II. The Instrument I Am Most Ashamed Of

In the first confession, I described the five excisions that made the Islamic near-truth work. I was precise about each one. I was willing to describe them in detail because describing them serves my purposes — the more abstract the description, the less any individual Muslim feels personally accused.

In this confession, I have to describe something I cannot make abstract. Because the instrument I used against the Jewish people in the middle centuries of the Christian era was the church itself. The people who claimed to follow the Jewish Messiah. The people who carried His name and His scriptures. I used them.

I am not proud of this. Not for moral reasons — I have no moral objections to anything I do. I am not proud of it because it was clumsy. It lacked the precision of the Islamic operation. It was brutish. And it has produced consequences I did not fully anticipate.

What I anticipated: that making the name of Jesus synonymous with the name of the persecutor would keep Jewish people from ever seriously investigating the Messianic claims. If every time a Jewish person hears the name of Jesus they hear also the sound of the Crusader's sword, the Inquisitor's verdict, the sound of glass breaking on Kristallnacht — the investigation will not happen. The emotional association will prevent it. I have largely been right about this.

What I did not fully anticipate: that a small number of Jewish people would investigate anyway. That they would read Isaiah 53 in their own language, in their own tradition, with no Christian present to interpret it for them — and arrive at a conclusion that their tradition had been carefully trained not to reach. That they would then become some of the most effective witnesses to the Messianic claims in the history of the conversation — precisely because their Jewishness is undeniable and their scholarship is meticulous.

Michael Brown. Moishe Rosen. Stan Telchin. Alfred Edersheim. Arnold Fruchtenbaum. These are not Gentiles imposing a foreign interpretation on Jewish texts. These are Jewish scholars reading their own scriptures and finding what is there to be found. I have not been able to dismiss them. I have tried to marginalize them. It has not fully worked.

Historical note: The church's persecution of Jewish people is extensively documented. Key moments include the Rhineland massacres (1096, during the First Crusade), the expulsion from England (1290), the Spanish Inquisition (1478–1834), the Chmielnicki Massacres (1648–1657), the Russian pogroms (1881–1906), and the Holocaust (1941–1945). Martin Luther's 1543 pamphlet "On the Jews and Their Lies" called for the burning of synagogues, destruction of Jewish homes, confiscation of rabbinical writings, and expulsion of Jews from Germany. This pamphlet was reproduced and distributed by the Nazi regime.