Talk:Antisemitism and the New Testament

Many modern day Christians, who have never read the New Testament all the way through, are unaware of the existence of all these verses. Some find it difficult to read these verses and still believe that Jesus himself did not teach anti-Semitism, despite the fact that Jesus was a Jew speaking to a predominantly Jewish audience.

[Removing Anti-Jewish Polemic from our Christian Lectionaries]

In the article Dr. Beck suggests that many passages in the New Testament are inherently racist or sexist, and should therefore be removed from public usage. Many, if not most, Christians would consider any such suggestions of inherent racism not as a component of the scripture but as a severely flawed interpretation of scripture. Many Christians would see the suggestion that selected verses be avoided on such grounds as a rejection of Christian tradition, and an attempt to edit the text of the Bible to fit the author's ideas.

Further, many of the following verses are accounts of the Jews' actions. To call these passages anti-semitic carries the implicit assumption that the events never happened, and that the described actions are uncharacteristic of actual Jews or Jewish leaders living at that time.

I've moved the above text to the /Talk page for two reasons, both having to do with a failure to be written from a neutral point of view. (1) The first paragraph strikes me as polemical; if you want to say that some people use these passages to argue that Jesus was an anti-Semite, please be clear about that. (2) It is not clear why Beck's views, in particular, on the proprietary of passages from the New Testament deserve to be highlighted in Wikipedia, such that Beck's views are presented, followed by the views of "many Christians"--as if there were not other scholars who had not written on the same subject, and as if Beck were the only important one.

I'm sure this can all be rendered unbiased without too much fuss. Please, rather than engaging in further debate, just do render it unbiased. --LMS