Is it antisemitic to say the Jews killed Jesus?

Question 60202.

Few sentences have done more damage than the claim that the Jews killed Jesus. It has been shouted outside synagogues, painted on walls, preached from pulpits, and used to justify expulsions, massacres and, eventually, an attempt to exterminate a people.

So the question deserves a careful answer rather than a slogan in either direction, and it will not do to settle it by simply refusing to read the accounts we have. Who was actually responsible for the crucifixion, what does the New Testament say and not say, and how should a Christian speak about it? Let me take those in turn.

Who Actually Killed Jesus

Start with the historical facts about who killed Jesus, because they are not complicated. The Jewish religious leadership of Jerusalem, specifically the high priestly party and elements of the Sanhedrin, sought His death and arranged His arrest. They lacked the legal authority to execute, so they brought Him before the Roman governor on a charge of sedition.

Pontius Pilate, a Roman official, examined Him, found no basis for the charge, and had Him crucified anyway. Roman soldiers scourged Him, mocked Him, drove in the nails and stood guard. Crucifixion was a Roman penalty, unknown in Jewish law, carried out by Roman hands, on a Roman cross, under Roman authority, at the order of a Roman governor who had the sole power in that province to impose a death sentence.

So the historically accurate statement is that a small group of Jewish leaders in Jerusalem and the Roman authorities together killed Jesus. Notice carefully what is not in that sentence: the Jewish people as a whole, the Jewish people living in Galilee or Alexandria or Rome at the time, and the Jewish people of every subsequent century, none of whom were present, consulted, or in any position to influence what happened that morning.

The Crowd Was Not the Nation

The Gospels describe a crowd calling for crucifixion, and that scene has been made to carry an enormous weight it cannot bear when the question of who killed Jesus is asked. Consider its actual size. The courtyard of the governor’s residence held a few hundred people at most, assembled early in the morning, and Mark says the chief priests stirred up the crowd.

At the same moment, Jerusalem was packed with pilgrims for Passover, and only days earlier a large crowd had welcomed Jesus into the city with palm branches. Luke records that a great multitude of the people and of women followed Him to the cross, mourning and lamenting. The population was divided, and the loudest voices in one courtyard were not a referendum.

Beyond Jerusalem, the vast majority of Jewish people in the first century lived elsewhere, in Galilee, Alexandria, Babylon, Rome and Asia Minor. They knew nothing about it until long afterwards. To say that the Jews killed Jesus on the basis of that courtyard is like blaming the whole British population for a decision taken by a dozen men in a room in Westminster.

The Deeper Answer the Bible Gives

The New Testament, having named the human actors, immediately moves the question somewhere else, and this is the part that matters most. Peter says in Acts 2:23 that Jesus was delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, and crucified by the hands of lawless men.

Both halves are held together without embarrassment. Real human beings made real culpable choices for which they were genuinely accountable, and the whole thing was at the same time the settled plan of God, announced through the prophets centuries beforehand and carried through exactly as written. The believers in Acts 4 pray it back explicitly: Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, gathered together to do whatever God’s hand and plan had predestined to take place.

Notice who is listed: Herod, Pilate, Gentiles and Israel. The New Testament’s own summary of who killed Jesus is everybody, and it is not making an ethnic point. It is making a theological one about the whole human race.

What Jesus Said About His Own Death

Then there is His own testimony, which ought to settle the matter for anyone who takes His words seriously. In John 10 He says that no one takes His life from Him, but that He lays it down of His own accord, and that He has authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again.

In Gethsemane He tells Peter to put the sword away and observes that He could appeal to His Father and receive more than twelve legions of angels. Before Pilate He says that the governor would have no authority over Him at all unless it had been given him from above.

That is a remarkable set of statements. The man being executed keeps insisting that He is not being overpowered. Whoever killed Jesus in the mechanical sense, He went deliberately, and He said so in advance repeatedly. See John 10:17-18.

Why the Collective Charge Is Wrong

Scripture rules out inherited collective guilt directly, which settles the question of whether later generations killed Jesus. Ezekiel 18 says the soul who sins shall die, that the son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father for the iniquity of the son. Deuteronomy 24 forbids putting children to death for their fathers.

So even if every Jewish person alive in Jerusalem in AD 33 had been complicit, which they were not, their descendants would carry no guilt for it. That is a principle Scripture states plainly, and Christians who have ignored it were not being faithful to a hard text. They were disregarding a clear one.

There is also the matter of who was doing the accusing. Almost every Christian who has said that the Jews killed Jesus has been a Gentile, whose own ancestors were the ones holding the hammer. If we are going to distribute inherited blame, Rome is a poor place for us to be standing.

The Evil History of the Deicide Charge

This is not an abstract discussion, and the history has to be told. The accusation of deicide, of God-killing, appears as early as Melito of Sardis in the second century and hardens over the following centuries into official teaching.

From it came the Rhineland massacres during the First Crusade, the blood libel from Norwich in 1144 onwards, expulsions from England in 1290 and Spain in 1492, the ghettos, the pogroms of Eastern Europe, and eventually the machinery of the Holocaust. Passion plays in medieval Europe were regularly followed by attacks on the local Jewish quarter, because the audience had been told who killed Jesus and went looking for them.

The Roman Catholic Church formally repudiated the collective charge at the Second Vatican Council in 1965, and most Protestant bodies have followed. That was right and it was very late. Whatever else this article does, it should not soften the historical record.

What the New Testament Does and Does Not Say

Two texts get quoted, so let me handle them honestly. The first is 1 Thessalonians 2, where Paul writes of the Jews who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets and drove us out. This is Paul, a Jew, writing about specific opponents in a specific situation, in the way prophets had always spoken about their own people. It is family argument, not racial theory.

The second is Matthew 27, where the crowd says His blood be on us and on our children. This has been treated for centuries as a self-imposed curse on a nation for ever. Read it in context: it is a shouted phrase from a particular crowd on a particular morning, reported by the narrator, endorsed by nobody, and it carries no authority whatever as a divine pronouncement.

Set against those, notice what Jesus said from the cross itself. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. If the one being executed asks for the forgiveness of those killing Him, no Christian has standing to hold the charge open.

Israel Is Still Loved

The New Testament’s settled position on the Jewish people is not resentment. Paul devotes three chapters of Romans to it, and the conclusion is unambiguous.

He asks whether God has rejected His people and answers by no means, pointing to himself as an Israelite of the tribe of Benjamin. He describes a partial hardening until the fullness of the Gentiles comes in. And he says that as regards election they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers, for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.

That is the framework a Christian should be working in. I hold that God’s covenants with Israel stand, that a future national turning to their Messiah is promised, and that Gentile believers are branches grafted into a Jewish root and had better not become arrogant towards the branches. See are modern Jews still God’s chosen people and why antisemitism is wrong.

So What May We Say?

Here is where I come out. It is historically inaccurate and morally wrong to say that the Jews killed Jesus, because the phrase implies a whole people across all time and no such thing occurred.

It is accurate to say that certain Jewish leaders in Jerusalem, together with the Roman governor and Roman soldiers, brought about His death. It is more accurate still to say that Jesus laid down His life deliberately, according to the plan of God, for the sins of the world.

And it is most accurate of all to say that my sin killed Jesus, which is where every honest reading of the passion narrative eventually deposits us. That is not a pious flourish; it is the New Testament’s own logic. He was wounded for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities, and the man who understands the cross has stopped looking for someone else to blame for it. See Isaiah 53:5.

A Word to the Church

Practically, this means being careful with our language in preaching, in Bible study and in the way we stage anything at Easter. The phrase the Jews in John’s Gospel usually means the religious authorities in Jerusalem rather than the Jewish people as such, and saying so from the pulpit takes ten seconds and prevents a great deal of harm.

It means refusing to let a joke or an assumption pass. It means teaching our congregations the history, because a church that does not know what was done in the name of Jesus will repeat parts of it without meaning to.

And it means praying for and loving Jewish people, which is the plainest possible refutation of what our predecessors did. Paul’s anguish for his kinsmen in Romans 9 is the tone a Christian should have, and it is a long way from the courtyard.

The Trial Itself Was Irregular

One further historical point is worth making, because it bears directly on how few people were involved. The night proceedings against Jesus broke a considerable number of the rules the Jewish authorities themselves recognised.

Capital cases were not to be heard at night. They were not to be held on the eve of a Sabbath or festival. A verdict of condemnation could not be reached on the same day as the trial. Witnesses were required to agree, and Mark records explicitly that their testimony did not agree.

That matters for our question. What happened was not the considered judgement of a nation operating its legal system. It was a rushed, irregular, night time action by a faction that needed the thing done before the city woke up. The people who killed Jesus were acting against their own law as well as against Him.

Paul, Peter and the Jewish Church

There is a fact that ought to end the collective charge on its own. The entire early church was Jewish. Every apostle, the writers of almost the whole New Testament, the three thousand converted at Pentecost, and the congregation in Jerusalem that grew to many thousands, were all Jewish believers.

Peter, preaching in Acts 2 to a Jerusalem crowd, does say that they crucified and killed Jesus by the hands of lawless men. And then he tells them to repent and be baptised for the forgiveness of sins, and three thousand of them do exactly that on the spot.

That is the apostolic pattern for handling the question of who killed Jesus, and it is the exact opposite of what Christendom later made of it. The charge was brought in order to offer forgiveness, not in order to establish a grievance. Peter was not laying the ground for a pogrom; he was calling his own people home.

Handling the Passion Narratives in Preaching

A practical note for anyone who teaches. The Gospels each shape their account of who killed Jesus differently, and being aware of that prevents careless generalisation.

John uses the phrase the Jews far more than the others, and in the great majority of cases he means the Jerusalem authorities who opposed Jesus, not the population. He himself was Jewish, as were the disciples he is writing about, so a flat ethnic reading makes the text incoherent within a verse or two.

Luke, writing for a Gentile readership, is careful to record the mourning of the crowds and Pilate’s repeated declarations of innocence. Matthew, writing to Jewish readers, presses the responsibility of the leadership. Read together they give a picture of a divided city and a Roman execution, which is what the history was.

So, now what?

If you have used this phrase without thinking, you are in a very large company and the remedy is simple enough: stop, and say instead what actually happened. Precision here is not political sensitivity. It is honesty, and it is love of neighbour.

And take the question inward, which is where the New Testament puts it. Every account of the crucifixion is written so that the reader ends up in the crowd rather than above it. When you read the passion narrative this year, do not spend the time deciding who killed Jesus. Ask instead why He stayed on the cross when He could have come down, and what that says about how He regards you.

But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.

Isaiah 53:5 (ESV)

For Further Study

For the historical background to the trial, Josh McDowell and other evangelical treatments of the Passion narratives set out the legal questions clearly, and J. Dwight Pentecost’s The Words and Works of Jesus Christ works through the sequence of hearings carefully. On the theology of the atonement, Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology and Charles C. Ryrie’s Basic Theology present the penal substitutionary account assumed throughout this article. For the relationship between Israel and the church, Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s Israelology is the fullest dispensational treatment available. On the history of the deicide charge, Edward Flannery’s The Anguish of the Jews is a hard but necessary read.