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ANALYSIS, IDEOLOGY, PALEST INE, RESIST ANCE, SPIRIT UAL, WEST BANK,
WORLD Z IONISM

IF JESUS WAS A REBEL,

WHO WAS HE REBELLING
AGAINST?
DECEMBER 25, 20 14 | MADDCOLDSONOFKUFA | LEAVE A COMMENT

by Richard Edmondson, The Ugly Truth

You could perhaps consider this a primer for Christian Zionists,

although others, possibly even atheists, might find it interesting
as well. Here is the question: If Jesus was a rebel, then who was
he rebelling against? Jackson Browne, although his song is quite
nice, doesn’t really give us an answer. Let us then examine the
matter ourselves and see if we can reach a conclusion.

Was Jesus in revolt against Rome? This is something Jews often

try and argue. Jesus, they tell us, was nothing more than a Jewish
nationalist, who, like many other Jewish nationalists of the day,
sought an end to the Roman occupation of Palestine (or the “land
of Israel” as they now like to claim it). Some of these Jewish
intellects have even gone so far as to hypothesize that Jesus
practicedPharisaic Judaism himself! But of course the
preponderance of evidence does not support these claims.

And Jesus, answering, said unto them, “Render to Caesar the

things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.

The above quotation, from Mark 12:17, is one of the few

statements from Jesus regarding Roman rule over Palestine that
can be found in the canonized gospels, and it would suggest he
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had no strong grievances or objections to it. Of course, that’s
only the canonized material. What of other early texts? What,
say, of the Gnostic sources? Or the vast body of apocryphal
writings? Is there anything in any of this material to support the
notion that Jesus’ mission in life was setting up a Jewish state?
The answer is little to none. Certainly there were a great many
Jews who did have this ambition. One was Judas of Gamala, who
often today is often referred to as Judas the Galilean. In 6 A.D.,
when Jesus was a child, Judas led a revolt against Rome. The
Jewish historian Josephus, who wrote in the late first century,
tells us a little bit about this revolt. He says Judas was joined by a
Pharisee priest named Zadok, and that both of them exhorted
the nation to rise up in response to Roman taxation and a census
that was to be taken. Rising up against taxation sounds
reasonable, right? No one, after all, wants to pay taxes, least of
all to a foreign occupier. But Josephus goes on, in Book XVIII of
his work Antiquities of the Jews, to tell us that Judas “was the
author of the fourth branch of Jewish philosophy.” In the first
century there were four main Jewish sects: The Pharisees, the
Sadducees, the Essenes, and the Zealots. Judas was the founder
of the Zealots. Josephus goes on:

All sorts of misfortunes also sprang from these men, and the
nation was infected with this doctrine to an incredible degree; one
violent war came upon us after another, and we lost our friends
which used to alleviate our pains; there were also very great
robberies and murder of our principal men. This was done in
pretense indeed for the public welfare, but in reality for the hopes
of gain to themselves; whence arose seditions, and from them
murders of men, which sometimes fell on those of their own
people, (by the madness of these men towards one another,
while their desire was that none of the adverse party might be
left,) and sometimes on their enemies…

These men agree in all other things with the Pharisaic notions; but
they have an inviolable attachment to liberty, and say that God is
to be their only Ruler and Lord. They also do not value dying any
kinds of death, nor indeed do they heed the deaths of their
relations and friends, nor can any such fear make them call any
man lord.

What Josephus is telling us here is that the Zealots believed they

should follow no laws other than what they perceived to be the
laws of God. Moreover, they had no qualms about killing people.
And after all, why should they? They were doing God’s work—or
at any rate what they believed to be God’s work. In other words,
the Zealots firmly held that the Jewish people were “chosen,” and
it was their goal, as members of the fourth sect of Judaism, to
convince the rest of the nation that Jews should recognize no
law imposed by Rome…or any other earthly entity for that matter.

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A Jewish state that recognizes no international laws. Sounds
familiar, doesn’t it?

So did Jesus have anything in common with these people? In

Matthew 10:4 we are told that one of his 12 disciples was a man
named Simon, who was known as “the Zealot” (see also, Luke
6:15), and Jewish scholars today point to this as evidence of
Jesus’ putative Jewish nationalism. Are they justified in doing so?
We can probably conjecture that Simon did indeed at some point
have some affiliation with the Zealot Party, but does this mean
the teachings of Jesus and those of the Zealots were mutually
compatible? Or is it possible Simon was a Zealot before he met
Jesus? Was he perhaps in the audience that day Jesus delivered
the Sermon on the Mount, and could he have been so inspired by
what he heard, either then or on some other occasion, that he
decided to leave the Zealots and become a follower of Jesus
instead? We don’t know, and this is all speculative of course, but
if Simon had been a Zealot for a long time, it is most likely he still
would have been called by that name regardless. How many
people today still retain titles for positions they no longer hold? I’ll
bet Bill Clinton still gets called “Mr. President” at times.

The important question is not whether one of the disciples was or

wasn’t a Zealot; the important question we must ask ourselves is
this: was it Jesus’ goal to set up in Palestine a Jewish state, a that
would adhere to no earthly code of law, that would savagely
attack other states and peoples at will? Does any shred of
evidence exist that would prove such a claim? Again the answer is
no. Nothing. Nothing can be found, not in a single ancient text,
either canonized or non-canonized, either Gnostic or Orthodox,
that would suggest he longed for such a thing, or even, as we
have seen, that he had any particular beef with Rome as the ruling
power at all. So something else was driving this rebel, and indeed
Jackson Browne has that part right—Jesus was indeed a rebel.
But who or what was he rebelling against?

Could it have been the rich? We are perhaps getting closer here,
for certainly we have statements on record, such as Luke 18:25, in
which Jesus clearly seems to take a dim view of great wealth and
those who devote themselves to amassing it:

How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!

Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of
a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of
God.

So yes, we have this and other similar statements, but at the

same time, we should also remember that one of Jesus’ especially
devoted followers was Joseph of Arimathea, a rich man who is
mentioned in all four canonized gospels and who most likely was
even a member of the Jerusalem Sanhedrin. It was in a prepared
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tomb belonging to Joseph that Jesus’ body was laid after the
crucifixion. Mark 15:43 describes Joseph as an “honorable
counselor” who “waited for the kingdom of God”—from which we
can probably conclude that Jesus’ statements on the rich were
never intended as blanket condemnations of all rich people per se.
So once again it seems we must look elsewhere.

To try and answer our question once and for all, let us revisit the
subject of the Zealots. In his book Revolution in Judea, the
Jewish author Hyam Maccoby tells us the Zealots took their
name from Phinehas, who in the Old Testament book of Numbers
is described as having been “zealous” for his God. If we look at the
story of Phinehas we find not only that he was a Jewish
nationalist, but also a Jewish supremacist who was opposed
—violently so—to interracial marriage and dating. The following
comes from Numbers 25, beginning with verse 1:

While Israel was staying in Shittim, the men began to engage in

sexual immorality with Moabite women, who invited them to the
sacrifices to their gods. The people ate and bowed down before
these gods. So Israel joined in worshipping the Baal of Peor. And
the Lord’s anger burned against them.

The Lord said to Moses, “Take all the leaders of these

people, kill them, and expose them in broad daylight
before the Lord, so that the Lord’s fierce anger may
turn away from Israel.”

So Moses said to Israel’s judges, “Each of you must

put to death those of your men who have joined in
worshipping the Baal of Peor.

Then an Israelite man brought to his family a Midianite woman

right before the eyes of Moses and the whole assembly of Israel
while they were weeping at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting.
When Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, saw
this, he left the assembly, took a spear in his hand and followed
the Israelite into the tent. He drove the spear through both of
them—through the Israelite and into the woman’s body. Then the
plague against the Israelites was stopped; but those who died in
the plague numbered 24,000.

Bloody as it is, we have here an interesting story—and a revealing

one as well, for at this point, the Old Testament writer tells us
how pleased God was with Phinehas’ double murder:

The Lord said to Moses, “Phinehas son of Eleazar, the

son of Aaron, the priest, has turned my anger away
from the Israelites; for he was as zealous as I am for
my honor among them, so that in my zeal I did not put
an end to them. Therefore tell him I am making my
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covenant of peace with him. He and his descendants
will have a covenant of lasting priesthood, because he
was zealous for the honor of his God and made
atonement for the Israelites.

The story of Phinehas seems to have been a case of Jewish

racism run wild. And thisis the man after whom the Zealots
modeled themselves? How would Jesus have viewed such
people? Consider his words to a group of Jews in the Temple, as
recorded in John 8:43-44:

Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are

unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father,
the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s
desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not
holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When
he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar
and the father of lies.

Jews have long pointed to this passage from John and blamed it
for a host of their troubles down through the centuries. Many
people today are under the mistaken belief that Christianity’s
narrative of the Jews killing Christ caused the rise of anti-
Semitism, but as I wrote in a previous post, anti-Semitism
predated Christianity by at least 400 years. Moreover, since most
if not all of his own followers were Jews, it is obvious that in John
8:44 Jesus is not speaking of all Jews. So which Jews was he
referring to? When he said, “You belong to your father, the devil,”
who did he mean? Perhaps if we put the quote in its proper
context it will become clear.

Eleven verses prior to this, in John 8:33, we have the same group
of Jews boasting to Jesus that they are children of Abraham. And
then in verse 39 they again reiterate, “Abraham is our father.” It is
obvious that for these Jews, being children of Abraham makes
them, in their own eyes, divinely “chosen.” We should also keep in
mind that the temple, where the entire exchange is taking place,
had an official policy of exclusion of Gentiles. Those ascending
the steps of the temple came initially to an outer court where
Gentiles were allowed, and which was in fact called the Court of
the Gentiles, but beyond this, Gentiles were forbidden from
entering, under penalty of death. It would be worth remembering,
too, that there were strict Jewish laws governing purity and which
attempted to discourage contact with Gentiles. Under these laws,
Gentiles were often regarded as unclean.

So what does all this tell us?

Could it possibly mean that Jesus was a rebel against Jewish

supremacy?

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It is beginning to appear that way.

If we jump to Matthew chapter 23, we again find Jesus in heated

discussion with a group of Jews, who, this time, are clearly
identified as Pharisees. Keep in mind what Josephus told us about
the Pharisees and the Zealots being closely aligned with one
another. Much of Matthew 23 is filled with Jesus venting his anger
at the Pharisees. I won’t quote the whole thing, but here is an
interesting excerpt:

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…

Woe to you, blind guides! You say, “If anyone swears

by the temple, it means nothing; but if anyone swears
by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath. You
blind fools! Which is greater: the gold or the temple
that makes the gold sacred? You also say, “If anyone
swears by the alter, it means nothing; but if anyone
swears by the gift on it, he is bound by his oath. You
blind men! Which is greater: the gift, or the alter that
makes the gift sacred?

Notice what Jesus is saying here about the tendency of the

Pharisees to twist and turn oaths, or, as it were, legal regulations,
to their own advantage. The Pharisees were proponents of a vast
body of decrees which were then known as the “oral law”—
rabbinical pronouncements that later, starting in the third century,
were meticulously compiled and written down. Today we now
know that body of writing as—the Talmud.

The Talmud tells us, among other things, that “when a Jew
murders a gentile, there will be no death penalty. What a Jew
steals from a gentile he may keep.” It is a voluminous body of
writing that regards non-Jews as subhuman, and much of it
seems particularly intended to incite hatred for Gentiles among
Jews. Is it possible that Jesus—2,000 years ago—recognized the
danger such an ideology poses to humanity? I would submit that
the answer to our question, then, is that Jesus was rebelling
against his own people, or, more specifically, against that
predominant strain among them that causes large numbers of
them to view themselves as chosen and therefore superior to
others. Many Jews today, including Jewish scholars, would say no,
you’ve got it all wrong. Jesus was a Jewish nationalist. But they
should take their cue from the writers of the Talmud, who were
under no illusion about the matter. In the Talmud, Jesus is
depicted as boiling in excrement in hell for his “idolatry.”
Christianity, under rabbinical teaching, is considered an idolatrous
religion, and its founder’s execution is regarded as justified. Here
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is what Israel Shahak says on the matter in his book, Jewish
History, Jewish Religion:

According to the Talmud, Jesus was executed by a

proper rabbinical court for idolatry, inciting other Jews
to idolatry, and contempt of rabbinical authority. All
classical Jewish sources which mention his execution
are quite happy to take responsibility for it; in the
talmudic account the Romans are not even mentioned.

So where does this all of this leave us today? Last year, a group
of Israelis held a protest against interracial dating, or specifically
against Jewish girls dating Arab men. The protest took place in
the city of Bat Yam and was organized by a group calling itself
Jews for a Jewish Bat Yam. Sounds a lot like Phinehas, doesn’t it?
I’ll bet if he were alive today he would have attended the protest.
We also have in Israel an organization called Lehava, whose main
purpose is opposing marriages between Jewish women and non-
Jewish men. Recently the group circulated a letter, signed onto by
the wives of 27 prominent rabbis, calling on Jewish women not to
date Arabs, not to work in places where Arabs are employed, or
to volunteer for national service with them.

If Jews were an insignificant fringe minority, and if Israel did not

have nuclear weapons, all of this would perhaps be of no great
import. But Jews today stand at the pinnacle of world power. This
is apparent to all but the most purposefully blind. Their pro-Israel
lobbies, in one Western country after another, have gained
control over decision-making to an astonishing degree. Consider
the fact that in Psalm 110 we can read of God promising to make
the Gentile nations into “footstools” for the Jews. Today we see
that the U.S., Canada, France, Britain, Germany, and a great many
other nations besides, have in fact become just that—footstools
for the leaders of Israel.

A lot of people today are fond of comparing America with ancient

Rome. The power that America holds over other countries is
indeed somewhat comparable to that exerted by the Romans
over the many lands and peoples they conquered and occupied
two millennia ago. But there is one very major difference between
these two empires: in ancient Rome, Jews did not hold power
anywhere near commensurate to that which they presently exert
over America. Nowhere near it. As I say, Jews have reached a sort
of pinnacle or apex on the global stage. The level of influence
they have accrued is unprecedented. Hardly any wonder, then,
that so many individual Jews have adopted the supremacist
beliefs of the Chabad Lubavitch organization, coming to view
themselves in the process, either consciously or subconsciously,
as members of a superior, more intelligent species of life. The
extent of Jewish dominion in the world today would almost defy
any other explanation. The question the rest of us need to
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consider is just what is the explanation. How did such a tiny group
of people come to have such ascendancy over a huge and
apparently growing swath of humanity? What accounts for the
phenomenon?

The rebel Jesus maybe knew the answer to that, and we can
perhaps read his words for hints, some more explicit than others.
Whatever the answer may be, it is ancient. It did not begin in 1948
with the establishment of the state of Israel, or in 1897 with the
first Zionist congress. The explanation, I have a feeling, is much
older. How does Christianity figure into all this? It’s perhaps an
interesting, nay even crucial, question. Jewish attacks on
Christianity in the modern era have obviously taken a very
different form from their attacks against Islam—but they have, in
their own way, been just as persistent and ongoing. We see
Christians and their faith ridiculed and demeaned in Hollywood
movies, TV shows, and music videos. In fact, about the only
Christians who don’t get mocked and caricatured in US
mainstream media are those of the Middle East, who are of
course routinely portrayed as victims of Muslim persecution.

The hows and the whys of all this are perhaps many and varied,
but what it says to me, and what I believe in my heart to be true, is
that Jesus, though he lived 2,000 years ago, remains a major
thorn, obstacle and stumbling block for a great many modern-day
Jews. And that no matter how many police state laws our AIPAC-
vetted congress may enact, no matter how many of us they may
round up and put into FEMA camps or some other detention
facility, no matter how many wars they may start, no matter how
many innocents they slaughter—no matter all of this, as long as
there remain on this earth those who exalt this rebel, who follow
his teachings, and who celebrate his birth each year, their control
over humanity will never—never—be complete or total. And this
they know.

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