Who Killed Jesus? 10 Things Peter's Statements in Acts Reveal

Peter’s statements about who carried out the crucifixion deserve careful examination. Today, it is more important than ever. Some use these passages to claim that the Jews are no longer called; Dave Daubenmire referred to Jews recently as “Those Christ-haters.” And with great exasperation and frustration, he then explained that the blessings that God spoke to Abraham are no longer to the Jewish people. Daubenmire referred to people in Israel as “those people who hate Jesus.” An X user tweeted, “They hate Christ,” referring collectively to Jews. Provocateur and pseudo-pastor Dale Partridge wrote: “Christian America has an unusually close relationship with Christ-hating Jews.”

Is that what the New Testament projects? That the Jews are Christ-haters? That they are the enemy of Christians?

I believe anyone reading the Bible for the first time, with no prior opinion of Jewish people, would see clearly that it was the Jewish leaders — jealous of Jesus — who handed him over to Pilate to be crucified.

If that same first-time reader were told that the entire nation, and all future generations of Jews, were guilty, they would recognize the injustice immediately, since literally all of his followers were Jewish.

• They would ask about the 5,000 in Galilee who were miraculously fed — “Weren’t they Jewish?”

• They would point out that all of his apostles were Jewish, and that the crowds who welcomed him into Jerusalem, crying, “Hosanna” (“please save us”), were Jewish.

• And certainly the 3,000 who came to faith in Yeshua in Jerusalem on Pentecost were all Jews.

So let’s look closely at what Peter (who was Jewish) actually says about those who carried out the crucifixion.

1. It begins in Acts 2:23. Before assigning blame to anyone, Peter first states that Jesus’s death was ordained: “This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge” (Acts 2:23). Isaiah had said the same thing 700 years earlier: “Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin” (Is. 53:10a). Peter’s first word on Jesus’s death is that it was God’s plan — and that ought to remain our focus, too. Jesus himself made this clear: “No one takes my life from me; I lay it down freely” (John 10:18).

2. Peter does not mention only Jews. He says, “and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.” The Greek word for “wicked” is anomos — “lawless,” or in Jewish ears, “without Torah.” This is not merely my reading; it is the conclusion of scholars such as F. F. Bruce: “The ‘lawless men’ of verse 23 are the Romans, people living outside the Jewish law (see Romans 2:14).”[1] Ben Witherington agrees: Luke “speaks in 23b of Jesus being ‘killed by the hands of those outside the law,’ clearly non-Jews.”[2]

3. In Acts 4:27, as the believers pray, they assign blame broadly: “Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed.” Notice that Peter limits Jewish involvement to those “in this city.” Even in Acts 2, his address is to “Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem” — though he also says “men of Israel” (v. 22). Scholar Christopher Persaud points out that the location itself makes a nationwide indictment implausible:

Additionally, the Praetorium of the Antonio Fortress, where Jesus’ trial took place, could not accommodate more than 100–200 people at one time. It is therefore markedly unlikely the crowd that cried for Christ’s blood to fall upon them and their children, as recorded in Matthew 27:25, could have encompassed the entire Jewish nation.[3]

Some scholars, such as John Dominic Crossan, put the number at no more than a dozen.[4] Remember, this was 6 a.m., when most people were still sleeping. What we have often imagined as a massive crowd calling for Jesus’s death may have been a few dozen false witnesses at most — certainly not more than a couple hundred.

What is clear is that a small group led by the ruling council carried this out, while the vast majority of Israel’s population had no idea it was even happening — and it happened with the complicit involvement of the Roman authorities. As Dr. Jon Weatherly puts it: “According to Luke, not all Jews are responsible for Jesus’ death, and not all those responsible are Jews.”

4. It is no surprise, then, that when Peter speaks directly to the Sanhedrin, his language sharpens: “You nailed Jesus to a cross, but God raised him from death” (Acts 4:10). This is the most direct language we hear from Peter, and here he names no one else — not the rest of Israel, not the people of Jerusalem, not Herod, Pilate, or the Gentiles. He uses the Prophetic You, as Nathan did with David: “You are the man!” (2 Sam. 12:7).

The shift between Acts 4:10 (addressing the leaders directly) and Acts 4:27 (the prayer that names Herod, Pilate, and others) reflects two different rhetorical contexts. Why the difference? Because without Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin, Jesus would not have been crucified. Others played a role, but this group instigated the process. Peter’s direct address to the Sanhedrin makes theological and rhetorical sense: he is confronting those who held actual authority and decision-making power over Yeshua’s fate — not Jews like blind Bartimaeus, the woman with the issue of blood, or the multitudes of sick and lame he healed, but a small group of leaders in Jerusalem. But in other statements, he includes, “Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles” (Acts 4:27).

5. Referring back to the Prophetic You: This is a standard Hebraic prophetic idiom — the same device by which later generations are addressed as “you” for the golden calf or the wilderness rebellions. Israel functions here as a covenant entity, indicted through its representative leadership.

Nor was the crowd a spontaneous gathering of people wandering Jerusalem in the early morning hours. Christopher Persaud writes that:

“The chief priests and elders, who persuaded the crowd to demand Jesus’ death, probably selected a special group of people to support their perverted agenda. Such people quite likely included impostors, false witnesses, and embellishers of the truth.”[5] 

This group of partisan sycophants acted in the nation’s name without the nation’s knowledge or consent. That is not collective guilt. As Raymond Brown puts it, “The cries of the crowd against Jesus in the Gospel accounts are mob pressure on the prefect, not the voice of a recognized jury.”[6]

Consider an analogy: if I said, “The US lost to Belgium in the World Cup,” someone could rightly respond, “I didn’t lose to Belgium — I’m not on that team. I don’t even like soccer!” And yet the team represents the country. That is how this idiom normally functions: as inclusion and identity, not indictment. When the prophets do use “we” as indictment (“we have sinned”), the purpose is to spur repentance and brokenness — not to assign blame for the actions of people the speaker has never met, many of them long dead.

Acts 2 actually uses “you” for both inclusion and indictment in the same passage — indicting for the crucifixion while calling the hearers to repentance and baptism. What later antisemitic readings did was strip away everything but the accusation, discarding the invitation to repentance that gave the accusation its meaning. And we should not forget: in Scripture, guilt is passed on to three or four generations, but blessing is passed on to a thousand (Ex. 20:6; Deut. 5:10).

Augustine wrote:

“But as we say to the Jews, ‘You killed Christ,’ although it was their parents who did so, so these persons shall grieve that they in some sort did what their progenitors did” — although “those that receive the spirit of mercy and grace, and believe, shall not be condemned with their impious parents, yet they shall mourn as if they themselves had done what their parents did” (City of God, Book 20, ch. 30, alluding to Zechariah 12–13).

Even though Augustine here seems to extend blame to all Jews living in Jesus’s time — a conclusion I don’t accept — he still recognizes that later generations bear no guilt of their own; at most they grieve what their ancestors did. It is the posture of Abigail pleading with David for the sins of her foolish husband Nabal: she was not guilty, but she belonged to his household, and so her plea meant something.

It’s not unlike how we Messianic Jews pray today. If we say, “Forgive us for rejecting Jesus,” people understand what we mean. We don’t reject Jesus — we love him. But we identify with the majority of Jewish people who have rejected him, and we cry out in intercession on their behalf, not with blame. That is not collective guilt; it is identification for the sake of intercession.

6. How, then, could Jews who loved Jesus be guilty of his murder? Clearly, Peter never intended to imply that every Jewish person alive at the time was complicit in the plot to kill Jesus. The Gospel writers record that the religious leaders arrested him at night precisely because they feared the ordinary Jewish crowd (am ha’aretz) — and they feared that crowd because the people loved Jesus. Matthew 26 and Mark 14 both say the leaders avoided arresting him during Passover for fear of provoking a riot among the people. The average Jewish person was not in on this plan and did not even know of it. Similarly, Matthew 21:46 says the leaders held back from arresting him because the crowds believed he was a prophet. They were afraid of the Jewish majority that loved him and held him in high regard.

7. Peter is a Jew speaking to Jews. It is an in-the-family conversation — the classic style of the Hebrew prophets, internal covenantal self-critique aimed at the addressed community’s own repentance. The moment Gentile Christians, centuries later, pick this passage up as warrant to treat an unconnected people as guilty, the speaker’s role has shifted from insider-prophet to outsider-accuser, and the whole moral logic of a prophetic confrontation collapses.

Here is the difference: the prophet longs for the people’s repentance. The Church, across much of its history, offered the Jewish people accusation followed by punishment instead. (See the Ecclesia and Synagoga sculptures at Strasbourg Cathedral, which depict the Synagogue as blind and the Church as seeing — a fitting emblem for a history in which, on Valentine’s Day 1349, some 2,000 Jews were murdered in Strasbourg by Christians.)

Paul’s word to Gentiles was to provoke Israel “to jealousy” (Rom. 11:11) — not to accuse or replace. He went out of his way to insist that the Romans understand that God had not rejected Israel (Rom. 11:1), and that Israel remained called (Rom. 11:29). And he warned sternly against many of the attitudes we see today, stated in the beginning of this blog (Rom. 11:18-22).

Instead, he wanted the Gentile believers to understand that God had hardened Israel temporarily until the full number of Gentiles come in. For their benefit, Israel was blinded.

8. Judgment can fall on the whole because of the sin of the representative. Luke’s focus rests on the Sanhedrin, which was both responsible for handing Jesus over to the Romans and served as the legal representative of the people. Weatherly notes: “It remains possible that by focusing on Jerusalem and the Sanhedrin, Luke assigns responsibility to entities which represent the entire Jewish people.” Judgment can still fall on a people because of their leaders’ decisions, even when the people themselves are not personally guilty. All of Israel suffered on October 7th because of the sin and failures of a relative few in leadership — not because the nation as a whole bore personal guilt.

9. Jesus himself said it would be the chief priests and the scribes who would condemn him to death and hand him over to the Gentiles (Matt. 20:18–19). He does not say “the Jews” would do this. So Jesus himself does not cast collective blame on the entire Jewish people — which would be strange indeed, since he was speaking to Jewish people, as one of them.

10. John’s Gospel is the one place where the phrase “the Jews” (Greek: hoi Ioudaioi) appears with the kind of frequency that has, historically, done the most damage — read in isolation and centuries removed from its context, it can sound like blanket condemnation. But John was himself a Jew writing about other Jews for a community that included Jews, and the term does not carry one flat meaning throughout his Gospel. In most of the passages describing conflict over Jesus, hoi Ioudaioi refers to a specific group: the Judean religious authorities in and around Jerusalem — the same chief priests, scribes, and Pharisees named explicitly elsewhere — not the Jewish people as an ethnicity or a nation. John also uses the same phrase neutrally and even positively elsewhere in his Gospel: to describe Jewish feasts, Jewish customs, and individual Jews who believe in Jesus, including “many of the Jews” who come to faith (John 11:45; 12:11). Read across the whole Gospel rather than in isolated verses, John’s usage lines up with what we have already seen in Peter and in the Synoptics: responsibility rests with a specific, named, empowered leadership — not with a people.

Conclusion

Taken together, these ten points tell a consistent story: Peter never lays the crucifixion at the feet of the Jewish people as a whole. Blame falls on a specific, named leadership, acting alongside Roman authority, for a death which Scripture says God himself ordained. The Prophetic “You” was never meant to indict a nation across the centuries — it was meant to call a covenant people to repentance and restoration, the very thing Peter offers in the same breath in which he accuses. Nearly two thousand years of reading it otherwise has cost the Jewish people dearly. It’s time we let Peter’s own words settle the question, and instead of assigning collective blame, we can contend for the salvation of the Jewish people, as Paul had hoped.

[1] F. F. Bruce, Acts: Bible Study Commentary (Nashville, TN; Bath, England: Kingsley Books, 2017), Ac 2:22–36.

[2] Ben Witherington III, The Acts of the Apostles: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998), 145.

[3] Christopher H. K. Persaud, Israel against All Odds: Anti-Semitism from Its Beginnings to the Holocaust Years (volume I) (Cambridge, OH: Christian Publishing House, 2019).

[4] John Dominic Crossan, “Crowd control: A critique of The Passion of the Christ,” The Christian Century, March 23, 2004, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2004-03/crowd-control.

[5] Christopher H. K. Persaud, Israel against All Odds: Anti-Semitism from Its Beginnings to the Holocaust Years (volume I) (Cambridge, OH: Christian Publishing House, 2019).

[6] Raymond E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah and 2: From Gethsemane to the Grave, a Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels, vol. 1 (New York; London: Yale University Press, 1994), 721.