International Condemnation .., page-19

Jewish deicide is a historic belief among some in Christianity that Jewish people as a whole were responsible for the death of Jesus.^[1] The antisemitic slur "Christ-killer" was used by mobs to incite violence against Jews and contributed to many centuries of pogroms, the murder of Jews during the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and during the Holocaust.^[2]

Source of deicide charge[edit]

Justification of the charge of Jewish deicide has been sought in Matthew 27:24–25:
When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. "I am innocent of this man's blood," he said. "It is your responsibility!" All the people answered, "His blood is on us and on our children!"
The verse that reads: "All the people answered, 'His blood is on us and on our children!'" is also referred to as the blood curse. In an essay regarding antisemitism, biblical scholar Amy-Jill Levine argues that this passage has caused more Jewish suffering throughout history than any other in the New Testament.^[4]
According to Jeremy Cohen:
Even before the Gospels appeared, the apostle Paul (or, more probably, one of his disciples) portrayed the Jews as Christ's killers ... But though the New Testament clearly looks to the Jews as responsible for the death of Jesus, Paul and the evangelists did not yet condemn all Jews, by the very fact of their Jewishness, as murderers of the son of God and his messiah. That condemnation, however, was soon to come.^[5]
As early as 167 AD, Melito of Sardis, in a tract that may have been designed to bolster a minor Christian sect's presence in Sardis, where Jews had a thriving community with excellent relations with Greeks, made assertions in his Peri Pascha that transformed the charge that Jews had killed their own Messiah into the charge that the Jews had killed God himself. He was the first writer in the Lukan-Pauline tradition to raise unambiguously the calumny of deicide against Jews.^[6][7] This text blames the Jews for allowing King Herod and Caiaphas to execute Jesus, despite their calling as God's people (i.e., both were Jewish). It says "you did not know, O Israel, that this one was the firstborn of God". The author does not attribute particular blame to Pontius Pilate, but only mentions that Pilate washed his hands of guilt.^[8] At a time when Christians were widely persecuted, Melito's speech is believed to have been an appeal, not to punish Jews, but for Rome to spare Christians.^[9]

St John Chrysostom made the charge of deicide the cornerstone of his theology.^[10] He was the first to use the term 'deicide'^[11] and the first Christian preacher to apply the word "deicide" to the Jewish nation.^[12][13] He held that for this putative 'deicide', there was no expiation, pardon or indulgence possible.^[14] The first occurrence of the Latin word deicida occurs in a Latin sermon by Peter Chrysologus.^[15][16] In the Latin version he wrote: Iudaeos [invidia] ... fecit esse deicidas, i.e., "[Envy] made the Jews deicides".^[17]