Murder of god

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The expressions of the murder of God (Greek theoktonia , Latin deizid ) and the murder of God ( also Christ murderer , Savior murderer ) denote in church history an alleged irrevocable collective guilt of the Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth , who is regarded as the Son of God . The term originated in 160 due to the statement of Bishop Melito of Sardis : "God has been murdered."

This charge of guilt is a central stereotype of Christian anti-Judaism . With this, the church established the religious “rejection” and “disinheritance” of Judaism ( substitution theology ) since the 2nd century and justified the social discrimination , oppression and persecution of Jewish minorities in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period . The image of the Jews anchored in popular piety as the “people of the murderers of God” contributed significantly to the fact that hostility towards Jews became a “cultural code” in the history of Europe . The accusation of the murder of God favored the modern anti-Semitism that had arisen since around 1860 , contributed to “acute forms of complicity” of the major churches with National Socialism and made it possible for the Holocaust to be carried out predominantly by perpetrators baptized Christian.

The churches gradually officially recognized this anti-Judaist stereotype and other theses as an error and guilt and moved away from it (see Churches and Judaism after 1945 ).

New Testament

Gospels

The New Testament (NT) nowhere speaks of a "murder of God". The Gospels name three interacting groups who participated in various degrees in the arrest, condemnation, extradition and crucifixion of Jesus: the Romans as the military occupying power, the Sanhedrin as the supreme religious authority of Judaism at the time, and the followers of the Sadducees in Jerusalem . The Passion stories leave no doubt that the Roman governor Pontius Pilate and his soldiers executed Jesus, but assign the high priest a strong share of responsibility: the Sanhedrin he led sought Jesus' death, arrested him, condemned him and handed him over to the Romans. Extra-biblical sources confirm that only the Romans had and could enforce capital jurisdiction, and question a regular religious process.

The early Christians, however, did not determine primarily historical responsibility, but proclaimed Jesus' passion as God's final stand for the chosen and persecuted people of Israel . The passion report of the early Jerusalem church on which the Gospels are based is entirely pro-Jewish. In it, Jesus appears as the Son of Man , whom the acutely persecuted Judaism hoped for since Dan 7 : 13-25  EU : To him, the representative of Israel, which suffers from the rulers of tyranny, YHWH will transfer his universal rule over all systems of violence at the judgment. Following on from this, Jesus says in Mk 14.41  EU , now the Son of Man himself - like the Israelites in Dan 7.25 - will be delivered into the hands of “sinners” (rulers). So he suffers and dies with the people he represents. Before that, at the Passover meal , which commemorates Israel's exodus from Egypt , he gives the group of twelve, who represent the twelve tribes of Israel, a share in his gift of self in advance and includes the peoples according to Isa 53: 11-12  EU : "This is my body ( Life) for you - this is my dying for the many ”, which renews the covenant of God with Israel ( Mk 14,24  EU ). With the solemn oath Mark 14.25  EU , he puts his last meal in the perspective of the universal rule of God , which according to Isa 25.6-8  EU will overcome death and suffering worldwide. According to Mk 14.58  EU, the interrogation of the Sanhedrin is about Jesus' announcement of the destruction and rebuilding of the temple ( Mk 13.2  EU ; cf. Jer 26  EU ). Since the new temple is biblically only entitled to the Messiah , the high priest consistently asks about Jesus' Messiah dignity. According to Mk 14.62  EU, Jesus answers the question in the affirmative and promises the representatives of Judaism the coming of the Son of Man: Israel, as God's people, has a future even after the destruction of the temple. To protect the temple cult, the Sanhedrin handed it over to the Romans. The Passion Report puts Jesus at the side of the oppressed and disenfranchised Jews in telling details: Simon of Cyrene , a Diaspora Jew , is forced to carry the cross ( Mk 15.21  EU ). In accordance with his Passover oath, Jesus rejects the anesthetic drink used by the Roman executioners ( Mk 15.23  EU ). He is crucified with insurgent zealots under the title of the cross INRI , i.e. because of his standing up for the Jewish hope of liberation ( Mk 15.26-27  EU ). He suffers on behalf of the biblically announced, limited and unrepeatable final judgment, expressed in the hourly scheme of the times and in the image of the judgment eclipse over the whole earth ( Mk 15.33  EU ). He shouts the court cry of God-forsakenness, at the same time the open complaint of all Jews suffering injustice ( Mk 15.34  EU ; quoted Ps 22.2  EU ). So the whole report says: Jesus, the Son of Man, died as the representative of Israel for and with Israel, took the judgment in his place and went down in the story of his passion. This is how God's reconciliation with the world took place, and the peoples received a share in Israel's hope of liberation. According to Bertold Klappert , the god murder theory followed from the loss of this “Israelite contour” of the Passion Report. It was a fundamental perversion that the closed court imposed on the Jews, denied solidarity with the suffering Jews, persecuted them and projected their own guilt for their sufferings back onto Judaism.

This began with the editorial staff of the Gospels itself. The Gospel of Mark claims that the temple priests had already decided on his death after Jesus' attack on the sacrificial cult in the temple and, because of the sympathy of the Jewish people, arranged his secret arrest "with cunning" ( Mk 10.33  EU ). The Sanhedrin unanimously condemned him to death ( Mk 14.64  EU ) and then handed him over to Pilate on false charges. He thought Jesus was innocent and offered the Jews present his release several times. They would have rejected this and demanded: Crucify him! Pilate finally gave in to this pressure ( Mk 15.1–15  EU ).

The other Gospels follow this description, reducing the main responsibility of Pilate and increasing the co-responsibility of the Sanhedrin. In the Gospel of Matthew , the Jewish crowd replied to Pilate's question about Jesus 'guilt ( Mt 27.25  EU ): “His blood come on us and our children!” With this “blood curse” the evangelist made Jesus' Jewish contemporaries for the consequences of the Roman one Unjust judgment liable. In doing so, he followed the biblical relationship between doing and doing , according to which unpunished murder would cause harm to the generation living in each case. Accordingly, the early Christians interpreted the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in the Jewish War (70 AD) as God's punishment for rejecting his son ( Mk 14.58  EU ; 15.38 EU ; Lk 21.24  EU ).

In the Gospel of Luke , Jesus' death is represented by analogy with the righteous who suffer with and for Israel. The request of the crucified for forgiveness for his murderers ( Lk 23.34  EU ) excludes any accusation of guilt against groups of perpetrators. It was left out in some later NT manuscripts, probably to exclude the Jews from this forgiveness as alleged murderers of God.

The Gospel of John reflects the already completed separation of Jews and Christians: unlike the older synoptic Gospels, it speaks indiscriminately of "the Jews" as opponents of Jesus. According to Jn 19.12  EU , they collectively blackmailed Pilate into having Jesus executed. The evangelist portrays them typologically as representatives of the anti-god aeon which Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection ended and overcame. This theological interpretation of his work of salvation presupposes Israel's irrevocable election to the people of God and confirms: "Salvation comes from the Jews" (Jn 4:22). That is why Jesus does not address all Jews in one of the speeches composed by the evangelist, but only addresses his opponents at the time as those who “had the devil for their father” (Jn 8:44). Joh 19,16  EU ("He delivered Jesus to them so that he would be crucified. They took over Jesus") suggests after the interrogation scene beforehand that Pilate handed Jesus over to the high priests so that they should crucify him themselves. But Joh 19,23  EU clearly names Roman soldiers as those who carried out the crucifixion. Historically, at that time only the Roman governor, not the Sanhedrin, could enforce the death penalty.

Following Jules Isaac and Paul Winter , New Testament scholars judge at least the Sanhedrin's death resolution, the unanimous death sentence (Mk 14.64), the torture of Jesus by councilors (Mk 14.65), the Passover amnesty of Pilate (Mk 15.6-15) and the self-accusation of the Jewish accusers of Jesus (Mt 27:25) as anti-Jewish editors. This shifted the historical responsibility for Jesus' execution from the Romans to the Sadducees and their followers in Jerusalem. The background was the situation after the destruction of the temple in the year 70, when the Christians tried to distance themselves more strongly from the Jews in order not to be persecuted with them by the Romans. Winter emphasized that all NT statements that seem to condemn the Jews across the board come from original Christians of Jewish origin who continued to see themselves as part of Judaism. Such statements are therefore regarded as internal Jewish polemics in the process of separating the two religions, not as an expression of general hatred of Jews.

The New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan considers the Sanhedrin trial against Jesus to be altogether ahistorical and explains the history of its impact:

“As long as the Christians were an underprivileged fringe group, their Passion narratives, which portrayed the Jews as guilty of the death of Jesus, but exonerated the Romans of all guilt, basically harmed no one. But when the Roman Empire became Christian, the fable became murderous. [...] Even if the origins of the invention can be explained and the motives of its inventors understandable, the insistence on this fable [...] has made it a long-lasting lie, and for the sake of our own integrity we Christians must finally call it such . "

Acts of the Apostles

The Acts of the Apostles of Luke follows the presentation of the Gospels and names the Jerusalem city population and their Jewish representatives as the cause of the death of Jesus ( Acts 13:27  EU ):

“For those who live in Jerusalem and their rulers, because they did not recognize Jesus , fulfilled the words of the prophets, which are read on every Sabbath , with their verdict . And although they found nothing in him that deserved death, they asked Pilate to kill him. "

This emphasizes the innocence of the victim and the injustice of the perpetrator, but at the same time protects them: In this way they have become an instrument of the will of God announced long before in Scripture.

The first public sermons of baptized to unbaptized Jews in Jerusalem afflict their addressees with complicity in the death of Jesus in order to offer them salvation and to enable them to turn to God ( Acts 2,23f.  EU ): “Him who was given up through God's plan and providence , you have nailed to the cross by the hand of the Gentiles and killed. " Acts 3,15  EU :" You killed the prince of life. " Acts 5,30  EU :" The God of our fathers raised Jesus, whom you in the They hanged wood and killed them. ”At the same time they affirm that the perpetrators acted out of ignorance ( Acts 3:17  EU ):“ Well, dear brothers, I know that you did it out of ignorance, as did your rulers. ”These statements are integral part of the proclamation of the gospel .

The so-called Hellenists among the Jerusalem early Christians began with the Gentile mission, rejected the Jerusalem temple cult and declared it ineffective with Jesus' crucifixion. According to Acts 7.52  EU , Stephen preached to the temple priests:

“You stubborn and uncircumcised hearts and ears! You are always resisting the Holy Spirit, just like your fathers so do you. Which prophet did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who previously announced the coming of the righteous, whose traitors and murderers you have now become. "

Right down to the choice of words, this polemic corresponded to the sharp criticism of the Jewish prophets of Israel's idolatry . Prophetic cult criticism has existed in Judaism since Elijah and Amos (around 800 BC). It was an expression of an intra-Jewish conflict between various interest groups and the theologies associated with them. Jeremiah had around 590 BC BC announced the destruction of the first Jerusalem temple in the temple district and risked his life (Jer 26).

Paul

Paul of Tarsus saw the mission of the nations as his task since his calling . In his first church letter he wrote ( 1 Thess 2:15  EU ): “They killed Jesus the Lord and the prophets; They also persecuted us. ”Only this passage in the NT collectively accuses Jews of killing Jesus. Gentile Christians are addressed . Paul referred to the biblical tradition of the murder of the prophet , which was anchored in Judaism as a criticism of one's own religion. Here, however, he linked it with the cliché of “hatred of people” (Latin: odium generis ), which was established among the non-Jewish educated classes of antiquity and which often appears in the Roman historian Tacitus ( Annales 5.5).

The background to this reproach is shown in 1 Thess 2.16  EU “They prevent us from preaching the gospel to the Gentiles and thus bringing salvation to them…” Paul saw himself at that time prevented from his mission to the nations by Jewish Christians . But immediately he rejected a condemnation of his opponents: "... But all the wrath [of God] has already come upon them." This referred to the judgment of God that had already happened, which Jesus suffered on the cross and thus took people out of hand.

In Paul's letter to the Romans (chapters 9-11), he ultimately contradicted the opinion that God had rejected his chosen people Israel and terminated the covenant with them ( Rom. 11 : 1--29  EU ). He characterized this opinion as Christian arrogance with which the Christian community separates from its origins and thus loses God's grace and the biblical promises of the future. On the contrary, the non-recognition of Jesus Christ by most of the Jews is an incentive to mission among the nations and will only be lifted by Christ himself when he comes again.

Accordingly, Paul emphasized in Rom 12.19  EU : “Do not exercise retribution yourself, beloved, but leave room for God's judgment of wrath; Because it is written: Retribution is mine, I will reward, says the Lord. ”With this he referred to the Torah prohibition of vengeance ( Dtn 32,35  EU ), which is also contained in the Torah commandment of charity ( Lev 19,18  EU ) .

Judaism is consistently chosen in the NT with the honorary name "Israel" as a permanently chosen people of God, Jews are accordingly referred to as "Israelites".

But as the partial statement "The Jews killed our Lord Jesus" was removed from its own context and from the entire Pauline theology and separated from the guilt of the perpetrator groups involved, it continued to act as an accusation of Jewish collective guilt in church history.

Late antiquity

The primitive Christian proclamation aimed at salvation was replaced by substitution theology after the destruction of the temple (70) and the expulsion of most of the Jews from Palestine (135) : God finally “rejected” the people of Israel and instead chose the church. Judaism was fixed as an outdated religion, antipole and negative foil of Christianity. This view was justified with the internal Jewish polemics of the NT, so that words like John 8:44 received a meaning that was contrary to the original context: They now branded all Jews as satanic enemies of God and condemned them as eternally rejected. For this theological “disinheritance” of Judaism, the accusation of an alleged Jewish collective guilt for the death of Jesus became the central linchpin.

Most church fathers and theologians of the early church have made this charge since the 2nd century . Justin the Martyr wrote in his main work Dialogue with the Jew Tryphon (around 160): “You crucified him, the only innocent and just. […] You put the crown on your unnaturalness by hating the righteous man you killed. ”So he combined a historical thesis with an alleged, current general hatred of Christians by the Jews. In doing so, however, he did not refer to the Gospels, but to Christian apocrypha . In addition, he interpreted the Jewish circumcision as a curse with which God marked the Jews visibly from the peoples in order to allow them to be punished more easily by them.

Around 160, Bishop Melito von Sardis († around 190) accused the Jews of the following in his sermon On Passover, which was rediscovered in 1940 as a manuscript :

“What a terrible wrong, Israel, have you done? You have desecrated him who honored you ... You prepared for him sharp nails and false witnesses and fetters and scourges and vinegar and gall and the sword and tribulation as for a robbery ... You killed the Lord in the midst of Jerusalem! Hear it, all generations of the peoples, and see: Unheard of murder happened in the midst of Jerusalem in the city of the law, of the Hebrews, of the prophets, in the city that was considered righteous! ... He who hung the earth has been hanged; who fastened the heavens has been fastened; who fastened the universe has been fastened to the wood ... the god has been slain; the king of Israel has been eliminated from the hand of Israel. Oh, what an unheard of murder! Oh, what an unheard of injustice! "

The speech distorts the NT tradition of Jesus' Passion by transferring “sharp nails”, “scourge”, “sword” from the Romans to Jews. She makes them responsible not only for the death sentence and extradition, but also for the torture and execution of Jesus. The guilt charge is a rhetorical stylistic device to demonstrate Israel's alleged collective guilt towards the Christian preachers and from there to all peoples. Jerusalem is identified as the "City of Law" so adherence to this law appears to be the cause of Jesus' death and injustice. The special historical judicial murder of a Jew is elevated to the murder of the creator of the world, so that this injustice acquires cosmic dimensions and the Jewish belief in the creator appears as hypocrisy. This should theologically deprive rabbinic Judaism , which interpreted and preserved the Torah as the continuing will of God after the end of the temple cult, of any right to exist. The background to the sermon was the early Christian dispute over the date of Easter : For Melito, it coincided with the 14th Nisan , the main festival day of the Jewish Passover. This made it all the more necessary for him to emphasize the superiority of Christian over Jewish doctrine of salvation. Melito elevated Jesus' death to the murder of God in order to justify the religious “disinheritance” of Judaism as the biblically chosen people of God by the church. In addition, the inner-Christian dispute about the two natures of Jesus Christ was already brewing in the 2nd century : For the orthodox line that later prevailed, the person Jesus was directly identical with the being of God, who turned to the world, so that everything that people did to him was against God himself was judged. Even for theologians who rejected this identity of Jesus with God, his death was a human sin against God, which, however, could not attack God's immortal being. Like the Jews, the talk of “murdering God” appeared to them to be blasphemy . Only at the First Council of Nicaea (325) was this dispute resolved in Christianity.

Tertullian interpreted the self-curse of the Jerusalem crowd in Mt 27.25 against Paul (Rom 9-11) as a curse that continues to have an effect ( De Oratione 14; around 200): "... the blood of the prophets and the Lord himself clings to them [the Jews] for all eternity. ” Origen followed this interpretation (Matthew Commentary, around 245):“ The blood of Jesus does not adhere to those who were his contemporaries only, indeed to all future Jewish generations, until the end of time. ”

The Didaskalia Apostolorum (~ 280) has Jesus Christ command: "You should fast in their place [of the Jews], because on this day, during their Easter festival , they crucified me." This made the reproach part of the Christian instruction for church teachers. However, the text also called for the Jews to be called “brothers” despite their alleged hatred of Christians. The dogmatic demarcation from Judaism did not establish a general social distance at that time.

Ephraem the Syrians (~ 306–373) justified the exclusion of Jewish Christians from the church and the Jewish pogroms of the time with the murder of God thesis: “Heil you, honorable church, which you are now free from the stink of stinking Jews. Drive out the Jewish people! It has shed the blood of God, now its blood is being shed. "

In his church history (written after 324) Eusebius of Caesarea justified the thesis that the destruction of the Jewish temple by the Romans in 70, the loss of land and the dispersal of the Jews among the peoples (135) were God's punishment for their alleged murder of Jesus Christ. He referred to the biblical theology of history, especially to the Deuteronomist history .

Until the church was legally recognized as the Roman state religion (380), the accusation of the murder of God became a fixed stereotype in the Adversos-Iudaeos texts ("against the Jews") of early church theologians and officials, including Prudentius , Hilary of Poitiers , Gregory of Nyssa , Ambrosius of Milan , Epiphanes , Cyril of Jerusalem and others.

Jerome identified the Messiah , whom the Jews continued to expect after Jesus, around 400 with the Antichrist and explained the present misery of the Jews who have been scattered in the world since the destruction of the temple from the murder of God:

“What crime, what cursed offense, has God turned his eyes away from you because of what crime? Don't you know Remember the word of your fathers: “His blood be on us and our children!” [Mt 27:25] “Come, let us kill him, and ours will be our inheritance!” [Mk 12.7] “We have none King besides the emperor! ”[John 19:15] Now you have what you have chosen. You will serve the emperor until the end of the world, until the fulness of the heathen is converted. Then all Israel will also be saved [Rom 11: 25f], but what was once the head will now become the tail. "

With this he justified the current and permanent oppression of the Jews in the Roman Empire. He made their salvation on the other side dependent on the success of the Christian peoples' mission, which at the same time was supposed to globalize anti-Judaism.

Around 390, John Chrysostom wrote in the sixth of his sermons adversos Iudaeos , which were indirectly directed against Judaizing Christians:

“Because you killed Christ, because you raised your hand against the Lord, because you shed his precious blood, therefore there is no recovery for you, no forgiveness and no apology either. For at that time the attack went on servants, on Moses, Isaiah and Jeremiah. Even if wicked actions were taken back then, what was perpetrated was not yet worthy of death. But now you have overshadowed all the old crimes by your rage against Christ. Therefore you are being punished more now. For, if this is not the cause of your present dishonor, why did God endure you when you committed child murder, whereas now, when you did nothing of the kind, he turns away from you? So it is clear that by murdering Christ you have committed a much worse and greater crime than child murder and any violation of the law. "

Augustine of Hippo wrote in De Civitate Dei (420):

“But the Jews, who handed Christ over to death and did not want to believe in him, that he must die and be resurrected, serve us by the roots, afflicted even more disastrously by the Romans and from their kingdom, where foreigners already ruled over them anyway exterminated and scattered over all countries [...] through their writings as a testimony that the prophecies about Christ are not the work of Christians. "

Accordingly, as punishment for Jesus' extradition or crucifixion and for their disbelief in his messianship, the Jews lost their own state and temple cult, were scattered among all peoples and subjected to Christians. This bondage is willed by God so that the Jews, through their existence and their biblical writings, would have to confirm the superior truth of Christianity again and again until the end of the world.

These views became common property of Christian theology in the 5th century, also represented by Tiro of Aquitaine († around 455) and Cassiodorus († around 583). Pope Leo the Great († 461) was a very rare exception at that time: in his Passion Sermons he not only cited the self-curse Mt 27.25, but also Jesus' forgiveness for his murderers (Lk 23.34), thus referring to it Judaism. The fact that the Romans had tortured Jesus and crucified him together with other Jews was hardly mentioned and its consequences for the relationship between the church and the state were no longer considered.

Emperor Justinian I withdrew all civil and religious rights from the Jews of the Roman Empire with an edict in 537, because the crucifixion of Jesus Christ was an "ineradicable guilt".

middle Ages

In the early Middle Ages , the accusation of the murder of God had solidified into teaching in Christian theology and was rumored as a fact that was no longer questioned. Archbishop Agobard of Lyon († 840) z. B. accused the Jews of numerous crimes in his anti-Jewish polemics written around 825. Like John Chrysostom 400 years earlier, he assumed that all Jews had a criminal character, which he attributed to their murder of God. He cited this reproach as a fact without giving any further reasons.

Also Hrabanus Maurus († 856), Archbishop of Mainz, and Petrus Damiani († 1072) spoke of Jews generally only as “wicked people” and “Christ murderers”. Unlike Agobard, they were by no means fanatical enemies of Jews. However, this applied to the Benedictine abbot Rupert von Deutz († 1129), who wrote a fictional dispute between a Christian and a Jew around 1120.

In the age of the Crusades , the accusation of the murder of God led to an acute threat to all of Judaism. Christian leaders of the First Crusade justified their massacres of Jewish communities on the way to and in Palestine as revenge for the alleged murder of God by the Jews. According to contemporary sources, Godfrey of Bouillon swore “not to leave home without taking revenge on the blood of Israel for the blood of his God; of everything that bears the name of Jew, not to let the rest or refugee [alive]. "

In the High Middle Ages , other anti-Judaistic motifs were derived from the solidified thesis of the murder of God, above all the legends of ritual murder and rumors of the sacrilege of the host . Both were based on the idea that the Jews, as enemies of the true God, Jesus Christ, were collectively forced to repeat the Christ murder of Christian children or church sacraments. The allegations of usury and well poisoning demonized and criminalized the "Christ murderers" as "Christian murderers". At that time the accusation of the murder of God was also spread in Christian iconography , for example the Roman soldier who pierced the crucified and already dead Jesus with a lance according to Jn 19:34, was depicted with a Jewish hat since the 12th century .

In the High Middle Ages, especially during Holy Week and epidemics, these stereotypes were often used as an opportunity for local and regional expulsions, individual murders and pogroms in Jewish communities. The god-murder stereotype was then often used to justify this persecution of the Jews as a self-inflicted "curse".

Early modern age

After his conversion to Christianity (1504), Johannes Pfefferkorn wrote a series of anti-Jewish diatribes in which he held the Jews responsible as alleged murderers of God for all the evils of medieval society and indeed of the whole world. In 1509, on behalf of the emperor, he had all Jewish religious writings in the Rhineland confiscated in order to have them burned. The Hebrew and humanist Johannes Reuchlin countered this as an expert on an imperial commission of inquiry from 1510. He did not share the legends of host sacrilege, ritual murder and well poisoning, but took the view that the current threatened marginal position of the Jews in medieval society was a punishment for their alleged murder of Jesus. This situation cannot be changed as long as they do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah .

Martin Luther , the initiator of the Reformation , described Judaism in early exegetical commentaries as an example and instigator of the human sin of righteousness and self-redemption. But he believed that Jews and Gentiles had crucified Jesus Christ together and that God was realizing his grace in it. For this reason, Luther's thesis of the murder of God and the anti-Judaistic legends derived from it of host sacrilege and ritual murders were withdrawn. So he replaced the Catholic template of the Passion hymn in the improperia of the Good Friday liturgy, which cursed Judas Iscariot and the Jews as Christ murderers, around 1520 with the following text:

“Our great sin and grave iniquity
Jesus nailed the true Son of God to the cross.
We'll beat you, poor Judah, to the Jewish crowd
Not to be allowed to scold you hostile. The guilt is ours!
Kyrie eleison ! "

According to Luther researcher Heiko Augustinus Oberman , Luther tried to "get to the roots of the passion piety that whipped up hatred, which in Christian Europe has made Holy Week a special time of horror for Jews for centuries."

But Luther counted all Jews among the "stubborn", hardly convertible enemies of God's grace in Christ, mainly because the majority of them rejected God's offer of salvation even after Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection. In 1523 he firmly refused the compulsory baptism of Jews and advocated converting them to the evangelical faith through convincing church reforms. Since 1526, after disappointed missionary hopes and rabbinical criticism of his Bible exegesis, he changed this attitude diametrically. In his book Von den Jüden und their Lügen (1543), he took up almost all of the anti-Judaist stereotypes of the time and intensified them. As evidence of an alleged innate lust for murder on the part of the Jews against Christians, he claimed that they had already condemned and killed Jesus out of hatred and envy. With this he did not want to call for pogroms, but rather induce the evangelical princes to drive out the Jews or to force them to work (see Martin Luther and the Jews ).

In response to the Reformation, some of which they saw as instigated by the Jews, later popes reaffirmed the church's anti-Judaist dogmas. With the bull Cum nimis absurdum (July 14, 1555), Pope Paul IV obliged the Jews to live in ghettos . Because they are "condemned to eternal slavery through their guilt". A few days after the bull was announced, 24 Marranos , i.e. Jews who were forced to convert, were burned in Ancona . In 1566 Pius V renewed the bull with arguments about the murder of God and forbade any contact between new Christians (baptized Jews) and Jews.

19th century

In the 19th century, along with European nationalism , modern, social Darwinist and racist anti-Semitism emerged . Although he distanced himself from religious anti-Judaism in order to justify his hostility to Jews in a pseudo-scientific manner, he remained stuck with the stereotype of the murder of God. So Karl Eugen Dühring took up the Christian ritual murder legend and reinterpreted it as the murder of the Christianized peoples:

"The Jews like to understand Christianity in such a way that modern peoples should allow themselves to be crucified by the Jews."

Christian opponents of the Jews propagated the thesis of the murder of God in parallel and provided anti-Semites with a central argument. It was common practice among Christian authors who distinguished themselves from anti-Semites to portray the dispersal of Jews in the Roman Empire as a well-deserved punishment for murdering the Messiah: for example, with Rudolf Kleinpaul ( Old in New Jerusalem ), Franz Kayser ( The exploitation of the Christian denominations and political parties by the Jews ), Carl Fey ( building blocks for the history of anti-Semitism ), JGA Walch ( The Jewish question ). The Jesuit Theodor Granderath (1839–1902), for example, based on the legend of the Eternal Jew spread in the 17th century :

“An explanation of the fact of the eternal homelessness of the Jews ... is solely that explanation which is offered to the Christian as if by itself: Almighty God and Lord of the peoples ... has this people who have not fulfilled his calling and who Messiah rejected and crucified, condemned to eternal homelessness as a punishment. "

Max Bergedorf wrote in 1884 ( The prison of the Jews. Not a right of human self-defense ... but a duty of Christian obedience ) that Jews had been dispersed among the Christian nations as convicts of God as punishment for murdering the Messiah , so that Jewish emancipation was an unauthorized release of prisoners . Therefore this had to be completely withdrawn, the Jews had to be radically "eliminated" from state life and the Christian state had to be renewed.

time of the nationalsocialism

In the ascent phase of National Socialism , Nazi propaganda adopted the murder of God thesis for its eliminatory anti-Semitism and for the Hitler cult. This is how Julius Streicher stylized Adolf Hitler in 1923 after the failed Hitler-Ludendorff putsch as the Messiah of the German people crucified and resurrected by Jews: “The savior does not come from where the word 'Christianity' is used to commit the greatest deceit of the people, either from where German people are in the service of the Golgotha ​​murderers. I could tell you the name of the man who will save Germany. ”Before and after 1933 he reinterpreted the motif of the murder of God in numerous articles in the propaganda paper Der Stürmer as“ genocide ”through“ racial shame ”.

From 1933 onwards, Christians of all denominations justified the state persecution of Jews as a result of the alleged murder of God, through which they had drawn an alleged "curse" on themselves. This theory was advocated by leading representatives of the Hermannsburg Mission , including its founder Louis Harms .

Even Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his essay The Church and the Jewish question in April 1933 as a response to the boycott of the Jews : "Never has been lost in the Church of Christ the idea that the 'chosen people', which hit the world's Redeemer on the cross, in long history of suffering must bear the curse of his suffering. ”Nevertheless, he called on the church to protect human rights for persecuted minorities such as the Jews, to which it was absolutely obliged by Jesus Christ. The Bethel Confession , which he co-authored in August 1933 , justified this as follows:

“The fellowship of those belonging to the church is not determined by blood and therefore not by race, but by the Holy Spirit and baptism. If the German Evangelical Church excluded the Jewish Christians or treated them as second-class Christians, it would have ceased to be the Christian Church. We reject any attempt to compare or confuse the historical mission of any people with the salvation-historical mission of Israel. It can never, ever, be the mandate of a people to avenge the murder of Golgotha ​​on the Jews. "

Bonhoeffer welcomed this passage written by Wilhelm Vischer as a clear demarcation from the racism and anti-Semitism of German Christians . When Lutheran theologians reformulated the passage, he withdrew his signature on the entire text. As a result of the November pogroms in 1938 , about which the Confessing Church (BK) remained silent, he began to turn away from its anti-Judaist tradition. According to the later Bonhoeffer biographer Eberhard Bethge , Bonhoeffer, as her instructor vicars of the BK, contradicted the synagogue destruction was not a curse of God against the Jews because of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, but a pure violent crime in which National Socialism had shown its true ungodly face. Then he said to the NT passages Mt 27,25 and Lk 23,28, on which the escape theory was based: The original Christians did not have all Jews, but only “the theologians of that time”, the high council, and “the state authorities of that time “, The Romans, blamed for Jesus' execution. He also referred to God's lasting promise for his chosen people according to Romans 9-11. As early as December 1937, he had referred to Zech 2:12 (“Whoever touches you touches the apple of my [God's] eyeball”) to persecuted Jews, not just to Jesus' followers.

On September 5, 1941, representatives of the Catholic Relief Organization for Jews at the Berlin Ordinariate described the concerns that the state law on wearing the Jewish star had also triggered among Jewish Christians. According to the report, Jewish converts were ready to wear the Star of David in Catholic church services: “... they recognize in it a possibility given by God to them, despite all dangers and persecution, unwaveringly faithful, also externally recognizable True Church of Christ to atone for what the Jewish people have sinned against Christ. ”With this, Christian saviors of the Jews adopted the anti-Judaistic thesis that the conversion of individual Jews is an atonement for the alleged murder of God of all Jews.

The then Pope Pius XII. advocated the divine murder theory in his Christmas address to the cardinals in 1942 when the Holocaust was known in the Vatican.

After 1945

Roman Catholic Church

The anti-Semitic accusation of the murder of God remained present in the churches during and after the Nazi era and was justified again and again by church theologians with tendentious, psychologizing exegesis of the NT Passion reports. The Roman Catholic New Testament scholar Pierre Benoit claimed in his book The Trial of Jesus (1940): Jesus was not a political rebel. Pilate noticed this and "resisted the pressure of the Jews as much as possible", but finally gave in because he was "intimidated". “The Jews are responsible insofar as they wanted the death of Jesus and enforced it with moral coercion. This objective historical fact cannot be shaken. [...] In this sense, the term 'murderer of God' ... is only justified. What the Jews did was objectively 'murder of God' because, according to our belief, the person they had killed is really God. "

Following Benoit, the Catholic New Testament scholar Josef Blinzler described the Sanhedrin as the driving force behind the execution of Jesus ( The Trial of Jesus , 1951). The representatives of the Jews had planned a judicial murder from the outset , therefore unanimously condemning Jesus to death for blasphemy , deliberately falsely reporting him to Pilate as a political rebel and threatening a mob to prevent his release. He attributed this to a “malevolent attitude” of the council members: They would have wanted “the destruction of Jesus at any cost”.

Romano Guardini wrote in 1964: "This is how they [the Jews] feel that he [Jesus] is not the spirit of their spirit, and do not rest until they have put him out of the way." Michael Schmaus wrote in his Catholic Dogmatics (1958) : “The Jews had to bump into Jesus […]. The unease grew into hatred for him. They decided to get rid of this troublemaker and killed him [...]. At the decisive hour it [the entire Jewish people] took the guilt consciously and with all its consequences (Mt 27:25). In the execution of Christ, the whole people sealed the rejection of God's messenger…. It placed itself under the judgment under which everyone remains who rejects Christ in unbelief. "

The Second Vatican Council moved to the memorandum Nostra Aetate in 1965 for the first time from this centuries-old deicide teaching from:

“Although the Jewish authorities and their followers insisted on the death of Christ, the events of his suffering cannot be accused either of all Jews living then without distinction, or of today's Jews. [...] Also, as the Church has always taught and teaches, Christ, in freedom, for the sake of the sins of all people, took upon himself his suffering and death out of infinite love, so that all might attain salvation. It is the task of the preaching of the church to proclaim the cross of Christ as a sign of the universal love of God and as the source of all graces. "

The memorandum was controversial to the end precisely because of this passage. Bishop Luigi Maria Carli , as spokesman for some conservative bishops, demanded that the term "God's murder" be retained, since today's Jews are also collectively guilty of Jesus' death. After Pope Paul VI. Speaking in a sermon that "the Jews" had killed Jesus, the cardinals Franz König and Augustin Bea in particular demanded that the accusation of the murder of God be expressly rejected in the text. Their advance was ultimately successful. The sentence contained in the original that the Jewish people could "no longer" be called "the people of the murderers of God" was deleted from the final version.

The memorandum mentioned neither the Holocaust nor the church's complicity in it, nor did church officials and theologians who had taught and disseminated the divine murder thesis for centuries and thus provided an essential argument for anti-Semitism. These consequences were only generally rejected:

“Aware of the heritage that it has in common with the Jews, the Church, which rejects all persecution against any human being, not for political reasons, but driven by the religious love of the Gospel, deplores all outbursts of hatred, persecution and manifestations of anti-Semitism that occur directed against the Jews at any time and by anyone. "

The motif of the murder of God remained present in Catholic practice and popular piety even after the reforms of the Council. The edition of the New Hours of the Dioceses of Salzburg, Zurich and Trier until 1971 contained a commentary on the psalms by Augustine, in which Augustine established the theory of the murder of God.

The Catholic Adult Catechism of 1997 rejects the doctrine of the murder of God with reference to Nostra Aetate : “The Jews are not collectively responsible for the death of Jesus. […] If one takes into account how historically involved the trial of Jesus is according to the reports of the Gospels and how the personal guilt of those mainly involved in the trial (from Judas, the Sanhedrin, from Pilate) - whom God only knows - may be one does not blame the whole of the Jews of Jerusalem for it - despite the cry of a manipulated crowd [Mk 15:11] and despite the general accusations in the calls to conversion after Pentecost [Acts 2, 23.36; 3.13-14; 4.10; 5.30; 7.52; 10.39; 13.27-28; 1 Thess 2: 14-15]. When Jesus pardoned them from the cross [Lk 23:24], he - like Peter later - excused the Jews of Jerusalem and even their leaders with their “ignorance” (Acts 3:17). It is even less permissible to hear the cry of the people: “His blood be on us and our children!” (Mt 27:25), which is a confirmation formula [Acts 5:28; 18: 6] as an opportunity to extend the guilt to the Jews of other countries and times. "

In 2004, the historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen referred to representative surveys from 1985: According to this, 25% of the Germans surveyed, 33% of Austrians and almost 50% of Italians either affirmed or did not reject the accusation that the Jews were collectively guilty of Jesus' crucifixion. Goldhagen therefore demanded that 450 passages that he judged to be anti-Semitic should be deleted from the NT. This intensified the church and public debate about these NT agencies and how to deal with them.

The traditionalist Pius Brotherhood rejects the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, especially Nostra Aetate . In the context of the debate about the intercession on Good Friday and the resumption of the Pius Bishops in the Roman Catholic Church, the then German district superior Franz Schmidberger affirmed the pre-conciliar doctrine of disinheritance and the murder of God in December 2008: “With the death of Christ on the cross the curtain is torn, the old covenant is abolished the Church […] born from the pierced side of the Savior. Thus, the Jews of our day are not only not our older brothers in faith, as the Pope claimed during his visit to the synagogue in Rome in 1986, they are rather complicit in the murder of God as long as they do not divorce themselves through the confession of the divinity of Christ and through baptism Distance the guilt of their forefathers. "

Evangelical Church in Germany

An awareness of the church's particular complicity in the extermination of the Jews only began very gradually in the EKD after 1945 . In the first declarations of guilt in the post-war period, there was no mention of the Holocaust, anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism. Rather, the theology of the murder of god and substitution initially continued unabated. So it said in the "Word on the Jewish Question " of the EKD from 1948:

“In crucifying the Messiah, Israel rejected his election. [...] The election of Israel passed through and since Christ to the church from all peoples, from Jews and Gentiles. "

It was also said that all people were complicit in the death of Christ, so that Christians should not brand Jews as solely guilty. But what followed were sentences that interpreted existing Judaism only as a witness to God's judgment and the Holocaust as a sign of its "patience":

“The fact that God's judgment follows Israel in rejection to this day is a sign of his long-suffering. [...] The fact that God does not allow himself to be mocked is the silent sermon of the Jewish fate, a warning to us and a warning to the Jews whether they do not want to convert to him with whom alone their salvation stands. "

Two years later (1950) the Synod of Weißensee, under the impression of new anti-Semitic excesses, passed a declaration that moved away from these problematic theses: “We believe that God's promise to the people of Israel that he has chosen will continue to be in force after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ stayed. "

An official church statement by the EKD thus revoked for the first time the escape theory derived from the murder of God. The following passage showed the difficulties of those involved in naming an ecclesiastical complicity: "We confess to the guilt of the Germans who acted or were silently guilty before the God of Mercy through the mass murder of the Jews." This also went to some church leaders the synod too far.

Nevertheless, influenced by the Judeo-Christian dialogue , the major churches turned away from anti-Judaism. The Jewish Holocaust researcher Eva Gabriele Reichmann surprised her Protestant audience at the 1961 Kirchentag with the question: “Why have the Jews always been accused of murdering Christ but not being praised as Christ givers? Isn't it based on the depressing fact that people - especially if they are grouped together - prefer to hate rather than love, revile rather than acknowledge? "

In the Protestant area, the synodal resolution of the Rhenish Regional Church in 1980 paved the way for a decisive revision of anti-Jewish dogmas based on the confession of the church's complicity in the Holocaust.

Orthodox churches

Orthodox churches have so far hardly distanced themselves from the traditional thesis of the murder of God. On December 6, 2011, Chrysostomus II of Cyprus, an Orthodox archbishop, condemned the theory of Jewish collective guilt for the death of Jesus for the first time.

Ecumenism

At the Seelisberg Conference , an international meeting of Jews and Christians in Switzerland in 1947, the participants formulated a “call to the churches” (Seelisberg theses) to reorganize their relations with Judaism worldwide. As essential theological topics they named the belief in “one God”, the Jewish origin of Jesus and the Church, the overcoming of the “god murder” accusation through a differentiated presentation of the Passion of Jesus and the rejection of the thesis of the “rejection” of the Jewish People.

The World Council of Churches (WCC) rejected when it was founded in 1948 to anti-Semitism as a "sin against God and humanity" and called on all member churches to counter this. The third assembly of the WCC in New Delhi in 1961 rejected the divine murder thesis in an additional statement: “In Christian teaching, the historical facts that led to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ should not be presented in a way that makes them a responsibility to the Jewish people of today which is a burden on us, humanity as a whole. "

Depictions of passion

Medieval Passion Plays were didactic means to convey Christian dogmas in a theatrical way and to pass on the well-known anti-Judaist stereotypes in order to aggravate the polarizing opposition between Christians and Jews. In the Donaueschingen Passion Play (from 1470) and in the Frankfurt Passion Play (from 1493) the murder of God was staged particularly cruelly. In the end, the main character Christiana called on the audience to avenge the shameful act on the "false Jewish council". She calls out to the Jews that they were born to the “great shame” on earth and that they must be “forever lost”.

Passion festivals in southern Germany, Tyrol and Switzerland have spread anti-Judaist stereotypes such as the murder of God and Christ for centuries and were also used by the National Socialists for this purpose. Criticism of this was only gradually loud after 1945. The designers of the Oberammergau Passion Play took such criticism into account against great local resistance since 1977. It was not until the performance year 2000 that passages were deleted from the texts that portrayed the Jews as murderers of God or Christ.

Johann Sebastian Bach's passion music, such as the St. Matthew Passion and the St. John Passion , were received in an anti-Judaistic way, but emphasize Jesus' self-determined path to the cross, which fulfills God's will. The text on the St. John Passion, which depicts the Jews as murderers of Christ, is based on the traditional Lutheran Jewish polemic. Newer introductions to the works refer to this and, while listening, call for the church to commemorate complicity in the Holocaust.

school books

Church historian Jules Isaac, whose research significantly influenced the Nostra Aetate Declaration, proved in 1962 that most French Catholic textbooks at the time continued to spread the traditional anti-Judaist “doctrine of contempt”, including the stereotype that Jews were “murderers of God”.

Since 1988, individual German school books have indicated that the accusation of the murder of God justified the persecution of Jews for centuries.

See also

literature

New Testament

  • Klaus Berger: Anti-Judaism in the New Testament. In: Julius H. Schoeps et al. (Ed.): Goldhagen, the Vatican and hostility towards Jews. Philo, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-8257-0330-4 , pp. 229-242.
  • Willehad Paul Eckert, Nathan Peter Levinson, Martin Stöhr (eds.): Anti-Judaism in the New Testament? Exegetical and systematic contributions. Munich 1967

Melito of Sardis

  • Peter von der Osten-Sacken: murder charges and death sentence. Reality, religion and rhetoric in Melitos' sermon “On the Passover”. In: Lutz Doering, Hans-Günther Waubke, Florian Wilk (eds.): Jewish Studies and New Testament Science: Locations - Limits - Relationships. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 3-525-53090-0 , pp. 334-357 .

Church and cultural history

  • Hardy Ostry: "God Murderer" - Chosen People: The American Jewish Committee and the Declaration of Jews of the Second Vatican Council. Paulinus, 2003, ISBN 3-7902-1373-X .
  • Frederick B. Davis: The Jews and Deicide: The Origin of an Archetype. University Press of America, Lanham 2003, ISBN 0-7618-2542-8 .
  • Christian Wiese: murderer of god - bloodsucker - stranger. The Political Dimension of Christian Anti-Judaism from the Early Modern Age to the Shoah. epd documentation 10, 2003, pp. 25–40.
  • Heinz Schreckenberg: The Christian Adversus Iudaeos texts and their literary and historical context (1st – 11th centuries). Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-631-33945-3 .
  • Karl-Erich Grözinger: First picture: The murderers of God. In: Julius H. Schoeps , Joachim Schlör (eds.): Images of hostility towards Jews. Anti-Semitism - Prejudices and Myths. Augsburg 1999, ISBN 3-8289-0734-2 , pp. 57-66.
  • Friedrich Gleiss: From the god murder lie to genocide, from enmity to reconciliation: Church anti-Judaism through two millennia and its overcoming, illustrated with images from Christian iconography. Geiger, 1995, ISBN 3-89570-060-6 .
  • Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Images of Jews. Cultural history of anti-Jewish myths and anti-Semitic prejudices. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1991, ISBN 3-499-55498-4 , pp. 218-241: Kreuzestod und Gottesmord .
  • Ruth Kastning-Olmesdahl: The Jews and the death of Jesus: anti-Jewish motifs in the evangelical religion books for the primary school. Neukirchener Verlag, Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1981, ISBN 3-7887-0658-9 .

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Matthias Blum: God's murder. In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus Volume 3: Terms, Theories, Ideologies. De Gruyter, Berlin 2010, ISBN 3-11-023379-7 , p. 113 f.
  2. ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder. Reinbek 1991, p. 8.
  3. ↑ Hans-Ulrich Wehler: German History of Society Volume 4: 1914-1949: From the beginning of the First World War to the founding of the two German states. Beck, Munich 2008, ISBN 3-406-32264-6 , p. 817
  4. ↑ Manfred Gailus, Armin Nolzen: Quarreled "Volksgemeinschaft": Faith, denomination and religion in National Socialism. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2011, ISBN 3-525-30029-8 , p. 288; Fritz May: Israel between blood and tears: the suffering of the Jewish people. Schulte + Gerth, 1987, ISBN 3-87739-081-1 , p. 134; Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz : Joint responsibility and guilt of Christians for the Holocaust. In: Evangelische Theologie 42/1982, pp. 171–190.
  5. ↑ Gerd Theißen, Annette Merz: The Historical Jesus. 4th edition, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2011, pp. 387-410.
  6. ↑ Bertold Klappert: The loss and reassignment of the Israelist contour of the story of Jesus' passion (the cross, the suffering, the Passover meal, the trial of Jesus). In: Hans Hermann Henrix, Martin Stöhr (ed.): Exodus and cross in ecumenical dialogue between Jews and Christians. Einhard, Aachen 1978, pp. 115-143.
  7. ↑ Marlis Gielen: The Passion Story in the Four Gospels: Literary Design - Theological Focus. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 3-17-020434-3 , p. 161
  8. ^ Franz Mussner, Michael Theobald: Jesus of Nazareth in the environment of Israel and the early church: Collected essays. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1999, ISBN 3-16-146973-9 , p. 124.
  9. ↑ Felix Porsch: “You have the devil for your father” (Jn 8:44). Anti-Judaism in the Gospel of John? In: Bibel und Kirche (BiKi) 44/1989, pp. 50–57.
  10. ↑ Gerd Theißen, Annette Merz: The Historical Jesus. Göttingen 2011, p. 500
  11. ↑ Paul Winter: On the Trial of Jesus. (2nd edition 1974) De Gruyter, Berlin 2010, ISBN 3-11-002283-4 , especially p. 111 ff.
  12. ↑ John Dominic Crossan: Who Killed Jesus? The origins of Christian anti-Semitism in the Gospels. Beck, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-406-44553-5 , p. 10.
  13. ↑ Hans Jörg Sellner: Das Heil Gottes: Studies on the soteriology of the Lukan double work. De Gruyter, Berlin 2012, ISBN 3-11-097863-6 , p. 229ff.
  14. ↑ Martin Hengel, Anna M. Schwemer (ed.): King's rule of God and heavenly cult in Judaism, early Christianity and in the Hellenistic world. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1991, ISBN 3-16-145667-X , p. 357 f.
  15. ^ Klaus Haaker: Elements of pagan anti-Semitism in the New Testament. In: Evangelische Theologie (EvTheol) 48/1988, pp. 404-418.
  16. ↑ Bertold Klappert: Tract for Israel: The Pauline determination of the relationship between Israel and the Church as a criterion for New Testament statements about the Jews. In: Martin Stöhr (Ed.): Jewish existence and renewal of Christian theology. Christian Kaiser, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-459-01376-1 , pp. 99-104.
  17. ↑ Reinhard von Bendemann: "Zorn" and "Zorn Gottes" in Romans. In: Dieter Singer, Ulrich Mell: Paulus and Johannes: Exegetical studies on Pauline and Johannine theology and literature. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2006, ISBN 3-16-149064-9 , pp. 179-199
  18. ↑ Jacob Thiessen: God has not repudiated Israel: Biblical-exegetical and theological perspectives in determining the relationship between Israel, Judaism and the community of Jesus. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 3-631-59863-7 , p. 38
  19. ↑ Micha Brumlik: Anti-Semitism. Reclam, ISBN 3-15-961545-6 , p. 15
  20. ↑ Jules Isaac: Genesis of Anti-Semitism: Before and After Christ. Europa Verlag, Vienna 1969, p. 116.
  21. ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder , Reinbek 1991, p. 222.
  22. ↑ Günther Bernd Ginzel, Günter Fessler (ed.): The churches and the Jews: attempt to take stock. Bleicher, 1997, ISBN 3-7953-0939-5 , p. 57 f.
  23. ↑ Susanna Buttaroni: Ritual Murder . Legends in European History. Böhlau, Vienna 2003, ISBN 9783205770282 , p. 57, fn. 6
  24. ↑ Friedrich Gleiss: From the god murder lie to genocide, from enmity to reconciliation: Church anti-Judaism through two millennia and overcoming it, illustrated with images from Christian iconography. Geiger, 1995, ISBN 3-89570-060-6 , p. 16.
  25. ↑ Jules Isaac: Genesis des Antisemitismus , Vienna 1969, p. 117.
  26. ↑ Julius H. Schoeps (Ed.): New Lexicon of Judaism. (1992) Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 2000, ISBN 3-577-10604-2 , p. 168 (article Christ murder allegation )
  27. ↑ Jörg Ulrich: Euseb of Caesarea and the Jews. De Gruyter, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-11-016233-4 , pp. 135ff.
  28. ^ Jules Isaac: Genesis of Antisemitism , Vienna 1969, p. 122; Wolfgang Bunte: Jews and Judaism in Central Dutch Literature (1100-1600). Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-631-40823-4 , p. 209.
  29. ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder , Reinbek 1991, p. 223.
  30. ↑ Christina von Braun, Ludger Heid, Wolfgang Gerlach (ed.): The eternal hatred of Jews: Christian anti-Judaism, German national anti-Judaism, racist anti-Semitism. Philo, Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-8257-0149-2 , p. 25.
  31. ↑ Alex Bein: The Jewish question. Biography of a world problem , Volume I, Stuttgart 1980, p. 55.
  32. ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder. Reinbek 1991, p. 223.
  33. ↑ Gerhard Schweizer: The others are always unbelievers: world religions between tolerance and fanaticism. 2nd edition, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-608-94223-8 , p. 134.
  34. ↑ Walther Zimmerli: The guilt on the cross. In: Walther Zimmerli: Israel and the Christians. , Neukirchener Verlag, Neukirchen-Vluyn 1964, ISBN 3-7887-0631-7 , p. 19 f.
  35. ↑ a b Kurt Schubert: Christianity and Judaism through the ages. Böhlau, Vienna 2003, ISBN 3-205-77084-6 , p. 87
  36. ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder. Reinbek 1991, pp. 300-304.
  37. ↑ Ellen Martin: The German writings of Johannes Pfefferkorn. Kümmerle, 1994, ISBN 3-87452-849-9 , p. 303.
  38. ↑ Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Handbook of Antisemitism Volume 2: People. De Gruyter, Berlin 2009, ISBN 3-598-44159-2 , p. 683
  39. ↑ Michael Marissen: Lutheranism, Anti-Judaism, and Bach's St. John Passion: With an Annotated Literal Translation of the Libretto , Oxford University Press, 1998, ISBN 0-19-511471-X , p. 26
  40. ↑ Heiko Oberman: The Jews in Luther's View. In: Heinz Kremers, Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz, Bertold Klappert (eds.): The Jews and Martin Luther, Martin Luther and the Jews: history, impact history, challenge. 2nd edition, Neuenkirchener Verlag, Neuenkirchen-Vluyn 1987, ISBN 3-7887-0751-8 , pp. 136–162, quotation p. 161.
  41. ↑ Johannes Brosseder: Luther and the suffering of the Jews. In: Heinz Kremers, Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz, Berthold Klappert (eds.): The Jews and Martin Luther - Martin Luther and the Jews , Neukirchen-Vluyn 1987, p. 119.
  42. ↑ Nicoline Hortzitz: The language of hostility towards Jews in the early modern period (1450-1700): Studies on vocabulary, text and argumentation. Winter, 2005, ISBN 3-8253-1365-4 , p. 350.
  43. ^ Rainer Kampling: Cum nimis absurdum (Paul IV.). In: Wolfgang Benz, Brigitte Mihok (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus Volume 8: Supplements and registers. De Gruyter / Oldenbourg, Munich 2015, ISBN 3-11-037932-5 , pp. 190 f.
  44. ↑ Stefan Lehr: Anti-Semitism - Religious Motives in Social Prejudice. Christian Kaiser, Munich 1974, pp. 23-25.
  45. ^ Franco Ruault: "New creators of the German people". Julius Streicher in the fight against "Rassenschande". Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-631-54499-5 , p. 231
  46. ↑ Gunther Schendel: The Hermannsburg Missionary Institution and National Socialism: The Path of a Lutheran Milieu Institution between the Weimar Republic and the post-war period. LIT Verlag, Münster 2009, ISBN 3-8258-0627-8 , pp. 363–365
  47. ↑ Karl Martin: Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Challenge to responsible belief, thinking and acting. Food for thought - documents - positions. Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2008, ISBN 3-8305-1524-3 , p. 78; Full text online
  48. ^ Ferdinand Schlingensiepen: Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: A biography. Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-53425-2 , p. 154 f.
  49. ^ Paul Gerhard Schoenborn: Succession - Mysticism - Martyrium: Studies on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Edition ITP-Kompass, 2012, ISBN 3-9813562-3-3 , p. 163
  50. ↑ Werner Müller, Lucia Scherzberg (Ed.): Theology and coming to terms with the past: a critical inventory in an interdisciplinary comparison. Schöningh, Paderborn 2005, ISBN 3-506-72934-9 , fn. 84
  51. ^ Saul Friedländer: Pius XII. and the Third Reich: A Documentation. Beck, Munich 2011, ISBN 3-406-61681-X , p. 225 f.
  52. ↑ Quoted from Wolfgang Reinbold: The oldest report on the death of Jesus: Literary analysis and historical criticism of the depictions of the Passion in the Gospels. De Gruyter, Berlin 2013, ISBN 3-11-087751-1 , p. 311, fn. 113
  53. ↑ Wolfgang Reinbold: The process of Jesus. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-525-61591-4 , p. 11f.
  54. ^ Rudolf Krämer-Badoni: Judenmord, Frauenmord, Holy Church. Fischer, 2016, ISBN 3-10-560821-4 , p. 80.
  55. ↑ Charlotte Klein: Theologie und Anti-Judaismus: a study on the German theological literature of the present. Christian Kaiser, Munich 1975, ISBN 3-459-01026-6 , p. 107.
  56. ↑ Heinz-Joachim Fischer: Popes and Jews: The turning point under John Paul II and Benedict XVI. LIT Verlag, Münster 2012, ISBN 3-643-11699-3 , p. 85 ; Full text online
  57. ↑ Thomas Brechenmacher: The Vatican and the Jews: History of an unholy relationship. Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-52903-8 , p. 267
  58. ^ David Neuhold: Franz Cardinal König - Religion and Freedom: A Theological and Political Profile. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 3-7278-1607-4 , p. 112.
  59. ↑ Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Handbook of Antisemitism Volume 1: Countries and Regions. De Gruyter, Berlin 2009, ISBN 3-11-023137-9 , p. 402 . On the reasons Willehad P. Eckert: The Church and the Jewish People. In: Freiburger Rundbrief No. 65/68, 1966 (PDF, especially p. 30, fn. 3)
  60. ↑ Urs Altermatt: Catholicism and anti-Semitism. Huber, Frauenfeld 1999, ISBN 3-7193-1160-0 , p. 94; further examples pp. 76-83.
  61. ^ Heinz-Joachim Fischer: Popes and Jews , Münster 2012, p. 186 ; Full text online
  62. ↑ Daniel Jonah Goldhagen: The Catholic Church and the Holocaust: An Inquiry into Guilt and Atonement. Goldmann, 2004, ISBN 3-442-15293-3 , p. 273.
  63. ↑ Armin Lange: Intra- and extra-Jewish polemics , in: Markus Tiwald (Ed.): Q in Context I , Göttingen 2015, p. 61
  64. ↑ Ernst Fürlinger: The setback in interreligious dialogue. In: Til Galrev: The Pope in the Crossfire: back to Pius or continue the Council? LIT Verlag, Münster 2009, ISBN 3-643-10128-7 , p. 148
  65. ↑ Edith Petschnigg, Irmtraut Fischer, Gerhard Langer (eds.): Does the Jewish-Christian dialogue have a future? Current aspects and future perspectives in Central Europe. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2017, ISBN 3-8471-0717-8 , p. 138 ; Full text online
  66. ↑ EKD declaration on the Jewish question 1950. In: Wolfgang Benz, Brigitte Mihok (Ed.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus Volume 4: Events, Decrees, Controversies. De Gruyter / Saur, Berlin 2011, ISBN 3-11-025514-6 , p. 97
  67. ↑ Christoph Münz, Rudolf W. Sirsch: "Think of the days of the past - learn from the years of history": 40 years of the Buber-Rosenzweig medal. Lit Verlag, Münster 2009, ISBN 3-8258-1717-2 , p. 44
  68. ^ Jewish-Christian Relations: Cyprus: Orthodoxy condemns talk of Jewish collective guilt. Joint statement by Archbishop Chrysostom and Chief Rabbi Metzger. December 31, 2011
  69. ↑ Maximilian Gottschlich: Unredeemed shadows: The Christians and the new anti-Semitism. Schöningh, Paderborn 2016, ISBN 3-657-78247-8 , p. 28 ; Full text online
  70. ^ Rolf Rendtorff, Hans Hermann Henrix (Ed.): The Church and Judaism. Documents 1945 to 1985. Paderborn 1988, p. 341.
  71. ↑ Jochen Bär, Marcus Müller (ed.): History of language - language of history: Problems and perspectives of the historical linguistics of German. De Gruyter, Berlin 2012, ISBN 3-05-005111-6 , p. 144
  72. ↑ Thomas Metzger: Anti-Semitism in the City of St. Gallen 1918-1939. Academic Press, Freiburg 2006, ISBN 3-7278-1563-9 , p. 122 and fn. 85
  73. ↑ Dietrich Hub (Deutsches Pfarrerblatt 3/2010): Passion Play in Oberammergau: Every ten years again ( Memento from July 17, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  74. ^ Klaus-Peter Lehmann: Passion music by Johann Sebastian Bach. Evangelical working group for Christian-Jewish conversation in Hesse and Nassau.
  75. ↑ Dagmar Hoffmann-Axthelm: The Jewish choirs in Bach's St. John Passion. The Thomaskantor as a designer of Lutheran polemics against Jews. Freiburg circular 5/1998
  76. ^ Dorothee Recker: Jules Isaac (1877–1963). In: Petrus Bsteh, Brigitte Proksch (Ed.): Trailblazer of the interreligious dialogue. LIT Verlag, Münster 2012, ISBN 3-643-50332-6 , p. 94
  77. ↑ Zsolt Keller: The blood call (Mt 27.25). A history of Swiss impact 1900–1950. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-525-55328-5 , p. 54
  78. ↑ Thomas Lange: Judaism and Jewish history in school lessons after 1945: Inventories, experiences and analyzes from Germany, Austria, France and Israel. Boehlau, Vienna 1994, ISBN 3-205-98245-2 , p. 84 and p. 205