History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

They saw the truth, sometimes the ugly truth, about themselves, and they told it in the Bible. Whereas other peoples produced their national epics to endorse and bolster their self-esteem, the Jews wanted to discover what had gone wrong with their history, as well as what had gone right. That is why the Bible is littered with passages in which the Jews are presented as a sinful people, often too wicked or obstinate to accept God’s law, though they know it. The Jews, in fact, produced the evidence for their own prosecution. Christian apologists did not, on the whole, believe that Jews should be punished for the crime of their ancestors in killing Christ. They made a different point. Jewish contemporaries of Jesus had witnessed his miracles, seen the prophecies fulfilled and had refused to acknowledge him because he was poor and humble. That was their sin. But every generation of Jews ever since had shown the same spirit of obstinacy, as in the Bible. They were constantly concealing the truth, tampering with it, or suppressing the evidence. St Jerome accused them of cutting out references to the Trinity in the prophets. There were clues in Ezra and Nehemiah which, said St Justin, they had taken out. The old rabbis who compiled the Talmud knew the truth and even put it in the record in hidden form – that was one reason Christian debaters tried to use it for their arguments.