Excerpt from Jesus Wasn't Killed by the Jews, edited by Jon M. Sweeney, 2020
I was talking with a religion professor at a large university in the [US]American South the other day. He's a friend of mine. He's a Christian. He teaches world religions to undergraduates. He said: “Most of my students, when they first enter my classroom, believe that the faith and practices of Jews today are what they have read about in the Old Testament in Sunday School.” ...
“Don't they wonder where the priests are, and the animal sacrifice?” ...
“They assume animal sacrifices are still going on,” he said. He was serious. “That's part of why they think Jews and synagogues are scary.”
I'm scared at how little we seem to know about each other in the twenty-first century.
The most fundamental misunderstanding of Christians toward Jews today throughout the world is the view held, unfortunately, by a majority of us in the pews who think that Judaism equals what we read in the Old Testament. This misunderstanding is both pervasive and dangerous. The truth is, what we know as Judaism is only about as old as the Christian church. Judaism and Christianity are siblings. They both began about two thousand years ago.
What we read about in the Old Testament—which we should, instead, refer to as the “Hebrew Bible,” to avoid marking it as the “out-of-date” kind of “old”—describes the beginnings and activities and teachings of ancient Israel, a people.
Those people went into exile (forced to leave what we call the Holy Land) during what is called the Babylonian Captivity about six centuries before Christ. Nearly five centuries after they came back from this captivity, the Roman Empire came to rule Israel, and in the context of the Roman Empire both Judaism and Christianity were born.
...There is much to read, much to know. You will find...when Jesus argues with the Pharisees, for instance, it isn't a case of two faiths debating but two rabbis debating. Think about it that way the next time you read in the Gospels where Jesus is correcting a Pharisee. Jesus was colleague and cousin with Pharisees; they were his fellow Jews and fellow teachers of Torah.
