‘…the Jews, 2:15 who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets and persecuted us severely.’

Several years ago a fundamentalist church in the Denver metro area gained notoriety during Lent by quoting on their marquee a small fragment of the sentence that spans 1 Thessalonians 2:14-15: “the Jews, who killed the Lord Jesus.”  It was a frightening throwback to the days of the Nazis who labeled all Jews as Christkillers.  Only after significant publicity called attention to it, did the church take it down.

Many translations separate 1 Thess 2:14 and 15 with a semi-colon (AV, ASV) or a comma (RSV, NIV and others).  The effect of the comma is to suggest that ‘the Jews’, in an unrestricted sense, killed Jesus, and it has thus been dubbed, ‘The Antisemitic Comma’.

The Complete Jewish Bible, a Messianic Jewish translation, unsurprisingly removes the comma.  So does the updated NIV.  The NLT, using the principles of dynamic equivalence, has, ‘For some of the Jews killed the prophets, and some even killed the Lord Jesus.’

F.F. Bruce (WBC) points out that this is the only place in the Pauline writings where ‘the Jews’ are said to be responsible for Jesus’ death.  The only other place where the agents of his crucifixion are specified is 1 Cor 2:8, where they are ‘the rulers of this age’  Such language is used in John’s Gospel, where it refers to the priestly hierarchy.  In Acts the responsibility is limited to the Jerusalemites (Acts 2:23, 36; 3:13–17; 7:52; 13:27, 28).

I think that this might be a simple instance of a widely-used figure of speech call a ‘synecdoche’, in which the whole is given for the part.  The immediate context suggests that Paul is using language in this way (presumably, he does not think that all of the Thessalonians’ countrymen persecuted them, any more than he thought that all of the Jews in Judea persecuted the churches there).  This is supported by the wider context, too, for in John’s Gospel ‘the Jews’ often refers to those Jewish leaders who sought to kill Jesus.

When Paul says that ‘the Jews’ persecuted him and his associates severely, we know that this was not true of the Jewish population as a whole.  That he was thinking of a particular sub-group of Jews is clarified by reference to Acts 17, where it is recorded that certain Jews sought to stir up Gentile opposition to Paul in Thessalonica.  That same chapter also records that the Jews in Berea were ‘more noble’ than those in Thessalonica: Paul could scarcely have grouped with with those of their countymen who were responsible for the deaths of Christ and the prophets.

Moreover, the (Jewish) prophets were, in the main, persecuted and sometimes killed by their own fellow-Jews.  So, once again, Paul cannot have been thinking of the entire Jewish population as somehow responsible for this.

We know that Paul (himself a Jew, of course) was not systematically opposed to Jewish people.  Consider his concern for their salvation as expressed in Rom 10.1ff and Acts 28.19.

The comma could be retained, then, without carrying any antisemitic implications.