His Blood Be Upon Us and Our Children

Dear Ehud,

And now we have come to a short parenthetical topic. This is one that I wanted to address shortly after the earlier letter I wrote about Christ as the Prophet, the prophet “like unto Moses.” It is important to deal with this issue before the memory of that particular point grows too cold.

According to the “Christ-killer” taunt that some misguided souls have leveled at the Jews, the idea is that the Jewish people are collectively and uniquely responsible for the execution of their Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth. I will discuss the full range of that word uniquely a bit later in this letter. The fatal moment when this was settled is supposed to have been during the showdown between Pilate and the chief priests. Pilate had tried repeatedly to release Jesus, but the crowd outside his palace would have none of it.

So then Pilate took water, seeking to wash responsibility for the coming judicial murder off his hands, claiming that he was “innocent of the blood of this just person” (Matt. 27:24). And to this the whole crowd replied:

Now we need to realize that there are numerous threads that we have to weave together here. The first is that this crowd represents the ruling elites in Jerusalem, and not the city as a whole. Just a few days before this, the people of Jerusalem had received Christ with thunderous joy. And if they had managed to keep quiet, the rocks would have started to sing (Luke 19:40). This particular crowd, on the other hand, was an organized mob. They showed up at Pilate’s house first thing in the morning, which is a key detail. Jesus had been tried during the night, contrary to Jewish law. When it came time for sentencing, the sun was barely up . . . but a crowd was already on the spot.

He had been convicted by the Sanhedrin of blasphemy during the night, but in order to obtain an execution, the Romans had to do it. Blaspheming the Jewish God would not cut it in a Roman court, so the charge before Pilate had to be sedition, that of claiming to be another king—a rival king to Caesar. So they made it to the residence of Caesar’s representative, first thing in the morning, near the crack of dawn. Luke tells us that He was brought there “as soon as it was day” (Luke 22:66). The Palm Sunday crowd had plainly been out-maneuvered, and were all still at home in bed. In order to get a crowd there at dawn, it needed to be from rent-a-mob. This was an arranged lynch mob.

Now there was some indication that the Jewish leaders had set up an earlier “deal” with Pilate, which started to unravel when Pilate started resisting, asking awkward (and unexpected) questions. He caught them flatfooted by being resistant, and so they replied somewhat testily.

They were expecting a conviction to sail through, but Pilate made it necessary for them to go into everything, and that meant they had to bring the full pressure of the crowd to bear on the governor. And as it turned out, it needed to be a full court political press.

They wanted and needed a death sentence, and they intended to have it.

So this was the context in which they cried out for the Lord’s blood to be on them, and on their children. And so was it? Did that curse actually come down upon them? Was it an efficacious self-malediction? It most certainly was, as Jesus Himself had declared beforehand. In His lament over the Jerusalem of the first century, what did Jesus foretell?

But it was not only the blood of Jesus that would rest upon those men and their children, it was also the blood of every faithful martyr in the history of the world. All of it was going to come crashing down on that damned city. The grimness of that judgment had no parallel in the history of the world. And it had nothing whatever to do with Jewish ethnicity because Abel wasn’t a Jew, and neither was Cain. It had everything to do with the spiritual lines of descent (Gen. 3:15)—the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent.

The prospect of this coming judgment was enough to make Jesus Himself weep, seeing the approaching disaster rising upon Jerusalem like a blood moon, three sizes too big (Luke 19:41). And in fact, you don’t need anything more than this simple fact to check on the pretended “Christianity” of those who think they are imitating the Lord . . . but they do it through jeering where He wept.

But we still need to press the point. Over what, precisely, was Jesus weeping?

Jesus says, “Let’s go back to Judea.” The disciples say, “Don’t you know the Jews are wanting to kill you?” At this point we have to remember that the word translated here as Jew is Ioudaios, which can be translated either as Judean or as Jew. It is the word for Jew and it is the same word for Judean. Jesus said they were going back to Judea, and the disciples wondered at that because it was the Judeans who were plotting to kill him. They weren’t talking about ethnic DNA Jews, because all of them were that. They were talking about Judeans, particularly about the ruling elites of Judea. And I argue that Judeans here refers to the Judean rulers because the rank and file of Judea had made up the crowd in the Triumphal Entry.

Those who try to make the author of the fourth gospel into an antisemitic racist—whether to applaud him for it or to attack him for it—are simply projecting modern categories back into the first century when these categories are entirely alien to the first century. If the word were to be rendered as Jew, we would be talking about Jew as opposed to Gentile. If it is translated as Judean, the central contrast would be with Galileans. And that is what it was. The group of disciples that Jesus had gathered around Him, with the likely exception of Judas, were all Galileans. Remember how the angel spoke to them at the Ascension . . . “Men of Galilee . . .” (Acts 1:11).

So remember that Jerusalem was the doomed city, located in Judea. The ruling elites in that city engineered their own doom, calling down a curse upon themselves and upon their children. That self-malediction came to terrible fruition in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., within the lifetime of their children. That is what that particular curse means, and that is why it is in the Bible.

One question remains however. Does it have anything at all to do with modern Jews? The answer is both yes and no. This brings us back to that word uniquely that I used at the beginning of the letter. If any Jew, centuries later, is so filled with anti-gospel bigotry that he owns and identifies with what was done to Jesus back then, then he himself has signed up for the label of Christ-killer. There are some awful things said about the Lord Jesus in certain parts of the Talmud, for example. But if another Jew, centuries later, displays the same kind of horse sense that Gamaliel did (Acts 5:34), even though Gamaliel was not a Christian, then he is in the same position as any other Gentile non-believer. On a personal level, he will at some point have to come to grips with the question of what to make of Christ, that is true. And he is also responsible for the death of Jesus in the same way that any sinner is responsible for it.

But if anyone, Jew or Gentile, wants to go beyond this, if they want in their words and actions to identify with some of the bad actors of the first century who actually railroaded the Lord, they have more exemplars to choose from than just Jews.

There is quite a range to choose from—Gentiles and Jews both. And so it turns out that a modern Jew could identify with one from this number by hating Christians so much that he identifies with “the people of Israel” here, meaning the wicked men of the first century Sanhedrin. And a modern Gentile, driven by his Jew-hate, could identify with the Roman soldiers who placed the crown of thorns on that Jew’s head. Or the soldier who inscribed the placard that taunted Jesus as the “king of the Jews.”

There is plenty of room here for any or all of the haters.

Cordially in Christ,

Douglas Wilson