Christian self-fulfilling prophecy about Jews suffering for rejecting Jesus

Throughout the last two thousand years and even to this day Christians have claimed that the Jewish people have experienced great persecutions and immense suffering because G-d has punished them for their rejection of Jesus. Since Jews, as the Greek Testament claims, murdered the “son of god”, and since they flatly refused to worship the man-god Jesus in addition to the G-d of Israel whom they already worshiped, or even accept his messianic claims, they received their just deserts. What is overlooked by Christians in such claims is the fact that much of this suffering was meted out not by some third parties, but by their own European and later Christian forebears.

The seeds of this can already be seen in the New Testament itself. In the passage the many NT scholars believe to be a much later interpolation by church scribes written in Paul’s name (since it has Paul speaking of the “wrath”, i.e. the destruction of the Temple and Romans sacking of Jerusalem, an event that occurred after Paul’s own death), we read as follows:

New Testament, 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16:

For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea. For you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and OPPOSE ALL MANKIND by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved—so as always to fill up the measure of their sins. But wrath has come upon them AT LAST!

I have quoted the above passage to a Messianic Jewish friend of mine just yesterday over dinner at a cafe. His reaction was stunning to me – he was taken aback and refused to believe it was even in the New Testament. Paul would never say such a thing about his own Jewish people, he told me. Since he’s convinced that the New Testament is an incorruptible word of G-d and that Paul himself wrote 1 Thessalonians, he may be in for a real shock.

The church scribes who put together and edited the New Testament knew what they were doing when they wrote many of the NT’s anti-Jewish passages. They labored to build up Christianity, whitewashing Rome’s own participation in murders and crucifixions of tens of thousands of other Jews, including Jesus himself, while painting Jews as evildoers and the faith of the Jews, Judaism, as both corrupted and obsolete. That Jews have suffered so much at the hands of physical and spiritual descendants of Christians who penned, edited and canonized those very passages should then come as no surprise. New Testament’s demonization of Jews encouraged persecution of the Jewish people, quickly turning those words into self-fulfilling prophecies.

As Harold Kushner wrote in his book To Life!

I was once asked at a public lecture: “Doesn’t the history of the Jews’ wandering and low status prove  that they are being cursed for rejecting Jesus?”

I answered, “No, not at all, because the people who predicted that the Jews would suffer are the same people who persecuted them. It would be as if I predicted that the window would break, and then threw a rock through it. That would say more about my propensity for violence than it would about my gift of prophecy.”