Is It Antisemitic to Say the Jews Killed Jesus?

Question 60202

To ask whether it is antisemitic to say the Jews killed Jesus is to raise a question that is both historical and moral, and the two have to be kept apart to answer it honestly. As a sweeping accusation that blames the Jewish people as a whole, across all generations, for having killed Jesus, the charge is both historically careless and morally poisonous, and it has fuelled centuries of real persecution. Yet that does not mean we may not speak truthfully about who was actually involved when Jesus was killed, and Scripture itself spreads the responsibility far wider than any one nation.

So the question deserves a careful answer that refuses both the antisemitism that blames a whole people and the dishonesty that pretends no one bears any responsibility at all.

Who actually killed Jesus?

When we ask who killed Jesus at the level of plain history, the New Testament names several parties. The Jewish religious leadership of the day, the chief priests and the council, arrested Jesus, examined Him, and handed Him over. The Roman governor Pilate passed the death sentence, and Roman soldiers carried out the execution, since crucifixion was a Roman penalty and only Rome held the power to put a man to death. A crowd in Jerusalem called for His death, while most of the Jewish people scattered across the world at that time knew nothing of it.

The early church prayed about this very thing and named the parties together. In Acts they say that Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, were gathered against Jesus. Both Jew and Gentile had a hand in the death of Jesus, which is exactly what we would expect, since He came to save both. To pin the blame for having killed Jesus on the Jewish people alone is to ignore the Romans who actually drove in the nails, a fuller account of which is given in the question of who killed Jesus.

The deeper answer: our sin and God’s plan

Scripture presses past the human actors to a deeper level. Peter tells the crowd at Pentecost that Jesus was delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, and then crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. Both things are true at once. Wicked men freely did wrong, and God’s saving purpose was being accomplished through it. Jesus was not a helpless victim, for He said no one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.

At the deepest level it was our sin that killed Jesus. He was pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities, bearing the penalty that belonged to us. This is the heart of the matter, and it means that every believer must say, before pointing a finger at anyone else, that it was for my sin that He died. The cross indicts the whole human race, not one ethnic group, a truth at the centre of the question of why Jesus was crucified.

Why blaming the Jewish people is wrong

It is here that the antisemitic version of the charge collapses. To say that the Jews killed Jesus, meaning the Jewish people as a race and for all time, is to commit the basic injustice of collective guilt, holding millions of people who were never there, including every Jew alive today, responsible for the act of a particular leadership two thousand years ago. Scripture never reasons this way, and neither should we.

The absurdity becomes plain when we remember that the first believers were almost all Jews. Jesus Himself was a Jew, born of a Jewish mother, as were Mary, the twelve apostles, Paul, and the thousands who believed at Pentecost. The gospel went to the Jew first. To turn the death of the Jewish Messiah into a weapon against the Jewish people is to forget that the entire foundation of the faith is Jewish. The one who was killed came as the Saviour of Israel and of the world alike.

The evil history of the deicide charge

This matters because the accusation that the Jews killed Jesus has a long and bloody history. For centuries the slander that the Jewish people were collectively guilty of deicide, of killing God, was used to justify pogroms, expulsions, forced conversions, and massacres, and it helped prepare the soil in which later horrors grew. The cry of Christ-killer has accompanied some of the darkest cruelty ever done in the name of Christianity, much of it a betrayal of Christ rather than a service to Him.

A believer who understands this will be slow and careful with his words. To repeat the charge that the Jews killed Jesus, in the collective sense the world hears, is to align oneself with that history of hatred, whatever one intends. This is why the question of why antisemitism is wrong belongs alongside this one, and why antisemitism is not a minor failing but a serious sin against people God still loves.

What the New Testament does and does not say

Some point to verses that seem to support blaming the Jewish people, and these must be handled honestly. When the crowd cried, his blood be on us and on our children, they were a particular mob in a particular moment, not a curse binding an entire people for ever, and the New Testament never treats it as such. When Paul, himself a Jew, speaks sharply of his countrymen who opposed the gospel, he writes as a grieved member of the family, not as an outsider stirring hatred, and the same Paul says he could wish himself cursed for the sake of his people.

Nowhere does the New Testament license contempt for the Jewish people because Jesus was killed. The apostles preached repentance and forgiveness to the very people of Jerusalem who had called for the crucifixion, and thousands believed. The gospel’s answer to those involved in the death of Jesus was not vengeance but the offer of mercy, which is the opposite of the spirit of antisemitism.

Israel still loved by God

A right answer also rests on the place Israel still holds in God’s purposes. Paul says that as regards the gospel the Jewish people may be opposed, but as regards election they are beloved for the sake of the patriarchs, for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. God has not finished with Israel, and a great future turning of the nation to her Messiah still lies ahead, as the question of whether modern Jews are still God’s chosen people sets out.

This stands directly against the replacement theology that imagines the church has taken Israel’s place and that the Jewish people are now cast off, a view considered in the question of replacement theology. The Christian who grasps God’s ongoing love for Israel has every reason to love the Jewish people and none at all to despise them over the death of the Messiah who came from among them.

Both Jew and Gentile, by the plan of God

It is worth dwelling on the fact that both Jew and Gentile shared in the death of Jesus, because it dismantles the antisemitic charge from another angle. The Gentiles in the account are the Romans, and through them the whole watching world, so that no people can stand back and say their hands are clean. When we ask who killed Jesus, the honest answer implicates humanity as a whole, not one nation singled out for blame.

Even this, Scripture says, happened by the definite plan and foreknowledge of God. The ones who killed Jesus did genuine evil and are genuinely responsible, yet God was working His purpose of salvation through their wickedness. This is the mystery of the cross, that the worst act in human history became the means of the world’s redemption. The hands that killed Jesus were guilty, and the God who permitted it was saving sinners through it.

How then should we speak of who killed Jesus?

All this gives us a way to speak truthfully without cruelty. It is accurate to say that the Jewish leaders of the day handed Jesus over, that the Romans killed Jesus by crucifixion, and that the whole event unfolded by God’s plan and for our sin. It is false to say that the Jewish people as a race, then or now, are the ones who killed Jesus. The first statements are history; the second is slander.

Christians should therefore drop the careless shorthand that the Jews killed Jesus, because in the ears of the world it carries the very collective blame that has done such harm. Precision here is not pedantry but love, refusing to lend our words to a lie that has cost Jewish lives. The believer who knows why Jesus was killed will guard his speech accordingly.

The gospel’s answer to those who killed Jesus

The most striking thing of all is how the New Testament treats the very people involved in the death of Jesus. From the cross Jesus prayed, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Weeks later Peter preached to the crowd in Jerusalem that they had crucified the Lord, and in the same breath offered them forgiveness and the gift of the Spirit if they would repent, and three thousand did. The gospel’s answer to those who killed Jesus was mercy, not revenge.

That sets the pattern for us. If the apostles, who could have named the guilty, instead offered them the forgiveness purchased by the One they killed, then there is no room at all for Christians to nurse hatred over the cross. The death that the world meant for evil God meant for the salvation of all who will believe, including those who had a hand in it.

Loving the people from whom the Saviour came

A Christian who understands the cross rightly will love the Jewish people, not despise them. From them came the patriarchs, the prophets, the Scriptures, and the Messiah Himself, and to them belong promises God has not revoked. To blame them for having killed Jesus and so to justify contempt is to turn the gospel on its head, for the gospel came from the Jew to the world before it ever came from the world back to the Jew.

This love is practical. It means refusing antisemitic jokes and conspiracy theories, speaking against the slander of collective guilt wherever it appears, and longing and praying for the salvation of Israel rather than gloating over her. The believer remembers that it was not finally the Jewish people but his own sin that killed Jesus, and that humbling truth leaves no ground for pride against anyone.

Examining our own hearts first

The surest cure for the antisemitism that asks who killed Jesus is to turn the question inward before aiming it outward. The believer who has understood the cross knows that his own sin was the reason Jesus went there, and that knowledge silences every instinct to scapegoat another people. Before I accuse anyone of having killed Jesus, I must confess that He was wounded for my transgressions.

This is not a pious evasion of history but its deepest meaning. The Jewish leaders and the Roman state played their parts, and yet behind them all stood the sin of the whole human race, mine included, for which the Saviour willingly died. The one who grasps that he himself had a hand in why Jesus was killed has no stones left to throw.

A word to the church

The church has not always spoken well here, and honesty requires us to own it. For long stretches of history professing Christians used the charge that the Jews killed Jesus to justify cruelty, and that record should grieve us and make us careful. We cannot undo the past, but we can refuse to repeat its errors in our own speech and teaching.

So let the church be known for the opposite spirit. Let us teach clearly why it is wrong to blame the Jewish people for having killed Jesus, let us love and pray for them, and let us hold out the same gospel of forgiveness that the apostles offered to the very crowd in Jerusalem. The death of Jesus was meant to reconcile, not to divide, and the church dishonours the cross whenever it turns the Saviour who was killed into an excuse for contempt.

In the end the question of whether it is antisemitic to say the Jews killed Jesus presses every believer back to the foot of the cross. There we see the guilt of the whole human race and the love of God meeting in one place, and we lose any appetite for blaming a single people, because we know our own part in why Jesus was killed. The cross humbles the one who understands it.

And there too we find the answer that the gospel always gives, which is mercy held out even to those whose hands were stained. The Saviour who was killed rose again and sent His followers to preach forgiveness first in Jerusalem, to the very city where He died. A faith that begins with that kind of mercy can have no room for the hatred that the deicide charge has so often carried.

So, now what?

Speak about the cross with both truth and care. It is accurate to say that Jewish leaders and Roman authorities together handed Jesus over and that He was killed by lawless hands, and it is essential to add that it happened by God’s plan and for our sin. It is false and hateful to say that the Jewish people as a whole, then or now, bear the guilt for having killed Jesus.

Then turn the question on yourself before you aim it at anyone else. The deepest truth is that our sin put Jesus on the cross, and He went there willingly to save us. Let that humble any temptation to blame, and let it move you to love the Jewish people, to reject every form of antisemitism, and to marvel that the Messiah they gave to the world was killed for the salvation of all who believe.

“…for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel.” Acts 4:27

For Further Study

Readers wishing to think further about this will be helped by sound treatments of Israel and the church in the writings of Arnold Fruchtenbaum, John Walvoord, and Charles Ryrie, and by careful study of Romans 9 to 11, where Paul sets out God’s continuing purpose for the Jewish people. These show why a Christian understanding of the death of Jesus, far from breeding contempt, should produce humble gratitude and a genuine love for the people from whom the Saviour came.