KILLING JEWS: WHAT WOULD MEL GIBSON DO?

Heinrich, a reader from New Berlin, PA, has sent in the following question: Last summer, after showing Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ at our church, my pastor told us Jesus wants us to kill Jews—is he right?

MH: Dear Heinrich in New Berlin, No.  In fact, it turns out that Jesus himself was Jewish—and even more surprisingly, almost everyone is the Bible was a Jew! Can you believe that? We often think of this tendency to blame the Jews for everything as "European History" or "Henry Ford’s Other Big Idea."

But I understand the confusion; I’ve received similar letters from around the U.S. and Europe. (This is why I don’t think fundamentalist Christians should homeschool their kids: besides not teaching them science, they also don’t teach them how to read.) But anyway, I think your pastor and Mel Gibson (The Perfect Murder disavows any association with Mel Gibson) got it wrong on one critical point: God had been telling the Jews to kill people for the entire Old Testament, and when they didn’t, they would suffer plagues, tribulations, or exile. Killing Jesus was the one time the Jews actually listened to God—they are not to be punished for that, they’re probably going to heaven for it. (Although I’m not sure Jewish heaven and Christian heaven are the same place—I have a sense that Jewish heaven might be Christian hell and vice versa, or they might both share a tripartite afterlife arrangement with the Muslims, so who knows where anyone will end up. It makes me all the more glad I’m an atheist—although I guess that might mean I end up in three separate hells simultaneously.) So, if you think you are doing a favor to God by killing the Jews, I think you need to actually read your Bible (that means the Old Testament too).

Now, if we can separate the theology from the act of murder itself, we have a different question. If the person you kill happens to be Jewish, you must realize that you still might be labeled anti-Semitic (VOCABULARY-BOOSTING ASIDE: killing Arabs would also make you anti-Semitic, since they’re Semitic peoples too, but no one seems to care about them) or worse, a Neo-Nazi, in which case your murder will definitely be tried as a hate crime. Personally, I would hate to be thought of as a Neo-Nazi, so I would always ask the person I was about to kill if s/he were Jewish, disabled, LGBT, or some other group so as not to be seen as an intolerant murderer.

But that’s just me.