Shannon E. Quigley
Abandoning the Jewish Jesus and Abandoning the Jews: The Anti-Jewish Polemic, Christian Dejudaization Efforts and Die Botschaft Gottes in the Nazi Era
2018 | Full access
The Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life (Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des Jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben) was an academic Institute opened in May of 1939. It was composed of German theologians seeking to meld National Socialism and German Christianity together in the Nazi era. Among their numerous publications was their rewritten and dejudaized version of the New Testament text, Die Botschaft Gottes (The Message of God). This work was a critical venture for the future of German Christianity in the eyes of these theologians. It will serve as a central focus of my research into the thought and theology of this particular group of Nazi-era Protestant theologians and leaders as it related to their Christianity, and the persecution of the Jewish community and the Holocaust.
The Institute theologians believed they would do away with what they saw as the corrupting Jewish influences on Christianity and the Christian Bible. Despite the respect generally upheld by Christian theologians in their treatment of what the historical Church considered to be divinely-inspired Scriptures, the theologians of the Institute evaded even the most basic appreciation of how to treat the scriptural texts in order to deal with the problem they considered most critical: the Jewish problem. In the minds of these men, their ideological impulse related to the degenerate Jew was primary, removing them from the honor and reverence generally afforded to the Scriptures and to human life in Christian tradition.
This study aims to reveal and connect the longstanding hatred of Jews within Christian theological thought and the dejudaization efforts of Church leadership from the 2nd century on to the efforts of these Nazi-era theologians who chose to rewrite the New Testament text according to this longstanding hatred and polemic. The early efforts to separate and divide Jesus from his Jewish context and Gentile followers from the Jewish Jesus in effect brought about a divorce of sorts, which would affect the mindset of Christian theologians throughout Christendom up until, and including the theologians who led or served as part of the Institute.
The thesis compares and contrasts Die Botschaft Gottes with reputable translations of the New Testament text and to the original Greek text, noting how it relates to orthodox Christian theology and how it is different. It also assesses and compares the words and ideas found in the writings and sermons of the early Church fathers, as well as later Christian theologians such as Luther, who formed Christian thought and theology about the Jewish people, with writings of Institute leaders to find commonality of thought as well as distinctiveness. This analysis attempts to illuminate the way the New Testament text itself was read, used, and interpreted by a group of German Christian theologians in agreement with racial Nazi ideology. The culmination of Christian dejudaization efforts was reached in the Nazi era, with the efforts of the Institute (among others) supporting the Nazi regime’s genocidal mandate against European Jewry.
Supervisors:
Prof. Hagit Lavsky
Dr. David Silberklang