More Famous Christians

Continuing the series showing the 'love, tolerance and forgiving nature' of the founding fathers of Christianity, this is an assortment of quotes showing the development of anti-Semitism which led to the many pogroms and massacres of Jews throughout the history of Christendom, culminating in the Holocaust. Many of these Christian 'thinkers' will appear in evangelical Christianity's list of favourite 'historians' who allegedly were eye-witnesses to the historicity of Jesus - even they were all born many years after Jesus supposedly lived and died.

You might think this anti-Semitism is now a thing of the past, especially in America where Christians and Jews seem to live in relative harmony. I'll show why this is a contrived illusion in another blog.

	We too, would observe your circumcision of the flesh, your Sabbath days, and in a word, all you festivals, if we were not aware of the reason why they were imposed upon you, namely, because of your sins and the hardness of heart. The custom of circumcising the flesh, handed down from Abraham, was given to you as a distinguishing mark, to set you off from other nations and from us Christians. The purpose of this was that you and only you might suffer the afflictions that are now justly yours; that only your land be desolated, and you cities ruined by fire, that the fruits of you land be eaten by strangers before your very eyes; that not one of you be permitted to enter your city of Jerusalem. Your circumcision of the flesh is the only mark by which you can certainly be distinguished from other men... as I stated before it was by reason of your sins and the sins of your fathers that, among other precepts, God imposed upon you the observance of the Sabbath as a mark. Justin Martyr - "Dialogue with Trypho" (138-161 CE)
We may thus assert in utter confidence that the Jews will not return to their earlier situation, for they have committed the most abominable of crimes, in forming this conspiracy against the Savior of the human race... hence the city where Jesus suffered was necessarily destroyed, the Jewish nation was driven from its country, and another people was called by God to the blessed election. Origen of Alexandria (185-254 CE)
	The synagogue is worse than a brothel... it is the den of scoundrels and the repair of wild beasts... the temple of demons devoted to idolatrous cults…the refuge of brigands and dabauchees, and the cavern of devils. It is a criminal assembly of Jews... a place of meeting for the assassins of Christ... a house worse than a drinking shop…a den of thieves, a house of ill fame, a dwelling of iniquity, the refuge of devils, a gulf and a abyss of perdition... I would say the same things about their souls... As for me, I hate the synagogue... I hate the Jews for the same reason. John Chrysostom ("Golden Mouthed") (344-407 CE)
How hateful to me are the enemies of your Scripture! How I wish that you would slay them (the Jews) with your two-edged sword, so that there should be none to oppose your word! Gladly would I have them die to themselves and live to you! St. Augustine (c. 354-430 CE), "Confessions", 12.14
	Yes, you Jews. I say, do I address you; you, who till this very day, deny the Son of God. How long, poor wretches, will ye not believe the truth? Truly I doubt whether a Jew can be really human... I lead out from its den a monstrous animal, and show it as a laughing stock in the amphitheater of the world, in the sight of all the people. I bring thee forward, thou Jew, thou brute beast, in the sight of all men. Peter the Venerable (1092-1156 CE)

What Christians now need to explain is how they can be pretending to not be anti-Semitic with such a long and tawdry history of anti-Semitism, hatred and massacres and with so much early Christianity being founded on anti-Semitic racism by virulent anti-Semitic racists, and with so many senior Catholic and Protestant clerics being enthusiastic supporters of the Holocaust as recently as the twentieth century.

My next blog will explain why they are doing so.

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