The Passion narrative supplied an easily weaponized Christkiller charge

Evidence

In the Good Friday mass, in the sermons that relate the Good Friday story from the Christian gospels, and in the narratives of the medieval passion plays, Jews play a central role in the death of Jesus. For those who wish to harness the emotion of the Passion for their own purposes, the charge that the Jews were the killers of Christ, the killers of the Son of God, has been easy to fabricate and manipulate. Words from the New Testament account of the condemnation of Jesus, such as “Let his blood be on us, and on our children” (Mt. 27:26) could be taken out of context and applied to all Jews, with devastating implications. — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 119

Categorization

• XREF: The Christkiller charge as a killing ritual parallels the reader’s curated material on scapegoating and ritual sacrifice.
• SHARE: The detail that European Jews stayed indoors during Easter week until World War II is a sharp contrast for someone studying ritualized violence.