By Michael Brown
WND
June 8, 2019
For several decades, I have drawn attention to the church’s historic persecution of the Jews in Jesus’ name. It is one of the ugliest and longest chapters in church history, and it cannot be downplayed, forgotten, or ignored. With God’s help, I will continue to call out “Christian” anti-Semitism wherever I see it today. But I will not ignore Jewish persecution of Christians. It too must be called out.
In the Gospels, Jesus and His followers, all of them Jews, were persecuted by hypocritical Jewish leaders, ultimately leading to the Lord’s death on the cross. And that pattern continued in the Book of Acts, where the Jewish leadership stood in opposition to the message of Jesus the Messiah, sometimes persecuting His Jewish followers to the death (see Acts 7).
Some even stirred up trouble wherever these Messianic Jewish emissaries went to share the good news (see Acts 17), and this continued in the centuries that followed, with some documented cases of Jewish leaders siding with local efforts to persecute Christians.