Christian Texts

A Jewish Book,
and What Was Done With It

The most-read book on earth opens in a Jewish world: a Jewish teacher, Jewish disciples, the Hebrew Scriptures on every page. Then a great deal was built from it against the Jews, and much of it has since been taken back.

This page reads the New Testament the way this site reads every text, with the light and the hard parts both named. It is a record, not a sermon. This page names both what this book owes the Jewish people and what Christendom did with it.

Three things matter here for the story of the Jewish people. Where this book came from (a Jewish root). What was made of it (a long inheritance of contempt, and its repair). And where the church stands now toward Israel.

Part One

The Common Root

Before Christianity was a separate religion, it was a movement of Jews, inside Judaism, reading the Jewish Scriptures. The New Testament shows this on nearly every page.

Part Two

The Hard Inheritance

From this Jewish book, Christendom built nineteen centuries of contempt. Naming it is not an attack on Christianity; the repair came from within Christianity itself.

Part Three

Where It Lands Today

The ruins of the ancient synagogue at Capernaum on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.
The ancient synagogue at Capernaum, on the Sea of Galilee, where the Gospels say Jesus taught. The setting of the Christian story is Jewish through and through: synagogues, Sabbaths and Passovers in the Land of Israel.Photo: Eddie Gerald, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.

That shift really happened. The church that once taught contempt now contains Israel's largest body of support in the world. Across the United States, an estimated 60 to 80 million evangelical Christian Zionists back the Jewish state, more than ten times the entire US Jewish population, with Pew and LifeWay Research polling putting evangelical support for Israel above 65 percent, on the strength of the very first promise in this story, “I will bless those who bless you” (Genesis 12:3). Catholic and mainline churches have spent sixty years unlearning the deicide charge. See Israel's allies →

And the texts themselves remain a witness against erasure. The Gospels are set in Judea, Galilee and Jerusalem, among Jews keeping Sabbaths and Passovers in the Land of Israel in the first century. To deny the Jewish connection to that land, you would have to delete the setting of the Christian scripture itself. The case for the land →

The double accounting. The same book cuts both ways: it testifies to the Jewish roots and the land more clearly than almost any ancient source, and it was turned into the longest-running weapon against the Jewish people in the West. Credit the root, name the harm, and credit the repair. For where that harm went, see the oldest hatred; for the Tanakh it grew from, the Jewish texts; for the catastrophe it helped make thinkable, the Shoah.