For they have not recognized the Hour of their Visitation.

The disastrously entangled situation in today’s Middle East can be said to revolve around a certain question: “Is the Old Testament a property deed in perpetuity, or is it something much greater, i.e., a binding spiritual covenant?” Modern day Zionists and the secular State of Israel generally accept only the first interpretation and are thereby willing to set the entire region ablaze in defense of that position. And yet we are told that upward of 70% of Jewish Israeli citizens are either secular, agnostic, or atheistic – more than confirmed by the highly secularized culture of Tel Aviv and other major Israeli urban centers. And while we in the West have long fretted about the threat of Communism to a Christian based social order, very few seem to recognize that Communism’s younger brother, political Zionism, may actually be the fatal ‘ism’ which draws mankind into a Third World War. Such a scenario appears to be more plausible today than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

The question then arises as to how Zionism is to be understood in the larger context of Judaism, a crucial distinction that many so-called Christian Zionists and Jewish pundits such as Ben Shapiro seem unwilling to address, despite the fact that there are thousands of orthodox and even many secular Jews who reject Zionism outright. Despite this inconvenient body of Jewish opposition, the Zionist program has expanded greatly over the past 75 years from its original stated goal of a shared Jewish homeland in Palestine into a far more ambitious agenda to transform the Israeli State into the dominant regional hegemon, the seizure of every square meter of Palestinian land, and now the rebuilding a 3rd Temple in Jerusalem, after 2,000 years, for the resumption of animal sacrifice.

Such a project would necessitate the destruction of the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, one of the three most important pilgrimage sites in Islam, an act which would undoubtedly incite the world’s 2 billion Muslims to unprecedented fury. So why would any rational person or government risk such a volatile provocation? And yet it is no secret that countless Zionists of both Evangelical Christian and Jewish persuasions are working hard to achieve this very end which they understand full well would incite a geo-political upheaval of unimaginable scale: a worldwide religious war. It that indeed is their aim, then the American and Zionist State’s two recent perfidious sneak attacks on Iran in the midst of supposed ‘peace negotiations’ may merely represent the prelude to a much deadlier conflict.

Political Zionism in its concrete manifestation as the ‘State of Israel’ would appear, in its short history, to possess an insatiable appetite for warring with its neighbors, incessantly pleading self defense even as it surreptitiously pokes the neighborhood dogs with a sharp stick. These facile aggressions are commonly justified using a false and deliberately distorted reading of the Old Testament where God apparently promises to Abraham and his descendants in perpetuity all that land between the Nile and Euphrates, on a map stretching from the heart of Egypt into the middle of modern day Iraq. (Gen. 15: 18-21) In fact the modern Israeli flag is a telltale symbol of that pact. Notice that the Star of David (so-called) is set between two blue bands representing, you guessed it, the Nile and Euphrates Rivers!

There is only one problem with this generous and overtly fundamentalist interpretation of Genesis 15, namely that the original covenant between God and Abraham’s descendants is CONDITIONAL. The primary condition in that covenant is one of obedience to God’s commandments (something of which the modern Israeli State seems manifestly unconcerned). In fact the entire Old Testament harps continuously on this theme. Moses himself warns the Israelites in Deuteronomy,

“If you obey the commandments of the Lord, your God, which I enjoin on you today, loving him and walking in his ways, and keeping his commandments, you will live and grow numerous, and the Lord, your God, will bless you in the land you are entering to occupy. If however you turn away your hearts and will not listen, but are led astray and adore other gods, I tell you now that you will certainly perish; you will not have a long life on the land which you are crossing the Jordan to enter and occupy. I call on heaven and earth to witness against you: I set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse.” (Deut 30: 16-19)

As history attests, the Israelites were neither faithful nor obedient, continually lapsing into various forms of idolatry and transgressions of the law. Even Solomon, builder of the 1st Temple, succumbed in his old age to the idolatry of his foreign wives. In response, God divided that kingdom under Solomon’s sons. Israel’s depravities continued over the next three centuries; eventually the Northern Kingdom was carried off by the Assyrians. Even so the remnant Judean kingdom continued to offend God despite the warnings of the prophets sent to them. Preceding the Babylonian exile, the Prophet Jeremiah fruitlessly warned the Jews against presuming on the Temple in Jerusalem for their protection.

“Put not your trust in the deceitful words, ‘This is the Temple of the Lord!’ Only if you thoroughly reform your ways and your deeds; if each deals justly with his neighbor; if you no longer oppress the resident alien, the orphan, and the widow; if you no longer shed innocent blood in this place, or follow strange gods to your own harm, will I remain with you in this place, in the land I gave your fathers long ago and forever. But here you are putting your trust in deceitful words to your own loss! Are you to steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to Baal, go after strange gods that you know not, and yet come before me in this house which bears my name, and say: ‘We are safe; we can commit these abominations again?’ .. I will do to this house named after me, in which you trust, and to this place which I gave you and your fathers, just as I did to Shiloh. I will cast you away from me as I cast away all your brethren, all the offspring of Ephraim.” (Jer 7: 4-10;14-15)

Do Jeremiah’s words not ring more true today in light of the brutal activities of the Israeli State in the West Bank, in Gaza, and Lebanon? Just so the Jews were delivered into the Babylonian captivity and the 1st Temple utterly destroyed in the year 587 BC. Yet in time God relented and later allowed the Jews to return to the land of Israel and to rebuild a 2nd Temple under the generosity and protection of the Persian monarchs, that is today’s Iran! This is a bit of history the Zionists are not eager to publicize, of course. Nor was this amnesty a reward from God for the Jew’s fidelity but rather intended as preparation for the eventual coming of the Messiah, arriving in the person of Jesus Christ, the fulfillment of the Old Covenant. In Him the mission of the Jews was completed, presenting to the world its Redeemer.

Building on the foundation of the Abrahamic Covenant, Christ (Do not think I have come to abolish the Law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. (Mt 5:17)) then instituted a New Covenant which He sealed in his own blood. Like the former, this Covenant consisted of a promise and a curse. The promise for those who freely accepted it was eternal life in a New Jerusalem unbounded by geography, which is heaven. Those who rejected this Covenant would be cursed and forever expelled from the land as foretold in Deuteronomy. “Just as the Lord once took delight in making you grow and prosper, so now He will take delight in ruining and destroying you, and you will be plucked out of the land you are now entering to occupy. The Lord will scatter you among all the nations from one end of the earth to another… Among these nations you will find no repose, not a foot of ground to stand upon, for there the Lord will give you an anguished heart and wasted eyes and a dismayed spirit. You will live in constant suspense and constant dread both day and night, never sure of your existence.” (Deut 28: 63-66)

According to this New Covenant there was no need for a temple of stone and mortar because Christ body itself became the new and everlasting Temple. This transformation was symbolized by the veil of the Jerusalem Temple being rent from top to bottom at the moment Christ expired on the cross. (Mk 15:38) Christ had already prophesied that the old Temple would be destroyed and not a stone left upon a stone (Lk 21:6) in part because there was no longer any need for animal sacrifice. He himself had become the one and perfect sacrifice of atonement for sin. Some of the Jews accepted his perfect act of redemption while others rejected it, and Christ himself, preferring to remain under the old, and now superseded Covenant. Regardless, just as Christ had foretold, the 2nd Temple was utterly destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. In rejecting Christ’s New Covenant those recalcitrant Jews were de facto rejecting God’s Covenant with Abraham which, like a software update, was simply enfolded into this New, more complete Covenant.

Whether they fully realized it or not, in rejecting Christ those ‘stay behind’ Jews were also rejecting Abraham, Moses, David, and all the prophets who had anticipated and looked forward to the coming of the saving Messiah. “Although he had performed so many signs in their presence they did not believe in him, in order that the words which the prophet Isaiah spoke might be fulfilled: ‘He blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts, so that they might not see with their eyes and understand with their heart and be converted, and I would heal them.'” (Jn 12: 37-38;40) In fact, God permitted the Jews a 40 year grace period before the actual destruction of their Temple, in consideration of the widespread Jewish diaspora which at that time spread them out widely from Babylon to the Iberian peninsula (modern Spain and Portugal).

But since Christ himself is the new Temple “not built by human hands” any attempt to rebuild a 3rd Temple of stone and bricks would represent an abomination before God. “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God” is a dire warning against modern day 3rd Temple Christian Zionists who are attempting to hasten Christ’s Second Coming by such foolhardy intentions. In fact, the only prior attempt at constructing a 3rd Jerusalem Temple was made by the Emperor Julian the Apostate in 363 AD. His project ended in disaster when, as related by contemporary witnesses, a violent earthquake shook Jerusalem and fireballs exploded out of the ground maiming many of the workers. Their attempt had to be abandoned completely. In an ironic post-script, said Emperor Julian then rode off on a military expedition against Persia where he died. Persia is of course known today as Iran.

Apparently contemptuous of much of this history, modern day Zionists are quick to conflate Zionism with Judaism, thus in their eyes to oppose the Zionist project is tantamount to anti-Semitism. This ridiculous claim falls flat in the face of countless orthodox and even secular Jews who have vehemently opposed Zionism. They testify that one can be fully Jewish without supporting either Zionism or the modern State of Israel. In fact the Zionist cause is a comparatively recent phenomenon over perhaps the past 150 years when set against 4,000 year of Jewish history. It represents at best a limited (though disproportionately influential) faction within the Jewish world and, as such, should not be considered representative of Judaism as a whole.

Judaism is a very much more complex historical organism consisting of many, often conflicting ideologies, movements, and personalities over millennia. It is not some homogeneous mono-culture because, like Christianity itself, it has undergone countless modifications and schisms over its long and colorful history. This diversity was apparent even 2,000 years ago at the time of Christ when Sadducees and Pharisees; Jews and Samaritans; Zealots and the Sanhedrin were all in competition, often violently, with one another. Even then the Jewish diaspora, which had begun centuries earlier with the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles, had flung these descendants of Abraham all across the Roman world. In fact so many Jews were Greek speaking in the 3rd century BC that it was seen fit to translate the Hebrew scriptures into Greek, the Septuagint as it became known. Judaism represented even then a cosmopolitan, disparate, and multilingual community which included some 10% of the entire population of the Roman Empire. Quite naturally, early Christianity attracted a large percentage of its followers from among the Jews. Many early Christians actually continued to frequent local synagogues throughout the First century before eventually being expelled by the Jewish rabbis.

But what of that substantial remnant of Jews who separated from their Christian-Jewish brothers, particularly after the disastrous events of 70 AD? The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus gives a gripping eyewitness account of that tragic Roman siege of Jerusalem in his “History of the Jews.” This documentary eloquently attests to the fact that First century Judaism was already a deeply fractionalized society, and over the next 2,000 years this pattern would constantly repeat itself. Jewish history is a tale fraught with internal dissension, quarrels, and divisions. Undoubtedly much internal polarization can be attributed to two observable characteristics of Jewish culture: legal scholarship and an inherent revolutionary tendency. For a people whose very identity is harnessed to study and discussions of the (Mosaic) law, debate and argumentation becomes a way of life. Excessive legalism was one of Christ’s primary criticisms of Jewish leaders. Again it was the revolutionary disposition of various Zealot factions, so amply chronicled by Josephus, which eventually incurred the destructive wrath of Rome upon the entire Jewish state.

Retreating from Jerusalem after its disastrous destruction, a handful of surviving Pharisees (a leading one apparently smuggled out of the city in a coffin) reconvened to established a rabbinic academy in Jamnia near the Palestinian coast. There, as historian Paul Johnson relates, “the Sanhedrin and the state were buried, and in their place a synod of rabbis met, in a vineyard near a dovecote, or in the upper chamber of a house. The rabbi and the synagogue became the normative institutions of Judaism.” After another revolt by Simon bar Kokhba in 135 AD was crushed by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, a second academy was established in Babylon where a Jewish community had continued to exist from the 6th century BC Babylonian exile. These two rabbinic schools became a kind of pseudo Sanhedrins where Jewish calendar calculations were determined as well as virtual legal courts where decisions of the lead rabbis were passed on throughout to the larger Jewish sphere.

But they did more than that. Over the next four centuries in both Jamnia and Babylon scholars undertook to codify the vast body of oral tradition and commentary by various rabbis on the Torah, a compilation which became known as the Talmud. In time the Talmud became revered as perhaps more authoritative than even the Torah itself. Over time these rabbinic scholars took it upon themselves to doctor and redact the Holy Scriptures, often pointing prophetic scripture passages away from Christ as being the promised Messiah. They apparently went so far as to redact the genealogies recorded in Genesis by eliminating some 1,200 to 1,500 years in order to make it appear that Christ had arrived too early on the scene to fall within the traditionally held parameters for the Messiah’s arrival.

These discrepancies come clearly to light when comparing their pre-Masoretic and later Masoretic texts with the more ancient Septuagint texts dating from the 3rd century BC. Encyclopaedia Judaica itself states, “For most early Christians, the creators of the LXX (i.e., the Septuagint), whether they knew it or not, were prophetic in the sense that much of their distinctive wording looked forward to the coming of Jesus as Christ. And this was in spite of the fact that the LXX was created by Jews for Jews, almost three centuries before Jesus’ birth!” (E.J. Vol. 3, p. 596)

St. Jerome himself was lulled into relying on many of these doctored texts for his great Vulgate (Latin) translation of the Old Testament between 390 and 405 AD. Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that, “Jerome found the LXX increasingly unsatisfactory and became convinced of both the supreme authority of the Hebrew and the necessity of producing a fresh translation based on the original “Hebrew Truth.” (ibid. p. 598) St. Augustine, however, had serious concerns about Jerome’s using Hebrew source texts supplied by rabbis who had descended from the Pharisees, concerns which he expressed directly to Jerome. “I beseech you not to devote your labor to the work of translating into Latin the sacred canonical books, unless you follow the method in which you have translated Job, viz. with the addition of notes, to let it be seen plainly what differences there are between this version of yours and that of the Septuagint, whose authority is worthy of highest esteem.” (Letter from Augustine to Jerome (A.D. 394 or 395) New Advent)

This raises the unsettling question of Biblical authenticity. We know that the Bible is God’s unerring word, but the fact remains that His inspired word has also undergone countless translations, revisions, scribing errors, and redactions by humans over the centuries even down to the present day. (You can learn more about this process from a fascinating recent article titled, “Which Version of the Bible Are We Talking About?” on the Ecce Agnus Dei substack, Feb 7, 2026; also see “An Overlooked Bible Controversy – Septuagint vs. Masoretic Text” by Patrick O’Connell on the jamesperloff.net website.)

Other influences and divisions also occurred within Judaism even as the Talmudic rabbis attempted to maintain some kind of cohesion over the ensuing centuries. Early on traditional Jewish cosmology and praxis began absorbing various Gnostic myths and perversions, even as those same dualistic ideas were challenging Christian doctrines. A kind of Gnostic syncretism embedded itself in certain Jewish circles through a new and growing body of writings known as the Kabbalah, an erstwhile compendium of Jewish mysticism. Kabbalah contains numerous esoteric doctrines, myths, chants, spells, and superstitions ~ many borrowed from surrounding pagan cultures in Egypt, Persia, and beyond.

The Kabbalist book called the Zohar or Book of Light brims over with Gnostic legends and fantasies, curses, and so-called ‘white magic’ which entails using hidden names for God to invoke power or desired outcomes. If not the outright practice of witchcraft, Kabbalah is certainly nipping at the edges of sorcery which is, of course, a direct violation of God’s First Commandment given to Moses. Again, the using of the Holy Name in various esoteric incantations represents a grave offense against the Third Commandment. So early on this unresolved conflict between the Jewish Torah and Kabbalah engendered serious conflicts within the more orthodox Jewish sectors.

As time moved on the question of the Messiah’s arrival also continued to fester as it placed the Jews, now deprived of any public religious Temple worship, in a kind of spiritual ‘no man’s land.’ Since the time of John the Baptist There had been no Jewish prophet. The nation was in exile and widely dispersed which pious Jews interpreted as a direct punishment from God. With the rise of Islam the intellectual center of Judaism had moved to Spain by the Middle Ages. A certain rationalism began to appear among some Jewish philosophers such as Maimonides who still anticipated the Messiah, but not one who would necessarily work miracles or precipitate an apocalypse. Then in 1665s a supposed Messiah appeared, a certain Shabbetai Zevi, who for a time managed to convince a substantial number of rabbis of his authenticity, often through rumors from elsewhere.

Great excitement was aroused throughout the Jewish world. By the fall of 1666 however, Zevi was detained by Turkish Ottoman authorities and given the choice of death or converting to Islam. The pseudo-Messiah immediately adopted the turban. This quick and pliant apostasy was a rude shock to the Jewish communities and the rabbis who Paul Johnson tells us, “closed ranks to impose a total silence on the affair.” Nevertheless, this Shabbatean movement continued to enjoy followers over the next century, though in an underground sort of way. The affair seems to have re-ignited the hope that the long awaited Messianic age was just around the corner, priming the Jewish psyche to some degree even as the so-called Age of Enlightenment was dawning.

By now the original Sephardic Jews of Semitic origin had been expelled from Spain and migrated into Dutch, French, English, and German lands. The Sephardi tended to be sophisticated, prosperous, and well educated. Meanwhile a completely different Jewish racial stock (central Asian Khazaris) known as Ashkenazi had settled north of the Black Sea all the way up to the Baltic in an area later known as the Russian Pale. Though highly intelligent they tended to be much poorer and more politically disadvantaged. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries the Sephardi were happily assimilating into the Western nations while losing aspects of their Jewish identity. Many were even converting to Christianity as in the case of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli who, while he believed in the superiority of the Jewish race, straddled the fence. He called himself, “the missing page between the Old Testament and the New.” In Paul Johnson’s words, “he took great satisfaction in both blaming the Christians for not recognizing the virtues of Judaism, and blaming the Jews for not grasping that Christianity was ‘completed Judaism’… he thought it absurd that Jews should accept only the first part of the Jewish religion.” (Johnson, History of the Jews, p.324)

But it wasn’t merely assimilation into Christian cultures that was drawing many (usually more prosperous) Jews away from rigid rabbinic orthodoxy but the burgeoning secular and rationalistic ideas best illustrated by the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza championed the idea of rational Biblical criticism and proposed an openly Pantheistic view of God. Branded as an atheist, though not exactly so, he was excommunicated from the synagogue. Spinoza seems to have been the inspiration or precursor for another form of Judaism which the 19th century produced in quantity, the atheist Jew, most famously personified by Karl Marx. Yet even as a Jewish atheist Marx’s theories still exhibit a messianic dimension. Communism was, after all, a kind of messianic worldview.

At the same time this notion of a collective Messiah, after the Shabbatean disillusionment regarding a singular personal Messiah, began to take root in countless Jewish minds. Granted the orthodox rabbis resisted any such heterodox concepts, but centuries of fruitless waiting and moving about had not produced the expected result. Too many Jews had become restless waiting for the Messiah. Thus one can argue that political Zionism emerged as a model of the collective Messiah, sprung forth from the same kernel of disappointed hopes as collectivist Communism. Both are inherently socialist, the Israeli kibbutz and the Communist farm collective being tangible expressions of both. Moreover it wasn’t the well heeled assimilated Sephardi but the poorer and politically persecuted Ashkenazi who were most drawn towards socialized Communism and Zionism.

One other thing that Zionism and Communism share in common is that both are inherently Christophobic. While modern day Jewish Zionists such as Ben Shapiro may oppose and detest Communism, it has become apparent from their visceral negative reaction to former allies like Candace Owens that proclaiming Christ’s kingship is the red line that can never be crossed. For these Zionist neo-cons it is Israel, not Christ, to whom every knee must bend. Like Disraeli they subscribe to a kind of Jewish supremicism manifested in Israel’s contempt for its neighbors. Contrary to Disraeli, however, they insist on “accepting only the first part of the Jewish religion.”

Interestingly enough, more secular, left wing leaning Jewish intellectuals such as Glenn Greenwald, Norman Finkelstein, Max Blumenthal, or even Jeffrey Sachs don’t seem to get hung up on Christians expressing their core beliefs. Their broader concern is that Zionism, in both its Christian and Jewish iterations, has created and enabled this pariah state which is systematically giving all Jews in the world an undeserved black eye while at the same time providing a pretext for the next round of real, not just imagined, anti-Semitism. Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud bully boys have never seemed to internalize the age old lesson that one can accomplish much more with a carrot than a stick. It would also appear that their American Zionist allies from the White House down to the local mega-church are equally dense. After all, it is a decidedly bad idea to encourage and facilitate Armageddon, and I would strongly encourage every war mongering Zionist to carefully study Flavius Josephus’ “History of the Jews” to see where this kind of bellicose intransigence ultimately leads.

Whether we like it or not, the Jews represent the best and the worst in all of us. They have given mankind the Ten Commandments, Holy Scriptures, and a Saving Redeemer as well as diabolic nuclear weaponry, Communism, and political Zionism. They make incredible doctors and musicians yet are capable of producing financial predators and Jeffrey Epsteins. They epitomize mankind’s highest aspirations and its lowest condition. They are the mirror which God provided for every other race to honestly consider and contemplate its own mortal strengths and weaknesses; serving as the archetypes of our common humanity.

Perhaps that is why God made them to be the “chosen people,” but “chosen” in different senses, the most obvious being that they were chosen to give the world its true Messiah, Jesus Christ. But it could be argued that this unique people were also chosen to be an object lesson to humanity, manifesting the failings and weaknesses to which we are all subject in our fallen state: Chosen to be a warning to where a lack of humility can lead any one of us, namely into senseless conflict and even ruin. But also chosen by God, like the rest of us, to hopefully attain His greatest promise, which is not a piece of real estate in the Levant but heaven itself. As Mother Miriam, who grew up Jewish, has so thoughtfully explained, “the worst form of anti-Semitism is refusing to inform the Jews about their true Messiah, Jesus Christ.”

Francis J. Pierson +a.m.d.g.