Rome’s Own Contribution to the Neo-Judaizing Passover Popcockery

Sure, blame Darby and Scofield. But Roman Catholicism also had an important role to play in the ‘Happy Passover’ infatuation.

JD Hall, Insight to Incite, Apr 4, 2026

Every spring, Catholics and confessional Protestants unite in mutual exasperation at the evangelical circus of Christian seders, Hebrew Roots cosplay, and social media feeds full of “Chag Sameach” from people who couldn’t locate Leviticus with both hands and a concordance. The standard diagnosis points to Dispensationalism, and the diagnosis is mostly correct. But the full investigation reveals a second set of fingerprints on this dumb and novel tradition, and they belong to Rome.

Every spring, as reliably as the pollen count and the allergies that accompany it, my social media fills up with Roman Catholics pointing their fingers at the evangelical rubes, wishing each other “Chag Sameach” and congratulating themselves on having avoided the whole embarrassing “Happy Passover” mess. After all, that’s an evangelical malady. Not as a whole, thank God, most evangelicals don’t go full-Judaizer. But the invention of Dispensationalism in 1821 certainly led to the theological error that would one day have Christians pretending to be Jewish during Holy Week. There’s no avoiding that reality. 

Darby and Scofield, with their circus of prophecy charts and pretribulation rapture theology, planted this seed, and now we’re all drowning in its fruit. And they are not wrong. The whole Dual Covenant infrastructure that convinced millions of American evangelicals that the Jewish people occupy a special, parallel lane in God’s redemptive economy traces back to a Plymouth Brethren eccentric and his theological innovations of the 1830s. Catholics pointing at that lineage are identifying a real thing, and they aren’t making it up. 

As a Protestant, I feel like I want to apologize to the “TradCaths” for the doctrinal damage committed by Darby. And that’s silly, because most Protestants didn’t fall for Darby. It’s just that a very loud continent of American evangelicalism did fall for it, and they happen to own the evangelical media machine. Reformed or Confessional Protestants never did, so I have nothing to apologize for. I usually just point out that Darby got his views from a Jesuit named Ribera, to demonstrate nobody is perfect and move along. But as I write about the dangers of Judaizing theology, I get pelted by stones from Catholics for having been associated with a religious tradition in their eyes that is creating a heretical crisis right now.

So before the self-congratulation curdles entirely into smugness, it is worth asking a different question. If Dispensationalism built the kindling, who struck the match? Because while John Nelson Darby was busy inventing a theology that would eventually produce the Messianic seder circuit, the Christian Zionist lobby, and the annual spectacle of Mike Huckabee wishing the State of Israel a heartfelt Happy Passover on official U.S. Embassy letterhead, the Catholic Church was doing its own substantial work to make all of that culturally possible. The name of that work is Nostra Aetate, published October 28, 1965. And sixty years later, both the current Pope and the American evangelical with the kippah selfie owe it a debt of gratitude.

THE DOCUMENT 

Nostra Aetate, Latin for “In Our Time,” is the shortest of the sixteen documents produced by the Second Vatican Council. It is also, in terms of downstream cultural consequences, arguably the most consequential. The specific origins of the document trace back to a private audience in 1960 between Pope John XXIII and Jules Isaac, a French-Jewish historian and Holocaust survivor who had spent years documenting the role of Christian theological teaching in providing moral cover for antisemitism Jew-Hatred in Europe. Isaac wanted a formal reckoning and got one, though it took five drafts, considerable political opposition from Arab bishops who objected to any document that appeared to favor Zionism, and a final vote of 2,221 to 88 among the assembled bishops.

Theologically, the document demolished two foundational pillars of historic Christian teaching regarding Judaism. The first was the “deicide” charge, the collective guilt of the Jewish people for the crucifixion. The document declared that responsibility for Jesus’s death could not be charged against all Jews then living or against Jews today. The second is that it affirmed the continuing validity of God’s covenant with the Jewish people, declared “antisemitism” a sin against God, and called for mutual biblical and theological dialogue between Catholics and Jews. The Church that had spent two thousand years teaching that the Old Covenant was superseded and fulfilled in Christ suddenly announced that the covenant was still valid. It reaffirmed, as the ADL would later summarize approvingly, “the eternal covenant between God and the People of Israel.”

This is what the document says. And every Pope since Paul VI has not merely maintained it but built enthusiastically upon it. The first of the document’s claim was borderline accurate, in that it’s not the fault of someone what their ancestors did. But the second was heretical, because Jews maintain no Covenant promises or blessings outside of faith in Jesus. It is – in no uncertain terms – Dispensationalism without the silly framework. To phrase it another way, it’s the conclusion of Dispensationalism, without showing the homework. 

A SIXTY-YEAR LOVE AFFAIR

John Paul II, whose pontificate ran from 1978 to 2005, transformed the relationship between the Vatican and world Jewry in ways that would have been unrecognizable to any previous generation of Catholics. He visited the Great Synagogue of Rome in 1986, the first pope to do so, and referred to Jews there as “elder brothers in faith.” He wept at Auschwitz. He visited the Propaganda Retaining Wall in 2000 and tucked a handwritten prayer into its cracks. It was under his leadership that the Holy See and the State of Israel signed the Fundamental Agreement on December 30, 1993, establishing full diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the Jewish state for the first time in history. The agreement itself was widely described as the direct result of Nostra Aetate. The theological revolution of 1965 had, after a thirty-year incubation, produced a Zionist pope.

Francis continued that trajectory. He visited Israel on his first papal pilgrimage. He met repeatedly with Jewish leaders and consistently condemned “antisemitism.” He reiterates a Jewish Covenant with God that promised blessings without Christ.

The new Pope, Leo XIV, arrived in May of 2025 and immediately wrote personal letters to the Chief Rabbi of Rome and to the American Jewish Committee pledging to “continue and strengthen the dialogue and cooperation of the Church with the Jewish people in the spirit of Nostra Aetate.” In October 2025, he presided over the 60th anniversary commemoration of the document itself, joining religious leaders from more than a dozen faith traditions at the Colosseum for an interfaith appeal for peace, then delivering an evening address at the Vatican in which he declared that Nostra Aetate “takes a firm stand against all forms of antisemitism” and remained “highly relevant today.” Sixty years after Paul VI promulgated the document, the current occupant of the Chair of Peter was celebrating it as a living theological commitment.

Catholics pointing at Darby and Scofield might want to take a moment and do some introspection.

WHAT NOSTRA AETATE UNLEASHED

To understand how a Vatican document connects to the evangelical in your X feed wishing her followers “Chag Sameach,” you need to follow the cultural current downstream from 1965 and understand that cultural currents do not respect confessional boundaries.

The Messianic Jewish movement emerged in the United States between the 1960s and 1970s from the earlier Hebrew Christian movement, most prominently propelled through Jews for Jesus, founded in 1973 by Martin “Moishe” Rosen, a Conservative Baptist minister. What distinguished the Messianic movement from its Hebrew Christian predecessor was a fundamental inversion of identity. Where Hebrew Christians said, “we are Christians who happen to be Jewish,” the new Messianic Jews said, “we are Jews who believe in Jesus.” The Jewish noun became primary. The Christian modifier became secondary. That shift had enormous consequences because it positioned Jewish religious forms, including the Passover seder, as legitimate objects of Christian veneration and imitation rather than as fulfilled types that the New Covenant had superseded.

The 1967 Six-Day War had dramatically elevated Jewish identity and Israeli prestige among American evangelicals, who read Israel’s military victory as prophetic confirmation of Dispensationalist end-times expectations. The Charismatic Jesus Movement of the same era brought young, ethnically Jewish Baby Boomers into evangelical Christianity while the broader cultural currents of the 1970s encouraged ethnic and cultural pride rather than assimilation. All of that is the Dispensationalist contribution to the problem, and it is real and substantial.

But it did not operate in a vacuum. It operated in a world where, five years before Jews for Jesus was even founded, the most authoritative institutional voice in Christendom had formally declared that Judaism’s covenant was still valid, that supersessionism was a theological error, and that Christians should engage Jews in mutual dialogue as a positive religious obligation. Nostra Aetate did not create the Messianic movement, but it created the permission structure without which the Messianic movement’s central claim – that Jewish religious forms have ongoing theological validity for Christians – would have looked far more obviously like what it actually is. The Catholic dismantling of supersessionism was the cultural oxygen that allowed the Messianic fire to breathe.

THE CHRISTIAN SEDER PIPELINE

The practical transmission mechanism from these theological shifts into evangelical living rooms runs directly through the Christian seder. Since the 1970s, a growing trend of Christian groups has been creating their own Passover seders, initially as evangelistic tools aimed at Jewish converts but rapidly evolving into devotional practices for Gentile congregations with no Jewish members whatsoever. Jews for Jesus became the primary delivery vehicle, with its missionaries visiting churches approximately 35 times a year during the Passover-Easter season to demonstrate their Christological gloss on the seder. Their materials claimed that the practices Jews use today actually derived from the early Hebrew-Christian followers of Jesus, which, of course, is absolutely false. Historically, that’s just not true; they developed centuries later and came from Rabbinic Jews, not Hebrew Christians. 

The movement grew across denominational lines. Evangelical churches began hosting seders as Holy Week educational events. Messianic congregations spread across the country, with the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations formally organized in 1979. The Hebrew Roots movement, a further radicalization that pushed Gentile Christians toward full Torah observance, emerged from the same theological soil. By the time social media arrived to amplify everything, the “Happy Passover” greeting had fully detached from its Messianic origins and become ambient evangelical background noise, the kind of thing a Southern Baptist grandmother posts without any awareness that she is participating in a movement with a traceable forty-year history.

This is, to be precise, the Dispensationalist infrastructure doing what Dispensationalist infrastructure does. But none of it was possible without Nostra Aetate, in which the largest professing Christian institution on earth had formally endorsed the ongoing theological validity of Jewish covenantal identity, which gave the whole enterprise its unearned legitimacy. 

BLAME GAME

What both Rome and the Dispensationalists got wrong, through different routes, is supersessionism. No, not the caricature of supersessionism that says God abandoned the Jews and therefore pogroms were acceptable, but the actual biblical doctrine that the types and shadows of the Mosaic economy were fulfilled in Christ and that the New Covenant, enacted in His blood, is the telos toward which the entire Sinai system was pointing. That is not a Protestant invention. It is what Paul argues in Galatians 3. It is what the author of Hebrews argues across ten chapters of sustained theological labor. It is what the entire Reformed tradition, including the 1689 London Baptist Confession (my own), has consistently maintained. Christ is our Passover. The feast accomplished its purpose. The lamb has been slain.

When a Christian says “Happy Passover” to a Jewish neighbor, what he is actually communicating, whether he knows it or not, is that the Passover still means what it meant before the Cross. It also implies that what is being celebrated today is the Passover that Moses instituted, or at least vaguely resembles it. It doesn’t. It looks nothing like what God ordered via Moses. A bloody lamb, unleavened bread, bitter herbs, and wine have been replaced with four cups, 15 parts, and no lamb. 

The disease has two vectors. One wears a Scofield Reference Bible. The other wears a miter. Both of them arrived at the same destination: a Christianity that has made its peace with a post-Temple Judaism that explicitly rejects Christ’s atonement, treating it as a valid parallel covenant worthy of annual celebration. The Catholics who enjoy pointing at the evangelicals are pointing at a mirror. Nostra Aetate didn’t solve the problem of Christian philo-Judaism run amok. It wrote the problem into conciliar law and elected all its successors to enforce it.

Pope Leo XIV, on the 60th anniversary of that document in October 2025, declared it “highly relevant today.” He is correct, though probably not in the sense he intended. It is relevant today precisely because its theological errors are still bearing fruit, in Roman collars and in Scofield margins alike, every spring when the seder tables go up and the Christians pull out their haggadahs and start wishing each other a holiday whose liturgy, as Eisenmenger documented with painstaking care, includes a fourth-cup petition for God to pour out His wrath upon Christian nations. Happy Passover, indeed.

https://insighttoincite.substack.com/p/romes-own-contribution-to-the-neo