In Defense of Religion - Part IV Judaism

Of all the Abrahamic religions, Judaism is the oldest surviving tradition. It bears with it a very powerful mystical tradition and many elements of power and self-fulfillment. Of all the Western traditions, Judaism is the smallest, but also the wisest. Judaism hardly needs defense against its own dogmas—it needs to be defended from other groups. This article will expose the hypocrisy laden within modern day Christian anti-Semitism, Islamic anti-Semitism requires another article and will be addressed later.
In many forms of the Christian tradition, Judaism is misunderstood completely. The Jews are sometimes blamed for the alleged crucifixion of Jesus, and much controversy arises regarding this aspect of theology. I am attempting to sway Christians against this form of anti-Semitism. If Jesus was truly crucified (readers of my Gnostic articles will recall that I do not believe that he died on the cross) scriptures indicate that he was set up for this fate by the Pharisees. True, the Pharisees were a Jewish sect at the time, but they were not the only Jews around. There were Sadducees the believers in an eschatological doctrine dissimilar from the Pharisees hedonism, there were Zealots the religious activists there were Samaritans who possessed a creed of helping those in need, and there were the Essenes the mystical sect from the deserts. John the Baptist and Jesus were believed to be Essenes. Virtually all the sects other than perhaps the money lenders, the Pharisees, avoided misuse of the material realms in order to satisfy their spiritual impetus. The Essenes especially, were primarily focused on spiritual salvation. My first refutation of Christian anti-Semitism: how can we pigeonhole all Jews as like these Pharisees, when there were so many other sects of Judaism around? How can we blindly assume that Jews today are anything like the biblical Pharisees? How can a whole people in the first place be blamed for something that only one small community of Jews did in the first place?
My second basis for the refutation of anti-Semitism is simple: Jesus never abandoned Judaism, nor did he abandon his Essene mysticism. Christianity in its pure form should be considered a form of the Essene doctrine, and Christians should be consulting these texts for proof of my claims—see the Dead Sea Scrolls or any compilation of Gnostic scriptures. Thus, to hate a Jew as a Christian is truly to hate oneself!

http://www.beelzebul.net/antinihilistT.pdf MY TAROT DECK