Jews and Anti-Judaism in the New Testament by Terence L. Donaldson (review)

The question of anti-Semitism or, more accurately, anti-Judaism in the New Testament has a long history. In the ecumenical age of Jewish-Christian relations, this question becomes central, even paramount. Yet the terms of the question are often under-theorized or under-historicized. That is, in most circles today, believing and practising Christians want their scripture not to be anti-Judaic (much less anti-Semitic) but the authors of those scriptures and many of their interpreters had no such preference or inclination. The initial problem with another book on this subject is that so much has already been written it is hard to find a new angle worthy of yet another study. Terence Donaldson, a seasoned scholar in New Testament studies, has attempted, and in my view succeeded, to do just that.

Donaldson correctly, in my view, considers the term anti-Semitism in regards to the New Testament as problematic, even anachronistic, for many reasons, one of which is that many of the texts discussed were written by Jews and intended for a Jewish audience. He does acknowledge anti-Semitism when it comes to certain interpreters of the New Testament but even there the term, connected to racial theory and not theological argument, is not really an operative one in his study. He frames his book by first narrowing the approaches he will engage to three significant writers on this topic: Jules Isaac, Gregory Baum, and Rosemary Ruether, each of whom takes a decidedly different approach to the question. Isaac contends that the anti-Judaism of Christianity is largely the product of the early interpreters of the New Testament who took anti-Judaic themes present in it and developed them into outright anti-Judaic and subsequently anti-Semitic positions. Baum argues against Isaac that ‘there is no foundation for the accusation that a seed of contempt and hatred for the Jews can be found in the New Testament.’ That is, for Baum, the early interpreters were simply misinterpreting. As an aside, Donaldson interestingly notes that both Isaac and Baum are Christians who herald from Jewish families (I wish he would have weighed in on what he thought the significance of that fact might be). Finally, Rosemary Reuther contends that ‘Christian anti-Judaism was intrinsic to the christological message that was part of the Christian movement from the beginning.’ Donaldson engages this question within the orbit of these three positions, narrowing his reading of the New Testament to three basic questions: what was the text’s self-definition (be it gospel or epistle), what was its social location, and what was its rhetorical function? This narrowing of his parameters enables Donaldson to focus more intently on the common yet also very distinct anti-Judaism themes that appear throughout the New Testament. He does not draw any definitive conclusions on the matter, preferring to set out a series of readings in context and then making tentative suggestions given the three authors and three questions that serve as his frame.

The book proceeds in a very systematic fashion, each chapter focusing on one of the gospels and then Paul’s letters. In each chapter Donaldson rehearses well-known anti-Judaic verses, refracting them through his three questions, and then draws some conclusions in a very cautious manner that does not yield an apologia or an outright indictment of the text in question. Rhetorically, the three questions serve largely to raise more questions than they resolve and prevent collapsing his or any other analysis into one methodological trap because in almost every case at least one of those questions remains unanswered or, at least, ambiguous. What is accomplished, at least to this reader, is that the common assumptions captured in the Isaac-Baum-Ruether trajectory are made more complicated if we accept the premise that his three questions (self-definition, social context, and rhetoric) require answers before making more concrete determinations.

The existence of anti-Judaic material in the New Testament...