When John’s Gospel Was Turned Against His Own People

Why an Intra-Jewish Witness Sounds Anti-Jewish in English – and What That Tells Us About the Church, Not John

We were at lunch when you said it, and you weren’t wrong to push:

“Look, I hear what you’re saying about context, but when I read John in English, it just sounds anti-Jewish. That can’t be an accident… can it?”

You’re right to press that.

Because no, it wasn’t an accident.

A lot of the way John sounds in English is the result of very intentional theological and political moves over centuries. John didn’t wake up one day and become the “anti-Jewish Gospel.” He was used that way, slowly and consistently, by a church that needed distance from the people it came from.

And the irony is brutal: one of the very stories people love from John—the woman at the well, the Samaritan encounter—only makes sense inside a Jewish story with Jewish fractures, not a Christian story against “the Jews.”

All I’m doing here is pulling that thread into the light and asking you to look at it with me.

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Why Your English John Sounds Anti-Jewish

If you could step into the first-century Jewish world for five minutes and ask,

“Hey, is John’s Gospel anti-Jewish?”

you’d get a blank stare.

Everyone in that world is Jewish:

• The Messiah is Jewish.

• His disciples are Jewish.

• His audiences are Jewish.

• His Scriptures are the Tanakh.

• His symbols are the Temple, the feasts, Passover, Exodus, shepherds of Israel.

John is a Jewish disciple writing about a Jewish Rabbi, drawing from Jewish Scripture, inside a Jewish conversation about Israel’s destiny and God’s faithfulness.

So why does it so often read like “Jesus versus the Jews” in English?

Because that perception did not come from John’s world. It grew out of post-Temple, post-Constantine Christianity – a church bound up with empire, defining itself over against the Jewish people, and reading John in ways that served that shift.

That’s the part most believers inherit without ever being told.

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This Didn’t “Just Happen”: The Agendas That Shaped John

Over time, three currents ran together: theological agenda, political agenda, and liturgical/rhetorical agenda. You don’t need a cartoon conspiracy; you just need a religious institution that knows what story it wants to tell and keeps nudging the text to match.

Theological Agenda: Replacement Theology

Once the institutional church emerged after the destruction of the Temple, it had a burning identity question:

“If Israel is God’s chosen people, then who are we?”

The answer that gained power was supersessionism (replacement theology):

• Israel was chosen.

• Israel rejected Messiah.

• Therefore, the church is now the “true Israel.”

• The old covenant people slide into the role of “those who killed God.”

To make that feel solid, John became very handy.

Instead of reading John as:

a Jewish Messiah confronting corrupt Judean leadership,

the church began to read him as:

“Jesus versus the Jews.”

That shift is not a random lexical glitch. It’s a theological move. It props up a new story:

We are the true people of God now;

they rejected Him;

John proves it.

That’s not neutral scholarship. That’s purposeful framing.

Political Agenda: Empire Needs an “Other”

Once Christianity got entangled with Rome and later Christendom, it stopped being a persecuted community and became a pillar of the social order.

And empires love a permanent “other.”

• Jews refused to baptize into the system on demand.

• Jews refused to surrender Torah identity.

• Jews refused to dissolve into Christendom’s religious culture.

So it became politically convenient to cast Jews as stubborn, blind, and God-rejecting outsiders. In that environment, readings of John that turned internal Jewish conflict into ethnic and religious condemnation weren’t just tolerated – they were useful.

Preachers, councils, theologians – many of them baptized in the same assumptions – leaned into the idea that:

• “the Jews” in John = all Jewish people, across time and space,

• whose main function in the story is to reject God so the church can take their place.

Again, not neutral.

Liturgical & Rhetorical Agenda: Using John as a Weapon

Then comes the pulpit, the liturgy, and the drama.

• Holy Week readings that spotlight “the Jews” calling for Yeshua’s death.

• Passion plays that cast “the Jews” as the villains.

• Anti-Jewish homilies that pound the phrase “the Jews” into the imagination of the crowd.

And at almost no point does the church collectively stop and say:

“Wait. The Greek hoi Ioudaioi doesn’t always mean ‘all Jews everywhere.’

Sometimes it clearly means ‘Judean leaders’ or ‘religious authorities.’

Maybe our translations should reflect that.”

Instead, the blunt English phrase “the Jews” is allowed to stand – century after century – in contexts where it clearly points to leadership and power structures, not to every Jewish man, woman, and child.

Leaving that phrase untouched made it a perfect blunt instrument for polemics and propaganda.

No, that doesn’t mean every translator sat in a dark room planning a pogrom.

But it does mean this:

The overall trajectory of Western Christianity consistently favored readings and translations of John that supported its own narrative – not John’s.

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What John Actually Means by “the Jews”

Here’s where you start to see the crack in the wall.

In John’s world, the word Ioudaioi (“Jews/Judeans”) has a range of meanings, depending on context. It can refer to:

• Jews as opposed to Gentiles.

• Judeans as opposed to Galileans or Samaritans.

• Judean authorities as opposed to the common people.

John uses the term in all of these ways, but very often he’s clearly talking about power structures:

• Temple elites.

• Religious authorities.

• Ruling factions aligned with Rome.

When John is describing plots, hostility, or scheming, he’s not talking about some anonymous Jewish farmer in the Galilee. He’s talking about those who hold religious and political power in Judea – the ones who have the most to lose if Messiah’s light exposes their darkness.

In other words:

Many of John’s sharpest lines are not “Jews versus Jesus.”

They are corrupt leadership versus Israel’s own Messiah.

And that puts John squarely in the line of the prophets before him:

• Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel – all Jewish, all speaking against corrupt priests, princes, and shepherds, for the sake of the people and the covenant.

John is participating in that same covenantal pattern: intra-Jewish rebuke, not ethnic hatred.

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The Woman at the Well: When “the Jews” Cross Their Own Lines

Now bring the woman at the well back into the frame, because this is where the whole thing gets exposed.

John 4 is built on a division between two related peoples:

• “The Jews” and

• “The Samaritans.”

The text itself says it bluntly:

“For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.”

That’s not a throwaway line. That is centuries of tension in one sentence—temple disputes, rival claims to Israel’s story, mutual contempt. These are not “Jews versus Gentiles.” These are family fractures inside Israel’s broader story.

And what does John put on display?

• A Jewish Messiah deliberately passing through Samaria when Jews typically avoided it.

• A Jewish man speaking publicly with a Samaritan woman—crossing social, religious, and gender boundaries in one move.

• A conversation that isn’t about “you people are trash,” but about living water, true worship, and the Father seeking those who worship in spirit and truth.

If John were interested in demonizing non-Jews or glorifying some new, detached “Christian” identity, this is a very strange way to do it.

Yeshua doesn’t flatten the woman into “those people.” He meets her inside her story—her failed marriages, her social shame, her Samaritan theology—and then pulls the camera back:

• “Salvation is from the Jews” – He roots her hope in Israel’s story, not out of it.

• “The hour is coming…” – He opens worship beyond both Mount Gerizim and Jerusalem, but without erasing Israel’s role.

• She becomes a witness to her own community, not a prop for anti-Samaritan or anti-Jewish rhetoric.

John is doing the opposite of what later church history did with his Gospel:

• John shows Yeshua crossing the divide between two hostile groups who share a tangled claim on Israel’s inheritance.

• Later interpreters use John to deepen the divide between the church and the Jewish people and to erase Israel’s ongoing calling.

The woman at the well is a living contradiction to the weaponized John of later centuries. In one scene, John shows:

• A Jewish Messiah

• Refusing to honor the boundary

• That “the Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.”

In other words, John lets “the Jews” be both:

• the people who hold their own lines of hostility, and

• the very people in whose Messiah those lines are being crossed and healed.

That’s not the voice of ethnic contempt. That’s the voice of covenant restoration.

When you read John 4 this way, you start to see how insane it is to turn this Gospel into a charter for hating Jews:

• The same Gospel that shows Yeshua restoring a Samaritan outcast

• Is now being used to justify contempt for the people He came from?

That’s not John talking. That’s centuries of churches putting words in his mouth.

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How a Single Translation Choice Became a Weapon

Over centuries, three shifts slowly turned that nuanced reality into a blunt weapon.

From “Judean Leaders” to “the Jews” as a People

Early church teachers began preaching John as if Yeshua is standing against “the Jews” as an entire nation.

That was not forced by Greek grammar. It was a theological decision that:

• reinforced the claim that Israel, as a people, had rejected God,

• and cleared space for the church to claim, “We are the new Israel now.”

So when John says hoi Ioudaioi in a context clearly focused on authorities, teachers and preachers still presented it as “the Jews” – the entire people.

From Nuanced Greek to Blunt English

Translators had options. They could have written things like:

• “the Judeans,”

• “the authorities,”

• “the Jewish leaders,”

where the context pointed in that direction.

Instead, they preserved the flat phrase:

“the Jews.”

At first, that might have sounded mostly regional. But as Europe solidified as “Christian” and Jews became the perpetual minority in a Christian majority world, the phrase hardened:

• “the Jews” morphed into a loaded ethnic and religious category:

  the people who are not us, who rejected Christ, who killed our Lord.

Translation committees had centuries of opportunity to correct this, clarify this, nuance this. They largely didn’t.

Why?

Because the bluntness served the theology and social order that had already been accepted.

From Family Argument to Anti-Jewish Ammunition

What began as family arguments inside Israel – prophetic, painful, covenantal – was steadily recast as:

God’s wholesale rejection of the Jewish people.

John’s Gospel became proof-text fuel:

• for councils drafting anti-Jewish canons,

• for preachers stirring contempt from the pulpit,

• for mobs looking for “biblical” justification for their attitudes and actions.

So when you open an English Bible and hear John as anti-Jewish, you’re not just hearing John. You’re hearing John dragged through 1,700 years of anti-Jewish framing and left uncorrected.

The problem isn’t merely that John was misread once.

The problem is that John was kept misread because that misreading gave power, identity, and justification to a church that wanted distance from the people it came from.

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When Translation Becomes Theology

Here’s the quiet reality most believers never get told:

Every translation is an interpretation.

The choice to keep “the Jews” in places where the Greek supports “Judean leaders” or “the authorities” is notlinguistically inevitable. It is doctrinally convenient.

Over time, that convenience hardened into a background dogma:

• Israel = the people who killed God.

• Church = the people who replaced them.

• John = the Gospel that proves it.

So the phrase “the Jews” stays in the text, untouched, even when:

• it confuses geography with ethnicity,

• it collapses authority figures into an entire people group,

• and it quietly feeds the idea that God is fundamentally done with Israel.

Now hold that against what’s actually on the page:

• John’s Messiah is Jewish.

• His disciples are Jewish.

• His primary imagery – Temple, feasts, Passover, Exodus – is Jewish.

• His Scriptures are the Hebrew Scriptures.

• His story is woven through Israel’s festivals and covenant promises.

If John were truly anti-Jewish in the way later readers claim, he would have to be:

• anti-himself,

• anti-his own Rabbi,

• anti-his own Scriptures,

• and anti-his own people.

Does that make any sense for a first-century Jewish disciple?

Or is it more honest to admit:

What changed was not John.

What changed was who held the microphone, and what they needed John to say.

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Giving John Back to His Own People

So what do we actually do with this?

We’re not rewriting history, but we can refuse to keep participating in the distortion.

Start with a few simple, uncomfortable questions:

• Every time you hit “the Jews” in John, are you willing to stop and ask:

  “Is this really about the entire people, or is this about leaders in Judea?”

• Will you let the context decide – geography, politics, power – instead of your inherited theology?

• Can you hear John as a Jewish internal critique, like Jeremiah or Amos, instead of a Christian indictment of “the Jews” as a race or religion?

And while you’re at it, can you let the woman at the well do her job?

• She stands at the fault line between two related peoples—Jews and Samaritans.

• She shows you a Jewish Messiah who walks into the fracture line His own people observe and refuses to honor it.

• She becomes a witness not to a new religion that hates Israel, but to a Messiah who is restoring Israel’s calling and opening living water to those on the margins.

When you do that, John’s Gospel starts to sound far less like:

“God against the Jews”

and far more like:

“God’s Jewish Messiah confronting corrupt shepherds of Israel, crossing Israel’s fractures,

and opening living water to those the system has written off—

for the sake of Israel and the nations.”

And then the questions get closer to home:

• How has a weaponized translation of John shaped your view of the people God first called His own?

• How has it colored your Good Friday, your sermons, your casual comments about “the Jews” and even “those people” in your own world?

• Where have you let the church’s later anxieties speak louder than the text itself?

You were right to feel the tension at lunch.

You were right to say, “This can’t just be an accident.”

It isn’t an accident. It’s a trajectory.

The invitation now is not to hate the church, or to pretend history didn’t happen, but to repent of inherited distortions and to let John be who he actually is:

A profoundly Jewish witness, in a Jewish argument, about a Jewish Messiah –

calling His own people, Samaritans on the margins, and the rest of us,

back to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

You don’t have to agree with every conclusion I draw.

But if you’re going to keep reading John, at least be honest about whose voice you’re allowing to shape your heart:

John’s?

Or the long, heavy echo of a church that needed him to say something he never said.

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May the shalom of our Abba guard you —

shalom v’shalvah.

Your brother in the Way,

Sergio