have had brutal consequences for Jews, not just in the past, but in the present. The Gospel narratives of the passion and death of Jesus have, across centuries, framed how Jews are perceived. The response to the tragic events now unfolding in Gaza and Israel requires a fresh look at this unresolved and expressly Christian quandary. The lesson may be familiar, but it has urgent relevance.

An unfathomed thermal current long running below the surface of a broad culture—call it the culture of “the West”—is still being tapped, even if unconsciously. That current was first generated roughly two thousand years ago, in the way that early followers of Jesus told the story of the Crucifixion, as a crime laid at the feet of the Jews. After the Holocaust made plain that the “Christ-killer” slander was part of what prepared the way for the mass murder of Jews, the trope was repudiated by the Second Vatican Council, in the 1965 declaration Nostra Aetate. “What happened in His passion,” the fathers of the Roman Catholic council said, “cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.”

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