The Revised Common Lectionary, the three-year cycle of Scripture readings used in liturgical churches around the world, may be revised to address concerns about anti-Jewish bias, particularly in texts from the Gospel of John and the Acts of the Apostles.
The Consultation on Common Texts, the North American ecumenical body that developed and stewards the lectionary, released a set of proposed changes on April 11, including modifications to the Passion readings on Good Friday and Palm Sunday, different Old Testament readings for Eastertide, and an alternative track of readings from the Book of Acts in Ordinary Time.
If approved after a three-year trial period that starts in Advent, this would be the first major revision of the lectionary since its launch in 1994. A lightly adapted form of the Revised Common Lectionary has been the Episcopal Church’s official lectionary since 2006, and is printed in the Book of Common Prayer. The lectionary is also used by Anglican churches in the British Isles, Canada, Australia, and Hong Kong.
“This use of the word ‘Jew’ in John and Acts has contributed to a common misreading of the Gospel story—that Jesus died because of the behavior of non-Christian Jewish people, rather than because of the decisions by Roman officials or the sinfulness of all humanity,” the consultation said.
“This misreading has in turn been used to support discrimination and violence against Jews. It still inspires anti-Jewish actions to this day. This is something for which Christians need to repent. We must acknowledge how we and members of the church before us have discriminated against and mistreated Jews. We need to seek ways to amend our personal and communal understanding of Scripture that shapes our attitudes and behavior toward the Jewish people.”
The decision reached during the CCT’s annual meeting at the headquarters of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in Louisville, Kentucky, has been more than a decade in the making. A 2012 petition asked that the body consider changes to the Holy Week readings, and the consultation established a five-member working group on Anti-Semitism and the Lectionary in 2023.
For the Rev. Dr. Amy Schifrin, the only Jew who served on the working group, the project has also been deeply personal.
“For more than 50 years, I have been a confessing Christian, and in almost every church to which I was a member, or where I served, or at a seminary, I experienced anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism …. I came to understand that nobody really wanted a Jew in the pew. Well, we could say that nobody really wanted that Jew that was on the cross, either, but Jews are considered somehow other,” she told TLC.
The liturgical scholar and president emeritus of the North American Lutheran Seminary said her grandparents fled Russian pogroms, many of which began on Good Friday, sparked by preaching on the biblical accounts of Christ’s Passion. She also suggests that these texts, and related assumptions that Jews have been replaced by Christians as God’s people, may shape violence against Jews today.
“I would hope that this work would help those pastors, teachers, and lay leaders who really want to explore how supercessionism and replacement theory leads to anti-Judaism, and then anti-Semitism,” Schifrin said.
“There is a line; a supersessionist text or a supersessionist lectionary—that which leaves out the Old Testament, which has been the case for much of Christian history—that leads to other places. An intra-Jewish argument in the first century becomes my old governor from Pennsylvania having his house arsoned on the first night of Passover,” she said, referring to the April 13 attack on the home of Governor Josh Shapiro, an observant Jew who had celebrated the Seder with his family the previous evening.
The Rev. Al Zadig, a retired priest from Rhode Island—and, like Schifrin, a Jewish Christian—said he has worked with several lectionaries in more than five decades of ministry. He agrees that the time for such changes has come.
“Especially now, with the Hamas horrors still fresh in many of our minds, and the plight of Palestinians in Gaza generating new waves of hatred not only for Israel and Israelis, but Jews in general, it seems to me that addressing the misuse of biblical texts and resulting teaching of bigotry needs to move from ‘a good thing to do—someday’ to a high priority,” he said.
John’s Passion
The consultation offers a historical overview of the way the Passion narratives have been interpreted in anti-Jewish ways and makes some general suggestions about how preachers and teachers should handle these important texts.
Especially when the texts are used during Lent and Holy Week, consultation members urge preachers to “acknowledge with confession and lament” the misuse of these texts to incite violence and discrimination against Jews. They also suggest using Bible translations like The NET Bible and the New International Version that translate the term the Jews in a variety of ways with attention to context. When the Passion is read dramatically, they suggest, the whole congregation should read verses like Matthew 27:25 that attribute responsibility about the death of Jesus to the Jewish people.
The proposal drafters are especially concerned about the use the Jews in the Passion narrative of John’s gospel (18:1-19:42), which the current lectionary directs to be read in its entirety on Good Friday.
In contrast to the nuance shown in the other gospels about different groups within Judaism at the time of Jesus, in John, they say, “the close connections of Christians to other Jewish groups are generally ignored.”
“John’s Gospel was written in the context of the beginnings of the parting of ways between church and synagogue a half-century after the lifetime of Jesus and often uses the word ‘Jew’ to refer to those Jews who opposed Jesus’ teaching,” they argue.
In place of the full Passion narrative from John, the proposals suggest using only John 19:1-42, a move that eliminates several verses in which Jesus’ captors and the hostile crowds are described as the Jews.
Alternatively, they suggest using the full Passion reading from the Gospel of Mark (14:1-15:47), in which “the term ‘Jew’ is not applied collectively to non-Christian Jewish groups.” In Year B, when the Markan Passion would ordinarily be read on Palm Sunday, they suggest that John 19:1-42 be used on Palm Sunday instead.
The consultation’s suggestion about using Bible translations with more nuanced treatment of the Jews, and its emendation of the Passion reading from John, are included in the Episcopal Church’s Alternative Liturgy for Good Friday, which General Convention approved for use throughout the church with local bishops’ approval.
The alternative liturgy’s author, the Rev. Dr. Dan Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, the Kraft Family Professor and Director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College, served as a consultant on the consultation’s lectionary revision proposals, and commended the precision of the proposals’ description of the complexity of Judaism in the time of Jesus.
He says the church needs to ask about these troubling sections of the Passion narratives, “Do we want to keep on saying that in church, when we know the historical problems of that claim, when we know the power of that language that, to this day, continues to be used by anti-Semites?”
Old Testament Readings in Easter Season
A second set of proposals discards the Revised Common Lectionary’s assignment of a reading from the Acts of the Apostles instead of an Old Testament lesson during most of Easter season. The consultation calls it “a potentially harmful practice” at variance with the Church’s ancient traditions of interpreting God’s work in Christ.
“For Christians not to read from texts shared with Jews during any season of the year is inherently problematic. God has exercised mercy and has worked deliverance and salvation throughout the biblical story apart from the specific events and dynamics of the passion. Indeed, the early followers of Jesus and the gospel writers, in particular, learned how to interpret Jesus’ life and death as redemptive precisely by looking at what God had been habituated to do with Israel,” they say.
The proposed changes eliminate most of the Acts readings in Easter Season. In their place, 18 Old Testament readings are suggested, each with an accompanying section of the Psalter. Schifrin said that on the principal feasts of the season—Easter Day, Ascension Day, and Pentecost—the current allowance for a choice between an Old Testament reading, a reading from Acts, and an Epistle reading would be preserved.
The 1979 Book of Common Prayer Lectionary, which predates the Revised Common Lectionary and is still used by some Episcopal congregations, also assigned an alternate Old Testament reading for each Sunday in Eastertide. These 18 readings, however, were chosen by the Church of Scotland and were recommended for use in 2010 by the English Language Liturgical Commission, a British and Irish sister organization to the Consultation on Common Texts.
On some Sundays, like the Fourth Sunday of Easter in all three years, they have clear thematic links to the lectionary’s other readings. In other cases, the connections are more obscure.
Thirteen of the 18 Old Testament readings were already in use in the Revised Common Lectionary on other Sundays, but five are entirely new to the lectionary. These are Proverbs 4:10-18, a meditation on the way of wisdom; Zechariah 10:1-12, God’s promise to rescue Israel from exile; Genesis 35:9-15, God’s renaming of Jacob as Israel; Jeremiah 10:1-10a, a call to scorn idols; and 2 Kings 7:1-16, an account of two hungry lepers’ discovery of Samaria’s deliverance from the Syrians.
Joslyn-Siemiatkoski said he was especially excited about this part of the consultation’s proposals. “The longer I pay attention to it, the odder it seemed to me that we go for seven weeks essentially saying the first canon has nothing to say to us about the hope of the resurrection,” he said.
He added that rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “If Christians really want to improve their relationship with the Jewish people, they need to come to love Torah as much as Jews do.”
“I think by expanding the scope of readings from the Hebrew Bible here, it helps the Episcopal Church and other churches that would use these readings to deepen their love for the scriptures,” Joslyn-Siemiatkoski said.
Schifrin said she was pleased that one of the new readings was from Proverbs, which is largely sidelined in the Sunday lectionary.
Acts in Ordinary Time
While largely eliminating readings from Acts in Easter season, the consultation’s proposals move many of the same readings to Ordinary Time, when they would be alternatives to the currently assigned Epistle readings. Seven readings from Acts are suggested for each year, on thematic tracks. The readings in Year A focus on Peter’s ministry, Year B on the life of the early church, and Year C on Paul’s ministry.
Fourteen of the 21 Acts readings use texts currently assigned to Eastertide, but five of them are eliminated from the lectionary. They include two texts that describe Jewish leaders acting with hostility toward leaders of the early church, Peter and John’s confrontation with the Sanhedrin (Acts 5:27-32), and the martyrdom of Stephen (Acts 7:55-60).
The cycle also includes seven new texts from Acts. These are the institution of the diaconate (Acts 6:1-7), Priscilla and Aquila’s instruction of Apollos (Acts 18:1-3, 18-21, 24-28), and five scenes from the ministry of St. Paul, including incidents during his missionary journeys (Acts 13:1-12, 17:1-12, and 21:17-26) and testimony from him during his trial in Caesarea and Rome (Acts 25:6-12, 26:24-32, and 28:14-20).
Because the new alternate lessons would fall during portions of the liturgical year when the Revised Common Lectionary already assigned alternate Old Testament lessons, a total of five readings (plus two Psalms) would be assigned to each of these Sundays. Lectionary users would need to pick three of the five for use on a given Sunday.
The placement of the alternative Acts readings aims to minimize disruption to the continuous reading of Epistles that predominates in that season. The Year B and Year C readings are in July and August, when they overlap with continuous readings from Ephesians and Colossians. Year A’s Acts readings are scheduled for the fall, when they overlap with continuous readings of Philippians and part of 1 Thessalonians. The final Sunday, Proper 26, is observed as All Saints’ Sunday in most Episcopal churches.
Joslyn-Siemiatkoski said he remains concerned about Acts 3:1-19 and 4:5-12, passages included in the proposed track for Year A in which Peter confronts the people of Jerusalem and Jewish leaders for their complicity in Jesus’ crucifixion (though neither uses the term the Jews).
The seven new texts, he said, offer an opportunity for “elevating Biblical literacy for the congregation. They will be exposed to a range of passages they would not typically encounter. It stretches the preacher as well.”
A Doxological Catechism?
Some preachers, though, are skeptical about the value of tinkering with a resource intended for long-term Christian formation.
“The changing of the lectionary so frequently seems itself problematic to me,” said the Rev. Geoffrey Mackey, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Parkersburg, West Virginia, and a former instructor in liturgy at Trinity Anglican Seminary in Ambridge, Pennsylvania.
“It hasn’t been quite 20 years since the [Revised Common Lectionary] officially replaced the 1979 lectionary. How formative is our liturgical life if we’re always re-forming it, rather than being formed by it? This is not, of course, an argument against reform. But it seems to me that we should give things time to see how they actually form us before we make drastic changes,” he said.
Joslyn-Siemiatkoski says that his experience using Good Friday liturgies attentive to concerns about anti-Judaism in different Episcopal churches over the last several years has shown him the pastoral value of changes like those suggested by the consultation.
“I do not think that most members or congregations themselves are anti-Jewish, or that they’re hearing anti-Jewish teaching or preaching. What I have come to discern is that for many people in North America, there are Jewish people that they care about,” he said.
Non-Christian Jews who participate in Episcopal services as musicians or Episcopalians who have Jewish relatives have been especially moved, in his experience.
“Pastorally, it is wise to attend to how we speak about Jews and Judaism, because in some ways, there are always Jews present, whether physically, relationally, or emotionally, for people in that congregation. The words land for them in a way different from other members of a congregation for whom that might not be true,” he said.
Schifrin agrees: “What we say still may carry some authority and how we can open up the text and exegete these texts, in ways that don’t support discrimination and violence against Jews, I think, is really important, not just for Jews, but for the lives of [Gentile] Christians, who are the majority.”
She said that she thinks of the lectionary as the Church’s “doxological catechism,” which elevates the importance of the texts selected for it.
“It’s where you learn, that’s where you are formed in faith, and give glory to God. … We all want people to hear God’s word and give thanks and then live this out.”
The Consultation on Common Texts, which is chaired by the Rev. Dr. Robert Prichard, longtime instructor in liturgy at Virginia Theological Seminary, is a remarkably diverse ecumenical body. Representatives from 23 North American churches participate, including the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod churches, and the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship, as well as a range of mainline Protestant churches. All North American churches that use the Revised Common Lectionary are encouraged to be involved in its work.
The consultation invites responses to its proposals throughout the three-year trial period that will begin on the First Sunday of Advent.
The Rev. Mark Michael is editor-in-chief of The Living Church. An Episcopal priest, he has reported widely on global Anglicanism, and also writes about church history, liturgy, and pastoral ministry.
