In support of the
notion of Jesus as a political as well as spiritual figure, Baigent
perceptively points out that Jesus was crucified, a Roman punishment for sedition,
not stoned, as he would have been if it were the Jews who had him executed for
religious crimes. From this key distortion, cemented into the so-called New Testament under Constantine in 325
AD, comes the source of Anti-Semitism in Christianity that leads directly to
Mohammed's purges, the Inquisition, the pogroms, and the Holocaust.
"Casting out the money changers" by Carl Heinrich Bloch.
A lot has been made of Judaic law dealing with usury and the pivotal words that prohibit Jews from charging interest to each other, but permit Jews to charge interest to those outside of the tribe. This code was written at a time when Israel and other nomadic peoples consisted of well-defined tribes. Codes were written to secure the survival of the tribe. In addition to usury, another example of such a code would be the prohibition of homosexuality, because such unions did not result in greater numbers and more soldiers. Both of these codes have shown themselves to be temporal expediencies, not universal truths. Those who take literally the Torah and its Christian version, the so-called Old Testament, are not able to make the distinction between universal and temporal truth.
Usury was in fact considered immoral by Jews too. The great Jewish theologian, Maimonides, wrote "why is [usury] called nesek [biting]? Because he who takes it bites his fellow, causes pain to him, and eats his flesh." [4]
For obvious reasons, most modern churches work very hard to keep economic and spiritual behavior separate, using "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's" as a partition to maintain their psychopathology. But the teachings argue for a frank discussion. The Torah and the Christian Bible combined mention money and financial matters--including gold, silver, wealth, riches, inheritance, debt, and poverty--more than nearly any other subject. So, why the confusion over the message in today's so-called religions?
As it turns out, both prophets and social theorists predicted this: humankind worships golden idols; everything, including humans, becomes commoditized; political science and prophesy have converged:
"Then [Jesus] said to them, 'Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.'" (Luke 12:15)
"On the basis of political economy itself " we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities." Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
There is no better example of how greed poisons human relationships than in the banking industry, which, like Ebenezer Scrooge (a bastardization of "squeeze") aims to kill off "the surplus population." Dickens makes it very clear in A Christmas Carol that, in the beginning, Scrooge is no Christian. Just so, those who operate the private banks that control a majority of the world's economies are not Jews, or Christians, or Muslims. They worship a golden idol, just as Scrooge's one-time fiancà ©e, Belle, tells him.
Such idolatry allows them to perform criminal acts and characterize it in socially acceptable terms (the very definition of psychopathology), for example, to make money by creating it from nothing and extending it as credit, as if they had the sovereign power to create currency. By charging interest on this faux currency (Federal Reserve Notes), these usurers exacerbate their civil and spiritual crimes.
The currency created by these illegitimate forces is used to drive a wedge between people, rather than unite them. That is why Jesus rejected the coin with Caesar's image on it.
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