Why the Holocaust Happened: Its Religious Cause and Scholarly Cover-Up by Eric Zuesse

Author:Eric Zuesse [Zuesse, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Judaism, Holocaust, Christianity and Antisemitism, Holocaust; Jewish (1939-1945), Military, World War II, Christianity and Other Religions, History
ISBN: 9781931055123
Google: UQ4cAgAACAAJ
Amazon: 1931055122
Barnesnoble: 1931055122
Goodreads: 5943398
Publisher: SuperBooks.com
Published: 2000-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

16: Christianity’s War Against Judaism

Acts 21:21 forward portrays Paul as the subject of Jewish riots against him over Paul’s preachments and policies regarding circumcision and the Covenant. This general thrust of Acts can probably be believed; these were highly public—even mass—events, so that if they had not occurred then Acts’ pure invention of them would have been widely recognized even in Luke’s era. Furthermore, given that Paul had been preaching that the Jewish Covenant had been terminated by God, so that the religion these people believed in and practised was now mere “garbage” (or “refuse,” or “excrement,” according to Philippians 3:8), it is certainly understandable that Paul would elicit riots from Jews. And what Acts describes here is nothing less than a state of war between Paul and the Jews—not just the Christian sect of Jews; all Jews. Paul was fortunate enough to survive these riots and escape; but his hatred of Jews and of Judaism—both Jesus-followers and not (e.g., 1 Thessalonians 2:15-6, Galatians 6:12, 2 Corinthians 11:13-23, and Philippians 3:2&8)—can only have been increased thereby. And this hatred also freed him to go all-out to win the Romans and thus ultimately the entire Empire, by absolving the Roman regime of the crucifixion and pinning the Deicide upon Paul’s own enemies, “the Jews.” The only high-wire routine he had to worry about from now on was (as in Romans 9-11) keeping the few Jews who were in his congregations. But the anti-Semitic die was cast.

According to many scholars, 1 Thessalonians was the earliest written of all Paul’s epistles, and the earliest of all the books of the New Testament. (I believe that 1 Corinthians contains parts of a letter that Paul probably wrote even earlier.) 1 Thessalonians was quite possibly written shortly after the event that is described in Galatians 2:11-6—the creation of the “Christian” faith, which itself occurred immediately after Paul had defended his practises to the Jesus-sect elders at the council in Jerusalem. It thus is quite understandable that 1 Thessalonians might contain Paul’s first rabidly anti-Semitic outburst—which it did, in 2:15-6, referred to “the Jews,” saying that they were the ones “who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and persecuted us. How displeasing they are to God! They are the enemies of all Mankind! They even tried to stop us from preaching to the Gentiles the message that would bring them salvation. All this time they have been filling their guilt to the fullest, and now God’s retribution has at last come down upon them!” In Paul’s view, the delegation to Antioch headed by Peter and sent by James, ordering that all of Paul’s adult male Gentile converts must be circumcised, was a clear demonstration that “They even tried to stop us from preaching to the Gentiles the message that would bring them salvation”—i.e., that circumcision is not required. And, in keeping with Paul’s repeatedly expressed belief (e.g., Romans 13:1-4) that political rulers are God’s agents on Earth carrying out God’s divine justice, it seems that

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