Antisemitic! Some people now make this charge against the Epistle to the Hebrews. This is a serious accusation, one that reflects the long-standing tensions between Jewish and Christian people that erupted in the horrors of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. If true, this allegation means that Hebrews is one of the worst things ever written.

Let’s begin with five concessions:

1. It is impossible to justify the terrible ways many Christians over the centuries have treated many Jews.


2. Extremely negative attitudes over the years toward Jewish people and their religion among Christian leaders in Germany and elsewhere contributed to the evils that occurred under the Nazis.


3. The traditional Christian doctrine of "supersessionism," the idea that the Jewish religion no longer has a theological right to exist because Christianity replaces it, is one of the most important sources of these negative attitudes.


4. Many Christians today still do not know how to appreciate Jesus as the embodiment of the New Covenant without depreciating Judaism as the Old.


5. Some of the things we Christians still say today can be experienced as antisemitic by Jews and Gentiles whose sensitivities have been intensified by the Nazi Holocaust.

Please consider a number of comments that have recently appeared on this Web site. According to Sakae Kubo, Hebrews teaches that "Christ is the ultimate, final, and comprehensive revelation of God, which the prophets of the Old Testament could only partially and insufficiently express." Charles Scriven writes that this epistle teaches that "Jesus is supreme in comparison with all the faithful—even all the prophets who have gone before him." Leo S. Ranzolin, Jr., puts it this way: In Hebrews, "The everlasting nature of Christ’s Melchizedekian high priesthood overcomes the deficiencies of the transient levitical priesthood, the most salient being its failure to lead people to perfection."

Continuing along these lines, John Brunt writes that Hebrews "wants to emphasize the superiority of Jesus’ priesthood to even the best of the Old Testament priests." Rolf J. Pohler summarizes the epistle as follows: "The letter to the Hebrews seeks to demonstrate the superiority of Christ and his ministry to the Jewish religious system and its priesthood."

Because they accurately portray what Hebrews actually says, the issue is not whether the authors of these comments are antisemitic. They aren’t. The question is whether the epistle is.

My view is that, if Hebrews were being written today, the author would make even more efforts to exalt Jesus as the personification of the New Covenant without seeming to debase Jewish people and their religion. Communication is not merely what we say; it is also what others hear. To be sure, what others hear partly depends upon what we say. It also depends upon time, place, and the circumstances of those who hear us, however. The same words in different contexts can have very different consequences. I believe the author of Hebrews would take into consideration our different setting.

It is anachronistic in one direction to hold the author of Hebrews responsible for the ways subsequent generations overstated and twisted its themes with murderous results. It is just as anachronistic in the opposite direction to expect this ancient letter to be mindful of sensitivities that exist in our time but were not common to the same degree when it was written.

Nevertheless, it is not enough in the twenty-first century merely to repeat what Hebrews says without noting the dreadful things that Christians have done to Jews between its day and ours. Although the epistle is not antisemitic, we can be if we do not wisely interpret and apply its claims with an eye to this horrible legacy.

We face a dilemma. On the one hand, if we affirm Jesus as the embodiment of the New Covenant, we seem to deny Judaism as the faulty instance of the Old. On the other hand, if we do not hold that the New Covenant in Jesus is superior in some sense to the Old, we have no reason to make special claims on his behalf. If this isn’t a bind, what is?

This is probably a good time to dust off and reexamine an old idea. According to this earlier way of organizing everything that Scripture says on this subject, and integrating it with everything else we also know, what Hebrews calls the "Old Covenant" is actually the second of at least three human conditions. The first covenant expresses God’s everlasting intentions for human life as portrayed, for example, in the biblical stories of creation. In this state, there is harmony between what people ought to do and what they want to do. In the second state, what Hebrews calls the "Old Covenant," a regrettable gap between duty and desire wounds human experience. In the third state, what Hebrews calls the "New Covenant," duty and desire are reconciled wholly in Jesus and partially in each of his followers. If this formula makes sense, the first and third states are more alike than either is to the second.

According to this way of organizing our thoughts, when we Christians now extol Jesus as the personification of the New Covenant we mean that he is superior to the second state of affairs, not the first. This fits with the Gospel of Matthew’s claim that Jesus came to fulfill Judaism at its best, not to destroy it (Matt. 5–7). It also fits with Paul’s reminder in Romans that Gentile Christians are like a branch that is grafted into the living tree of Judaism (Rom. 9–11). This approach reminds us that Christianity continues to draw life from the healthy forms Judaism, that if they die Christianity does too.

When Christianity was getting started, many asked if it was necessary for Gentiles to become Jews in order to become Christians. Many in our time ask the opposite question: Is it necessary for Jews to become Gentiles in order to become Christians? There are three excellent answers to both questions: No! No!! No!!!

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