ancient and modern judaism

There’s a couple of things here.
Firstly; that doesn’t resound an overt antisemitic charge. In Hebrew law, a sin (a moral wrong against another) is considered inherited through the family - think of this much the same as the Japanese idea of family honor.

So IF (I’ll get to this in a moment) this was indeed an account of what a bunch of Hebrew people said, then they would have been referring to their specific selves present at the court; not all Hebrew people inherently by proxy of race.

Now, I’ve commented on this many times in the past, but Matthew post-21 is pretty suspect as the grammar shifts and uses terms and structures that we don’t see in the main body of Matthew.
I used to state that I considered 21 through 25 suspect, but after investigating 26 on further, I see more patterns relating grammatically in everything after 21 with itself than with the rest of Matthew.

For just a very simple example, take the word αἵματος (keep in mind, this is not the full extent of my argument, but a brief example).
This term only exists in Matthew after Chapter 23, except for chapter 16 which is a chapter where I’ve previously reported seeing suspicious grammatical changes that are unique to just that chapter and the post-21 sections of Matthew.

That probably isn’t all that convincing in itself, but also, again attempting to be a bit brief here, if you look at the overall grammatical flow after 21 on, the amount of nominative used after 21 is far larger than prior to the ending sections of Matthew.
There are some uses of the nominative in Matthew previously; indeed, and there are times for using it.
However, after 21, it takes up almost 2/3rds of the casing.

Along with this, consider the following verse count per Chapter:

Chapter | Verses 1 | 25 2 | 23 3 | 17 4 | 25 5 | 48 6 | 34 7 | 29 8 | 34 9 | 38 10 | 42 11 | 30 12 | 50 13 | 58 14 | 36 15 | 39 16 | 28 17 | 27 18 | 35 19 | 30 20 | 34 21 | 46 22 | 46 23 | 39 24 | 51 25 | 46 26 | 75 27 | 66 28 | 20

Now, if I ignore the first 3 chapters (which are very small by comparison; and there’s some issues there that cause question of being part of early Matthew texts), then the average from 4 to 20 is an average of nearly 37 verses per chapter, but when we look at 21 through 28, then the average is nearly 49 verses per chapter.

So, first of all, my position on that section is that it doesn’t appear to me to be something that was part of the early Matthew texts (I didn’t even comment on the difference theologically between these sections).
Now, these later sections do appear in fragmented format by the early 3rd c CE, so they were clearly important to some factions by then, but there is considerable reason to be skeptical regarding the uniformity or addition of these sections to what was already present.

For instance, the section you cite clashes with Matthew 15 pretty heavily if we understand Matthew 27 to be claiming that the Jews are to be cast down, isolated, and persecuted.

My take on things is that it was an addition that came very early, and wasn’t intended to state an antisemitic tone, but instead was added to mark the point of moral judgement that becomes a rather large focus of only the post-21 sections of Matthew.

My conjecture is that without that section there is a bit of a problem in that Pilate is seen as sentencing and cannot be cleared of fault unless some other group takes the fall. The motive for wanting such could be to attempt to mitigate any prosecution by the Romans for having texts which slander the regional leader.
The easiest thing to do in such a case is point the finger at the ambiguous crowd that was present and tie it up with the Law of moral wrong against others transferring through the family line until the balance is restored or payed off.

Another reason, as well, that this section is odd by comparison to the rest is that it just leaves the fault laying open on the table to no one in specific; just the crowd present.
The crowd is a very odd choice because the crowd wasn’t the group who charged Jesus in the community.
There lacks the accountability of all of the Hebrew court sections in this blame; again, a reasonably smart thing to do if you didn’t want political factions chasing after you for your worship of this new following, and your group still resided somewhat in this region, or Egyptian lands (and actually it would make even more sense in the Egyptian lands by those who ran South, as there it would not be popular to blame Pilate, but if you were attempting to continue the Jewish friendly approach for gaining new adherents, you wouldn’t want to point fingers at their politically leading factions either).

So Jay, are you saying that the blame for the Jews killing Jesus was a later add in to Matthew, in an effort to cozy up to the Romans?

It was more a multiple part answer, so I’ll have to say, “No”, but in explaining that answer, you’ll see that it’s also capable of being a, “Yes”.

I can’t answer your citational question without bringing up what I know about the textual criticism and the related anthropological considerations, but this is also why I made it a two-part answer where the first looks at just anthropological considerations assuming that the section is part of the very early texts.

In that regard, my answer is in 2 points.

  1. That the Hebrew Law held sin to be wrong against another, and the stain of that hung onto the family (much like the famous Japanese’s concepts regarding family honor).
    If the statement was being expressed as the viewpoint of the witnessing population of Hebrews at the sentencing, then those who were responsible for calling for the conviction would be stained with the perceived sin mentioned; not all Hebrew peoples.

This wouldn’t be seen as something which conveyed the idea that all Hebrew peoples were responsible for his death and were in need of oppression.

However, this same section is where a lot of the Crusade era antisemitic theological arguments came from because they did choose to render it without anthropological consideration and adapted it to apply to their current standing of wanting to rid the Jewish and Muslim population from the Holy Lands.

So there’s that part of the answer.

  1. The rest was me stating that there’s reason to take note of a difference in this section regarding authorship and cultural community.
    As a sub-part to this, in reference to what motive there would be for a secondary author to write in something like item 1 would be understood as, I offered anthropological considerations of the era which would match rather sensibly and culturally with the need for those actions.
    In this part, the answer would be yes, but no…the No is because I’m not saying they were exactly pandering up to the Romans (though that is one possibility), but instead that there is the possibility that this could have been part of the portions added post-Alexandria where some Hebrews fled to, and in so doing, they would be interested in two things: recruiting more fellow Hebrews into their belief, and refraining from offending national cultural politics (they just ran away from Judea, avoiding Roman oppression) and as Egypt was an ally with Rome, there would be sensible motive to mitigate the overt painting of Pilate as a villain and put him over a bit as just a man who lacked control to stop the events from happening.
    Notice, for instance, that Pilate washes his hands (something that doesn’t happen in Mark) in Matthew; this is a noted Hebrew ritual ‘bathing’ ceremony for cleansing before a sacrifice.
    Mark doesn’t have this in it; it just explains that Pilate was hesitant, but that’s a very far cry different from Matthew’s elaborate ritual offering image.

So, yes, I offer that interpretation in 2, as well as the Egyptian possibility, but, no, I’m not hanging on that for an answer; instead, my direct form is item 1.

nytimes.com/2013/10/01/us/po … 31001&_r=0

Like my friend who was raised an orthodox Jew in England, and now has nothing to do with it, nor believes in God in any real way.