Does the Truth Change?

     National Public Radio reporter, Vanessa Romo, quotes the audit done by the Anti-Defamation League:  “Anti-semitic incidents in the U.S. rose 36% in 2022,…”  Can we look to causes or does this just happen?  Let us look at a possible root cause, the New Testament.  This article will be just a glimpse of the Antisemitism in the Gospels. It will focus on the Gospel of Matthew and the a Antisemitism in Saint Thomas Aquinas as indicated in his Commentary on Matthew, Chapter 27.    The theology of St. Thomas Aquinas was designated by Pope Leo XIII (1878 - 1903) as the official theology of the Church.

The Gospel of Saint Matthew was written in the year 70 AD for Jewish Christians, approximately 40 years after Jesus’ death. Matthew’s narrative of Jesus before Pilate answers Pilate’s question of who is responsible for Jesus’ death.  The crowd replies, “…his blood be upon us and upon our children.” (Mt. 27:25) The other three Gospels do not have this answer.  What does Matthew mean?  All Jews for all time?  Jesus was a Jew.  Does this include his family?  The early Christians, still a part of Judaism, included Peter and James, Jesus’ brother, a former Pharisee, both Jews.  What about Paul the former Pharisee?  The early Christians were Jews.  Paul, a Jew, wrote primarily to Gentiles before Matthew’s Gospel was written.

Thomas’ Commentary says, “And in this way it came about that Christ’s blood is demanded of them even to this day; and what is said fits them well: the voice of your brother’s blood cries to me from the earth (Gen 4:10).  We cannot hold Thomas to contemporary biblical research, but he should be held to simple Aristotelian logic with which he was very familiar.  Can the action of a limited number be applied to all Jews for all time? 

Such scapegoating has resulted in fierce Antisemitism; for example, the slaughter of the Jews in the Rhine Valley in the first Crusade in 1095.  The most horrible of all, the Holocaust, the slaughter of six million Jews by Hitler’s Germany during World War II. 

Vatican II concluded that the Jews were not responsible for Christ’s death.  The document is named “Nostra Aetate”, (In Our Time).  So the position of the Catholic Church changed from the time of the first Crusade and Thomas’ later Commentary.  Is it that ‘truth’ changed and in ‘our age’ the Jews are innocent of Jesus’ death?

We need to look at root causes of anti-Semitism.  This is an existential challenge to Christianity. 

Resources:

Weisheipl, O.P., James A., Friar Thomas D’Aquino his life, thought and works,  Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, (1256 - 1259 lecture in Paris) p. 371;      Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, NewYork, 1974.

Thomas Aquinas, O.P., Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, p.  431, (Paragraph 2343); The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, Lander, Wyoming, 2013.