Nadene Goldfoot
Setting the scene for anti Semitism was the Christian world. It developed through the New Testament writers; Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Then there's , Thor (Old Norse: Þórr) who is the Norse god of thunder, the sky, and agriculture. He is the son of Odin, chief of the gods, and Odin's consort Jord (Earth). Thor is the husband of the fertility goddess Sif, who is the mother of his son Modi and daughter Thrud; his other son, Magni, may be from a union with the giantess Jarnsaxa. Jörd, (Old Norse: “Earth”, ) also called Fjörgyn, or Hlódyn, in Norse mythology, a giantess, mother of the deity Thor and mistress of the god Odin. In the late pre-Christian era she was believed to have had a husband of the same name, perhaps indicating her transformation into a masculine personality.
Any replacing of Judaism's One and only G-d with a human as G-d is going against Judaism. Our one and only G-d concept is unseen, not ever having been in human form. Jews do not even draw pictures of G-d. We don't even over-write the word or over-use the word, so write it like this: G-d.
This concept of Jesus's parentage first came from the Greek and Roman religion that was polytheistic and it was they who told of humans with one parent being the head god of their beliefs like Zeus.
The gospel writers wrote about Jesus. Jesus, also called Jesus Christ, Jesus of Galilee, or Jesus of Nazareth, (born c. 6–4 bce, Bethlehem—died c. 30 ce, Jerusalem), was a religious leader revered in Christianity, one of the world's major religions. He is regarded by most Christians as the Incarnation of God. What a time to be born! The Romans were occupying Jerusalem. By 70 CE, they would burn down the Temple and the city of Jerusalem, kill thousands of Jews, take others as slaves, causing them pain and death from then on.
This is an anathema to Jews, of which Christian legend says he was a member of the Jewish people. The facts presented by these writers is that " he was born to Joseph and Mary of Nazareth who traveled to pay their taxes to Bethlehem. Jesus was then born in Bethlehem, sometime between 6 bce and shortly before the death of Herod the Great (Matthew 2; Luke 1:5) in 4 bce. According to Matthew and Luke, however, Joseph was only legally his father."
The story adds that in truth, he was the son of G-d. So why did Matthew bother to write up a genealogy ? He wanted to first convince the Jews that he had legitimate rights to claim to be the Messiah, possibly.
Matthew's is the most Jewish of all the gospels. The Gospel According to Matthew was composed in Greek, probably sometime after 70 ce, with evident dependence on the earlier
Mark wrote in Greek so you know he was a Hellenized Jew. Mark's audience probably consisted of at least some Gentile converts to Christianity, but the bulk of them were more likely Jewish Christians who didn’t need to be educated in depth about Judaism.... Mark's "Little Apocalypse" in chapter 13 is usually regarded as speaking of the events of the First Jewish Revolt, which took place 66-70 CE. The events . surrounding the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple left a deep impression on the Jews of the time. Jerusalem and the Temple were the center of religious life for Palestinian Jews, and the war with the Romans had ravaged the countryside and left thousands dead. Thus, it is understandable that some would associate these horrible events with the end times. An exegesis of Mark 13 shows how the author's description corresponds with the calamities of the First Jewish Revolt..
Luke was a gentile physician who traveled with Jesus, born in 9CE in antioch, Syria and died in 84 CE in Thebes. Luke's Greek is the highest quality in style of anything in the new testament. It reads more like a novel in the Greek tradition, rather than Mark's gospel, which has a kind of crude quality at times to the Greek grammar. E. T. Sanders (Methodist biblical scholar who retired from Duke University), argues powerfully—and at times vehemently—in this book that Luke too had ‘a fundamental and systematic hostility’ (the word is not too strong!) towards the Jews in general because they crucified Jesus and opposed the church, and that he must be regarded as a virulent anti-Semite. (‘Luke dislikes the Pharisees enough to slander them’).
Why did Luke, who only uses the word "Jew" five times in his gospel, increase this usage almost sixteen times in the book of Acts? Since the same person wrote both volumes, the difference cannot be simply a matter of an author's unconscious choice of words. A clue to Luke's use of "Jew" is that the word is not evenly distributed in Acts. In the first eight chapters, where the setting is Palestinian, "Jew" appears only three times, and the word only becomes frequent when the setting becomes Greek. This distribution corresponds to Luke's tendency for matching style with setting. As long as his narrative moves in Palestinian circles, his style is quite semitic; but, as the story moves into the Greek world, the semiticisms disappear.57 When writing about events in Palestine, he tends to distinguish among the various Jewish groups as any Palestinian Jew would do. In a gentile setting, Luke refers to Jews as a gentile would, and lumps them together as "the Jews" without distinction. Similarly in John, the frequent use of the word "Jew" may well be due, at least in part, to an author who writes from a gentile point of view.
It was the Greeks who first named the "land of the Philistines" as Palestine. The Palestine in our history books was actually called Palestinian Syria. Evidently the Romans called Judea as Palestine in order to minimize the Jews' ownership to the land. Palestine in Hebrew was 1st called Eretz Canaan, then it changed to Eretz Yisrael. Arabs living on the land called themselves Palestinian Syrians, and the Jews just called themselves Palestinians. Pretty soon they were all using just Palestinians until May 14,, 1948 when Israel again came into being.
John of the 1st century was the son of Zebedee, a Galilean fisherman, and Salome. He wrote his gospel in Greek. He was the most virulent against Jews of all 4 of the writers. It is certainly true that the word "Jew" appears in John far more than in the other gospels. When it "Jew" is used, it's usually unflattering. It is not surprising that Rosemary Ruether, an American feminist scholar and Roman Catholic theologian known for her significant contributions to the fields of feminist theology and ecofeminist theology, has found the fullest development of New Testament anti-Jewish bias within the Gospel of John. Her estimate of the gospel's anti-Jewish stance reflects the opinion of most exegetes. The reasons for this evaluation of the gospel are well-known and often repeated. First of all, John proclaims a replacement theology. What John's Jewish contemporaries held dear the evangelist seems to have abolished and replaced with the Christian Jesus. That means that Jews are no longer necessary in the world because the Christians decided that they have replaced the Jews. This replacement theory continues today with many Christian groups.
These were humans with their own opinions about the man they adored and were following. They had to be defensive because they were introducing a new concept in the world that would be against the Jews. The Romans took over from the new Christ followers calling themselves Christians and in 325 CE had a meeting where they took over the religion, setting their beliefs and the fact that they felt they had to do away with Judaism, the religion they would be in competition with.
This all started with the Roman Emperor Constantine's mother , Helena, going to Palestine to find remnants from Jesus. Helena talked her son into dropping his Roman Olympic religion and taking on Christianity which he did half heartedly, actually adoring his old religion more according to his own writings. She was born in either 246/248 and died in 330 CE.
The Council of Nicaea, held in 325 CE, was the first council in the history of the Christian church that was intended to address the entire body of believers. It was convened by the emperor Constantine to resolve the controversy of Arianism, a doctrine that held that Christ was not divine but was a created being. The council then condemned Arius and, with reluctance on the part of some, incorporated the nonscriptural word homoousios (“of one substance”) into a creed to signify the absolute equality of the Son with the Father.
In the East there was religious dissension and fierce anti-Semitism, already caused by new Christians. Constantine had called a Council of the (non-Jewish) Christians at Nicea, relatively close to his capital of Constantinople. It involved a number of pagan philosophers plus the sectarians who had banned Jews and Jewish Christians. Rome, the imperial center of paganism, had long been abandoned as an imperial capital. Was a new start possible? Constantine took a tough line. He said he considered himself greater than all the apostles. Together, they created Christianity without even knowing much about what Jesus was teaching. What was being created would work against Jews from then on even greater than ever.
The idea that every person is created in the image of God is especially meaningful to Jews and Christians. While this idea is explicit in the Torah, Rabbi Akiva elaborates on it inPirkei Avot (3:14) saying, “Humanity is cherished for having been created in [God’s] image…as it states, ‘for He made Man in the image of God’(Genesis 9:6).” Another principle, also stemming from the account of Creation, is that of kinship among the entire human population. We are all cousins, descendants of Adam and Eve. The sages invested this fact with profound significance, using it as the basis for promoting peace and condemning bigotry: “This is why Adam was created alone…for peace among people, so that a person could not say to another, ‘my father was greater than your father.’” So no man should be worshipped as being a half-man and a half-god. Again, the Jewish concept of the Messiah will be a human.
Resource:
https://www.biography.com/religious-figure/saint-matthew#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Bible%2C%20Saint,author%20of%20the%20New%20Testament.&text=Apr%202%2C%202014-,According%20to%20the%20Bible%2C%20Saint%20Matthew%20was%
https://www.learnreligions.com/audience-of-marks-gospel-248657
https://www.earlychristianwritings.com/mark.html
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/review/the-jews-in-luke-acts/
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https://www.theoi.com/articles/who-was-hercules-mother-and-was-she-a-god/#:~:text=Hercules%20(Heracles%20in%20Greek)%20is,kind%20of%20the%20gods%2C%20Zeus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helena,_mother_of_Constantine_I
https://www.britannica.com/event/First-Council-of-Nicaea-325
https://stories.gordon.edu/5-things-you-didnt-know-about-the-christmas-story/#:~:text=There%20are%20several%20arduous%20journeys,to%20Nazareth%20from%20the%20East.
https://www.worldhistory.org/Thor/
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Thor-Germanic-deity
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-John-the-Apostle
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