Old Christian saints and modern messianics agree: Jews suffered terribly for rejecting Jesus

“One Law” messianic was arguing to me that Jews have suffered so much because they made a terrible, huge mistake – they rejected Jesus as their messiah and god:

[When] Messiah returns, Jews will weep as one weeps for an only son (Zech 12). As hard as it may be you to believe, Gene, Jews and Judaism have also committed errors, perhaps the greatest being the rejection of the real messiah and subsequent embracing of a false messiah. Both have had disastrous consequences.

This messianic’s argument is not new at all. In fact, it’s very familiar to the Jewish people, who have heard it all before. It is, of course, found in the New Testament. But it has also been inherited from the so called Christian “saints”, who likewise argued that Jews have suffered so much because they rejected, indeed conspired to murder G-d in the form of Jesus, “G-d’s son”:

“Judaism, since Christ, is a corruption; indeed, Judas is the image of the Jewish people: their understanding of Scripture is carnal; they bear the guilt for the death of the Saviour, for through their fathers they have killed Christ.” [St Augustine]

“The Jews, therefore, not only made themselves strangers to the covenants, but also dishonoured the Father and killed the Son in envy.” [St Ephraim the Syrian]

“The Jews are murderers of the Lord …. They are guilty of shouting: ‘Away with him, away with him! Crucify him!’ He who was God in the flesh!” [St Gregory of Nyssa: Oration on the Resurrection of Christ]

“Nor is it sufficient that we call Him who is in Heaven ‘Father.’ We must add to the name ‘Our Father.’ This name rebukes and condemns the Jews who not only spurned Christ faithlessly, but also cruelly executed Him Who was announced to them by the prophets, and sent first to their nation.  No longer may they call God their Father, because the Lord confounds and refutes them, saying: ‘your father is the devil’ [John 8:44].  O sinful nation, O people weighed down with guilt, breed of evil-doers, lawless children, you have turned your backs on the Lord and have provoked the Holy One of Israel.” [St Cyprian: On The Lord’s Prayer]

“If someone should kill the beloved son of a man, and then stretch forth their hands still stained with blood to the afflicted father, asking for fellowship, would not the blood of his son, still visible on the hand of his murderer, provoke him to just anger instead?  And such are the prayers of the Jews, for when they stretch forth their hands in prayer, they only remind God the Father of their sin against His Son. And at every stretching forth of their hands, they only make it obvious that they are stained with the blood of Christ.”
[St Basil: On Prayer, Sermon Nine]

“…. from that time seditions and wars and mischievous plots followed each other in quick succession, and never ceased in the city and in all Judea until finally the siege of Vespasian overwhelmed them. Thus the divine vengeance overtook the Jews for the crimes which they dared to commit against Christ.”
[Eusebius of Caesarea, Church History: Book II, Chapter 6]

My own brief thoughts on the validity of these “arguments”, either from the messianics or the “Christian saints” of old, are as follows:

When the true Messiah comes it will not be a day of mourning for Jews – it will be a day of great rejoicing for Jews. We have waited patiently for G-d and we have suffered for centuries for His sake at the hands of the very people who worshiped Jesus as god. We, as a nation, have not bowed our knee to idols for thousands of years since Babylonian exile has ended. We have not traded our G-d for another, either under threat of torture or death or through wonderful promises of great blessings. Christians who point to the supposed collective Jewish guilt and sin against Jesus are like those “friends” of Job – “surely Jews must have been punished so terribly with Holocaust and all the bloodshed at the hands of their enemies for something horrible they did – they rejected Jesus”. But G-d has rebuked Job’s friends and I believe that He will rebuke these modern “friends” of Jews too. Like Job, we too will pray for our former unjust accusers when they repent.

The future reality will be quite different than either the ancient Christians or the modern messianics imagined. Jews will not mourn their rejection of Jesus. There will be gladness and joy in every Jewish house. However, for those who have placed their faith in dead idols (including Jesus, the dead man-god who accomplished nothing, like the other false gods, but with which people diverted worship from G-d to futile things), for all the false witnesses and accusers who accused G-d’s people of deicide and persecuted them without mercy in the name of Jesus, either in deed or in word, it will indeed be a day of mourning. That day will be a day of great shame and a day of regret for the time wasted chasing after nothingness and bowing to a non-god that doesn’t save. The idolaters and all Jew-haters will come licking the dust at the feet of the people of Israel in shame and repentance.