By: Dr. Jerry Bergman
Montpelier, Ohio
Although the scriptures are clear on the fact that Jesus was a Jew, many German theologians attempted to argue otherwise.
The book, The Aryan Jesus, by Susannah Heschel, the daughter of Rabbi Joshua Heschel, documented this from archival material thought to be lost.
She determined that many, or even most, of Germany’s best minds competed with each other to provide intellectual support for Nazi antisemitism and justification for the murder of millions of Jews.
They attempted this goal by rewriting both history and the Bible. One example is they tried to prove that Jesus was not a Jew but an Aryan, an idea that many leading German theologians had accepted.
One example is the book, The Aryan Ancestry of Jesus, by renowned Bible translator Paul Haupt. Haupt, an authority on ancient Middle Eastern cultures, discovered the Sumerian language.
He argued that first-century Galileans, including Jesus, descended from Iranian colonists in ancient Palestine who had later adopted Judaism.
During the Third Reich, prominent German Protestant theologians were motivated by the Darwinian belief that some people groups, including the Jews, were less evolved, thus inferior, than other people groups, namely Aryans.
From the late 1920s until 1945, ambitious German Protestant theologians worked to redefine Christ as an Aryan and Christianity itself as a patriotic Germanic faith at war against Judaism.
In 1939, these theologians established the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life, led by German Protestant theologian Walter Grundmann (1906–1976).
Grundmann was the author of many learned volumes on the putative evils of Judaism, as well as complicated issues of New Testament theology. The Institute’s leadership included the militant Nazi Protestant theologian Wolf Meyer-Erlach.
The Institute was closely associated with the University of Jena, home of the well-known evolutionary professor Ernst Haeckel.
Haeckel, after reading On the Origin of Species in 1860, became a leading German proponent of evolution, which he effectively used to challenge Christianity. Haeckel also converted the majority of his peers to Darwinism.
Lutheran bishop Martin Sasse was a leading figure in the Protestant Deutsche Christen church movement, an alliance of pastors, bishops, theologians, and lay people who enthusiastically supported Hitler and sought to create a unified antisemitic (‘nazified’) German Protestant church.
The movement eventually attracted close to a third of all Protestant church members. The Protestant church movement demonstrated its support for Hitler by placing the swastika on the altar next to the cross, enthusiastically giving the Nazi salute at its rallies, and celebrating Hitler as a man sent by God to eliminate inferior races, preventing them from polluting the superior race through racial intermarriage, called miscegenation.
The horrors of the antisemitic riot Kristallnacht (the “Night of Broken Glass”) on November 9-10, 1938, were an event of rejoicing for Bishop Sasse, the head of the Lutheran church of Thuringia.
On November 15, he distributed the pamphlet titled “Martin Luther on the Jews: Away with Them!” in which he reprinted excerpts from Martin Luther’s 1543 pamphlet, “On the Jews and Their Lies,” urging the destruction of Jewish property.
Kristallnacht, Sasse claimed, was fulfilling Luther’s goals; the Nazis were acting as Christians. This night of riots, looting, beatings, and widespread destruction of synagogues and Jewish property fulfilled Sasse’s dreams: the Nazi regime was finally ridding the Reich of Jews.
Many of Germany’s best minds and models of ethical behavior and bastions of Christian charity competed with each other to provide the logic to support the murder of millions of Jews.
Many authors have tried to place all the blame on Catholics while ignoring the millions of German Protestants who willingly supported Hitler.
About one-third of Germans were strongly pro-Nazi, one-third were more neutral, and about one-third were generally not supportive of the Nazis.
Opposition to the Nazi movement existed but was limited to the much smaller Bekennende Kirche [Confessing Church]. It included theologians and pastors such as Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Martin Niemöller, who resisted Nazi control of the German Evangelical Church.
The Confessing movement was composed of thousands of clergy and church members who opposed the pro-Nazi “German Christians” and affirmed that the church’s allegiance belonged to God, not the State.
They accepted that the Old Testament, with its Jewish origins, formed a permanent part of the Christian religion.
Unfortunately, many Confessing Church members believed that modern Jews are an inferior race. These Confessing Church pastors were generally supportive of “non-Aryan” Christians, i.e., Jews who had undergone Christian baptism.
One Amazon reviewer commented that “most large European and American denominations evince the same toxic mix of theological liberalism, pagan influences, and fervent antisemitism (now thinly masked as anti-Zionism). In particular, ecclesiastical anti-Israeli pressure groups appear hell-bent on mimicking the destructive theological stance of The Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Life.
“An antisemite like Grundmann would have felt very much at home today. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if most churches became complicit in another attempt to destroy the Jewish people. The Aryan Jesus provided ‘a warning from history’ that should be heeded. It’s a must read for those concerned with the present state of Christianity and the future of the Jewish people.”
Conclusions
Darwinism, which taught survival of the fittest, meaning the extinction of the less evolved, was a critical element in causing World War II. This war cost the lives of an estimated 85 million people, making it by far the deadliest conflict in history.
The majority were civilians who died from genocide, massacres, bombing, disease, and starvation in a conflict that involved nearly every country in the world. The cost was 4.1 trillion 1940 dollars, most paid by the United States. Most German Christian churches rejected the clear teaching of Genesis that Adam is the father of all humans; thus, no inferior races exist.
They also rejected Jesus’ words recorded in Matthew 19:4-6: “In the beginning of creation, God made them male and female,” a reference to Genesis 1:27 and 2:24. In 1939, over 95 percent of Germans were baptized supporting members of the two main German churches, the Lutherans and the Catholics.
Today, the churches not bombed during the war are close to empty. In 2024, only 6.6 percent of Catholic Germans attend church at least once a month, compared to 2.3 percent for Protestants.
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Dr. Bergman is a multi-award-winning professor and author. Has 9 degrees and has taught at both the graduate and undergraduate level for over 40 years. His over 2,100 publications are in both scholarly and popular journals. Dr. Bergman’s work has been translated into 15 languages. He has spoken over 2,000 times to college, university and church groups in America, Canada, Europe, the South Sea Islands, and Africa. He lives in Montpelier and is available to present in churches and schools. Jerry can be reached at JerryBergman30@yahoo.com.
Source: The Village Reporter
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