Saturday 5 June 2010

‘Passion of Christ’ – The ADL version

Rehmat's World

June 5, 2010

Currently, the Bavarian village of Oberammergau (pop. 5000) is holding its 41st repeat of five-hours Oberammergau Passion Play from May 15-October 3, 2010. Its first session was conducted in 1634 CE. The legend goes that when half of village population was wiped out by a deadly plague in 1633 CE, the village elders vowed that if the village was spared they would re-enact the Crucification of Christ according to the New Testament narration – every ten years – and they have kept their promise ever since.

All the actors taking part in the play are local, who re-enact the life and horrible death of Christ at the hands of Romans and Jews and then his resurrection and disappearance. This year, the organizers are expecting more than half-million visitors around the world to come to Oberammergau and watch the play.
Jewish lobby groups in Germany, France and the US have for years called the play-script being ‘anti-Semitic’. Most of the biblical story surrounding Jesus life, death and resurrection has been water-downed for the approval the ZOG in Bonn. This year play was previewed by Rabbi Eric Greenberg, Amy-Jill Levine and Professor Leona B. Carpenter, a New Testament expert. Their observations were that though many revisions (acceptable) have been made to the original biblical narration of Jesus’ birth, life, death and resurrection (as shown in Mel Gibson’s movie – watch an interview below) – the play continue to depicts damaging setreotypes of Judaism and presents Jewish leadership as “deceitful, legalistic, vindictive and xenophobic”.

Harmony Grant Daws, an expert on the New Testament and associated with National Prayer Nework, in her response to ADL, titled ADL Rewrites New Testament, wrote: “For Abraham Foxman (national director Anti-Defamation League), 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.
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.”

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………”
Earlier in 1903 – Cyrus I. Scofield revised the King James version of Bible by inserting pro-Zionist notes in the margins, between verses and chapters and on the bottom of the pages. It was published by Jewish publishinghouse, the Oxford Press under the name Scofield Reference Bible, which gave Zionist Jews and Zionist Christians ‘the divine’ right to expel 700,000 Muslim and Christian Palestinians in order to make space for the unwanted Jews in Europe.

Categories: Contemporary religions

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