The last few decades in America are one of the few times and places in the history of post-Exilic Judaism that a Jew could go through life without ever being accused of killing God. The rise of secularism, and the shocked conscience of post-Holocaust Christianity, have made the accusation of deicide taboo. Even the Catholic Church has repented of its traditional depiction of the Jews as Christ killers. In the 1965 encyclical Nostra Aetate, drafted by the Second Vatican Council and promulgated by Pope Paul VI, the Church declared that “what happened in [Christ’s] passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.”

It is this background of precarious tolerance, this temporary reprieve from millennia of slander, that made the Mel Gibson film “The Passion of the Christ” seem so luridly threatening to Jews, and to some Christians. By reviving, in especially gruesome and sadistic form, the charge that the Jews were and are directly responsible for Jesus’s death, Mr. Gibson proved that the oblivion with which that accusation has been covered is merely temporary. The scandal of the film, indeed, lies in its ostentatious faithfulness to the text of the Gospels. Mr. Gibson knew, and forced the world to acknowledge, that the accusation of deicide is not an embarrassing blemish on the surface of Christianity that might be removed through the ecumenical equivalent of cosmetic surgery. It is at the very heart of the Christian faith, as we see from the Gospel of Matthew:

Pilate saith unto them, What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ? They all say unto him, Let him be crucified. And the governor said, Why, what evil hath he done? But they cried out the more, saying, Let him be crucified. When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.

In “Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion From the Bible to the Big Screen” (Oxford, 336 pages, $29.95), Jeremy Cohen, a professor at Tel Aviv University, offers fine rational and historical arguments why we need not take this Gospel as gospel. Even without disputing that Jesus was divine, Mr. Cohen writes, one can dispute the versions of his story offered by the Gospel writers, who lived decades after the events they recount. The Gospels are not history but myth — which, Mr. Cohen hastens to add, “does mean a falsehood. Quite the opposite, a myth is a story that expresses the ultimate truths and values of a community.” For reasons specific to the Gospel writers and their audience — Christians living in Judea after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans — the “myth” of deicide became such an “ultimate truth,” serving to differentiate Christianity from Judaism, and Christians from Jews. But this does not mean that Jesus felt the same way, or that Matthew’s version of the Passion is what actually took place.

Anyone likely to read a book such as “Christ Killers” would probably agree. The problem is that such a sophisticated approach to hermeneutics and history cannot be expected from the hundreds of millions of people who read the New Testament as literal truth. To such believers, when the Jews say “his blood be on us, and on our children,” it means exactly that. And for most of European history, as Mr. Cohen documents in this wide-ranging and sobering study, the belief that the Jews killed Christ — and that their descendants, down to the present, share the blame — was universal in Christendom.

Indeed, Mr. Cohen’s achievement is to show how very fertile the belief in deicide has been: how it has inspired theologians and lynch mobs, saints and propagandists, painters and poets. “Christ Killers” is designed as an accessible survey, and one might wish for a more thorough and focused treatment of the subject. But by collecting the most illustrious and notorious exponents of the Christkiller myth, Mr. Cohen gives the reader a sense of its tenacity and scope.

Already in the 2nd century C.E., we find a long poem by Melito of Sardis, “On the Pascha,” devoted to the theme:

What strange crime, Israel, have you committed?
You dishonored him that honored you;
you disgraced him that glorified you;
you denied him that acknowledged you;
you disclaimed him that proclaimed you;
you killed him that made you live.

As Christian theology evolved, and as the conditions of life in Christendom changed, the deicidal imagination took successive new forms. Throughout the Dark Ages, the authority on the subject was Saint Augustine, who first enunciated the idea that presentday Jews, the descendants of the original Christ killers, should be preserved as specimens of the error that Christians have renounced. In a famous image whose implications Mr. Cohen expertly unpacks, Augustine wrote that the Jews are like a blind man looking into a mirror. They cannot see themselves rightly, but others can see them; what’s more, the sighted — that is, the Christians — can confirm that they are able to see by comparing themselves with the blind.

For Augustine and his followers, then, the Jews killed God out of ignorance, and they should survive as examples of ignorance. But in the High Middle Ages, Augustine’s hostile vision of the Jews gave way to an actually murderous one. For Thomas Aquinas, it was no longer credible that the Jews rejected Christ out of ignorance that he was God. Rather, “they beheld the blatant signs of his divinity, but they corrupted them out of hatred and jealousy of Christ.” This principle had dangerous implications for contemporary Jews. If they were not simply ignorant, but malicious — if they killed Jesus not because he was not God, but precisely because he was — then they themselves had to be uniquely evil. It is no coincidence, Mr. Cohen shows, that this theological evolution went hand in hand in with the emergence of the blood libel — the popular and durable accusation that Jews kill Christian children in order to drink their blood. After all, people who could murder God were capable of anything.

Mr. Cohen goes on to trace the permutations of the Christ-killer idea in popular and high culture. He shows how it informed popular tracts about cases of blood libel — such as “The Life and Miracles of Saint William of Norwich,” which revealed that a world council of Jews met every year in Narbonne to decide where the next year’s child murder would take place. He traces its influence in the scripts of passion plays and the iconography of altarpieces. He even shows how Jews themselves, from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, responded to the deicide accusation by reinterpreting and reappropriating the image of Jesus for themselves.

Finally, Mr. Cohen reminds us that the hoariest medieval libels have found new life in the Arab world, where they are happily adduced to prove the unchanging wickedness of the Jew. This durability is what makes the Christkiller myth so menacing. Even in our own age, there is no escaping it; it lurks in the pages of the Gospels like a time bomb, always ready to be set off. Mr. Cohen’s book, with its chronicle of 2,000 years of hatred, leaves the reader with an unhappy suspicion that, as long as the Gospels are taken to be the literal word of God, Jews and Christians might never be permanently reconciled.

akirsch@nysun.com