Today is good Friday the thirteenth... what an odd oxymoron of sorts. Anyway, a Jewish friend of mine told me today about a time when he was in elementary school, and his Galilean counterparts threw rocks at him on good Friday. I'm sure much worse has occurred over the course of history, as good Friday is "kick a Jew" day for many loving Christians.

What exactly are they so mad about? Now, presupposing the existence of JeZeus, I wonder about the following: Wasn't it the Romans who kicked the snot out of their God (who was himself a Jew by the way)? Strange how the Romans killed a Jew, and to this day the Romans (Galileans) are still pissed off, and respond by attacking Jews. What an odd contradiction. Just my thoughts.

For some reason this puts me in mind of people who refused to take part in performances of Bach's St. John Passion, since it contains the line "Die Juden!" over and over.

Of course, it just means "The Jews!" in German. But it doesn't look very nice when you look at the score.

However, the Roman authorities were depicted as cowering before a Jewish lynch mob.

But even that does not mean that the entire Jewish people must be held to blame for the execution of JC.

And if that execution is substitute punishment for everybody's sins, and if JC would rise from the dead 3 days later as if nothing had really happened, then why pick on anyone about it?

If we take Mark as the earliest gospel, followed by Luke and Matthew (who had a copy of Mark in front of them when they wrote their accounts) and ending up with John's Gospel (written about 90-100 AD) we can trace the evolution of "Jew bashing" in the New Testament.

In Mark, Jesus is crucified by "the people." In Matthew it becomes "all the people." In John it becomes "the Jews." The careful reader will also note that John's Jesus--far from being the speaker of parables and the doer of exorcisms-- speaks in long, dense, theological monologues (mainly about the importance of believing in him) and calls the Jews "children of the devil."

As with all the gospels, John was written by a specific community to a specific audience. Scholars theorize that the community of believers in John's gospel had quite a clash with orthodox Jews and this conflict was highlighted by placing the invective into the speech of Jesus retroactively. Mainstream scholars see the Fourth Gospel as having little value for illuminating the figure of "the historical Jesus."