Collective Guilt for Killing Christ

There’s an idea I want to get down even in a rough form.

I have got unreasonable amounts of mileage over poking and prodding at some of the doctrinal oddities of the restored gospel.

Here are two of them:

1.  This world is the worst of all possible worlds, no other world would have betrayed Christ; and
2. Only the Jewish remnant of Israel in the 1st Century AD would have killed Christ, any other nation would have repented.

Christ being betrayed by his own is a theme in scriptures.  “I was wounded in the house of my friends.”  It’s not too far of a stretch to assume that any other people would have treated Christ better, and in fact the gospels more or less make this point explicitly.  “A prophet has no honor in his own country,” and “Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works had been done in Tyre and Sidon, which were done in you, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes.”  From those scriptures to the idea that the Jews at the time of Christ were uniquely bad in some way is not a big leap at all.  This leap has been used to justify anti-semitism though it need not.  Our version of it in particular isn’t anti-Jewish, since if Israel bears collective guilt for what it did to its master, brother, and bridegroom, we ourselves count as Israel.

But in this post I want to explore another sense in which we–humanity–all of us–bear collective guilt for Christ being killed.  Not in the sense that Christ had to die for all of us because we are all gone astray, though that is true.  What I mean is that the fact that the Jews of that time were bad enough to kill Christ is in some sense all of ours’ fault.

Let’s take a look at the normal speculations about why this people were willing to kill Christ.  The first common one is that if this is the worst of all worlds then Judea was the worst of all peoples and so naturally that’s where Christ went to do his ministry.  The second one is a variant of the old tag corruptio optima pessimi–when the good go bad, they go really bad.

There is probably some truth in both of these speculations, but I want to point out problems with them that are sometimes overlooked.

On the first one, 1 AD Judea being the worst people in the worst world, we run into two problems.  First, the Jews of that time just don’t seem all that bad in general.  Not good, plenty of wickedness and hypocrisy, but not the level where you just shudder at the vileness and think to yourself, yep, Christ-killers.  Second, it seems like a huge coincidence that the worst people on this world just happened to be God’s chosen people.  It’s pat.

That brings us to the second idea, which says its not a coincidence that the worst people were God’s chosen people, that’s what you would expect because when people with light sin and have the light withdrawn they go really, really bad.  Christ says something similar when he likens Israel to a house possessed by a devil, the devil being cast out, then the house swept and garnished, and seven devils move in.  “The last state is worse than the first.”  The two problems here are first that the Judeans just don’t seem that awful.  Bad, not but not world-historic bad in general.  The Nephites and Lamanites at the end of the Book of Mormon are clear examples of corruption optima pessimi and they are eating each other and performing mass human sacrifices and exterminating each other Mfecane style.  Judea 1 AD was not an apocalyptic hellscape.  Second, if the idea is that the people with the most light who sin will then become the worst, why is Christ here on the worst of all possible worlds?  Shouldn’t he be on the best one, since the sinners there would just have to utterly vile people presumably? (One interesting implication is that if our world is uniquely bad, it may be because we have more light and knowledge than the others.  Maybe they are all peaceful primitive hunter gatherers wandering around Austropithecine style. OK, probably not).

So here’s my thinking.  Let’s say  you are a decentish person in an extremely nasty world.  Maybe you are a conquereed province of Rome, which was no utopia.  Now, as a decentish person in a normal place you woul feel pretty mediocre, maybe even lowly and humble because most everybody around is you is better than decentish.  You would not have any temptations to spiritual pride.  But here in trashworld, being decentish might make you extremely arrogant because you think you are better than everybody else.  Thinking you are so much better than everyone else is at its most dangerous when you are so much better than everybody else but also you aren’t very good.  That sets you up to be the sort of person who would cheer for the death of a miracle working holy man because how dare he say we are sinners look how much better we are (genuinely) than everyone else, so we must be pretty good.  This would fit with the evidence of the gospels where a number of Romans were attracted to Judaism.  Why?  Not because the Jews were so depraved but because they had something valuable.  Unfortunately, it was only comparatively valuable.

OK, same situation, decentish but not all that great people surrounded by depraved brutality.  That’s the perfect recipe for hypocrisy, because lots of people are going to be drawn to real evil, its all around you, but at the same time you want the benefits of being among a somewhat OK people.  So you lie, steal, and manipulate.

OK, last point.  If you have some scraps of goodness but you are surrounded by obvious nastiness, you are going to be very defensive.  You feel like you are under threat and things that you would normally never even think of, like holding a sham trial to have the occupying power execute a preacher based on false accusations, become thinkable in your desperation to protect your little island of sanity.

So in a way the gentiles are also responsible for Christ’s death.  The people of Judea would not have been who they were without the wickedness of the gentiles.

This has been a rough post, I know.  Comments and insight needed.  The core point I guess is putting yourselves in the shoes of the Jews of that time and seeing how genuinely being OKish, a little better in some ways than the people around you, could lead you into all these serious troubles.  If you tie it into our yes and no post from yesterday, you might say that the Jews who rejected Christ were the ones who were saying no to the surrounding depravity while the ones who accepted Christ were the ones who were saying yes to the vision God had for Israel and therefore realized they still had very far to go. I don’t think you’re in the proper mindset to understand the New testament very well if you don’t realize the Jews who are focused on saying no had some good reasons for it.