An Anti-Defamation League survey determined that 26% of Americans still believe that “Jews were responsible for the death of Christ.”
Sadly, there is no reason to imagine that Jews would have if the Romans had not gotten their first. If one accepts the gospels, then Jesus was a blasphemer … an offense punishable by stoning to death. My namesake, St. Stephen is supposed to have been killed by stoning for being the first Jew to call himself a believer in Jesus as a God.
Efforts to exculpate the Jews seem to me to be wrong headed. Pope Benedict XVI specifically rejected the narrative which blames Jews for the death of Jesus in a 2011 book, “Jesus of Nazareth — Part II.” He explained biblically and theologically the reasons why Scripture doesn’t support the argument that the Jewish people as a whole can be held responsible for the death of Jesus. He asked, “How could the whole people have been present at this moment to clamor for Jesus’ death?” That is true, but it covers the fact that in Jesus time blasphemy was punishable by death and lets the Church itself escape ITS far greater culpability it has for the hundreds of thousands of Jews and Muslims it has killed. often by burring to death, for exactly the same “crime.”