Records of the Dangerous Gospel

How the liberating Gospel of John has also been used for oppression

CW: violence, racism, anti-Semitism

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Photo by Daniel Tafjord on Unsplash

What do we do with good that is used for evil?

That is a dilemma not easily solved. Today I don’t write to solve it but to witness a recurring instance of that dilemma, one which continues to trouble me. The trouble comes from the contradiction between, on the one hand, how I have met Jesus in liberating ways through the Gospel of John, and on the other hand, how the Gospel of John has been repeatedly used to justify wicked oppression throughout history.

Any decent commentary on John will, at minimum, mention how many interpreters and communities have misread John so as to justify and rationalize anti-Semitism. But very few scholars give concrete examples or cite historical research on Johannine reception history.¹ The focus is typically on understanding the meaning of Scripture, the historical context of John, and protecting against harmful misreadings. Those are important tasks, but they are not enough, especially after World War II. “[T]he human and moral catastrophe of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry, and the complicity of many Christian churches in it, have demanded a reexamination of the biblical and historical sources of European anti-Semitism, which includes the anti-Jewish polemic of the Fourth Gospel.”²

What follows are just a few brief examples of how the Gospel of John has been weaponized against the Jewish people. Lauren Winner helped me see the need for this awareness in her book The Dangers of Christian Practice: On Wayward Gifts, Characteristic Damage, and Sin: “Some Christian practices [ie goods, gifts from God]…can generate from within themselves an awareness of the damages for which they have a propensity; and Christians may (we can, again, rightly hope) learn to notice and fitly respond to the damage.”³

“Host Desecration”

Did you know that Christians falsely accused Jewish people of stealing and trying to destroy eucharist wafers, and used that false accusation to murder entire Jewish communities? I was horrified to learn of this medieval history in Winner’s book.⁴ The account is truly harrowing, and I can’t get into too much detail, eg, the complex social dynamics between Christians and Jews during that period. Starting in the late 13th century and continuing at least through the 16th century, thousands of Jews were killed and entire communities wiped out. All because Christians believed that the eucharist wafer (ie, the “host”) was truly the body of Christ, and any attempt to harm it was on par with “the Jews” who killed Jesus and committed deicide.⁵

It is the Fourth Gospel’s account of Christ’s passion that especially grounded such grotesque violence:

“It is a commonplace in considerations of the history of Christian violence against Jews to note Christians’ propensity for enacting violence on Jews during Holy Week. Scholars have addressed what it is about Holy Week—and Good Friday in particular—that so often mobilized violence against Jews: Good Friday liturgically reprised deicide charges and put the Johannine passion account, with its vituperative language about “the Jews,” before the people.”⁶

Martin Luther

In 1543 Martin Luther wrote a work titled On the Jews and Their Lies. While he draws on the entire Bible, the Gospel of John provides key ammunition for his hateful anti-Jewish rhetoric.

Five times in this text Luther refers to all Jews as “children of the devil,” a clear allusion to John 8:44 where Jesus says to the Ioudaioi, “You are of your father the devil.” Luther further alludes to this verse when he claims that the Jews of his day lie about being alleged “captives” of Christians. In contrast to this lie, lying which is characteristic of children of the devil,

“they are really the ones who hold us captive in our own country by means of their usury, and that everyone would gladly be rid of them. Because they curse us, they also curse our Lord; and if they curse our Lord, they also curse God the Father, the Creator of heaven and earth. Thus their lying cannot avail them. Their cursing alone convicts them, so that we are indeed compelled to believe all the evil things written about them. Undoubtedly they do more and viler things than those which we know and discover. For Christ does not lie or deceive us when he adjudges them to be serpents and children of the devil, that is, his and all his followers’ murderers and enemies, wherever they find it possible.”

I haven’t researched to see what physical violence resulted from this language, but the language is horrifically violent. Here is just the first and last from a bullet list of Luther’s “sincere advice”:

• “First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom.

• In brief, dear princes and lords, those of you who have Jews under your rule: if my counsel does not please you, find better advice, so that you and we all can be rid of the unbearable, devilish burden of the Jews.”

Nazi Germany

As early as 1936, the international community learned of a new German translation of the New Testament.⁷ According to Susannah Heschel and Shannon Quigly,

“Weidemann [the bishop of Bremen] was quoted as saying that as Nazis, they were drawn to the Gospel of John because ‘in it the bearers of the Divine message stood in an embittered fight against the Jewish people’…Weidemann explained that his ‘germanizing’ of the New Testament had begun with the Gospel of John because it was ‘the most sharply anti-Jewish document.’”⁸

Known today as the German National Socialist Bible, it was titled The Message of God. Notably, John is the only gospel to have it’s own dedicated chapter, which shows that John held “a privileged position within the theological world of the German Christians.”⁹

There is a similarity to Luther in their attraction to John 8:44:

“The intensity of this rhetoric [in John 8:44] appears unique when compared with the Synoptic Gospels—a fact which has contributed to the depiction of John as a fundamentally anti-Jewish Gospel. This is undoubtedly one of the central justifications for its extended treatment in [The Message of God]. Even Nazi propagandists— many of whom were otherwise ill-disposed toward Christianity—could not ignore the raw, seemingly anti-Jewish material offered in John’s Gospel, with roadside posters bearing the words “the father of the Jews is the devil” used in German towns.”¹⁰

Preventing Characteristic Damage

We cannot remain ignorant of these wicked abuses of God’s Word, past and present. Granted, abuse does not negate proper use (abusus non tollit usum). Yes. But proper use turns improper when past abuse of what is proper goes unacknowledged. So Winner advises Christians to remain watchful of what she calls “characteristic damage” of God’s gifts, damage that inheres in predictable and characteristic ways. In light of the evidence noted above, the characteristic damage of the Gospel of John is oppressive anti-Jewish violence. But characteristic damage can be foreseen and prevented.

Quote from Lauren Winner

“An account of characteristic damage can help a community be alert to the kinds of damage its hallmark practices are likely to extend; thereby, an account of characteristic damage can help the community sometimes avoid extending such damage in the future.”¹¹

Next time on Thesis 96: In two weeks we’ll look at a small town in western Kansas founded in 1877 which shows the liberating potential of the Gospel of John.

Question

How do you wrestle with God’s good gifts that have been used to harm you? How do you wrestle with God’s good gifts that have been used to harm others?

1. Elizabeth A. Katz, “Anti-Semitism and the Reception History of the Gospel of John,” BA thesis (Athens, GA: University of Georgia, 2009), 1-2.

2. Lance Byron Richey, Roman Imperial Ideology and the Gospel of John, 153.

3. Lauren F. Winner, The Dangers of Christian Practice: On Wayward Gifts, Characteristic Damage, and Sin, 17

4. Winner highlights the lack of knowledge about this history: “Given the strong claims the Eucharist makes about memory, it may be more than ironic that Christians have by and large erased the history of host desecration violence from our Eucharistic memory,” (Dangers, 47).

5. While most English translations use “the Jews” for the Greek οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι, I agree with scholars like Scot McKnight who, for multiple reasons including historical violence against the Jewish people, prefer to transliterate “the Ioudaioi”.

6. Winner, Dangers, 33.

7. For example, see the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from January, 1937

8. Susannah Heschel and Shannon Quigly, “The Fate of John’s Gospel during the Third Reich,” in Religion, Ethnonationalism, and Antisemitism In the Era of the Two World Wars, eds. Kevin P. Spicer and Rebecca Carter-Chand (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022), 121.

9. Ryan Buesnel, “The German State Church Under Nazism: The Institute for the Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life, Die Botschaft Gottes, and the Limits of Contextual Theology,” PhD diss (Charles Sturt University, 2023) 167.

10. Buesnel, 172.

11. Winner, Dangers, 155.