Samuel Sandmel and anti-Semitism in the New Testament

Research paper for Rabbi Cytron's Judeao-Christian heritage class, HONR 350


In the preface to Anti-Semitism in the New Testament?, author Samuel Sandmel writes “In writing [the book], I have two primary loyalties. One is to objective scholarship, the other is to my Jewish background” (ix).
The fact that anti-Semitism has so frequently been drawn from the New Testament of Christian scripture has become self-evident, manifested in Nostra Aetate and the “Declaration of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to the Jewish Community,” among other such pieces of dialogue. And Sandmel, a rabbi, may very well feel an obligation to not only seek out the sources of anti-Semitism in scripture, but also to investigate the legitimacy of the path of logic that led to so many centuries’ worth of animosity and subconscious hostility between two religions.
Anti-Semitism in the New Testament? provides an exceptionally detailed traipse through the New Testament and its contemporary pagan culture in response to the first goal. The second, on the legitimacy of the things he finds, is left unanswered by the admittedly unknowing Sandmel. At the very least, though, he has provided the discussion with balance and made available the tools needed to decide, if even for oneself, whether the New Testament sanctions anti-Semitism. Yet it’s worth noting that, though Sandmel remains agnostic to the subject for good measure, his scholarship all but makes the answer obvious: no.

The origins of anti-Semitism
Sandmel situates his research by first posing a question regarding the very nature of Christianity: “…was the conception as Christianity as an aggregate of virtues merely sentimental self-deception on the part of comfortable, middle-class people, the reality being that Christianity represented also intolerance, arrogance, and cruelty?” (xv).
He extends the question to the roots of the Holocaust, pondering whether the mass murder was “out of keeping with the reality of Christianity” or “the direct and logical result of the very nature of Christianity” (xv).
The focus of his work assumes the second answer: “If the latter, when and how did hostility to Jews enter Christianity?” (xv).
He provides two principal answers – of which he never truly ascribes legitimacy to one over the other. One line of reasoning, he writes, is “to ascribe the origin of anti-Jewish motifs to the second or even third Christian century, to a time after the age of the New Testament, in order to exempt the New Testament itself.” (xv). This makes sense, he continues, because Jesus and his disciples were Jews, and most if not all of the New Testament literature itself was written by Jews, “hence the New Testament could not have been anti-Jewish” (xv).
The alternative? Sandmel acknowledges that “perhaps it is the New Testament itself that is, or at least can be, the source of and sanction for Christian hostility and contempt for the Jews” (xv). In this view, Sandmel is empathetic towards those who have used the New Testament as justification for anti-Semitism. Whether they are correct is admittedly unknown, however absurd Sandmel proves said line of thinking to be.

Breaking down the New Testament
Sandmel begins the breakdown of New Testament scripture by asserting that, plainly put, the allegorical and narrative insights offered in the bible are all but unconditionally factual: “One conviction is that sacred means eternally authoritative…Another conviction is that although Scripture is indeed sacred it is not exempt from some bondage to time and circumstance, nor is it fully free from a human element, namely, that men preserved this literature and that men wrote it” (xv). Again, though he presents the competing arguments agnostically, his position on the question of biblical literalism is abundantly clear, if only because the latter position named here is quintessential to the framework of most of his argument, in addition to his continued treatment of the historical, Jewish, Jesus: “If Jesus had not been a Jew and it Christianity had not derived from Judaism, the New Testament writings would not have contained those passages that are the concern of this book” (xvii). Such is the topic, in fact, of what is perhaps a better-known work of Sandmel’s – The Historical Jesus – which will be revisited later in this analysis.
Sandmel then embarks on a progressive and chronological breakdown of each of the Gospels, Paul’s Epistles and Acts, as well as a brief analysis of biblically contemporary cultural anti-Semitism. He disperses the type of anti-Jewish language and/or messages in each and looks further into the factors that shaped the various anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic messages.
Pagan anti-Semitism
Sandmel first distinguishes the difference between cultural, racially-based anti-Semitism in the pagan world and the type derived from holy scripture: “One type [of pagan anti-Semitism] was the vulgar social frictions that arose between Jews and pagans in part of the Greco-Roman world, like that among immigrants to America in a common urban neighborhood…To equate Christian anti-Semitism with the earlier pagan anti-Semitism is grossly to misunderstand Christian anti-Semitism” (1-5). Since the subjects and writers of the New Testament are Jewish, it is reasonable to furthermore assert that said cultural frictions were not a primary source of scriptural anti-Jewish passages.
The letters of Paul
Paul is a traditional symbol of Christian-based anti-Judaism. His “conversion” on the road to Damascus followed by his trademark criticisms of Judaism’s stringent social customs and laws make him a figurehead for the proponents of supercession theory. John Gager describes the common perception, one he also argues is misguided, as “the father of Christian anti-Judaism, the author of rejection-replacement theology, who claimed that God had rejected his people Israel and replaced them with a new people, the Christians” (57). However, as Gager adds, not only was Paul not converted to a religion that did not exist at the time, but also that “if we are ignorant of his rhetorical techniques, when we read his letters we are bound to get him wrong” (57).
Sandmel explores that rhetorical technique and attempts to explain the internal factors that led Paul to write the way he did. One method is to attribute Paul’s critique of Jewish law as a continued criticism rather than a denunciation of the religion as a whole:
“In support of his view that Gentiles need not conform to Jewish observances, he came to argue that these observances were not the primary element in Judaism; that is, he went beyond merely exempting Gentiles from the observances and even proceeded to contend that Judaism, properly understood, did not any longer need to preserve its inherited regulations” (7).
Sandmel distinguishes, additionally, between the criticisms of Judaism apparent in Paul and those apparent in the Gospels, which he says are unparallel and from which it could not be logically inferred to contain the same message: “But in his Epistles there is an almost complete lack of ascription to the Jews of those unedifying traits that the Gospels ascribe to them. If modern Christians can infer aspersions against historic Judaism from the Epistles of Paul, they could not readily and easily infer from him the same kind and measure of aspersions of Jews that can arise from the Gospels.” (18) Furthermore, Sandmel writes that, in several instances, the Gospels present in narrative form pieces of Paul’s writings that were originally presented in theological or allegorical form (22). New Testament anti-Semitism, therefore, is inconsistent between various facets of scripture. That universal rules of anti-Semitism could be drawn from two differing messages, it would seem, is a flawed line of thought.
The Gospel of Mark
Sandmel’s theory on Mark is fairly simple. Adele Reinhartz (in an analysis, oddly enough, of the Gospel of John) writes that a negative portrayal of Judaism arose in the Johannine tradition from a “need of this community (made up of Jews) to define themselves over against other Jews in the context of the painful process of separation” (116). Insofar as this need for distinction arose from a need for validation, Sandmel argues that Mark’s Gospel takes on a very similar role in that the Christian community needed to be assured of its own validity, being that it was located outside Judea and was composed primarily of Gentiles: “How could Gentiles be assured of their authenticity in a movement that began with Jews in Judea? In answer, the Gospel of Mark was so shaped – probably reshaped – to assure the community that, though Gentile, it possessed full validity” (47-48).
Sandmel writes further that “In normal controversies the assertion of one’s own validity is followed by denigrating one’s opponents” (48). Hence Mark’s portrayal of Jews and Judaism as invalid (48).
The Gospel of Matthew
Sandmel, similar to his analysis of Mark and Reinhartz’s work on John, recognizes an attempt by the author to validate the authenticity of Christianity. In this case, however, it is a matter less of arguing one’s case and proving an opponent invalid, but rather a direct appeal for traditional Jews to break ties with their old faith and join this more authentic form of Judaism. What’s more, Sandmel writes, he uses a technique the validity of which has been affirmed and reaffirmed by MTV and the punk rock movement: “…for Matthew the scribes and the Pharisees represent what we would today call ‘the establishment’ and that Matthew is appealing, as it were, over the heads of ‘the establishment’ to the ordinary Jews, inviting them to the movement…Christianity in Matthew’s view is the authentic Judaism” (69-70).
It is easy to see where this perspective could turn sour. Marc Saperstein writes that Jewish-Christian relations through the reformation, culminating in Martin Luther’s scathing writings, was one such example. “The reformation provides an object lesson for what can happen when one group defines the other in terms of an agenda totally alien to the other group’s self-definition” (36). Such a self-definition would take a development or two past the writings of Matthew, but the attitude purveyed in this Gospel certainly provides the stepping stones of animosity and interfaith rifts.
The Gospel of Luke
Sandmel writes that the portrayal of Jews in Luke is just as venomous, though much more subtle, than that recorded in either Mark or Matthew. Jews are portrayed, he writes, in such a way that the best case against Judaism is the behavior of the Jews themselves rather than any diatribe on the part of the author: “The villainy of the Jews in Luke is not primarily in what Luke says against them…It is rather that the acts and words of the Jews are their own indictment. It is in this sense that the anti-Semitism in Luke is more subtle than that in Mark and Matthew” (85). Jesus in Luke is a faithful Jew, never accused of blasphemy; rather, it was the tendencies of that faith community, to which Jesus was loyal, that cast Jesus on the outside.
The Acts of the Apostles
Sandmel takes Acts to task for dubious historical accuracy. “Some Christian scholars have expressed the judgment that ‘Acts as history is thoroughly untrustworthy…’” (99) he writes, though, as Sandmel then points out, G. H. C. Macgregor, in The Interpreter’s Bible, considered these views flawed. “Though our author’s treatment of events may not always be well informed or intelligent, there has been no deliberate falsification of history” (100), Macgregor writes.
Why, then, even if Sandmel is correct, is the historical accuracy of Acts any more significant than the accuracy of any other New Testament passage subject to form criticism?
Because, Sandmel answers, the Jews are portrayed so negatively in Acts that this subjective matter merits attention: “Whether Acts is historically reliable or not will always remain a matter of subjective interpretation…But can it be denied that Acts is written from a Christian viewpoint?...In Acts, “the Jews” are villains and their villainy could not be worse…Is Acts an account of what really happened or is it, with respect to Jews, a series of vilifications?” (100).
The Gospel of John
In Sandmel’s analysis of John, he very nearly revisits Saperstein’s analysis of the reformation, insofar as it can be said that the anti-Jewish language in John provides a stepping stone for a rhetorical animosity-ridden showdown between the faiths. As Sandmel put it, John’s Gospel is written in a way that reflects a sort of bitterness – a sore spot for early Christians that resulted when the Jewish people failed to comprehend, in the eyes of Christians of the day, the “messiahship” of Jesus: “instead of believing, Jews contended against Christian assertions…The Gospel according to John reflects the ultimate in the reflection of one side of a reciprocal bitterness, a two-sided animosity” (119).
More frustrating for Christians of the day was the fact that Jesus was a faithful member of the Jewish community – a fact that should have drawn support from Jews rather than doubt and denial of Jesus’ divinity: “Jews of all people should have believed, for Jesus was a Jew (as were his disciple), and he preached in synagogues and in the Temple, and Scripture foretold him” (119).
And to what extent does Saperstein’s analysis purvey the Gospel of John? To what extent might we revisit Adele Reinhartz with similar results? Given what Sandmel later writes, it’s clear that the work of these two applies once again, whether or not Sandmel meant to imply this: “The charge of deicide itself, though, is the historical product of the bitter two-sided controversy raging at the time of the writing” (138).

The Historical Connection
Near the end of Anti-Semitism, Sandmel reflected further on the role that Paul and a correct or incorrect understanding of his message regarding Jesus, Judaism and the path to salvation: “Paul’s view of the Christ is so thoroughly different from the one held by the Jews that ordinarily Jews are quite unable to understand it, and ordinarily Christians, not informed on what Jews believed about the Messiah, are equally unable to understand the Jewish denial of the messiahship of Jesus” (133).
Paul’s role and the historical context of Paul’s life and letters is also the subject of earlier work by Sandmel. In the 1958 book The Genius of Paul: A Study in History, Sandmel closely analyzes a number of the parts of Paul’s life that may have contributed, in some form, to his writings, teachings, and general understanding of Jesus and the faith. Sandmel actually breaks Paul’s life into three stages – Paul as a man, Paul as a Jew and Paul as a convert – and analyzes aspects of Paul’s life at the time, including the scriptures he was studying, his career, and the evolution of his theories and thought patterns, as well as Sandmel can derive them.
“Paul’s thought can be simple,” Sandmel writes in the introduction to The Genius of Paul. “This is true because we are today far removed from Paul in time, in geography, and in thought patterns. But Paul is not beyond our grasp and his importance in the history of religions makes him well worth the effort” (xii).
Sandmel’s affinity for seeking understanding of historical context and accurate scriptural interpretation extends into another piece of his work, The Historical Jesus.
Why the need to historically analyze he who many believed to be messiah? Sandmel attributes the influx of rationalism and its subsequent stripping of the authority of the Gospels to this need to understand Jesus as a historical figure, basically, because Jesus’ message was an important one, worth remembering and acting out: “If only the Gospels could be stripped of the legendary and the supernatural, so the argument ran, then the ethics of Jesus would be discernible as a man whom rational men could imitate” (Historical 193).
The Historical Jesus, in fact, is another site of Sandmel’s analysis of New Testament anti-Semitism: “There are, however, Christians in abundance who recognize the circumstance that the anti-Jewish tone of the New Testament is the product of an age and a set of conditions” (204). Those who doubted Sandmel’s position after reading Anti-Semitism might reasonably rest assured that they know, having read this passage, despite the fact that he is again attributing the thought to a group of people with whom he is not directly affiliated – in this case, open-minded Christians.
Sandmel is considered a leader in the field of scriptural analysis, historical or otherwise. In Roots of Rabbinic Judaism: An Intellectual History, Gabriele Boccaccini cites a method of Sandmel’s ( or, rather, Sandmel’s criticism of scripture analysis in the absence of this technique) nearly identical to that used to differentiate between Paul and the Gospels and discredit anti-Semitic parallels between the two: “Sandmel defines [the method] as ‘that extravagance amongst scholars which first overdoes the supposed similarity on passages and then proceeds to describe source and derivation as if implying literary connection flowing in an inevitable or predetermined direction” (Boccaccini 29).
Furthermore, Sandmel’s own theory has become the subject of academic scrutiny, evidence that he has become, in some sense, entrenched and understood to hold a certain authority over the subject of Jewish-Christian relations (emphasizing the perspective of Judaism) and scriptural analysis. Ignaz Maybaum cites Sandmel’s 1965 book We Jews and Jesus in Ignaz Maybaum: a Reader, writing that “The Hellenistic world, the West, responded to the biblical ‘God is One’ with the doctrine of the Trinity. To Jews this doctrine is, according to Samuel Sandmel, ‘inherently incomprehensible.’ But the philosophy of Plato or Kant may also be incomprehensible to many Jews” (Maybaum 71).

So, is there anti-Semitism in the New Testament?
Now that Sandmel’s authority on the subject has been demonstrated, we come to ask: what is his conclusion? Is it reasonable for so many people to have inferred an anti-Semitic message from the New Testament, a set of scripture the hallmark of which is Jesus’ message of love and forgiveness? What’s more, if the anti-Semitism is evident, to what extent is it, for lack of a better phrased, being sanctioned in Christian holy scripture?
It becomes clear that Sandmel gives Christians the benefit of the doubt: “The Christian will to purge Christianity of anti-Semitism exists both broadly and in many places deeply” (163).
Yet he recognizes fully that the New Testament is full of passages that, accurate and worthy of attention and effort or not, exist, and will cause animosity, if even inherently, because of Jesus’ label as the messiah – something that Jews, by description following the split from Christianity, do not believe as a standard facet of theology: “This will collides with the authority of Christian Scripture for Christians, their devotion to it, and their use of it. Rosemary Ruether…raises the question ‘Is it possible to say ‘Jesus is Messiah’ without implicitly or explicitly saying at the same time ‘and the Jews be damned’?’” (163).
Sandmel’s closing note is essentially an admission that objective readers may very well come away from an honest reading of the New Testament with anti-Jewish inspiration and trains of thought: “It does not seem to me that [Ruether] exaggerates the extent to which Judaism appears in Christian theology as that which needs negation and rejection” (163). All that Sandmel can do, he seems to admit, is try his best to provide us with the most objective and historically-based analysis available. If he’s done his job right, he might hope, we’ll all come to the same conclusion he has.







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