"A CRIB-SHEET FOR THE POST-MORTEM." Biblical scholar Jack Miles offers a summary of "What Jews Need to Know About Jesus" (in light of Mel Gibson's upcoming The Passion of the Christ) in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles. He surveys the basics about the New Testament, why most Jews rejected Jesus, the historical Jesus, and Christian anti-Semitism arising from Matthew 27:24-25. The essay is accessible, sympathetic to its subject without pulling punches, and entertaining. I'll just excerpt the last part on the Matthew passage:

Most scholars recognize in the Gospel of Matthew the most Jewish of the four canonical Gospels. It was almost certainly written by a Christian Jew for other Jews like himself and against their Jewish opponents. Imagine, if you will, the anger of secular Israelis about the ultra-Orthodox Israelis who called for the execution of Yitzhak Rabin and who applauded Yigal Amir when he did the deed. Intense as it was, that anger was not an anti-Semitic anger, for all parties to the transaction were equally Jewish. So it may have been here as well � originally.

Alas, when a Gospel containing such anger migrates out of its initial all-Jewish context into other contexts where Jews are a minority, the notorious line takes on a fearsome new anti-Semitic potential. In my judgment, it retains that potential down to our own day. Theologically, the death of Jesus is not a wrong that could be set right if his murderers could somehow be brought to justice. Theologically, Jesus� passage from death to life in his resurrection is a new Exodus, bringing the human race as a whole to the new promised land of immortality. Theologically, those who killed Jesus, even if they sinned, were tools in God�s hands; and God�s enemy was not his people Israel but Satan. Theologically, it was Satan and Satan alone who was defeated when Jesus rose from the dead: Paradise lost, paradise regained. But when have anti-Semites ever cared, really, about theology?

I hope that "The Passion" does not live up to the worst of its advance notices; but if it does, the result will be more a pity than a peril. Anti-Semitism is not best confronted by bowdlerizing "The Merchant of Venice," censoring Bach�s "St. Matthew Passion," expurgating the Gospel according to Matthew or editing the latest Jesus movie to come down the pike. To think this way is to treat anti-Semitism as something like the genitals of human thought and of ourselves as a frail Victorian damsel who might faint dead away if her innocent gaze ever fell on the dread organs. We are stronger than that, I dare to think � strong enough, if you will, to stare the obscenity down. The anti-Semites among us only rejoice when we act otherwise.

This seems about right to me.