Alas, these professional religious polemics, these literary exercises in odium theologicum, were lifted out of their historical context and became the basis for a general Christian indictment of the Jewish people. Polemic should be avoided, Erasmus was later to observe, ‘because the long war of words and writings ends in blows’. The collective guilt charge in Matthew, and the ‘sons of the devil’ charge in John, were linked together to form the core of a specifically Christian branch of anti-Semitism which was superimposed on and blended with the ancient and ramifying pagan anti-Semitic
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