Did the Jews kill Jesus?

What the Gospels say

Crucifixion was a Roman punishment, used across the empire on slaves, rebels and anyone Rome saw as a threat to its order. In Judea only the Roman governor could order it. In Jesus’ case that was Pontius Pilate, who governed the province from about 26 to 36 CE. The charge posted over the cross was political: “The King of the Jews” (John 19:19). Roman soldiers carried out the sentence.

The people who pressed for his death were few. The Gospels name the high priest Caiaphas, the chief priests around him and some elders of the council. The high priest held his office at Rome’s pleasure, and his circle had every reason to fear a popular figure at Passover. Even the council was divided. Joseph of Arimathea, one of its members, “had not consented to their decision and action” (Luke 23:51).

The Gospels also show the leaders afraid of the people. They planned to arrest Jesus quietly, “lest there be an uproar from the people” (Mark 14:2), because “all the people were hanging on his words” (Luke 19:48). On the road to the cross, a great multitude followed him, among them women who mourned and lamented for him (Luke 23:27).

Every one of his first followers was Jewish. So was his mother, and so was Jesus himself (see Was Jesus Jewish?). The crucifixion is a story among Jews, about a Jew, in a Jewish city at Passover. To say “the Jews killed Jesus” you have to forget that Peter, John and Mary were Jews too.

He laid down his life

The New Testament never presents the cross as something forced on Jesus against his will. He said so himself.

No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again.

John 10:18

The apostles taught that he died for the sins of the whole world (1 John 2:2). That places every person, Jew and Gentile alike, among those he died for, and among those whose sins made his death necessary.

Seven weeks after the crucifixion, Peter stood in Jerusalem at Shavuot and spoke to his fellow Jews. He told them plainly that they shared in what had happened, and in the same sentence said it came about “according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23). Later, at the Temple, he added, “I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers” (Acts 3:17), and called them to turn back to God and be forgiven. He spoke as a Jew to Jews, and his words ended in an invitation.

When the first believers prayed together, they named everyone involved: “both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel” (Acts 4:27). Jesus himself prayed for those who crucified him, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).

“His blood be on us”

One verse has been used against Jewish people more than any other. When Pilate washed his hands of the case, “all the people answered, ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’” (Matthew 27:25).

Read it in its setting. A few verses earlier, “the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd” to ask for Barabbas instead of Jesus (Matthew 27:20). The people who shouted were the crowd in front of the governor’s residence early that morning, a small fraction of the pilgrims in Jerusalem for Passover and of the much larger Jewish population of the land and beyond. A crowd cannot bind a whole people for all time, and the Torah itself says each person shall be put to death for his own sin (Deuteronomy 24:16; see also Ezekiel 18:20).

Matthew’s Gospel also tells us what Jesus’ blood is. At his last Passover he called the cup “my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matthew 26:28). Many readers, Messianic Jews among them, hear the crowd’s words in that light. Whatever the crowd meant, the blood they named is the blood that forgives.

How a false charge spread

As the church became mostly Gentile and drew apart from the synagogue, some Christian writers turned the story of the cross into an accusation against the Jewish people as a whole. Around 160 to 170 CE, Melito, bishop of Sardis, preached a Passover sermon that accused Israel of murdering God. It is the earliest surviving statement of what came to be called the deicide charge, from the Latin for the killing of a god.

In 386 and 387, John Chrysostom, a celebrated preacher in Antioch, delivered eight sermons against the Jews. He aimed them at Christians who were attending synagogue and keeping the Jewish feasts, and he repeated the charge in harsh language that later generations quoted for centuries.

In medieval Europe the charge became the background for worse lies. The blood libel, first recorded at Norwich, England, in 1144, claimed that Jews murdered Christian children in mockery of the crucifixion. It spread across Europe and led to trials, expulsions and massacres. Holy Week, when the passion was read and preached, was often a dangerous time for Jewish communities. Passion plays staged the story with Jewish villains, and some carried that portrayal into the modern era. The best known, at Oberammergau in Bavaria, has been performed since 1634 and was substantially revised only in recent decades.

Nazi antisemitism was racial, built on pseudo-science about blood and race. Yet it found people ready to believe it, in countries where the Jews had been called a cursed people for a very long time. Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. After the war, many churches looked honestly at what their own teaching had made possible.

The churches say no

Even before modern times, the church’s official teaching pointed elsewhere. The Roman Catechism issued after the Council of Trent in 1566 taught that sinners are the authors of Christ’s suffering, and that Christians who sin while knowing him bear a greater guilt than those who crucified him without understanding.

On 28 October 1965, the Second Vatican Council issued Nostra Aetate. Its fourth section says that what happened in Christ’s passion cannot be charged against all the Jews then living, or against the Jews of today, and that Jews must not be presented as rejected or accursed by God. It also deplores antisemitism directed against Jews at any time and by anyone. Later popes and Catholic documents have repeated this teaching.

Protestant churches made their own statements. The founding assembly of the World Council of Churches, meeting in Amsterdam in 1948, called antisemitism a sin against God and man. The Episcopal Church rejected the deicide charge at its General Convention in 1964. In 1994 the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America publicly repudiated Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish writings and expressed deep sorrow for their consequences.

Why it matters to Messianic Jews

For Messianic Jews this history is personal. Many grew up hearing that their people killed Christ, and many carry family memories of pogroms and the Holocaust. When a Jewish person hears the name of Jesus with fear, this history is a large part of the reason. It is also why Jewish views of Jesus are so often guarded (see What do Jewish people believe about Jesus?).

Messianic Judaism holds that God’s covenant with the Jewish people still stands. Paul asked whether God had rejected his people and answered, “By no means!” (Romans 11:1). A teaching that brands the Jewish people as Christ’s killers contradicts that covenant and the Gospels themselves. It belongs with replacement theology, which Messianic congregations reject (see What is Messianic Judaism?).

The honest answer is also a hopeful one. Yeshua died as a Jew, among his own people, for the sins of Israel and the nations alike. Peter’s first hearers were invited to be forgiven, and so is everyone else. If you want to talk about this with people who have lived it, a Messianic congregation near you is a good place to start.

Common questions

Further reading

• Nostra Aetate: Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions

  Second Vatican Council. 28 October 1965. Section 4 addresses the Jewish people and the death of Christ.

• The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism

  Edward H. Flannery. Paulist Press, revised 1985. A Catholic priest’s history of Christian antisemitism.

• Our Hands Are Stained with Blood: The Tragic Story of the “Church” and the Jewish People

  Michael L. Brown. Destiny Image, 1992. A Messianic Jewish scholar on the church’s record and the call to repent of it.