After learning what today’s British Establishment was all about at Rugby School and Cambridge, Alex Thomson served in a Christian mission in the former Soviet Union and went on to spend the rest of his twenties as a GCHQ officer.
He moved to the Netherlands aged thirty in 2009 and has spent the last decade and a half more quietly as a translator and interpreter and a researcher of networked evil.
Since 2014, Alex has presented his emerging findings via the Eastern Approaches brand on UK Column News, where his specialisms are Europe, geopolitics, religious affairs and constitutional matters.
He maintains the Eastern Approaches YouTube channel, mostly of careful readings of key documents indicating the scope of corruption of British and Western public life. He has two Telegram channels: Eastern Approaches and All the Eastern Approaches.
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Welcome to The Deling Pod with me James Delingpole and I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest but wait till you see who it is.
But first a quick word from our sponsor.
Hello it's me James with your favourite advert bit and I've got a really good book I would like to recommend to you.
I've mentioned it before.
on in the days when you remember I used to do a podcast with somebody called Toby something or other London calling and I mentioned this book and I wanted him to read it because it might have educated him and of course he was resistant to it he never did did read it it's called Gwyn's Gwyn's introduction to true philosophy and it's a book that's a book It's by this publisher called St Edward's Press.
Hugh Williams, who founded St Edward's Press, has been cancelled by Amazon, which I think gives you a good idea of the sort of books he produces.
He produces books about history.
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And this is real history.
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But apart from that book, do get Gwyn's introduction to true philosophy.
There are two sections I particularly like.
One on the true history of evolutionary theory.
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Even Charles Darwin, in The Origin of Species, even he recognised that there were serious flaws in his argument.
Also, Gwyn, who's a very educated chap, He writes a very good section on the history of Isaac Newton and his Principia Mathematica.
And what you realise is that Newton was a 17th century psyop.
His reputation was vastly inflated and a lot of his claims don't stand up.
I recommend that book.
I'm going to give you the link to the website, St.
Edward's Press, below this podcast, in the blurb, so that you can buy this book, maybe buy from her to us as well.
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It's a really great Christmas present.
Thank you.
Alex Thompson, welcome back to... James, it's been far too long.
Thank you so much.
Hasn't it?
How long has it been?
Half a year or more?
Yeah, exactly.
And what I find is that each time I talk to you, I've gone further down the rabbit hole so that my previous self, you know, I think you naive fool.
Have I reached the stage yet where I'm even further down the rabbit hole than you and you're just looking at me like he's really gone mad this time?
I wouldn't discount it, James.
I mean, you're certainly broad in your registers of language that you use to flight the enemy.
F-L-Y-T-E, for those who don't know this old English word.
But, you know, more power to you.
You're finding your niche, that's for sure.
If not, definitely found it.
Well, do you know what, Alex?
I'm just a seeker after truth.
And I will go wherever it takes me.
And I don't care Whether they were going to be dragons or, or I don't know, sort of creatures lurking in the mirror or wood woes or whatever on the way, you know, that's just that's just the deal.
I accept for being the Green Knight on his quest.
We're going to talk today.
We work.
You are on the list to do Psalm 2 with me.
And so you have now officially bagged that one.
Any other kind of religious types thinking I'd love to do Psalm 2 with James?
Sorry, Alex has nicked that one.
But today, We're going to talk about something.
I was going to say something more topical, but actually Psalm 2 is really topical.
It's about as topical as it gets, but we're going to talk about something equally topical and biblical and geopolitical as well.
We're going to talk about supersessionism.
I think a lot of people don't know what that means, but I think it has relevance to Israel right now.
Israel Gaza and also the divisions that I've noticed building up within the Christian community between those who are thinking well we've got to support Netanyahu as he destroys every last building in Gaza because hey these are the children of Israel and the people of God the chosen people
And those Christians who I suspect recognize that that story is just a story.
James, supersessionism, which is spelt with an S in the session part of the word, it's nothing to do with to cede, C-E-D-E, to give away, it's the same root as sede, to sit, session being a sitting down.
So in that sense, to supersede is to sit in the place of, in Latin, and so supersessionism, with S's throughout, is the default understanding and doctrine of the entire Church, West and East, Ancient and Modern, that the Church of Jesus Christ has, and I will shamelessly say it, replaced the Jews.
Now, this is in God's purposes for the current age.
I would immediately point people to the masterful section of the Epistle to the Romans, chapters 9 to 11, which has been much theologized on in recent years because of apologies to the Jews, but Paul says there will come a time when All Israel shall be saved, and that's as ambiguous in Greek as it is in English, pas Israel so thizetai.
Does that mean all the Jews who are ethnic or religious Jews in that generation will come to faith, which some Protestants believe, like the Free Presbyterians in Scotland?
Or does it mean that the fullness of the church, Jew and Gentile, will be called and gathered in by that point?
These are all details, but we don't say that we have contempt for the Jews in any way.
Any Christians have always accepted that.
But until the, I would say, 1980s, at least that was when the new term was coined to denigrate supersessionism, which is a replacement theology.
And the slogan that is attributed to us majority Christians is then, oh, you say that the church is Israel now.
Yes, we do.
So does Paul.
Look at the end of collations, we'll talk about that in a moment.
That's been the historical development since the 1980s, a little before with dispensationalism, J.N.
Darby in 19th century Dublin, London, the Continent.
And the Brethren and more particularly pre-millennialist strains that come up.
It has been challenged this idea that God deals with the Jews then he pauses and he deals with the Gentiles and he pauses.
We're getting in at the deep end here, James, but... I was going to say, yeah, you've just said a lot of stuff that I need to take in and I'm thinking, whoa!
Slow down, Alex.
Take me through this slowly because should we not go back to the early 19th century in this Derby character.
Is this where... and I'm sure that there's a connection here with the Schofield Bible.
There absolutely is.
Tell me the story.
I'm sorry that once again Cambridge made the martyrs and Oxford burned them.
There you go.
We've got one up on you because our university press in Cambridge never gave publishing time and space to the dispensationalist theology that is espoused at the end of the 19th century in Schofield's Reference Bible, which is where you get a running commentary, this bit's for the Jews, this bit's for the church, this bit's for the Jews.
Hang on, here's another word that I think is... all these words That one sort of comes across and thinks, oh, what does that mean?
What does dispensationalism mean?
Okay.
Theology is rife with elegant synonyms, because it is an academically weak subject, and has been since the 18th century.
It's not where the brains or the bravest people are.
It used to be very much, it used to be the queen of sciences.
Consequently, and the evangelicals are the worst, They do scholarship milling for scholarship's sake, churning out stuff so that they don't have to face the real world or even a real-world university in many countries like the States, though it will be dwindling now.
They've been able to have their whole careers in, I'm not going to say fake, but third-rate academic subjects like New Testament studies, which is very weak Greek, always despised by the classicists as not based on much.
It can't be as bad as gender studies though, come on.
Oh no, it's a different league from that.
And there are some very fine New Testament studies, people who have that in their title, before I give offence where it shouldn't be taken, but I'm characterising the whole discipline here.
Not founded on much.
So, theology says, okay, God deals with people in Scripture in different ways.
I mean, that's classic Protestant Reformed theology, and it has its equivalent in mainstream Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic theology, that there was a time when God dealt thus with the Jews, you know, for example, with patriarchs, then with the nation, Then, this is the bit that's contested now by Zionists and their Christian fellow travelers, God said in both Testaments expressly in many passages through the prophets above all, if you don't stop behaving wickedly in this land I led you into, I'll give it to others.
There are questions and debates over the permanence of that, but that's the background.
This is called dispensations.
This is how God dispenses or deals with the Jews in the Old Testament period before the age of Christ.
This is another key point I'll say right away, in which if you're any kind of Christian, certainly a biblical Christian, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic or Protestant, you cannot say that there is a special role now, sorry, there is a special benefit now in being a Jew.
You have to be saved by repentance and faith in Jesus Christ as Messiah.
Otherwise you might as well discard the entire Bible.
Yes, because that was the new covenant, wasn't it?
God's former covenant was with the children of Israel, but when Christ came along, the old contract was cancelled in favour of this new one.
Yes, and in Hebrews, the most intellectually rigorous book in the New Testament, written, as the book name suggests, to Jewish Christians, We even read in the middle of that book, around chapter 7, that in a series of contrasts, the Old Covenant and its priesthood, which was an Aaronic priesthood, Aaron was the forefather of these priests and Levites, was never confirmed by God with an oath, because then he would have had to abide by it forever, to remain true to his righteous and truthful character.
But he didn't.
Because a priesthood based on bread and wine, hint a type of Christ and his sacrifice once made never to be repeated on the cross, that priesthood prefigured by Melchizedek 400 years and more before Moses in Abraham's day That is the covenant which you'll read about in your favorite book, the Psalms, which the intelligent and honest Jews, the rabbis of the Middle Ages and others, have always said is the key to understanding the whole of Scripture.
Even if, as a Jew, you only think that the 39 books of the Old Testament are Scripture, fewer in Jewish counting, they say 24, but it's the same amount of canon in the Old Testament as the Protestants have.
Even if you say that, the Psalms give the key.
Alex, that's really cool to hear.
So you mean, quite by accident, I've chanced on the key to everything, that I've become obsessed with this thing, and I'm right to do so?
Psalm 2, and I don't mind giving people a hint in case they want to bag this other one, Psalm 110, which I'd love to do with you, but to anyone else who wants to have a go and feels called, by all means do.
These messianic psalms, in which we see Christ as the victorious warrior on behalf of his people, Bringing them to his father, reconciling them.
Tell us more about the crucifixion, the resurrection and the character of God than anywhere else in the scriptures.
Wow!
Luther, every great Christian theologian, not just Protestant either, has recognized that.
And apparently I was told by somebody who's read all that City of God and stuff that Saint Augustine was like that as well.
Oh yes, because in every time and place serious Christians have chanted the Psalms, usually on a monthly rolling schedule.
One of the many good things we have got from the Jews, of course.
This is brilliant.
In a nutshell, we get from the Jews practices and forms, and read Romans 3 verses 1 and 2, we get the carefully preserved scriptures.
We don't go to them for explanations because they don't know it themselves.
And again, I'm speaking in nutshells here because I have to, but that's because with the deliberately forgotten sack of Jerusalem by Titus and Vespasian in A.D.
70, prophesied by Christ and mentioned in every New Testament book, more or less, and deliberately ignored now by Jews and Christians, Since that time, you know, there's not been a land, there's not been a priesthood, and after that time, rabbinical Judaism arose.
It wasn't the Judaism of the Second Temple that even Christ knew just one generation before that.
But that arises in opposition, and it starts saying, well, we won't read the same Greek translation of the Scriptures as we used to, because most used it weren't native speakers of Hebrew anymore, namely the Septuagint, because the Church is using it, and it's embarrassing because the Septuagint translation of the Psalms in particular, and the Prophets as well,
Points very much to Christ being the long-awaited Messiah, so we can't have that ah I'm glad we've got into this one, but actually I think we're digressing from You know me I love a digression But I want to talk about the identity of the Jews and how they connect with the children of Israel and also What you know about Talmudic Judaism, which seems to be the state religion of Israel And maybe we can talk about this other thing which was always I think a lot of Christians in their naivety think that
The Jews are basically like Christians, but with the New Testament taken off, that basically the Jews spend their time looking at the Old Testament and chanting psalms and stuff.
And I'm not sure that's altogether true, certainly not in Israel, where, as I just said, the state religion is Talmudic Judaism.
It's not Torah-centric.
Well, of course, that very last thing they would contest, Israel would say that it's Jewish and that the four things that Halakha Jewish law insists on, for example, only orthodox Jewish marriages can be conducted, the state won't be involved in civil ceremonies, and the three others Dietary is another kosher, Sabbath is another, the fourth slips my mind, but they would say we're a secular pluralist, well they wouldn't use the word pluralistic because that's only for Gentiles, sorry to say, but they don't believe in that kind of diversity.
But just this afternoon, we're recording this on the 2nd of December 2023, an Israel watcher among our many subscribers sent me an Israeli TV Banner line that was being flashed up in Hebrew and it says our trust is in Hashem the Jewish euphemism to avoid saying the name of God unnecessarily based on the third commandment and so that he said this is the first time I've seen in ages that the Israeli state media are saying we trust in God because of the diastrates they're now in with this war Right.
But other than that, they would say, oh no, we don't have a state religion, much less Talmudism.
But, you know, there's such a plurality in Judaism.
I mean, you mentioned just the Israeli part of the Jewish worldwide community, so the non-diaspora part in Israel.
Well, I mean, they've got two chief rabbis for a start.
They've got an Ashkenazi and a Sephardic.
The last Sephardic one, who's now passed on, was extremely notorious for his rabid statements.
But generally, it's the Ashkenazi or European Jews who Have taken the biscuit for up to and including genocidal levels of Arab hatred, by no means all of them, but they're the project of Israel since 47-48 has been led by them, especially since the Likudniks took over in the 70s, the Netanyahu father and son brigade and their hangers-on from Poland and Ukraine.
The previous generation were all Labour Socialists and quite anti-religious actually.
Okay, maybe we'll go back to this one.
But I think that...
Before we go on, dispensationalists believe what, in a nutshell?
J.M.
Darby is a Toff in Dublin in the early 19th century and Lady Powerscourt promotes him and has soirees and he talks about his ideas.
At the same time as a raft of other early 19th century men in both Britain and America, as time goes on more in America but the intellectual leadership always comes from Britain, the Americans are real suckers for that.
They're starting to say, well, why is it that the world, both Christendom and the newly discovered colonies and sphere of influence, have not all turned to Christ, much less to a living faith in Jesus Christ?
Why is there cold formalism and nominalism?
Why are people still drunkards and wife beaters?
It's decided that this is because the flowing of the Holy Ghost, the outpouring of the Holy Ghost hasn't come along.
The beginnings then, because of bourgeoisification and peace, prosperity, The conquest of diseases and so on, although the 19th century was certainly not a party for everyone, you know, but not fun for everyone, but you know what I mean.
Life becoming much more predictable was leading to a, and there's been many scholarly books about this, a feminization, a wassification of the church, and, you know, much more beta male type characters standing up, and one of the consequences of that is this idea that a bit more prophecy, a bit more yielding to the Lord, and everyone will be holding hands, there will be no more evil on the face of the earth, you know.
This was already defeated in both Western and Eastern Christianity at an earlier stage, when it was pointed out that, you know, we'll have evil right till the end.
Whatever view you take of the manner of Christ's return and its timing, and what happens to the church and the Jews in the interim, every Christian sect has its own view on that, but that persuasion had been put to bed.
But then it re-emerges in Derby's day, and Derby is by no means the most radical.
You've got others like Finney and Irving, but Darby then has success.
He goes to the continent with his fluent French, which all British toffs had at that time, and of course as an Anglo-Irish aristocrat he would have said he was English and British.
He goes off to Lausanne, arguably the continental European centre of evangelicalism, in the proper old-fashioned sense of Bible-believing Protestantism, and as the diaries of local ministers make plain in French, he goes around trashing
The best churches in Protestantism, certainly the best outside the British Isles, perhaps even more solid than ours theologically, and says, oh no no, the church is in ruins, and this is classic Brethrenism, although I have many dear friends in the Brethren movement, which itself is split into open and closed, you know, but many persuasions within, but He founds them by saying, there is no church anymore, forget the denominations, they're all in a pile of rubble.
A bit like Joseph Smith founding Mormonism, but a bit less extreme and less secret society related.
Not unlike how many of us feel now, Alex.
We look around at the churches and we look at the Roman Catholic Church headed by, well, I mean, he's an apostate.
And we look at Welby, who's clearly not a man of God, and I don't know who he worships.
Oh, let's go the whole hog.
Brian Gerrish says he's a Satan worshipper.
Yeah, I think he probably is a Satan worshipper.
I'm in trouble now because he's a fellow Kikyou man.
He's from Cambridge Intercollegiate Christian Union, where only the best evangelical future and current leaders are bred, but I'll say it anyway.
Yeah, well, we know that Satan has infiltrated.
I mean, obviously, if you were Satan, what would you do?
You're going to infiltrate the church, and you're going to spread dissension, and you're going to undermine doctrine, and all sorts of things.
But I hadn't realized that what's going on now, people felt Even as far back as the early 19th century.
I mean, I know Matthew Arnold wrote about the melancholy, long-withdrawing roar of the sea of faith.
I think of him as more like a Dawkins of his day.
Of course, son of one of my heroes, Thomas Arnold, headmaster of my alma mater.
I was going to say, not Dawkins.
No, people criticized Thomas Arnold, too, for more emphasis on muscular than on Christianity, but his priorities were quite right.
You know, Christians first, gentlemen second, scholars third.
Although the scholarship, too, was darn fine.
But Matthew Arnold very much regrets and bemoans the retreat of this sea of faith because he realizes that with it, and Tennyson's writing in the 1850s, too, about nature read in tooth and claw and Darwinism, and it's not just the secret society wing, Malthusian wing of Darwinism, the Galton stuff, but the general Understanding of natural history is coming to a point where men realize, oh, our mothers raised us to be fine Christian gentlemen, but there's no rationale for that anymore.
And, you know, they foresee correctly that in another 50 years, what becomes the Edwardian era, the aristocracy will be bed-hopping and amoral, and then it will spread to the middle class and ultimately the working class, which has happened to nowadays.
So to forestall that, Matthew Arnold and others have said, you know, let's remain cultural Christians.
And Dawkins, though I understand he's recently laid into Ayaan Hirsi Ali, at an Oxford dinner party for converting to Christ, which, by the way, she was making noises about in the Dutch Reformed scene over here 15 years ago, but now she's done it now.
Apart from that, Dawkins has said in recent years, you know, he wants to be a King James reading kind of atheist, a bit like the old question in Belfast, you know, are you a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist?
And Dawkins would like us all to be reformed Protestant atheists for the sake of civilization, I think.
Right, for the literature, for the Oroton, well, the decent prose, let's say.
Yeah, I get that.
So, Matthew Arnold, this is just more for my curiosity, I wouldn't have liked him.
He's a sort of pinco-liberal, squishy... Yes, I mean, another ten years, James, and you're on to The beginnings of the Oxford movement, the Tractarians, was already in full swing to re-Catholicise.
Are they goodies or badies?
To be fair to our Catholic brothers, they're always, even in those days, regarded as more Catholic than the Pope and more bells and smells than the cradle Catholics and making a fuss over nothing.
So that's going on, Newman is to arise, but also the Rhodes-Milner conspiracy, led of course by Ruskin, the inaugural Professor of Art at Oxford, is saying the same thing, clothed in more socialistic garb, which is, I'll cut to the chase, what they're both saying, both Arnold and Ruskin, who inspires Rhodes and ultimately Chatham House and all of these nests of nasties.
They're all saying, well, there's not much point in living, whether in Madagascar or the East End of London, if you don't have the standard of living of an English chap.
And only chaps like us are fit to live in this world.
Some present that more positively as, you know, let's humanely dispense with the rest.
But others, you know, before any German had started thinking about it, have taken it to the extreme of Lebensraum and eugenics, which, as you know, is a Victorian English idea before it goes anywhere into Sweden and Germany.
Yes.
That's Galton, isn't it?
Yes.
Well, many others, but Galton and Malthus, ultimately.
So this long battle's been going on.
So what you're detecting there is the metrosexual metropolitan.
You know, I saw so many of these types at GCHQ.
I disdain and only pretend to tolerate these plebs, you know, who have different views and values than me.
I'd rather just there be people like me and, you know, hang it all if I can't convert them, you know, mentally or Right.
or environmentally, then they might as well go.
Right, right.
It's a kind of secular version of the apocalypticism I was mentioning a generation earlier, you know, the 1820s odd, when the church is being led increasingly by men who say, oh, why hasn't everyone become a Christian?
You know, they don't read their Bible for explanations about the evil in the human heart.
Jeremiah 17.9, for example, the heart of man is desperately wicked and deceitful above all things.
Who can know it?
Oh no, no, we're taming people now.
We're civilizing.
We have a mission to extend Christendom.
And at that very point, Christendom, which has been lasting since the 4th century in the West and about the same time in the East, is crumbling.
And the visionary men see it.
So one of the sort of the knee-jerk or sulky responses to that is to think, well, we might as well wind the world up then and just carry on with, you know, everyone pretending to be a middle-class Christian gentleman.
So, OK, I'm always keen to know, and obviously you have your own biases, but I kind of trust you.
I need to know who the goodies and the baddies are.
So, for example, you mentioned Lady Power's court.
So, who was presumably a sort of... she sort of funded good causes.
Yeah, she was a patroness, and it was the Powerscourt Circle, which was just the Dublin equivalent.
You had one in every Anglo high society city.
You had people coming together to wring their hands.
Some were very laudable.
A little earlier you had the Clapham sect, presided over and hosted by a similar aristocratic lady, and this was just one in which they had Sessions, which, before you know it, became a kind of pseudo-séance, you know, that the world will be converted, this is the plan.
Darby's dispatched, he goes off to Switzerland, and I'll give them their due, the atheistic, often ethnic-Jewish but unbelieving critics of this scene.
Anton Chaitkin, C-H-A-I-T-K-I-N, is one of the best, from the Linden-LaRouche people, the real radicals in America who, behind the 1970s, were correctly saying that the British Crown oversaw the smuggling of drugs.
And the drugging of American minds, in many ways, to keep them in the Empire, which is a Rhodes idea.
They have correctly said that, you know, evangelical Anglicanism has often been led by such characters.
They go too far, sometimes, and tar people.
I would say Lady Cox is a good example, with the brush wrongly, because she has done a great deal for the Armenian people over the decades, who continue to suffer.
As we record this, they've been expelled from the Gorno-Karabakh.
But there's always been this The idea from that time onwards that the Church of England, which at the top is losing its faith even then, at Archbishop level, is using these movements, the new ecstasy and glossolalia speaking in tongues that arises in Sunderland and in Azusa Street, LA, around 1904 in both cases, is using these and refining it to what works with blacks, what works with whites, what works with free church, what works with established church,
To try to keep the whole English-speaking world on board and led spiritually from Canterbury.
OK, but you seem to me to be missing out a key detail about Derby.
You describe him as a sort of Anglo-Irish toff, which he was, but he also lived in the most haunted castle in Ireland, where unspeakable atrocities had taken place in their dungeon or their oubliette.
There are lots of bodies, lots of skeletons were found down there, and the guy was a Satanist, was he not?
Well, I don't want to say that without... I mean, I say it of Welby because by their fruities you'll know him, and you can tell him, among others, have seen enough of what he does and advocates, and the people he and even worse Archbishop of York, Cottrell, What they do to faithful biblical parish ministers, you know, bully them out of the church and blacken their name.
So I have no hesitation in saying that of those men.
Derby, I would hesitate to say, but I will say that UK Column casework has shown up and, you know, long-term viewers will know I have a particular love and I say a fairly deep knowledge of the Irish people in all of their historical diversity.
There has been a long history, and we founded a few years ago with UK Column cases as well, The aristocratic piles around Ireland seem to have a very, very dark history.
And I don't just mean what people would describe for short as British colonialisation, which isn't even an accurate term because the Scots started colonising Ulster before the UK even existed in King James VI's reign.
But that aside, whether it was Gaelic or settler or even Norman, probably a lot of it's Norman centuries earlier, the castles there have got a horrendous history.
of Satanist ritual abuse.
So have many parts of Britain, East Anglia, the northeast of Scotland, the southwest of England, etc.
But the Irish scene does seem to have a great concentration of, shall we say, henchmen families who are sitting on Satan's secrets.
This is a complete digression, but I can't resist.
Has this been since time immemorial, this association between the aristocracy, the governing classes, and Satanism?
I think it has.
You know that the old saying, well maybe you don't, but it's a good saying of old-fashioned evangelicals, perhaps other Christian traditions as well, that all souls are of equal worth in God's sight because he created them all, but not all souls, not all lives, should I say, although biblically, in both biblical languages, that's the same idea, soul and life, but not all lives are of equal worth when it comes to soul winning, strategic evangelism, or Satan's strategic dark arts.
Both the good and the bad's forces will make a beeline for aristocrats and kings and noblemen.
That was how England was converted, as you know, first Kent, then Northumberland.
Northumbria, I should say, back then, and then a pincer movement to the middle.
Mercy was the holdout pagan kingdom in the middle of England.
And aristocrats have always had a particular vulnerability and are worthy of our continued prayers, which Paul then joins and other biblical writers pray, particularly for those in authority, that they would resist the huge temptation that comes their way, not least to feign service to Christ while actually serving the enemy.
Well, this seems to be more often the case than not.
That they pay lip service to... I mean, look at the Elizabethan court.
I mean, they were all churchgoers, because you had to be, but they were probably really Gnostics, or, you know, Luciferians, let's face it.
At best!
I'm looking for it, I can, it's in one of Peter's two epistles, but from memory the wording almost exactly is, for ye see your calling brethren, Peter means the Christian profession, that not many rich, not many wise, not many noble are called.
And this is why it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man into... Yes, it's just struck me that it's actually James because James goes on from that to say, what's all this fawning over the rich when they come into your services, which the Victorians were very guilty of as well, putting them Putting the great unwashed behind a curtain, you know, smelly plebs that way in church.
That was happening in the early church, the primitive church, the first century church, and James castigates them by saying, isn't it the rich, the noble and the mighty who haul you off to prison for your Christianity?
Well, do you know what?
I used to wonder, when I first started kind of wanting to relive Brideshead Revisited in my Oxford days, I remember my mother being really unimpressed and really just did not like the idea of me trying to cultivate toffs.
And I thought, well, that's just, you know, sort of snobbery, but I think it's not that.
I think that my mother, who has faith, although, you know, she doesn't waste time going to church or anything, but she's definitely, she's based.
And I think she understood far earlier than I did that actually Put not your trust in princes.
She sniffed out these people and knew that I was actually better than them.
And she didn't want me to be kind of solid.
Fair play.
We're going back in time to the 1830s is it?
It is about that time that Derby is swanning around.
I'm saying he was a Satanist, you're saying not proved.
I don't want to give him the benefit of the doubt but I shan't accuse him from the other side of the grave.
The Great Day will reveal it, but I do not like its influence because as the godliest men in continental Europe, and this was the same time as the Réveil, the awakening of the dormant Protestant Church in the French-speaking countries and in the Netherlands was going on, these godly men say, Darby comes and he started a new sect called Darbism, which is not how we call it in English, we call it Brethrenism.
But the essence of Darbism, as the Continental Divines rightly describe it, is alas, alack, awo, there is no proper church anymore, there's just a scattered rabble, so we can only gather around the Word.
You know, sacraments, not all Protestants would use that term, but baptism and the Lord's Supper is a question as it is for the Salvation Army and other Christian movements that become more parachurch organizations who's licensed to dispense the sacraments.
But that aside, the practice is you meet and there's a leveling, there's no unction or ordination.
And I'm an anti-sacredotalist anyway, I believe in a flat hierarchy and I now am in Presbyterianism and before that Baptist churches.
So we don't have episcopacy in either of those Protestant branches.
But the effect is, even if a continental free church would perhaps, through gritted teeth because they're more hierarchical than the Brits, be prepared to accept that, What it's done is, the historical term is the Magisterial Reformation, the authority and the learning that Rome gave us, or we got via Rome.
It was our own learning from our own British Isles, of course, ultimately, but that is squashed.
There's only, listen to Brother Snodgrass this week, and next week Brother Maudlin will be on the rota, and most of them don't know how to preach.
In any sense, theology or public speaking or decent language or etc.
And people get, you know, used to very low standards or walk out in absolute despair.
It's almost as bad, if not worse in some ways, than the opposite evil of an unconverted parson who has all the tricks because he went to Oxford or Cambridge, which was the bane of 18th century life in Britain and many other countries, that he was going through the motions and wasn't converted.
Yes.
You're quite right about mothers and their vision.
My dear mother said, and she was brought up Anglican before becoming a Baptist for my father's sake when she married him, but in later years they've both drifted back to the Church of England in Bedfordshire, although they live in Bunyan country in Bedfordshire, which is the epicentre of throwing over Anglicanism in favour of the Baptists historically.
But still, when the Baptists crumbled to nothing in the 1990s, stopped using the King James and singing hymns etc, She said, Alex, if you go to a bad Baptist service, where of course there's no liturgy, you have nothing.
If you go to a bad Anglican service, at least you've got Cranmer.
Yeah.
Good point, Mum.
And that was playing out 200 years ago.
OK.
OK.
So, but what's Darby's mission exactly?
What's he trying to do?
And has he been paid to do this?
The latter part is the million-whatever-shekel question, but I don't know.
Is there a Rothschild involved?
Well, I wouldn't be surprised.
I mean, they all know each other, don't they?
But the upshot of it is that the denominations are bled of many of their most visionary, perhaps not wisest, but certainly most fervent servants of the Lord, who go into Brethrenism, which is just the first and the least cult-like of a general Anglo-American 19th, 20th century phenomenon of quite major sects popping up and saying, forget them all.
You know, all of the historic Protestant denominations.
And, you know, some of them are, you know, burned for the Lord.
For example, nothing bad to say about William Booth and the Salvationists, although it was a bit strange that he sent his daughters into atheistic Paris to get beaten up as, you know, as evangelists.
It should have been men's work, but still, they had that zeal.
But that's the effect of it, really, that the Church's social mission is bled.
A lot of the best theologians and historians, and of course I've translated a lot of these as well as read them, say that the effect of this is that the social clout of the Church, which is very much an Old and New Testament theme, that if you've got a position in society and you believe in Christ, God's given you that calling and you live out those two roles faithfully, with Christ as Lord being the The top priority, obviously, the top commitment.
That starts to bleed as we were talking about the mid 19th century, the 1850s, 60s.
This was already happening.
You know, anyone who was anyone was almost ashamed of saying they literally believed the Bible anymore.
So this Darwism is accelerating or catalyzing that trend that, before you know it, and this is also the early years of the greatest preacher of all time, the Prince of Preachers, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, in the late 1850s.
He comes from a very hyper-Calvinist, that is, you know, right-wing Baptist circuit in the south of London to prominence at the Metropolitan Tabernacle at Elephant and Castle, still one of the biggest Baptist churches in Britain and the world.
What happens then in the early years is Spurgeon is disdained and panned in the press for not being a respectable preacher and attracting to him all the bumpkins and the urban equivalent of bumpkins, cockney urchins, who shockingly, scandalously want to go and weep over their sins and be gloriously saved, instead of doing things decently.
Right, okay, so it sounds like C.H.
Spurgeon had actually read his Gospels.
Oh yes.
Because actually Jesus similarly hung about with fallen people, not with respectable people.
That was the deal.
Of course, because he was there to change and heal them, as he was at pains to say to the Pharisees and the Scribes at every such opportunity.
He'd come to call them to repentance, although a very early Scribal fiddle, there were so many attacks on the text of Scripture, even in the first century, a fiddle with the text of Mark's Gospel took out the words to repentance.
And some ultra-modern, liberal, Protestant theologians have said, you see, you see, in Mark's original writing it was so radical, Jesus was there to be a faithful presence, as it's now called, with the down-and-outs.
And only later, with Matthew and Luke, has it been refined to Jesus wanting them to repent.
Your description of what happened in the 19th century makes me realize that this problem I have right now, which is, I'm a Christian, but I look around at my fellow Christians and I think, A lot of you are away with the fairies in your understanding of what it's all about.
It seems like this has been going on since forever probably, because I imagine these problems predate even the 19th century.
They have, and we're talking about the Jews today, how does the church deal lovingly and truthfully with the Jews.
Read the book Judaism is not Jewish, written by the 80 One-year-old, I think he is now, retired Baptist pastor Baruch Maoz, B-A-R-U-C-H, surname M-A-O-Z, who for years was running the largest Reformed Baptist congregation in Israel.
By the way, the number of Messianic Jews properly described, so actual personal believers in Christ who are Jewish and Israeli, has skyrocketed.
Since the foundation of the State of Israel.
There's over 100,000 in that very small population of a few million in Israel now, who are genuine Christians.
Okay.
Jews, right?
And Mauls had the biggest congregation.
He's now passed it on to a younger pastor, whom I know personally as well, and interpreted for him.
And Beersheba, in the south where that congregation is, was always being invaded by ultra-orthodox nationalists, Zionists, in its Sunday services.
Maus retired a couple of years ago to Seattle to be with his grandchildren.
With the outbreak of the 7th of October 2003-23 war, he has gone back, together with a lot of Jews, and, you know, I'm not going to lambast his motives, you know, he loves his people, but I say all this because even 20 years ago when he wrote Judaism is not Jewish, he was at pains to say, particularly, and he's Massachusetts-born, particularly to, you know, ill-informed American Protestants, For goodness sake, people, please realize that rabbinical Judaism post-dates the New Testament.
Yes!
And all these practices, you know, at the extreme end, the nonsense of Davidic dancing, in that book he rather humorously and aptly says, you know, if you want to be one of your, you know, fat middle-aged Americans doing unrestrained Davidic dancing in the aisles, well, you try doing that in a synagogue in the US, Israel, or anywhere else and see how many seconds it takes for you to be thrown out by the ushers.
These are invented traditions and as usual the evangelical Christians who go in for it are much less intellectually able and much less integral about it than the Jews.
Rabbinical Jews have a huge weight of tradition and they face lifelong ostracism up to and including your parents holding a funeral for you if they convert to Christianity.
So we have to tell them the truth in love very sensitively but also directly.
But I can understand that dynamic and being Jews they go about things intelligently And with historical understanding and with logical categories in place.
But it's all emotion and make-believe for the messianism, the strands of messianism you get in American and increasingly British and Australian evangelical Christianity.
And I've seen it happen in Finnish churches as well that I've visited.
The Dutch are a bit different because they have a deep and genuine love for the Jews that goes back to the time that they were kicked out of Spain and Portugal, the Jews were.
and made Amsterdam, substantially made Amsterdam the great city it is today.
And the whole of the Dutch Protestant church, evangelical and very conservative reformed, is pro-Israel.
I still take issue with them, because pro-Israel is not the same as pro-Jewish, which you want to get into.
But I'm saying that the epicentre of this silliness is Anglo-American evangelicalism.
The key thing is it's being steered cynically by Canterbury, and always has been.
OK, so I'm struggling, though.
There are bits of the story that I don't quite get.
OK, so we've got Darby.
He goes out to Lausanne and places like that to spread his message among Baptisty and Evangelical Christians and his message is the church is finished.
I mean, is he sola scriptura, or whatever it's called?
Yes, yes, but he would say so, but as with the Mormons, and I'm not making any judgment about, you know, any value judgment here, but just a simple intellectual note here.
As with the Mormons, as with any other non-liturgical, non-priestly religious tradition, particularly in Protestantism, They say we don't have a liturgy here, brother, but you have to use the right form of words and the right order of service, which has been passed down orally, right?
Same with the Dutch Free Churches in the Reformed.
situation although they go about it better and in practice you get visionaries and self-proclaimed prophets who come about and maybe this is the key you're missing that you wanted to hear about with brethrenism both the open which is just conservative evangelical wing and the closed wing led by Jim Taylor 50 years ago when he well long story short he was a drunkard and then an
He was from New York, and a horrendous scene, but that illustrates the point.
What you get then is, the brethren term for it is, there is the Bible and there are assembly truths.
You know, the Lord's people accept this vision, or this view of Scripture, or this scheme for the end times, because the anointed prophet Says so.
And there's one per generation.
So you get that formally in Mormonism, they sing the song, Follow the Prophet, and teach their children that he's Christ's voice on earth, etc.
Right.
Blasphemy, just as blasphemous as what's said about the Pope.
But in Brethrenism, you've got the same, you know, you always, it's presenteeism, bums on seats.
You always have to be at the meeting, but not just for the sake of form, or for the sake of, you know, sadly, it's mainly an empty pretense now, but they say, well, you've got to be there twice because we evangelize.
No one ever comes in these days, no interest, but The real reason beyond that is because these utterances, it's almost Quaker-like.
An unschooled brother, and I don't mean to look down on him, one who doesn't have anything particularly from his own learning of scripture or the Holy Ghost, but who just feels it's his turn, will say something, and if he's sufficiently high up in the informal hierarchy, that will actually be level-pegging with the Bible, in authority terms.
Right, okay.
And was Bernard Cornwell Plymouth Brethren.
I haven't heard the term, but they are surprisingly high-achieving, like a lot of smaller denominations.
Hang on.
You know Bernard Cornwall, who wrote the... Oh, the novelist?
Yeah.
Oh, yes.
Hang on.
Bernard... I was going to Google it.
Bernard Cornwall.
I'm pretty sure... Um... He has written... Uh... Oh!
While you're looking it up, an interesting side note is...
And I'll give them their due.
They're great scripture students, all forms of brethren, and they've mentored me a lot through life, and so they've done to others.
It's simply a coincidence that it's in the city of Plymouth, but when Brian de Gerrish came ashore from the Royal Navy and wanted to ask all the churches in Devon what is going on with fraud and corruption and Satanism, they all literally and metaphorically showed him the door, particularly the C of E, but also the likes of the Baptists and the Methodists in his village.
The only two who didn't were the brethren, who schooled him in prophecy and scripture, And they're a Unitarian group, so not to everyone's taste.
They don't believe Jesus is God, but the Christadelphians, one of these serious, studious, late 19th century groups that arose in Britain and America.
I just looked it up, by the way.
They were the two who told Brian Gerrish, we'll actually spend time with you looking at God's word and prophecy about the end times.
OK.
So there's obviously good and bad in all these... They were called the Peculiar People, the ones that his family were from.
Oh, that's East Anglia, 1920s time frame, they were very popular.
And for those who don't know the etymology of it, Peculiar, as in a royal peculiar, you know, a church belonging directly to the monarch, is simply Latin for belonging individually to.
And this is straight from Peter's epistles again.
Ye are a royal priesthood, a peculiar people.
So they didn't deliberately call themselves the odd people.
They were saying, with peculiar people, we belong directly to the Lord.
But the effect is the same, because they deliberately didn't conform with the world's dress sense or mode of speech, etc.
So, okay, we're in, we're in the continental Europe with Joseph, and we're sounding very much like an episode of In Our Time with Melvin Bragg.
We're using the historic present, which my wife finds infuriating, but there we are.
On the continent, they do it all the time, so...
you can't get away from it now so darby is in he's founded the plymouth brethren who have these kind of prophets and they obviously they're quite strict and and stuff but what does this have to do with this how how does it evolve that lots and lots of christians think that israel today the state of israel is the same as the israel that god is talking about the the The link, before the 19th century is out, is what you alluded to.
It's the Schofield reference Bible.
Right.
And I'm sorry that I don't have the book title to hand, but there is an excellent biography of Schofield.
The word man features in the biography of Schofield.
I forget the rest of the title.
Pond man.
Something like that.
Snake oil salesman.
But Schofield comes along.
It's an age of chances as well, you know, because as with what becomes Pentecostalism and extreme hyper-charismaticism as the 20th century progresses, showmen, and in some cases literally failed or would-be stage actors, men and women, even more scandalous the women, who want to, you know, stand up on stage and scream at the top of their pair of lungs, they all find an inroad.
No, the Lord has told me to do this.
But even at the modest end of this, that the seeds have been sown, going back to Charles Finney and Irving and Derby, obviously, that if the Lord's put something in your heart, why just stand up and say it?
I mean, in a sense, the Welsh revival is born of that milieu, and there's been lots of criticism of that, as well as the souls that were saved and the nation that was changed at Wales.
There's a lot of sense of, you know, this was emotion and sentiment.
Going on, you know, so that's just part of the age.
It was a spirit of the age.
So as part of this Schofield says and of course, you know, it would sound snobbish these days, but the criticism of these chaps in at the time both in Britain and even in egalitarian America was who do you think you are?
You haven't studied.
You know, and that is a New Testament criticism.
You know, that we're all supposed to study the Word of God and not just come up with our own ideas.
But in Schofield's case... I think this part of Scripture is dispensed to the Jews.
Even in the New Testament, this part's for the Jews, not for you, don't believe it, don't read it.
Very odd stuff.
And unaccountably, and this is where I think the Rhodes people and Canterbury come in again, Oxford University Press, which as you know in the 1880s was as stuck up as nobody's business, takes mr scofield's uh nothing to recommend it manuscripts and says of course we will we will put it in our catalogue for 1880 whatever it was the year it came out 1890 something i think how on earth do you pull that one off you must have high high ranking people connect i should coco yeah that's not good
that doesn't happen by accidents So, Schofield, as I understand it, was a complete con artist.
He was just not a biblical scholar of any kind.
Of course, America, a lot of the most visionary believers from the Puritans onwards had gone to the colonies.
By this time, a lot of them had gone to Australia, which arguably, until very recently, the entire nation was Evangelical Anglican.
Remarkable spiritual history.
But, you know, the Eastern Seaboard, before the pioneers went inland, had already, as the historians of religion call it, burned out.
Look at upstate New York, where Smith was in the 1820s.
There'd been, you know, two genuine awakenings led by the greats like Whitfield in the 18th century.
By the 1820s, everyone was so jaded and they thought that, you know, if it wasn't extreme and more sentimental and breathtaking than last time, then it wasn't a move of God.
So in that background, the charlatans have got a hearing, even though And I did a series with my father on ukcolumn.org that you can find by searching literacy in the ukcolumn.org search function to find that three-parter, even though the Appalachians, New England, were extremely well-read, serious people.
You know, they knew what the scriptures said, and they knew that there was a tendency for people to deceive in religion, matters of the human heart.
But in many places, they still went along with it.
And, you know, genuinely because of the democratization of American church and state after independence.
As the 19th century goes on, a lot of the historians, Mark Noll is the great historian of American Christianity, that's N-O-L-L, no K, they all say the result of this is that by the second, third wave of awakenings in the 19th century, the established churches, Episcopalianism, which is what the Anglicans are called in Scotland and North America, or at least in the US,
The Presbyterians, they are losing out in favour of new movements, the most mild and moderate of which are the Baptists and the Methodists, which in the mother country were regarded as upstarts and were illegal and scorned in the 17th and 18th centuries, and had policemen coming out to disperse their preachers.
You know, but in America, these were the ones that take the lead, and they're the most sort of establishment you get.
It's either that, or as time tails off into the 20th century, You've got the snake handlers and the one-man bands.
I like the snake handlers.
Don't say a word against the snake handlers.
I would like to go to a snake handling church, because I like handling snakes, basically.
People have died of fatal bites there, because that long ending of Mark, which again was something that was taken out by a lot of corrupt scribes in the early church history, and the modern critics say, oh, these are the earliest texts, which they're not, but that's another story.
That long ending remark says that those who believe in Christ, these are Christ's own words, after his resurrection shall do certain things, including handle snakes.
Well, the fulfilment's right there in Acts 27, beginning of 28 actually, isn't it, when Paul's been shipwrecked on Malta, and he finds a snake attached to his, a venomous one, attached to his hand.
And that story's in Scripture because the yokels are there saying, ooh, ooh, he's escaped the sea, but goddess vengeance won't let him live, and they're astonished to see that his hand doesn't swell up and he doesn't fall over.
I would say there are probably not many snakes on Malta capable of giving a fatal bite.
They'd probably... They'd be quite nasty.
So, I mean, I still think it's a miracle because his hand didn't swell up.
But I wouldn't... It's not like being bitten by a copperhead.
No.
Or let alone a banded krait.
Or a fierce snake, which is the world's most poisonous snake.
But yeah...
Anyway, look, thou shalt tread on the lion and adder, the young lion and dragon shalt thou trample underfoot.
We're immune to snakes, apparently.
That's the devil, you understand that, don't you, of course?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
From Genesis 3 onwards, the snake is...
A symbol for the devil and his deceit.
I do worry about this.
The fact that I'm so drawn to snakes, even now.
It's atavistic in us, isn't it?
I understand our womenfolk have it even more strongly programmed into them than us.
They do.
As do cats.
There's this cruel genre of YouTube videos where people slide a cucumber near to a cat out of its field of vision just to see it jump.
Because they take it for a snake, but women, and of course this is absolutely, and the Roman Catholics are very strong on this because of their adoration of Mary, women have always had this innate sense of, I see a snake, I crush it with my heel, otherwise it will get my children.
And that's why the Proto-Evangelion, which the Dutch wonderfully call the Mother of All Promises, the Moederbelofte, in Genesis 3, 15 and 16 is, thou shalt, and it's about the woman's seed, which is Jesus Christ, you know, thou shalt crush his head and he shall bruise thy heel.
I'm loving our digressions.
We're a long way from our destination still, which is okay.
But there's a huge amount of intellectual history to get through if you want to understand the Church and the Jews.
Well, I suppose that's true.
Look, I'm not complaining, Alex.
I'm just really pointing... I'm showing to the viewer and listener, look, I understand what you're worried about.
Look, Alex and I may be kind of...
Meandering, sinuously, on our snake-like journey towards the truth.
So, look, Schofield.
What was his first name?
Can you remember?
Oh, it's eluded me now.
Darby was John Nelson.
John Nelson.
Schofield was not called Philip, but he was equally suspect.
Yeah.
I was without an H in the case.
Yeah, I'm just going to Google him while we...
The Sirius Scofield Bible.
Sirius!
Of course he was.
The book title, which you couldn't remember, doesn't have man in the title.
It's called Mr Scofield and His Remarkable Bible, or very similar wording.
You can get it second hand or online.
Sirius Scofield, his name was.
Sirius Scofield, that's it.
And he was dodgy, at least as dodgy as Darby.
Actually, maybe he wasn't a Satanist.
But, come on, you must be able to tell me that the Rothschilds were involved in this particular project.
Well, the Apostle Paul also warns that people will make merchandise of, or huckster, the Word of God for profit.
He says to the Corinthians, we're not among those who, and he uses a participle in Greek, kapelidontes, which means we make a habit of touting the Word of God for sensation and gain.
So, there's always been a market for that.
Sure.
Here in the Netherlands, when they had the greatest literacy and the greatest Christian golden age of anywhere in the world, any time, in the 17th century, and I've had the privilege of Translating some original research on this by Professor Robert Hoff that there were some books that had a million copies of when the population was just a handful of million people.
You know, really hardcore Bible study books.
So everyone was reading them.
At that time, what was it that brought us onto this?
Just rewind, what were we saying a moment ago?
Well, you see, I'm going to pin you down here.
You said earlier that you don't get published by Oxford University Press when you're a complete nobody.
You're not known for your scriptural expertise and suddenly you're saying, I've got this annotated Bible that I'm going to... Come on!
I think he had not gone commercial.
I mean, the Germans took even longer.
The Bible Societies and the university presses in Germany only now are starting to hollow out their content for money.
And this was not happening even in Britain, which is a lot more commercialised, bastardised academia these days, back then.
Stuff doesn't happen.
You know and I know that stuff doesn't happen for a reason.
There's a reason, for example, that Harry Potter became the best-selling children's book of all time.
It's argued that J.K.
Rowling didn't even write them from scratch.
John Coleman, as you know, Claims that the Webbs, the couple who exculpated Stalin in the 1930s...
Beatrice and Sidney Webb.
Yes, they told all the bien-pensants that, you know, Fabians like us must welcome Stalin.
I mean, there were historians by the 70s saying, you know, we know about all the millions he killed, but it was worth it.
And the Webbs were an early version of that.
Well, the same Webbs are said to have written, with the name of Harry Potter, the drafts of these stories, just waiting for the right time for children to be married.
…magics.
The thing I forgot a moment ago is that even in the most solid Christian culture perhaps there's ever been, the 17th century Netherlands, there was a huge market for bootlegged theology.
People would go and take shorthand of sermons, they do it in Britain too at the same time, Puritan sermons, and just, you know, they weren't believers, they'd just do it for a quick buck.
flood the market with cheap copies and even attribute false claims and false theology to respected ministers.
So there's a long history of making money out of God's people.
One minister said notably a few years ago to me, the Egyptians always did prefer Israelites to build their pyramids.
Just, okay, I'm still not going to let you go on this one.
It seems, duh, and I've read it elsewhere that this was, the Zionist movement got in there early.
Yeah.
And for those who are not following the history, the Zionist movement is precisely the same decade, the 1880s.
As what?
As the Schofield Bible.
The Schofield Bible itself was very early in the 1890s.
1896-7 is also the, I think, the definitive World Zionist Conference in, was it, Basel?
Yeah.
But they were both getting going in the 1880s with Theodor Herzl writing Der Judenstaat.
But the key thing there, James, of course, is that from then till the 1950s, so after they managed to make Aliyah and go to the Land of Israel, Palestine as it was just until the beginning of that period, They were all saying, our fellow Jews are schmucks and schlemiels.
We would get arrested for saying these things now, but these men were irreligious, proud of being well integrated into middle Europa society, nominal Jews, maybe synagogue attenders, maybe pious even, but their loyalty was to the Kaiser of whichever European state they were in, and, you know, they had Old Testament and Jewish traditional reasons to justify that, fear God, honor the king, do well in the society you're in.
Um, but the result was that they were dislocated.
They had no sense of who they were and Herzl said, You know, we are, you know, we have a high proportion of bums and no-gooders and, you know, this is a theme throughout European Jewish history, you know, we the elite Jews despise these poor guys who only care about reading the Talmud or whatever it is and think that's a higher value and send their wives out to work, which they do to this day, so that the men can do their so-called highest duty of reading Talmudic angels dancing on pinhead stuff all day.
You know, so out of despising of that, The Zionists said, well, the remedy for this is we have to turn the Jew into the thing he wants.
He's never been since Old Testament days, since we were kicked out of the land, which the Jews know was for disobedience twice, 587 BC and 70 AD.
We have to make him a farmer again.
We have to send him to a kibbutz.
So he'll learn through hard work and having his own land in both senses, you know, his farm and his country.
He'll learn what it is to be a proper nation again.
So there was no religious content to that, quite the opposite.
Okay, but just going back, correct me if I'm wrong, and this is me dimly remembering what I've read elsewhere, that Christianity was the dominant cultural religion certainly in the West at that time.
It was waning already, but it was of the masses for sure.
Sure, so Zionists wanted to to create a Jewish homeland in Israel.
They certainly didn't want a Jewish democracy, which is a contradiction in terms, because Jewish law talks about the laws of the king and of the kingdom, not of democracy.
But they already had the Jewish part.
That's still the tension in Israel today.
Are we Jewish, democratic, or both?
You can't be both, actually.
Yeah, but I'm looking at big-picture stuff here.
As I understand it, a lot of Jews really weren't interested in going back to this kind of hot place.
I think it's quoted in Roland Perry's book, The Fifth Man.
This remarkable Australian historian I may have mentioned in a previous conversation who went to Moscow when the KGB archives somewhat opened up and found that Anatoly Gulitsyn, the defector to MI5, was telling the truth, that Victor Rothschild, the wartime leader of the Rothschild dynasty, was spying for the Soviets and for Mossad, what became Mossad.
Well, of course you would be.
And as part of that, there's a wartime letter quoted from Rothschild to a friend, that there will be no room for poor Schnorrers, meaning mustachioed religious Jews, these unkempt guys who only care about, you know, doing their dovening, their worship all day.
Rothschild said there will be no room in the land for them after the war.
So there are those who go maybe two bridges too far and say, well, he was in on the Holocaust then.
I think that's pushing it a long way.
It was a fortuitous outcome.
We don't need to go there.
The non-elite Jews who do arrive, for example all the African Jews, some of the Sephardic Jews, so the Oriental Jews, some of the Mizrahis, who are now again dominant, but everyone who's not an Eskenazi, you know that they got sterilised through irradiation, allegedly a pest control measure.
When they arrived as immigrants, as Aliyot, as Olim.
So this is well known, that there was a great despising of the religious Jews, which is behind a lot of the heavy-handedness that you get with the Israeli police now.
Yes, no, you see footage of... Those who don't believe, who are consistent with Jewish history, both Old Testament and Jewish tradition, who say we have no right, it would be a great sin and blasphemy to set up a Jewish state before Mashiach comes.
Yes, I get that, I get that.
Many ultra-orthodox Jews do not believe in the physical state of Israel because they understand that it's a kind of metaphorical thing.
And refuse to be, whether they are on paper or not, refuse to act like citizens.
Yeah.
But, it seems to me that you're slightly dodging the issue of whether or not Israel was a Rothschild project, which it seems to me that it was.
I was just going to the religious line there.
In a political sense, I've got no doubt, no hesitation in saying that it was.
But OK, so whatever the Lord Rothschild was to whom Balfour wrote his letter, his declaration, he was just a later Rothschild, presumably...
You and I know how the rulers of the darkness of this world operate, and they think way further ahead than us ordinary, ordinary folk.
They think in generational terms.
Yes, and the Jewish and Chinese ones think in 500-year chunks, whereas, you know, our dark operators in the West, okay, they work for Satan, who thinks in longer terms, and he knows his time is short, Scripture tells us, but our Western elite, as you know, as well as I do, Public School in Oxbridge,
only think in terms of the next electoral cycle or will I get my son into the same school as me despite the increased third world competition but they're really long term and the Jews and Chinese have got a mutual admiration society going on because they think in half millennium time periods okay
so what I'm trying to pin you down on is the the overall game plan in the 19th century which which led to the hijacking of many Christians yes getting them on board with the Zionist program using false information yes by distorting the Bible's So we've got explain the connection.
But first of all, Can you explain how the Scofield Bible, this Bible annotated by a charlatan, how it became so popular in America, number one?
It was flogged a lot, you know, people found it new and sensationalist.
2 Timothy 3, the huge list of adjectives at the beginning of that chapter about what people will be like in the end times.
And one of the things they will be is, and I think Paul's using the word ironically rather than literally, he says there will be silly women, gunai karia, probably means sort of wee wifey type men, in the pulpit or in the pew, equivalent, they weren't pulpits and pews in the New Testament but you know what I mean, they will be the ones he describes as silly women who are ever learning, ooh what a new interesting thought, and never able to come to a knowledge of truth.
But what's he saying?
Have you read the Scapegoat Bible?
No, the notes are just bilge.
I mean, but they must be quite readable bilge.
Yeah, of course.
It was, you know, it gives people an intriguing sense of, hmm, I'm beginning to see the chronology.
I mean, there was a trend in the 19th century already because of archaeological improvements to say, OK, we're reading about Hezekiah.
This happened in year... I'll probably get the dates wrong, but Hezekiah must be 624 BC or whatever it is, you know.
And so to try to date everything.
And using Archbishop James Usher's chronology, 17th century Bishop of Armagh, they would even start in Genesis 1 with the central column saying, this is 4004 BC.
So that's fair enough, although you can dispute the early timings.
But they're just starting to say, OK, well, when I read of a shall in the Prophets or in the New Testament, that's going to be not necessarily this many years in the future, but the relative chronologies there.
So one of the effects of the Scofield Bible is that you get these people, and you can see immediately their swivel-eyed loons on YouTube, because they're doing their usually two-man podcasts, filmed podcasts, about prophetic times and our support for Israel, and sometimes they've literally painted the wall behind them with these lurid Cheap, but very busy illustrations of, ah, here's the crucifixion.
At least they still say that's the center of history.
But here's a Jewish bit.
Here's a Christian bit.
And before you know it, oh, there's Napoleon.
And so, OK, he's the beast.
And they get that?
None of them agree.
You know, they did it to misappropriate an expression from the Gospels.
For neither yet did their testimonies agree.
That's the thing.
No two sects of Lune have the same chronology.
But Schofield inaugurated the whole concept, the whole category of having a chronology for a prophetic timetable.
Okay, so assuming he was funded by the Rothschilds, or, well, yeah, it's going to be the Rothschilds, because they were the uber-Zionists, weren't they?
What were the messages that he was putting in the Bible, in his notes, that misled people?
Well, the most innocuous part was, God hasn't finished with the Jews, you know.
And that is, okay, Matthew 27, 25, the Jews say, His blood be upon us and on our children, when condemning Christ to be crucified, or approving the Roman condemnation.
But there was always, in Protestantism, particularly Reformed Protestantism, a love Above all, among the Dutch and Scots, and it's become an article of faith in the Reformed churches in those two countries, that's, you know, the Jews will turn to Christ in the end times and we have to show them in a friendly and sincere manner who Christ is and evangelize them sensitively.
Okay, that's dissipated now because there's a lot of Dutch evangelicals who say, oh, I'll never mention Christ to a Jew because of the Holocaust, which is a flat denial of the New Testament.
And just while we're on that spur, I'll say that I learned better courtesy of my dad, vicariously, who it must've been 50 years ago now, was speaking to a messianic Jewess, so a convert to Christ in Liverpool when my parents lived around there and said, and she said, "Alex, you really love the Jews, don't you?" He said, "Yes." And she said, "You'd love them all the way to hell, wouldn't you?" Now that shook him out of his stupor of going to synagogue and saying how interesting the way you Jews do things without mentioning Christ, okay?
So that historically was the position that the Jews read Romans 9 to 11 above all, that God hasn't finished with them, but somewhere in those three chapters that are essential reading in Paul's letters to the Romans, he says that the Jews are beloved for the sake of the fathers.
And I've sat at a fellowship meeting with a Dutch reform minister, in fact the man who conducted our wedding service, Who very lovingly disabused a lady of her excessive love for the Jews in this regard.
She said, God's old covenant people the Jews.
I think she even left out the word covenant and just said God's old people.
But then God would have two people at once.
Right, rather than the biblical term of grafting in or saying, OK, the church will do what Israel used to do, without excluding in any way that individual Jews will come to faith in Christ in this gospel age, and also not excluding a future end-time conversion of many old Jews.
But our minister said to this lady's sister, I have to correct you gently there, They're not God's old covenant people.
The church is God's people.
The church is the third temple.
You know, Acts 17, Paul in Athens, God does not dwell in temples built by human hands.
Peter, you know, we are the temple.
Lively stones, living stones.
Romans 12, Your Reasonable Service, all of these texts point to that.
He said, let me correct you sister, they're not God's old people, they rejected willingly that role, didn't want to be God's people.
Read Hosea, Lo Ami, Thou Art Not My People, but also the prophecy that she will become a people again and she will gain mercy again in Christ.
Well, what they are, sister, the minister said, is they are beloved for the sake of the fathers.
The same reason, by the way, it often was quoted in the Highlands, among the most pious people that the British Isles ever saw in the 19th century, that the reason the Lord hadn't finished with the nation and its wickedness, despite its wickedness, was that particularly in places in the Highlands, Northern Ireland, Wales, there were pockets where a majority had been fervent Christians, and for their sake the Lord wasn't going to overturn the nation in judgment.
I think that's why we had Her Majesty for 70 years.
Never mind her personal faith and commitment, which may have been privately different, who knows?
We couldn't have had a better Queen or better monarch in that period.
I know people will be shouting at their mobile phones some of them will she tolerated Satanist ritual abuse but what would the alternatives have been that were on offer I'm not going to go down that Anyway, you can take that or leave it, but it's an example of if you pray for preservation for the sake of the Lord's people in a particular place or church who used to serve him warmly, the Lord's never obliged.
He can always remove his candlestick, as the biblical language says, from a church or a national church.
If it decides to cheerlead abortions and replacement migration, it's had its chips.
But where there is genuine godliness, the judgment will often be delayed.
You might know the answer to this.
There's a line in Marvell's To His Coy Mistress, where he writes, and you should, if you please, refuse till the conversion of the Jews.
It's like, till the cows come home.
In the 17th century, it was very much standard fare in Puritanism and its continental equivalents, like the Dutch Reformed.
The last thing that happens before the Lord's return, and this is quite separate from the other debate of pre-postal amillennialism, let's park that one, when's the thousand years, or is it literal or metaphorical?
That aside, everyone said, oh, at the end times, the Jews will see the light, as per Romans 9 to 11, they'll be called.
You know, it's not the only way to interpret that passage of God's Word.
There's not necessarily going to be a mass conversion, but it is an article of faith and a decent hope, something to be worked for.
And when I was mentioning Baruch Ma'oz's book, I forget the title, but any history of Jewish Christianity or the relationship between the church and the Jews will say that the Golden Age was the first half of the twentieth century, well, from the mid-nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth, when Great men such as the converted Dutch Jew Isaac da Costa were shamelessly, and they didn't need to be ashamed, and at the cost of their reputation and maybe even their safety, would evangelize the Jews.
They do it under Queensbury rules.
You don't go into a synagogue and say Jesus is the Messiah, even if you're a fervent evangelical Christian.
You respect their time and their turf, but you engage with them.
You don't beat about the bush.
And there was a great harvest, and crucially, those converts didn't call themselves Messianic Jews, using the adjective Messianic to qualify the core noun of Jews as their identity.
They called themselves Hebrew Christians, until about the Second World War.
Right.
What about the bit in the Talmud where it says that Jesus is boiling in excrement?
That's Bhagavad Gita, isn't it?
There's two Talmuds, James.
There's a 20-volume Bavli, the Babylonian Talmud, where all the wickedness of Eastern religion gets interpolated.
And by the way, in the time of Christ, the Second Temple period of Judaism, They had already, as a nation, gone on to worshipping angels, all the things that the New Testament and serious Jews of the time warn against, because of this Oriental influence.
So, sure, some centuries after Christ, that strand of Judaism in the Diaspora, in Mesopotamia, is being very Persian or even Indian about it.
Making wise cracks about Jesus.
There's also a lesser known and shorter Yerushalmi, a Jerusalem Talmud, which doesn't contain any of this stuff.
And the language of the Talmud, both versions of the Talmud, is Aramaic, a very obscure kind.
Only a few people can translate it properly.
And the defenders of the Talmud will say that even if these passages in certain tractates, individual documents in this massive library that's the Talmud, even if they seem to say, you know, God's got his own back on that upstart Jesus, that's not what all Talmud readers say.
But parking that, giving them the benefit of the doubt, Talmud is preached by the overwhelming majority of Jews, those who are rabbinical, in fact only about 50 to 70,000, I think it is, Jews in the world called Karaites, K-A-R-A-I-T-E-S, are non-Talmudic.
They read only the Old Testament as the Word of God, or as authoritative.
Right.
All the others are rabbinical, so 99 point something percent.
All of those will say, and you'll read it in the preface to any edition of the Talmud, of which there's several in English now.
These days there didn't used to be, but it would, by the way, it was Dominicans and then the Puritans and Luther who translated this stuff to bring to light all the stuff that was said in the dark.
to disabuse Christians of the notion that all Jews are friendly and well-disposed towards our faith.
They will all say in the preface to the Talmud, OK, we've got Tanakh, the Jewish name for the Old Testament, but that's child's play, that's high school stuff, that's for women and boys.
Right.
The real juice and the real essence of Judaism, because so many great Jews worked on it as if they were greater in mind and spirit than God, but that's what they're saying, I'm afraid, is the Talmud.
And some will go the whole hog until anecdotes in Talmud or in commentaries, because you've got two levels, Mishnah Gemara, And commentary upon commentary on commentary, but some commentaries by rabbis on Talmudic sources will say, oh, the rabbis were so smart that they managed to tell God, hey, we control Earth now, and laughed, as it were, behind their hats about, you know, we've beaten you, and God in this story is said to say, oh, my children have got the better of me.
So that's one extreme end, but the whole of Talmudic Judaism, okay, in the truth movement, Talmudic is often taken as a synonym for deceit and double language and so on, but more broadly, more neutrally than that, a Talmudic attitude is Jewish learning, the striving for the truth, the striving to heal the world, although that's Kabbalah, that's a mystic end of Judaism.
You know, the attempt to fulfill the law, keep the 613 commandments, that is the core of Judaism.
Which it never was biblically, and it was never held to be until after the fall of Jerusalem.
Well, this sounds to me closer to being one of the Babylonian mystery religions than it is to... Yes.
Well, that's Luciferianism.
It is.
That's the enemy.
Yeah.
So here we are.
I'll give you two descriptions of that in the New Testament.
Paul in particular, who was steeped in this before his conversion, although it wasn't written down in his day.
And Christ, when he's talking about your traditions, he's talking about the documents that were oral that later got written down.
By the way, one of them, Rabbi Yohanan, I think, end of the second century AD, said if a Gentile studies this stuff, he's worthy of a death sentence.
And he has the cheek and presumption to base himself on a verse at the end of Deuteronomy where it seems to be interpolated by Joshua.
He says, Moses gave us these commandments, they're for us.
And so he says, they're for us, they're not for the Gentiles.
That's how twisted things get.
But Paul, whenever he's talking about traditions, vain Jewish fables, he's talking about this stuff.
He's not generally talking about old wives tales.
Well, he is talking about old wives tales, he uses that term, but he's not talking about people who gossip and speculate, a bit like the 19th century sects we're talking about.
He's talking more about These secret teachings, Gnosticism, Hermeticism creeping in, which are Eastern anyway.
They come into Platonism and the church that way in the 5th or 4th or 5th century, but they also come into Judaism.
Right, so a key verse, I'll give you just two to meditate on.
One I think is 1 Thessalonians.
First or second?
They're only very short, but they're very important.
I'll give you the other one first, and I'll look it up meanwhile when you respond.
OK, so the first one is the positive one, which is Galatians 6.
It would have made more sense the other way around.
In summing up, and this is the key epistle about how we relate to the Jewish law, answer, we as Gentile Christians should not be enjoined to obey it, but he says in his final paragraph, Genesis, sorry, Galatians 6, 12 onwards, as many as desire to make a fair show in the flesh, that's Judaizing, making people obey the Old Testament and traditional law, they constrain you to be circumcised, which Paul is using a shorthand past pro-toto for the whole idea of become a Jew.
Only, meaning the only reason they do so, lest they should suffer persecution for the cross of Christ.
Because of course the persecutors of the church, this will be the Thessalonians text in a moment, have always been led by envious Jews who don't like us.
Yeah.
They hate above all Jewish converts to Christ, more than they hate Gentile Christians.
For neither they themselves who are circumcised keep the law, but desire to have you circumcised, look how many converts I've gained for Judaism, that they may glory in your flesh.
But God forbid that I should glory, which means boast, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world.
Here I pause to say that what a shame that most hymnbooks no longer include the most magnificent verse to my mind of When I Survey the Wondrous Cross, which is, His dying crimson, meaning blood, His dying crimson like a robe, Spreads o'er His body on the tree.
Then am I dead to all the globe, And all the globe is dead to me.
So that's the Christian's license for not following worldly fashions.
But Paul says that famous verse, and then he says the bit which is less well-known.
For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision avails anything, neither being a Jew by birth or conversion, nor uncircumcision.
It's not, on the other hand, more noble or less baggage in life to be born a Gentile who's a Christian.
But a new creature, the new birth in Christ individually, is the only thing that avails.
And as many as walk according to this rule, he's deliberately alluding to the idea of rules and laws in Galatians.
So this is the new law, the law of Christ.
Peace be on them with emphasis.
These are the people, whether Jews or Gentiles by heritage.
These Christians are the ones who get peace from God and mercy and upon the Israel of God.
There are many mentions of Israel in both testaments, James.
This is perhaps the most important one, that God has an Israel as well, made up of Jews and Gentiles who believe in his son Jesus Christ.
Yes, I can see that that is key.
So your take Which I think is what most sort of scholarly Christians think, is it not?
That the deal in the New Testament is that with Christ, Israel ceases to be a geographical entity and also ceases to refer specifically to... Technically, as prophesied by Christ, he said this generation will see it.
And Flavius Josephus gives the details, and old commentaries have referred to this year of A.D.
70, until very recently, Jews and Christians agreed to stop talking about it.
Until A.D.
70, as prophesied by Christ as the final warning, the final prophet, there was a Jewish dispensation, there was a temple, God was worshipped there with sacrifices, there was a priesthood, all overturned, the veil of the temple was rent in twain on the day of his crucifixion, but one generation of grace, as it were, until, as he foretold, get out of Jerusalem.
The Christians read Matthew 24, what became Matthew 24, and they knew to flee, and they escaped the judgment by living in Pella, which is another story, many of them did.
But the land of Israel was squashed, and again in the Bar Kochba revolt, 132 AD.
After that, the Jews were banished from the whole land, and their whole city became Aelia Capitolina, it was renamed.
Palestine was the new name for the territory, etc.
But without going into that history, yes, all Christians and all honest Jews knew this, that the Jews were banished and that their covenant had ended.
The Jews wouldn't go quite that far, but their covenant was overturned.
They ceased being his people at that time.
OK, but can we go back to the big picture stuff, which is in the 19th century, The Zionist movement, which presumably was not very big, but it had some rich backers, managed to co-opt vast sections of Christianity with this, thanks to the fake
And it's the fake expertise of Cyrus Schofield, something to do with the Plymouth Brethren, and I still haven't worked out what.
Remember at the beginning of the podcast, we set out to answer the question, why, I mean, I've almost lost friends and allies over this.
Why is it that there are so many Christians, I mean, millions of them, who are saying, yeah, Yeah, Netanyahu.
Go in and bomb the hell out of these Palestinians because you are the children of Israel.
You're God's chosen and we should be backing Israel come what may because they are... James, I'll give you an honest answer as always.
It's because whether they're in America, Britain, Australia, or any other country where there's a preponderance of evangelical Protestants, they have sat for decades, if they're middle-aged, in the church listening to thousands of sermons and reading thousands of books and Bible studies, and never once has this been mentioned.
And whenever they see Israel they think the nation-state, the Jews, it's all one and the same.
Because of ministerial cowardice, ignorance, and A combination of other factors.
For exactly the same cluster of reasons as, for example, the vast majority of, certainly, Protestants in the world, it's better in Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, the vast majority of Protestants have never heard an explanation of 1 Corinthians 11 on ladies covering their heads, at least during worship, if not the whole time.
As an act of Christian reverence, because, you know, a classic example was one of the evangelical megachurches in Cambridge in my day, decided to go through the first epistle to the Corinthians, a whole term, And they timed it so that at half-term, they stopped just before that passage, and after half-term, resumed with the next chapter, without commenting.
Because, we don't talk about that, we don't rock the boat, that's controversial, you know, that would split the church.
In other words, there would be fewer donations and we'd be in the press.
What, women wearing hats?
Yes, or more New Testament would be just a veil over the hair.
Which is what you get in Eastern churches to this day.
You're saying that women should wear... It's plainly taught in Scripture.
Although Paul doesn't say Christ commanded this.
He says at the end of that passage, verse 16 of chapter 11, I think.
I was talking to the catechism students about it this last week.
He says, if you want to quibble at this, we don't have the custom, which most Christians historically have understood as meaning we don't have the custom of women uncovering their hair in worship.
Some say, take it the other way and means, OK, well, we don't have the custom of quibbling.
So decide what you want to do yourself.
The point I'm making is simply that this is a corollary, a comparable phenomenon of cowardly and ill-taught ministers and elders.
Right.
But we just don't discuss that.
We just focus on Jesus, they say, which means feelings.
I certainly get that the Zionists played a blinder by deciding that they were going to call their new state Israel.
Yes.
There were early discussions, would they call it Judah?
You know, because they were two nations after King Solomon and split between Jeroboam and Rehoboam.
You've got two tribes in the Ten Tribes and the southern two are Judah.
And that's where the adjectival form of Judah, Yehudi or Jew, comes from.
The Northern Ten Tribes, which had a mixed religion and fell away from the Lord very early on and were punished with I would argue eternal scattering.
You can't find them now, I'm not a British Israelite.
Oh, I think I might be, Alex.
I know you might be, you've certainly got some of the tendencies, but fair enough, a lot of good brethren are.
Some of the tendencies!
I was in the High Victorian era for the same reasons, you know, a kind of post-hoc attempt to explain why Britain had been given so much greatness that we didn't earn.
I'm not going to talk to you about British Israel because you're clearly, you know, you're like one of those people that dismisses flat earthers and I'm not having that.
We'll stick to the matter in hand, which is... The name of the State of Israel was definitely playing a blinder.
It was.
There was some debate among Zionists at the time.
The more religious ones wanted that, I think, that name.
No, another name.
And the more cynical ones, the Rothschildites, decided for the name of Israel.
Yeah.
So, I've noticed this.
That there are quite a lot of Christians who don't understand that there are layers and layers of meaning in the Bible.
Yeah.
Some of it is instantly comprehensible, it is what it is, but some of the stuff... I mean, the word Jew, for example, has a multitude of meanings depending on what... and it doesn't even appear in early translations.
Paul in Romans, is it chapter 2?
For he is not a Jew which is one outwardly.
So the Bible's explicit in saying there are layers of meaning.
Exactly.
And then you've got the Synagogue of Satan.
What is the Synagogue of Satan, do you reckon, that appears in Revelation?
Well, I would argue Revelation's written before A.D.
70, and the whole book is understood best that way.
Read, I think I mentioned it before, kaisercommentary.com on Revelation.
K-A-Y-S-E-R commentary.com.
Phil Kaiser in Omaha, Nebraska.
But he's basing himself on, again, the classic Both Western and Eastern Christian position that all New Testament warnings largely get or primarily gets fulfilled in A.D.
70.
That was the first time.
What?
That's a shame.
That was the first time Christ came back as threatened.
That's why the Jews stoned Stephen in Acts 7 and 8 because he could see that the Son of Man was about to act, standing poised to judge them.
So revelations happened?
He supervised what Vespasian and Titus did.
Or rather, what the Jews did to themselves in their zealotry, in pulling down their own temple.
A fat lot of good it did them in the end.
They were fighting over its sanctity and impregnability and in the end they destroyed it themselves to fight the Romans during the siege.
But anyway, the That was the first fulfillment of that.
Well, that means that we needn't bother reading Revelation if it's already happened.
Well, no, it's, you know, there's a Biblicist and there's a Historicist and there are many other forms of understanding Revelation that don't fall into the trap of Futurism, you know, which is, it's all for the future, which is associated with the Schofield line and Jesuitry.
They've pushed this idea because the Church is consoled as she sees these things happening in real time.
It's not, is the synagogue of Satan in Pergamon in Revelation 2 and 3, is that this movement?
No, we deal with spiritual types in Revelation, above all, in any book of the Bible, but especially Revelation, which has got the highest density of Old Testament quotations of any book in the New Testament.
It's saying, ah, whenever you see this arising, that's Satanism, and it's happening within, in this case, not the church, but actually it is in the church, sorry, in Pergamon, yes.
So watch out, Satanists, we'll crop up in the church.
The thing is Alex, I don't want to go through all this incredible shit that we're going through right now if it turns out that I don't even get the treat at the end of seeing the Antichrist coming and the horses wading up to their chests in blood and stuff like that.
That particular thing did happen as described by Josephus and it went out for however many stadia and all the measurement of distance But that need not preclude it happening again in a future Armageddon.
But the idea of apocalypticism, of waiting for Armageddon, if not hasting the day that it comes out of a sense of titillation or impatience, is of the devil.
Well, says you.
I'm thinking actually that we...
That it is getting things are getting particularly horrible and the only reason the only thing to be grateful for for living this absolutely appalling time that we're living through where we're having all our freedoms taken away.
Everything is going to shit and an evil people are everywhere and triumphing.
The only consolation to my mind is that at least we get the ringside seat at the end of the world, and maybe we'll see the second coming, although I don't think I'm going to live to see it.
But if you're saying that revelations already happened, I mean that's a bit... The things prophesied in it happened in some spectacular detail in AD 70, but it's also a book for the church age, and the things described then are happening again, as it were, in a global scale, in any age you care to look.
Look, Romans 16.20, and the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly.
That's Paul's closing word of comfort to believers in Rome who weren't affected by the fall of Jerusalem.
The epistle was written perhaps two decades before the fall of Rome.
So there is a warrant for a New Testament Christian, although he's a peaceful chap, to look forward with gleefully rubbing hands to the idea, to the prospect of Satan being given a good whacking.
Absolutely there is.
Right.
This isn't a complaint, this is just an observation.
We have skittered about.
We have.
An awful lot.
And I'm not even sure that I... Have we actually covered supersessionism yet?
Well, if we haven't in all we've done, we'll do it with this other quotation in 1 Thessalonians 2, verse 14 onwards, which I'll read, which would have gone better before Galatians, because that Galatians is the more positive note, but This is why the Church has superseded the Jews.
Now, before I read it, eudaioi, the Greek New Testament term for Jews, sometimes, such as in John, definitely means Judeans, as in the hobnobs around Jerusalem who led the religion in 2nd Temple Jerusalemism, as distinct from the despised Galileans in the North.
Right?
That's one meaning of eudaioi.
But in this passage, Paul is writing to Christians in Thessaly, both Jews and Greeks, who are suffering mightily, as in Asia Minor, when the local Jews kick up a fuss and get the local Authorities to persecute them.
And he's saying, look, these things are being done because the Jews are persecuting you.
He is there unambiguously talking about religious Jews rather than you die as a subcategory of Jerusalem magnates of Judaism.
But what he says here is this, for ye brethren became followers of the churches of God, which in Judea are in Christ Jesus.
So the Jewish believers in Jerusalem who had it really very bad and were very poor.
For ye also have suffered like things of your own countrymen, even as they have of the Jews.
So arguably he's saying your local Jews are persecuting you in Thessaly just as Jewish authorities in Jerusalem are persecuting the Jewish Christians.
Or he's saying they're Jews as a religious group.
Jews who both killed the Lord Jesus, Paul is unabashed in saying that, although the Romans crucified him, Paul is a Jew himself, isn't he?
Of course he is.
A very Jewish Jew, as he says in 2 Corinthians.
He gives all his credentials.
A Jew of the Jews, a Hebrew of the Hebrews.
Obviously, the Jewish authorities would have wanted nothing more dearly than to have been able to impose the death sentence, but the Sanhedrin couldn't, because of the Roman occupation, so they contrived to get the Romans to do it.
But all that unambiguously says, the Jews killed the Lord Jesus.
I don't mean it in the Roman Catholic sense, you know, well-known in Ireland, of find a Jew and point a finger at him and say, you killed the Lord Jesus, because the Protestant understanding is that our own sinfulness, the sinfulness of his own people, nailed him to the cross.
But as a matter of historical record, Paul is unafraid to say the Jews killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, which Christ talked about in his parables, you know, look at all the prophets who you killed and stoned, and have persecuted us, meaning the apostles who evangelize.
And, this is the key, James, they, the Jews Paul is writing about, they please not God And are contrary to all men, which makes me think of that line in Tacitus, odio humanae generis, their hatred of the human race, forbidding us To speak to the Gentiles, that they, meaning the Gentiles, might be saved, to fill up their sins all way, meaning to keep racking up the account until God deals with them.
For the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost, which to me is the strongest hint he's writing.
We know he's writing before A.D.
70, but he's prophesying A.D.
70 there.
Because God can't tolerate anymore and he's given enough warning that it will happen to that generation.
But that idea of don't, whatever you do, take these Old Testament promises and laws that we don't want to obey anymore, that we've twisted, and don't be, whatever you do, be preaching them to heathen nations, some of whom will rapturously receive Christ and obey him from a pure heart, in true repentance.
That's the last thing they wanted.
And that spirit is still around in Judaism.
The very same people who, you know, around Netanyahu's outfit, for example, who make a great show of having evangelical pastors in the USA on speed dial.
Yes, well, of course they do, because the Christian lobby is still quite an important I mean, that's the one that votes all the money to Israel, thinking that, well, it says in the Bible, therefore, there must be goodies.
Yeah, I mean, it goes back as far as Genesis 14-15, that God gives Abraham that precious promise, and Abraham wasn't a Jew.
He was hundreds of years before anyone spoke Hebrew or called themselves a Jew.
In fact, the word Jew probably only comes in a thousand years after Abraham, around the 5th century or so, but Abraham is the father of faith, his seed is Christ, So, you know, singular collective use of seed to mean all who believe in him, not descendants as in the nation, as it's mistranslated in contemporary Bibles.
Abraham is told, all the nations of the earth will be blessed in you.
That's Abraham and his faith.
There's no law.
There's 430 years before Moses, as Paul points out.
But there's no written law at that point.
There's a law written on our heart, obviously.
There's no covenant with the Jews yet.
Much less a nation of Israel, and God is saying to Abraham, those who bless you will be blessed, those who curse you will be cursed.
Abraham is the human forefather of Christ in this regard, and of those who believe in Christ.
Even though I'm not sure how well we've got, I've really enjoyed our kind of tour d'horizon of all manner of Can I just ask you, not strictly relevant to supersessionism, but do you think Jesus was bothered whether or not women wore hats in church?
In his earthly ministry, as is very well expressed in the engagement with the Syro-Phoenician women in the Gospel of Luke, he was honouring And in Matthew as well, in the Sermon on the Mount, think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets, I am come not to destroy but to fulfill.
And also that not a jot or a tittle, not the smallest pen stroke, would fall out of the law till all was fulfilled.
Heaven and earth would pass away but his words would not pass away, which again is A.D.
70, because heaven and earth means God's dispensation in Jewish parlance.
In all of his earthly walk, before his crucifixion, certainly before John the Baptist was put in prison, And he made pains to establish, OK, John's in prison, now I'll preach the gospel of the kingdom, because John couldn't do it anymore.
He was the last Old Testament prophet.
At that point, Christ was always saying when heathen who were seriously interested, Roman soldiers or local pagans, when they wanted to believe or be in and be healed by Christ, he was quite harsh with them to test their faith.
You know, I have not come but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
It is not meat to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.
And by the way, he means little pet dogs in the house there, diminutive form.
He doesn't mean you are a horrible dog.
He's been quite endearing.
But the woman He elicits faith from the woman.
And then he says, your faith has healed you.
Afterwards, there's no distinction.
The old, the veil's been rent with his crucifixion, the temple service was fruitless for the final 40 years and then was physically destroyed, thanks to the Jews' own stubbornness, the zealots within them anyway, with AD 70.
Now they're trying in vain, with Christian support, to rebuild it.
But we, the church, are the third temple.
So was Jesus bothered?
He would have said in his earthly walk if asked, and by the way it wasn't a distinctive in meetings, as in Islam women are not actually obliged to attend the meetings, and synagogue was a later term because they went to temple when it was available until A.D.
70, so none of the conditions are really the same as New Testament church, but if he was asked about a matter of observance and worshipping God, Equivalent of in our gospel era, do ladies cover their heads in church?
He would have said, do what is in the law.
He even said in the Sermon on the Mount, obey the rabbis because they sit in the seat of Moses, they've got his authority.
But he came to bring in a higher standard of righteousness too.
He said, except your righteousness exceed that of the Pharisees, another allusion to Talmudism and hypocritical self-justification and outward religion, you will in no wise see the Kingdom of Heaven, enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.
So if it was a matter of Old Testament religion, even practice, he would have said, go along with it for the decency's sake.
Paul doesn't go beyond that.
Paul doesn't say it's a great blasphemy to God for a lady out of ignorance or defiance to walk into a worship service with uncovered head.
He says, the church in all times and places does this, even though it was only one generation old.
That's our custom.
We don't want to be annoying people.
A theme he returns to in Romans 14 and again in 1 Corinthians.
You don't want to be annoying weaker brethren for the sake of it.
So if for that reason alone Christ and the Apostles would have said, what's your problem?
What's your beef here?
The Dutch Reformed churches here are pleasantly un-British about it.
They just put a sign in the vestry saying women and girls with uncovered heads will not be admitted.
They don't get mealy-mouthed and say, so sorry, it's our custom, please try to understand.
They just say, this is the Lord's house, this is our understanding and custom, go along with it or worship elsewhere.
Now, I like women in hats.
I think, I mean, especially riding hats, but yeah, hats, hats generally, I think hats look good on.
I mean, I think chaps should wear hats as well.
As you know, the Satanists who run the world are particularly interested in Israel, and they see the building of the Third Temple as part of the fulfilment of their
Well it seems to me that they are trying to bring about revelation and they're doing things like, what's this about, importing red cows or something?
A red heifer.
Red heifers.
I happened a few days ago to have been inspecting for, let's just say, a European bureaucracy and the whole mission was on the colour of cattle.
So I was there interpreting for officials, do you ever manage to breed any red cattle?
And I was thinking in the back of my mind, I know some other people who'd be interested in this, and I was told it was a recessive feature of certain breeds of cattle.
But they've already imported them, haven't they?
Prescribed that these calves have to be slaughtered because, you know, they're not allowed to be of that colour, to be part of that breed.
What is your non-career-safe, Delingpole-esque take on On the regime running Israel.
I mean, they are basically Luciferians, aren't they?
The pious Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora know that they are a godless shower.
Reverend Baruch Ma'oz, who runs a website, by the way, I think it's themaozweb.com or org, you can subscribe to his newsletters, mostly about the current war now, but they've given years of information,
is of that majority, of course he's a Christian, but just that majority of Jews in Israel, in his case born in America and moved there soon after the war, would say, and he's been saying it consistently for years, Netanyahu is a charlatan, a dictator, but we were born here, there is a Hebrew speaking, mostly Jewish worshipping or nominal Jewish nation of Israel, do you want us all to Are we supposed to get into the sea?
What is supposed to happen with us?
Are we supposed to take every blow that's rained upon us by our enemies?
That's another can of worms, but what I mean to say is that the majority of Israel, middle Israel opinion, is that Netanyahu is a disaster.
Yeah, but you're kind of backing out of the question, which is that, look...
There are two teams in this world.
You know that, and I know that.
There's team Christian, which basically understands that... Look, it comes down to this.
The fallen angels, the people who work for the other side, are basically backing Lucifer and his crew, or Satan and his crew.
That's the deal.
That's the battle.
You agree with me on this, don't you?
Yes.
This is the battle that's happening in the world.
It's being played out in the material world.
Yes.
And it's a reflection of that supernatural battle.
So, when I know that, when I see all the kind of occult symbols on things like hospital roofs and hospital designs and stuff in Israel or whatever, or I see that they're planning on rebuilding the third temple, And they're getting the red heifers in.
I'm not thinking, oh, it's just an accident that they've gone for some red cows.
I'm thinking this is Satan's plan being on the verge of being fulfilled.
Yes, it is.
And I wouldn't say the Jews or the Israelis want that, although clearly some do because of the occult architecture in Jerusalem that you've mentioned.
You know, all the buildings, the Knesset, the Supreme Court seem to have this, as does Washington DC and Paris and so on.
But it's more Satan's plan.
To use that territory and those nominal Jews as his main pawn, I think.
Again, read To Eliminate the Opiate by Rabbi Marvin Antelman in two volumes, written 50 years ago, I think, by a Boston rabbi, to see the detail.
He was one of the loudest and most coherent jewish writers to say don't you realize we're being played for fools here straight down the line orthodox jew of no political political bent and if you want a one world religion and one world court etc of course you're going to want it to be based in jerusalem because then in satanic and luciferian thinking you have got the real estate you've got the claim on the allegiance of
and if you can mangle wangle the vatican to go along with it which seems to be happening then you've got the vast majority of judaism christendom and islam looking to jerusalem as the natural religious headquarters of the world government and And anyone who stands up there and says, I'm the prophet, you must obey the beast, the political guy, of course the people are going to go along with that.
Yeah.
Well, this is why I'm not going to defer.
I mean, Alex, obviously, explain why I should have asked you at the beginning.
How come you know so much about scripture and stuff?
Because I grew up as an only son.
Pilfering my dad's library, which is full of the best material from different countries and eras and languages about this stuff.
And as with, you know, my dear parents' early concern about what kind of King Charles would turn out to be, early on in, you know, Her Late Majesty's reign, when they were young, I listened to their conversations.
And, you know, always listened to the dissenting views.
Right.
But I was aware that in church and state, most people would say, well, we don't talk about that.
It's not British.
And you're a polymath, aren't you?
How many languages do you speak?
I speak fluently at half a dozen, but I can translate out of perhaps two dozen, three dozen.
So you've been related to each other.
So you've read the Septuagint in Greek, obviously, and you've read the Old Testament in Hebrew.
I teach the Old Testament in Hebrew, and then you speak to Greek every week.
OK, but all that said, Alex, I'm not going to defer to you.
I'm looking at The Red Heifers.
I'm looking at the Third Temple.
I'm looking at the Mark of the Beast in the form of vaccine passports.
And I am not going to take your line that, oh, it just refers to the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.
It's already been fulfilled.
It seems to me that, come on, come off it!
It's pretty striking.
Although Red Heifers aren't mentioned in Revelation, the Mark of the Beast in the hand is mentioned in Chapter 13.
The other thing you mentioned.
It is striking, isn't it?
But there's a kind of emulation as well going on.
There's a lot of people lapping us as Satanists.
A jolly good wheeze if we did it in exactly the same way that's warned about in Revelation.
They are doing a very good job.
So where do the red heifers come from then?
Who invented that one?
They're mentioned in Leviticus.
How are they?
The idea is further elaborated in Jewish tradition.
It's rabbinical tradition that matters.
I mean, the whistleblower Ronald Bernard, the Dutch, he's often wrongly called a banker, a good friend of mine.
Is he?
Yes.
He's been in this house several times.
He takes the position that Revelation is to be rejected because it's a Luciferian plan.
And that it's an attempt to deceive the Church.
I don't take that, but it is interesting that the most important Church, for the purposes of who sets the canon, you know, which books of the New Testament are inspired by God, has always been the Greek Orthodox Church, because it's their tradition, the Byzantine Church, and we took their manuscripts when Protestantism got going as its own wing of Christendom to inform ourselves.
And they, until Archbishop Cyril Lucaris, or Lucar in the 17th century, who may have been assassinated by the Sultan, his ship sank in strange circumstances as he was in dialogue with the Dutch Protestants, interestingly, but until his time in the mid-17th century, the Greek Orthodox Church said, Revelation is like the deuterocanonical or apocryphal books to the Protestants, in the sense that we read them for interesting information, but they're not inspired directly by God, they contain error too.
Oh!
And the Greeks did this for very, very striking, interesting reasons, which is, as Eusebius, the father of church history, says, and this goes back to the 4th century or so, everyone said, well, that's been fulfilled, hasn't it?
Everyone knows Revelation was fulfilled with A.D.
70, and at the most, stretching it out to the ten pagan emperors who followed up until Constantine.
They were the ten horns, weren't they?
You know, that was the universal position of the Greek and the Western Latin Church in the early church days.
It was only with Jesuitry in the 16th, mid-16th century, that the idea of Futurism came along to replace Preterism.
You know, that it's all in the future, don't worry your pretty little heads, and it's certainly nothing to do with the man in Rome.
And the Jesuits are so dodgy, so... Oh Alex, I'm... Talking about snake handlers, we started with them so we'll end with them.
Ignatius Loyola, he was certainly struggling with serpentine apparitions in caves, wasn't he?
This is just like, I tell you what, next podcast, not next podcast because that's going to be Psalm 2.
We're not going to pick a topic because we're just going to ramble, we're just going to go all over the place because I have to say the best bits of this podcast are where we just sort of digressed because you know so much and it's lovely.
Shall we do this episode, a funny thing happened on the way to Armageddon?
We could do.
We could do.
What was I going to say?
Yeah, I don't feel that we've really... Wait till you get your post back.
When you see your haul of repeatable feedback on this, not the obscene stuff, which there will be, you can categorise that, and where people feel that I haven't given enough of a coherent chronology or defined terms, we can go for that.
Well, yeah.
No, but I know what I was going to say.
I was going to say, of all the rabbit holes I've been down, there is none more with more side tunnels, and you're not sure where you are, than Christianity.
It is all religion, I suppose, in the broader sense, but it's just... Christianity is the greatest phenomenon in world history.
Whether or not you accept that the gospel of Christ is salvation, There's nothing bigger as a phenomenon in world history than Christianity.
I mean, Christianity is so big that it even subsumes the entire concept of Christendom, which is the whole of the world-dominating Western civilization until about a hundred years ago.
Well, I would like to think that this podcast has been as interesting for non-Christians as it is for Christians, because, like, I don't think you even need to be a God-botherer to find this stuff interesting.
I mean, it's key.
It affects everything, even if you don't believe it.
It's been my consistent finding, James, that the fellow travellers who are on my Eastern Approaches Telegram channel stick around precisely because fascinating Christian concepts and history are discussed in a non-pushy way, but in a self-assured way.
Well, I liked the way that you managed to plug some of your product.
I'm going to encourage you to do more of this.
Alex, tell us where we can find you, find your staff.
I am on ukcolumn.org for the next few months.
It'll be mainly Monday lunchtime news I'm presenting.
You can watch that live as well.
If you go to community.ukcolumn.org, you can enable us to keep doing what we're doing.
Not just expanding, but keeping the current production on the road.
Our guests, our videos, our articles commissioned by other people or commissioned by us for other people to write take money.
So, we're not enriching ourselves.
That money is throughput to enable UK Column to continue doing what it's currently doing, let alone expand in the new studios, which our generous subscribers have enabled us to do.
So, don't watch us for free, if you're drawn to us.
You might be consuming us on Telegram, YouTube, to the extent we're not banned there, etc.
Odyssey, Bitshoot, Rumble, but above all, please go to UKColumn.org, join the UK Column community, not just for the extras, like being able to talk in forums with fellow members, like-minded people, although that's a great boon, but principally so that we can keep going.
Staff and contributors, regular and occasional contributors, and I'm on Telegram as Eastern Approaches, T dot M E slash East App.
I have a smaller backup channel, All The Eastern Approaches, t.me slash all east app, which I intend to make that busier and keep Eastern Approaches itself to just a few highlights a day.
But the channel description is deliberately multifarious.
It's geopolitics, Christianity, education, and I forget even the fourth one that I've put on there now, but those are the areas I cover.
Well, thanks Alex.
It's been always great talking to you.
I've really enjoyed it.
And dear viewers and listeners, when you finish supporting UK Column, as indeed you must, I'd appreciate it if you supported me too.
And thank you for those who do already.
I think the place to go now is really Substack.
I do have a presence on Patreon and Locals and Subscribestar, but Substack seems to offer the best reader experience.
I get better comments.
It obviates the press completely.
There's no need for it.
Brilliant writers can write there without censorship, fear or favour.
And the algorithm is a positively written one, you know, instead of a deceptive one.
If one subscribes to you on Substack, one will get a pop-up saying, you'll want these three like-minded people for free as well.
Or you might want to support them financially as well, having donated to your Substack, which is a wonderful way of expanding the reach of people you wouldn't otherwise have heard of.
And by the way, I don't offer that many perks because I'm so disorganised, but I think it's worth doing.
If you're one of those people who wants what's in it for me, I would say you get to see my podcast.
I'm going to delay, although I generally release my stuff free in the end, I'm going to delay Because I think subscribers ought to get benefits, and so you get to see my stuff in advance.
Some of it I'm always going to keep paywalled for various reasons, just for exclusivity or whatever, but that's the way forward I think.
And thanks for those of you who don't want to commit, who just want to buy me a cup of coffee, that's great too.
And yeah, again Alex, thanks for being on the show, and we'll do Psalm 2 in a while.
We can answer the question.
Why do the heathens so furiously rage together and why do the people imagine a vain thing?
Because they haven't looked up to God's holy hill in verse 7 and onwards, but we'll get into that.
Yet have I set my king.
See you again before the apocalypse.
Well, yes.
Now I know that you're an apocalypse denier.
I'm not sure I'm going to talk to you about that anymore.
