-- Over the centuries there has been a lot of passion unleashed in the church a lot of anti-Semitism unleashed in the church when the Crucifixion is blamed on Jewish folks. The deeper issue that I want to get to here is not found in the movie itself; it is in the actual New Testament. Is the story of Jesus` death anti-Semitic at its core? The main thing I want to say here is that one of the aspects of Jesus that for a lot of reasons the church tended to forget historically and one that is being rediscovered in New Testament scholarship in our day is that Jesus is thoroughly, thoroughly Jewish.

-- Roger Wilson is a NT scholar at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. He writes about seeing a piece from a Sunday school lesson published by a major denominational publishing house. Thousands of kids would have seen this when they went to Sunday school. It`s a picture of Jesus as a little boy, going into a building, and here`s what the caption beneath the picture says: "Jesus was a good Christian boy who went to church every Sunday." Does anybody detect anything wrong in that caption? It`s exactly correct except that He wasn`t a "good Christian boy"; He was a good Jewish boy. And He didn`t go to church; He went to synagogue. And he didn`t go on Sunday; He observed the Sabbath. Other than that, that whole sentence is all OK.

-- What is very important to understand about Jesus is that when He grew up, He became a Jewish rabbi. And he revered the Jewish Scriptures. A contemporary scholar by the name of Ray VanderLaan has done a lot of research in this area, and he notes that in Jesus` day it was the custom that if you were going to become a rabbi, you would have memorized the entire Torah the first five books of the Old Testament. If you have ever read about Jesus, one of the things that will strike you is His commanding knowledge of the Old Testament. Ray says that there were certain rabbis a very, very small number of them known as "rabbis with authority" who had memorized the entire Old Testament. And again, if you know the New Testament, there are a number of times when people talk about Jesus as being a "rabbi with authority."

-- It seems a funny thing to me that sometimes in our day, people will talk as if there`s a gap between the God who is presented in the Old Testament and then the loving God who is presented in the New Testament. Do you know who did not believe there was a gap? Jesus. That`s where He read of the Father that He loved so much. You don`t understand Jesus unless you understand that He was a thoroughly Jewish boy who grew up to be a Jewish rabbi. And when did Jesus ever say, "Now it`s time to repudiate my faith? Now it`s time to repudiate the Hebrew Scriptures?" He never does. In fact, He says quite deliberately, "Don`t think I`ve come to abolish the Law and the Prophets. I`ve not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. I want the Old Testament to be understood as God initially intended them to be understood. I want to fulfill them in my life, and I want to make that fulfillment available to everybody."

-- So this is real important for us to understand as a church: Jesus` disagreements with other Jewish leaders were disagreements that were, in a sense, within the family. You know how I can say something about someone in my family, because I`m an insider. But if you say something about somebody inside my family, that`s kind of a different deal? Well, Jesus and the other writers of the New Testament His followers were Jewish. There were a lot of disagreements in that day, just as there always are among people of different schools of Judaism. But when Jesus spoke, He was somebody who was inside the family and who loved the family.

  I think one of the saddest things that happened to the church over the centuries was the suspicion and hostility and mistrust and, in certain cases, hatred that arose. During the Crusades ''the first Crusade'', on their way to the Holy Land, Christian soldiers slaughtered 10, 000 Jewish people. Down through the years, one of the saddest parts of the history of the church has been anti-Semitism. For the church in general, certainly for us as a community, part of what we want to say is that we want to be a community where everybody is honored and loved and revered and welcomed. This ought to be especially true in our relationships with the people who are part of the people from whom the One we follow came!