t of theological discussion and debate has occurred over what some have seen as Luke's "anti-Semitic" viewpoint, while most contemporary thought has tried to shift the emphasis away from this view.
Jack T. Sanders may well represent the contemporary "anti-Semitic" school of thought. In numerous publications, he has extolled the interpretations of Ernst Haenchen and others who believe that the failure of the entire Hebrew nation to recognize and accept Jesus of Nazareth as Israel's messiah condemns "the Jews--that is, the Jewish people considered together as a group, without any distinctions among them" and, therefore, prohibits their collective, and (by necessary implication) individual, salvation. He has synthesized the Lukan "portrait" of the (New Testament) Jews into one of two mutually exclusive propositions: "(are) the Jewish people (seen) as guilty in the death of Jesus or not, as irredeemably opposed to the will of God or not, as recipients of the salvation of God or not?"
Sanders claims that this viewpoint is "almost as old as critical New Testament scholarship," and he cannot believe that "the representative of the two opposing views have been reading the same edition (of the
...