hostile anti-Jewish statements in the Christian scriptures," said R. Alan Culpepper, Scripture Professor at the Southern Baptist Seminary in his essay "The Gospel of John as a Threat to Jewish-Christian Relations." "So sharp is the contrast in that gospel between Jesus' exhortations to his followers to love one another and the hostile references to the Jews that Kaufmann Kohler commented that John is 'a gospel of Christian love and Jew hatred.'" (Charlesworth page 21).Anti-Jewish sentiment could not only be found in the Gospels but also in the writings of St. Paul, himself a converted Jew, and someone who once lovingly analogized the relations between Judaism and gentile Christianity as a grafted olive branch."In proclaiming his Christian message Paul stressed that the Jewish nation had been rejected by God, and the new Covenant had superseded the old," said David Cohn-Sherbok, in his book The Crucified Jew. "In these ways the New Testament laid the foundations for later Christian hostility to the Jewish nation...and served as the basis for the early Church's vilification of the Jews" (Cohn-Sherbok xv).In his book Jesus Through the Centuries, Jaroslav Pelikan also raises the issue of Catholic theological focus fueling the flames of Christian hatred of the Jews."Would there have been such anti-Semitism, would there have been so many pogroms, would there have been an Auschwitz, if every Christian church and every Christian home had focused its devotion on icons of Mary not only as Mother of God but as the Jewish maiden?" asked Pelikan. "And Jesus as Rabbi Jeshua bar-Joseph in the context of the history of a suffering Israel and a suffering humanity?" (qtd. in Charlesworth page 51).According to Cohn-Sherbok, a theology professor at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, anti-Jewish hostility which, he claimed, had evolved from the Adversos Judeos of the Church Fathers, continued into medieval times. On their way to the Crusades to ...
