The Roman-Jewish Wars + The Political Purpose of The Gospels

Soldiers loot holy relics and religious treasures because it's fun and demoralizes the enemy, at least in the moment. Long-term, the looting backfires. The Vikings and Crusaders had a grand old time looting Catholic monasteries and Byzantine churches. But looters always become losers. 

Growing up we weren't taught Jewish history in school, apart from the Holocaust, which we now know was a scandalous hoax. It just wasn't a subject that I was interested in. I liked reading about conquerors. Men like Napoleon, George Washington, Julius Caesar, Frederick the Great, not particular races and religions. Plus, I never read the Bible or any Abrahamic literature, so Judaism was and still is foreign territory. 

But I want to understand why the Jews are the way they are. What made them so race centric and so warlike? Why are they always angry? Why do they divide the world between Jew and Gentile? Why label non-Jews Goyim? Why pull off something like 9/11 and specifically warn Jews to not enter those buildings on that day? Why are Jews so special?

And when did this religious madness begin?

The Roman-Jewish Wars seem like a good place to start. 

I've been listening to Joseph Atwill's interviews on this subject. The way he tells it, Christianity was Rome's official answer to messianic Judaism, not a grassroots religion that developed from the teachings of a man named Jesus.

Rome had a big problem on their hands when it came to the rebellious Jews. In the 1st century B.C. the Jewish religion was becoming extremely violent and unpredictable. They did not take Roman conquests lying down. Other cults and peoples found a way to assimilate to the Roman empire and pay lip service to the Caesars. But not them.

Not only would the most extremist Jews not do that, they also started periodic rebellions that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of citizens in the empire. 

Rome had to find a way to keep the peace. They had wars to fight. They figured if violence couldn't do the trick then maybe religion could. So they invented a peaceful rebel who espoused the tenets of Judaism but would also turn the other cheek when the Emperor demanded taxes and obedience.

With Christianity the goal was to declaw Judaism and turn it into just another cult without all the military baggage and messianic fervour.

This makes a lot of sense to me because if we take Christianity for just another astrotheocratic religious system and mystery cult then why did it appear at this point in time---at the height of the Roman-Jewish wars? 

Its emergence couldn't have been a spontaneous event but the result of a political decision by Rome to respond to the Jewish rebellions with something other than brute force, something that would endure, and permanently alter the nature of the relationship. 

At this time Rome planned on staying around for a thousand years. All empires look ahead into the distant future. The idea of fighting rebellious Jews inside the empire every fifty years just wasn't economically or militarily feasible. Empires can fight other empires for generations without feeling the political cost, but suppressing rebellion after rebellion is another matter. That chips away at authority and makes ruling a large empire impossible.

The Roman-Jewish conflict wasn't a story of small and good underdogs vs. the big bad wolves. It was a story of a vast empire with many diverse religions and cults trying to co-exist with a small but powerful religion that could not tolerate the politco-religious symbols of a foreign ruler on its ancient, ancestral lands. 

And that's totally understandable. I'm sure that if Trump built a tower with his name on it on the ruins of the Kaaba millions of Muslims would be fighting America for the next century. There's some things you just don't do, even if you're the most powerful man in the world. The Roman Caesars did not understand that. They were too arrogant. They were too vain. 

Imagine how history would have unfolded if they just let that stupid temple stand and allowed the Jews to practice their religion in peace.

II.

An excerpt from, "Responding to Comments Part 1 with Joseph Atwill" Source: Neo-Imperial Cult, July 25, 2026, [from the 33: 26 mark in the video]:

Joseph Atwill: I don't think that the Gospels were ever really intended for Zealots. I think that the messianic Zealots, many of whom were brought to Rome following the war, it would have been impossible to convert them. They were steadfast in their religion. They had been defeated militarily but they weren't open to any kind of Roman changing of their scripture. 

I think that just to recognize the zealotry of the Jews, look at the Kitos rebellion. This would have been like fifteen years after the Gospels were written, and I think this was what they were trying to head off with the Gospels. At least not with the Gospels, but with the story of Jesus Christ that they would have brought out. It would have been verbal. They were trying to stop the political spread of messianic Judaism. And Josephus records this, so it's not like I'm conjecturing this. This was the political purpose of the Gospels. It wasn't to convert Zealots. They didn't think they could do that. It would have just stopped the Zealots from getting at the Diaspora Jews and setting off little rebellions all through the empire. 

So they brought out the story of Jesus. It would have been told in the Imperial Cults. And it would have contested any missionaries from the militaristic side of Judaism so that they could have an easier time. However, it was a total flop, because the Kitos rebellion, which is a rebellion of Diaspora Jews, it was the most bloodthirsty thing imaginable. And the Jews got control of Cyprus and they killed all of the Gentiles, 250,000 Gentiles. They rounded them up and slaughtered everyone. This was what Rome was basically trying to effect, that racial hatred. It was warfare. It was warfare between Jews and Gentiles. And religions were just big parts of it. 

Wikipedia:

In 115 CE, a wave of large-scale Jewish uprisings, known as the "Diaspora Revolt", erupted almost simultaneously across several provinces in the Eastern Mediterranean. The uprisings took place while Emperor Trajan was waging a military campaign against the Parthian Empire further east. The revolts appear to have been influenced by long-standing ethnic tensions, the destruction of the Second Temple and revolutionary ideas spread by insurgents from Judaea. Additional factors fueling the unrest included the humiliating Jewish Tax imposed by Rome and widespread messianic expectations of divine redemption. Scholars believe that the rebels may have aimed at a return to Judaea, the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty, and the rebuilding of the Temple.

In Libya, Jewish forces launched attacks against Greek and Roman populations under the leadership of either Andreas or Lukuas – possibly the same individual known by both names. In Egypt, the uprising reportedly began with clashes between Jewish communities and their Greek neighbors, which escalated when Lukuas and his followers arrived from Cyrenaica. They plundered the countryside and overcame local resistance. The Greeks, supported by Egyptian peasants and Romans, retaliated, massacring the Jews of Alexandria. In Cyprus, Jewish rebels under Artemion's leadership reportedly devastated the island and the city of Salamis.

The Roman response was severe. Marcius Turbo, initially deployed against the Parthians, was redirected to suppress the revolts in Egypt and Libya with a large military force. His campaigns were marked by extreme brutality, leading to the near-extermination of Jewish populations in Cyrenaica, Cyprus, and Egypt. By late 117, the revolts had been largely quelled, though some disturbances in Egypt may have continued into early 118. In the aftermath, Jewish communities in the affected regions suffered immense losses, with archaeological evidence indicating severe destruction, particularly in Cyrene, which required reconstruction under Hadrian.

An excerpt from, "Revolt Against the Modern World" by Julius Evola, 1934, Chapter 29:

The failure of the attempt of the Chaldean hero Gilgamesh corresponds to the fall of Adam in the myth of another civilization within the Semitic cycle, the Hebrew civilization. Here we find a fundamental and characteristic motif: the transformation into sin of what in the Aryan version of the myth was regarded as a heroic, bold deed, often crowned by success, but that in Gilgamesh's myth had a negative outcome only because the hero was caught asleep. In the context of Hebrew Semitism, the one who attempts to take possession of the symbolic Tree is univocally transformed into a victim of woman’s seduction and a sinner. The curse he has to suffer and the punishment that has been meted out to him by a jealous, terrible, and omnipotent god, follow him; there is no better hope, in the end, than that for a “redeemer” who will provide a vicarious atonement. 

In the ancient Hebrew tradition there are also elements of a different type. Moses himself, though he owed his life to a woman of the royal family (i.e., pharaoh’s daughter, Exod. 2:5), was conceived of as having been “rescued from the waters”; likewise, the events described in the book of Exodus are capable of esoteric interpretation. Besides Elijah and Enoch, Jacob too was a heroic type, because he fought an angel and won; in relation to this, even the name “Israel,” which the angel gave him, conveys the idea of a “victory over the deity” (Gen. 32:29). 

These elements are still sporadic and reveal a curious oscillation, which is typical of the Jewish soul, between a sense of guilt, self-humiliation, deconsecration, and carnality and an almost Luciferian pride and rebelliousness. Maybe this could be explained by the fact that even the initiatory tradition, which is also found in Judaism (e.g., the Kabbalah) and which played an important role in the European Middle Ages, has some particularly involuted traits, which characterize it at times as an “accursed science.”

The Jews originally conceived the otherworld as the dark and mute Sheol, or as some kind of Hades without the counterpart of an “Island of Heroes”; not even sacred kings such as David could escape it. This is the theme of the “way of the ancestors” (pitŗ-yāna in Hinduism), which in this context has special relevance as the idea of an ever greater distance between man and God. Even on this plane, however, we find a double characteristic. On the one hand, according to the ancient Hebrews, Jehovah is the true king; thus, the Jews saw in the full and traditional understanding of regal dignity a disparagement of God is privilege (whether historical or not, Samuel is opposition to the establishment of a monarchy is very significant). On the other hand, the Jewish people considered themselves to be a “chosen people” and “God’s people,” who had been promised dominion over all the other peoples and possession of all the riches of the earth. They even derived from the Iranian tradition the theme of the hero Saoshyant, who in Judaism became the “Messiah,” retaining for some time the traits typical of a manifestation of the "Lord of Hosts."

Not without relation to all this, in ancient Judaism we find a very visible effort on the part of a priestly elite to dominate and coalesce a turbid, multiple, and turbulent ethnical substance by establishing the divine Law as the foundation of its “form,” and by making it the surrogate of what in other people was the unity of the common fatherland and the common origins. From this formative action, which was connected to sacred and ritualistic values and preserved from the first redactions of the ancient Torah to the elaboration of the Talmuds, the Jewish type arose as that of a spiritual rather than a physical race. But the original substratum was never totally eliminated, as ancient Jewish history shows in the form of the recurrent betrayals of God and his becoming reconciled with Israel. This dualism and the ensuing tension help to explain the negative forms that Judaism assumed in later times.

For Judaism, as in the case of other civilizations, the time frame between the seventh and the sixth century B.C. was characterized by upheaval. Once the military fortunes of Israel declined, defeat came to be understood as a punishment for “sins” committed, and thus an expectation developed that after a dutiful expiation Jehovah would once again assist his people and restore their power. This theme was dealt with in Jeremiah and in Isaiah. But since this did not happen, the prophetic expectations degenerated into an apocalyptic, messianic myth and in the fantastic eschatological vision of a Savior who will redeem Israel; this marked the beginning of a process of disintegration. What derived from the traditional component eventually turned into a ritualistic formalism and thus became increasingly abstract and separated from real life. To be aware of the role the Chaldean priestly sciences played in this cycle would allow one to connect to this source everything that was successively articulated in Judaism in the form of abstract thought and even of mathematical insights (up to and including Spinoza’s philosophy and the modern “formal” physics in which the Jewish component is very strong). Moreover, a connection was established with a human type, who in order to uphold values that he cannot realize and that thus appear to him increasingly abstract and utopian, eventually feels dissatisfied and frustrated before any existing positive order and any form of authority (especially when we find in him, though in an unconscious way, the old idea according to which the state of justice willed by God is only that in which Israel rules) so as to be a constant source of disorder and of revolution. 

Spain, A Symptom

Ceuta, Spain.

The attack on Spain by Israel, the United States, and Morocco has gone unanswered.

Morocco should have been punished right away. It has made a mockery of Spain's immigration laws and the European Union.

Spain's weakness is a symptom of a greater disease that's plaguing Europe.

The Spanish government is derelict in its main duty, which is to protect the borders of the sovereign state of Spain. The Spanish King has been more vocal in his defense of Ukraine and Palestine than his own country. He should perhaps open a map and focus on the security and well-being of his own people.

It's no wonder why the Zionists and Neocons take European leaders and the European Union for a joke. It is a continent that has been politically, mentally, and culturally raped since the end of WWII.

They don't know their best interests. They don't even know their heads from their asses. Comrade Putin stretches out his hand in the spirit of brotherly relations and they slap him away. The Americans and the Jews tell them to kneel and they can't get down fast enough.

A colonized mind mistakes a friend for an enemy and an enemy for a friend. It internalizes the thoughts of its overlords and justifies its own destruction as a matter of destiny.

It is also an atrophied mind that is slow to react to crises like the one in Ceuta. 

The longer the crisis lingers the worse it will get.

Adso of Montier-en-Der - Letter on the Origin and Time of the Antichrist

Wikipedia:

Adso of Montier-en-Der (Latin: Adso Dervensis; 910/920 – 992) was abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Montier-en-Der in France, and died on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Biographical information on Adso comes mainly from one single source and has come under question, but the traditional biography depicts him as an abbot who enacted important monastic reform, as a scholar, and as a writer of five hagiographies. His best-known work was a biography of Antichrist, titled "De ortu et tempore Antichristi", which combined exegetical and Sibylline lore. This letter became one of the best-known medieval descriptions of Antichrist, copied many times and of great influence on all later apocalyptic tradition, in part because, rather than as an exegesis of apocalyptic texts, he chose to describe Antichrist in the style of a hagiography.

An excerpt from, "Letter on the Origin and Time of the Antichrist" By Adso of Montier-en-Der, PBS:

This treatise was written at the request of Queen Gerbera of France for clarification on the details of the rise and life of the Antichrist. The author, a monk named Adso, writes his response in the form of a saint's life, a literary form established at the time. It is an important document in the history of apocalypticism because it summarizes the traditional stories of the Antichrist in an accessible and popular way. It also helps establish the idea of the "Last World Emperor," who will unite Christianity and defeat the Muslims before the Antichrist arises. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the letter was revised many times, under various psuedonyms, and widely distributed. [This excerpt omits the prologue to Queen Gerbera]

When you wish to be informed about the Antichrist the first thing you want to know is why he is so called. This is because he will be contrary to Christ in all things and will do things that are against Christ. Christ came as a humble man; he will come as a proud one. Christ came to raise the lowly, to justify sinners; he, on the other hand, will cast out the lowly, magnify sinners, exalt the wicked. He will always exalt vices opposed to virtues, will drive out the evangelical law, will revive the worship of demons in the world, will seek his own glory (John 7:18), and will call himself Almighty God. The Antichrist has many ministers of his malice. Many of them have already existed, like Antiochus, Nero, and Domitian. Even now in our own time we know there are many Antichrists, for anyone, layman, cleric, or monk, who lives contrary to justice and attacks the rule of his way of life and blasphemes what is good (Rom. 14:16) is an Antichrist, the minister of Satan.

Now let us see about the Antichrist's origin. What I say is not thought out or made up on my own, but in my attentive reading I find it all written down in books. As our authors say, the Antichrist will be born from the Jewish people, that is, from the tribe of Dan, as the Prophet says: "Let Dan be a snake in the wayside, an adder on the path." He will sit in the wayside like a serpent and will be on the path in order to wound those who walk in the paths of justice (Ps. 22:3) and kill them with the poison of his wickedness. He will be born from the union of a mother and father, like other men, not, as some say, from a virgin alone. Still, he will be conceived wholly in sin (Ps. 50:7), will be generated in sin, and will be born in sin (John 9:34). At the very beginning of his conception the devil will enter his mother's womb at the same moment. The devil's power will foster and protect him in his mother's womb and it will always be with him. Just as the Holy Spirit came into the mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ and overshadowed her with his power and filled her with divinity so that she conceived of the Holy Spirit and what was born of her was divine and holy (Luke 1:35), so too the devil will descend into the Antichrist's mother, will completely fill her, completely encompass her, completely master her, completely possess her within and without, so that with the devil's cooperation she will conceive through a man and what will be born from her will be totally wicked, totally evil, totally lost. For this reason that man is called the "Son of Perdition" (2 Thess. 2:3), because he will destroy the human race as far as he can and will himself be destroyed at the last day.

You have heard how he is to be born; now hear the place where he will be born. Just as Our Lord and Redeemer foresaw Bethlehem for himself as the place to assume humanity and to be born for us, so too the devil knew a place fit for that lost man who is called Antichrist, a place from which the root of all evil (1 Tim. 6:10) ought to come, namely, the city of Babylon. Antichrist will be born in that city, which once was a celebrated and glorious pagan center and the capital of the Persian Empire. It says that he will be brought up and protected in the cities of Bethsaida and Corozain, the cities that the Lord reproaches in the Gospel when he says, "Woe to you, Bethsaida, woe to you Corozain!" (Matt. 11.21). The Antichrist will have magicians, enchanters, diviners, and wizards who at the devil's bidding will rear him and instruct him in every evil, error, and wicked art. Evil spirits will be his leaders, his constant associates, and inseparable companions. Then he will come to Jerusalem and with various tortures will slay all the Christians he cannot convert to his cause. He will erect his throne in the Holy Temple, for the Temple that Solomon built to God that had been destroyed he will raise up to its former state. He will circumcise himself and will pretend that he is the son of Almighty God.

He will first convert kings and princes to his cause, and then through them the rest of the peoples. He will attack the places where the Lord Christ walked and will destroy what the Lord made famous. Then he will send messengers and his preachers through the whole world. His preaching and power will extend "from sea to sea, from East to West" (Ps. 71:8), from North to South. He will also work many signs, great and unheard-of prodigies (Apoc. 13:13). He will make fire come down from heaven in a terrifying way, trees suddenly blossom and wither, the sea become stormy and unexpectedly calm. He will make the elements change into differing forms, divert the order and flow of bodies of water, disturb the air with winds and all sorts of commotions, and perform countless other wondrous acts. He will raise the dead "in the sight of men in order to lead into error, if possible, even the elect" (Matt. 24:24). For when they shall have seen great signs of such a nature even those who are perfect and God's chosen ones will doubt whether or not he is the Christ who according to the scriptures will come at the end of the world.

He will arouse universal persecution against the Christians and all the elect. He will lift himself up against the faithful in three ways, that is, by terror, by gifts, and by prodigies. To those who believe in him he will give much gold and silver. Those he is not able to corrupt with gifts, he will overcome with terror; those he cannot overcome with terror, he will try to seduce with signs and prodigies. Those he cannot seduce with prodigies, he will cruelly torture and miserably put to death in the sight of all. "Then there will be tribulation such as has not been on earth from when the nations began to exist up to that time. Then those who are in the field I will flee to the mountains, and he who is on the roof will not go down into his house to take anything from it" (Matt. 24:21,16; Dan. 12:1). Then every faithful Christian who will be discovered will either deny God, or, if he will remain faithful, will perish, whether through sword, or fiery furnace, or serpents, or beasts, or through some other kind of torture. This terrible and fearful tribulation will last for three and a half years in the whole world. "Then the days will be shortened for the sake of the elect, for unless the Lord had shortened those days, mankind would not have been saved" (Matt. 24:22).

An excerpt from, "Reform, Queenship and the End of the World in Tenth-Century France: Adso’s “Letter on the Origin and Time of the Antichrist” Reconsidered" By Simon MacLean, University of St Andrews:

Over the last two thousand years, western political discourse has frequently reserved a special place for the Antichrist. From the early Christian thinking which identified him with the Roman Emperor Nero to the more recent political invectives which railed against supposed modern incarnations such as Saddam Hussein and Ronald Reagan, Christ‟s final enemy has become a byword for ultimate human evil and has therefore proved to be an evocative, flexible and timeless vehicle for polemic of all kinds. In the history of ideas about the Antichrist, few authors have been as influential as Adso, usually identified as abbot of the monastery of Montier-en-Der in the Champagne region from 968 until 992, and best-known as author of the “Letter on the Origin and Time of the Antichrist”, composed between 949 and 954 at the request of Queen Gerberga of West Francia. Adso‟s short treatise describes how the Antichrist will be born in Babylon under diabolical influence to Jewish parents, how he will “win over kings and princes to his cause”, and how, preceded by two prophets, he will be received in Jerusalem as a false messiah before being killed by Christ in advance of Judgement Day. None of this will take place, according to the treatise, while the “Roman Empire” (represented by the kings of the Franks) persists, or before its final ruler abdicates on the Mount of Olives and thus “consummates the Christian Empire”. The key to the tract‟s influence lay not in any originality of thought (most of what it said was drawn from canonical texts like the commentary on 2 Thessalonians by the ninth-century theologian Haimo of Auxerre and the myth of the Last Emperor preserved in Latin versions of the seventh-century Syriac text known as the Pseudo-Methodius) or aesthetic virtue (Adso‟s attempt to reconcile diverse sources led to a certain amount of repetition and contradiction), but rather in its innovative structure. By moulding the scattered exegetical and legendary material into a simple biographical format, Adso was the first author to truly personify the Antichrist; and by presenting him as an anti-saint whose life could be understood as a photo-negative of Christ‟s at every stage, he seemingly struck a chord in medieval culture. The work‟s impact was almost instant: within a couple of years of Adso‟s death, his “Letter” was already being read and used in the entourages of such notable millennial figures as Archbishop Wulfstan of York and Emperor Otto III. The modern critical edition of the treatise is based on a staggering 171 manuscripts, which testifies eloquently to its great influence on numerous major writers of the central and later middle ages.

Stephen Sizer On The History of Christian Zionism + The Scandalous Origins of Dispensationalism

They won't stop at banning priests. They never do.

Wikipedia:

Stephen Robert Sizer (born 27 July 1953 is a priest in the Church of England. He is banned from serving as a priest until 2030. From 1997 to 2017, he was vicar of Christ Church, Virginia Water, in Surrey.

Sizer is known for his opposition to Christian Zionism, which is the basis of his 2003 PhD thesis and the focus of his published works, and for his controversial views about Jews. In October 2012, the Board of Deputies of British Jews lodged a complaint against Sizer with the Church of England under the Clergy Discipline Measure alleging that he had made antisemitic statements and published links to antisemitic web sites. Although he did not admit culpability, at a conciliation meeting in October 2013 Sizer agreed to have his online web usage monitored.

In 2015, the Board of Deputies lodged a further complaint against Sizer, this time for posting a link accusing Jews and Israel of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks in the United States. He was censured by the Bishop of Guildford, who imposed a complete ban on Sizer's use of all social media for at least six months.

In 2022, a Church of England tribunal found that his conduct had been "unbecoming to the office and work of a clerk in Holy Orders, in that he provoked and offended the Jewish community" and, by posting a link in 2015 to an article that was "virulently antisemitic in its content", he had "engaged in antisemitic activity". In January 2023 Sizer was prohibited from licensed ministry in the Church of England until 2030.

An excerpt from, "The Road to Balfour: The History of Christian Zionism" By Stephen Sizer, Britain Palestine Project, November 2, 2012:

The late 18th and early 19th Centuries saw a dramatic movement away from the optimism of postmillennialism following a sustained period of turmoil on both sides of the Atlantic. There was the American War of Independence (1775-1784), the French Revolution (1789-1793) and then the Napoleonic Wars (1809-1815).  In 1804, Louis Napoleon had been crowned Emperor of the Gauls in the reluctant presence of the Pope.

During the Syrian campaign of Napoleon’s Oriental expedition, in which he had sought to defeat the Ottoman rulers, cut off Britain from its Empire, and recreate the empire of Alexander from France to India, he become the first political leader to propose a sovereign Jewish State in Palestine:

‘Bonaparte, Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of the French Republic in Africa and Asia, to the Rightful Heirs of Palestine. Israelites, unique nation, whom, in thousands of years, lust of conquest and tyranny were able to deprive of the ancestral lands only, but not of name and national existence … She [France] offers to you at this very time, and contrary to all expectations, Israel’s patrimony … Rightful heirs of Palestine … hasten! Now is the moment which may not return for thousands of years, to claim the restoration of your rights among the population of the universe which had shamefully withheld from you for thousands of years, your political existence as a nation among the nations, and the unlimited natural right to worship Yehovah in accordance with your faith, publicly and in likelihood for ever (Joel 4:20).’

Napoleon believed that with compliant Jews controlling Palestine, French imperial and commercial interests as far as India, Arabia and Africa could be secured.  Neither Napoleon nor the Jews were able to deliver. Nevertheless his proclamation ‘is a barometer of the extent to which the European atmosphere was charged with these messianic expectations.’

In 1807 he plotted the division of Europe with the Czar of Russia and began a blockade of British sea trade with Europe. Two years later he arrested the Pope and annexed the Papal States. He then began the systematic destruction of the Roman Catholic Church in France, seizing its assets, executing priests and exiling the Pope from Rome. By 1815, Napoleon’s armies had fought, invaded or subjugated most of Europe and the Middle East, including Italy, Austria, Germany, Poland, Russia, Palestine and Egypt. Napoleon appointed his brothers as kings of Holland, Naples, Spain and Westphalia in what is today Germany. He even gave his own son the title ‘King of Rome’. His plan was to create a United States of Europe, each state ruled by a compliant monarch, subject to himself as ‘supreme King of Kings and Sovereign of the Roman Empire’. Numerous preachers and commentators speculated on whether Napoleon was indeed the Antichrist. Charles Finney, for example, predicted the imminent end of the world. In 1835 he speculated that ‘If the church will do all her duty, the Millennium may come in this country in three years.’ William Miller narrowed the return of Christ down to the 21st March 1843, while Charles Russell more prudently predicted that Christ would set up his spiritual kingdom in the heavenlies in 1914. For many years, Russell’s popular sermons linking biblical prophecy with contemporary events were reproduced in over 1,500 newspapers in the USA and Canada.  This sectarian speculation came to be embraced by mainstream evangelicalism through the influence of J. N. Darby and the Brethren.

The revolution in prophetic and apocalyptic speculation concerning the Jewish people and the return of Christ can be largely attributed to the Scottish, Edward Irving1, also the forerunner of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements.

Given his growing popularity Irving was invited to preach at the annual service of the London Missionary Society in 1824, and a year later in 1825 to the Continental Society, in which Henry Drummond was already influential. Irving’s address on that occasion was provocatively entitled, ‘Babylon and Infidelity Foredoomed’. Irving controversially insisted that far from being on the threshold of a new era of blessing, the Church was about to enter a ‘series of thick-coming judgments and fearful perplexities’ preparatory to Christ’s advent and reign. Irving was clearly convinced that the Lord would return in his generation,

I conclude, therefore, that the last days… will begin to run from the time of God’s appearing for his ancient people, and gathering them together to the work of destroying all Antichristian nations, of evangelising the world, and of governing it during the Millennium…

Irving’s premillennial and prophetic views concerning Israel came to have a profound influence over many Christian leaders and politicians not least John Nelson Darby, the founder of the Brethren and Henry Drummond (1786-1860), a city banker and politician, who later founded the Catholic Apostolic Church.

On the first day of Advent in 1826, the same year Irving was translating Lacunza’s work, Drummond opened his home at Albury Park to a select group of some twenty invited guests to discuss matters of prophecy. These included the Revd. Lewis Way who had helped found the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity Among the Jews, or London Jews Society, as it was more commonly named, along with Joseph Frey. Also present was Hugh McNeile, another Anglican who, in 1830, published a book entitled ‘The Prophecies Relative to the Jewish Nation,’ from Albury Rectory. In this book McNeile made frequent references to ‘dispensations’ and the future national pre-eminence of Israel.Some twenty men attended the first conference and in the region of forty attended one or more of those held at Albury. The majority were like Lewis Way and Hugh McNeile, were Anglicans, although others were Moravian, Church of Scotland and Nonconformist ministers. Irving was to write of the first such conference,

…the six days we spent under the holy and hospitable roof of Albury House, within the chime of the church bell, and surrounded by the most picturesque and beautiful forms of nature… of which I can say is this, that no council, from that first which we convened at Jerusalem until this time, seemed more governed, and conducted, and inspired by a spirit of holy communion.

Similar premillennial prophetic conferences were held at Albury each year until 1830, before proliferating, apparently under the increasing influence of J. N. Darby to other venues including the Powerscourt Conferences in Dublin held in the 1830’s.

John Nelson Darby is regarded by many as the father of Dispensationalism and the most influential figure in the development of Christian Zionism. He was a charismatic figure with a dominant personality. He was a persuasive speaker and zealous missionary for his dispensationalist beliefs. He personally founded Brethren churches as far away as Germany, Switzerland, France and the United States, and translated the entire Scriptures into English.  The churches Darby and his colleagues planted with the seeds of Premillennial Dispensationalism in turn sent missionaries to Africa, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand and, ironically, to work among the Arabs of Palestine. From 1862 onwards his controlling influence over the Brethren in Britain waned due, in particular, to the split between Open and Exclusive Brethren in 1848.  Darby consequently spent more and more time in North America, making seven journeys in the next twenty years. During these visits, he came to have an increasing influence over evangelical leaders such as James H. Brookes, Dwight L. Moody, William Blackstone and C. I. Scofield.

Video Title: The Scandalous Origins of Dispensationalism. Source: The Conquering Truth. Date Published: July 9, 2024.

The Antichrist In The 16th Century

 

Martin Luther, John Dee, and Pope Paul III. 

The Protestants arrived on the historical scene in the 16th century by declaring the papal authority in Rome the Antichrist. 

This was a turbulent period. End times propaganda was in the air. The European public's susceptibility to religious extremism was at an all time high. Theological learning was becoming deinstitutionalized, and ancient manuscripts and philosophical books were being translated into common languages. 

An excerpt from, "Martin Luther’s Views on the Antichrist" by Dennis Pettibone, Journal of the Adventist Theological Society, 2007: 

If Protestantism owes its very existence to Luther’s conviction that the papacy was the Antichrist, it might be instructive to inquire why Luther held this view and under what circumstances he came to this conclusion. We will see that he came to this view slowly and reluctantly, driven by historical circumstances and theological reflection. We will also briefly note the comparable views of other Protestant Reformers and their predecessors. Looking at the idea that the papacy is the Antichrist of prophecy in its historical context might give us a rational basis for evaluating it.

We will focus primarily on Luther because it was his views on the subject that triggered the Protestant Reformation. However, we should note that Luther was far from the first person to hold this view. Luther himself credited John Huss with being the first to call the pope an Antichrist. Huss did indeed consider the Pope to be the Antichrist, but he was not the first to do so, nor was his mentor, John Wycliffe, although Wycliffe and at least some of his Lolland followers, including Sir John Oldcastle, held this belief. This idea also circulated among the Waldensians, the Albigensians, and the Fraticelli, a group of Franciscans with more regard for the rule of St. Francis than for papal authority.

. . .Martin Luther was probably unaware of the previous attacks on the papacy when, in 1517, he drafted his 95 Theses. If he had been, he would have been unsympathetic. At the time he regarded John Huss as a heretic. His target was not the papacy; it was a greedy Dominican monk named Johann Tetzel who was distorting Catholic doctrine by exaggerating the benefits of indulgences. Luther had no intention of splitting the church: he was only trying to protect his parishioners.

Enraged, Tetzel made sure that Rome knew what was happening. This set in motion a chain of events that led to a summons for Luther to appear before a papal representative. It also led to a theological attack on Luther’s position by Sylvester Cardinal Prierias, the papal court’s chief theologian. Prierias wrote, “He who does not accept the doctrine of the Church of Rome and pontiff of Rome as an infallible rule of faith, from which the Holy Scriptures, too, draw their strength, is a heretic.” Furthermore, “Whoever says that the Church of Rome may not do what it is actually doing in the matter of indulgences is a heretic.” Prierias had transformed the debate from a question of procedure to one of authority.

An excerpt from, "John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature" by Deborah E. Harkness, Cambridge University Press, 1999, Pg. 136 - 139: 

Today we tend to group all beliefs that the world is ending under the rubric of "apocalypticism." In the early modern period, however, apocalyptic expression fell into several different categories: apocalypse, prophecy, and eschatology. Neither the interest in the final days of the earth nor the response to that interest was homogeneous. While some speculation and divination was tolerated, other opinions met with considerable resistance. Still, the belief that the end of the world was approaching continued to flourish well into the seventeenth century, where it took on a new cast within shifting social, cultural, religious, and economic contexts. The lines dividing apocalypticism, prophecy, and eschatology were never so clearly demarcated as is suggested here, but it is important to distinguish among them because the distinctions can help us to understand why Dee was initially "well received" by monarchs and church officials yet later turned away when his angelic revelations became increasingly apocalyptic.

An apocalypse was a particular genre of speculation about the final days whose authors claimed to have received a direct revelation from a divine agency - either God, an angel, or a saint. Apocalypses were usually communicated to the world through prophets, as in the case of Girolamo Savonarola. Prophecy was a dangerous business in early modern Europe; Savonarola's public execution in Florence in 1498 reminded everyone from common astrologer to exalted natural philosopher of the risks implicit in making predictions about the future that claimed to rest on divine directives. The interpretation of signs of the End of Days, or eschatology, was different from either apocalypticism or prophecy. Most apocalyptic writings in early modern Europe were not actually apocalypses but eschatologies.

Eschatologists like Gabriel Harvey who commented on natural disasters claimed no privileged and direct line of communication from God but instead pointed out the importance of natural signs. Early modern eschatalogical texts attempted to fit recent events into preexisting canons of apocalyptic signs, though some advanced radically new interpretations. Discussing and analyzing signs of the earth's predicted demise was a popular industry in medieval and early modern Europe. The list of pamphlets and books on the new star, on the grand conjunction, and on hosts of natural marvels like monstrous births or rains of blood suggests that anyone might have his views on the subject published. Presses throughout Europe issued one apocalyptic interpretation of contemporary events after another to meet the seemingly insatiable demands of readers. Sheltco à Geveren's Of the Ende of this Worlde, and the Seconde Commyng of Christ, for example, was quickly translated by Thomas Rogers from its original Dutch into English and reprinted in London five times between 1577 and 1589. Printing facilitated the formulation of a widely recog nized canon of eschatological signs ranging from natural and supernatural events to military skirmishes, all of which mounted with alarming speed as the fifteenth century moved into the sixteenth. No longer was knowledge of surprising or unusual events confined to their immediate locales by the limits of word-of-mouth transmission. What this signified in practical terms was that the Catholic church was unable to control the spread of prophetic messages and guide their interpretation. At the Fifth Lateran Council convened in 1512, the Church officially renounced the popular enthusiasm for eschatological speculations that were being printed, circulated, and discussed by those outside its authority.

Just as the printing press was challenging Catholic authorities in the cities of Europe, so the Reformation (whose main proponents made good use of the new printing technology) was establishing alternative forms of worship. The Reformation of the church, coming as it did in the midst of a series of eschatalogical signs, was given a weighty role in Protestant accounts of the world's progress toward redemption. The Catholic church responded with its own program of reform, claiming sole responsibility for leading humanity into the next spiritual age of restitution and rebirth. The jubilee year of 1600 became the focus for Catholic eschatologists. Among the Protestants, the exact time of the Second Coming was more imprecise; many thought that God might begin the next age between 1583 and 1588. This time frame was particularly potent because of its proximity to the great conjunction of 1583, and because prophecies often referred to miraculous events as happening 1,558 years after Christ's birth.