Christianity 101: How to Baptize the Jews with Fire

Christianity is commonly regarded as anti Semitic because Jesus Christ calls the Jews of his day evil and promises the total destruction of their city and way of life. But Christianity cannot be more anti Semitic than Judaism itself, which coined the notion of Jews being punished by their own deity for their own inattention and misbehavior. Jesus was not the first prophet to “predict” the desolation of the temple in Jerusalem; in fact the Jewish prophets had “predicted” the destruction of Solomon’s temple by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar centuries before.

Christianity cannot be more apocalyptic than Judaism either, since YHWH used Nebuchadnezzar to lay waste to all the nations of Earth, including Judah and Israel, in order to make way for YHWH’s everlasting Messiah. As we shall see, Christianity is intent on reclaiming the Jewish prophecies about Nebuchadnezzar and the original Messiah, who was Cyrus the Great, Emperor of Persia. Parallel logic blaming the Jews for their own downfall originates not only with Isaiah and Paul, but also with the Jewish historian Josephus, who describes Rome’s triumph over Jerusalem.

“Jerusalem Burning” by David Roberts, c.1850

The first page of Mark, the first Gospel ever written, emphasizes that Jesus had a “forerunner” named John who baptized his followers. John foretells the ministry of Jesus Christ, saying “I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit” (Mark 1:8). Matthew takes this promise a disturbing step further: saying “he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit AND FIRE”. In fact he says Jesus Christ will “burn up the chaff with an unquenchable fire” (Matthew 3:11-12).

Matthew’s intent on incineration comes as no surprise, since he goes well beyond Mark in denouncing the Jews as evil. In Mark, Jesus ministers to Jews by exorcising “unclean spirits”, saying “The strong have no need for a doctor, only the ill. I came not to call righteous men, but sinners” (Mark 2:17). But Matthew places an added emphasis on Jewish wickedness: John the Baptist calls the Jews a “generation of vipers” (Matthew 3:7); Jesus asks “O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? (Matthew 12:34)”; Jesus calls them a "wicked and adulterous generation” (Matthew 16:4) and a “faithless and perverse generation” (Matthew 17:17).

Jesus Christ was actually invented by a self described Jew (Paul), but Mark was the first gospel to give Jesus a life story. Paul only wrote about Jesus’s death and resurrection. Meanwhile Matthew assumes the first page of the New Testament, with Mark easily overlooked in its shadow. Mark contradicts Paul in irreconcilable ways – even the idea of Jesus as a wise man or healer would have been anathema to Paul. Mark turns Paul’s teachings into a parable, and puts some of Paul’s words into Christ’s mouth, giving biography and dialogue to Jesus for the first time. Only later did Matthew turn Mark into something much more outrageous.

Scholars date Paul before the year 70 CE and the four Gospels later because Mark reveals a specific knowledge of events that transpired in Jerusalem that year, when a Roman army under Titus Flavius besieged and razed the city even as the Jews convulsed with civil strife. Mark’s gospel clearly relies upon Josephus’ history books in addition to the older letters of Paul. In fact, the predictions made by Jesus in the Gospels are so concordant with the works of Josephus that many early Christians believed the “second coming” of the “Son of Man” happened long ago. This method of interpretation is called Preterism, and we can be certain that it was Mark’s intent.

Josephus emphasizes that Titus’ destruction of the “second” temple in 70 CE was a re enactment of Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of the “first” temple in 587 BC – twin events occurring on the exact same date six centuries apart. This double destruction day is still commemorated by the Jews as “Tisha B’Av”. As we shall see, Josephus invokes a parallel morality with the legend of the first temple in order to imply a parallel outcome: the eventual restoration of the righteous to Jerusalem.

In contrast to Billy Joel, Josephus admits that they did in fact start the fire:

“As for that House [the temple], God had for certain long ago doomed it to the fire; and now that fatal day was come, according to the revolution of the ages: it was the tenth day of the month Lous [Av], upon which it was formerly burnt by the king of Babylon; although these flames took their rise from the Jews themselves, and were occasioned by them” (Wars 6.4.5).

The “first” temple has long fallen from the realm of possibility into the abyss of total myth. No archaeological trace of Solomon’s wundertemple has ever been uncovered, yet its construction and destruction is perhaps the most important story in the Jewish Bible. Josephus justifies the destruction of the “second” temple by Titus as the wrath of YHWH, just like the Jewish Bible justifies the burning of Solomon’s temple by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. Despite being Jewish, Josephus was loyal to Rome in its war against Judea, and his ultimate loyalty to the Romans must always be remembered. Like Mark, he endeavored to justify their victory.

Beginning with Mark, followed by Matthew and Luke, Jesus graphically predicts the razing of Jerusalem and the destruction of its inhabitants, using the same vocabulary as Josephus in War of the Jews. Jesus places the impending downfall of Jerusalem in a very specific timeframe, saying “This generation shall by no means pass until all these things come true” (Mark 13:30). According to tradition, Titus triumphed 40 years after the ministry of Jesus and 70 years after his birth.

The Razing of Jerusalem

Jesus begins his fortune telling routine outside the temple in Jerusalem, after a disciple remarks on all the great stones and buildings. Jesus responds that the temple will be destroyed and Jerusalem ruined!

“These great buildings? There will not be a stone left upon a stone to knock over” (Mark 13:2). “Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in places and famines” (Mark 13:8). “A brother will deliver a brother to death and a father his child; children will rise against parents and put them to death” (Mark 13:12).

Christ’s iconic description of “not one stone left upon a stone” precisely echoes Josephus, who states that after Kaisar ordered the final destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, “it was so thoroughly laid even with the ground by those that dug it up to the foundation, that there was left nothing to make those that came thither believe it had ever been inhabited” (Wars 7.1.1). Luke also describes the siege of the city:

“The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another” (Luke 19:44).

Josephus also describes embankments built against the walls of Jerusalem, and its eventual encirclement, as Titus decrees “they must build a wall around the whole city” (Wars 5.10). The old testament prophet Ezekiel, called a “son of man” by YHWH, likewise anticipates the siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar: “Now, son of man, take a block of clay, put it in front of you and draw the city of Jerusalem on it. Then lay siege to it: Erect siege works against it, build a ramp up to it, set up camps against it and put battering rams around it” (Ezekiel 4:1-2).

As we saw in Mark, Jesus also predicts earthquakes, famines, and civil war as signs of Jerusalem’s downfall. Meanwhile Josephus writes of the signs of the temple’s destruction: “at that feast which we call Pentecost, as the priests were going by night into the inner sanctum [...] they felt a quaking, and heard a great noise, and after that they heard a sound as of a great multitude, saying, ‘Let us remove hence’” (Wars 6.5.3). This scene is apparently recreated at the beginning of Acts 2 when the “holy spirit” comes upon the apostles at Pentecost, causing them all to speak in tongues.

As for famine and civil war, they are the central themes of Josephus’s work. Jerusalem was torn between rival Zealot leaders including Simon (bar Giora) and John (of Gischala). Josephus says these two Jews preyed upon the other inhabitants of Jerusalem even as the Romans starved them out.

Some Jews swallowed their gold and attempted to flee the city, but “John and Simon, with their factions, did more carefully watch these men's going out than they did the coming in of the Romans; and if any one did but afford the least shadow of suspicion of such an intention, his throat was cut immediately”, and then his belly too. (Wars 5.10.1). Josephus adds, “For the well-to-do, it proved equally fatal to remain in the city or to attempt to get out of it (Wars 5.10.2).

And just like Jesus Christ describes family members delivering each other unto death, Josephus describes family members dooming each other to starvation, complete with Luke’s reference to dashing children upon the ground:

“Children pulled the very morsels that their fathers were eating out of their mouths and, what was still more to be pitied, so did the mothers do to their infants. When those who were most dear were perishing in their arms, they were not ashamed to take from them the very last drops that might preserve their lives. [...] They lifted up children from the ground as they hung upon the morsels they had gotten and threw them down upon the floor. […] The upper stories were full of women and children dying by famine, and the lanes of the city were full of the dead bodies of the aged” (Wars 5.10).

This coming hellscape explains the urgency with which Jesus urges the Jews to flee:

“Let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. The one on the roof should not come down or take anything out of his house, and the one in the field should not turn back to take his jacket. WOE to pregnant and nursing women in those days. Pray that it does not happen in the winter, for the distress of those days has never been seen since the beginning of time and will never be seen again. If the lord did not shorten the days, no flesh would be saved at all” (Mark 13:14-20).

Jesus makes his clairvoyance explicit, saying “be on your guard, I have told you everything in advance” (Mark 13:23). He warns his followers to be ready at any hour, saying “For as lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man” (Matthew 24:27). Jesus offers further omens:

“The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will be falling out of heaven, and the heavenly powers will be shaken.’ And then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with much power and glory. And he will send his angels to gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens” (Mark 13:24-27).

Incredibly, Josephus describes many of the same signs given to Jerusalem in anticipation of its destruction, including a falling star, an army in the clouds, and a man named Jesus declaring a voice of judgment from the four winds. Not only do these signs align with the predictions of Christ in the Gospels, they conclude with Jesus “the Woe Sayer” preaching doom to Jerusalem.

Josephus writes: “[The Jews] did not attend nor give credit to the signs that were so evident, and did so plainly foretell their future desolation. Thus there was a star resembling a sword, which stood over the city, and a comet, that continued a whole year”. When the eastern gate of inner temple opens miraculously, the scribes believe “that the security of their holy house was dissolved of its own accord, and that the gate was opened for the advantage of their enemies. So these publicly declared that the signal foreshowed the desolation that was coming” (War 6.5.3).

Josephus adds, “Before sun-setting, chariots and troops of soldiers in their armor were seen running about among the clouds, and surrounding of cities.” Compare to Jesus who says “you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of divine power and coming with the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:62). And Daniel too, describing a son of man: “I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man […] And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away” (Daniel 7:14).

Josephus concludes his description of the omens given to Jerusalem with a description of Jesus the Woe Sayer. Jesus Christ also cries woe repeatedly in the Gospels, as he does seven times in Matthew 23, first and most famously: "Woe to you, scribes and pharisees, hypocrites!" This theme also traces back to the original Jewish prophets, who quote YHWH: “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” (Jeremiah 23:1). Josephus writes:

But, what is still more terrible, there was one Jesus, the son of Ananus, a plebeian and a husbandman, who, four years before the war began, and at a time when the city was in very great peace and prosperity, came to that feast whereon it is our custom for every one to make tabernacles to God in the temple, began on a sudden to cry aloud, "A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds, a voice against Jerusalem and the holy house, a voice against the bridegrooms and the brides, and a voice against this whole people!" (Wars 6.5.3).

And just like Christ in the Gospels, Jesus the Woe Sayer remains silent when accused:

“Certain of the most eminent among the populace had great indignation at this dire cry of his, and took up the man, and gave him a great number of severe stripes; yet did not he either say any thing for himself, or any thing peculiar to those that chastised him, but still went on with the same words which he cried before. Hereupon the magistrates, supposing, as the case proved to be, that this was a sort of divine fury in the man, brought him to the Roman procurator, where he was whipped till his bones were laid bare; yet he did not make any supplication for himself, nor shed any tears” (Wars 6.5.3).

Jesus behaves similarly once apprehended and brought before Pontius Pilate. Pilate asks Jesus, “‘Aren’t you going to answer? See how many things they are accusing you of.’ But Jesus still made no reply, and Pilate was amazed” (Mark 15:4-5). This silence of the “suffering servant” was actually first depicted by Isaiah: “He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7).

A passage within Josephus called the Flavian Testimony attests rather briefly and incredibly to the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. However, this testimony is widely regarded as a fraud interpolated into Josephus by Eusebius in the 4th century CE. If it were genuine, it would mean that Josephus paid more verbiage to Jesus the Woe Sayer than Jesus the immortal Messiah.

For more on the razing of the temple, and parallels between Josephus describing Simon bar Giora rising headfirst out of the ruins and Jesus Christ exclaiming that he will build his new church upon the “rock” of Simon Peter (aka Cephas), please see the cornerstone of this blog, “On This Head I Will Build My Church”.

Lakes of Blood in the Temple

As we saw in the introduction, Josephus argues that the destruction of the “first” temple by Nebuchadnezzar and the destruction of the second temple by Titus Flavius are parallel events. Isaiah and other prophets explain that the “first” temple was destroyed by the King of Babylon on behalf of YHWH as divine punishment against the Jews and Israelis. Meanwhile Josephus justifies the destruction of the “second” temple by saying the Zealots had desecrated its grounds by spilling innocent blood all over the place. First the high priest Jonathan was assassinated, as Josephus writes:

“This seems to me to have been the reason why God, out of his hatred to these men's wickedness, rejected our city; and as for the Temple, he no longer esteemed it sufficiently pure for him to inhabit therein, but brought the Romans upon us, and threw a fire upon the city to purge it; and brought upon us, our wives, and children, slavery - as desirous to make us wiser by our calamities” (Antiquities 20.8.5).

Josephus laments the assassination of the high priest Ananus by Zealots and the wider bloodshed of their revolt: “And now the outer Temple was all of it overflowed with blood; and that day, as it dawned, saw eight thousand five hundred dead there.” (Wars 4.5.1). Josephus also describes a man named Zacharias who is murdered by Zealots in the Temple, after he was acquitted of a crime: “Two of the boldest of them fell upon Zacharias in the middle of the Temple, and slew him” (Wars 4.5.4).

Compare the Zealous bloodying of the temple, culminating in the execution of Zacharias, to the accusation levied by Jesus Christ against the Jews in the Gospels: “...upon you [is] all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar” (Matthew 23:35).

Josephus continues:

"[Pilgrims to] this celebrated place, which was esteemed holy by all mankind, fell down before their own sacrifices themselves, and sprinkled that altar which was venerable among all men, both Greeks and barbarians, with their own blood. The dead bodies of strangers were mingled together with those of their own country, and those of profane persons with those of the priests, and the blood of all sorts of dead carcasses stood in lakes in the holy courts themselves.”

Oh most wretched city, what misery so great as this didst thou suffer from the Romans, when they came to purify thee from thy internal pollutions! For thou couldst be no longer a place fit for God, […] Yet mayst thou again grow better, if perchance thou wilt hereafter appease the anger of that God who is the author of thy destruction (Wars 5.1.4).

Matthew shows the Jews in Jerusalem similarly tainted by innocent blood, as they claim responsibility for the execution of Christ after Pilate washes his hands of the deed: “His blood is upon us and our children!” (Matthew 27:25).

The use of fire to purify and make holy is a recurring theme in the Jewish Bible. In the typical method of a “burnt offering” (a holocaust) to YHWH, first blood is let on the altar, then the sacrificial animal is consumed by fire. An essay in Mosaic Magazine sheds further light upon the Jewish perception of fire as a purifying force:

“This is the fire that purges and purifies, that destroys what is evil or unsavory in God’s eyes: the fire that burns Sodom and Gomorrah, melts the Golden Calf, consumes Nadav and Avihu, and devours Koraḥ and his 250 men. It is the fire that sets man’s cities of sin into flames; the fire of divine wrath; the fire that turns evildoers to ashes. Sometimes God’s fire and smoke are directed against His enemies; sometimes, against His own chosen beloved people—of whom, because of His unique covenantal love of them, He is at once demanding and jealous. When He encounters unfaithful or duplicitous behavior, His love kindles to anger, and He describes Himself in Deuteronomy as ‘a consuming fire, a jealous God.’

“To us the cathartic fire of the Bible can seem shocking and even offensive. Does the world’s sin ever justify men and women being burned into nothingness? What kind of God burns sets aflame entire cities to punish their defiling inhabitants for their ways? How can a loving and personal God turn against His own people? The cathartic fire is terrifying: awakening nightmarish fears of God’s burning punishment for our own misdeeds, or the specter of apocalyptic annihilation in a world armed with force and counterforce of unimaginable destructiveness.”

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/religion-holidays/2016/12/the-jewish-tradition-unfolds-in-flames-heres-why/

In describing all the human blood shed upon the altar and the temple grounds, Josephus implies that a burnt offering will complete the sacrifice and make atonement. He then describes the Jews themselves starting a fire on the temple grounds which was later spread by a Roman soldier to the “holy house” itself. Josephus says Titus tried to extinguish the flames but failed. And after it burned he ordered it to be levelled. Just like Jesus promises the levelling of the temple, and Matthew promises that Jesus will baptize evildoers with fire.

These thorough parallels between Josephus and the Gospels cannot be an accident. They show that Josephus was just as important as Paul when it came to writing Mark. Paul claimed “Christ Jesus” fulfilled Jewish prophecies in a new way. Josephus claimed Titus Flavius was acting as an agent of YHWH when he conquered Jerusalem, in direct analogy to the Jewish Bible. And Mark brought these two ideas together, attempting to show that Jesus Christ predicted the coming of Titus.

The Son of Man and the Messiah Himself

The Jewish Bible is actually all about the coming of the Messiah who is Cyrus, the emperor of Persia. Nearly all of the prophecies of the Jewish Bible had been fulfilled by the time it was published; Cyrus conquered Babylon in 539 BC. The Jewish prophecies “predict” the initial triumph of Babylon over Judah and the eventual restoration of the “remnant” of chosen people to Jerusalem by the Messiah.

As the “prophet” Jeremiah says, the length of time between the Babylonian conquest of Judah and the reconstruction of the temple by Cyrus is 70 years (586 BC – 516 BC). Jeremiah makes the connection to Nebuchadnezzar explicit, using an array of symbols that would later be adopted by Christianity:

“I [YHWH] will summon all the families of the north, and I will send for my servant Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, whom I will bring against this land, against its residents, and against all the surrounding nations. So I will devote them to destruction and make them an object of horror and contempt, an everlasting desolation. Moreover, I will banish from them the sounds of joy and gladness, the voices of the bride and bridegroom, the sound of the millstones, and the light of the lamp. And this whole land will become a desolate wasteland, and these nations will serve the king of Babylon for seventy years” (Jeremiah 25:8-11).

YHWH promises to destroy all nations in his rage, concluding with Babylon:

“So I took the cup [of wrath] from YHWH’s hand and made all the nations drink from it, each one to whom YHWH had sent me, to make them a ruin, an object of horror and contempt and cursing, as they are to this day—Jerusalem and the cities of Judah, its kings and officials; Pharaoh king of Egypt, [...] all the kings of Arabia, and all the kings of the mixed tribes who dwell in the desert; all the kings of Zimri, Elam, and Media; all the kings of the north, both near and far, one after another—all the kingdoms on the face of the earth. And after all of them, the king of Babylon will drink it too. Then you are to tell them that this is what commander YHWH, the God of Israel, says: ‘Drink, get drunk, and vomit. Fall down and never get up again, because of the sword I will send among you.’ If they refuse to take the cup from your hand and drink it, you are to tell them that this is what commander YHWH says: ‘You most certainly must drink it! For behold, I am beginning to bring disaster on the city that bears My Name, so how could you possibly go unpunished? You will not go unpunished, for I am calling down a sword upon all the inhabitants of the Earth” (Jeremiah 25:17-29).

Compare this verse to Daniel 9:27, which repeats Jeremiah’s horrible warnings: “on the wing of abominations will come the one who makes desolate, until a complete destruction, one that is decreed, gushes forth on the one who makes desolate”. This verse refers to Nebuchadnezzar as “the one who makes desolate”, who will in turn be completely destroyed by YHWH’s decree.

We must understand the logic of Jewish scripture here. According to the Jews, a real historical event – the Babylonian conquest of Judah – was “predicted” by Isaiah and others in the decades before it happened. Jeremiah explicitly frames the event as a punishment levied upon the Jews by YHWH for not reforming themselves to the freshly discovered law of Deuteronomy (canonically dated to 622 BCE). Only 35 years separate the alleged discovery of the Torah and the destruction of Solomon’s supposed temple by Nebuchadnezzar. This is the length of time YHWH gave the Jews to reform themselves before inflicting his capital punishment.

To distill the prophecies: first YHWH will use the King of Babylon to punish the Jews, then Babylon will in turn be defeated by the final Messiah, YHWH’s eternal king. According to the same scripture itself, Cyrus the Great was the one who conquered Babylon, released the Jewish remnant from captivity, and rebuilt the temple. Isaiah makes Cyrus’ role as the Messiah perfectly clear:

“Who says of Cyrus, ‘He is my shepherd, and he shall fulfill all my purpose’; saying of Jerusalem, ‘She shall be built,’ and of the temple, ‘Your foundation shall be laid.’ Thus says YHWH to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped, to subdue nations before him and to loose the belts of kings, to open doors before him that gates may not be closed” (Isaiah 44:28-45:1). “‘I have stirred him up in righteousness, and I will make all his ways level; he shall build my city and set my exiles free, not for price or reward,’ says commander YHWH” (Isaiah 45:13).

The role of Cyrus as the Messiah is confirmed by Ezra and repeated in the second book of Chronicles: “This is what Cyrus King of Persia says: ‘YHWH, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah” (Ezra 1:2).

Yet by Paul’s day, many Jews felt that their prophecies had failed or were failing: they expected a new Messiah to deliver them from the Roman civil war and establish an everlasting global reign. This is the context in which Paul imagined a new kind of Christ – a heavenly Christ – who could preside over a new kind of kingdom. Paul’s vision of Christ in turn became the Roman parable of Mark, in which Jesus Christ proactively claims the mantle of Messiah for Titus Flavius.

According to the Gospels, Titus must be the second coming of the Messiah, a Son of Man, fulfilling the desolation of Jerusalem promised by Jesus to his disciples. The Gospels frame this destruction of the errant or wicked Jews as a way to make way for the return of the righteous to Jerusalem. This narrative structure runs in parallel to the original intent of the Jewish prophecies, which was to justify the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon in order to make way for the Messiah, Cyrus.

And Yet Judaism Did Not Come out of Judah

We must also consider who actually wrote the Jewish Bible, because it does not appear to be the Israelites or Judahites. The Jewish Bible appeared out of whole cloth from the library of Alexandria circa 250 BCE, written in Greek. Although this Bible (known as the Septuagint) was supposedly translated identically by 70 scholars locked in 70 rooms for 70 years (or whatever), no earlier versions of Hebrew language scriptures have ever been found. The Dead Sea Scrolls show that some Septuagint verses were copied into a new Jewish script by the year 70 CE. But the first significant comparison of Greek and Hebrew scriptures was made by Origen five centuries later. And the first complete Hebrew Bible did not appear until more than 1000 years later!

The original authors of the Septuagint were Greek speaking Ptolemies, the patrician rulers of Egypt who lingered in the wake of the death of their benefactor, Alexander the Great. They were the founders and promoters of a vast world library that was later burned or disappeared after Christianity became the the state religion of Rome. It only makes sense that these people would write the false history of Jerusalem in such a way that the prophecies had already been fulfilled. Cyrus conquered Babylon on behalf of the Persian empire, and only 80 years later Alexander conquered the Persian empire, establishing the Ptolemaic dynasty to rule over Egypt.

The only problem was that the Jewish Bible foretold the endless reign of Zion. Then the claimants to Jerusalem fell into civil war. The original Ptolemaic Jews laid claim to Jerusalem by writing their false history as such. The Jewish Bible uses a framework of real historical events and plagiarized mythological sources to construct the false history of the Jews and their progenitors. The original role of YHWH’s “chosen people” was to occupy and enslave their own cousins. The Ptolemies wanted Jerusalem.

The Jewish Bible clarifies that every time the “chosen people” suffer, it is because they are being punished by YHWH. This is a necessary coping mechanism since they believe YHWH chose them over their own family to fulfill his Earthly desires. It is not possible, theologically, for the nations to be equal to the Jews. Whenever the Jews suffer defeat at the hands of the nations, it must be interpreted as the will of YHWH.

The New Testament repeats this archetypal belief when it calls the Jews evil, then decrees for them a divine punishment. It is the Jewish Prophets who say that YHWH expressed his will through Nebuchadnezzar in destroying Solomon’s temple and first exiling the Jews from Jerusalem. It is they who insist the Jews and Israelites were behaving badly in the first place, thus inviting their Earthly humiliation and destruction. It is they who proclaim that YHWH destroyed or will destroy the whole world in his displeasure. It is they who decree that a Messiah will finally rule over the fulfillment of this ruin.

So if Jews have a problem with anti Semitism in general, and Christian anti Semitism in particular, they should look deep within the book that defines their ethnic and racial identity in the first place. According to Judaism, whenever Jews suffer, it is only the will of YHWH, and they have only themselves to blame. When the Jews are destroyed en masse, it is because YHWH has decreed their just punishment.

This is what the Jewish Bible says about Babylon conquering Jerusalem, and this is what the Christian Bible says about Rome conquering Jerusalem. Neither Jews who expect the Messiah to come nor Christians who expect him to return have read their scriptures correctly. The Jewish Bible anoints Cyrus as Messiah, and the Christian Bible anoints Jesus, who promises to return within a generation to destroy Jerusalem. Titus Flavius was the second coming. It is time to put the all the Bibles up high on the shelf. They are not a window into the future. They are a dark fantasy of the past.