This week Joseph Ratzinger, stage name Pope Benedict XVI, made headlines by making a sweeping exoneration of the Jewish people for the death of Jesus of Nazareth in his upcoming book, The Audacity of Aiding and Abetting Pedophiles.
So I made the last part up, but the rest is true. No doubt Ratzinger’s gesture is one of goodwill, but the fact that he felt compelled to convey such a message is evidence of an unfortunate and befuddling reality.
For 2,000 years, Jews have been scapegoated, targeted, and persecuted because, according to the largely apocryphal New Testament, a handful of Jewish priests asked Roman governor Pontius Pilate to have Jesus executed. So Pilate did. And after a weekend power nap, Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven to be reunited with his estranged father. This wondrous event proved that Jesus was indeed the son of god, as he had said before, and that humans were thus saved from their iniquitous ways, so long as they gave Jesus his proper props as savior of mankind.
A more ridiculous and incoherent narrative would be difficult to conceive. Nonetheless, this is the Word for hundreds of millions of misguided individuals who think, (a) they needed to be saved from damnation, and (b) a vicious child sacrifice conducted in 1st century
I need not apprise you, dear reader, of the craziness and implausibility of such a situation. To even mount a counterargument to this hokum is to elevate it to something worthy of a rebuttal. Besides, I have already made counterpoints against this tripe before, so I need not repeat myself.
But if we accept the Anti-Semitic position that “the Jews are responsible for the murder of Jesus,” this begs a most obvious question: Why should Jews be persecuted for this killing and not praised? Indeed, the entire basis of Christianity is premised on the idea that Jesus of Nazareth had to die in order to absolve humanity of its inherently sinful and wicked ways. He had to be sacrificed, like a lamb in the Old Testament as an offering to his father who had sent him earthward for the purpose of being brutalized and victimized in a most unholy fashion. The whole sorry episode was a kind of sequel to the tale of Abraham and Isaac, except in this case the dirty deed was carried out to the awful end in a torturous filicide that finally quenched the bloodlust of the heavenly patriarch.
Given the terms of this odious quid pro quo, the Jews—far from being villains in this sordid story—were crucially necessary players in god’s Divine Plan of human sacrifice and vicarious salvation. Without the Jewish elders’ entreaties to Pilate to persecute Jesus of Nazareth, the crucifixion does not happen, the sacrifice does not happen, and the salvation does not happen. Without this atrocious occurrence, there is no everlasting life, only darkness. The Jews are therefore heroes, deemed by god as such, who carried out this dastardly deed as foreordained by god himself. They were merely acting as the instruments of god, who knew damn well what was going to happen when he impregnated Mary, while poor Joseph was left to wonder whether his wife had been sleeping around on him.
- Max
No comments:
Post a Comment