The Jewish Jerusalem Post believes it has the answer to this question — which has only ever puzzled Jews and their Judenfreunde. Everyone else knows that not only did the Jews kill the Lord Jesus, but in doing so they called a curse upon their race, which shall endure “to the end,” 1 Thess. 2. — Now, as its editors do not believe the Bible in any of its words, this testimony (and others like it) did not convince the Jerusalem Post, which recently published an article titled “No, the Jews did not kill Jesus.” In order that the blindness of the Jews might be made clear, and that we Christians might be seriously discouraged from despising the Word of God, as the Jews have done, I present the general thrust of this article.
First, the article (correctly) identifies St. Matthew’s account of the crucifixion of Christ as “the origin” of the teaching of the entire Christian Church, that the Jews murdered God. But it then immediately contradicts the sacred writer, saying that “Although a small group of Jewish priests and other groups allegedly collaborated with the Romans, Jews had no real power to inflict punishment.” He gives credit of a sort to Matthew for showing that although “Pilate was reluctant to condemn Jesus, he nevertheless ordered the crucifixion and acquiesced to demands from religious authorities.” But concerning the influence of these “religious authorities,” our writer then asserts the unreliability of Matthew and his fellow evangelists, saying that “The Gospels overemphasized the Jewish role in Jesus’s crucifixion.” And after this assertion of the unreliability of the Gospels concerning Christ’s crucifixion, he then accepts their report of the criminals crucified next to Christ — for this does no violence to his essential thesis.
Moving outside Scripture, the Jew then begins his utter condemnation of the Christian Church. He says: “Yet the church pushed the idea that Jews murdered Christ, which fueled centuries of antisemitism and led to persecution, mass killings, and pogroms, and was used as part of Nazi propaganda to justify the Holocaust. The myth of deicide painted Jews as the mortal enemy of Christianity. It inspired more blood libels, like accusing Jews of murdering Christian children to use their blood in religious ceremonies. This libel, along with those of Jews poisoning the well and host desecration, was used to vilify Jews and contributed to the long history of antisemitism.” That the Church is certainly right in considering the Jews to be enemies of the Gospel, or Christianity, is clear from Romans 11:28. The history of the so-called “blood libel” is beyond the scope of this article.
Next, the author becomes a veritable Papist and says: “In 1964, under Pope Paul VI, the Catholic Church finally discredited the notion of Jewish deicide in its ‘Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions.’ This act signaled a significant step towards promoting interfaith understanding, acknowledging the errors of past misinterpretations, and dispelling centuries of libels against Jews.”
The Jew ends his blasphemous article by commanding Christians to regard the Jews’ murdering of Christ as “a complex event influenced by political, religious, and theological factors.”
Now, what is to blame for all this sophistry and lying, which has characterized the Jews for millennia? Without doubt it is this curse from God, Deut. 28: “But if you will not obey the voice of the LORD your God or be careful to do all His commandments and His statutes that I command you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you. … The LORD will send on you cursing, confusion, and rebuke in all that you set your hand to do, until you are destroyed and until you perish quickly, because of the wickedness of your doings in which you have forsaken Me. … The LORD will strike you with madness and blindness and confusion of mind, and you shall grope at noonday, as the blind grope in darkness, and you shall not prosper in your ways.” It is this curse which they called upon themselves when they cried out: “His blood be on us and on our children” (Matt. 27:25). And this wish of their is confirmed to be granted in 1 Thessalonians 2, where the apostle Paul tells us Christians that the Jews “displease God and oppose all mankind by hindering us from speaking to the heathen that they might be saved — so as always to fill up the measure of their sins.”
Now, let us consider this passage of Paul. To “displease God” cannot mean anything but to sin by stubbornly resisting the will of God, which, we are informed in many places in Scripture, is characteristic of the Jews, just as lying was characteristic of the Cretans. That the Jews “oppose all mankind” means, as is explained, that they attempt to prevent the heathen from hearing the Word of God which shall not return empty (Is. 55); this is also how the Jews especially displease God (though they find many other ways) since the days of the apostles. Paul now tells us the purpose of the Jews’ wickedness, “so as always to fill up the measure of their sins.” Now, this measure should be considered as being like “the iniquity of the Amorites” (Gen. 15), with the understanding that the iniquity of the Jews is now complete. Finally, we are told that “wrath has come upon them to the end.” This is the partial hardening of Israel of which St. Paul speaks in Romans 11, which shall last “until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in,” that is, until the end of the world. That this saying might be understood in this way, Paul here extends their punishment, which, as I have said, is the hardening of the Jews, the deliverance of them to Satan, to “the end,” εἰς τέλος. An example of this hardening, which shall endure until “the end,” is the Jews’ slavery to Mammon, seen in their adoration of, e.g., usury, as Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Sihler says in footnote 20 here.
Now, if this is how God punished the people by whom He chose to bring His very own Son into the world, and which He describes routinely as His own bride — what hope do we Christians have if we despise the Word of God? Just look at what was formerly known as Christendom, and especially Germany, the place where God chose to restore His Gospel through the Reformation. Germany, which was nearly annihilated in two world wars and is now almost entirely atheistic. The “confessional” Lutherans there are now thoroughly Romanized. And the rest of Europe did not fare much better. Behold, Christian! the inevitable results of despising God’s Word! and return — Back to Luther, and back to the Word of God, which you have forsaken!
Altlutheraner 