Jesus himself taught that he did not come to bring peace but a sword . We Jews have felt the edge of this sword for more than fifteen hundred years now!
Jesus was actually referring to the Hebrew Scriptures when he said that he did not come to bring peace but a sword (see Micah 7:5–6 and Matt. 10:34). That same passage is quoted in the Mishnah with reference to family conflicts that will come with the advent of the Messianic age. In any case, what Jesus and Micah were talking about was bringing division into families over the issue of loyalty to God and his Messiah. As for literally taking up swords for the faith, Jesus utterly renounced this.
In a previous answer, I stated that one reason the Messiah, the Prince of Peace, did not usher in an age of peace is because we rejected him as a nation (see above, 2.4). Let me expand on this. The New Testament Scriptures record that when the Messiah was born in Bethlehem twenty centuries ago, a host of angels announced the event to shepherds who were watching their flocks by night, proclaiming, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests” (Luke 2:14).
Yes, this was to be a time of peace for those whose hearts were right with God. In fact, before Jesus was even born, Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, spoke these prophetic words about the Messiah, calling him “the rising sun [who] will come to us from heaven to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace” (Luke 1:78–79).
Tragically, just days before he was put to death, Yeshua wept over the city of Jerusalem saying:
If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.
Luke 19:42–44
It happened just as he said it would. Our holy city was ransacked by the Romans in 70 c.e., and tens of thousands of Jewish lives were lost. Yes, the Messiah did come to bring peace, but as a people, we missed the opportunity to receive him as our King, and we have been suffering the consequences ever since. Should we fault Jesus, our righteous Prophet and Savior who warned us in advance, or should we fault those of our forefathers who failed to listen to him? The sad fact is we missed our time of peace.
“Hold on!” you say. “What about Jesus’ own words? What about the fact that he himself said he did not come to bring peace but a sword? How do you explain that?”
Let’s take a look and see exactly what Jesus said, remembering his words we just cited: “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes” (Luke 19:42). He offered peace, but we missed the opportunity, resulting in great calamity for our people, our land, and our city (Jerusalem). Yet none of this caught Jesus by surprise. He knew he would be rejected and killed, and he knew many of his followers would suffer a similar fate, warning them about this repeatedly.
On one occasion, after telling his disciples “that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life,” he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it” (Matt. 16:21, 24–25). In other words, “I’m not the only one who’s going to die!” If the Master would be rejected, his servants would also be rejected:
If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember the words I spoke to you: “No servant is greater than his master.” If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also. They will treat you this way because of my name, for they do not know the One who sent me.
John 15:18–21
It was in a similar context that Yeshua made his famous—and quite ironic—statement that he had not come to bring peace but rather a sword, simply meaning that the effects of his coming would not bring earthly peace but rather a sword of separation. That is the plain and unmistakable meaning of his words. Just look at the extended context:
I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. Be on your guard against men; they will hand you over to the local councils and flog you in their synagogues. On my account you will be brought before governors and kings as witnesses to them and to the Gentiles… .
Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death. All men will hate you because of me, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved… .
A student is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master. It is enough for the student to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master. If the head of the house has been called Beelzebub [meaning “the devil himself”], how much more the members of his household! …
Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn “a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household” [Micah 7:5–6]. Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.
Matthew 10:16–18, 21–22, 24–25, 34–38
No honest person reading these words could question for a moment what Yeshua was saying: His servants would not be the ones taking up the sword. Rather, the sword would be taken up against them in the form of persecution, family separation, imprisonment, and death. Any other interpretation of the Messiah’s teaching here is simply impossible.
To reiterate: Jesus was not telling his followers that they would be putting people to death by the sword, he was warning them that they would be put to death by the sword! 90 Rather than being the persecutors—no true follower of Jesus would violently persecute another human being—the Messiah’s people have been the persecuted, right to this very hour.
Think back to the Messiah’s first followers, men such as Peter (his Aramaic nickname was Kepha, rock), Thomas (Greek for the original Aramaic Thoma), and Paul (whose Hebrew name was Saul). What happened to these men? All of them were killed for their faith! According to the traditions we have, Peter was crucified upside down for following Jesus (he requested that he be crucified in this fashion, since he didn’t feel worthy of being crucified in the same manner as was Yeshua); Thomas was speared to death after preaching for years in India; and Paul was beheaded by Nero. (And remember: If Paul had continued his career as a budding, Rabbinic leader, he could have enjoyed a relatively peaceful life. Instead, he was treated like a criminal because of his faith in Jesus the Messiah.) Such was the pattern for several centuries, and that’s why Paul could write that “everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Tim. 3:12).
The Messiah’s followers were consistently persecuted for their faith, often laying down their lives as martyrs. In fact, our word martyr comes from the Greek word for witness (martys, martyros). This was because so many faithful witnesses for Yeshua sealed their testimonies with their deaths that the concepts of “witness” and “martyr” became almost interchangeable, quite an amazing phenomenon. (Think of joining a religion in which being loyal to your faith was synonymous with being killed for your faith! 91) Again, this gives a vivid picture of what the Messiah’s followers, both Jew and Gentile, suffered then and what they suffer to this day, still being sent out like sheep among wolves, still being the persecuted not the persecutors. 92
“But,” you ask, “what about the church’s violent persecution against our people? What about all the Jewish blood that has been spilled in Jesus’ name?”
Did you know that for several hundred years after the Messiah’s death and resurrection, there is not a single example in a single recorded source, be it a Jewish source, a Christian source, or a secular source, of a single Jewish person being put to death because he or she refused to believe the gospel? Not one. And yet, during this same time period, thousands of Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus were put to death or imprisoned or tortured for refusing to renounce their faith. 93 Once again, the conclusion is unmistakable: The religion of Yeshua was not a religion to be advanced by violence or coercion.
This pattern continues to this very day: Although the Messiah’s followers number approximately one billion people today, as many as one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand believers are killed for their faith every year. That is an overwhelming statistic! The fact is, we who follow Jesus are not the ones taking up swords against our enemies, imprisoning and torturing our religious opponents, and forcing them to convert under the penalty of death. Rather, it is the true followers of Jesus—despite our great numbers—who are despised, rejected, beaten, and martyred for their faith, just as Jesus said it would be.
Here are just a few examples of persecution against Christians today: In Africa, as many as one million Sudanese Christians have been killed by Sudanese Islamic extremists during the last decade of the twentieth century. They have been isolated in desert regions and starved, burned alive in church buildings, or brutally slaughtered in grotesque fashion. Christian men have been crucified, nursing mothers have had one breast chopped off, daughters have been sold into slavery or prostitution, while sons have been deported to Islamic schools. This is happening today. 94
In Egypt, Coptic Christians have been beaten, tortured, and abused in the most horrific ways. According to a report sent out via e-mail by Charles Colson on November 12, 1998,
During a government crackdown on Egypt’s Coptic Christian community two weeks ago, a thousand Christians were manacled to doors, then beaten and tortured with electric shocks to their genitals. Teenage girls were raped. Even babies were not spared. Mothers were forced to lay their infants on the floor and watch helplessly while police struck them with sticks. And in a scene right out of ancient Rome, Christian men were nailed to crosses. It was a grisly example of a grave problem in the Middle East: the persecution of Christians by Arab governments—including governments like Egypt that America supports financially.
Such scenes are increasingly common in Islamic nations, including Indonesia, where Christian survivors have lived to describe what it felt like to have their entire families butchered and raped in front of their eyes. 95
In communist countries such as China and Vietnam, Christians are still subject to imprisonment, beatings, and even death for “crimes” such as preaching the gospel, holding Christian meetings in homes, and baptizing new converts. The widow of a Vietnamese pastor who was shot to death by the government for his faith actually received a bill for the bullet!
Richard Wurmbrand tells the story of Victor Belikh, a Ukrainian Christian bishop who was kept in solitary confinement for twenty years, with only a straw mat put in his cell each night for seven hours. Every day, for seventeen hours, he was made to walk around the cell continuously, like a horse in a circus.
If he stopped or broke down, they threw buckets of water on him or beat him and he was forced to continue. After twenty years of such a regime, he was sent to forced labour in northern Siberia, where the ice never melts, for another four years.
I asked him, “How could you bear this suffering after the years in solitary confinement and a starvation diet?”
He replied by singing a song he composed: “With the flames of love’s fire that Jesus kindled in my heart, I caused the ice of Siberia to melt. Hallelujah!” 96
Such accounts of victory in the midst of unbelievable suffering are being written even as you read these words, as Christians around the world suffer for their faith, just as Jesus said they would. And so I reiterate: True Christians will always be the persecuted not the persecutors!
As for Jewish people being persecuted for rejecting the message of Jesus, no Jew has ever been killed for rejecting the message I am declaring to you. No Jew has ever been put to death for refusing the New Testament message of the love of God. None of our forefathers were put to death as a result of rejecting this good news I’m sharing with you. Not one! Our Jewish people have been persecuted, abused, expelled, and even killed for rejecting a counterfeit message of a counterfeit Christ preached by a counterfeit church—and there is blood on the hands of that church. 97 None of our people, however, have ever suffered persecution for rejecting the true message of the true Messiah preached by the true people of God. (I’ll discuss this further in the next answer.)
To state it again: For hundreds of years after Jesus came into this world, there was no such thing as violent, Christian persecution of Jews (although there was some Jewish persecution of fellow Jews who followed Yeshua). This horrific aberration came about only by a process of departing from the true Messianic faith: First, in the second and third centuries of this era, a number of Gentile Christian leaders began to express hostility toward the Jewish people for rejecting Jesus, departing from the explicit teaching of the Messiah and his emissaries. Then, in the fourth and fifth centuries, when the Roman Empire became officially “Christian,” church leaders with political power began to act prejudicially against the Jewish people, occasionally advocating acts of violence against the Jews (or specifically, the synagogues). Finally, when the church bore almost no resemblance to the New Testament faith (it was really a cultural, political monstrosity better called “Christendom” than “Christianity,” and it actually persecuted Christians who adhered to the New Testament writings), angry mobs—called Crusaders—began to turn against the Jewish people en masse.
The first church-inspired violent persecutions of Jewish people by Christians took place toward the end of the fourth century, but such actions were hardly regular occurrences. (One of the more notable actions took place in 388 c.e. in Callinicum, a small town in Mesopotamia, when, “The Christian population of the town, prompted by the bishop, set fire to the synagogue”—and were then defended strongly by Ambrose, a prominent church leader.) 98 Examples of forced conversion of Jews are almost nonexistent for the first one thousand years of church history. 99 (Remember also that there are examples of Jews forcing Gentiles to convert—and this meant forcing the men to be circumcised—as happened with John Hyrcanus and the Idumeans in the second century b.c.e.) 100
The first examples of sustained violent persecution are found in the Crusades, beginning at the end of the eleventh century, and they are a complete and total aberration, a total misrepresentation of what the gospel is really about. (We’ll take this up in even greater depth in the next answer, 2.7). Still, the fact that virtually no acts of violence were committed against the Jewish people by the church—even an apostate, false church—for several hundred years after Jesus’ coming is enormously significant. Allow me to give you this illustration.
Let’s say that the European settlers who came to America worked side by side with the Native Americans (incorrectly dubbed “Indians” by the settlers), never fighting a war with them or driving them off their land, but rather making and keeping peace treaties with them. Let’s say that this went on for 350 years—longer than the United States has existed—despite some misunderstandings, occasional hostile sentiments, and rare displays of ill will. Then, after this long period of relatively peaceful coexistence, let’s say that the distant descendants of the original settlers decided to reinterpret or even discard the peace treaties, launching a terrible persecution against the Native Americans. This would not tell you anything about the original settlers or about their peace treaties. Rather, it would tell you about those who departed from the pattern and commitment made by the original settlers. In the same way, it was only an aberrant, political church that could order people to believe and be baptized under the threat of death. This is a complete denial of the New Testament faith.
Returning, then, to the saying of Jesus that we have been discussing—that he didn’t come to bring peace but a sword—it’s also important to remember that it was not Christian teachers who misinterpreted his words about not bringing peace but a sword. Instead, it has been a few Jewish rabbis and anti-missionaries who have misrepresented and misused the Messiah’s teaching. 101 In fact, to the best of my knowledge, no recognized church leader ever used this verse as a justification for taking up the sword against nonbelievers.
What makes this all the more interesting is that Jesus was simply quoting the words of the Jewish prophet Micah written seven hundred years earlier: “For a son dishonors his father, a daughter rises up against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—a man’s enemies are the members of his own household” (Micah 7:6). And it was this very verse—in fact, this was the one and only verse—that was cited in the Mishnah (compiled around 200 c.e.) regarding the days preceding the advent of the Messiah. In other words, there was a Jewish interpretation current in the days of Jesus (and continuing for some time after that) associating family upheaval with the coming of the Messiah (m. Sotah 9:15). This was part of a scenario predicted by the rabbis in which the moral fabric of society would disintegrate in the days immediately preceding the advent of the Messiah.
Yeshua quoted this very same verse in the context of the family divisions that his coming would cause, divisions that would bring a “sword” of separation between father and son, mother and daughter, daughter-in-law and mother-in-law. This pattern continues in our day when, for example, a young Hindu woman renounces her idols and puts her faith in Jesus the Messiah. Her own mother may turn against her. In fact, similar situations have sometimes arisen when secular Jewish couples have become Orthodox, resulting in separation between parents and children (or even grandchildren). 102
That is all Jesus was teaching, a fact that is supported not only by honest biblical interpretation but by history as well.
“History?” you say. “I thought that history proved the opposite!”
To the contrary, as we just stated, there are hardly any examples of church-organized violence against the Jewish people—in other words, “the sword”—for the first one thousand years of church history, even though Christendom had long since forgotten its Jewish roots. We’ll take this up in more detail in the next answer.
I do, however, want to leave you with an important spiritual truth. Although Jesus did not establish world peace when he came to earth two thousand years ago, he is still rightly hailed as the “Prince of Peace” (see Isa. 9:6 [5]). He brings peace between man and God as people turn from their sins and receive cleansing and forgiveness, and he brings peace between man and man, as people who were once hostile enemies become part of the same spiritual family. That’s why he could say to his followers, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid” (John 14:27).
In spite of the sword of separation and persecution that often comes against the Messiah’s people, both Jew and Gentile, in him we have peace, and when the Messiah returns to establish his earthly kingdom and root out the wicked and the rebellious, the whole world will be filled with peace.
90 This was clearly articulated by Riggans, Yeshua ben David, 197: “What Jesus is really saying, then, is that when Jewish people become believers in Jesus they will end as victims of aggression. They will suffer the violence, not perpetrate it!”
91 To help grasp the significance of this, let’s say that so many Hasidic Jews were killed for their faith during a fifty-year span that, over a course of decades, the word for martyr in our language became hasid, as in, “Let me tell you how many of our people have been hasids for their faith!” That would be an equivalent linguistic phenomenon.
92 For the theological underpinnings behind this, cf. Joseph Ton (Tson), Suffering, Martyrdom, and Rewards in Heaven (Lanham, Md.: Univ. Press of America, 1997).
93 Similarly, many Rabbinic (i.e., Pharisaic) Jews were imprisoned, put to death, or tortured by the Romans for refusing to renounce their faith.
94 For heartrending details, see now Cal R. Bombay, Let My People Go! (Portland, Ore.: Multnomah, 1998). There is also a powerful video put out by Voice of the Martyrs, “Mission Sudan: Running to Help,” with some graphic footage.
95 On October 10, 1996, an anti-Christian mob of twenty attacked the family of an Indonesian Christian named Petrus Kristian, trapping his father, mother, sister, cousin, and a church worker in a house—and then burning them to death. Amazingly, he had this to say shortly after the tragedy: “In my opinion, because we have Jesus it is not difficult to be a Christian although there are many oppressions” (cited in “The Voice of the Martyrs,” July 1997, 7). That is the spirit of true Christianity.
96 Richard Wurmbrand, The Overcomers (Tunbridge Wells: Monarch, 1993), 18–19. This entire book is filled with similar examples of remarkable faith in the midst of persecution for the faith. While such examples are known to many evangelical Christians, I fear the average Jewish reader is unaware of such accounts, perhaps having read only of Jewish heroism in the midst of suffering.
97 It is this church that we previously referred to as “Christendom” in order to distinguish the worldly, political, and sometimes violent expression of Christianity from the real thing.
98 Marcel Simon, Verus Israel, trans. H. McKeating (London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1996), 226. His entire discussion on 224–33 is important.
99 For the conversion of the Jews in Minorca in 418, see Scott Bradbury, ed. and trans., Severus of Minorca: Letter on the Conversion of the Jews (New York: Oxford, 1996).
100 See Schürer et al., History of the Jewish People, 1:207, 538; 2:3–6, 10.
101 See Troki, Faith Strengthened, 173: “Jesus himself admitted, that his object was not to afford peace; for he says in Matthew x. 34, ‘Think not that I am come to send peace on earth, I came not to send peace, but a sword.’ ”
102 For more thoughts on this, cf. above, 1.9.
Brown, M. L. (2000). Answering Jewish objections to Jesus, Volume 1: General and historical objections. (116). Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books.