NEW prayers recommended for use in the Church of England will turn Christians into “scapegoats” for anti-Semitism, a senior bishop said yesterday.

The Bishop of Durham, Dr Tom Wright gave a warning that the prayer, which forms part of the Church’s new devotional material for Passiontide, the days immediately before Easter, reflects the growing willingness of many Christians to accept and repent of complicity in the centuries of anti-Semitism inflicted on the Jewish people.

Written in the person of God speaking to his Church, the prayer says: “I grafted you into the tree of my chosen Israel and you turned on them with persecution and mass murder. I made you joint heirs with them of my covenants, but you made them scapegoats for your own guilt.”

It represents a revision of the theology of the authorised 1662 Book of Common Prayer, where the third collect for Good Friday reads: “Have mercy upon all Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Heretiks, and take from them all hardness of heart, and contempt of Thy Word.”

Dr Wright, a theologian who is the Church’s most senior evangelical, told the General Synod in York that he was “extremely grateful” for the new prayers.

“I’m looking forward to using it a great deal and it is going to be terrific and enhancing,” he said.

“But there should be nothing in it which is contradictory to the Church of England.”

The Bishop said that he interpreted the prayer about the “chosen” people of Israel as God accusing the Christians of persecution and of inducing an anti-Semitic culling of the Jews.

He said that this prayer was “reproachable” and made several statements that were “biblically and theologically unjustifiable.”

“We should not confess to sins we have not committed,” he said, adding that the prayer seemed to be “turning the Church into a scapegoat for anti-Semitism”.

“That’s never been mainstream Church of England teaching . . . If it’s not broken, please don’t fix it." The new prayers are intended to be seasonal supplements to Common Worship, the Church’s new prayer book that has succeeded the Alternative Service Book.

New harvest festival prayers call for repentance for sins against the environment, for oppression and for inequality. Congregations will now be asked to acknowledge their “selfishness in not sharing the earth’s bounty fairly”.

They will also apologise in their prayers for “our failure to protect resources for others” and for “inequality and oppression in the earth”.

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