No Judaism, No Jesus, No Christianity

And: Biden Pardons Hunter; Debanking; Syria; Re-Enchantment Is The Real Story

Noa Cohen as the Mother of Jesus in ‘Mary’ (Netflix)

Let’s start this week with a link to a piece I did for The Free Press over the weekend, about the ridiculous and sinister controversy over Mary, the upcoming (December 6) Netflix movie about the Mother of God. There are some pro-Palestinian activists raising hell over the fact that Netflix cast an Israeli actress to play the Holy Virgin. Imagine that: casting a Jewish woman to play … a Jewish woman!

Why is this not only stupid, but sinister? Because it’s an attempt to de-Judaize Christianity. You can certainly be 100 percent opposed to the Israeli government’s policy on the Gaza war, and it have nothing to do with the genealogy of Jesus of Nazareth. The Jewishness of Jesus (and his mother) is utterly irrelevant to what the modern state of Israel is doing to its enemy, Hamas. That some activists are using anger at Israel’s war policy to do obscene violence to Christian theology is significant, and must be called out and opposed. Excerpts:

Like a boil on the backside of the body politic, there has been an ugly irruption of Jew-hating foolishness over casting in the upcoming Netflix film Mary, about the life of Jesus’s mother. People are outraged—outraged!—that director D.J. Caruso cast an Israeli Jew, Noa Cohen, to play the title character.

“First Netflix taking all Palestinian content down and now they stream a movie about Mary with an all Israeli cast whilst those same people are bombing the birthplace of Christ? Boycott that shit,” said a Muslim woman in an X post. She added video commentary noting that the choice to film the movie in Morocco and not in Bethlehem—the actual birthplace of Christ—was “diabolical.”

The filmmakers could have shot in Bethlehem had the Palestinian Authority, which controls the town, given their permission. Then again, Israeli citizens like Noa Cohen, who plays Mary, are not allowed into Bethlehem.

I’ve been to Bethlehem, and I’ve visited Checkpoint 300—the crossing that makes daily life very hard for Palestinians who live in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority but work inside Israel proper. You would have to have a heart of stone not to pity the honest, decent Palestinians humiliated by these obstacles.

But why does any of this exist? As a response to the wave of Palestinian suicide bombings in the Second Intifada, which killed or wounded thousands of Israeli civilians. The Israeli government began building the barrier in the early 2000s; it dramatically reduced the number of suicide attacks—a fact lamented on Arab television by Ramadan Shallah, former leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group.

“There is the separation fence which is an obstacle to the resistance, and if it were not there, the situation would be entirely different,” Shallah said in 2006.

I digress, but this is the kind of thing one can’t let pass in this current propaganda war. The fake controversy over the Mary film is just one more audacious lie told in the service of the anti-Israel cause. The lie about the security barrier and the lie about Mary’s origins are the same kind of falsehood, one that depends on radical decontextualization to advance a pro-Palestinian, anti-Jewish narrative.

Again: I don’t care, in principle, if you side with the Palestinians in this terrible struggle. But you need to be honest about how we got here. In the piece, I go on to explain that this de-Judaizing began in the second century, with the work of a Christian theologian named Marcion, a semi-gnostic who denied that the God of the Old Testament is the same God of the New Testament. His teachings, Marcionism, were condemned by the early Church as heresy. And now it’s back, again:

Modern history shows us where weaponized Marcionism can lead. In 1939, the Nazis founded The Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life, for the purpose of “defense against all the covert Jewry and Jewish being” that had polluted the West. The Institute dedicated itself to “understanding Christian German being” in light of this refined knowledge.

Founded with the participation of eleven German Protestant churches, the Institute refashioned Jesus as an Aryan persecuted by Jews. Galilee, where Jesus grew up, was in this view a region inhabited by Aryans—Assyrians, Persians, Indians—who were forced to convert to Judaism. Jesus, then, who in reality died as a Jew, was really an Aryan martyr. When anti-Mary activists shout “Jesus was Palestinian!” you’d better believe there is precedent.

“The Institute shifted Christian attention from the humanity of God to the divinity of man: Hitler as an individual Christ, the German Volk as a collective Christ, and Christ as Judaism’s deadly opponent,” writes Susannah Heschel in her 2010 book The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany.

Read it all. My fear, as I say in the piece, is that the widespread theological ignorance among contemporary Christians will give this new version of a very old heresy a foothold. Whatever you think of Israel, the Palestinians, and their fight, the inescapable truth is: No Judaism —> no Jesus —> no Christianity. If Mary wasn’t a Jew, then Jesus wasn’t a Jew, then Christianity makes no sense. This is not merely an attack on the Jews; it’s an attack on the fundaments of the Christian faith.

I made this part of today’s newsletter available to the entire list, because I want people to see what I wrote. The rest of today’s issue follows below. Won’t you consider becoming a subscriber? It’s only six dollars per month, for at least twenty newsletters each month (and almost always more).