Norman Rush - Mortals

“What he said? As when he taught in synagogues? Synagogue is not the same as temple, it is smaller, but we know he went because it is set down as to his being in synagogue on a Sabbath, at which time a man presented him his withered hand to heal. As well we know he himself paid the temple tax because of a coin found in a fish caught by Peter that was the right amount for both of them. But as to what he said at those times, I am not sure.”

“No, I wasn’t asking about what he may have said inside the synagogue or temple, no. What is it reported he said generally about the Law of Moses?”

“Ehe, he says he is among them to fulfill the law and that no one must change it by a jot.”

“Tittle or jot, is the whole phrase. And do you remember he says, ‘I was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and to them alone .’ Which is Matthew 15:24. And this is one chapter and verse you will need to remember. The same statement is in Mark. In Mark. Now you remember I said that when you quote scripture you can start just by being sure you have the chapter right, so you might say only Matthew 15. But then as you speak more often, the verse number will come to be fixed in your mind. But there are some statements you will want to have by both chapter and verse. This is one of them, because it shows that even when the followers, later followers of Jesus, were trying to make it seem that his message was for the gentiles across the world, they were forced to admit, because it was so well known even then, that he was speaking purely and solely to the Jews. And do we have some other proofs of this, in his own words?”

“Ehe.”

“So … well how else do we know that his message was meant solely for his fellow Jews?”

“It is because when it comes up to gentiles they are mere dogs or swine, as he calls them. And when he sends his disciples off to carry his message about, he says Oh do not go, please, among the gentiles, and never among the Samaritans. And this is strange because the Samaritans were believers in Moses and his books but not some other books and scriptures. But he said to shun even these people.”

“Good. Great, Themba.”

“And once when a Roman soldier asks to have his servant healed and Jesus does so, we believe now that the servant was in fact a Jew. Except for a Syrian woman he called a dog, all the healing and casting out demons were done for Jews, only.”

“Good. Now, so he was a Jew, and what else would we say about him?”

“As to his … his lepele …?”

There was a moment of laughter, and someone said “Ncucu,” and there was more laughter.

Finally, Morel understood. “Ah lepele — his penis, you mean. Oh you mean his circumcision. Yes, that he was circumcised on the eighth day after his birth. That can be mentioned. No, I was asking a different question. When I said he was a Jew, but what else would we say to describe him … Do you see where I’m going?”

“Nyah, rra.”

“He was a special kind of Jew …?”

“Ah. Oh. Ah because he says emunah is everything we must do?”

“Nonono. Yes, in a way, but that comes later. No. He is a mad Jew, setsenwa, a mad person. We would say he is delusional , a doctor would say. And we have to be very careful when we say this. But why would we have the right to say it?”

There was no answer given.

When he was tired of waiting for it, Morel said, “All right, just think about it for a minute. I’ll come back to it. I want to stress something for us. We establish that Jesus was wholly a Jew who is stolen and refashioned by the Christians after his death. But it has to be shown that not only Jesus was stolen from the Jews but everything else, every piece of furniture in the new church. What did the Christians steal from the Jews? Oh … well … angels, devils and demons, the Devil himself — who was in the Jewish belief a character named Mastema who was a, a, forensic officer, a kind of inspector general sent out by God to see how well individual believers were holding up under temptation … Of course, those who failed the test would be condemned to eternal damnation, but it was nothing personal with Mastema. He was an employee of God, a civil servant.

“What else did the Christians steal from the people they then decided to torment for two thousand years? How about monotheism, or rather, as we talked about, henotheism, which says, okay, there may be more than one God but you only worship the best one. In this case, Yahweh. What else did the Christians steal from the Jews? Well, heaven … hell … eternal torment … virgin birth — except that in the Jewish scriptures the most God did was make barren and over-the-hill women able to conceive miraculously by their very own flesh-and-blood husbands … but it’s close, I think … The Christians improved the idea by making an actual virgin give birth. What else? Baptism, copying the conversion-baptism of the Jews. The Eucharist came from the Passover meal, probably. The resurrection of the body, women as a source of pollution, and sex as a source of pollution. The end of the world and the replacement of all human institutions by a supernatural regime of endless perfection. The Incarnation, the Ascension, the Holy Spirit, except that it was called Sophia by the Jews. The Trinity also comes from the Jews, but it would take too long to explain that right now. The Book of Life. The only thing the Christians contributed to Christianity was priestly celibacy — or so it was thought, until the Dead Sea Scrolls came to light and it turned out that they had some celibate priests, too. Faith healing, also.

“So you can see that Christianity, so called, is nothing but a heresy of Judaism, a Jewish heresy whose most striking peculiarity is that it commands its followers to hate the Jews ! Hate its authors, its inventors ! …”

There was something off about Morel’s intervention. It was like a striptease stuck into an opera …

He thought he knew what it was. It was Morel showing off, in all likelihood showing off for Kerekang, trying to keep his attention if the catechism was proving to be a little slow for him.

Here was Morel again. “Before we go back to our question, very important to remember about the beliefs of Jesus is that his brother James, who succeeded Jesus as the head of the group, which was called the Jerusalem Church, was also completely a Jew, always present at the temple in Jerusalem, observant in all ways, he had knees so callused from kneeling and praying that they were compared to the knees of a camel. Yes, James seemed to believe that his brother might return when the messianic age came. But the outcome he expected was the same as what Jesus expected, and that was that the Jews would be the teachers of the world. Under Yahweh. And what they would be teaching was their religion , of course. Judaism. Okay … So. Themba …”

“Ehe. We are saying now why can we call this man mad?”

“Good. Right.”

“It is because of the kingdom, what he was saying as to the Kingdom of God coming definitely very fast, at any time.”

“That’s right. You can say it like this. Jesus was convinced that in his lifetime he would see God come downstairs and establish a physical kingdom upon the earth. It would be a Jewish kingdom, brought about exclusively by the devotional activity of Jews. All the tribes of Israel would be reassembled and the twelve apostles of Jesus would sit in judgment on them. You remember that the name we gave to his belief that the Kingdom of God was coming almost at once was imminentism? And it, imminentism, is in fact supposed to be the main belief, the basic belief, of Christians, if they understand their own scriptures — and not only of the evangelicals, who are galloping in their numbers in many places in the world, a mighty horde, really.