Did the Jews kill Jesus? Who was responsible for Christ's death? - Podcast Episode 205

The Cultural Backdrop of Anti-Semitism and the Question of Who Killed Jesus

Welcome to the Got Questions podcast. We've been getting a ton of questions about something. It's super hot in popular culture and the news and in law and United States government around the world. What's going on in Israel right now is specifically related to Gaza and the Palestinians has stirred up a new wave of anti-Semitism around the world.

So we did an episode specifically on anti-Semitism. I think it was around episode 181. So I'd invite you to go back and watch or listen to that one as well, because that'll provide a lot of the background things we're gonna talk about today.

But specifically, we're gonna talk about what's going on here in the United States with possible new anti-Semitism laws being put into effect, basically outlawing the right to say that the Jews killed Jesus.

This has resulted in, of course, a hostile reaction in the other direction of saying, one, that violates free speech laws. Two, you're basically outlawing the New Testament because the New Testament says that the Jews killed Jesus.

So joining me today is Jeff, the managing editor of BibleRef .com and Kevin, the managing editor of GotQuestions .org. So we're gonna be tackling the issue. First of all, what actually does the Bible say about who killed Jesus?

And then also, how should Christians be thinking through laws like this or even the thought process behind them? And also, just something to make you be aware of, the phrase Christ is King, which up until recently, I thought was just a wonderful way of expressing that Jesus was the Messiah, that he is the King of kings and Lord of lords, as the book of Revelation says.

But now it's thus carrying a kind of a side meaning of the United States is a Christian nation, not a Jewish nation. This phrase Christ is King is actually sometimes being used in sort of an anti-Semitic way, which is a travesty because the statement itself is beautiful and entirely biblical.

So Jeff, what are you hearing out there? And specifically, what does the Bible say about who killed Jesus?

The Religious Leaders, Romans, Pilate, the Crowd, and God's Plan in the Crucifixion

Well, you see me rolling my eyes and shaking my head. So full disclosure, transparency behind the scenes, whatever people wanna call it. We decided to do this particular taping in response to seeing these things happening.

And I frankly have not been super duper up on those happenings. So some of what you are saying right now is actually news to me. The specific Christ the King aspect, that's why I'm sort of, I'm shaking my head.

It's like we can turn anything and everything into something offensive and then people just take the offensive thing. So I'm glad you got me to crawl out of my garbage can and talk about this because it's probably a good thing for us to discuss.

The issue that I see with some of this stuff when it comes to the crucifixion of Jesus and Judaism and the word Jews is that there is a sort of a cultural, a raw nerve around that word, those phrases.

So as an example, in our ministry's Bible ref commentary, there's a lot of times in the gospel of John where John specifically refers to the Jews. And he says, the Jews did this or the Jews said that.

In that context, when you read it, and we explain this in the commentary, John is really talking about the religious and political leaders of Jerusalem. That's who he means when he says that. He doesn't mean all of Israel or all Jewish people.

But because that phrase sort of just instinctively carries that, we don't typically use that when we are writing commentary, not because there's something ultimately wrong with it. We just respect and understand that when you hear somebody say a sentence where you say, the Jews, this or that, people tend to react to that with this sort of instinctive assumption that there's something racist behind it.

And there may be some truth to the way that that's been used. So I think in this entire issue, we do have to be careful to remember there are gonna be some things we have to be culturally careful about.

We don't wanna be callous. We don't wanna be cavalier about how this goes. But the fact of the matter is that, as you said, scripture does assign certain levels of responsibility to Jesus's death. But as we go through here today, we're gonna talk about how those responsibilities start with God.

They include Jesus. They also include the Pharisees and religious leaders of Jerusalem. They include the crowd that was there when Pilate was giving his sentence. They include Pilate, who had a responsibility that he did not fulfill.

And it includes all people around the world because of who we are and what we've done and the reason that Jesus had to be sacrificed in the first place. So scripturally, yes, we do see that there are times where people like Peter are telling the Jewish people, you crucified Jesus, you did this.

And in a very real sense in that way, yes, the Bible does say that the Jewish people, quote unquote, killed Jesus. But what it doesn't do is it doesn't say Jewish people, ethnically, racially, are uniquely responsible for the death of Christ and they should be punished for it forever and ever and ever.

It is a little bit more nuanced than that. It's not something that's just as black and white and clear as saying, oh, if you're a Jew, it's your responsibility that Jesus died.

Yes, so Jeff mentioned that there are plenty of people complicit in Jesus's death. According to scripture, I mean, there's plenty of blame to go around if we want to start assigning blame for the crucifixion of Christ.

And I'm gonna go ahead and just start with the religious leaders that were complicit in Jesus's death. The religious leaders of the day, when Jesus was alive and in Jerusalem, they had plotted to take Jesus's life.

John 11, verse 53, they were planning ahead of time, before the trials even, before they had even arrested him, they're already plotting to take his life because of the things he was teaching, because of what they perceived as his violations of the law, his claim to be equal with the Father.

And then the cleansing of the temple, that was probably the straw that broke the camel's back. They saw him as taking authority in their temple. So that got the Pharisees and the Sadducees involved and the Herodians and there were a lot of people that came together to go against Jesus and to try to put an end to his ministry.

The Romans, of course, were complicit in Jesus's death. I mean, crucifixion was a Roman form of execution. It was, the cross was constructed by the Romans. It was, the execution was led by Romans. It was Roman hands that nailed Jesus to the cross and Romans that kept guard and a Roman soldier that pierced his side and all the rest.

And then Pilate, of course, being a Roman and also the one in charge of a couple of the trials that Jesus was forced through, he was complicit and he had the responsibility to administer justice. He fails miserably and for whatever reason, Pilate lets Jesus be executed, even after Pilate says at least three times that this is an innocent man.

He says, I find no cause in him worthy of death. There's nothing that he's done that would necessitate a crucifixion and yet he has him scourged and then delivers him over to the soldiers to be crucified.

So, Pilate bears a big responsibility in all of this as well. Then there was the mob, the crowd that was there on hand when Jesus was being tried before Pilate and scripture says that the religious leaders stirred up that crowd in order to get what they wanted, which was Jesus' crucifixion.

So, the mob starts crying out, crucify him, crucify him. At that point, the mob mentality takes over but it was stirred up again by the religious leaders that were there that hated Jesus and wanted to see him dead and so the mob is complicit as well in all of this.

And then as Jeff mentioned, God was the one who allowed all of this. In fact, Peter brings this out in his sermon in Acts chapter two, the day of Pentecost. Peter says, this man, speaking of Jesus, was handed over to you, speaking to a Jewish crowd gathered at Pentecost.

This man, Jesus, was handed over to you by God's deliberate plan and foreknowledge and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. That's Acts two and verse 23. So, Peter kind of fingers a lot of different people here.

He says there was the crowd in Jerusalem, there were wicked men, that's a reference to the Romans, but also he mentions that this was God's plan. This was God's deliberate plan of salvation being enacted as Jesus was led away to be crucified and this plan went back before the foundation of the world, scripture says.

The lamb of God slain from the foundation of the world. It was always God's plan that his perfect son would provide that sacrifice needed for sin and, of course, Jesus went to this cross willingly. He prayed about it in Gethsemane.

Father, if it is your will, I mean, if there's any other way, if it is possible for the redemption of the world to happen apart from all of this suffering, all of this pain, then I would choose that, but then Jesus ended the prayer three times with not my will, but yours be done and then Jesus says to his disciples, I can call the armies of heaven to come and rescue me and you can bet that those angels were wanting to come and rescue Jesus.

They didn't like what was happening down there, but Jesus refrains. He was going to do the will of the Father, so Jesus willingly laid down his life and fulfilled the Father's plan and it involved a lot of wicked people.

When I say there's a lot of blame to go around, I mean there's a lot of blame to go all around because ultimately it also comes down to every person in this world. We're all sinners and it was sin that sent Jesus to the cross.

It was Jesus bearing the sins of the world that led to his crucifixion and so we are all culpable. We are all to blame. We are all complicit in the death of Christ simply by the fact that we are sinners and our sin needed to be atoned for by a God who loves us.

Our Sins, the Father’s Will, and the Good Purposes of the Cross

Kevin, well said. That's an excellent summary of there's a lot of blame to go around. In the movie, The Passion of the Christ, in the scene where Jesus is actually being crucified where the nails are being driven through his hands and feet, the director, Mel Gibson, actually had, his hands were the ones that you see holding the hammer and driving the nails and he said, I did that because I wanted a reminder to me that ultimately it was my sins that crucified Christ and so with all the blame to go around, whether the Jews, the Romans, being the Father's will, et cetera, ultimately it was our sins that nailed Jesus to the cross.

It was our sins that crucified him and ultimately we're to be grateful for that. I mean, in the church history, there's a time where in the Crusades where the European Christians were coming down, their ultimate goal was to free the holy land of Muslims but they ended up persecuting and killing and murdering Jews as well and they would say, well, because of the Jews, because you were the ones who crucified Jesus and so like this, I can see how this thing has been used throughout history but to me, that concept is so ridiculous because were it not for Jesus being crucified for our sins, we would not have salvation.

So to me, the whole anti, using the Jews killed Jesus for anti-Semitism doesn't make any sense because we know one, it was Father's will and two, ultimately we know it resulted in our salvation. That doesn't mean we have to be thankful like, yeah, I'm so glad the Jews crucified Jesus but at the same time, we are to be very glad.

And when I look at maybe a single verse to kind of summarize all of this, for me it's Genesis 50, 20 where it says, as for you, you meant evil against me but God meant it for good. And so yes, the Jews, the Jewish leaders, the Romans, the crowds, they meant this for evil.

Crucifying, murdering Jesus was an evil act but behind the scenes the entire time, God meant it for good. So to use something that God meant for good as an excuse for persecuting the people who crucified Jesus, it doesn't make any sense.

It's not biblical at all. And then ultimately, you have to remember, Jesus was a Jew. His 12 apostles were Jews. The very early church was predominantly Jewish. If it were there not for Jews, the church would not exist.

Salvation would not exist. God's plan throughout the whole Old Testament revolved around the nation of Israel. Jesus, again, he was a Jew. Paul, the one who wrote the epistles in the New Testament that we rely on for our doctrines, is like, I was the Jew of all Jews.

So anti-Semitism is foreign to the Bible. There's not a hint of we are to be angry or hostile towards Jews because of Jesus' crucifixion. It's just completely antithetical to the gospel, to the message of the Bible, Old and New Testament.

There is no excuse, biblically speaking, for there to be even a hint of anti-Semitism among followers of Jesus Christ.

Jews are, in fact, blessed people according to Scripture. Paul asks the question in Romans chapter 11, did God reject his people by no means? And then he says, I'm an Israelite myself, descendant of Abraham, Isaac, tribe of Benjamin.

God did not reject his people whom he foreknew. Then, of course, we've got the Abrahamic covenant all the way back in Genesis where God blesses Abraham and his descendants. The Jews are not a cursed people.

They are a blessed people, and he has not in any sense rejected them. Not only has he not rejected them,.

But we can see how absurd some of these anti-Semitic concepts are. So, for example, Paul in Romans 11 saying, I'm a Jew, God has not rejected Israel. We have all these historical things, and yet it's strange that there would even be an assumption that when somebody says something like, the Jews killed Jesus, that that would immediately strike to somebody in a racist or a hateful way.

Because, and I'm sure historians will jump all over me if I make the tiniest mistake, so fire up your keyboard warrior keyboards. But if I say something like, the Chinese invented gunpowder, I don't know of anybody who would sort of instinctively think that that means that every person of Chinese descent I meet, I'm crediting with the invention of gunpowder.

Or if I say the Spanish or the Portuguese or the British took over Native American tribes in America, that doesn't mean that I'm looking at somebody living in Portugal and saying, I hold you accountable for whatever.

And we sort of just instinctively recognize that. Nobody just takes it that way. But for some reason, this world has been so irrationally hateful to Jewish people that a statement like, the Jews killed Jesus, just seems to lend itself to something that it doesn't really even mean.

And that as we've established, the scripture does not support. There's nothing in Christianity that actually does that. But in history, you see a lot of that with antisemitism. The concept of blood libel was an issue for a long time where people would accuse Jewish people of stealing children and draining their blood to use them in their cooking and things like that.

Which is mind blowing when you consider how adamantly against drinking or eating blood the Old Testament is. That is something that's literally contrary to the entire history of the nation, but people were so rabidly hateful of God's people that they wanted to find some reason to do that.

So I can understand why we're trying to take steps to sort of curb or to move away from these antisemitic ideas, because it is pervasive, it is hateful, it is terrible. So many awful things in history have been connected to an antisemitic attitude.

But I suppose that what I would be concerned with is exactly what we do and how we do it. And I suppose that gets a little to the political side and we are not a political ministry, but there are times where things sort of overlap.

And the comments that I was making here about things like the Chinese and gunpowder or the Portuguese and that, I would find it hard to automatically assume if I heard somebody say, the Jews killed Jesus, I might wince a little bit because I know how some people are going to take that, but I would not assume that that is somehow a racist statement because in the context, we understand what it means.

So I get that it's a complicated thing. It's gonna become interesting for us to try to sort of handle this issue with tact. Yeah, that's good.

No, and that's exactly right. Jeff, what you talked about at the very beginning to me is like, it's really standing out to me is like, how do we not say anything that would lend itself to racism? So in any way, promote antisemitism, knowing that some people can take almost anything and make it a motivation for evil.

But at the same time, speaking the truth and the New Testament as we've gone through, ascribes some guilt for Jesus' crucifixion to the religious leaders of Jesus' day. They were part of the blame to go around, but were they the entirety of it?

No, and ultimately, this was God's will. Could blame the Father, the eternal God of heaven more so than you could blame the Jews because He allowed it, He willed it, He ordained it. He could have prevented it at any moment and He didn't.

So how do you speak the truth on something like this without lending itself to that? One, with the governmental laws, like you said, Jeff, we're not a political organization, we're definitely not a political podcast, but the idea of, well, you can't say that, that's exceedingly dangerous.

You never wanna endorse certain things you can or cannot say, especially when the statement is factually true to an extent, obviously with the limitations we've got. So how exactly do you do it? I don't know that the three of us are gonna come up with the perfect solution, but I know banning people from saying the Jews killed Jesus, that is not the solution.

I think ideally, let's have a conversation of what Jesus' crucifixion really meant, who was responsible, who was involved, who shares the blame, and ultimately, what was the result, which is the salvation of everyone who believes in Him.

So I would love for that to be the focus of this conversation, but as we all know, that's not ultimately gonna be the focus of this conversation, especially in a political sense.

And I'm also the type who, I tend to think we wanna be careful to resist the abuse of something. So if some group tries to co-opt some symbol or picture or sign, and we decide to say, oh, well, now that that's associated with them, every use of that ever is always evil.

Again, we are not political, but I do remember it wasn't that long ago when the sign that used to be referred to as okay, make a circle with your thumb and your forefinger, and the three other fingers were up, that my entire life growing up just meant okay is what it meant.

At some point in time, people of a certain political persuasion decided to start sort of using that, or it was more that they were blamed for that. They weren't even the ones who were doing it, but somebody said, oh, that's a symbol of this thing.

And then that group sort of took it on and said, yeah, this is part of it. And then all of a sudden, every time a single human being ever did that, it was somehow associated with all of the terrible things that people associated with that group.

It's the same kind of thing I think we wanna be careful with. So Che, you were mentioning a phrase like Christ is king. I understand culturally where somebody would try to say, you can't say the Jews killed Jesus.

I don't think I would agree. Like you said, it's dangerous to go that route. But I think any of that sort of falls in that same category. You're taking something that bad people have corrupted and co-opted, and you are deciding that you're just going to punish everybody for using it when the context doesn't even have anything to do with that.

And I get there's limits to the things that we can and can't say for safety reasons and things like that, but it's concerning as a believer to think that things that we could say that are very biblical and are not meant with any ill intent could wind up being illegal in some misguided effort to protect somebody.

It's like in a conversation, sometimes you have to start off by defining terms, make sure we're all on the same page. We have to do that with symbols now. And I think in this age of the soundbite era where everything wants to, people try to reduce everything to like a one little sentence, and then people are communicating back and forth with soundbites.

As if that is the whole discussion, if that is all the information, that's all there is to know on the subject, that is dangerous because especially like in an issue like this, things really do have to be discussed.

Things have to be delved into. We have to understand the contextual meanings of these different phrases that we're using, that the Bible uses. And I think we just need to get back to the place where we're engaging in conversation and having real and meaningful discussions and not just trying to go by slogans and assign meanings to those.

Anti-Semitism, Israel, and the Need to Define Terms Carefully

Yeah, Kevin, well said.

Defining terms. If you're gonna say in our current culture, the Jews killed Jesus, probably wise for you to clarify what you do and don't mean by that phrase. Same thing, sadly, if Christ is King continues to be used in an anti-Semitic sense, that would require some clarification.

It's a travesty that it would, but ultimately, if we're speaking the truth, we need to make sure people are using the same definitions of terms that we are. So in summary, and then I would again invite you to go back and watch our episode on anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism ultimately is satanic. You look through the history, world history, how many times the Jews have been under attack, under threat of annihilation. You can go back to the days of Esther where Haman decided, I wanna wipe out all the Jews.

You can look at more recently in the Holocaust, Satan has tried this again and again and again. Obviously, there's no direct attempt at another Holocaust right now because Israel is well-equipped to defend itself, but this anti-Semitic fervor that's going around the world could very well lead to another event like that.

And it's just an example of Satan attempting to do this again and again and again, and God defeating him again and again and again, because God has a plan for the nation of Israel. God has a plan for the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

We believe that Christ will reign over a thousand-year kingdom from Israel. We believe nothing is going to thwart that. But the anti-Semitism we're seeing, it's not a matter of who killed Jesus or who was responsible for Christ's death or who crucified Jesus.

That is a biblical issue. That is ultimately a theological issue that it's true. But as Kevin so eloquently said, there's plenty of blame to go around. The Jews are not to blame for Jesus' crucifixion.

Ultimately, our sins are to blame for Jesus' crucifixion. My sins, Jeff's sins, Kevin's sins, your sins are what nailed Jesus to the cross. So we're ultimately responsible. Remember, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Remember that Christ could have prevented this. Christ could have called 10 ,000 angels at any moment to rescue him. But no, he willingly sacrificed himself to be the atoning sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.

That includes your sins and my sins. So this whole the Jews killed Jesus ultimately is not an anti-Semitic statement. But with that said, let's just be careful to define our terms when that statement is said to clarify what we mean and what we don't mean.

Because God loves the nation of Israel. God has a plan for the nation of Israel and that plan will never be defeated. So I hope our conversation today has been helpful, encouraging, and educational for you about what's going on and how maybe we can process it in a biblical way.

So got questions? The Bible has answers and we'll help you find them.