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.(Barnabas is basing his interpretation on the Septua-gint the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.) The number 318is made up of the Greek letters tau, iota, and eta.Barnabas points outthat the tau, which looks like our letter t, is in the shape of the cross,and iota and eta are the first two letters in the name of Jesus.Cir-cumcision is not about foreskins.It is about the Cross of Jesus.What happens when a Christian author states that the Jews havenever understood their own religion, and that the Old Testament isa Christian, not a Jewish, book? It is an obvious attempt to rob Juda-ism of all its validity.And that was Barnabas s goal.His book is anti-Jewish to the core.As time went on, Christian anti-Judaism got worse and worse, asChristian authors began to accuse Jews of all sorts of villainous acts,not just of misinterpreting their own Scriptures.Some Christianauthors argued that destruction of the city of Jerusalem, the heart ofJudaism, by the Romans in 70 CE was God s judgment on the Jews forkilling their own Messiah.Eventually Christian authors appearedon the scene who took the logic a step further.As Christians beganto see Jesus himself as divine, some maintained that by being re-sponsible for Jesus death, Jews were in effect guilty of killing God.This charge of deicide first occurs in the writings of a late-second-century author named Melito, who was bishop of the city of Sardis.A sermon that Melito preached at some unspecified Easter celebra-tion was discovered in the mid-twentieth century.In Melito s church,Easter was celebrated at the time of the Jewish Passover, and so thissermon is called his Passover homily.In it he reflects on the Jewsguilt in killing Jesus, their own God, in rhetorically powerful butfrightful language:This one was murdered.And where was he murdered? In thevery center of Jerusalem! Why? Because he had healed theirlame and had cleansed their lepers, and had guided their blind242 j e s u s , i n t e r r u p t e dwith light, and had raised up their dead.For this reason he suf-fered.(chapter 72)Why, O Israel, did you do this strange injustice? You dishon-ored the one who had honored you.You held in contempt theone who held you in esteem.You denied the one who publiclyacknowledged you.You renounced the one who proclaimed youhis own.You killed the one who made you to live.Why did youdo this O Israel? (chapter 73)It was necessary for him to suffer, yes, but not by you; it wasnecessary for him to be dishonored, but not by you; it was nec-essary for him to be judged, but not by you; it was necessary forhim to be crucified, but not by you, not by your right hand, OIsrael! (chapters 75 76)Therefore, hear and tremble because of him for whom theearth trembled.The one who hung the earth in space is him-self hanged; the one who fixed the heavens in place is himselfimpaled; the one who firmly fixed all things, is himself firmlyfixed to the tree.The Lord is insulted, God has been murdered,the king of Israel has been destroyed by the hand of Israel.(chapters 95 96)Explaining the Rise of Christian Anti-JudaismHow did it get to this point? How did the passionately Jewish re-ligion of Jesus become the virulently anti-Jewish religion of hisfollowers?You can probably trace the logical progression of Christiananti-Judaism from the information provided in this chapter.A riftnaturally occurred as soon as Christians insisted that Jesus was theMessiah, that the Messiah had to suffer for sins, that the death of theMessiah was the means by which God made people right with Him,Who Invented Christianity? 243that the law could play no role in the act of salvation, and that Jewstherefore had either to believe in Jesus as the Messiah or be rejectedby God.Believers in Jesus were right with God; everyone else, in-cluding faithful Jews, stood under God s curse.We find this view inPaul, but he didn t invent it; it was already being propounded beforehe came on the scene.It is no wonder that Paul, when he was still anon-Christian Jew, found the followers of Jesus so offensive.The logic of this position more or less drove some Christians to saythat by rejecting God s Messiah, Jews had rejected God.The naturalcorollary was that God had rejected them.Christian thinkers could argue that the Jewish Scriptures them-selves indicate that the Jewish people had been rejected by God.TheOld Testament prophets repeatedly warn the ancient Israelites thatsince they have violated God s will and law, he is turning on themin judgment [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]