From hateful murmurs to blood libel

Many of our foundational theological and liturgical texts are anti-Jewish by design. As St. Augustine wrote in The City of God: “For what is that which is called the Old Testament but the veiled form of the New? And what else is that which is called the New but the unveiling of the Old?” This remains basic teaching today in churches of all kinds. And it’s complicated because, as English and comparative literature scholar Heather Blurton points out in Inventing William of Norwich, “Augustine took his inspiration directly from the words of Christ, who is represented in the Gospels on several occasions as identifying himself as the fulfillment of [Jewish] prophetic traditions.” These ideas are at the heart of supersessionism, a teaching recently repudiated in the magisterium of my own Roman Catholic tradition, albeit still taught from most of our altars and pulpits.

In Blurton’s words, supersessionism presumes that “through Christ’s fulfillment of the prophecies of the Old Testament and his sacrifice on the cross, the truth of the Old Testament is subordinated to the truth of the New, and Chris­tianity supersedes Judaism.” For 2,000 years, supersessionism has been the primary lens for a Christian understanding of Jews and Judaism. Chances are good that your favorite premodern Christian writer was infected.

In the Roman Catholic Church, the 1965 Vatican II document Nostra aetate went a long way toward correcting these mistakes with an understanding that all of the New Testament writers (with the possible exception of Luke) were Jews involved in intra-religious arguments. But even Nostra aetate doesn’t escape supersessionism completely. For instance, when it tries to correctively state, “the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures,” that sentence still begins: “Although the Church is the new people of God.”