I wonder how you and others on this thread feel about the
foundational conclusion of so much of recent Bible scholarship, to wit, that the dead Jew, Jesus, was turned into a mystical persona at the center of a new religious mythos that had at its heart blame and hatred for the Jews of Jesus's own time, which became the fountainhead of the hideous plague of antisemitism that is continuing to this day.
I have to confess I cannot answer the question, as you have put it, because I never cared for Paul & Co., had difficulty getting through the Acts of the Apostles, and do not know enough about Church history. That said, I'd like to make a few observations.
1) I gather that some scholars question the official version of the Crucifixion: namely, that the crowd (incited by the Jewish religious establishment) clamored for it, while Pilate tried (weakly) to save him from it. But you would of course know about (and no doubt would endorse) the view that the Gospels whitewashed Pilate, in the process blackening the Jews. And you would also know about the argument that there was no crucifixion at all, in which case, the Jews would also have been slandered.
2) It was only recently, under Pope John Paul II, that the Catholic Church renounced what for centuries had been official Catholic doctrine: that the Jews were responsible for the death of Christ. And I can remember good Catholic Irish boys, in my youth, taunting Jewish boys as "Christ-killers". I do NOT remember priests or nuns preaching explicit anti-Semitism, but the official Church doctrine on responsibility for crucifixion of course spoke for itself.
3) I do not know much about the Orthodox record in this respect, but I suspect it is not much better. In Orthodox Russia, for example, Jews were considered a religious group, rather than a national group, as they later were in Soviet Russia. Jews were under certain restrictions -- unless they converted to Russian Orthodoxy. Popular anti-Semitism expressed itself more as specifically religious hostility, than as ethnic hostility or economic resentment. In the 20th century, at the instigation of the Ministry of Justice, a Jew (Beilis) was put on trial for -- ritual murder! (But Russia had its Emile Zolas, fortunately.) Some of the most revered Russian "saints" of the period (John of Kronstadt, for example) were what you and I would call vicious anti-Semites. So, one would have to conclude that the Russian Church continued to "stir the pot", as it were.
3) Not that up on the Protestants, although seem to recall that Luther had some pretty awful things to say about the Jews.
So, it would seem that the view of Jews as "Christ killers" endured for centuries, and obviously played a major role in endemic anti-Semitism in Europe. But I don't know whether this would support the thesis that "a dead Jew...was turned into a mystical persona at the center of a new religious mythos that had at its heart blame and hatred for the Jews of Jesus's own time."
Seems to me that is passing off a part for the whole. It also has something of a paranoid ring to it, maybe only because of the way you have phrased it. The phrase "had at is heart" suggests, to me, that Jew-hatred was the central doctrine of Christianity, as it was of Nazism. I would suggest it might have been more a by-product of the mission to the Gentiles. (The Jews did not appreciate our message, but you will.) After all, the Apostles were themselves Jewish...
jbe
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