Passages from the Christian
Scriptures (New Testament)

The highlighted text is probably responsible for more loss of innocent life than any other passage in the Bible. The author has a Jewish crowd accept full responsibility on themselves for the execution of Yeshua. Further, they stated that their children would share fully in that guilt.

For many centuries, Christian faith groups had enlarged the group responsible for the execution beyond those Jews who were present at the sentencing, and their children. The church included all Jews who were alive at the time, circa 30 CE. This would include Jews who were living over 1,000 miles from the event in Jerusalem and knew nothing about Yeshua. Further, the church taught that all Jews, from the 1^st century CE onwards, shared equally in the guilt for Jesus' death. They believed that Jews were "Christ killers." The result was horrendous levels of oppression, discrimination and mass murder of Jews by Christians.

Edward Alexander, while reviewing a book Christian Antisemitism by William Nichols, commented:

"...since the ideology of Jew-hatred and its catastrophic modern result originated in Christendom, it is Christians more than Jews who should be searching out their roots and trying to extirpate them...Nicholls believes that neither modern antisemitism nor the Holocaust can be understood without taking into account the way the people of Europe had been taught about the Jews from their childhood up by their own religious tradition...The popular view that the Nazis chose Jews as their primary [Holocaust] target because 2,000 years of Christian teaching had accustomed the world to do so is, in Nicholls's view, essentially correct. In fact, he traces all modern forms of antisemitism, from liberal and Marxist to conservative and Nazi, to the Christian myth of Jews as the killers of Christ." _2,3

On 1965-OCT-28, following the Vatican II meeting by the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, the Vatican issued Nostra Aetate, a "Declaration on the Relation of the Church to non-Christian Religions." ₄ The Declaration notes that, according to the Gospels, some Jews in Palestine advocated for the execution of Jesus. But this guilt cannot be charged against all Jews of the 1^st century CE, nor can it be charged against any Jews of today. It stated that: "Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures....the Church...decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone."

This passage is the only one in the Christian Scriptures of which we are aware which transfers guilt from adults to their innocent children. It is unclear whether the original intent was to include additional generations of the mob's descendents as responsible for Yeshua's death.