Stephen and Christian Anti-Semitism

The end of the seventh chapter of Acts records the conclusion of Stephen's speech, just before the crowd stones him to death. Stephen says to his Jewish audience:

You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are forever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do. Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? They killed those who foretold the coming of the Righteous One, and now you have become his betrayers and murderers. You are the ones that received the law as ordained by angels, and yet you have not kept it. (Acts 7:51-53)

The passage troubles me because it encapsulates all the anti-Semitic rhetoric that Christians have thrown at the Jewish people for the past two millennia. Christians have spread the false propaganda that Jews have betrayed the wishes of their God, misunderstood the teachings of Yahweh, and are the killers of Christ. Stephen's words, taken out of context, become a bludgeon with which some Christians continue to abuse Jewish people today.

Jesus Christ was a faithful Jew. He never ceased to be one, and all his closest followers were faithful Jews as well. He began his teachings in the synagogues and never when far from them. Those teachings, by and large, are the accumulated wisdom of centuries of Jewish thought. In the gospels we find evidence that some groups of Jews received him gladly, while others resisted him. Jesus himself gives no suggestion that he has come to start a new religion. Throughout the gospels, he is a reformer within Judaism itself.

The split between Jews and Christians came about after Jesus' death and resurrection. Jesus-believing Jews grew ever more convinced that Jesus was the messiah. Their faithful Jewish neighbors knew that Jewish tradition proclaims the coming of a military messiah who will overthrow all oppression, including the Romans. They found it ridiculous to think that a messiah would die on a cross instead of fighting the Romans with holy war.

The exchange between Stephen and the crowd who killed him was an inter-Jewish conversation. Like most family fights, there was exaggeration and over-reaction on all sides. Stephen ignores a lot of Jewish history and prophetic reflection in the heat of the moment, when he's trying to make a rhetorical point. All speakers, writers and preachers do this--leave part of the truth out in order to make a certain point in context. It is foolish to read what Stephen says to the crowd as a model for how Christians are always to respond to the Jewish people. Christians and Jews are still learning how to understand our shared histories and live in peace.