“For Fear of the Jews”: Origins of Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity

This is a study of the beginnings of a persistent theme in the Christian psyche, sometimes dormant, sometimes flagrant, never absent. The theme has always been known and frequently written about. The writers have usually been theologians unconcerned with psychological issues, apologists aiming at reconciling irreconcilable differences, hostile critics declaiming on one side or the other, or psychologists ignoring historical boundaries. There are, however, embedded in the facts ambiguities and ambivalences that demand acknowledgment and psychological interpretation. The players in this great tragic drama were human-all-too-human, which means that psychoanalytic ideas may contribute to understanding them.

The founding documents of Christianity are those collected as the New Testament, standing from its beginnings as the concluding, but not superseding, addition to the Hebrew Bible, which was given the name of Old Testament. The earliest surviving manuscripts of New Testament books are few and fairly late, dating from the second and third centuries (Brown 1997, 47), and in fragmentary condition. These in turn are based on earlier written compositions, a few of them, the authentic letters of the apostle Paul, being by internal evidence from the forties and fifties of the first century—that is, written within twenty or thirty years after the events narrated in the “gospels,” the “good news” of the Jewish preacher, prophet, leader, Jesus of Nazareth, called Christ, meaning the Messiah, or anointed one. The gospels themselves were compiled later, from about 68 to 110.1 There is good reason to believe that they were “redacted” (structured according to individual editorial principles) out of earlier documents that included stories, legends, established convictions, opinions, prayers, collected by the earliest followers of Jesus. Many or most (depending on whom you ask) of the New Testament writings seem to have been done by men—we