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| Pâ•qidꞋ Yi•rᵊmᵊyâhꞋu |
Last week the conservative Right in the United States demonstrated its considerable muscle when CBS Television bowed to pressure from outraged Republicans and decided to cancel its controversial TV miniseries about Ronald Reagan. The movement, orchestrated by a single work-at-home dad named Michael Paranzino, was infuriated by a line, invented as a dramatic device, that has Reagan saying about AIDS: "They that live in sin shall die in sin.”
By contrast, American Jews – long accused of controlling the world – can't stop a movie from coming out that says they killed God.
Mel Gibson's movie the The Passion brings to the big screen the New Testament allegation that Jews are possessed of such dark power that they orchestrated the murder of the Creator, something that even Satan was too weak to achieve. The same Jews who couldn't drive the Romans out of their homeland, and who were being massacred by legionnaires in their thousands, took a break from their revolt against caesar and decided to slaughter the supreme Source of all existence. Whoa… Now that's an allegation.
Understandably, the Anti-Defamation League has come out fighting and condemned the film for its depiction of Jews as "blood-thirsty, sadistic and money-hungry …forcing the decision to torture and execute [Jesus]. …enemies of God and the locus of evil."
But incredibly, many high-profile American Jews have rushed to Gibson's defense, most notably radio host Michael Medved – a man I deeply admire and respect – who defended Gibson's right to "create a film of fearless, uncompromising Gospel authenticity."
The film, Medved argues, is balanced because it "boasts a Jewish Hero ([Jesus]) – not to mention many other sympathetic Judeans, including Christ's disciple and mother. Moreover, Gibson emphasizes the Hebraic identity of the Man from Nazareth. ..a welcome change from the Nordic Messiahs in many previous films."
But based on this unsound logic it would be acceptable to make a movie about the Holocaust portraying the Jewish capos as responsible for most of the cruelty rather than the Nazis, so long as there were also some Jewish heroes and victims in the movie as well.
And frankly, I question whether the fact that Gibson's [Jesus] has a big nose, dark skin, and bushy eyebrows (is that what is meant by a Hebraic identity?) is enough to offset the portrayal of Jews as sadistic, deity-murdering devils.
Dennis Prager, a man whom I consider a mentor, wrote that it is misguided to believe that the film would excite anti-Semitism. "Imagine what Jews would think of a Jew who hated Egyptians after watching The Ten Commandments, and you get an idea of how most Christians would regard a Christian who hated Jews after watching The Passion."
But the analogy is highly inaccurate for, unlike many Christians, Jews do not believe that the Egyptians as a people were cursed by God forever for their ill treatment of the chosen people. Nor have the Jews accused the Egyptians of having enslaved them due to an innately evil character. On the contrary, the main villain of the story is Pharaoh, and the motivation is the Egyptian desire for cheap labor and control. But the Jewish murder of Christ has been depicted in the New Testament as the work of the children of Satan who opposed God due to their malevolent natures, and who are eternally cursed and damned to suffer for deicide.
But whether or not The Passion will excite anti-Semitism, there is a much more important reason this film should be opposed, and it strikes to the very heart of its subject matter. Simply stated, it is a lie.
Not the innocent, harmless fiction of the Star Wars and Matrix variety. No, this is analogous to a movie being based on Thomas of Monmouth's Life of the Martyr William from Norwich which began the blood libel, or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or the Arab propaganda movie Jenin, Jenin which upholds the bogus Palestinian claims that Israeli soldiers carried out a massacre in Jenin.
Indeed, Medved's central argument that "the fact that persecutors and bigots have distorted teachings of the New Testament for their own cruel purposes doesn't mean that those Gospel texts, sacred to all Christians, must be scrapped, revised or ignored in a serious work of cinema" is beside the point, since the texts themselves were revised and distorted to portray the Jews, rather than the Romans, as [Jesus]'s murderers.
The argument that the Jews, rather than the Romans, killed [Jesus], rests on one central, absurd premise, namely that Pontius Pilate tried to save [Jesus]'s life but the Jews demanded that he be executed.
"Pilate said to [the Jews], 'Then what shall I do with [Jesus] who is called Christ?' They all said, 'Let him be crucified.' And he said, 'Why, what evil has he done?' But they shouted all the more, 'Let him be crucified.' So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, 'I am innocent of this man's blood; see to it yourselves.' And all the people answered, 'His blood be on us and on our children' (Matthew 27:22).
These verses are cheap forgeries, contradicted by all serious history of the time and by other verses in the New Testament itself. Pilate was known to be one of the cruelest Roman proconsuls ever. He killed thousands of people on an absolute whim. Philo wrote that Pilate was an "unbending and recklessly hard character. Corruptibility, violence, robberies, treatment of the people, grievances, continuous executions without even the form of a trial, endless and intolerable cruelties" were what he was famous for.
Josephus, in Wars of the Jews, Book II, wrote that Pilate began his career as ruler of the Jews with a major change, which almost caused enormous bloodshed, and then continued to cause disturbances, during which many Jews were killed.
And in Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus relates that Pilate's excessive murders and brutality eventually got him recalled to Rome.
One can only imagine how villainous a ruler he would have to be for even the brutal Roman to consider him too harsh. The idea that he fought to spare the life of a Jew who allowed himself to be called King of the Jews (Matt. 27:11, Mark 15:2, Luke 23:3) and who was rebelling against Roman authority is not just unreasonable but ridiculous.
The further idea that Pilate would take orders from the Jews about who should live and who should die is not just implausible but laughable.
Hyam Maccoby’s brilliant book The Mythmaker demonstrates how shortly after the death of [Jesus] a concerted effort was made to curry favor with the Roman authorities by implicating the Jews and exonerating the Romans in [Jesus]'s and his disciples' deaths.
But the haphazard and unprofessional editing effort left much of the. original and authentic story intact in the New Testament, like the fact that the Pharisees had earlier saved [Jesus]'s life (Luke 13:31}, and that the leader of all the Pharisees, Gamliel, saved Peter and the rest of the Apostles from execution by the corrupt High Priest, an appointee and agent of Rome (Acts 5:33-40).
The deliberate effort on the part of New Testament editors to slander the Jews by accusing them of the murderous intentions of others is further evidenced by Paul's story of how the Syrian King Aretus, an ally of Rome, tried to kill him for proseltyzing in Damascus and how he was saved by being lowered in a basket (II Corinthians 11:32-33).
Amazingly, when the exact same story is retold in the book of Acts (9:22-25), it is now the Jews who are trying to kill Paul.
To be sure, there is a famous Talmudic citation that says that the high Jewish court condemned [Jesus] to death (Sanhedrin 43a), But the [Jesus] it is referring to cannot be the founder of Christianity. In the Talmud there is more than one Yeshu ([Jesus]). A case in point is where the Talmud says that [Jesus] of Nazareth was a student of Yehoshua ben Perahia (Sotah 47a), a sage who died at least 100 years before the [Jesus] of the New Testament was born. More importantly, whoever this "Yeshu" is, it most certainly is not [Jesus] of the New Testament because the narrative of their deaths is completely different. There is no Roman involvement, no crucifixion, and a number of students are put to death with this Yeshu, something that does not happen in the New Testament.
To my christian brethren who will be scandalized at the assertion that the Christian Bible contains forgeries, I remind them that sadly, many parts of the New Testament were doctored to demonstrate Christ's break from his people and their retribution against him for rebuking them.
What emerged in the final text was sadly a tragedy for both Jews and Christians, namely, an anti-Semitic and hateful [Jesus] who is often unrecognizable as the same man who taught such wondrous ethical precepts as the Sermon on the Mount.
In what arguably ranks as the greatest act of character assassination ever, some early Christians took the prince of peace and lover of his people and turned him into the source of Christian anti-Semitism. Dagobert Runes wrote, "The New Testament contains 102 references to the Jews of the most degrading and malevolent kind, thereby creating in the minds and hearts of the Christian children and adults ineradicable hatred toward the Jewish people."
The reconstructed [Jesus] regularly labels his Jewish brethren deceivers and murderers. In John 8:44 he goes so far as to say, "You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning….”
In Matthew 23 he tells the Jews they are destined for the damnation of hell.
But could this possibly be the same man who so loved the Jewish people that he instructed his original 12 apostles: "Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 10:5-7)?
Could this be the same [Jesus] who famously told the Canaanite woman who begged him to exorcize a demon from her daughter, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. …It is not fair to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs" (Matt. 15:22-26)? ,"
[Jesus]'s hatred of his people is an utter fabrication designed to justify later Christian antipathy toward Jews for rejecting Christianity.
The great underlying secret of the New Testament, and what its later anti-semitic falsifiers tried so desperately to bury, was that [Jesus] hated not the Jews, but the Romans. He tried to overthrow the authority not of the rabbis – among whose number he counted himself – but the Romans, whom he detested and despised for their cruelty and paganism.
And because he preached revolt against the Romans, Pilate had him killed. Hence, the High Priest, Rome's corrupt political appointee, says to Pilate of [Jesus]: "We found this man… forbidding us to give tribute to Caesar, and saying that he himself is a king" (Luke 23:2).
Likewise, the accusation against Paul and Jason is that " they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, [Jesus]" (Acts 17:6-7).
[Jesus] preached revolt against Rome and tried to usher in a Messianic age in which Jewish political dominion would be reestablished. That [Jesus] believed he was the Messianic king I have no doubt. Indeed, there is nothing wrong with any Jew believing he or she is the Messiah, since the Jewish belief is that the Messiah is a human being rather than a deity. Any claimant will be judged solely by whether he or she fulfills the Messianic prophecies.
In [Jesus]'s case, well intentioned as he was to deliver his people from Roman oppression, he was killed without having fulfilled the prophecies and was therefore deemed definitively not to have been the Messiah.
But that did not mean that the Jews could not embrace some of his beautiful teachings. In the end, they rejected everything about [Jesus] not only because his followers made him into a God, but principally because they made him the fountain of anti-Semitism.
In this respect, movies like The Passion that perpetuate the lie that the Jews killed [Jesus] are worse for Christians than for Jews because they continue to poison Jews against [Jesus] and Christianity. But by understanding that the [Jesus] who is depicted as a mutineer who hated his own people is a forgery, and that he never claimed to be a deity but rather an earthly king of the Jews who tried to throw off Roman oppression so as to deliver his people, Jews and Christians might yet meet through the personality of [Jesus] of Nazareth, even as they both understand him in completely different ways.
To Christians, [Jesus] will still be a deity, and we Jews will continue to respect Christianity as a remarkable world faith that has brought the knowledge of God to billions of people. To Jews, [Jesus] will simply be a devoted son of his people, human like all others, and a man who would have never accepted Paul's later abrogation of the Torah.
As Jesus himself famously said: "Till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law. ..he who does the commandments and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven" (Matt.5:18-19).
The writer, an Orthodox rabbi is a broadcaster and author of The Private Adam: Becoming a Hero in a Selfish Age.
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