By Yoram Getzler. What that the consequences of the denial of the presence of the Jewish people in Judea, then renamed by the Romans: Syria Palaestina, feeds into the dismissal of our holy temple ever being in Jerusalem during the hundreds of years Before the Common Era.
That the justification for Christian traditionally claimed sites in Jerusalem, Bethlehem Nazareth Capernaum & the Mount of the Beatitudes as holy to them and their presence in these sites are all rendered fraudulent.
It occurs to me that perhaps not. After all the early church left Jerusalem to its fate and moved to Rome some time before 61AD and may not care much about that city today? At least not enough to challenge the current Arab/ Muslim, dismissal of history fronted by the Palestinians.
In any event; it appears in numerous discussions that this disconnect led by the Palestinians for purely political purposes is now accepted as fact by the Arab/Muslim world. It joins a list of fabricated history disseminated within that community and the world.
Attached to the fantasy that Arabs/Muslims were the first inhabitants of this land is an inability to confront actual factual historical events that do not fit in with the Muslim world view; that Islam is primary and first in all human and divine endeavors. Excuse me if I comment that this begins to sound rather childish…reminiscent of the Soviet decelerations of inventing everything; the airplane; electricity the coffee pot, vacuum cleaner, psychoanalysis etc.
We have experienced and heard Yassar Arafat’s denial to President Clinton of the presence of the Hebrew/Jewish Holy Temple in Jerusalem…we heard Hanan Ashwarai claim Jesus to being a Palestinian (decades before there was a place with that name). And recently we have learned that the Canaanites themselves were Palestinians, hundreds of years before the concept of that name was invented by the Romans. What we have here is a gigantic historical fraud, a theft of antiquity a forging of an authentic past without shame or integrity.
If it weren’t for the holiness attached to Hebrew Holy Temple, what else could have brought Muhammad the Prophet to fly (however effortlessly) all that way from Mecca to Jerusalem? There were far more famous and fabulous holy buildings in the Middle East at that time. Temples and holy sites standing proudly in all their ancient glory. While the Holy Temple of the defeated and despised Children of Israel lay in runes in a once great, small backwater city, plundered and despoiled, the site of the city trash and garbage dump.
In any event NOW is the time for the Church to step up and stand straight in the face of the onslaught on its legitimacy of origin, which includes its irreplaceable attachment to the Hebrew bible (so called “Old Testament”). To the Hebrew/Jewish stories and traditions which form the basis for what two thousand years ago was a new religion. A new religion that depended heavily on the religious sensitivity that had preceded it.
From where did the idea of a savior for all mankind originate?
Even the names Christianity sanctified had their origin in the Hebrew/Jewish community that lived , created, worshiped and thrived between the river and the sea beginning in the days of the “Judges” at the conclusion of the Israelite trek from ancient Egypt of the Pharaohs to their fabled and “promised land”.
The Jewish people have never had a problem sharing its legends with others. Christians or Muslims. All were welcome to see in Abraham, the first Hebrew Ivri (“over”one who goes over) the same greatness and originality of spirit as we do. Everybody anywhere is welcome to share with us our belief in Jerusalem and all the other cities here as holy city’s.
We invite everybody on the planet to share our belief in the eventual redemption of all human beings, no matter the name they may use for the divine being. We do not claim exclusivity of belief, of truth, or of closeness to the mythical single origin of all.
But neither can we or should we accept being excluded from participation in the holy community of man.
