Scholar Challenges Reference to "Jews" in Jesus' Death

The Rev. Frederick William Danker of St. Louis says "Jews" should be translated as "Judeans," referring to the people living in a particular region at the time.

For centuries, when Christians studied Gospel readings about Jesus' final hours, they read that "the Jews" shouted out to Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect of Judea, that Jesus should be crucified. For much of modern history, Jewish people have been blamed because of the belief that Jews called for Jesus' death, said a St. Louis Lutheran minister and Greek scholar who has written a new, highly praised Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament.

"The word Jew is an inadequate translation, there " said the Rev. Frederick William Danker, 81, of St. Louis' Compton Heights neighborhood. "In using the word Jews, the nuance is gone." The word Judean is the accurate word, he said. He suggests the word Jew should be changed in most of the Gospel stories about Jesus' sentencing to execution. Judean refers to people who lived in a particular region during Jesus' death and not to all Jews, he said.

The Lutheran minister pleads his case after a lifetime of study of the first-century Greek language and as the author of the new book, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, published this winter by the University of Chicago. The book has over 5,500 Greek words, each with multiple definitions and examples of how it was used in early Christians times. They fill 1,082 pages in small type in a book that weighs 5 pounds, 5 ounces and costs $85. The difference between a lexicon and a dictionary is that a lexicon defines words as they are used in a particular writing or group of books.

Geography is Key

For centuries, Bible scholars have taken the Greek word ioudaios, pronounced you-die-us, and translated the word as Jews. However, Danker says those who study how the word ioudaios was used in legal and other secular texts and tombstone inscriptions in the first century should avoid the religious and ethnic descriptive word Jew because it doesn't accurately tell the story. Instead, translators should translate the word ioudaios to be geographically specific, rather than ethnically or religiously specific.

"The term ioudaios is especially used in the Gospel of John, and it is closer to Judeans, which is a multifaceted, excellent term," Danker said. The word Judeans was understood by the Romans as the proper name for the people who lived then in southern Palestine, he said. "Judeans can be understood ethnically as people who lived under specific rules and regulations near Jerusalem," he said. "The hard-liners in Jesus' time were in Judea, in Jerusalem. Some of the Jews, who didn't go along with the Jerusalem chief priest and his hard-liners, were in the boondocks."

No one should charge the first-century Jews who lived in Galilee, in distant Roman provinces around the Mediterranean world or along the great river networks of Europe where the Roman-Hellenistic culture prevailed with deciding and calling out that Jesus warranted the death sentence. John's Gospel use of the word ioudaios certainly does not include them, Danker said. "Those Jews accustomed to Greek culture in the (Roman) provinces looked askance at the hard-liners trying to impose their laws on those outside Jerusalem, and that's why St. Paul got into trouble," Danker said. Disagreements between the chief priest and Jews outside Jerusalem is one reason St. Paul was so successful in winning Jews in Greece and Rome to Christianity, Danker said. Of course, some Jews in Jerusalem also disapproved Jesus' sentence of crucifixion, Danker said. Nicodemus, the Pharisee, and Joseph of Arimathea are two examples. "People forget that most of the early Christians were Jews," he said.

"Unnecessary Acrimony"

"Over the centuries, the word Jew in translations got so distorted and caused so much unnecessary acrimony, causing such tragedies between Christians and Jews." The 16th-century Greek scholars who translated the King James version of the Bible mostly used the classical Greek of Aristotle and other writers of Greece's golden age, who wrote 300 years before the Gospel writers. Today, the King James Bible and the Revised Standard Version translations of the Bible are "so ingrained in us that we automatically think of their words in their form," Danker said. "Some people will be upset with this idea, but in my profession, no matter what we say, someone disagrees with us," he said. He said good scholars can only be honest and accurate. His lexicon has received excellent reviews from classics scholars and members of biblical scholar associations as far away as Sweden.

Danker was born in Frankenmuth, Mich. He graduated from Concordia Seminary in Clayton, was ordained and began his ministry in a rural church outside Frankenmuth. He joined the Concordia faculty in 1954 and over the years, got a Ph.D. in Greek and Latin classics at the University of Chicago. In the 1970s, the Rev. Jacob Preus, seminary president, fired Danker and the entire faculty for what he called their liberal teaching. Danker and his older brother, the Rev. William Danker, who died last month, were among the 50 founders of the faculty's Seminary in Exile, better known as Seminex, at Grand and Washington boulevards in midtown. When the seminary moved to Chicago and became Christ Seminary-Seminex, Danker and his wife, Lois, moved there, too. The seminary and Danker's own church here, Bethel Lutheran in University City, are part of the 5 million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the nation's largest Lutheran body.

Since his retirement from the Chicago seminary in 1988, Danker has been working at his home here on the lexicon, his 15th book. He used the core of scholar Walter Bauer's landmark 1957 Greek-German lexicon. More than 20 percent of the book is Danker's original material, he said.

Since 1957, there has been an explosion of archaeological finds of first-century manuscripts, monuments and grave inscriptions. Danker added references from Greek words on new archaeological finds. For 12 years, he worked from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. six days a week on the book, he said. "I wanted to extrapolate what words mean using new findings, so we can renew our language," Danker said. "We want to find the meaning that the early Christian writers wanted."

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