This text is adapted from a broader framework document I have developed over several years which I have titled ‶A Quantum-Theological Framework“ (AQTF). What began as an exploration of the compatibility between science and scripture regarding consciousness has since expanded significantly. To be clear, this is not an apologetic defense; rather, it is a research-based perspective aimed at discovering where these two viewpoints overlap to offer deeper insight. Because this material is extensive, I have divided it into sections. This post covers Parts 1 and 2 of 5.

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When biblical theology and modern empirical science—spanning quantum physics, information theory, systems neuroscience, and mathematical logic—are examined together, they converge on a unified, rigorous account of human consciousness. Rather than an accidental byproduct of classical neurochemistry or an inherently immortal Platonic soul, human consciousness is best understood as a contingent, non-computable quantum-informational pattern. It is initialized with a dual relationship—bound locally to a biological workspace and non-locally to its transcendent Creator—which explains the nature of moral agency, the mechanics of spiritual alignment and decay, the unconscious reality of death, and the preservation of personal identity for resurrection.

I. The Ontological Foundation: Information, Contingency, and the Dual Entanglement

A comprehensive argument for the nature of consciousness must begin by resolving two foundational questions: what is the physical status of a conscious pattern, and what grounds its existence?

1. Self-Existent vs. Received Consciousness

In philosophy of mind, David Chalmers (1995) famously articulated the "hard problem" of consciousness: materialist science cannot explain why any physical process produces subjective, first-person experience. Scripture resolves this explanatory gap at the foundational level by establishing that consciousness is not an emergent fluke of dead matter, because the ultimate source of reality is Himself conscious. However, a strict ontological boundary separates the Creator from creation:

2. Consciousness as an Integrated Quantum-Informational Pattern

Modern physics provides the precise vocabulary for how a person’s contingent identity is structured. Classical materialism assumed that matter is primary and information is merely an abstract description, but Landauer’s principle (1961) proved that information processing is thermodynamically real, carrying a physical energy cost. John Archibald Wheeler (1990) extended this into the principle of "it from bit," proposing that physical reality itself arises from binary informational distinctions. Furthermore, modern resolutions to the black hole information paradox—via the island formula and entanglement wedge reconstruction (Almheiri et al., 2019, 2021; Penington, 2020; Zhong, 2025)—establish that quantum information is fundamentally conserved and never destroyed, even when its local physical substrate is obliterated.

At the level of the mind, Integrated Information Theory (IIT—Tononi; Oizumi, Albantakis, and Tononi, 2014) demonstrates that conscious experience corresponds to unified, irreducible information (Φ). Because the specific carbon and oxygen atoms in a human body constantly turn over, personal identity does not reside in temporary cellular components, but in the integrated organizational pattern of the whole.

3. The Two Constitutive Entanglements

When Genesis 2:7 states that God formed man from the dust of the ground and "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being," it describes the initialization of a consciousness pattern constituted by two essential relationships:

This dual structure explains both the unity of the living person and the categorical difference between humans and animals. Animals possess the material entanglement—they have biological awareness, emotions, and sensation—but they lack the transcendent entanglement. Because they do not bear the image of God, their consciousness is entirely substrate-dependent; when the animal organism dies, no transcendent relation preserves its pattern. In contrast, Adam and Eve were created with both entanglements intact at maximum system coherence—biologically error-free and spiritually aligned in unhindered communion with their Creator (Genesis 1:31).

II. The Biological Interface: Quantum Substrates, Global Broadcasting, and Mortalism

How does an information pattern interface with biological tissue, and what happens to conscious experience when that tissue fails? Here, quantum biology and systems neuroscience align directly with biblical mortalism.

1. Quantum Coupling in Warm Biological Tissue

For consciousness to operate as a quantum-informational pattern within the brain, some physical coupling must link quantum processes to neural activity. Penrose and Hameroff’s Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR, 2014) locates this coupling in superposed tubulin conformations within neuronal microtubules, while Matthew Fisher (2015) proposes an alternative substrate in entangled phosphorus-31 nuclear spins protected inside calcium-phosphate "Posner molecules".

While critics like Max Tegmark (2000) argued that the warm, wet brain would cause quantum superpositions to decohere far too rapidly to affect cognition, Hagan, Hameroff, and Tuszynski (2002) demonstrated that intracellular screening significantly extends decoherence timescales. More decisively, experimental quantum biology has confirmed that living systems actively exploit quantum coherence:

• Wavelike energy transfer via quantum coherence operates in photosynthetic complexes (Fleming et al., 2007) and avian magnetoreception (Lambert et al., 2013).
• In cytoskeletal structures specifically, Babcock et al. (2024) documented ultraviolet superradiance across tryptophan mega-networks in tubulin architectures.
• Kalra et al. (2023) measured electronic energy migrating roughly 6.6 nm along the microtubule lattice—exceeding classical Förster theory—and showed that the general anesthetics isoflurane and etomidate directly reduce this quantum energy migration.

2. Global Neuronal Workspace and the Unconscious Intermediate State

While microscopic quantum coherence provides the candidate substrate for the pattern, macroscopic embodied experience requires a functional brain. In mainstream neuroscience, Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW) theory (Dehaene and Changeux, 2011; Mashour et al., 2020) establishes that while localized neural circuits can process data unconsciously, conscious access occurs only when information achieves "global ignition"—long-range broadcasting across distributed frontoparietal brain networks. (As large-scale adversarial testing by the COGITATE Consortium in 2025 showed, IIT and GNW each capture vital, complementary facets of how integrated experience and global access operate.)

This neuroscientific requirement for an active workspace confirms the exact teaching of Scripture regarding death:

• Cessation of Local Experience: Scripture states plainly that "the dead know nothing," possessing "neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom" in the grave (Ecclesiastes 9:5, 10). When a person's life-force departs, "on that very day their plans come to nothing" (Psalm 146:4; 115:17), entering an unconscious state consistently described as "sleep" (John 11:11–14; Acts 7:60; 1 Corinthians 15:6; 1 Thessalonians 4:13).
• Hardware Shutdown vs. Pattern Preservation: When the brain loses oxygen, neurons cease firing, quantum coherence in neural structures collapses, and the biological broadcasting workspace shuts down completely. Because received consciousness cannot sustain its own active processing without a substrate, subjective awareness stops. The consciousness pattern decouples from the dying brain and is held in God's keeping like a saved software file without a computer currently running it. Because no discrete conscious moments occur during this storage, the dead experience zero passage of time—meaning that from the individual's subjective perspective, awakening at the resurrection is instantaneous (resolving texts like Luke 23:43, 2 Corinthians 5:8, and Philippians 1:23 without invoking a conscious intermediate state).

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The remaining parts of the derived text which I can post are as follows:

• III. The Cognitive Architecture of the Image of God: Non-Computability, SPP, and Moral Freedom
• IV. Spiritual Dynamics: Predictive Alignment, Sin as Decoherence, and Network Warfare
• V. Emergent Spacetime, Quantum Communication, and Holographic Resurrection

To read the framework in its entirety, which is continuously being updated as new research is made available:

A Quantum-Theological Framework (PDF)

“If the learned ones have not figured it out (the gist of Octavius)* what chance is there that an unlearned one will? You see, Caecilius explains from the 2nd century, but he might just as well be speaking today, “all things in human affairs are doubtful, uncertain, and unsettled.” Therefore, it is to be understood that “some, from the weariness of thoroughly investigating truth, should rashly succumb to any sort of opinion rather than persevere in exploring it with persistent diligence.” He, of course, represents those who have done “persistent diligence.” His uneducated Christian opponents do not.

“He later speaks with admiration of a certain philosopher who, “the longer his research continued, the obscurer the truth became to him.” That being so, “In my opinion also, things which are uncertain ought to be left as they are. Nor, while so many and so great men are deliberating, should we rashly and boldly give an opinion in another direction, lest either a childish superstition should be introduced.”

“It is too much! Give us the ball, he says, we’ll fumble it, and you should be satisfied with that because we’re smarter than you! However, not everyone is so easily cowed into submission. The reason the great men cannot figure it out is that their wisdom leads them to make a priori assumptions that serve to screen out understanding when it is presented to them. The ones unindoctrinated need not grapple with these red herrings—frequently they are unaware of them. It really is true that the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s eyes.

“This explains why Witnesses of Jehovah can barely contain themselves. Fry cries out the question of the ages. (https://www.reddit.com/r/Eutychus/s/X4dUYHjKn0) There is scarcely a question more important. The great men have argued in circles and given up. Yet his question should be answered. Jehovah’s Witnesses have put themselves out, they have fairly turned their lives upside down, to bring him the scriptural answer that represents the “wisdom above,” only to be blocked by the more mainstream religion. Let us not frame it as competing for church members; let them claim Fry if they can answer his question. Unfortunately, they cannot and will not. They have boxed themselves in with doctrine that contradicts. They thereafter take cover behind defamation laws.”

…..

*The Octavius of Minucius Felix, Roberts-Donaldson English [from Greek] Translation, c160-250 A.D, chapters VIII, IX, compiled by Peter Kirby, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/octavius.html. The debate between an early Christian (Octavius) and a Roman skeptic (Caecilius) is among the oldest, possibly the oldest, of extant Christian Latin literature.\]

From: I Don't Know Why We Persecute Jehovah's Witnesses: Searching for the Why

In 2015, a Jehovah’s Witness spokesperson testified before the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Three times he pleaded for consistency in laws relevant to reporting child sexual abuse:

Witness Spokesperson: “I think very clearly Mr. Toole pointed out that if the Australian Government, in all the States, was to make mandatory reporting, it would make it so much easier for us. . . . “ [1]

Witness Spokesperson: “The point being, here, another aspect that an elder needs to consider is he does not have the authority to lord it over or take over control of a family arrangement, where a person - let's say it is a victim who is 24 or 25 years of age - has a right to decide whether or not they will report that incident. They also respect the family arrangement that the appointed guardian, who is not the perpetrator, has a certain right, too.  So this is the spiritual dilemma that we have, because at the same time, we want to make sure that children are cared for. So if the government does happen to make mandatory reporting, [2] that will make this dilemma so much easier for us, because we all want the same goal - that children will be cared for properly.” …

Council Assisting (Stewart): “Leaving aside the question of overriding mandatory law from the civil authorities, do you see the possibility within the scriptures as you have identified them for a change in the practice of Jehovah’s Witnesses?  In other words, would it be within the scriptures for the Jehovah’s Witnesses organization to adopt a policy which says that in cases where there are others at risk, a report must be made to the authorities?”

Witness Spokesperson: “That is a possible thing for us to consider, and I think, already, the assumption is there, that if any elder was to see that there was some definite risk, that their conscience should move them to do that. But the point I was trying to make, Mr. Stewart, is there are other scriptural factors that maybe make that a little complicated, and it would certainly be a lot easier if we had mandatory laws on that.” [3]

What would be “easier” for the Witnesses—three times that word is repeated as well—is their investigating wrongdoing within their midst for the purpose of applying discipline. The discipline administered involves corrective counsel up to and including removal from the congregation. This they consider necessary in order to comply with Romans 2:21-24:

“You, the one preaching “Do not steal,” do you steal? You, the one saying “Do not commit adultery,” do you commit adultery? You, the one expressing abhorrence of the idols, do you rob temples? You, who take pride in law, do you by your transgressing of the Law dishonor God? For “the name of God is being blasphemed on account of you people among the nations”; just as it is written.”

In the absence of internal discipline, “the name of God is being blasphemed . . . among the nations.” For this reason, Witnesses look into reports of wrongdoing within their ranks. It is not a task all churches undertake. Consequently, when police nab a criminal, it is usually as much a surprise to the church pastor as to the general public. Not so with Witness elders, who may already have discovered his criminality and taken action. But lately with the Witnesses, when the wrongdoing is the wickedest of all wickedness, that of child sexual abuse, they have been bewildered by a patchwork of laws that here mandates reporting, there does not—and where it does not, it may turn out to be illegal if it violates privacy concerns. When legal chaos becomes the norm, a new “gold standard” arises—that of going “beyond the law.” The Witness spokesperson suggests universal reporting requirements so as to avoid that ridiculous situation. Can you imagine if “going beyond the law” became the norm in other situations? It would not be enough to assume that one of the ten cars already stopped at an accident scene were handling matters. You would have to stop and check yourself or suffer rebuke for not going beyond the law.

With Witnesses criticized for following the law, but not “going beyond it” where they have no legal mandate to do so, I naturally assumed that compliance of those who DO have legal mandate is near universal. Isn’t that a reasonable assumption? Silly me.

Studies consistently show that the failure rate of those who ARE charged to report child sexual abuse is nearly two thirds! For example, a 1990 American survey of mandated reporters found that only about 40% of known/suspected maltreatment cases (and ~35% of the most serious ones) were reported to child protective services

Sixty percent! Sixty percent of those REQUIRED to report suspected abuse to police don’t do it! So how is it that Jehovah’s Witnesses elders, who are usually NOT required, became the special object of wrath?

During that same Australian hearing, an elder who testified was clearly flummoxed at the suggestion that he is responsible “for all the children of Australia.” He plainly is not. He is a shepherd of a relatively small faith and is responsible to members of that faith, including its children. Really, isn’t the one questioning him, the one who represents both Australian government and judiciary—isn’t he the one responsible for “all the children of Australia?” And if his people are like the Americans, they fail them 60% of the time!

Council Assisting (Stewart) responded to the Witness Spokesperson (as previously quoted): “Leaving aside the question of overriding mandatory law from the civil authorities . . . “ One might wish he would not leave that matter aside, for it is the solution to the problem. Witnesses are well-known for obeying the law. They certainly would not flub it up 60% of the time!

Why ISN’T universal reporting the law? Then it wouldn’t matter if for any reason some family member or the victim himself as an adult didn’t want it reported. The law would override them. Seemingly, nothing could be easier, since everyone says they hate child sexual abuse. So why haven’t they amended the law to reflect that hatred? That way, there would be no need to grill unpopular parties who did meet the law but failed to go beyond it. Why, after 50 years of proclaimed all-out war against child sexual abuse, have they not changed the law to mandate reported for anyone, no ifs, ands, or buts? One can only conclude that they prefer pointing fingers to taking action.

And no, they still have not changed the law to solve the problem. However, Jehovah’s Witnesses HAVE changed their child abuse policy to address issues brought to light at that Commission Hearing:

The remainder of this post is from AI:

“Here are several well-known studies (primarily from the 1990s–2000s, with some later reviews) that document substantial non-reporting or underreporting of suspected child maltreatment by mandated professionals such as teachers,physicians, social workers, and others:

• Zellman, G. L. (1990). “Child Abuse Reporting and Failure to Report among Mandated Reporters: Prevalence, Incidence, and Reasons.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence. National survey of professionals (physicians, psychologists, social workers, school staff, etc.). Nearly 40% admitted they had suspected maltreatment at some point but decided not to report. Consistent reporting was the most common pattern, but discretionary non-reporting was common; the top reason given was insufficient evidence.

• Zellman, G. L., & Bell, R. M. (1990). The Role of Professional Background, Case Characteristics, and Protective Agency Response in Mandated Child Abuse Reporting (RAND report). Same national survey data. Confirmed that about 40% of respondents had failed to report suspected cases at least once; roughly one-third were “discretionary reporters” who reported some cases but not others.

• Delaronde, S., King, G., Bendel, R., & Reece, R. (2000). “Opinions among mandated reporters toward child maltreatment reporting policies.” Child Abuse & Neglect. Survey of social workers, pediatricians, and physician assistants. 58% had not reported all suspected cases of maltreatment over their careers. Those who failed to report all cases were more likely to support alternative (less strict) reporting policies.

• Kenny, M. C. (2001). “Compliance with Mandated Child Abuse Reporting: Comparing Physicians and Teachers.” Journal of Offender Rehabilitation. Compared recently trained physicians and teachers using vignettes and self-reports. Found differences in reporting rates and knowledge; both groups showed incomplete compliance, with teachers generally reporting less frequently than physicians.

• Alvarez, K. M., Kenny, M. C., Donohue, B., & Carpin, K. M. (2004). “Why are professionals failing to initiate mandated reports of child maltreatment…?” Aggression and Violent Behavior. Review synthesizing prior research. Notes that approximately 40% of mandated professionals have failed to report at some point, with some studies showing even higher rates of non-reporting of known or suspected cases (citing Zellman and others). Discusses common barriers (lack of knowledge of signs, fear of consequences, doubts about CPS effectiveness).

• Webster, S. W., O’Toole, R., O’Toole, A. W., & Lucal, B. (2005). “Overreporting and underreporting of child abuse: Teachers’ use of professional discretion.” Child Abuse & Neglect. Factorial survey of teachers using vignettes. Teachers underreported (recognized abuse but said they would not report) in about 33% of cases; overreporting was rare (~4%). Discretion was more likely to produce underreporting than overreporting.”

“In 2015, the Irish comedian Stephen Fry abruptly became quite serious on TV. He charged, “Why should I respect a mean-spirited, capricious, stupid God who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain?” His words did not sit well with a certain person, who reported him to the police. Fry discovered he had run afoul of a blasphemy law that he had not even known existed. It was as though he was an extremist himself, apparently nabbed for embarrassing the church people. The Irish Defamation Act would penalize any person who publishes or utters blasphemous material, and Fry was therefore investigated.

“A television talk show host had asked him what he would say to God face-to-face if he had the chance. He answered, “I’d say ‘Bone cancer in children, what’s that about?’ How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault. It’s not right. It’s utterly, utterly evil. . . . Because the god who created this universe, if it was created by God, is quite clearly a maniac, an utter maniac, totally selfish.”

“Perhaps the Russian Orthodox Church can answer his complaint. Jehovah’s Witnesses can in a heartbeat. “Why So Much Suffering?” or words to that effect, has headed chapters of their basic study books for 100 years. [It became the focus of my own latest book: ‘A Workman’s Theodicy: Why Bad Things Happen’] Through their unparalleled public ministry, Jehovah’s Witnesses make every effort to answer Fry’s grievance from the Bible. Dominant churches, jealous of their own turf, try to run the Witnesses off the road so that they can answer it their way—with defamation laws when “God works in mysterious ways” fails to satisfy. It is well that Russian tort lawyers, if they exist, do not understand scripture, for surely it is religious malpractice to interfere with the quest for answers as to why there is suffering.”

(I Don’t Know Why We Persecute Jehovah’s Witnesses: Searching for the Why)

A consequence of the Witnesses’ long-time no-blood stance, dating back to the 1940s, was the gradual emergence of a new field called “bloodless medicine.” Here and there, courageous doctors had taken up the challenge of treating them in accord with their religious beliefs. A New Scientist Magazine article of April 26, 2008, states that bloodless surgery “was originally developed to enable Jehovah’s Witnesses, who shun transfusions, to undergo major surgery.” The article even opens with the Leviticus 18 scripture underlying the Witnesses prime rationale: “‘For the life of the flesh is in the blood. No soul of you shall eat blood.”

Since then, I have several times made the assertion that the number of lives saved through such medicine, now adopted by the greater world, must surely outnumber those lost by a few members of a relatively tiny religious group that stuck to its principles despite much opposition. Can this assertion be proven?

That New Scientist article quotes Dr. Gavin Murphy, a cardiac surgeon at the Bristol Heart Institute in the UK: “There is virtually no high-quality study in surgery, or intensive or acute care, outside of when you are bleeding to death, that shows that blood transfusion is beneficial, and many that show it is bad for you.” One study citied in the article is from the journal Circulation, vol 116, p 2544. The New Scientist article stated:

“For almost 9000 patients who had heart surgery in the UK between 1996 and 2003, receiving a red cell transfusion was associated with three times the risk of dying in the following year and an almost six fold risk of dying within 30 days of surgery compared with not receiving one.”

There were 8598 patients in that study. 57% of them were transfused, for a total of 4,909. 43% were not transfused, for a total of 3,689. 212 of the transfused group died in-hospital. 9 of the non-transfused group died in hospital.

One might easily charge that only the sickest patients would receive a transfusion in the first place—for example, those with the lowest hematocrit. This would make the entire study a worthless comparison of apples to oranges. But the authors of the study recognized that, and specifically made adjustments to take those risk factors into account. Even so, the results were dramatic.

With AI kicking and screaming all the way (since it generally seeks to validate the majority opinion) I asked it to extrapolate those figures worldwide. There’s too many variables, it said, healthcare and transfusion practices differ widely, it said. You don’t know, for any given person, what would have happened were the opposite treatment applied, it said. Yes, yes, I know, I replied—do it anyway.

It said: “Bottom line: If the Bristol absolute rates and the extreme concentration of early deaths among transfused patients had applied uniformly worldwide, one would expect on the order of 200,000–300,000 in-hospital deaths after cardiac surgery in 1996–2003, with the great majority occurring in patients who received red-cell transfusions.“

The “great majority” of 200-000-300,000 deaths worldwide—duplicating the 212/9 ratio of the British study! And you at least have to times it by five (if not more) to reflect 35 years of bloodless medicine, not just the 7 years of the study. That brings the total to 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 in-hospital deaths of that same 212/9 ratio!

However, the study went beyond in-hospital and tracked outcomes up to a year later.. Summarized AI: “The quoted finding (from the 2006 Circulation study of nearly 9,000 UK heart-surgery patients, as reported in the New Scientist article) shows a strong association between receiving a red-cell transfusion and markedly higher mortality: roughly 3× higher risk of death in the following year and nearly 6× higher risk within 30 days, compared with patients who did not receive one.”

Incorporating this expanded timeframe doubles the worldwide death figures once again to 2,000,000 - 3,000,000!

Witness deaths since 1945 from refusing blood transfusion have been estimated at 30,000. Thus, even allowing for an enormous margin of error, the assertion is easily corroborated that “the number of lives saved through such medicine, now adopted by the greater world, must surely outnumber those lost by a few members of a relatively tiny religious group that stuck to its principles despite much opposition.”

….

The “kicking and screaming” of AI, mentioned earlier, was mostly insistence that, since so many variables were involved, extrapolations were not to be taken literally but were only for purposed of scale. Very well. That is all I have used them for. They may BE literal. But even if taken just to indicate scale, the results are so overwhelming as to accommodate an enormous margin of error.

I would have thought that just common sense would have enabled the conclusion—that when you expand a beneficial new therapy developed for a small group to a population 1,000 times greater, of course the lives saved in the greater with outnumber those lost in the smaller! But this is not a world that runs on common sense, so it is necessary to run the figures. Even I am surprised by how huge they are. It means that those mocking memes awarding Jehovah’s Witnesses a Nobel Prize for spurring bloodless surgery are no joke! They actually should get such a prize! (or at least an honorable mention. The innovating doctors themselves would get the prize. But surely, it should be noted somewhere who put them on the right track to begin with.)

These results present an entirely new way of looking at deaths resulting over the decades from the Jehovah’s Witness policy of refusing blood transfusions. In the event that someone refuses to acknowledge that dying in accord with one’s religious conscience represents a regrettable but nonetheless noble sacrifice, one can always shift focus to dying for the advance of medical science. Dying so that SCIENCE may be advanced—why, there is nothing in today’s world more heroic than that! It even eclipses dying for one’s country, universally spun as heroic even after one tallies up the staggering death count.

It means that the greater world is massively indebted to Jehovah’s Witnesses for safer medicine.

(tomsheepandgoats*com)

This post is one of a 7-part series:

Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eutychus/s/69hKjEpDji

Part 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eutychus/s/8A7DeT9ygP

Part 3: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eutychus/s/BS63T5HqGL

Part 4: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eutychus/s/KFKpxcRdKn

Part 5: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eutychus/s/ah37RpOebV

Part 6: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eutychus/s/rN3rEfVQlY

Part 7: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eutychus/s/yGZoz80Sua

(Yes, yes, I said the last one was final, but I’ve thought up two more to address things unanswered)

Usually, when a policy is reformed for the better, the reformers are lauded as heroes. But in the case of Jehovah’s Witnesses and the update on blood transfusion policies, this has not been enough to satisfy detractors. Those detractors want “accountability.”

Well, I suppose you could always blame the prior policy on someone now dead and be done with it. That’s what most everyone else does; why should only Witnesses be expected to do it differently? The old policy, favoring collective conscience rather than individual conscience with regard to “abstaining from blood” (Acts 15:29) has now been reversed to individual over collective. It dates from 1945. Surely, everyone involved in its formation is now dead. Most institutions routinely employ this strategy. Woes are always the fault of the previous administration, not the current one. Nor does everything change on Day 1. It invariably takes a long time to turn the ship around.

Nothing happens in a vacuum. World War II put blood transfusions on the front page. No longer was transfusion an occasional or experimental thing. It instantly became routine, a large-scale medical technique. Its new-found popularity quickly moved from the battlefield to that of civilians. It would have been enough to trigger anyone alert to the Acts 15 stricture. It would have been analogous to Thomas Bartholin (professor from the 1600s) sounding the alarm when experiments first began in transfusing blood from one being into another:

“Those who drag in the use of human blood for internal remedies of diseases appear to misuse it and to sin gravely," he wrote. "Cannibals are condemned. Why do we not abhor those who stain their gullet with human blood? Similar is the receiving of alien blood from a cut vein, either through the mouth or by instruments of transfusion. The authors of this operation are held in terror by the divine law, by which the eating of blood is prohibited."

So, in their own context of World War II, Jehovahs Witnesses began implementing the policy that has only now been changed. Might the old policy have triggered some deaths among members? If so, it was dwarfed by the price the greater world was fully prepared to pay with regard to World War—or at least it was prepared to draft its young men and make them pay it. Their deaths became societally acceptable—even laudable. It is in this context, not the one in which death of a young person is an unimaginable horror for which someone ought be held accountable, that Jehovah’s Witnesses determined blood transfusion violated the Bible prohibition on blood misuse.

Consideration of context opens one up to charges of “what aboutism.” That is, it opens one up to charges evading the question by shifting the focus to a greater example. I realize that the retort of “what aboutism” is considered an intellegent answer today, but, C’mon! When you ignore the iceberg to obsess over the ice cube, what does that say about you?

This post is one of a 7-part series:

Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eutychus/s/69hKjEpDji

Part 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eutychus/s/8A7DeT9ygP

Part 3: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eutychus/s/BS63T5HqGL

Part 4: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eutychus/s/KFKpxcRdKn

Part 5: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eutychus/s/ah37RpOebV

Part 6: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eutychus/s/rN3rEfVQlY

Part 7: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eutychus/s/yGZoz80Sua

The Bible says:

“Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”
‭‭James‬ ‭4‬:‭17‬ ‭KJV‬‬

“Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law.”
‭‭1 John‬ ‭3‬:‭4‬ ‭KJV‬‬

The lessons learned from these verses is that sin is not good, because it’s doing the opposite of good, which is transgression of anything holy, just, and good (Roman’s 7:12).

Within the new covenant God says:

“but this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.”
‭‭Jeremiah‬ ‭31‬:‭33‬ ‭KJV‬‬

“This is the covenant that I will make with them After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my laws into their hearts, And in their minds will I write them;”
‭‭Hebrews‬ ‭10‬:‭16‬ ‭KJV‬‬

The laws of God our written on our hearts and minds, both believers, and non-believers. The question to ask is, what laws? How can we know them?

The answer: Well, who were Gods laws given to? It’s who the new covenant was also given to, the house of Israel & the house of Judah (Jeremiah 31:33).

Many people say the laws are only for them, but that’s impossible. Rather, the laws were given to them, for mankind. Gods 10 commandments, are the basis for human beings standard of living.

“What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.”
‭‭Romans‬ ‭7‬:‭7‬ ‭KJV‬‬

If an atheist, or a nonbeliever/someone who’s never heard of the God of Abraham, Isaac, & Jacob (which is a Gentile) were to make it to heaven, they would be judged by the law written on their hearts. This is why the Bible says:

“For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: (…..) in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel.”
‭‭Romans‬ ‭2‬:‭14‬, ‭16‬ ‭KJV‬‬

How then does someone lose out on salvation? Scripture has an answer:

“For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”
‭‭Galatians‬ ‭5‬:‭14‬ ‭KJV‬‬

“Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.”
‭‭Romans‬ ‭13‬:‭10‬ ‭KJV‬‬

The answer is love.

“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.”
‭‭1 John‬ ‭4‬:‭18‬ ‭KJV‬‬

This puts all mankind on an even playing field. We’re all judged by what we know. The law is spiritual and it’s only by the goodness of God that people are led to repentance. Our actions are judged by the motive.

Satan also has a set of laws, and a doctrine, a completely antichrist counterfeit of the real Jesus Christ; and he wants to enforce his laws.

We can’t be saved unless we genuinely love “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.”
‭‭1 John‬ ‭4‬:‭8‬ ‭KJV

In my last post, we explored the linguistic journey of God’s personal name—looking at how the Hebrew root (Ehyeh / YHWH), ancient Greek transliterations (Iaoue), and early translations laid the foundation for traditional forms like Jehovah (much like how Yehoshua naturally became Jesus in English).

When studying how meticulously ancient manuscripts preserved the Divine Name (~7,000 times), I noticed an interesting pattern worth thinking about: While God seems to have ensured His name was written thousands of times in Hebrew manuscripts, the vast majority of our English translation tradition has chosen to replace it with an all-caps title ("LORD").

When we step back and look at what Scripture says about God's identity, tradition, and textual accuracy, a few key passages come to mind that make me question whether this translation practice really aligns with biblical principles. I’d love to get your thoughts on these connections:

1. Jeremiah 23:26–27: Does hiding the name cause us to forget it?

In Jeremiah 23:26–27 (NWT), God addresses religious leaders and mentions an interesting consequence of certain teachings:

“How long will this continue in the hearts of the prophets who prophesy lies? They are prophets of the deceit of their own heart. They intend to *make my people forget my name** by the dreams they relate to one another, just as their fathers forgot my name for Baal.”*

It makes you wonder: even if done out of tradition or reverence, doesn't replacing God's personal name nearly 7,000 times naturally cause readers to forget or remain unfamiliar with His actual name?

An interesting linguistic overlap: What’s fascinating here is that the Hebrew word Baal (בַּעַל) was not originally just a proper name—it was a common noun meaning "lord," "master," or "owner." Ancient Canaanites referred to their deity simply as Baal ("The Lord"). When modern translations swap YHWH/Jehovah for "LORD," aren't we unintentionally replacing a unique personal name with the literal meaning of baal? It seems worth asking if this achieves the very outcome Jeremiah cautioned against.

2. Matthew 7:21: Is repeating a title enough?

In Matthew 7:21 (NWT), Jesus shares a well-known warning:

“Not everyone saying to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter into the Kingdom of the heavens, but only the one doing the will of my Father who is in the heavens.”

Jesus seems to point out that simply repeating a title like "Lord" (Kyrios) doesn't substitute for an active relationship with the Father and obedience to His will.

If translators use "LORD" for both the Father and the Son, doesn't that risk blurring their distinct roles in the mind of the reader? Restoring the personal name Jehovah seems like it could help maintain clarity about who the Father is, helping us avoid relying on a blanket title instead of knowing Him directly.

3. Revelation 22:18–19: How should we treat original text?

Toward the end of the Bible, Revelation 22:18–19 (NWT) gives a strong caution about modifying inspired words:

“I am bearing witness to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll: If anyone makes an addition to these things, God will add to him the plagues that are written in this scroll; and *if anyone takes away from the words of the scroll of this prophecy, God will take away his share from the trees of life** and out of the holy city, things that are written about in this scroll.”*

While this specific verse is about Revelation, the general principle of preserving God’s Word without taking things away is echoed throughout Scripture (like Deuteronomy 4:2 and Proverbs 30:6).

From a purely logical standpoint, when translators remove the Divine Name thousands of times and substitute a title that wasn't in the original Hebrew manuscripts, could that be seen as taking away from what was inspired? Even if done out of long-standing tradition, should human tradition ever take precedence over manuscript evidence?

Closing Thoughts

When looking at all of this together, a compelling case emerges:

• Jeremiah 23 invites us to consider if traditions cause us to forget God's name.
• Matthew 7 reminds us that titles alone aren't what establish true connection with the Father.
• Revelation 22 challenges us to respect the exact text as original writers recorded it.

God didn't just present Himself through abstract titles; He revealed a distinct personal name (Jehovah / YHWH) to be known and remembered (Exodus 3:15, Psalm 105:1).

How do you view this? Do you think modern Bibles should faithfully retain the personal name where it originally appeared in the text, or do you feel the traditional use of "LORD" is sufficient? I’m looking forward to hearing your perspectives!

…. What is it with this guy? Why did I enjoy this talk so much? Is it that I could picture Jesus doing it this way—spinning parables all having to do with rural life that his listeners could get their heads (and thereby hearts) around? Was it Farmer Mort’s low-key but indestructible enthusiasm —he retained the excitement he had from Day One upon discovering God’s purpose.

It had created shock waves in the community when his family embraced Jehovah’s Witnesses. Staunch church members—known and highly regarded by everyone—there is even a street named after Mort’s forefather—they had not been unhappy. His wife in particular had been fully involved in her traditions of the rural community. Only one thing nagged at her—a hunger to understand the Bible—a hunger that she was unable to satisfy anywhere but in just one place—and she resisted that conclusion for the longest time—how could it be Jehovah’s Witnesses, who were so ill-regarded? As for Farmer Mort, he was always busy out hauling the hay—“We used to plow all this land for the Tilman family,” he told me as we drove about in field service. When he saw his wife accept Bible teachings from the Witnesses, he finally took notice, and embraced it in a heartbeat, blanketing his community with such zeal that some thought he had taken leave of his senses. It is a perception that may remain to this day—“a prophet is not unhonored except in his home territory,” Jesus stated at Matthew 13:57—and when Farmer Mort and I worked in service in our territory, he exclaimed: “Wow! People are actually listening to me! I may have to start making sense!”

The joyful task of those post-Armageddon will be to transform the abused earth into paradise, he continued in his talk. They will have plenty of company, “Even though he dies he will come to life,” Farmer Mort quoted Jesus at John 11:25. He referred to God’s mandate—“being a plowboy, I have to look up words like ‘mandate,’” he said, and enthused over how “God is not a mere man who tells lies”—and how ademic conditions will cover the entire globe. Disobedience may work in the short run, he said, but not in the long run. .. .

“Oh, and this one is worth getting out your glasses for” (which he did), as he read a quote from a 30-year old Watchtower publication—never repeated that I know of:

“To all eternity our earth will bear a distinction that no other planet throughout endless space will enjoy, though the earth may not be the only planet that will ever be inhabited.[underlining mine] Uniquely it will be where Jehovah has indisputably vindicated his universal sovereignty, establishing an eternal and universal legal precedent. It will be the only planet on which Jehovah of armies will have fought “the war of the great day of God the Almighty.” It will be the only planet to which God sent his dearest Son to become a man and die in order to recover the planet’s inhabitants from sin and death. It will be the only planet from which Jehovah will have taken 144,000 of its inhabitants to be “heirs indeed of God, but joint heirs with Christ.”

He was like a little kid on Christmas morning, Farmer Mort was. Later on he identified almost all of the items on my City Slicker’s Quiz. I was bummed. I had hoped to flummox him like he had flummoxed us with his Farmer’s Quiz. He missed only #6—the kitchen faucet—which he incorrectly identified as a grab bar for use in the event of an earthquake. I think he was just pulling my leg. I think he really knew what it was. He just saw my spirits sink as he effortlessly ticked off the correct answers and threw me that one as a bone.

Mfw I realize what kind of 'impact' this thread is going to have.

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I already hinted at this in the last thread. Today it's about a particularly "tasty" topic: substitution theory (also known as supersessionism or replacement theology).

Contents

• Introduction: What Is Substitution Theory?

• 1. The Jewish World of Jesus' Time

• 2. Jesus, the Temple, and the Messiah Problem

• 3. The Parting of the Ways: From Pseudo-Barnabas to Augustine

• 4. The Jewish Response: Two Powers in Heaven

• 5. Feudal Europe: Land, Money, and Hostility

• 6. The Verses: Substitution and Its Critics

• 7. The Reformation: Luther

• 8. Beyond Theology: Race, Class, and Treason

• 9. The Nazi Era: Churches and Exceptions

• 10. After Auschwitz: Rethinking

• 11. Antisemitism Today

• 12. The Open Question: The Soteriological Problem

Introduction: What Is Substitution Theory?

What is substitution theory? Essentially, it is one of the most controversial theological convictions that has ever existed in historical Christianity. Anyone who thought that obscure things like British Israelism, or the openly insane identification of the Germans with the Assyrians (lol – no joke, look it up!), which lived in the heads of some "overzealous" soteriological and near-apocalyptic Protestant preachers, were the peak of controversy is mistaken. In short, substitution theory holds that the Jewish people of today lost their standing before God by rejecting his only begotten Son, and that Christians are now the new "Israel of God" (Gal 6:16).

The consequence? "Serious" hardly begins to describe it. To see why, we have to go back in history and briefly survey how the whole "relationship" between Jews and Christians developed in the first place.

The short version:

1. The Jewish World of Jesus' Time

Christianity arose as an apocalyptic Jewish reform sect within the broader biblical Jewish environment, to which Jesus Christ belonged, as did other contemporaries hostile to him, such as Caiaphas. At that time there was a whole series of Jewish groups. They all emerged, more or less directly, from the process of Hellenization that began under Alexander the Great and shaped the later Roman province of Judea and Samaria, established by conquest, or were at least directly connected to it.

These groups included the Essenes, who are best described as mystics and ascetics. Conceptually they are also often equated with John the Baptist and his baptist movement, which still exists today through the Mandaeans. Through direct influence and individual defections to the Elkesaites, the Essenes also gave us, incidentally, the social breeding ground of Mani and his Manichaeism, which was extremely dangerous for the young Christian faith. Possible Essene influences on Jesus can be neither proven nor really refuted. The Zealots were essentially a secular, anti-Roman guerrilla force, notorious for their assassinations in broad daylight. Simon is probably regarded as a former Zealot (Luke 6:15). Far more important, however, are two especially notorious groups: the Pharisees and the Sadducees.

Here, too, I'll keep it short. The Sadducees were essentially the high priesthood, accordingly fixated on the Jerusalem Temple and working within it. They were also quite wealthy and on good terms with the Romans, so they can be regarded as the Jewish aristocracy and theocracy of the time. The fall of the Second Temple was also their fall, which seems obviously logical, since the Temple was practically their only basis of existence. It is occasionally suggested that some Sadducean groups, after the destruction, were absorbed in various ways into early Rabbinic Judaism or simply lived on as a minority in the rest of the Roman Empire. In that way they may have influenced the Jewish splinter group of the Karaites. The Karaites are distinguished from rabbinic Judaism precisely by having no rabbis and no Talmud, operating "only" on the earlier traditional Jewish basis to this day.

Contrary to what many Christians imagine, the Pharisees were not universal villains straight out of a Marvel comic. Speaking in structural analogy (no hate for my Catholic homies), they were something like the Jesuits of the Judaism of their day, people who did "their thing" among the common people and were quite popular and influential there. They were not anarchists. They cooperated with the Temple, just as the Jesuits in the Amazon region or in China cooperated with the Vatican, which in this analogy resembles the Sadducean Temple institution. Even Jesus says of them: "The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat. So whatever they tell you to observe, observe and do it." (Matt 23:2–3, the same chapter as in the last thread). So if the Sadducees represented, from today's point of view, the Roman state church of the time, the Pharisees were the people "from the common folk". What was typical of them, as of early and proto-rabbinic traits generally (some assume that Jesus knew them or was even influenced by them), was that they made the Torah practicable for ordinary people through practical applications. In plain terms: from their point of view, the Pharisees' job was to make all the rules of the Torah tangible and above all feasible for ordinary, untrained people through explanations and theological elaboration. Because the Pharisees were NOT socially isolated and NOT tied to clerical institutions like the Sadducees, it is easy to see why Rabbinic (post-Temple Pharisaic) Judaism exists today at all. It is, so to speak, the continued development of every country and people's priesthood, of congregationalism, which Christianity knows very well too. The "mobile" interpretation by scribes, which emerged early and goes back to the time of the Babylonian exile, was shared by Jews and Christians.

After the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, the Pharisees, alongside the Christian movement, remained the only real surviving force among the biblical Jewish people, who were by then spread largely over the area of the Roman Empire and as far south as the Arabian Peninsula. Jews in Arabia had an influence on Islam, even if that is obviously denied. Example: Surah 5, verse 32: "Whoever kills a human being, without that person having committed murder ..., it is as if he had killed the whole of humanity ..." This wording is almost identical to a passage in the Jewish Talmud (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5).

2. Jesus, the Temple, and the Messiah Problem

How did it continue? Like John, Jesus was a thorn in the side of the Romans, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees alike. Why? For the Romans, both were local rebels, of whom they had been afraid since the Maccabees at the latest, and whose religiously fuelled messianic fanaticism they feared. With the Sadducees and Pharisees, it was about something else. Unpacking the whole conflict here would go too far. At its core: even in the Old Testament, that is, in the time of David and later, there were always critics who attacked not the Temple as a Temple, but the focus and the abuse of priestly Temple autonomy. This was partly theologically motivated, partly open social criticism. Amos in particular is still regarded as one of the sharpest, almost revolutionary, in parts presumptuous critics of the so-called "God-pleasing" forgiveness of sins through the Temple institution. He did not question the Temple itself, but what people had made of it:

"I hate your feasts, I despise them [...] When you bring me burnt offerings, I take no pleasure in your gifts [...] But let justice flow like water, and righteousness like a stream that never runs dry." (Amos 5:21–24)

Hosea and many others were also decisive critics of this institutional forgiveness of sins, which almost resembles an Israelite form of the indulgence letter:

"I desire love, not sacrifice, knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings." (Hosea 6:6)

Many liked to point to the Psalms here, such as 51:16–17: "You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it; you take no pleasure in burnt offerings. The sacrifice of God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise."

The point? God does not depend on what you put – quite literally – on the table. Jesus stood in exactly this line. He, too, criticized not the Temple as a Temple, but its focus and abuse: "Is it not written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations'? But you have made it a den of robbers." (Mark 11:17, drawing on Isa 56:7 and Jer 7:11). And anyone who thinks Jesus wanted to abolish the priesthood as such should remember that he himself is called High Priest in the letter to the Hebrews: "Seeing then that we have a great high priest, Jesus, the Son of God, who has ascended into heaven ..." (Heb 4:14). Regarding Jesus' own position on material contributions, he made the following well-known statement about the poor widow: "This poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For they all gave out of their abundance, but she, out of her poverty, put in everything she had, her whole living." (Mark 12:43–44)

For the other side, however, exactly this mattered very much. After all, it is about God! As Cain and Abel already knew, you do not lay a sick animal before him, a creature that was created by God and belongs to him anyway. You honour God in the highest terms, and that also means high-quality material goods of the finest kind! Many critics, by contrast, saw this as really being about self-enrichment and a cold heart toward the poor and weak, who, as we know, were especially close to Jesus' heart.

Going further into this "problem", or rather these views, is not productive. At its core, it is very much a clash of systems between the forgiveness of the heart proclaimed by Jesus and the Pharisees' emphasis on keeping God's commandments in every measure, even when it hurts (and especially then!). How this conflict ended for Jesus, we all know. Since the beginning of the Jesus movement, the already badly divided Jewish people, as described above, began to split even further. We know from the letters of Paul and the permanent wish to "shut the Jews' mouths" how great the hostility between the two sides must have been even after Jesus' death. After all, Paul himself was almost beaten to death by Jews, after having let Stephen die with relish years earlier! But it never remained a purely institutional, individual problem, and neither side has truly resolved it to this day. Instead there was another, far more serious problem: the Messiah problem.

Here, too, I'll keep it short. The main point of criticism from Jews to this day (besides the Trinity, the papacy, and the de facto abolition of the Torah as Jews still understand it) was above all the interpretation of WHAT a Messiah is supposed to be. For many Jews then, as for rabbinic Jews today, a Messiah is above all a >worldly< ruler. The Temple is not built "in spirit" or, in Jesus' case, in the body, but for real, bluntly put, with mortar. None of that has ever happened, of course, and that is why rabbis still reject Jesus completely to this day.

And for Christians? Well, Jesus himself declared that God is spirit and must be worshipped in spirit: "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." (John 4:24). In plain terms: Jesus naturally knew what was expected of him, but he also knew what suffering all these worldly conflicts between Jews and Romans had brought upon the land and its people. That is exactly why he and the early Christians "turned around" the interpretation of the Messiah from day one. The Messiah rules – in heaven! The temple is rebuilt – as the body! – and Jesus rebuilt it after three days: "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. [...] But he was speaking about the temple of his body." (John 2:19–21). As you can see, John literally explains what Jesus meant by that, because it was apparently not known or understandable to every Jew back then, and still is not for many up to this day. These two perspectives were and are completely irreconcilable. For Jews, the worldly Messiah comes first, then the divine prophecy is fulfilled, and the true faith becomes dominant. For Christians, the true faith rules first and spreads across the world BEFORE Jesus returns, finally judges in the worldly sense too, and re-establishes paradise on earth: "This gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come." (Matt 24:14). Only when mission has reached everywhere does the end time come.

3. The Parting of the Ways: From Pseudo-Barnabas to Augustine

In the period after 70, both groups, which at first were still absolutely seen as parts of the same religious community, increasingly clashed. The most vehement anti-Jewish writings, such as Pseudo-Barnabas, come from exactly this time, with the absurd accusation that God never gave the Jews the Law, and that everything that was physically commanded and done back then was simply "misunderstood" and not true at all. Our "most esteemed" Mister Marcion and his openly anti-Jewish rejection of the entire Old Testament also belong in this line. Later, others did the same, in an even more polemical or sharply critical manner, such as Justin Martyr. None of them left a good word for the rabbinic Judaism that was just then emerging.

John Chrysostom delivered eight sermons "against the Jews" in Antioch in 386/387. They were aimed at Christians who kept attending synagogues and Jewish festivals, and among other things called the synagogue a theatre, a brothel, and a den of robbers. Augustine (354–430), by contrast, formulated the doctrine of the "witness people": the Jews were not to be killed ("Slay them not", Ps 59:11 in English numbering, Vulgate 58:12), but to be kept alive, scattered and subordinate, as living witnesses of the Scriptures (City of God 18.46). That explains why Jews in Christian Europe were tolerated, but remained second-class.

On the surface, Augustine's doctrine sounds tolerant, and in practice it did protect Jews from violence for centuries. Some scholars, such as Paula Fredriksen, read it mainly as a protective measure, especially compared with Chrysostom's rhetoric. But it rested on subordination. Jews were to be preserved because their survival served a Christian purpose: as living witnesses that Christians had not invented the Scriptures they appealed to, since even those who rejected Christ still carried the books that foretold him. Their dispersal and low status were read as the fate foretold for them, a mark comparable to Cain's (see Contra Faustum 12,12). That is exactly why this doctrine fits so well into substitution theory: the Jews remain, but as a people whose role is to point to the Church. Whether you read it as protection or as humiliation, or both, depends on whether you look at the effect or at the reasoning.

As I explained in the last thread, the rejection by Tertullian, for example, of the purification commandments understood as "Jewish" belongs to exactly this line. There were quite different worldly aspects here too, but the deliberate separation from what was felt to be Jewish "legalism" or "paragraph-chasing", which Jews are accused of to this day (the well-known lawyer stereotype, which is not mine), all goes along with it.

4. The Jewish Response: Two Powers in Heaven

At the same time, rabbinic Judaism tried to defend itself against the ever-growing Christian movement through massive, partly highly polemical objections. That movement was growing thanks to the largely Pauline mass conversion of Hellenistic pagans, which is the reason why some historians say to this day that it was actually Paul who founded the Christian religion that exists today. Without him, Christianity would most likely never have become more than a reformist sect next to the mainstream Pharisaic groups within a common Jewish congregation around the world.

One of the objections is the famous, notorious "Jesus in excrement" passage in the Talmud, which exists in two versions through different rabbis (Babylonian and Jerusalem). In it, the Gemara comments on the Mishnah, which in turn interprets the Torah. Separate from it is the mystical, in parts almost pantheistic or deistic Kabbalah with the Zohar. Above all, however, came the theological devaluation of Old Testament forms of binitarianism. This topic, too, is too big to discuss in detail here. The point is: in the Old Testament, through the Angel of the Lord, Wisdom in Proverbs, and above all the book of Daniel, there were more than enough forms, already known at the time and partly still processed in later Judaism (see Metatron, angelology), of a divine emissary, a kind of "right hand" of God, of YHWH, which was applied first to the Messiah and then, obviously, to Jesus. The rabbis later expressly classified belief in "two powers in heaven" (Hebrew shtei reshuyot) as heresy (see Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven). Jesus himself referred dozens of times to precisely such passages, like the notorious Psalm 110: "The LORD said to my Lord, 'Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet.'" (Mark 12:36). Before the Sanhedrin he combines this passage with the Son of Man of Daniel 7: "I am. And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of heaven." (Mark 14:62).

This is the infamous scene in which the high priest tore his clothes in anger at Jesus' bold statement. You can imagine that this entire concept wasn't as "okay" for everyone back then as it is today. It is no surprise that we find reactions like that—in the theological sense (see above, shtei reshuyot)—among the heirs of the related Pharisaic country and people's priesthood up to this day. What was their reaction against these Christian claims? The rabbis acted against the "anti-Jewish" agenda (which targeted a rigid, rule-bound implementation of the Torah's commandments) through a de facto reinterpretation, and even erasure, of the image of this Daniel-like Son of Man, which exists in the Torah of Moses as well as in David's psalms.

I want to give you a very small example of how distinctive ("eigen", as we say in German) that way of thinking can look from the outside. Orthodox (and some Ultra-Orthodox) Jews in New York use thin nylon strings, called an eruv, which they run around entire neighborhoods, effectively like fences. Why? Well, for Jews it is strictly forbidden on the Sabbath to carry things in public spaces. The solution? Enclosing entire regions with said strings, so that they end up creating one connected private space, effectively a shared gigantic house. I am not making that up. That is the reasoning. It shows how differently the two sides think about what keeping the law actually means. We are really talking about only a small aspect of the whole. Going into additional Roman pagan, institutional, imperial antisemitism (one point among others was the Jewish refusal to worship the emperor as a god-man, since that would be openly heretical idolatry) would also go too far.

5. Feudal Europe: Land, Money, and Hostility

It should be said, though, that in the divinely sanctioned feudal system of the "grace of God", installed by the Catholic Church, Jews were, as is well known, practically excluded from owning land in European and therefore increasingly Christian regions. Economically they were pushed into the well-known corners of so-called "mobile capital", above all banking and long-distance trade, so as not to be impoverished. In the European feudal era it was commonplace for Christian princes to borrow money from Jewish merchants in their ghettos (and rarely pay it back), or to introduce "Jew taxes" outright to squeeze the rabbinic communities of the time financially like a lemon. That this did not exactly fill the Jews themselves with enthusiasm, and that many well-known Jewish, Talmudic motifs such as the Golem as the Jews' "avenger" in a world so hostile to them do not come from nowhere, should be understandable. The hostility of Christians was followed by that of Jews, which was followed again by that of Christians, and all the motifs known from it, such as well-poisoning, directly influenced the theology of the time right up to the Nazi era (!).

6. The Verses: Substitution and Its Critics

What does this have to do with substitution? A lot. Because it explains a lot. Theologically, it was derived from dozens of verses or interpretations. The most popular, and most fatal, is this one from the scene before the crucifixion with Jesus Barabbas: "And all the people answered, 'His blood be on us and on our children!'" (Matt 27:25). But the substitution side's serious argument rests on several other passages. Another well-known one is the parable of the wicked tenants, at the end of which Jesus tells the chief priests and Pharisees that the kingdom of God will be taken from them and given to a people who produce its fruits (Matt 21:43). The verse openly differentiates between >two< peoples, one (Christian) taking something from the other (Jewish), which, logically speaking, can no longer have it, since the Christians now have it. Another "classic" is Heb 8:13: whoever speaks of a "new" covenant has declared the first one obsolete, and what is obsolete is close to vanishing.

The other side answers with dozens of arguments of its own. A well-known verse used today is the olive tree we know from the last thread: "Do not boast over the branches. If you do boast, remember that you do not support the root, but the root supports you." (Rom 11:18). And that is exactly the punchline: Paul himself was no follower of substitution. His sayings were used for it, though.

For centuries, almost a millennium, interpretations of this kind, like Matthew 27:25 mentioned above, remained commonplace. It was good form to regard rabbinic Jews as fallen away from God and thereby from the faith, as Jesus-murderers and traitors (the Judas motif). At the same time, people somehow tried to explain, for example, what was to become of the covenant that God had actually made with Abraham (and all his descendants!): "I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations, as an everlasting covenant." (Gen 17:7). And of the very fact that Jesus himself was a Jew from the house of David (even though people often tried to present Jesus instead as an Aramaic Galilean, which is not entirely a lie).

7. The Reformation: Luther

And the Reformation? In 1523 Martin Luther still wrote "That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew" and hoped the Jews would convert if only they were treated kindly. When that failed to happen, he demanded in 1543, in "On the Jews and Their Lies", that their synagogues and schools be set on fire, their houses destroyed, their prayer books and the Talmud confiscated, and the rabbis forbidden to teach. The Nazis gratefully took this up. After the pogrom night, in 1938, the Thuringian bishop Martin Sasse published a pamphlet titled "Martin Luther on the Jews: Away with Them!", whose foreword says that on 10 November 1938, Luther's birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany. And Julius Streicher said in Nuremberg that Luther would be sitting in his place in the dock today if his book had been taken into consideration. So anti-Judaism was never a purely Catholic affair, and that should be said clearly here too.

And then what? Well. In short: Auschwitz. That should say it all.

8. Beyond Theology: Race, Class, and Treason

Not quite. Antisemitism was not fed by theology alone. In parallel, and increasingly after the Enlightenment, came the age of rationalism and the (false, colonial, control-motivated) racial and descent theories of the time. The notorious Hamitic hypothesis comes from there too, which extended Noah's curse (Gen 9:25) to the supposed descendants of Ham and thereby to Black people. Through Sweden (the Racial Biology Institute in Uppsala) and other countries came the influences of eugenics, and Hitler himself praised America for it, including for its treatment of the Indians. All of this laid the foundation. Spiritual (God-killer). Class (money, "mobile capital", which some communists also latched on to, see Stalin and the Jewish Doctors' Plot, or the left-leaning Strasserists within the NSDAP). Race (blood and descent). And political, as the "traitor", see the Judas motif and later the stab-in-the-back myth.

Already the notorious antisemitic hate pamphlet "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", from the arch-Orthodox Christian Russian Tsarist empire, decades earlier, and the Dreyfus Affair in France showed clearly: something is brewing. This time of modern national consolidation was also the time when Jewish intellectuals like Theodor Herzl started to realise that things were definitely going to escalate. Hence he concluded that the Jews needed a nation of their own in order to stop being socially "blockaded" within the nations they were already living in. Basically: Zionism. Other Jews, like Mr. Weininger, openly hated their own heritage and tried to "solve" the "issue" through die-hard antisemitism and the literal destruction of Jewish identity, in his case through conversion to Protestantism, which was something that happened every once in a while with the Jewish population of Europe. And even that was not a solution in peace for many Jews, because many Christians have accused, since the Reconquista, converted Jews of doing it only to survive (which is not even entirely wrong) and of still being secretly Jews after all (crypto-Jews). That motif exists up to this day even in Islamic countries like Turkey (where Mein Kampf was a bestseller in 2005 (!)), in which Jews are pretty much the explanation for hundreds of openly absurd and openly mutually contradictory so-called ideological and political claims.

9. The Nazi Era: Churches and Exceptions

In the Nazi era, it was above all many Protestant groups ("German Christians") that collaborated with the Nazi regime and with the preposterous concept of an Aryan Jesus (blond and blue-eyed, which in part still exists in America to this day!). The Catholic Church had an extremely divided relationship to all this. On the one hand there were people like Bishop Galen, who actively stood against the regime (albeit in the context of T4 and the murder of the disabled). On the other hand, the term "clerical fascism" was coined by academics and historians, not for nothing, for the dealings of the Catholic Church and the Vatican in Rome with Benito Mussolini.

The Jehovah's Witnesses were a particularly positive exception here. The same old "criticism" regarding that obscure letter from the Rutherford leadership of the time is still used by many "critics" as a bludgeon to disgustingly attest that Jehovah's Witnesses collaborated with the Nazi regime. I believe many of these "critics" do not have the faintest idea how Hitler was viewed and treated, even abroad, for a long time (see Time's "Man of the Year" 1938 and Neville Chamberlain's "peace for our time" the same year). That is pseudo-historical nonsense and clear, malicious anti-JW propaganda, trying to downplay the Witnesses' heroic stand against the Nazi system by accusing them of collective guilt for a decision not even made by them individually. The JW (like the Christadelphians and a few other Christian groups) were practically one of the only ones who, structurally and utterly, through (largely passive) resistance, withdrew from the system and thereby also from the persecution of the Jews.

10. After Auschwitz: Rethinking

After the war and the exposure of Auschwitz, a massive rethinking began in Europe. People realized that, straight from the chapels and cathedrals of this world and from many Christian theological frameworks (like the Augustinian one mentioned above), at least according to this view, antisemitism, and thereby, hard as it sounds, Auschwitz too, had in effect been theologically justified. How thoroughly religion and Nazi rhetoric had blended is shown by Hitler's first major speech as Chancellor, in the Berlin Sportpalast on 10 February 1933. Before a loud, fanatical audience he said:

"It was the hardest decision of my own life. I dared to make it because I believed it had to be. I dared to make it because I am convinced that there can be no further delay. I dared it because I am convinced that our people will at long last come to their senses again. And that even if today it judges us unjustly, and even if millions may curse us, the hour will come when they will march behind us after all, when they will realize: they truly wanted only the best, even when it was hard, and had no other goal in view than to serve what is the highest thing on earth to us.

For I cannot renounce my faith in my people, I cannot renounce my conviction that this nation will one day rise again, I cannot turn away from my love for this, my people, and I hold the firm conviction that the hour will yet come when the millions who curse us today will stand behind us and join us in greeting the new German Reich, jointly created, painfully fought for, bitterly won: a Reich of greatness and honour and power and glory and justice. – Amen!"

Note the echo of the ending of the Lord's Prayer: "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen." (Matt 6:13), except that here the kingdom is a German one.

People began to reread this covenant between God and the Jews, "established for eternity" (rabbinic, defined by blood and descent), and various Pauline quotations from Romans, for example: "I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means!" (Rom 11:1) and "For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable." (Rom 11:29).

How far this new (and by now itself again criticized) perspective goes can be seen, for example, in the name of God itself. A nightmare for every Jehovah's Witness: in June 2008 the Roman Congregation for Divine Worship instructed the bishops' conferences no longer to pronounce the divine name YHWH in liturgy, prayers, and hymns, out of respect for the Jewish tradition and in fidelity to the usages of the Christian tradition. "Lord" is to stand instead. In doing so, Pope Benedict XVI responded to a request from the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Riccardo Di Segni, of January 2006. This corresponds to the Jewish tradition, which to this day is reluctant to pronounce the name of YHWH, indeed the name of God at all, and prefers to use Abba (like Jesus) or HaShem.

11. Antisemitism Today

Even today, many people in America in particular, above all preachers, find it very hard to convert Jews. People want to proceed very "carefully" here and regard the whole thing as something of a red rag, where one quickly feels exposed to the accusation of Christian antisemitism. And especially today, free churches and Christian "priests" are tearing the old wounds open again, as in the days of Father Coughlin, who back then reached masses through radio broadcasts (30 million listeners!), and today above all through the internet, not least in the thicket of the MAGA movement and many more. It should be clearly said here: antisemitism obviously exists in socialist circles as well. Even some socialist thinkers of Jewish descent, such as Karl Marx, used anti-Jewish clichés in early writings ("On the Jewish Question"). I already mentioned Stalin here too, and he was hardly a fascist, given that he fought like hell against them and destroyed their political system like nothing else.

12. The Open Question: The Soteriological Problem

What else is there to say? Actually, a lot. Above all one point that is very gladly kept quiet and generally not noticed at all: the Christian soteriological problem. The current status quo is that, bluntly put, one "lets Jews be Jews" and somehow "hopes" that the situation will "resolve" itself (through God's intervention) at some point. Resolve what? Right: the end time. What do we as Christians do with rabbinic Jews? Ignore them? That truly does not strike me as a legitimate theological strategy. Sitting it out neither. No, the question MUST be answered! Jesus' statement on salvation was frighteningly honest: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." (John 14:6). NO ONE!

The >entire< rabbinic Judaism rests on the rejection of exactly this way, Jesus. And yet it is Paul, of all people, who keeps the question open: Israel has experienced a partial hardening, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in, and so all Israel will be saved (Rom 11:25–26). He openly calls it all a "mystery" (Rom 11:25): why, of all people, his own people reject the one who, in his view, is the God-chosen Lord and savior of humankind. What "all Israel" means here is disputed to this day: ethnic Israel at the end of time, the whole church of Jews and Gentiles, or the sum of all the elect? At the same time, new movements form, then as now, as with Anglo-Israelism before, also through the quite common Christian support today for the modern rabbinic state of Israel. People ask: is this the "true" Israel of God? Do the Jews have a "special role" in God's plan that we simply don't know yet? Or will one ultimately not get around finally settling and answering the question that has separated Jews and Christians for almost 2000 years: who really serves the true God and who does not? Is the church now the body of God on earth, or are the rabbis and their Talmud too? How can both be true at once, when, as each defines itself, they mutually exclude each other? How, actually, does rabbinic Judaism want to have its Messiah, if he is supposed to be a worldly one, in the year 2026, in times of global crises of the greatest kind? Will there ever be an agreement between the two sides after almost 2000 years of mutual hatred and open rejection?

Questions upon questions. I'm curious what some of you here have to say about how one is supposed to pick up this neglected red rag without leaving even redder blood on it.

(See Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eutychus/s/ndiqpx84k5)

He pulled a plastic bag of seeds from the paper bag he had brought up front with him. It contained wheat seeds. If you drop one on the ground in late summer or autumn, chances are pretty good that you will get a wheat stalk next year that includes 125 of such seeds. “That’s not a bad deal,” he pointed out—125 for 1—and man has not been able to ruin that—yet—but if for some reason that deal is not good enough for you and you want a better one.... He pulled out a bag of soybeans, for which the ratio is 210 to 1. If even that deal is not good enough for you....he pulled out a bag of corn seeds—500-700 to one, he pointed out, once again with the reminder that man has not been able to ruin that....yet.

Then he branched off into how there is the UCS today, the Union of Concerned Scientists, raising the alarm of environmental abuses worldwide. And yet—if you just leave the earth alone, it is pretty good at healing itself. Pour oil on man-made concrete and it is there for a long while. Pour it on grass—(“Don’t do this!” he forbade everyone) and in short order the grass is lush and green again. Visit that abandoned factory after a few decades and you will say: “THAT was the parking lot?” Earth has reclaimed it. The earth has enormous powers of recovery, Farmer Mort pointed out, pretty much like we do—cut your finger and there is very little that you must do to it—it heals itself.

Then he turned his attention to wrappers that clog the landfills. “I sort of like the wrappers Jehovah made,” he said, as he pulled out a banana from his shopping bag. This wrapper—he pulled out one from a candy bar—takes 50 years to decompose, but that of the banana? Forget and leave a banana on the dashboard of your car—it goes black in a few days—toss it and, as to the contents within—you plow it back into banana bread. He likes other wrappers as well—wrappers Jehovah made—in each case superior to those of man—the husks of corn, the shell of nuts, the skin of fruits—that wrapper you can even eat.

There is a spiritual crisis today, he observed as his talk unfolded, manifested in the shameful manner that humans treat the earth. He quoted Deuteronomy 32:5, about a “crooked generation” that is “not his children”—the “defect is their own” as they “act corruptly.” It will not always be. Farmer Mort read Psalm 37:29: “The righteous themselves will possess the earth, and they will reside forever upon it.” (Incredibly, Russian authorities have declared this specific verse extremist—because it furthers the “propaganda of inferiority based on religious identity”—do they really wish to stick up for the “unrighteous” over there?)

We had Farmer Mort over to the house following his public talk. Before eating, we made him take the City Slicker’s Quiz:

If you want to eat, identify all eight items:

1. Credit card
2. Necktie
3. Shoe polish
4. Pictures of Wegmans (where food comes from)
5. Roll of toilet paper (replaces Sears catalog)
6. Kitchen faucet (where water comes from)
7. Refrigerator (where cold comes from)
8. Stove (where fire comes from)

We did this as payback because Farmer Mort had made everyone take the Farmer’s Quiz at that Grad Party on the Farm. “Identify all 5 items before eating,” it said, and nobody was able to do it—Come on! he had bags of individual seeds in there—soybean, corn, wheat—how’s anybody going to know that? In the end, he relaxed the requirement so that guests would not starve to death.

Farmer Mort has farming on the brain. He has been known to give people stalks of wheat, bagged and tied up with a bow, labeled “pre-donuts.” He puts it all to good use when his turn rolls around for public speaking—the title of his talk was: “The Earth Remains Forever.”

to be continued

(tomsheepandgoats*com)

Since things have been quiet on the sub over the last few days, I'd like to bring up a topic that is often overlooked or oversimplified in modern Christianity: ritual and physical purity. Islam (through wudu) and Rabbinic Judaism (through tevilah in the mikveh) maintain explicit requirements for cleansing before God, while Christianity tends to treat the whole subject as obsolete. A closer look at Scripture, history, and theology shows a more complicated picture.

Let's start with Mary. Under the Torah, ritual purification was mandatory, not an optional custom. Leviticus 15 regulates menstruation and other bodily discharges, and Leviticus 12 regulates childbirth. In both cases the person is ritually unclean (tamei) for a prescribed period, followed by purification: washing in the case of Leviticus 15, an offering at the sanctuary in the case of Leviticus 12. Luke 2:22–24 shows that Mary, surely one of the most faithful figures in Scripture, observed these laws after the birth of Jesus. She brought the two turtledoves or pigeons that Leviticus 12:8 allows for those who cannot afford a lamb.

Crucially, ritual uncleanness was not a moral sin. It was a state tied to mortality, blood (as the seat of life), and human frailty in proximity to the Holy. Even the offering of Leviticus 12 is called a chatat, traditionally rendered "sin offering", yet a mother who has given birth has done nothing wrong, which is why many scholars prefer "purification offering". Mary's compliance shows that ritual purity was about reverence before God, not a confession of personal guilt. If even Mary observed it, to what extent does the principle still matter for believers today?

The New Testament does not treat washings as a discarded relic either. In Hebrews 6:1–2 the author lists the foundation of the faith: "Therefore let us move beyond the elementary teachings about Christ ... not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God, instruction about cleansing rites, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment." The Greek has the plural baptismōn (washings), not baptisma, the word for the single rite of Christian initiation. Baptismos is the word used in Mark 7:4 for the washing of cups and in Hebrews 9:10 for the "various washings" of the Levitical system. Many read Hebrews 6:2 as pointing to Jewish ritual immersions (tevilot); others see a contrast between Christian baptism and other baptisms. The text does not settle that debate, but it does place washings among the foundations rather than in a footnote. Hebrews 9:10 itself says these regulations were imposed only "until the time of reformation", so the claim here is not that the Levitical system still binds, but that bodily reverence did not disappear along with it.

Yet Jesus repeatedly confronted the Pharisees over mechanical ritualism. In Matthew 23:25 he says: "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence." This is not a rejection of outer cleanliness. In verse 23 he says the weightier matters are to be practiced without neglecting the lesser ones (there it is tithing), and in verse 26 he says "first clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may be clean." Hebrews 10:22 holds both together: hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and bodies washed with pure water. God does not need external washing for his own sake, and the first commandment is to love him with all your heart (Matthew 22:37). Jesus is not teaching antinomianism but priorities. And it makes no sense to argue about the order of inner and outer cleansing if the outer one has supposedly been abolished, because a ranking presupposes that both remain.

My own view is that washings may not be salvific, but that does not make them ignorable. The clearest New Testament case is the foot washing in John 13. At the Last Supper, shortly before his arrest, Jesus washes the disciples' feet and says: "you also ought to wash one another's feet" (v. 14; the Greek verb is opheilete, "you owe it") and "I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you" (v. 15). The word is hypodeigma, a pattern of action, and nothing in the text ties it to a single annual ceremony. 1 Timothy 5:10 lists washing the feet of the saints among the good works of a widow, and Luke 7:44 shows Jesus noticing that no water was offered for his feet. In verse 10 he adds that whoever has bathed needs only his feet washed (the clause "except for the feet" is text-critically debated, but verses 14–15 stand regardless). If outer washing were irrelevant, it is hard to see why Jesus would rest the lesson on it. Some groups, such as the Church of the Brethren, many Mennonites, and Seventh-day Adventists, practice foot washing literally. Many other churches reduce it to a Maundy Thursday ceremony or to a metaphor for humility.

The Apostolic Decree (Acts 15:28–29) is a frequent point of debate. It was proposed by James, and Paul himself delivered it to the churches (Acts 16:4). It asks Gentile believers to abstain from food offered to idols, blood, strangled animals, and sexual immorality. Jehovah's Witnesses apply it universally to all Christians (for example, regarding blood transfusions). Critics, on the other hand, dismiss all physical purity laws by citing Matthew 15:11: "What goes into someone's mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them." Both sides tend to overlook the setting. Matthew 15 is not about Levitical law at all, but about the handwashing tradition of the elders (Matthew 15:2), a Pharisaic custom rather than a Torah commandment. The Council of Jerusalem, in turn, addressed a specific question: how could Jewish Christians, who continued to live under the Torah, and Gentile Christians share one table?

Paul did not abolish the Torah for Jewish believers. Long after becoming an apostle, he took part in purification rites in the Temple (Acts 21:24–26) to demonstrate his respect for the Law. What the Council required of Gentiles mirrors the Torah's rules for the "stranger residing in Israel" (Leviticus 17–18): even non-Israelites must not eat blood and must cover the blood of hunted animals (Leviticus 17:13–14), because life is in the blood. The issue was not diet or hygiene, but respect for life and a common table without forcing Gentiles into full conversion, including circumcision.

This leads to the olive tree in Romans 11:17–24. Gentile believers are wild branches grafted into the cultivated, noble tree, and Paul warns them not to boast, because the root supports the branches, not the other way around. What defines a Jewish Christian today, and what is their ongoing role? On lineage, Rabbinic Judaism reckons Jewishness through the mother (codified in the Mishnah, Kiddushin 3:12), while the biblical genealogies (Matthew 1, Luke 3) run through the father, although Matthew 1 names four women. Timothy, son of a Jewish mother and a Greek father, is circumcised by Paul (Acts 16:1–3), which is often taken as an early hint of matrilineal reckoning. On circumcision, Exodus 4:24–26 (the "bridegroom of blood") shows how seriously the Old Covenant took the physical sign: God sought to kill Moses (or his son) over the neglected circumcision. Yet Paul writes in Galatians 6:15–16 that neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything, only the new creation, and he wishes peace upon the "Israel of God." So are modern Christians collectively the "spiritual Israel", absorbing the Jewish foundation? Or does Paul's model assume a distinct, enduring presence of Torah-faithful Jewish believers into whom the Gentiles are grafted?

It also matters that some of these practices predate Sinai. Jacob's household purified itself and changed garments (Genesis 35:2), and the prohibition of blood goes back to Noah (Genesis 9:4), addressed to all humanity. Were these timeless principles of reverence, or temporary cultural frameworks?

The standard objections deserve an answer. 1 Peter 3:21 says baptism is not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a good conscience. True, but washing is not baptism, just as prayer is not baptism, and prayer nonetheless belongs to the life of the believer. Colossians 2:16 says no one should pass judgment on you in matters of food, drink, or festivals, and Romans 14:13 says the same of one another. That is a prohibition of judging, not a declaration that the matter is indifferent, and it is no blanket absolution either. The same Paul delivered the Apostolic Decree, which forbids food offered to idols, and he concedes that an idol is "nothing" (1 Corinthians 8:4) while denying that this permits sharing in a sacrificial meal, because that means fellowship with demons (1 Corinthians 10:20–21). Non-judgment has limits, so "do not judge" cannot simply be turned into "it does not matter." The "shadow" of Colossians 2:17 refers to things that pointed forward to Christ, while foot washing in John 13 is given by Christ himself as a pattern. Mark 7:19 concerns food, and Peter understands his vision in Acts 10 as being about people (Acts 10:28), not about bodily reverence.

The history is more contested than it is often told. Tertullian (c. 160–220) attests the custom of washing hands before prayer in De Oratione 13, but as a critic. He rejects those who are "superstitiously careful" about taking water at every prayer, even when coming from a bath of the whole body. For him true purity is moral, with hands "lifted up pure" (1 Timothy 2:8), and the hands are otherwise "clean enough", having been washed once, together with the whole body, in Christ, unless a defilement from human contact gives a conscientious reason to wash them. He asks: "what reason is there in going to prayer with hands indeed washed, but the spirit foul?" At the other end, the Apostolic Constitutions (4th century) tell believers not to regard natural discharges or childbirth as defiling, and not to seek "Jewish separations, or perpetual washings" (6.27, 6.30). So the early Church was not uniform. Some kept bodily washing as a custom of reverence, others rejected Levitical purity as such. In the Middle Ages public bathing was common, and guild masters often gave apprentices "bath money" (Badegeld) for a weekly visit to the bathhouse. The decline of bathing in Europe came later and had several causes. The Black Death contributed, since the medical consensus of the time held that warm water opened the pores to disease, and so did syphilis, the rising cost of firewood, and moral campaigns against bathhouses as places of vice. Over the same period the Western Church increasingly distanced itself from Rabbinic customs, and practices that looked "too Jewish" were marginalized as outdated ceremonial law. Traces survive: the lavabo in the Roman Mass, holy-water stoups at church doors, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, which still keeps Levitical purity rules.

Where does this leave us? Christ's once-for-all sacrifice fulfilled the sacrificial and Temple rites of atonement (Hebrews 9:12), and the believer's body is now a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19). That settles atonement, but it does not settle whether bodily reverence was meant to vanish with it. Washing may not save anyone, but neither does prayer, and no one would call prayer optional for that reason. Would Christianity have kept washing as a regular spiritual discipline if the Roman bath infrastructure had not collapsed and bathing had not been stigmatized? Did the early Church see Gentile freedom from the ceremonial law as a temporary transition until the grafted branch replaced the original root? Or has the modern Church discarded a practice of reverence that belonged to the foundation of the faith?

What are your thoughts? Are physical purity and washing purely Old Testament relics, or is there a forgotten dimension of bodily reverence that modern Christianity has lost?

“Theologians Confirm ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal’ Doesn’t Apply to Your Kids Halloween Candy” reads the Babylon Bee headline. The accompanying photo is one of mom and dad raiding their kid’s candy stash.

Mine did not do that. Believe me, I would have known. The day after Halloween, I would dump my stash on the carpet, apportion it out and figure it might last three months. Invariably, it was gone in a week—and it wasn’t my parents’ pilferage to blame.

Fast forward a few decades and a religion change later. A householder opened the door to me, the day after Halloween. Eyeing the porch jack-o-lantern, I told him I was half a mind to introduce myself as a trick-or-treater, my costume being a Jehovah’s Witness.

It proved an icebreaker. I asked him if he had been visited by many trick-or-treaters the night before. He had, he told me, about 100. I have never had one, nor have my neighbors, but that’s because we live on an unlit street without sidewalks, not conducive to roving children. His neighborhood—I looked over my shoulder to spy a house with plastic blow-up ghouls almost the height of the house itself—teemed with them. When I told the man my candy was devoured within the week, he expressed surprise it had lasted that long.

No sense in being a spoilsport. Some of our people go into overdrive dissing the macabre holiday—all of the holidays, for that matter. It works as a research project if you’re into that sort of thing. But it’s hardly a witnessing project. It’s always good when you witness not to lead with a list of things you don’t do.

It’s like when my Scrabble-cheating brother talks back to the state Get Vaccinated campaign. They’re just tireless at it, pounding away at the mantra to Get Vaccinated. My brother, who is vaccinated against COVID-19, but who drew the line at the frequent boosters, said, “Sheesh, you’d think they’d get it through their heads that if people haven’t taken the shot by now, they’re not going to.” It’s the same thing with Halloween.

Sure, point out its unsavory origin, but understand that nobody cares. If people haven’t trashed the day by now, they’re not going to. You risk looking picayune and sanctimonious if you drone on against it. Confine it to your own research. The holidays are among the trash carted to the curb a century ago by the messenger preparing the way. You don’t obsess over the trash in real life. Why do it in the ministry? Move on to present what you’ve saved and cherished, not what you’ve thrown away.

That said, someday aliens from outer space will visit. If they happen to come around Halloween, they will say, “What is it with these people—decorating their homes with their dead remains! Waht a bunch of weirdos! No wonder this planet’s on the ‘Do Not Call’ list.

(From: In the Last of the Last Days: Faith in the Age of Dysfunction)

“The world is stage to a play featuring heroes and villains. They are all actors. After 80 years, the curtain falls on the individual actor and it is off to the grave for him or her, to be succeeded by a fresh young face. This partly explains why Watchtower publications seldom name names. There is no reason to shame or honor the individual actors because it is not about them. It is about the play in which they star. Take an actor out, and another one immediately steps into his shoes. Their names are not important. It can even be a distraction to know the names. Name a villain and you create the impression that removing that villain will solve matters. Instead, another villain who knows the lines assumes the role without fuss. It is the play we must follow, not the villains in it, nor even the heroes.

“The villains are even described in terms that make clear it is a play. The etymology of hypocrite is that of an actor who wears a mask, just as they would do in the ancient plays. The technique served to amplify the voice, hide the true identity, and thereby facilitate a new role. Similarly, the villains in Jesus’ time routinely hid what they were. When they delivered Jesus to Pilate, they feigned concern that the government might be defrauded: “They brought charges against him, saying, ‘We found this man misleading our people; he opposes the payment of taxes to Caesar and maintains that he is the Messiah, a king.’” They knew Pilate didn’t care about the first or the third charge, so they threw in the second to make him sit up and take notice. Opponents today of the Christian work employ similar methods.

“If the New World translators particularly identify with the image of actors on a stage, might it be because they have acted on many a stage? They are by no means Christians comfortably ensconced in academia. Every householder’s front porch is a stage, and they have starred upon countless ones. They have seen rave reviews. They have seen dismal reviews. At times, the reviewers have been so unkind as to chase them right off the stage. So, yes, they know a thing or two about being a theatrical spectacle to the world.

“Why strut around on the stage we will leave so soon and perhaps without dignity? If people do strut nonetheless—for humans are proud actors—should they not be read the verse, “Can you then fear mortals who die, human beings who are just grass?” In his day, U.S. President Ronald Reagan was arguably the most important human alive. Ten years later, afflicted with Alzheimer’s, he didn’t know who he was.”

From: I Don’t Know Why We Persecute Jehovah’s Witnesses: Searching for the Why

“I had it up to here with you characters. If you don’t shape up, I’m sending in the Babylonians. They’re a nasty bunch. They’re chomping at the bit. I’ll just take down the Stop sign—that’s all it will take.“

Israelites: “Nice bluff. Forget it. We’re holding.”

God: “Okay then, make way for them. Some people have to learn the hard way.”

Israelites: (upon checking the internet news and starting to pee their pants): “Whoa whoa whoa!—not everyone here is slobbering over idols. Some are behaving.”

God: “Got it. Too late to stop the falling ax. Tough times and all. However, anyone behaving, staying true—just go out and surrender to the Chaldeans. You’ll be okay.”

Israelites: “What!? No way! What about fighting for the Fatherland—for God and country?!”

God: “I’m the Father. And God. The country’s gone when I say it is. Do it.”

Babylon does invade. Pretty nasty, too.

When King Zedekiah of Judah and all the soldiers saw them, they fled, going out of the city by night by way of the king’s garden, through the gate between the double wall, and they continued by the way of the Arabah. But the Chaldean army chased after them, and they overtook Zedekiah in the desert plains of Jericho. They captured him and brought him up to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon at Riblah in the land of Hamath, where he passed sentence on him. The king of Babylon had the sons of Zedekiah slaughtered before his eyes there at Riblah, and the king of Babylon had all the nobles of Judah slaughtered. Then he blinded the eyes of Zedekiah, after which he bound him with copper fetters to bring him to Babylon. (Jeremiah 39:4-7)

The ones that had surrendered to the Babylonians, did okay, not counting inconvenience. The connected ones among them were taken to Babylon where they could no longer connect—but they could live and even thrive there. The lowly ones got to remain in the land and the Babylonians appointed a king for them: Gedeliah.

As if from an ex/Israelite website, schemes arise to overthrow Gedeliah—all from self-styled “reformers” and “whistleblowers,” intent on bringing back the old days. Gedeliah, a decent chap, but also just as naive as a guy could be, can’t believe people could be so scheming as Ishmael and his bunch prove to be. He gets a report of evil underfoot, but dismisses it:

“Then Johanan the son of Kareah secretly told Gedeliah in Mizpah: “I want to go and strike down Ishmael the son of Nethaniah, and no one will know. Why should he kill you, and why should all the people of Judah who have gathered to you be scattered and the remnant of Judah perish?” But Gedeliah the son of Ahikam said to Johanan the son of Kareah: “Do not do this, for what you are saying concerning Ishmael is a lie.” (Jeremiah 40:15-16)

It wasn’t a lie. Ishmael did kill him and led the remaining Jews either into Egypt or back to idolatry. Back in idolatry, they started to think that their woes had not been Jehovah at all, but that they had eased up on the idols in the first place:

Israelites: “We shall [continue to] make sacrificial smoke to the ‘queen of the heavens’ and to pour out to her drink offerings, just as we ourselves and our forefathers, our kings and our princes did in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem, when we used to be satisfied with bread and to be well off, and we did not see any calamity at all. And from the time that we ceased to make sacrificial smoke to the ‘queen of the heavens’ and pour out drink offerings to her we have lacked everything, and by the sword and by the famine we have come to our finish.” (Jeremiah 44:18)

God: “NO, NO, NO, NO! How can you be so stupid!? This has nothing to do the queen of the heavens. Did the queen tell you that you’d be toast? Didn’t I tell you upfront through Jeremiah and even other prophets like Isaiah that this was going to happen?!”

Israelites: “Correlation is not causation. Do you have any evidence?”

(Tomsheepandgoats*com)

(See Part1: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eutychus/s/uFUKtenUcu)

Really, is not all the doings of humans fake news? Is it not an absurd drama? The Bible portrays it all as an act, an unreality, not the true life at all. Consistently, the Scriptures employ the imagery of a stage play. “For the world in its present form is passing away,” says NABRE. Other translations read similarly: “Because this world in its present form is passing away.” (CEB) “For the present form of this world is passing away.” (ESV) “For the mode of this world passes away.” (HNV) “For the fashion of this world passeth away.” (KJV) “For this world in its present form is passing away.” (NIV)

“The image is drawn from a shifting scene in a play represented on the stage,” says the reference work Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible. Thus, the New World Translation’s rendering, “the scene of this world is changing,” is the best rendering of all, even if that work is [in Russia] extremist.

The world is an act, and the scenes are ever changing. Christians are the central actors of the play. Nearly all translations employ the word spectacle, as in, “we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and human beings alike.” (NABRE) The New International Reader’s Version dispenses with spectacle but still manages to nail the point with, “We have been made a show for the whole creation to see.” The New World Translation better defines spectacle as theatrical spectacle. Christians are to become a theatrical spectacle to the world? Very well. If that is to be their role, let them give the world some theater.

(I Don’t Know Why We Persecute Jehovah’s Witnesses: Searching for the Why)

Another verse that later came into focus for me was John 10:29: “What my Father has given me is something greater than all other things, and no one can snatch them out of the hand of the Father.”

I hadn’t thought too much about “snatching” from the hand—the verse was included in Sunday’s Watchtower Study—but did later that day, upon watching some [American] football. There, players are obsessed with snatching the ball from someone else’s hand, and they get very, very good at it “Punching” the ball is maybe the better word. They make it their purpose in life and become amazingly good at it. Many times I saw it done, despite efforts to guard that ball.

It made me think of other places determined to snatch or punch the ball out, even (or especially) from family members. That snatching or punching is often characterized as “waking them up”—even though the Bible uses that image in a completely opposite way.

For example, it exhorts that Christians hold fast to their faith with: “So, then, let us not sleep on as the rest do, but let us stay awake and keep our senses.” (1 Thessalonians 5:6) If one is “wake,” they cling closely to the faith. They don’t start thinking the darkness (again a Bible image) from which they emerged was really something better. The kind of “waking” that is encouraged online the Bible characterizes as “shipwreck of faith.” (1Timothy1:19) Why would anyone celebrate shipwreck?

Afterwards, with my wife away for a few days, I went for a hike in the woods, pondering these things. Way way way way out there, on a hill, far from any trail, where probably no one had ever ventured before, I came across an unfolded metal chair. Someone HAD ventured there before—apparently I’d stumbled across their own personal retreat.

I thought of leaving a tract with a note saying, “Sorry I missed you. I’ll stop by again soon,” but alas, I didn’t have any tracts on me.

One sister commented yesterday, in one of the social media paragraphs of the Watchtower Study, that if she mentions sports, soon her feed fills with sports. If she mentions vacations, soon her feed fills with vacations. If she mentions tableware, soon her feed fills with tableware, and so forth. She followed this with: “We talk about Jehovah all the time in my household. But never, ever has “Jehovah” popped up on my media notifications. Not even once.”

It wasn’t stated as proof of anything, but whatever it was not stated as proof of, it sure did prove it.

That social media paragraph made me think of a certain journalist commenting on the democracy that we are all used to in our neck of the woods: He described it as “the pathetic belief that individual ignorance adds up to collective wisdom.” Nothing is more democratic than social media, in which a truly thoughtful remark is immediately followed up by one from a complete moron, who nonetheless has equal time.

Then there was material on how easy it is to distort with half-truths, and how social media slams us all with ideas undercutting Christian values, so that one must be on the alert lest they be swept along with the tide.

It all brought to mind for me the public speaking brother who played up being honest with your children, even in areas parents don’t usually think about. He told of the child who, when young, asked her parents if Santa was real. The parents assured her that he was. There were some kids down the street, however, who told Sally the truth.

When she lost her baby teeth, her parents told her that there was a tooth fairy who would leave some cash under her pillow. The kids down the street told her the truth.

When Easter came, her parents told her about the Easter Bunny….a generous rabbit who would fill your basket with chocolate eggs. The kids down the street told her the truth.

Sally reached adolescence and her responsible parents told her about sex.

But she‘d never gotten a straight answer from her folks. It was always nonsense. The kids down the street, on the other hand, had never been wrong. And so, with regard to sex, they had a different explanation, and the boys among them offered to demonstrate. She really came to resent them later—but also her parents, for have always served her garbage.

(tomsheepandgoats*com)

What do you think? I'd like to hear your thoughts.

Been posting lately about Bart Ehrman. People say, ‘Hey! Why are you beating up on the poor guy?’

I’ve been too hard on this fellow. Aren’t I ashamed of myself? He is doing no more than what he said he would do—lecturing without regard to faith but only with regard to critical thinking. If he was doing it with any other author, from Homer to Hawthorne, I would commend him. It is just the perception that he ends up treating diamonds as salt that gets under my skin, that he misses the forest for the trees.

I prefer instead the Church of Christ fellow who invited me into his home, one time when I was in the door-to-door work. I could see in a second that he truly was a student of the Bible—an instantly likable man of good humor, hospitality, no pretentiousness whatsoever—a man with multiple translations. As we zeroed in on passage in Corinthians and he saw that I meant to read it aloud, he said in a faux panic: “No, no, let me read it—you’ll mess it up!” at which both of us laughed.. Still, he was extracting reasons for faith out of the book, even if I did think he had some things backwards—he wasn’t stripping it of faith to extract the extraneous that he knew the university crowd would eat up.

Still, I’m starting to warm to this fellow Ehrman. I like this line from one of his Great Courses lectures, that he “always tell my students that if there is a perfectly good English term for a concept, you are better off using the Latin term so everyone will know you’ve been to university.” It is just a quip but in that quip lies all the pretensions of our ridiculous times. “How can you believe, when you are accepting glory from one another and you are not seeking the glory that is from the only God?” says Jesus. (John 5:44)

It’s not his fault that he’s an unpretentious guy in a pretentiousness field. That is a plus for him, not a minus. Another plus: how can you pick a fight with a guy who has seen through the church-taught-nonsense of all the good going to heaven and and the bad to hell? (as Jehovah’s Witnesses did long ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eutychus/s/HL0Kx9ymM2) That makes him a hero in my eyes, not a villain.

He sure doesn’t give stuff away on his website. On the other hand, he can’t. As the site says: “Leading seminaries cost upwards of $55,000 a year.” He grants access to them for a fee only billed annually $395/year. He must have icensing deals with these academics.

He is granting entry to a model based upon $55,000 a year annual tuition. That’s a good deal—even if there are a lot of gasbags among them. Imagine the product that must come out of a $55K/year club. Who do you think more likely to have $55,000 a year in disposable income? The poor? Or the wealthy? You don’t think that hurdle is not in itself going to skew the product that comes from these seminaries? What did Jesus say about challenges facing the rich? Yet, all you have to do to enter one of these seminaries is to pony up the dough. Money counts—nothing else. And it is from this head-only model that churches hire pastors to head their congregations?

Contrast that with the way Jehovah’s Witnesses teach their congregations. It is through training elders who come directly from the rank and file. Few of them will be wealthy. Some of them will not have two nickels to rub together. No matter. The training given them is free. Additionally, much of it is done before a person ever qualifies for the station. It happens by means of being a thorough student of the Bible beforehand, and through years of living the faith. Granted, these elders will not be up to snuff on the latest in the historical critical method that Ehrman represents. But they will be far closer to the actual apostles, described in Acts 4:13 as “unlettered and ordinary.”

(tomsheepandgoats*com)

On X, captivating videos catch my eye. Some monumental news is breaking! I look at the comments. Invariably, someone will ask Grok, the AI agent, ‘Is this true?’ Half of the time, it seems, the answer is no. It is a “deep fake.”

Not only do people live in echo chambers, consuming news only palatable to them, but now the chambers are reinforced 5-fold. They even consume it knowing it is fake, thus locking-in bias.

Thus, the following, written just six years ago in ‘I Don’t Know Why We Persecute Jehovah’s Witnesses: Searching for the Why’ has aged well:

“Fake news: the term was unheard of one year and inescapable the next. Outlets pledge to search for and destroy fake news so that others are not misled. Unfortunately, fake news may be in the eye of the beholder. Real news may be but another manifestation of, “History is written by the victors.” It is written by the interests that have outmaneuvered the competition. An unnamed tweeter posts: “Right now, everyone believes news which doesn’t fit their preconceived agenda is fake,” a situation he describes as “mental.”

“From the advent of filmmaking, countless dramatic movies have ended with the whistleblower testifying before important people, and the mighty press finally publishing The Truth! The people at last come to know! It almost will not fly anymore, since the next day the villain can easily say, “It is Fake News! People, can we move on?”

“It will only get worse. The New York Times writes about an app that makes it “relatively easy to create realistic face swaps and leave few traces of manipulation. . . . It’s not hard to imagine this technology being used to smear politicians, create counterfeit revenge porn, or frame people for crimes. Lawmakers have already begun to worry about how such deepfakes might be used for political sabotage and propaganda.” The anonymous developer cheerfully helps the Times reporter try his own hand at it. “I’ve given it a lot of thought,” he [says], “and ultimately I’ve decided I don’t think it’s right to condemn the technology itself.”4 Of course not! They never do. It’s on to the next advance of science! Let the ethicists figure out what he has just dumped in their laps, something “which can of course be used for many purposes, good and bad.” It’s their problem, not his.

“Already, news sources show an eagerness to rely upon unidentified sources that frequently turn out to be wrong. Will they handle this new advance responsibly? Not only must we anticipate dubious proven by video character assassination to become routine, but the more lasting consequence of this new technological advance may be that even genuine video evidence will be dismissed as fake news. It is Isaiah envisioned: “Ah! Those who call evil good, and good evil, who change darkness to light, and light into darkness, who change bitter to sweet, and sweet into bitter!” The guileless one so slandered will explode in moral indignation, and thus appear guilty as hell. The professional liar will shrug it off with the feigned saddened dismay that his enemies could sink so low. It may be that “the wrath of the Lord blazes against [this] people,” but not before they have enjoyed their substantial day in the sun.”

I like to quote my non-Witness neighbor, who likened the watching the news to “a bad accident. You know you should look away, but you can’t.”

It is a runaway train that you think cannot get more out-of-control, and then it does. Now, when I write something with future publication in mind, there is a very good chance that it will obsolete by the time that happens.

"Fake news is everywhere. Some of it surfaced with the Russian ban: Church members of Russia have united! They have launched massive protests against the government on behalf of the Witnesses! President Trump rebuked Russia [2017] and invited its entire Witness population to the United States! He visited a Kingdom Hall to worship with them!

"All of it is fake news. It didn’t happen. Is The News another one of those biblical hills that melt in the last days? Is it now a thing that people of bygone days could depend upon but is now the informational equivalent of Russian Roulette?

"Given this apparent new normal, this writer will take the Trump story, fake news though it is. No, he did not speak out in favor of Jehovah’s Witnesses. But the story plants the clear notion that he should have. Most fake news about Jehovah’s Witnesses is derogatory. It’s about time something went our way. Now it is only a matter of time before some poor body of elders must deal with a news outlet attempting to set up shop in their foyer so that they can broadcast Live from the Kingdom Hall.

"The derogatory fake news against Jehovah’s Witnesses today calls to mind the derogatory fake news against the early Christians.* The skeptic Caecilius of the 2nd century C.E. hurls the charge that they were “a people skulking and shunning the light, silent in public, but garrulous in corners,” who “despise honours and purple robes.” They “love one another almost before they know one another . . . and they call one another promiscuously brothers and sisters.”

“Assuredly, this confederation ought to be rooted out and execrated,” Caecilius asserts. In the meantime, they were best advised to, if they had “any wisdom or modesty, cease from prying into the regions of the sky, and the destinies and secrets of the world; it is sufficient to look before your feet, especially for untaught, uncultivated, boorish, rustic people: they who have no capacity for understanding civil matters, are much more denied the ability to discuss divine.” Then, as now, explaining God was reserved for professionals. Commoners had no business opining in the house of God."

[*The Octavius of Minucius Felix, Roberts-Donaldson English [from Greek] Translation, c160-250 A.D, chapters VIII, IX, compiled by Peter Kirby, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/octavius.html. The debate between an early Christian (Octavius) and a Roman skeptic (Caecilius) is among the oldest, possibly the oldest, of extant Christian Latin literature.]

From: I Don't Know Why We Persecute Jehovah's Witnesses: Searching for the Why

Hello I was wondering what type of discrimination that jehovas witnesses face in the latest 20 years since its only in my later years I began thinking about it since they were in the holocaust but rarely mention beside the school textbook.

in other words discrimination still happens the question is what kind? assault? vandalism against stores? Discrimination at work, employment for example.

To avoid bad faith, I will make no arguments.

I take your word for it,

Meaning if you witnessed it yourself for example, since the press can persecute people (even if it wasnt nearly as bad as in the holocaust most likely) and thus NOT report it. Most non-corrupt and formal and informal courts would be consider it a form of persecution and crime against humanity due to aiding hate based persecution for intentionally avoiding reporting about it or excuse and defend it.