Anti Jesus Quotes

I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.

Far better it is for you to say: "I am a sinner," than to say: "I have no need of religion." The empty can be filled, but the self-intoxicated have no room for God.

I wasn't saying whatever they're saying I was saying. I'm sorry I said it really. I never meant it to be a lousy anti-religious thing. I apologize if that will make you happy. I still don't know quite what I've done. I've tried to tell you what I did do but if you want me to apologize, if that will make you happy, then OK, I'm sorry.

Why are those who are notoriously undisciplined and unmoral also most contemptuous of religion and morality? They are trying to solace their own unhappy lives by pulling the happy down to their own abysmal depths.

It is a pity that there was no Dostoevsky living near this most interesting decadent [Jesus], I mean someone with an eye for the distinctive charm that this sort of mixture of sublimity, sickness, and childishness has to offer.

Obama is not a brown-skinned anti-war socialist who gives away free healthcare. You're thinking of Jesus.

The Nazis are not justified by saying, Don't you know that there is more than just the issue of the Jews? The issues are more complex than that! What of the poor in this country, who cannot afford housing? What about the sick and malnourished? Don't you care about these people? Don't you claim to be a follower of Jesus?! Supporting a murderous political agenda with such an argument is tragic! And what do we know about Obama? He is the single most anti-life proponent that has ever run for the office of president.

The Jesus freaks were the worst. While the ‘Suicide Solution’ case was going through the courts they followed me around everywhere. They would picket my shows with signs that read, ‘The Anti-Christ Is Here’. And they’d always be chanting: ‘Put Satan behind you! Put Jesus in front of you!’ One time, I made my own sign – a smiley face with the words ‘Have a Nice Day’ – and went out and joined them. They didn’t even notice. Then, just as the gig was about to start, I put down the sign, said, ‘See ya, guys,’ and went back to my dressing room.

I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based on the fetishizing of human primates: Jesus in one case and Mohammed in the other. Neither of these figures can be called exactly historical but both have one thing in common even in their quasi-mythical dimension. Both of them were first encountered by the Jews. And the Jews, ravenous as they were for any sign of the long-sought Messiah, were not taken in by either of these two pretenders, or not in large numbers or not for long. If you meet a devout Christian or a believing Muslim, you are meeting someone who would give everything he owned for a personal, face-to-face meeting with the blessed founder or prophet. But in the visage of the Jew, such ardent believers encounter the very figure who did have such a precious moment, and who spurned the opportunity and turned shrugging aside. Do you imagine for a microsecond that such a vile, churlish transgression will ever be forgiven? I myself certainly hope that it will not. The Jews have seen through Jesus and Mohammed. In retrospect, many of them have also seen through the mythical, primitive, and cruel figures of Abraham and Moses. Nearer to our own time, in the bitter combats over the work of Marx and Freud and Einstein, Jewish participants and protagonists have not been the least noticeable. May this always be the case, whenever any human primate sets up, or is set up by others, as a Messiah.

Anti-intellectualism remains strongly entrenched in many parts of the church, but it is grounded in fear, not in faith. (p. 19)

You cannot sodomize a Sacrament and expect God to say, 'Well done.

Today's young people have gay friends whom they love. If they view the church as an unsafe for them, a place more focused on politics than on people, we just might be raising the most anti-Christian generation America has ever seen, a generation that believes they have to choose between loving and being Christian.

The faith that stands on authority is not faith. The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul. The position men have given to Jesus, now for many centuries of history, is a position of authority. It characterizes themselves.

We whitewash MLK - how fittingly absurd. I mean, we white-wash everything. We have to stop revering MLK for the wrong reasons, sanitized, domesticated, like Santa Claus and Jesus Christ. He was vehemently anti-racism, anti-oppression, anti-war, anti-materialism, pro-union, pro-social-services, anti-capitalism. Yes. MLK believed capitalism had outlived its usefulness and advocated democratic socialism.

For real men serve their country with random acts of kindness, not vicious acts of violence. And real soldiers have one duty, and one duty only; they have a duty to mutiny!

Would Jesus build a wall? Would Mother Teresa? No, of course not. They would welcome the refugees and give them free universal healthcare.

Being Christian doesn’t mean being anti-American, but it does mean that Christian identity and loyalty matter more than national identity and loyalty. When there is a conflict, Jesus is Lord.

So what exactly did Jesus say about gays?  Well, nothing actually, but he did say something about loving the least of god’s children. What did Jesus say about the right to bear arms? Well, there were no guns at the time, but I seem to recall him being anti-stoning. What did Jesus have to say about capital punishment?  Well, I’m not sure but I’m willing to bet that toward the end of his life he was against it.

Could it be that the Jesus who supports “the American way” is in reality an anti-Christ?

Jesus’s admonition to not look on women lustfully is not anti-sex—it’s anti–sexual harassment.

But the fact is that the gospel demands everything of all of us. If someone thinks the gospel has slotted into their life quite easily, without causing any major adjustments to their lifestyle or aspirations, it is likely that they have not really started following Jesus at all.

Anti-Christian sentiment is vehemently enforced in the Quran, as the book emphatically preaches that the crucifixion of Jesus never occurred, “they slew him not nor crucified him, but it appeared so unto them.”32 However, this cornerstone of Islamic theology is proven to be a lie as ancient secular and Jewish sources (Flavius Josephus and Tacitus) in Judea documented Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection - this happened 600 years before Muhammad was even born. Yet,

If someone thinks the gospel has somehow slotted into their life quite easily, without causing any major adjustments to their lifestyle or aspirations, it is likely that they have not really started following Jesus at all.

A general summing up, such as this, is highly characteristic of the old Oriental mode of approach to a religious and philosophical teaching, and it naturally recalls the Eight-fold Path of Buddhism, the Ten Commandments of Moses, and other such compact groupings of ideas. Jesus concerned himself exclusively with the teaching of general principles, and these general principles always had to do with mental states, for he knew that if one’s mental states are right, everything else must be right too, whereas, if these are wrong, nothing else can be right. Unlike the other great religious teachers, he gives us no detailed instructions about what we are to do or are not to do; he does not tell us either to eat or to drink, or to refrain from eating or drinking certain things; or to carry out various ritual observances at certain times and seasons. Indeed, the whole current of his teaching is anti-ritualistic anti-formalist.

Using an anti-abortion position to provide moral cover for pro-death practices and policies advantageous to the principalities and powers should not be confused with a pro-life ethic derived from the life and teaching of Jesus Christ.

It is the same for us all - 'whoever'. I am to deny myself, take up my cross and follow him. Every Christian is called to costly sacrifice. Denying yourself does not mean tweaking your behaviour here and there. It is saying 'no' to your deepest sense of who you are, for the sake of Christ. To take up a cross is to declare your life (as you have known it) forfeit. It is laying down your life for the very reason that your life, it turns out, is not yours at all. It belongs to Jesus. He made it. And through his death he has bought it. Ever since I have been open about my own experiences with homosexuality, a number of Christians have said something like this: 'the gospel must be harder for you than it is for me', as though I have more to give up than they do. But the fact is that the gospel demands everything out of all of us. If someone thinks the gospel has somehow slotted into their life quite easily, without causing any major adjustments to their lifestyle or aspirations, it is likely that they have not really started following Jesus at all.

And so we have one of the great ironies of the early Christian tradition. The profoundly Jewish religion of Jesus and his followers became the viciously anti-Jewish religion of later times, leading to the horrific persecutions of the Middle Ages and the pogroms and attempted genocides that have plagued the world down to recent times.6 Anti-Semitism as it has come down to us today is the history of specifically Christian reactions to non-Christian Jews. It is one of the least savory inventions of the early church.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that there is something seriously wrong with this system. Capitalism is a system that puts rich people on a pedestal, legalizes greed, and enables the rich to exploit the poor. It’s morally wrong. What kind of a God would support something so immoral? Would Jesus support the exploitation of the poor by the rich? No, of course not. If you think of yourself as a follower of Christ’s teachings, if you consider yourself a good person, you are morally obligated to be against greed. It’s your duty as a good person to be against exploitation. It’s your moral duty to be against predatory capitalism.

The story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 1o) can he interpreted mystically in such a way that the question of the knowledge of God becomes its focus. The priest and the Levite, who walk past the man who fell among robbers and was seriously hurt, are pious God-fearing persons. They "know" God and the law of God. They have God the same way that the one who knows has that which is known. They know what God wants them to be and do. They also know where God is to he found, in the scriptures and the cult of the temple. For them, God is mediated through the existing institutions. They have their God - one who is not to he found on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho. What is wrong with this knowledge of God? The problem is not the knowledge of the Torah or the knowledge of the temple. (It is absurd to read an anti-Judaistic meaning into a story of the Jew Jesus, since it could just as well have come from Hillel or another Jewish teacher.) What is false is a knowledge of God that does not allow for any unknowing or any negative theology. Because both actors know that God is "this," they do not see "that." Hence the Good Samaritan is the anti-fundamentalist story par excellence. "And so I ask God to rid me of God," Meister Eckhart says. The God who is known and familiar is too small for him.

If you think of yourself as a follower of Christ’s teachings, if you consider yourself a good person, you are morally obligated to be against greed. It’s your duty as a good person to be against exploitation. It’s your moral duty to be against predatory capitalism.

Jesus was: A peaceful, radically nonviolent revolutionary Who wasn’t American and never spoke English Who hung around lepers, hookers, and crooks Never sought tax cuts for rich Nazarenes Was anti-wealth and anti–death penalty Anti–public prayer, too (Matthew 6:5) Never asked lepers for a co-pay Never called poor people “lazy” Never even slightly antigay Never mentioned abortion Supported paying taxes

Facts about Jesus that I told Kimberly to annoy her 1. Jesus was Jewish 2. Jesus was a socialist 3. Jesus was a refugee 4. Jesus was anti-death penalty 5. Jesus was anti-school prayer (Matthew 6:5) 6. Jesus was opposed to the accumulation of wealth 7. Jesus was silent on the issues of homosexuality and gay marriage 8. Jesus was a brown-skinned Middle Easterner who wore sandals to the dinner table 9. Jesus was a friend to prostitutes

Mystical experience needs some form of dogma in order not to dissipate into moments of spiritual intensity that are merely personal, and dogma needs regular infusions of unknowingness to keep from calcifying into the predictable, pontificating, and anti-intellectual services so common in mainstream American churches. So what does all this mean practically? It means that congregations must be conscious of the persistent and ineradicable loneliness that makes a person seek communion, with other people and with God, in the first place. It means that conservative churches that are infused with the bouncy brand of American optimism one finds in sales pitches are selling shit. It means that liberal churches that go months without mentioning the name of Jesus, much less the dying Christ, have no more spiritual purpose or significance than a local union hall. It means that we -- those of us who call ourselves Christians -- need a revolution in the way we worship. This could mean many different things -- poetry as liturgy, focused and extended silences, learning from other religious traditions and rituals (this seems crucial), incorporating apophatic language. But one thing it means for sure: we must be conscious of language as language, must call into question every word we use until we refine or remake a language that is fit for our particular religious doubts and despairs -- and of course (and most of all!) our joys.

It would be a mistake to suppose that the teachings of Jesus Christ have been effective in guiding human behavior. It seems that the earliest Christians did try to live in accord with the teachings of Jesus (as they interpreted them), but at that stage the Christians comprised only a tiny minority. With the passage of years, the Christian way of life was progressively vitiated in proportion to the growing number of Christians, and by the time Christianity had become dominant in the Roman Empire few Christians still lived as those of the first century AD had done. The world went on as before, full of war, lust, greed, and treachery.

The clear message of the Bible is that there is nothing we can do to make our hearts clean before a holy God. We can work constantly, pray fervently, give extravagantly, and love sacrificially, but our hearts will still be stained by sin. This is why the Bible teaches that faith alone in Christ alone is the only way to salvation from sin. Faith is the anti-work. It’s the realization that there is nothing you can do but trust in what has been done for you in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Faith is the realization that God’s pleasure in you will never be based upon your performance for him. Instead, God’s pleasure in you will always be based upon Christ’s performance for you.

They say the devil is only antichrist, but why not also anti-God?

Christians believe, as is reported in the New Testament scriptures, that Jesus of Nazareth healed 10 men with leprosy. It sounds like an astounding feat, but compare that to Jacinto Convit who saved thousands of lives when he developed the vaccine that protects us from it. In 1988, Convit was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his anti-leprosy vaccine. So, while the promise of Jesus’ healing power is a centerpiece of the Christian myth, the demigod’s results leave something to be desired when compared to the rigor of man’s scientific inquiry.

Irish and Italian kids were taught in Catholic schools that the Jews killed Jesus Christ. Such teachings encouraged anti-Semitism. Gangs of Catholic boys would seek revenge on Jewish kids.

...it is most certainly Christianity itself which is primarily responsible for the intellectual sloppiness of its critics. Apart from the single instance of Stalinism, it is hard to think of a historical movement that has more squalidly betrayed its own revolutionary origins...For the most part, it has become the creed of the suburban well-to-do, not the astonishing promise offered to the riffraff and undercover anti-colonial militants with whom Jesus himself hung out...This brand of piety is horrified by the sight of a female breast, but considerably less appalled by the obscene inequalities between rich and poor.

But unlike the apologists who struggle to make historical sense of Mark’s scenario, we really don’t need to waste much speculation trying to solve these difficulties – since there’s a bigger problem with the entire set-up. Perhaps the single biggest historical difficulty with the customary releasing of a prisoner at Passover (Mark 15:6) … is that we have no corroborating evidence whatsoever that this “custom” ever existed. Neither the Jews, the Romans nor Pilate himself ever had a custom of freeing prisoners on Passover (or any other day), not that an occupational governor would ever have offered to release a convicted murderer and anti-Roman insurrectionist even if that were the case. Christians have spent years scouring Roman and Jewish records in search of supporting evidence to justify the historical veracity of this so-called Privilegium Paschale, to no avail (see Nailed, pp. 97-99).

Some books about the Holocaust are more difficult to read than others. Some books about the Holocaust are nearly impossible to read. Not because one does not understand the language and concepts in the books, not because they are gory or graphic, but because such books are confrontational. They compel us to “think again,” or to think for the first time, about issues and questions we might rather avoid. Gabriel Wilensky’s book, Six Million Crucifixions: How Christian Antisemitism Paved the Road to the Holocaust is one book I found difficult, almost impossible to read. Why? Because I had to confront the terrible underside of Christian theology, an underside that contributed in no small part to the beliefs and attitudes too many Christians – Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox – had imbibed throughout centuries of anti-Jewish preaching and teaching that “paved the road to the Holocaust.” I cannot say that I “liked” Gabriel Wilensky’s book, Six Million Crucifixions: How Christian Antisemitism Paved the Road to the Holocaust. I didn’t, but I can say it was instructive and forced me to think again about that Jew from Nazareth, Jesus, and about his message of universal love and service – “What you do for the least of my brothers [and sisters], you do for me” (Matthew 25: 40). As Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, the Holocaust did not begin with Auschwitz. The Holocaust began with words. And too many of those hate-filled words had their origin in the Christian Scriptures and were uttered by Christian preachers and teachers, by Christians generally, for nearly two millennia. Is it any wonder so many Christians stood by, even participated in, the destruction of the European Jews during the Nazi era and World War II? I recommend Six Million Crucifixions: How Christian Antisemitism Paved the Road to the Holocaust because all of us Christians – Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox – must think again, or think for the first time, about how to teach and preach the Christian Scriptures – the “New Testament” writings – in such a way that the words we utter, the attitudes we encourage, do not demean, disrespect, or disregard our Jewish brothers and sisters, that our words do not demean, disrespect, or disregard Judaism. I hope the challenge is not an impossible one.

The most important fact to know about the Christian Church in the two hundred years after Jesus' death is that only at the end of this period did the Church comprise as many people as the far-flung Jewish community numbered (five million) in the Roman Empire. Christianity developed an intense rivalry with Judaism, and for many decades was compared to the Jews as a minority. This accounts for the intense anti-Semitism that became enshrined in Christianity by 200 A.D.

Just as Hebrews 10:5-8 (Appendix A) says, this coming was not to be a sacrifice but was the opposite, it was anti-sacrificial.  Jesus did not come to fulfill the logic of the sacrificial system (either Jewish or pagan) but to expose it and put an end to its reign in our lives.

He who believes in Me . . . out of his heart will flow . . . .” John 7:38     Jesus did not say, “He who believes in Me will realize all the blessings of the fullness of God,” but, in essence, “He who believes in Me will have everything he receives escape out of him.” Our Lord’s teaching was always anti-self-realization. His purpose is not the development of a person—His purpose is to make a person exactly like Himself, and the Son of God is characterized by self-expenditure. If we believe in Jesus, it is not what we gain but what He pours through us that really counts. God’s purpose is not simply to make us beautiful, plump grapes, but to make us grapes so that He may squeeze the sweetness out of us. Our spiritual life cannot be measured by success as the world measures it, but only by what God pours through us—and we cannot measure that at all.

THE QUESTION seems a hopeless one after 2000 years of resolute adherence to the old cry of “Not this man, but Barabbas.” Yet it is beginning to look as if Barabbas was a failure, in spite of his strong right hand, his victories, his empires, his millions of money, and his moralities and churches and political constitutions. “This man” has not been a failure yet; for nobody has ever been sane enough to try his way. But he has had one quaint triumph. Barabbas has stolen his name and taken his cross as a standard. There is a sort of compliment in that. There is even a sort of loyalty in it, like that of the brigand who breaks every law and yet claims to be a patriotic subject of the king who makes them. We have always had a curious feeling that though we crucified Christ on a stick, he somehow managed to get hold of the right end of it, and that if we were better men we might try his plan. There have been one or two grotesque attempts at it by inadequate people, such as the Kingdom of God in Munster, which was ended by crucifixion so much more atrocious than the one on Calvary that the bishop who took the part of Annas went home and died of horror. But responsible people have never made such attempts. The moneyed, respectable, capable world has been steadily anti-Christian and Barabbasque since the crucifixion; and the specific doctrine of Jesus has not in all that time been put into political or general social practice.

A critically aware, historically informed study of Jesus in his Jewish context does more than provide benefits to Christians and Jews alike; it aids in preventing the anti-Semitism that tends to arise when the history is not known. The concern to recover Jesus’s Jewishness is these days particularly urgent.

While gently pushing her towards the dressing room, Lazarus ventured, "Can I ask you something kind of personal?" Pulling her shirt over her head behind the curtain, and holding her hand out for the corset, she replied, "Anything for you, Laz." "How are you still friends with him?" "Can you hook this thing?" Holding the corset on her stomach, Lazarus peeked through the curtain, fingers deftly snapping the twenty hook-and-eye latches. "He saved my life. There are a million reasons to hate him, but there are a million and one reasons to forgive him for his faults." Twisting to look in the mirror, adjusting her breasts in the tight silk, she continued, "He'll say the worst thing at the worst possible time, except every once in awhile, he says the one most perfect thing that just makes you want to cry from happiness. He knows the exact way you need to be touched at any moment, in any mood, like he's fucking telepathic. He'll make you want to scream when he ignores you, but then you find out he knows your favorite color, your favorite meal, what movie makes you cry and he can list every little thing in the entire world that you hate. And mostly? Well," Turning to face Lazarus and strike a pose, "I just can't fucking stop.

Do we understand the gravity of the sin of dishonesty? It is not only unchristian, it is anti-Christian…it is anti--Christ! Whether it be lying, or cheating, or robbery or deception; whether it is in the home, in business, in sports, or in the classroom; dishonesty is completely foreign to the teachings of Jesus.

In prosecuting the anti-slavery enterprise, we have been asked to spare the church, to spare the ministry; but how, we ask, could such a thing be done? We are met on the threshold of our efforts for the redemption of the slave, by the church and ministry of the country, in battle arrayed against us; and we are compelled to fight or flee. From what quarter, I beg to know, has proceeded a fire so deadly upon our ranks, during the last two years, as from the Northern pulpit? As the champions of oppressors, the chosen men of American theology have appeared-men, honored for their so-called piety, and their real learning. The LORDS of Buffalo, the SPRINGS of New York, the LATHROPS of Auburn, the COXES and SPENCERS of Brooklyn, the GANNETS and SHARPS of Boston, the DEWEYS of Washington, and other great religious lights of the land, have, in utter denial of the authority of Him, by whom they professed to be called to the ministry, deliberately taught us, against the example or the Hebrews and against the remonstrance of the Apostles they teach, "that we ought to obey man’s law before the law of God." My spirit wearies of such blasphemy; and how such men can be supported, as the "standing types and representatives of Jesus Christ," is a mystery which I leave others to penetrate.

Christ Jesus set himself wholly apart for believers. We may say, “Lord, condemnation was yours, that justification might be mine; agony was yours, and victory mine; pain was yours, and ease is mine; agony was yours, and victory mine; the curse was yours and the blessing mine; a crown of thorns was yours, and eternal life mine!

Look, I'm here because we need to stop this killer. I'm somewhat on board with the craziness. But we've now got a priest stealing the Shroud of Turin from the Catholic Church so we can use the blood of Jesus to defeat the anti-Christ, who, by the way, is Newsweek's (sic) poster boy of the year, all at the urgings of an alcoholic priest. Do I have it right?

few years ago, the Barna Group, a prominent research company, went to every state in the US and asked young non-Christians what their perceptions of Christians were. What they found was heartbreaking. The top three answers were: (1) anti-gay, (2) judgmental, (3) hypocritical. And they did not say the number one thing Jesus said we should be known for: loving.

Care for the sick? No. Turn the other cheek? No. Render one’s taxes? No, sucker. Be kind to the incarcerated? Hell no. Welcome the stranger? Bitch, please. Modern right-wing Christians have been suckered into an anti-Christian trap of aligning with power, instead of challenging it. But conservative power was what Jesus stood up to—not for—time and time again:

I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth. The clergy converted the simple teachings of Jesus into an engine for enslaving the world and adulterated by artificial constructions into a contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves…these clergy, in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ – Thomas Jefferson

The Jesus described in the Bible is scandalous. He is not portrayed as the founder of a world religion, but the challenger of all religions. He is a subversive, anti-institutional revolutionary. Now, when I say "anti-institutional," I am not suggesting that Jesus opposes all forms of organization, but that he opposes dependence on any one organization for our connection with God.

For the first three hundred years of the church any suggestion that the aims of the kingdom of Christ could be served by corrupt Caesars would have been viewed as ludicrous or even demonic. The early Christians knew that the ways of Jesus and the ways of Caesar are forever incompatible. One is Christ; the other is anti-Christ. Though Christians prayed for Caesar to behave benignly, they always knew that Caesar was more likely to behave beastly. Empire is always bloody in tooth and claw. Christians never thought Caesar was capable of carrying out the work of Christ. Caesar advances the interests of the principalities and powers by wounding and killing the weak. Christ advances his kingdom by being a lamb wounded and killed. Peter could never have imagined a day when Christians would clamor over who should hold Caesar’s bloody sword.

It is as if joy were the default setting of human emotion, not the furtive, fugitive glimpses it becomes in lives compromised by necessity, familiarity, ‘maturity,’ suffering. You must become as little children, Jesus said, a statement that is often used to justify anti-intellectualism and the renunciation of reason, but which I take actually to mean that we must recover this sense of wonder, this excess of spirit brimming out of the body.

After serving in the United States Coast Guard in the Second World War, he began his career in radio and television ministry. In 1979, he founded the Christian Men’s Network, and not long after he diagnosed a catastrophic condition plaguing the nation. An “anti-hero syndrome” had “eliminated our heroes and left us bereft of role models as patriotic examples.” His 1982 book on the topic, Maximized Manhood, would sell more than one million copies.15

I am asking why the white evangelical leaders of the religious right haven’t drawn a moral line in the sand on the racial idolatry of white nationalism and supremacy that is directly and distinctively anti-Christ—as they have with issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. That choice not to draw a moral line sends a clear signal to people of color around the world in the body of Christ as to what is a political deal breaker for American white evangelical Christians and what is not.

What a revolution! In less than a century the persecuted church had become a persecuting church. Its enemies, the “heretics” (those who “selected” from the totality of the Catholic faith), were now also the enemies of the empire and were punished accordingly. For the first time now Christians killed other Christians because of differences in their views of the faith. This is what happened in Trier in 385: despite many objections, the ascetic and enthusiastic Spanish lay preacher Priscillian was executed for heresy together with six companions. People soon became quite accustomed to this idea. Above all the Jews came under pressure. The proud Roman Hellenistic state church hardly remembered its own Jewish roots anymore. A specifically Christian ecclesiastical anti-Judaism developed out of the pagan state anti-Judaism that already existed. There were many reasons for this: the breaking off of conversations between the church and the synagogue and mutual isolation; the church’s exclusive claim to the Hebrew Bible; the crucifixion of Jesus, which was now generally attributed to the Jews; the dispersion of Israel, which was seen as God’s just curse on a damned people who were alleged to have broken the covenant with God . . . Almost exactly a century after Constantine’s death, by special state-church laws under Theodosius II, Judaism was removed from the sacral sphere, to which one had access only through the sacraments (that is, through baptism). The first repressive measures

The kingdom of God is built on all that the kingdom of Satan is opposed to. Instead of rivalry, there is to be love. Instead of accusation, there is to be advocacy. Instead of violence, there is to be peace. Instead of domination, there is to be liberation. Instead of maintaining the vicious cycle of beastly empire, Jesus comes to establish the humane kingdom come from heaven. This is the gospel! The demonic is all that is negation, pro-death, and anti-human. Jesus brings all that is flourishing, life-affirming, and truly pro-life.

The way of salvation is found with humility.  Being able to admit that we are recalcitrant glory-hounds.  Being able to admit that we need Jesus because we are just like those disciples in our text, fixated on ourselves and our own status and glory.  Humility is the divine anti-venom to the poison of pride.  And this humility is not something that we can muster up out of our resources and willpower.  True humility, the kind of humility described by Christ here, is a gift of the Holy Spirit, a fruit of faith and of the new birth worked in us by God.

In this classic reversal of reality, we do not stand before him, but the King stands before us. We question him; he doesn’t question us. The irony of it all! While the name of the Lord was constantly blasphemed by men, Jesus is now accused of being a blasphemer (Matthew 26:65). Talk about a primitive form of defense—projecting your guilt onto another. Could it be any clearer that Jesus had come to the anti-kingdom, where everything was the opposite of the way it was intended? The mocking was nonstop. Accusers took turns kneeling before him, feigning homage.

Jesus’ triumphal entry was the anti-military parade. It was a mockery of Rome’s intimidating show of military power. It also presented Jerusalem with a stark contrast between the way of war and the way of peace. At the beginning of Holy Week, Pontius Pilate and Jesus of Nazareth are at the head of two very different parades.  The question for us is which parade are we marching in—the military parade of Pilate that still believes the world is to be shaped by war, or the peace parade of Jesus that understands that with the coming of Christ war has been abolished?

How sad indeed for someone who is already weighed down by sin to be denied the true remedy for the problem. That is what gay Christianity does. It denies the sexual sinner repentance and immerses her in the futile task of trying to domesticate her sin. Trying to deal with sin in your own flesh is what Pharisees always encourage. Jesus speaks to this: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves” (Matt. 23:15).

One simply cannot live without boundaries. The question is, whose boundaries? This was what the self-appointed critics of established society didn’t quite know how to deal with: If we are going to dismantle the boundaries set by society, which boundaries are we going to promote? For we cannot live as a society without boundaries. These cultural revolutionists never paused to think of our infinite capacity for destruction. Anti-absolutist thinkers seldom come to terms with the fact that freedom is not destroyed only by its retraction; it is devastated by its abuse.

Today Jesus’s words are too familiar, too domesticated, too stripped of their initial edginess and urgency. Only when heard through first-century Jewish ears can their original edginess and urgency be recovered. Consequently, to understand the man from Nazareth, it is necessary to understand Judaism. More, it is necessary to see Jesus as firmly within Judaism rather than as standing apart from it, and it is essential that the picture of Judaism not be distorted through the filter of centuries of Christian stereotypes; a distorted picture of first-century Judaism inevitably leads to a distorted picture of Jesus. Just as bad: if we get Judaism wrong, we’ll wind up perpetuating anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic teachings, and thus the mission of the church - to spread a gospel of love rather than a gospel of hate - will be undermined. For Christians, this concern for historical setting should have theological import as well. If one takes the incarnation - that is, the claim that the “Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1: 14) - seriously, then one should take seriously the time when, place where, and people among whom this event occurred.

Radical hope in the Kingdom of God is essential to Christianity.3 The forward-looking position of our hope causes us to reject the status quo as unchangeable or unchallengeable. Just because this is how it has been done, because we live in capitalism, does not make the systems of this world immovable realities we must accept without protest. On the contrary, because we hope in the coming reign of God, we contradict this world and its sinful systems of injustice and mammon worship. The Church of Jesus Christ cannot accept systems of oppression and exploitation without giving up its foundational hope.

Powerful forces have a vested interest in our believing the myth (and it is a myth) that we are following no one at all. Many of the cultural liturgies that indoctrinate us daily - "Be true to yourself," - can be traced back to sources with a nefarious agenda. If "they" (whether multinational corporations, politicians, anti-democratic government agents, marketing departments, influencers who just want more followers, etc., etc.) can make us believe that each person is a blank slate, just following the inner compass of our "authentic self" in an upward march to happiness, then they can keep us blind to all the ways we've been "discipled" - formed and manipulated - by their desires.

The anti-Semitic interpretation fails to discern the real intention of the Gospels. It is clearly mimetic contagion that explains the hatred of the masses for exceptional persons, such as Jesus and all the prophets; it is not a matter of ethnic or religious identity. The Gospels suggest that a mimetic process of rejection exists in all communities and not only among the Jews. The prophets are the preferential victims of this process, a little like all exceptional persons, individuals who are different. The reasons for exceptional status are diverse. The victims can be those who limp, the disabled, the poor, the disadvantaged, individuals who are mentally retarded, and also great religious figures who are inspired, like Jesus or the Jewish prophets or now, in our day, great artists or thinkers. All peoples have a tendency to reject, under some pretext or another, the individuals who don't fit their conception of what is normal and acceptable. If we compare the Passion to the narratives of the violence suffered by the prophets, we confirm that in both cases the episodes of violence are definitely either directly collective in character or of collective inspiration. The resemblance of Jesus to the prophets is perfectly real, and we will soon see that these resemblances are not restricted to the victims of collective violence in the Bible. In myths as well, the victims are or seem different. So

True also that Luther, in particular, turned to the Jews for support in his new construing of the Bible and his rejection of papal claims. In his 1523 pamphlet, Das Jesus Christus ein geborener Jude sei, he argued that there was now no reason at all why they should not embrace Christ, and foolishly looked forward to a voluntary mass conversion. When the Jews retorted that the Talmud conveyed an even better understanding of the Bible than his own, and reciprocated the invitation to convert, Luther first attacked them for their obstinacy (1526), then in 1543 turned on them in fury. His pamphlet Von den Juden und ihren Lügen (‘On the Jews and their Lies’), published in Wittenberg, may be termed the first work of modern anti-Semitism, and a giant step forward on the road to the Holocaust.

Confident pluralism has a very simple premise, namely, that people have the right to be different, to think differently, to live differently, to worship differently, without fear of reprisal. Confident pluralism operates with the idea that politics has instrumental rather than ultimate value. In other words, politics is a means, not an end. No state, no political party, no leader is God-like, or can demand blind devotion. Any attempt by political actors to create social homogeneity by compelling conformity, by bullying minorities or by punishing dissent, whether in religion or in policy, is anti-liberal and undemocratic. As Australian political leader Tim Wilson writes: ‘A free society does not seek to homogenise belief or conscience but instead, affirms diversity and advocates for tolerance and mutual respect.’43

It would be absurd to see the New Testament as only a work of literature: it is all the more important, therefore, to realize that it is written in the language of literature, the language of myth and metaphor. The Gospels give us the life of Jesus in the form of myth: what they say is, 'This is what happens when the Messiah comes to the world.' One thing that happens when the Messiah comes to the world is that he is despised and rejected, and searching in the nooks and crannies of the gospel text for a credibly historical Jesus is merely one more excuse for despising and rejecting him. Myth is neither historical nor anti-historical: it is counter-historical. Jesus is not presented as a historical figure, but as a figure who drops into history from another dimension of reality, and thereby shows what the limitations of the historical perspective are.

And of course, the empire, in its refusal of the things that make for peace, generates a society of hostility, aggression, greed, conflict, and violence. The wonder of Jesus’ peacemaking is what he does in specific cases as freighted signs that break the power of the anti-peace empire. His grief over the city is an awareness that some of his own local Jewish contemporaries had been seduced and bewitched by the force of empire. It is no wonder that when he stood before the Roman governor, Pilate had no categories through which to understand him, because, as he is remembered as saying, “My kingdom is not from this world” (John 18:36), that is, not derived from fearful aggression. As the confrontation ends with a discussion about the truth, the imperial governor is left bewildered because he cannot understand a way of truth that contradicts the power of the empire.

In liberation theology—that form of religious thought proclaiming that God has a “preferential option for the poor” and seeking to put biblical pronouncement in service to political and economic ends—Jesus is the pedagogue of the oppressed, the redeemer of the underclass, the hero of the masses. The problem is not the use of Jesus for political ends; the biblical material has always been (and should continue to be) used to promote a more just society. The problem is that the language of liberation all too often veers off into anti-Jewish rants. Jesus becomes the Palestinian martyr crucified once again by the Jews; he is the one killed by the “patriarchal god of Judaism”; he breaks down the barriers “Judaism” erects between Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, male and female, slave and free and so can liberate all today. The intent is well meaning, but the history is dreadful, and the impression given of Judaism is obscene.

Christians like yourself invariably declare that monsters like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Kim Il Sung spring from the womb of atheism. ... The problem with such tyrants is not that they reject the dogma of religion, but that they embrace other life-destroying myths. Most become the center of a quasi-religious personality cult, requiring the continual use of propaganda for its maintenance. There is a difference between propaganda and the honest dissemination of information that we (generally) expect from a liberal democracy. ... Consider the Holocaust: the anti-Semitism that built the Nazi death camps was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, Christian Europeans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately secular way, its roots were religious, and the explicitly religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued throughout the period. The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914. And both Catholic and Protestant churches have a shameful record of complicity with the Nazi genocide. Auschwitz, the Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of Cambodia are not examples of what happens to people when they become too reasonable. To the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of political and racial dogmatism. It is time that Christians like yourself stop pretending that a rational rejection of your faith entails the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. One need not accept anything on insufficient evidence to find the virgin birth of Jesus to be a preposterous idea. The problem with religion—as with Nazism, Stalinism, or any other totalitarian mythology—is the problem of dogma itself. I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.

One of the challenges for practitioners of any religion is wrestling with elements in their tradition that have been used to justify evil and then bending those elements back toward the good. Many Christians ignore New Testament passages that blame Jews for the death of Jesus. But because some Christians have used these passages to justify hatred, persecution, and murder of Jews, the challenge is to attend to these words with care and then to drain them of anti-Semitic connotations. Similarly, the challenge for Muslims is to attend to passages in the Quran that extremists have used to justify unjust killing. Many Muslims are meeting this challenge. To suicide bombers, they point out that the Quran condemns suicide unequivocally—"Do not kill yourselves" (4:29)—and promises hell for those who do so. To those who kill women or children or civilians, they point out that the Quran condemns mass murder (5:32) and insists on proportionality (2:194). Since the seventh century, Islamic law has been committed to vigorously defending the rights of noncombatants.

Jesus said unto them [the Jews], If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me. Why do ye not understand my speech? Even because ye cannot hear my word. Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it. And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not. (John 8:41–45) With the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, Christians—gentile and Jew alike—felt that they were witnessing the fulfillment of prophecy, imagining that the Roman legions were meting out God’s punishment to the betrayers of Christ. Anti-Semitism soon acquired a triumphal smugness, and with the ascension of Christianity as the state religion in 312 CE, with the conversion of Constantine, Christians began openly to relish and engineer the degradation of world Jewry.36 Laws were passed that revoked many of the civic privileges previously granted to Jews. Jews

You’ll see the day, ten years from now, when Adolf Hitler will occupy precisely the same position in Germany that Jesus Christ has now. —REINHARD HEYDRICH One sometimes hears that Hitler was a Christian. He was certainly not, but neither was he openly anti-Christian, as most of his top lieutenants were. What helped him aggrandize power, he approved of, and what prevented it, he did not. He was utterly pragmatic. In public he often made comments that made him sound pro-church or pro-Christian, but there can be no question that he said these things cynically, for political gain. In private, he possessed an unblemished record of statements against Christianity and Christians. Especially early in his career, Hitler wished to appear as a typical German, so he praised the churches as bastions of morality and traditional values. But he also felt that, in time, the churches would adapt to the National Socialist way of thinking. They would eventually be made into vessels for Nazi ideology, so it little served his purposes to destroy them. It would be easier to change what already existed and benefit from whatever cultural cachet they possessed. 166

Ralph, none of us are strong enough to stand on our own, or to bear our own sins. That’s why Jesus died for us. Your soul is crying out to Him and you just don’t know it.” “Isha, I’m not ready to start going to church, okay?” Every now and then she invited him to worship with her and he always declined. It wasn’t that he had anything against Christians, most of the best people he knew were Christians. When ever he’d run into an anti-Christian bigot, on the other hand, he was always taken aback by their hypocrisy. If they were “tolerant” as they claimed, then they’d accept both homosexual and Christian viewpoints, for example. Instead, they choose sides and called those that disagreed with them the bigots. Ralph suspected “tolerance” was really just a smoke screen for people who wanted to hate Christians. He couldn’t explain it, he liked Christians and disliked their opponents, but it just wasn’t for him. Isha looked at him like she could read his mind. “Sometimes we think something might be good for other people, but not us. Then we find out we didn’t know what we were missing.” She smiled at him, leaned over and rubbed Tabooli’s belly. “Of course, I’m talking about dogs.” Ralph smiled back.

Too often scholars have thought and even suggested that what happened during and after Constantine was that the church sought to replace the pagan temples, priests, and sacrifices with their own. This is at best a half truth. If this had been primarily what was going on, we would have expected to find priestesses showing up in the mainstream church in and after the time of Constantine, since there were certainly priestesses in the pagan temples. But this we do not find in the historical record. This is because the church of that period was not merely trying to supplant pagan religion with Christian religion, though some of that was going on. More to the point, there was a rising tide of anti-Judaism, and one of its manifestations was this Old Testament hermeneutic. The Torah had been claimed as the church’s book, Jews were being ostracized and then later ghettoized, and a hermeneutic of ministry was being adopted which co-opted the Old Testament for church use when it came to priests, temples, and sacrifices, and indeed sacraments in general. Thus ironically enough while the structure of the ecclesial church was becoming more Old Testamental, the church hierarchy was not only becoming less tolerant of Jews, it was forgetting altogether the Jewish character of Jesus’ ministry and his modifications of the Passover that led to the Lord’s Supper celebration of the early church in the first place.

My kingdom isn’t the sort that grows in this world,’ replied Jesus. ‘If my kingdom were from this world, my supporters would have fought, to stop me being handed over to the Judaeans. So then, my kingdom is not the sort that comes from here.’ (John 18:36) This translation captures something that many commentators gloss over. Yes, Jesus’ kingdom is not like the kingdoms of this world. It doesn’t originate the same way or behave like the kingdoms of this world. But Jesus’ kingdom is still for this world, for the benefit and blessing of this world, for the redemption and rescue of this world. If Jesus were an earthly king of this age, then there would be soldiers killing to bring about his kingdom, just as they do for every other earthly kingdom: victory through violence. Yet that’s not how Jesus’ kingdom will come. The kingdom will come rather through the imperial violence done to him on the cross and through the anti-imperial, death-reversing, justice-loving power of resurrection. Then the kingdom spreads, not through conquest, but through the spirit’s life-giving and liberating power being experienced by more and more people and through their life-giving contributions to the world. At the heart of John’s kingdom-theology is God’s love revealed in the death of his Son, the Lamb, the Messiah. This is conquest, but by love. This is power, but in weakness. This is kingship, but in self-giving suffering for others. This kingdom is not one that arises from within the world. But as it advances, as it spreads, it dispels and displaces the dark forces in the world.24

The fate of the Gospels was decided by death — it hung on the “cross.”... It was only death, that unexpected and shameful death; it was only the cross, which was usually reserved for the canaille only — it was only this appalling paradox which brought the disciples face to face with the real riddle: “Who was it? what was it?”—The feeling of dis may, of profound affront and injury; the suspicion that such a death might involve a refutation of their cause; the terrible question, “Why just in this way?” — this state of mind is only too easy to understand. Here everything must be accounted for as necessary; everything must have a meaning, a reason, the highest sort of reason; the love of a disciple excludes all chance. Only then did the chasm of doubt yawn: “Who put him to death? who was his natural enemy?” — this question flashed like a lightning-stroke. Answer: dominant Judaism, its ruling class. From that moment, one found one’s self in revolt against the established order, and began to understand Jesus as in revolt against the established order. Until then this militant, this nay-saying, nay-doing element in his character had been lacking; what is more, he had appeared to present its opposite. Obviously, the little community had not understood what was precisely the most important thing of all: the example offered by this way of dying, the freedom from and superiority to every feeling of ressentiment — a plain indication of how little he was understood at all! All that Jesus could hope to accomplish by his death, in itself, was to offer the strongest possible proof, or example, of his teachings in the most public manner ....

Lagos, typically for a nonbusinessman, had a fatal flaw: he thought too small. He figured that with a little venture capital, this neurolinguistic hacking could be developed as a new technology that would enable Rife to maintain possession of information that had passed into the brains of his programmers. Which, moral considerations aside, wasn't a bad idea. "Rife likes to think big. He immediately saw that this idea could be much more powerful. He took Lagos's idea and told Lagos himself to buzz off. Then he started dumping a lot of money into Pentecostal churches. He took a small church in Bayview, Texas, and built it up into a university. He took a smalltime preacher, the Reverend Wayne Bedford, and made him more important than the Pope. He constructed a string of self-supporting religious franchises all over the world, and used his university, and its Metaverse campus, to crank out tens of thousands of missionaries, who fanned out all over the Third World and began converting people by the hundreds of thousands, just like St. Louis Bertrand. L. Bob Rife's glossolalia cult is the most successful religion since the creation of Islam. They do a lot of talking about Jesus, but like many selfdescribed Christian churches, it has nothing to do with Christianity except that they use his name. It's a postrational religion. "He also wanted to spread the biological virus as a promoter or enhancer of the cult, but he couldn't really get away with doing that through the use of cult prostitution because it is flagrantly anti-Christian. But one of the major functions of his Third World missionaries was to go out into the hinterlands and vaccinate people -- and there was more than just vaccine in those needles. "Here in the First World, everyone has already been vaccinated, and we don't let religious fanatics come up and poke needles into us. But we do take a lot of drugs. So for us, he devised a means for extracting the virus from human blood serum and packaged it as a drug known as Snow Crash.

Still, when Harvard said I wasn’t eligible for financial aid, and another university offered me a full scholarship, I thought I should go there. My mother became furious and said I was always sabotaging myself. She was proud of being able to borrow money at a loss from her own retirement fund, and give it to Harvard. I felt proud of her, too. But I did not feel proud of myself. It made the college application process feel, in retrospect, somehow hurtful and insulting: all the essays and interviews and supplements and letters seemed to be about you, about your specialness—but actually it was all about shaking your parents down for money. — Harvard seemed really proud of its own attitude toward financial aid. You were always hearing about how “merit-based aid,” which was fine for other schools, didn’t work here, where everyone was so full of merit. When your parents paid full tuition, part of what they were paying for was the benefit you derived from being exposed to people who were more diverse than you. “My parents are paying for him to be here, so I can learn from him,” my friend Leora said once, about a homeschooled guy from Arkansas in her history section who started talking about how the Jews killed Jesus. Leora had been my best friend when we were little, and then we went to different middle schools and high schools, but now we were at college together. She already thought every single person on earth was anti-Semitic, so she definitely hadn’t learned anything from that guy. To me, the part of financial aid that made the least sense was that all the international students got full scholarships, regardless of how much money their parents had. The son of the prince of Nepal was in our class, and didn’t pay tuition. Ivan had once caused me pain by saying something deprecating about “people whose parents paid a hundred thousand dollars for them to be here.” Did he not know that my parents were paying a hundred thousand dollars for me to be there? The thought that really made me crazy was that my parents had paid for Ivan to be there. It was another experience they had paid for me to have.

I COULD HAVE reminded the Arab Knesset member of other historical facts once known to many schoolchildren but which have since been forgotten—or distorted by anti-Israel propaganda. The history of the Jewish people spans almost four millennia. The first thousand years or so are covered in the Bible, and are attested to by archaeology and the historical records of other, contemporaneous peoples. As the centuries progress, the mists of time and the myths gradually evaporate and the unfolding events come into sharp historical focus. Reading the Bible from second grade on, I could easily imagine Abraham and Sarah on their long trek from Ur of the Chaldeans to the land of Canaan almost four thousand years ago. Abraham envisions one God, unseen but present everywhere. He buys a burial cave in Hebron and bequeaths the new land to his progeny. The descendants of Abraham’s grandson Jacob are enslaved in Egypt for centuries, until Moses takes them out of bondage. He leads them for forty years in the wilderness to the Promised Land, giving the Children of Israel the Ten Commandments and a moral code that would change the world. The indomitable Joshua conquers the land, wily David establishes his kingdom in Jerusalem, and wise Solomon builds his Temple there, only to have his sons split the realm into two. The northern kingdom, Israel, is destroyed, its ten tribes lost to history. The southern kingdom, Judea, is conquered and Solomon’s Temple is destroyed by the Babylonians, by whose rivers the exiled Judeans weep as they remember Zion. They rejoice when in 537 BCE they are reinstated in their homeland by Cyrus of Persia, who lets them rebuild their destroyed Temple. The Persian rulers are replaced by Alexander the Great, one of whose heirs seeks to eradicate the Jewish religion. This sparks a rebellion led by the brave Maccabees, and the independent Jewish state they establish lasts for eighty years. It is overtaken by the rising power Rome which initially rules through proxies, the most notable of whom is Herod the Great. Herod refurbishes the Jerusalem Temple as one of the great wonders of the ancient world. In its bustling courtyard a Jewish rabbi from the Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth, overturns the tables of the money changers, setting off a chain of events culminating in his eventual crucifixion and the beginning of the Judeo-Christian tradition. When the Jews rebel against Roman rule, Rome destroys Jerusalem and Herod’s Temple in 70 CE. Masada, the last rebel stronghold, falls three years later. Despite the devastation, sixty-two years later the Jews rebel again under the fearless Bar Kokhba, only to be crushed even more brutally. The Roman emperor Hadrian bars the Jews from Jerusalem and renames the country Palestina, after the Grecian Philistines, who have long disappeared.

While there are difficult times ahead for God’s people, I believe we will soon see the greatest outpouring of God’s Kingdom activities in the history of humankind. In spite of the growing anti-God world and its hatred of believers, the glory of God will be manifested to us, in us, through us, and out of us with the spiritual strength and moral courage of overcomers. We will do great signs and wonders as witnesses to the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and the exalted Son of God-Son of Man, Jesus the Lamb of God, and Lion of the Tribe of Judah. May His name be praised forever.

How does the death of Jesus Christ on the cross save anyone? Save them from what? From the horrific sentence of hell that “God” himself (Jesus Christ himself) imposed on humanity for the non-event of eating an apple! For Christ’s sake!!!

Could a religion started by a Jew ever be free of the Jewish taint? This is perhaps the ultimate example of how difficult it is to transcend anti-Semitism; you can literally be Jesus Christ and it won’t be enough for some people.

Yet Islam and Judaism share a common critique of Christianity; both see the idea of any “son” of God as blasphemous to the concept of the One God, who does not beget and cannot be subdivided. The concept of a Trinity smacks of polytheism, which is equally anathema to both Jews and Muslims. According to Islam, Jesus did not die on the cross but was taken up to heaven by God. And it will be Jesus, not Muhammad, who will return at the day of judgment to quell the anti-Christ, punish the enemies of Islam, and bring justice.

Some sects of Progressive Christianity have devolved into a religion in which Jesus condemns his own followers, Christians, but praises everyone else in the world. It could be inferred in this religion that he is revoking his Kingship (thus turning his back on those who regard him as King); it could be inferred in this religion that instead, mankind is King.

Martha Crenshaw notes that terrorists tend to exhibit an intense obsession with morality, in particular with sexual purity—in the name of a “higher good.’’ It brings to mind the so-called Moral Majority (which feminists exposed as being neither). It also brings to mind the now-infamous marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North, who, from the offices of the National Security Council, coordinated the U.S. bombing raid on Libya, supervised the U.S. invasion of Grenada, oversaw the mining of Nicaraguan harbors, organized the Contra operations in Central America, and devised the Iran-Contra-diction of selling weapons to Iran. This is the man Ronald Reagan called “a national hero” (though North himself chuckled that “I have also been described as a terrorist” by others). This is the man who has adventuristically waded through scores of illegal and covert murderous actions with a boyish grin on his all-American face. And this is the "born-again" Christian who states that he has "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as a driving force" in his life. This is the anti-reproductive-choice zealot, one who is "pro-life" and whose car bumper sticker boasts "God is Prolif-ic.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have not been known for creating “harmonizing” people. In general, peacemaking, non-violence, love for the outsider or the poor, humility, and dialogue have never been the strength of these religions. Even though many people in each group attained higher levels of transformation, our concern was usually group order, consistency, organization, and clarifying and enforcing of membership requirements: not all bad, but not all good either, because we lost some essential values that the harmony-based religions preserved. (Members of those religions could probably identify values they lost as well.) The fact that the two great wars emerged in a Christian Europe filled with churches and theology schools needs to be examined. The fact that racism, profound social inequity, and anti-Semitism were not broadly recognized as a serious problem until almost two thousand years after Jesus is forever a judgment on the immaturity of Western Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant.

The fact that the two great wars emerged in a Christian Europe filled with churches and theology schools needs to be examined. The fact that racism, profound social inequity, and anti-Semitism were not broadly recognized as a serious problem until almost two thousand years after Jesus is forever a judgment on the immaturity of Western Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant. Communism often emerged in formerly Christian cultures where social injustice had not been addressed in any serious way (China being the major exception). The former colonies of Latin America have never been known for even minimal social justice since their inception, despite their Catholic identity. The genocide of American Indians and the enslavement of black Africans seems not to have been a problem for North American Protestants. Sexism did not begin to be seriously faced until after the 1950s, and its remedies are still ignored and even resisted by most patriarchal churches.

Jesus isn't anti-command, not by a long shot. But for Jesus, leadership isn't about coercion and control; it's about example and invitation.

Roland Bainton in his effort to make the best of Luther declared that Luther's view of the Jews "was entirely religious and by no means racial."'`' True; the crackpot version of social Darwinism that gave rise to "racial" anti-Semitism was a creation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Luther hated the Jews because they rejected Christ. But his fury was no less cruel and vicious because its underlying motives were different or because his suggestions for carrying his cruelty to some final solution were less comprehensive and efficient. His fury culminated in his vicious book of 1543, On the Jews and Their Lies. In late 1542 Pope Paul III had issued a call for the great reforming council to assemble at Trent beginning in 1545. It was to become a Catholic and papal triumph. What Trent would become was unclear in 1542, but Luther could see clearly enough that it represented a defeat for the evangelical cause. Through these years his attacks on foes of all kinds became even more vulgar and inflammatory because, as Heiko Oberman has said, he felt his work threatened on every Personal issues may also have been an influence. His beloved daughter Magdalena died in his arms on September 20, 1542. Afterward his grief was intense, and he spoke feelingly of the terror before death while affirming his trust in Christ.-'' This combination of woes may have driven him to lash out at someone, and the Jews were there, testifying to his worst fear, that Jesus had not risen from the dead, and that Chrisitians would enjoy no victory over the grave. Whatever the cause, his outrageous attack in On the Jews and Their Lies represents one of those rhetorical horrors that may be explained in the various ways that we explain the cruelties that human beings inflict on others when the tormentors feel their own place in the universe threatened with annihilation. Yet explanation cannot finally excuse the horror. After raging against the Jews for dozens of pages of tedious vehemence, Luther recommended what should be done with them: Their synagogues should be burned down; their books should be taken from them, "not leaving them one leaf"; they should be "forbidden on pain of death to praise God, to give thanks, to pray, and to teach publicly among us and in our country"; and they should "be forbidden to utter the name of God within our hearing."22 Christians were guilty for not taking vengeance against the Jews for having killed Christ and for having killed innocent Christians for three hundred years after the Crucifixion, for not "striking them to death."23

Christianity isn't anti-science, but it is anti-scientism. Scientism is the belief that science is the only way to know anything. But there are many things we know without the benefit of science at all, like logical and mathematical truths (which precede scientific investigations), metaphysical truths (which determine if the external world is real), moral and ethical truths (which set boundaries for our behavior), aesthetic truths (like determining beauty), and historical truths. Christians believe that science can tell us many important things but not all of the important things.

Tolkien was very sensitive about anti-Semitism, so we know he would not have agreed with Justin Martyr’s comment we saw earlier in the book about the early church’s emerging replacement theology. In fact, in Rom 11: 18, Paul warned the gentiles coming into the church not to behave as if they had an advantage over either non-Christian Jews or Jewish members of the church: “Do not consider yourself to be superior to those other branches. If you do, consider this: You do not support the root, but the root supports you.” By Justin Martyr’s time (mid-second century), however, this warning went unheeded, largely due to two Jewish revolts against Rome, increasing tension between the various sects of Judaism, and the rise of a new messiah, Simon bar Kokhba. As we will see, Tolkien offered a corrective for this real historical problem through the relationship between Gimli and Legolas, who are close companions of Aragorn. Indeed, Aragorn’s return brings these two races back together, itself an indication that Aragorn resembles Jesus typologically. By including allusions to Israel’s story in the stories of elves and men in addition to the dwarves, Tolkien may have had Gal 3: 28 in mind where Paul says, “There is neither Jew nor gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

More than wanting us to ask “WHO is the Antichrist?” Jesus wants his people to discern “WHAT is anti-Christ?” What is Anti-Jesus? What is Anti-Lamb? Anti-giving-to-others? Anti-sacrificial-love?

Homosexual sin is not inescapable Paul continues in verse 11: And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. 1 Corinthians 6 v 11