Yesterday a friend of mine, who had just come back from an interfaith retreat and had picked up a cold, said, “The Jews made me sick.” Well, she was sitting in between two Jews, both with bad colds, at a dinner during the retreat and she happened to pick up what they had. But, given all the reading that I’ve been doing about the history of New Testament scholarship, it was almost a parody of some of the sadder moments in NT research. NT scholars throughout history have so often (and so easily) “blamed” the Jews for some theological problem they had.
For example, I have read in a few sources about how William Whiston (1667-1752), famous as the translator of Josephus’s works, demonstrated this tendency in dealing with the problem of Old Testament prophecy fulfillment in the NT. One of the major concerns for the early post-Reformation researchers in biblical studies was the fulfillment of prophecy. Alongside miracles, for them it was an indicator of the Bible’s divine origin. By Whiston’s time, however, much of the research on the “literal” sense of the putative “prophecies” in the Hebrew Bible was showing that these seemed to be misused by the authors of the New Testament. Read in their proper and “literal” or “plain sense” context, these were not prophecies at all, but mostly referred to historical events from their own historical situation.
Whiston’s solution? Blame it on the Jews! The early Christians used the original Hebrew texts appropriately, according to Whiston, attentive to their “literal” meaning. But then Jews, in reaction to Christian interpretations, went back and changed their own sacred Scriptures so that the literal meaning would not support the Christian claims of prophecy fulfillment.
I don’t doubt that there was back and forth between Jews and Christians and there was, at some point, some sort of “parting of the ways” between the two. I don’t doubt that such a parting led to the tweaking of some teachings on both sides of the equation (although, I’d imagine it was quite heavier on the Christian and anti-Judaism side of things). But to suggest that Jews would actually corrupt their own Scriptures to spite Christian interpretations, and to make this suggestion just so that Christians can hold onto a threatened belief in prophecy fulfillment . . . That’s just ridiculous.
