Students of church history know the sad fact that Holy Week was in past centuries often the occasion for anti-Jewish incidents, as Christians who spectacularly missed the point of the Passion narrative set out to “avenge” their own Redemption on the descendants of Jesus’ cousins. The liturgy of Good Friday itself, in the traditional form used by the Catholic Church, was seen by some providing a spark for such persecution, since it prayed for the conversion of the “perfidious” Jews. In context, this was simply a tactless translation of the Latin word which meant “without [our] Faith,” but it might have been a factor in popular anti-Semitism, which is one reason the Catholic Church rewrote that prayer as part of its liturgical changes at Vatican II. Holy Week and now Easter, with all its scenes of Jewish crowds rejecting Jesus (a Jew) and hunting his (Jewish) apostles, makes a good occasion for briefly reviewing what the historical Church has said about its ancestors in the Faith of Abraham.

As Israel’s prophets themselves attested in fiery laments, the Jewish people were repeatedly unfaithful to Moses’ code, especially in the core area of idolatry. The Jewish people were the only monotheists in the region, and indeed the pagans around them were sunk in some particularly loathsome fertility cults involving temple prostitution and even child sacrifice. So the Lord decreed that they keep themselves apart from all their neighbors, practicing a strict dietary law and shunning the admixture of pagan elements such as images (e.g., idols).

Sadly, many Jews, including some of their leaders, were beguiled by the military glories and religious rituals of their neighbors and, through a kind of cultural peer pressure, began to emulate pagan ways. So Israel forfeited God’s protection as a nation, and was conquered repeatedly. Eventually it was conquered decisively by the Babylonian empire. The Jewish people were sent into exile there and at one point targeted for genocide (see the Book of Esther). But through some miracle, the Jews did not dissolve in the ethnic gumbo that was the ancient Middle East.

In time, the Persian monarch Cyrus saw fit to return them to their homeland, albeit as his subjects. The ancient Jews never regained their independence, but became just another province that empires traded among themselves, until they finally ended up as subjects of the Romans.

The sect that controlled the Temple and provided its priests, the Sadducees, were religious minimalists and political collaborators; they rejected the later books of the Torah and disbelieved in life after death. They had little interest in politics, and helped provide legitimacy to the Roman occupation in return for being left alone. A loosely defined group of religious nationalists, the Zealots, tried to keep alive the dream of a revolt against the Romans, and looked for a military Messiah to come and lead their cause. The bulk of religious Jews looked to the Pharisees, who saw the loss of Israel’s independence as God’s punishment for their ancestors’ carelessness with the Law. So they determined to win back God’s favor for their people by obeying its every jot and tittle. Still another group of Jews, the Essenes, lived in the desert and practiced asceticism. Some think they formed the core of John the Baptist’s initial followers.

Each of these groups may have treasured the claim that they were the faithful “remnant” of Jews who had stayed faithful to God, treasuring His promise that a Messiah would come and restore their forfeited privileges. In fact, he would do even more, and make them a light to the gentiles — a people who took the Law from their tiny kingdom and spread it across the earth.

It was to fulfill the promise that Jesus came, but he did so in a most unexpected way, clearly answering some of the prophetic predictions about the Messiah (including that he would be a “suffering servant”) while apparently leaving other promising hanging by the end of his earthly ministry, such as the promise that God’s people would be freed from bondage, and that he would come to exercise a moral authority across the earth. Jesus’ death on the cross, Christians believe, did indeed free God’s people from the bondage of sin — but didn’t free the Jews of the curse of Roman occupation.

The Church that Jesus founded would likewise become a worldwide moral authority, teaching the Ten Commandments to tribes in North America and New Guinea. Jesus would die and rise from the dead, as attested by many witnesses. But in the generations that followed Jesus, the political nation of Israel did not see a resurrection.

In addition, Jesus’ claims surprised many Jews, who hadn’t understood the prophetic references to the “Son of Man” as predicting that God Himself would become incarnate; that he himself would replace the “scapegoat” the Jews drove into the desert as the bearer of their sins; or that he would replace their Passover dinner with a miraculous sacrifice of his own flesh and blood, which they would consume as spiritual food. They hadn’t seen that coming.

It was at best a divine surprise — or at worst a bizarre set of assertions by a false prophet guilty of blasphemy, which was the charge on which the high priests and Pharisees arraigned Jesus and condemned him to death. So while the whole of the Christian church for around a decade after the resurrection remained entirely Jewish, many Jews rejected him — and banned his followers from worshiping in the Temple at Jerusalem. They even put at least one of his apostles, James, to death. A zealous Pharisee named Saul served as a kind of Jewish inquisitor, hunting down the Christians, a group he regarded as renegades and idolaters.

In the face of rejection and even persecution on the part of Jewish authorities, the Jews who’d accepted Jesus insisted that they were the faithful “remnant” of the Jews — that the bulk of Jews had fallen away from perfect obedience to God by refusing His last and greatest prophet, John the Baptist, and rejecting His Messiah.

This observation led to the theory that was widespread throughout Christian history and theology, and only rejected definitively by the Catholic Church at Vatican II: That the Church had “superseded” the Jewish people, completely replaced it in God’s plans for humanity, leaving those who claimed to be faithful Jews in roughly the same spiritual state as the Samaritans of Jesus’ day — renegades and rebels. St. Augustine even wrote that God had kept the Jewish people in existence, in exile and oppressed, as an object lesson in what happens to those who disobey Him.

With the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate, the Church firmly abandoned this theory (called “supercessionism”), though controversies still swirl today around the question of whether the Church ought to

a) leave Jews alone, assuming that they can get to Heaven on their own track, without our help;

b) aggressively target Jews for conversion, as Christians did throughout the Middle Ages, sometimes employing force, without much success; or

c) accept gratefully from Jews the many gifts they gave us — monotheism, the Ten Commandments, and Jesus come to mind — and hope that our prayers and friendly witness will somehow contribute to their eventual acceptance of the Messiah who came first of all for them.

Option a) appeals to theological liberals, who believe that any person of good will who follows his conscience is in effect an “anonymous Christian.”

Option b) is beloved of traditionalists, who regard any criticism of past Church practices as probably a surrender to secular humanism.

Option c) is the one endorsed by Pope Paul VI, St. John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis. In light of the role that Christian anti-Judaism played in preparing the ground for the Holocaust, and the paranoid anti-Semitism that grips the Muslim world, it seems both the humbler and the more effective approach to this complex, vexing question.