ADL REWRITES NEW TESTAMENT
By Harmony Grant Daws
3 June 10
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.” ADL even wrote in a new scene
in which Jesus stands outside the Temple, holds up a Torah scroll and
leads His followers in reciting in Hebrew “ the major Jewish
prayer known as "Sh'ma Yisroel" – "Hear O Israel,
the Lord is God the Lord is One."”
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.”
He protests that it is no longer anti-Semitic.
Yet for ADL, even the censoring and trashing has not been enough.
Its experts
attended a preview May 8 and reported, “ the play
continues to depict damaging stereotypes of Judaism and presents Jewish
leadership as deceitful, legalistic, vindictive and xenophobic."
Goldman’s Forward article explains the locus of the
conflict: Jewish leaders hate the Gospels, basically. Before the 2000
production, the play’s dramatic advisor tried to convince ADL
head Abe Foxman that the play was about love and redemption. Foxman
bitingly replied, “If you want to give me love and understanding,
there are a lot of other Christian subjects. Give me another play;
if it’s about a Crucifixion in which the Jews kill Christ, you
can never clean it up enough.”
For Foxman, the
Gospel itself is anti-Semitic and dangerous,
as is Christian evangelism to Jews. His book, Never Again? The
Threat of the New Anti-Semitism, alleges that “with every
annual reading or reenactment of the story of the death of Jesus in
Christian churches, millions of Christians imbibed the notion that
the Jews had been guilty of the worst crime in history. Into our own
time, the deicide libel has been used to justify hatred of Jews and
violence against them, including from Christian pulpits.” Violence
from Christian pulpits even includes the commission to witness to Jews,
according to Foxman, which is seen as attempted genocide of their souls!
Jewish leaders, captained by Foxman, have been radically successful
in their assault. 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. A timeline of some of
the billions spent on Holocaust memorials can be seen here: http://timelines.com/topics/holocaust-memorials.
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.”
If such awareness were alive in the world—if Christians themselves
were vigilant to Jewish antagonism, to the cosmic conflict—perhaps
hate crime laws would not have passed. Perhaps we would not be so far
down the road to criminalizing Christianity. That day is coming fast,
largely because Christians meekly submit to Jewish leaders’ powerful
agenda, always defended by the myth of Jewish innocence and victimhood
against the ever-present and irrational “anti-Semitism” of
Christians and Gentiles. We have submitted to this myth. We have refused
to expose the Talmud. Also ADL. We have surrendered the Gospels to
Jewish excising. We have signed contracts when entering Israel, promising
not to evangelize. We have underwritten the Jewish state with tax donations
and religious offerings. We have lionized the Jewish tradition. We
have drunk the Kool-Aid. Even before Jewish activists took scissors
to the crucifixion stories, we ourselves used White-out on the words
of Christ.
We ignored His timeless warnings,
Be careful, be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees
and Sadducees. (Matthew 16:6)
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites!
You shut the kingdom of heaven in men's faces. You yourselves do
not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to. Woe to
you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel
over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one,
you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are… (Matthew
23)
We ignored Paul,
Beware of the concision [the Jews].... For we are the circumcision
which worship God in the Spirit…(Philippians 3:2-3)
The problem is that it can’t be had both ways. Stand behind
the Bible or don’t. Accept its warnings—all of them—or
admit you are an unbeliever.
Evangelical Christians hold to Biblical literalism yet ignore its
most vibrantly relevant truths when they reflect adversely on Judaism.
The Bible explains why Oberammergau has been butchered. It explains
why Germany is lined with blood yet Jerusalem can continue, without
censure, its vendetta against Christianity. Yet Christian leaders themselves
need no coaching to ignore these verses.
Unless they stop this willful blindness, Jewish power will continue
to grow and someday soon the Bible itself will be replaced—like
the Oberammergau script—with the tradition of those who nailed
Jesus to the cross.
