Thursday, June 3, 2010

ADL Rewrites New Testament

Every ten years since 1635, the small alpine town of Oberammergau, Germany has produced a six-hour Passion Play memorializing the final hours of Jesus Christ. About half the town’s citizens help produce the play. Amateur actors fill the stage. The citizens are fulfilling their ancestors’ 375-year-old vow to God to produce the play every decade since He delivered them from the bubonic plague.

Over the past two decades, the town has been the stage for a different kind of passion play. Few places in the world more perfectly present the drama of Jewish power and aggressive intent to deny public expressions of Christianity.

For the past two decades, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League—ever-ready to stifle any virile expression of Christianity—has taken its editing scissors to the play’s script. Jewish crimes have been expunged. Today, the Jews play a bleached and sanitized role in the death of Christ. (What did Jesus say of the Pharisees? Whitewashed tombs?) Romans now stand guard outside Jesus’ first entrance to Jerusalem, “making it clear who is really in control.” The Jewish high priests debate theology, many siding for Jesus. The infamous blood oath—“His blood be upon us and our children”—has been axed from the script. Even Judas, incredibly, is pure at heart. He wants “to facilitate dialogue with the priesthood and is duped into betraying Jesus. It is one of the best roles in the play. When Judas understands that he has been manipulated, he storms the Temple, demanding Jesus’ release.”

AJ Goldman in Forward says the play has become a lovely and moving piece of art, now “less about Jesus and more a rare chance to experience a legendary tradition”... no longer anti-Semitic.

In Oberammergau, the gospel has been stripped. Its testimony is unspeakable in public. A 375-year-old religious tradition—vowed by a city, to thank God for deliverance—has been knifed of its content. (What happened to the sovereignty of old culture? What happened to the sanctity of traditions?) Nothing could more clearly state unbelieving Jewry’s intent to make the New Testament itself unspeakable, unacceptable…illegal.

And still, it is not enough. This year the ADL led a 16-page report from interfaith experts, denouncing the play. They want it decimated completely. The report, “supported by the American Jewish Committee, B'nai B'rith International and the National Council of Synagogues,” calls for “a totally new script using contemporary biblical studies and historical research in order to eliminate continuing damaging negative stereotypes of Jews and Judaism.”

This is about the Bible, plain and simple. The original passion play was lifted from the pages of the Christian Scriptures. The text was taken to the stage. Germans simply dramatized the Pharisees’ vengeful, unrelenting persecution from the book of John; Judas’ ugly, searing betrayal which Matthew witnessed; the Jewish masses’ homicidal contempt, retold by Mark; the agony of Christ, gut-wrenchingly recorded by Luke. History proves what happened. After Jesus’ return to the Father, Christians were persecuted relentlessly. The Jewish Talmud, to this day, records Christ as an evil bastard, now in hell, writhing in boiling semen. (Gittin 56b-57a)

What happened is really not debatable. But it is unacceptable to speak. Anti-Christian Jews can be blamed for nothing. Their leaders must be portrayed as always wise, balanced, good and moderate. As a people, they were never xenophobic or legalistic. And they had nothing, nothing, to do with Jesus’ death. The nails went through His hands and feet as if by magic. There was no murder.

Isn’t it interesting? Jewish leaders allow others no such exoneration.

In Germany, there is no such convenient bleaching of history. A radically different situation prevails. There, no one can be free from their ancestral guilt. No reparations can be enough. It is actually illegal to deny German blood guilt, their culture of hate, their cries through complicity of “Gas them! Gas them!” Under Germany’s Holocaust denial laws, only Jews may revise German history (as in Oberammergau). A person who even questions the Holocaust can go to prison. It is illegal to deny the intentional, mechanized murder of six million Jews. It is illegal even to question the methods used by the Nazis. In Germany, the streets themselves are painted with the memories. Black tulips are grown in memorial sites. Every year on Holocaust Memorial Day the whole of Europe grieves for its guilt and vows it will never be repeated.

History, we know, is written by the conquerors. There can be no remaining doubt about Jewish power in the western world today. Jewish leaders are the scripters of history and Christians are silent and cowed, submitting our sacred Gospels and traditions to Jewish scissors as if they mean nothing.

The world would look vastly different if this weren’t true—if Jews enjoyed less power, if they mourned or even admitted what they did to Jesus and then to Christians. Picture it.

If Jerusalem were Germany, there would be monuments on every corner. In the concrete graven words would say, “This is where Jewish crowds jeered Christ up the street…This is where Jews cried, “Crucify Him.” Plaques and columns would stand between black tulips to announce, “This is where Steven was stoned because he was a Christ-follower…Let us never forget…Never again…Never again.”

The whole of the source article by Harmony Grant Daws can be found here.

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