January 2004
The Jesus Nobody Knows
THE EDITOR
Emasculated and stripped of His divinity by both clerical and secular atheists who claim He didn't even know Who He was, Our Lord Jesus Christ has long been reduced in popular imagination to a goatee-sporting, sandal-wearing, tree-hugging, first century peacenik Who wouldn't say boo to a goose.
This supernaturally denuded persona is exemplified in works like The Changing Face of Jesus, whose author, ex-priest Geza Vermes, "came to a belief, based on years of scholarship (on the Dead Sea Scrolls) that the Jesus Christ of the Catholic faith was a human construct… a charismatic holy man, who worked as an exorcist, who told simple tales based on the everyday world of Galilean peasants – lost sheep, lost coins, fish, mustard plants." One high-brow reviewer of the book, an atheist generally sympathetic to the Judeo-Christian cause, opined in a leading British daily that "if only the churches were brave enough to embrace the truth of Geza Vermes' books, then the Christ they worship – the spiritual icon who symbolises all the aspirations of the Jewish people and of those Righteous Gentiles who turned to him – could be a great focus of spiritual revival, among Jews and Christians, celebrating their common origins." And as an indication of how the Holy Father's controversial mea culpas are now co-opted to further this subversion, the critic added: "You think it will never happen? Most Roman Catholics 25 years ago would never have said that no Pope could ever repent, as the present Pope did recently, of the anti-semitism of his church. At the root of that anti-semitism is the false way of reading the Gospels which Geza Vermes has now so authoritatively corrected."
The relentless secular conspiracy against Christ's deity and salvific role is undergirded by the pseudo-Christian ecumenical movement. Typical of the fare promoted at a zillion ecumenical ventures and gatherings around the globe is the American Faith and Reason video series, reviewed in The Wanderer of 23 November 2000 and available through EcuFilm, "an ecumenical film/video service that includes most major mainline Protestant denominations, the National Council of Churches, the World Council of Churches, and the Maryknoll Missioners." On 24 different videos of 25 minutes duration aimed mainly at Sunday school audiences, the speakers repeatedly debunk Christian beliefs, repeating that: "Jesus is not God"; the Holy Trinity is not "important"; Jesus "did not see Himself as the Son of God, He didn't see Himself as anything special"; God is "not a God of Justice… he never punishes or rewards" but is interested in relationships and systematic political justice.
On and on it goes, the Gospels and Christ's divinity, atoning sacrifice and the Resurrection all reduced to second century embellishments on a good story. One speaker, who describes himself as a pantheist, calls Jesus a "spirit person" who leads his followers into a "super spiritual life". "I don't believe in a God of eternal damnation," he says. While another declares: "Jesus had no systematic philosophies and He doesn't have a systematic theology. But He does have a pattern of living."
Beyond the secular and ecumenical endeavours, however, we find this wicked agenda openly promoted within the Church Herself, which ostensibly legitimises the whole blasphemous deconstruction. The ineffectual, therapeutic Jesus above is promoted incessantly by the Modernist educational apparatus – not least through the many heretical yet episcopally-approved catechetical programmes foisted on Catholic children – and preached openly at diocesan events. Apart from any number of examples carried in this magazine over the years [cf. "The Unstoppable Clare Richards!", Dec. 2003], there is the "Renew 2000" (aka At Your Word Lord) programme currently undermining the Faith en masse throughout the Westminster archdiocese.
A non-doctrinal course that relies heavily on New Age and Protestant sources to promote a non-denominational, heretical Christianity, the Renew 2000 Leaders' Manual typically tells us that "Jesus never worked any miracles, and if perhaps He did, there is no proof that He did, for no amount of scholarship can prove that the miracles did or did not happen." Christ is said to be present in His word when the Scriptures are read but there is no mention of His presence in the Eucharistic species. In preference to the truths taught by Our Divine Lord, the authors of the programme, and presumably the several US bishops who approved it and Cardinal Murphy O'Connor who has embraced it, prefer to stress the "truths embodied in feminist spirituality and ecologically sensitive spirituality", as in the "Prayer of Directions" composed by a lesbian theologian which is entirely pagan, if not Wiccan. Subverting Christ and His living Magisterium, the Renew Manual offers several credal formulas, none of which mention belief in the "one, holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church."
In this pagan environment, we can appreciate why academics are emboldened even to call for the replacement of the Christian designations AD and BC with BCE (Before the Common Era) and CE (Common Era): as has the British Broadcasting Standards Commission because it believes "the assumption that Christianity has the sole claim to virtue and value is offensive to all religions." And we can better comprehend, too, why polls regularly reflect such an abject ignorance of Jesus among the general populace: like that which found only 15 per cent of Britons interviewed able to associate the Millennium with the birth of Christ. After all, why would one link such an epochal event with a merely decent man who stood for nothing, let alone measure all time from his birth?
At any rate, this whole enterprise, which effectively denies our Creator and Saviour the worship and submission owed to Him by each individual and nation on the planet, has suited all parties: the Masonic elite and their New Age/UN puppets, who are laughing; the atheistic clerics and their pseudo-religious fellow-travellers in every walk of life, desperate to rationalise their own disorders and project them onto everyone else; and the affluent namby-pamby West in general, whose self-serving victim culture demands a wimpy, timorous exemplar – not a Divine and Merciful King Who teaches, rules, and judges according to His immutable Law. This is the Jesus nobody knows. The Jesus those committed to sin and its defence dare not know.
Yet if apostate Westerners don't know Jesus, neither do the non-Christians presently filling the religious vacuum. As so-called Christians busily deny Him, Christ is also being lost and buried beneath an avalanche of false religions and their false prophets. The stats are copious and telling. Like Italy's reported 70,000 converts to Islam. Or the 15% of the French who in 1994 gave their religion of preference as Buddhism, which boasts 500,000-600,000 followers in 160-200 worship centres. In Britain, a high proportion of the 5,000-10,000 Muslim converts are said to be Catholics, while about 400 religious cults have sprung up in this country since the War, with 3.2 cults per million of the population compared with 2.3 per million in America.
The trend is relentless and the chickens are coming home to roost. Uncontrolled mass immigration is rapidly opening secular eyes to the cost of swapping Jesus for the likes of Mohammed. Even naïve Catholics, disgusted by Western decadence and long impressed by apparently prayerful, family-oriented Muslims, are beginning to see the big picture and wonder if they might have given Islam more credit than it deserves.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there were numerous reports of rising interest in Islam and the Middle East. At Durham University, for instance, such courses were heavily oversubscribed. While Oxford University Press rushed through a reprint of The Koran after copies sold at four times their usual rate. Nowadays, however, quite apart from issues of terrorism, media headlines are regularly highlighting the sort of alien culture and unsavoury, even deadly, social mores that Islam brings in its train.
Last October, the widely publicised forced removal of crucifixes from an Italian primary school, at the instigation of the head of the Italian Muslim Union, was typical of recent rude awakenings about life with Islam. At the same time, according to the German media, secret Shari'a courts appear to be meting out "justice" in the north of Italy, where a man known to Muslims as a sex fiend recently showed up with a hand missing. It had obviously been amputated as punishment. Italian doctors report treating Muslim women who had evidently been lashed. While NewsMax reports that in France about 70,000 young women, chiefly Muslim, are being subjected to forced marriages every year, according to the country's High Council for Integration, which also related that 35,000 girls each year are either circumcised or under threat of circumcision.
Increasingly, too, the British media is turning its attention to the barbaric practice of Islamic "honour" killings, in which the male members of a family arrange to kill girls who they say have "shamed them" or not obeyed the strict codes of izzat, or honour. According to Muslim writer Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who herself has sheltered young girls on the run from the cruelty of their fathers and brothers: "such killings are shockingly frequent in Muslim countries (although they also take place in Hindu and Sikh families). Now we are seeing them with alarming frequency in Britain too" [Daily Mail, 1 October 2003].
She goes on to recount some of the recent murders, including a 19-year-old girl, pregnant by a boyfriend after leaving a husband who had been forced on her in the first place, who was strangled by her brother as her mother held her down; and the 21-year-old stabbed 22 times by her cousin while getting ready for her wedding, simply because she was marrying out of choice and her relatives disapproved. Among two murder convictions for "honour" killings last October was a Muslim father who methodically planned the killing of a young Catholic Albanian seeking to marry his daughter.
Bounty hunters are also regularly engaged to track down daughters considered to have shamed the family, reputedly earning up to '5,000 a time. A bounty hunter in Bradford (where the population is 20% Asian) told the Sunday Times: "I have met many parents who are prepared to kill their daughters if they go astray and, although I do my best, many of the cases I have been involved in have ended tragically." One young woman, who ran off with her boyfriend at the age of 21 to escape the slavery of life at home in Northern England, has been in hiding for the past ten years after her family hired a hitman to kill her and her white husband. She recounted how her father, highly respected within his Muslim community, informed her on the phone: "We're going to chop you up and put you into bin liners. You're both walking corpses."
This gruesome fact of cultural life is also a largely unspoken yet resurgent part of the Iraqi conflict. Countering Mr Blair's facile presentation of the state of play, a British newspaper columnist recently noted that "removing Saddam Hussein has restored a nightmare world in which men can murder women almost at will (the usual penalty is a year in jail) if they bring 'dishonour' to the family. In August, 872 people were bought to Baghdad's morgue, 80 per cent with gunshot wounds. A 17-year-old boy who shot dead his mother, half-brother and four-year-old sister told the Sunday Times, 'I'll serve my year in jail and then get out. I don't regret what I did. Far from it. I feel liberated'. Had we been informed about this aspect of Iraqi culture," the columnist claims, "we'd have been even less willing to support Messrs Blair and Bush's liberation adventure."
The UN reports that there are about 5,000 "honour killings" annually worldwide and police believe that 12 took place in Britain last year Yet Alibhai-Brown states that in the UK "we hear only of a tiny minority of the most extreme cases. Hospital casualty wards hide many more unseen victims of this disgraceful cultural practice." And she concludes in respect of her own religion: "it is time this burden of 'respect' that we owe another culture is questioned… To suggest that all different cultures must always be 'respected' is patronising and dangerous nonsense."
Well said! Let's not patronise. Rather, let us plainly state that the frightening attitudes and behaviour above derive from the incendiary dictates of the Koran itself. As they say, 'you can look 'em up!':- apropos non-Muslims generally [surah 2:191 & 193; 8:13-17 & 60]; Christians and Jews [surah 9:29; 5:54], women's rights [surah 4:11 & 34]; sex and marriage [surah 4:3; 2:223]; human rights [surah 3:110; 5:63; 47:4], democracy [surah 5:36; 3:85;] etc., etc. It's flammable stuff, before which the PC lines mouthed by journalists ("The religion of Islam itself is not the problem," Daily Mail, 6/9/03) and politicians ("Americans think terrorists are evil people who have hijacked a great religion," President Bush, 28/10/03) and moderate Muslims defending their patch ("Islam harbours no room for terrorism and no room for murder"; "Islam teaches us friendship and peace and love") all begin to sound like the 'black is white' Orwellian mantras they are. Anyone who refuses to accept the Big Lie is damned as a racist and accused of inciting religious hatred.
Pleeeze! Does Catholicism enslave, torment and kill its own adherents and opponents? Ideas have consequences! The simple truth is that while bad Christians are bad despite the teachings of their Saviour, bad Muslims rightly claim encouragement and succour from the teachings of their Prophet. Conversely, good Christians are good because of the teachings of Jesus; millions of peaceable, upstanding Muslims are good despite the countless calls from Mohammed to "fight" and "kill" and "instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers" [surah 8:13-17; 8:60; 9:14; 9:123]. And all their goodwill combined cannot wish away that fact and the Koranic social mores just described, or the treacherous militancy manifested in the response to one post-9/11 survey by an Asian radio station, in which 98 per cent of young Muslims in London under the age of 45 indicated that they would not fight for Britain, and 48 per cent said they would take up arms for Bin Laden. A sign of things to come. Britain already has more detainees (9) at Guantanamo than any other Western country.
"The situation is potentially dangerous," opined one journalist: "no country can be divided against itself on matters of national security." Tell that to the French, with its 5-6 million Muslims, many huddled together in explosive, crime-ridden high rise estates, half of whose youngsters are well integrated while the other half (about 1 million) are completely disaffected, view themselves as Muslims rather than Frenchmen and are ripe for radicalising. It was not high-minded moral objections but this massive, unstable, alien constituency within its own borders, as well as lucrative arms contracts with Saddam, that dictated the French position on Iraq.
Of course, on top of this ominous physical presence of Islam and its ever growing political clout, is the ongoing diffusion of nihilistic Eastern relativism. Not so much due to 'boutique religions' like Buddhism and the Heinz 57 varieties of esoteric cults, but through the wholesale, subliminal Hinduisation of Western popular culture. As Hindu convert and former Brahmin priest Rabi Maharaj put it: Hinduism is yoga; yoga is Hinduism.
So, denied and obscured by His own and His enemies alike, Our Lord Jesus Christ remains just another name among the pantheon of religious prophets on offer in the West. Last November, despite its deep Christian roots, the British Red Cross even banned Him from its shops, along with nativity scenes and advent calendars, for "fear of offending minority faiths" and maintaining its "neutrality." This reflects the thinking of the West in general. Yet in matters of ultimate belief there is no such thing as neutrality. Our grim snapshot above confirms the fact, as does every past attempt by the religious and irreligious to build a world without Jesus. Moreover, before the ever rising tide of psychological, legal, bio-medical and political control being overseen by the UN and its New Age satellites, as they look to subjugate all religions to the satanic pantheism of the Lodge, neutrality is simply not an option. Because neither Buddha nor Shiva nor Confucious nor any other exotic panjandrums can save our dysfunctional Western societies from this totalitarian fate. Only "the restoration of all things in Christ" - the social enthronement of Christ the King - can defeat the 'one world' demagogues. It is not Mohammed but the Jesus nobody knows Whom they fear.
Meanwhile, I recently discovered the sure antidote to Islam in the form of a movie epic called "The Message," about Mohammed and the genesis and dissemination of his teachings. If all fence-sitting secularists and syncretists are compelled to endure this tedious, hagiographic whitewash, and then made to view "The Passion", Mel Gibson's forthcoming film on the last gruelling hours of Our Lord's life, any lingering doubts about which 'prophet' embodies religious truth will instantly vanish!
Referred to by some as "high art", Gibson's powerful movie is set to become a missionary tool par excellence. Be sure to promote "The Passion" at every opportunity, by word of mouth and by telling your local cinema that you want to see this film (download and view trailers via our homepage). It will not only deepen our own faith, portraying the unspeakable depths of Divine Love as never before, but touch and win souls who have never known Jesus - after the fashion of this young Muslim who recalled the impact of his own cinematic encounter with Christ:
"In 1988 at the age of fourteen I watched the film Jesus of Nazareth starring Robert Powell, at Easter time. The film changed my life because for the first time I doubted Islam. I realized that the Old Testament prophets were in fact Jews, not Muslims. I also rejected the Koran's teaching that Jesus did not die on the cross and his soul was taken to heaven so he felt 'no pain.' I felt that Islam for me was living out a set of rules, which prohibited calling God 'Father' and praying to him spontaneously. I prayed five times a day by bowing to Mecca and reciting passages from the Koran. For several years I was even more devout than my parents were… I tried to ignore my conversion to Jesus, but to no avail. In the end I confessed to a Christian teacher at school, who prayed for me, and I became a Christian from that day onwards.
My father made many verbal threats towards me, and my mum cried herself to sleep… they cannot accept Christianity and when I reject their plans for an arranged marriage next year, they will disown me… My Muslim friends accept me but if I was living in an Islamic country I would be killed for converting to Christianity… I still do not regret changing my religion because for me it was impossible to ignore the calling of Jesus." [The Furrough, Sept. 2003]
Deo gratias! And let us pray he now escapes the dark, deceptive shadows of Protestantism to pursue that divine call all the way to the pure light of the one true Church - which is Jesus, and thus alone can save souls from the false beliefs of the countless false prophets who blind, debase and dehumanize them.